novels: thaw
Thaw follows Ruth White, a socially isolated microbiologist, for three months. The first day of her journal follows. It will be published by Snowbooks in February 2010.
Monday 1st March
These hands are ninety three years old. They belong to Charlotte
Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail her grand-daughter had to
carry her onto the set to take this photo. It's a close-up. Her bony arms emerge
from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe
velvet, as if we're being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist
rests on the other and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair
of folded wings. And you can see her insides. Her knuckle bones bulge
out of her skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun
and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look stuck
onto the outside of her hands. They're a colour that's difficult to
describe - blue, but also silver, green. her
blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died
shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it?
Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.
I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I'm
giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think
that sounds melodramatic, but I don't think I'm alone in wondering
whether it's all worth it. I've seen the look in people's eyes. Stiff
suits travelling to work morning after morning on the cramped and humid
tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling
on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness
of their weeks with one desperate, fake-happy night. I've heard the
weary grief in my dad's
voice.
So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about
me? I'm Ruth White, thirty two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone
with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact
I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I'm
sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so
often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in
a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and
lives with his sensible second wife Julie in a sensible second home.
Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first
diagnosis. What else? What else is there?
Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve
minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually
the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting
wine. I have huge books all over my flat - books you have to take into both your hands
to lift. I've had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first
book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really
ill I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating
on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose
it helped me to think about something other than what was happening.
I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene
to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate then everything
stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they
bring me closer to it. I've
still got that first book. When I take it out I handle the pages as
if they might flake into dust.
Mother used to write a journal. When I was small I sat by her bed in
the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat
out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing
about - princesses dressed in star-patterned-silk, talking horses,
adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was
going to cook for dinner and how annoying dad's snoring was. I've always
wanted to write my own journal and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance.
The idea is that every night for three months I'll take one of these heavy
sheets of brilliant white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up
on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long then no-one
can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say 'it makes no sense,
she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for', before adding
that I did keep myself to myself. It'll all be here. I'm using a silver
fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these
idiosyncratic rituals, they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea,
squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My
writing is small and neat, I'm striping the paper. I'm near the bottom of
the page now. Only ninety one more days to go before I'm allowed to make my
decision. That's it for today. It's begun.