novels: the letters
The Letters follows Violet as she leaves behind her orderly life to live by the sea, where she starts receiving mysterious letters written by a young girl in a mother and baby home in 1959... It will be published by Snowbooks in March 2009.Violet bursts from her lover’s house and leaves the door gaping like a mouth. She jogs the two and a half miles back to her own cottage, spitting Catherine-Wheel sparks of fury. The soles of her feet slap the ground as she blows out her breath in short blasts. Rah. Rah. Rah. Her eyes are fixed straight ahead. Houses move past her, trees, parked cars. She doesn’t notice the familiar hint of seaweed on the breeze, or that the laces of her left trainer have come undone and are sopping wet and trailing behind her. She turns into her street and doesn’t notice her neighbour Marjory Peters, sweeping crisp frosted leaves from her front path. Marjory gives her a sparky wave and opens her mouth to frame a ‘yoohoo’ before clocking the look on Violet’s face and thinking better of it. Her hand and face remain frozen into a gesture of welcome long after Violet has disappeared down the road. Violet doesn’t notice the stars above her, glowing like fading embers in the darkening sky. It’s only when she’s slammed her cornflower-blue door behind her that the wind drops, and she slumps down onto her doormat like a fallen kite. She’s home.
The rage begins to fade like a horrible smell released from a wheelie-bin or from her ex-husband’s innards, the molecules dispersing, sinking to the floor or rising to the ceiling. Her lungs start to catch up and her breathing slows. She notices her clock ticking along the hall, tick-TOCK, tick-TOCK, and a threadbare patch of carpet that needs replacing. Thoughts begin to take shape from the mist of red. Most of them are old comrades. How has she got herself into this state? She isn’t a hot-blooded hormone-soaked teenager any more – she’s fifty one years old, with grown children of her own. How do her arguments with Tom escalate so quickly and so violently? And why do they go round and round in an endless loop – why can’t they move forwards? Now that she’s calmer, the content of their argument almost bores her. It’s the same old rubbish – Violet doesn’t open up enough, Tom doesn’t give her enough space, Violet doesn’t think about anyone apart from herself, Tom is incapable of making a single simple decision without consulting her at length… blah blah blah. They seem so innocuous when they begin – Violet taking offence at an off-hand comment, or forgetting that Tom prefers wholemeal bread to granary – and before she knows it she’s clattering about in her cupboard of insults, trying to find something that will cut her lover to the bone.
She won’t go back there, not this time. She can’t afford to. And these thoughts are familiar too – how many times has she planned to cut herself off, move away, never see Tom again? But what else can she do? She can’t carry on living like this. It’s too tiring – at fifty one she should be settling down, not riding this unending roller-coaster. She’s never felt so full to the brim of feelings in her life. Not in her whole life – not when the children were born, not when she got married to Charles, not when she divorced him. She doesn’t know where it all comes from – great swathes of rage and joy. Yes, joy too. But there’s just too big a price to pay. And as the realisation sinks into her, slowly, she feels sorrow pooling around her ankles. She hasn’t felt this sadness before, and she doesn’t like it. She brushes it aside like sweeping china from a table. She hears Tom’s voice in her mind, saying ‘let the feelings come, make friends with them.’ What a pile of shit. How could that possibly do her any good? ‘Hello sadness, oh do come in, I just love the feeling of wanting to do myself in. Let’s talk about the woes of the world, shall we?’
This brings a little smile, and she becomes slowly aware of her body. She’s crouched on the floor like a child, and her thighs and calves are aching. Old bones. She must look ridiculous. She imagines what her mother might say, then quickly tries to un-imagine it. Her phantasmagorical mother frequently pops up uninvited in her head but rarely has anything helpful to add, just like her real mother. She takes a deep breath and says ‘come on, you silly moo.’ She straightens out her stiff legs, gingerly, and takes off her coat. She has dust on the back of her leggings and rubs it off, thinking ‘picking myself up, brushing myself down’. When she kicks off her trainers the floor feels chilly through her socks and so she wraps her long flapping cardigan around her and goes into the kitchen to fiddle with the thermostat. Now she’s here, she may as well put on the kettle.
Her strong milky tea, the colour of satinwood, sloshes in the mug as she climbs the creaking stairs to her tiny bedroom. Blue is sleeping in his usual spot on the landing, curled up with his head tucked under and his bristly chin in the air. He shows her a sliver of one golden eye before closing it again and flexing his legs and paws in a blissful mini-stretch.
‘Do you want your mummy, birdy? Who’s my middly-muddly-moo, who’s my best kitty?’ she coos. Her throat feels sore after all the shouting. Blue refuses to play his part and so Violet has to lift him instead. He goes limp like a gym bag full of tennis balls and lets out a disgruntled, low-pitched ‘Mraow’, but seems happy enough to be placed on her rose-pink duvet. He sinks into it, stretching out to his full length with his tail at a right angle to his back, and his spine curved as if flying through the air. ‘Supercat!’ as her son Guy would say. She has to drag Blue into a different angle to give her the room to push her toes to the bottom of the bed. He half-heartedly swipes at her and catches the back of her wrist with a sharp claw. ‘Oi, you bastard!’ she says, too loudly and with too much violence, and immediately regrets it. Blue’s ears go back and the tip of his tail starts flicking. Why can’t she hold her tongue? It was the same with her children – she’d frequently lost her temper with them while they were growing up, as if she were a kettle constantly on the verge of boiling over. She knows that she shouldn’t be doing it as soon as she opens her mouth, but it seems hard for her to stop once she’s started. Charles was forever raising his eye-brows at her from behind his paper, and occasionally he even dared to stick up for a wronged Megan or a tearful Lucy. This would infuriate Violet further and the argument would usually culminate with her storming from the room, muttering about how nobody was ever on her side.
‘Don’t mean it, blue-bird. Come on. Mummy’s just in her usual rotten mood. I’ll tickle your ears, come here. I’ll make it up to you, you grouchy old puddy.’
After a time the ear-tickling triggers a deep rolling hum. It emanates from the middle of Blue’s being, and she imagines the centre of him as a smooth stone, vibrating. She imagines holding the warmth of it in her hand like an egg.
She gives the fur on Blue’s head a final ruffle and leans back on her headboard. It’s plain wood and unforgiving so she’s draped it with a crocheted blanket folded into four to give her back some padding. There isn’t much natural padding left on her now. The fat just never came back after her illness, not that there was much there to start with. She wonders where it went - if it’s floating around in the ether somewhere, or hiding under the floorboards and waiting to claim her. Those centimetres of soft stuff; insulating her hips, spilling over the waistband of her jeans, hanging from her arms where she could grab it and pull it into wings. What would it look like if she poured it all into a bucket - viscous and heavy like syrup or light and spongy like blancmange? How much would there be? She still pinches it – an old habit. She used to hold onto a fold from her waist or cup a handful of thigh-flesh at night, for security, like Guy’s favourite blanket that travelled with him everywhere until he was seven. It’s less comfortable now – there isn’t anything to get a grip on. It doesn’t fill her hand like it used to. She has to tug it from the bones.
She wonders how long she ought to lie there. She never realised it would be so bloody difficult, living on her own. When she decided to move down here a year ago, leaving her career as a Lecturer in Structural Engineering, she only gave serious thought to the advantages. Having the bathroom all to herself. Watching whatever she wanted on television. Getting to know herself again without the distractions of motherhood and wifedom. Soon it’ll be a year since she moved in. She tries to work out the date using last week’s committee meeting as a reference point… that was the 26th… wait – isn’t it Halloween today? Yes – a year next week. She should have some kind of celebration, that she’s survived this far… Her mind makes a move towards thinking about the past year, and she holds it back like a dog on a leash– she doesn’t want to go into all that now. Her mind makes another move towards the future, but that’s no good either – especially after what happened with Tom this afternoon…
Her eyes criss-cross the room and settle on a trashy detective book on her bedside table. She clicks on her lamp and reaches for it, hoping the simple shape of the story might hold her attention. It’s terribly written, really. The characters are riddled with clichés, and the plot holds on tightly to her hand and points out the ‘important clues’ in a loud voice. Just what she needs. She’s grown quite fond of the main character, a man called River who seems to spend most of his time drinking bourbon late into the night and having flashes of inspiration while he listens to the blues. Better than those awful novels the girls read – what are they called, chick flick? She’s constantly perplexed by the way her children have turned out. You’d never think they’d come from her and Charles’ loins. Eugh, she didn’t want to think about Charles’ loins. She lets out a snort of disbelief as she remembers a conversation she had with her oldest daughter Lucy on the phone last week, about the rights of illegal immigrants. Where did those ideas of hers come from? Friends, she supposes, the dreaded ‘peer group’. She picks up the novel and bends back the spine, aware of her mother tutting at the ‘desecration of a book’. Violet gives the ghost of her mother the finger, smiles sweetly, and bends it back even further until it cracks.
The book is slipping out of her fingers when the doorbell goes...