Bloggery and writerly

A fellow blogger blogged something on their blog about this national novel writing month thingy (international, I guess, but hey, who's being pedantic?) Anyway, the thing here is that you commit to write a 50, 000 word novel in November - 1, 666.66 (recurring) - words per day.

This is neatly synchronous, as I've recently been resuscitating my 'dark European history/memory/remaking yourself' novel. Part of that resuscitation is writing 1, 000 words a day (which started on Saturday). So my plan is to keep doing that, and use the November NaNoWriMo as a focus/nagging discipline to keep me on track. I'll post the daily drafts as a further act of discipline/habituation - there is something nice and naggy about knowing that "I must keep my commitment and post stuff".

I begin:

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Sat. 22nd October Draft Fragment

On the bus to Uncle Jan’s, passing through the familiar night-time suburban streets, her mind is whirling from thought to thought – please don’t let him die…if he dies, who will inherit the house?…how will dad react? He’s his only brother, after all…I hope I get back to the hospital in time… – but, looking out through the grease- and dust-smeared bus window, she seems to see everything with tremendous clarity and fixedness: the brightly-lit fast food and convenience store windows; the angled stacks of exotic fruits and vegetables outside the ethnic groceries – orange, green, and cream; the kaleidoscope of street fashions and faces picked out in the lights; the glinting windows, mirrors and roof curves of the kerb-parked cars. As she swings her gaze back to the bus interior, she registers the structures, shapes and sheens of the seats, roof and metal safety rails as a whole mesh of function, and sees the other passengers as discrete, delicate individuals, with their own life stories and value and perspective.

And she feels as if she’s barely been alive for years; as if she’s been dreaming, fooling herself by forgetting that all of this will come to an end. She feels simultaneous mood currents of despair and hope washing across each other like reflected waves on a beach. She knows that she must change. She feels affection and sympathy for everyone on the bus – even allowing some uncharacteristically generous indulgence – they’re only young, they’ve got to learn their own way – for the foul-mouthed teenagers that she can hear shouting and swearing on the top deck.

…

As she stands on the open platform at the back of the bus, gripping the white safety rail, waiting for the driver to slow down for the stop nearest Uncle Jan’s house, she feels clouds of chilly autumn air streaming across her cheek, and smells the warm smell of diesel smoke from the exhaust pipe as the driver changes down.

She hasn’t been to Uncle Jan’s in the dark for a long time – how many years must it be? Five? Ten? It would have been a Christmas or an Easter visit…Easter, probably, when they’d left soon after nightfall, carrying their chocolate eggs out to dad’s big black car, placing those delicate masses in the oil-smelling boot, snug amongst the old blanket and the greased, angular metal jack. She remembers that dusty, sickly odour of metal, and chemicals, and hot petrol and paint.

With shock, she realises that it’s more like fifteen years – dad has had at least two different cars since the black one; in her memory, she morphs instantly from eighteen to twelve, seeing her dark hair grow longer and her face fuller, with a suggestion of a double chin. She remembers holding her breath as they got into the car, not wanting to breathe in the smell of the leather seats that never seemed to have dried properly since dad had painted them with the upholstery coating he’d got from someone in the pub: the smell is a cloying mixture, with hints of the thick yellow bleach that mum puts down the toilet on Saturday mornings, and of over-ripe fruit. As soon as the smell starts seeping into her nostrils she can feel her temples tightening, and an incipient headache focusing just behind the bridge of her nose. That sickly feeling is bound up in her mind with memories of Uncle Jan and Aunt Mariette’s front garden at night: the dry rustling of the rose bush leaves against the wooden fencing, the damp smell of the flowerbeds, the grip of dad’s hand around hers, the dark passage down the side of the house that leads to the high wooden gate to the back garden.

And here she is standing by that gate again, ten years later, feeling focused and alive, and much wiser and calmer suddenly this evening, her senses sharpened and precise. But Aunt Mariette is dead, and Uncle Jan might die, and mum and dad barely talk to each other any more unless it’s to criticise or snipe. She looks up, past the sheer dark brick of the house wall, past the black roof edge, and up at the autumn night sky, where thin clouds reflect the city’s amber glow and gust across the shivering background of faint stars.

Dad told her that there was a spare key for Jan’s back door hidden under a bucket in the shed: it’s been there for years. She struggles to open the shed door, the yellowed light from the torch clamped under her arm swaying across the wooden panels as she uses both hands to shift the stiffened barrel of the unforgivingly hard draw-bolt with its sharp-edged brackets. She barks two knuckles – tastes blood and dirt on her tongue as she sucks at the abrasion – before the bolt finally twist-grates free, the door scrapes over the grass that’s grown up between the paving stones, and then she’s inside the dusty, desiccated shed.

Again, it’s like stepping back in time, so strong is the sensory assault on long-forgotten memories. The feeble torchlight casts its pale circles and flares along the length of the big shed, over the canvas-shrouded tools and garden furniture, shadows flickering back and forth like something half-seen in your peripheral vision. Uncle Jan was always a demon for tidying things up: everything had a specified place, and everything stored in here had a particular orientation and angle. As a child, Mathilde had known intuitively that if you came in here – and she knew it was probably wrong to come in here at all – if you came in here, you would have to make sure that everything was put back in precisely the same position, otherwise Uncle Jan would know that you’d been in here, and that you’d touched things; and that would mean…well, she didn’t know quite what, but the threat of something bad was there, that was for sure.

There’s a big wooden workbench on one side, with deep drawers underneath for Jan’s woodworking tools; a metal vice big enough to secure a ship’s hawser gleams at the far end of the bench. She knows that if she scraped open one of those drawers she’s find the tools resting on a bed of curled wood shavings and soft, dampened sawdust. She remembers the feel of those wood residues on her fingertips, the smooth curves of the wooden tool handles, the uncompromising cross-hatchings of flat files, the brutal blades of planes and oiled saws. She remembers how she imagined uncle Jan bent over the bench in his white protective apron, concentrating on the emerging form of the wood he was working, the tools resting easily in his hands, working with precision and control. There would be little flakes of wood and dust in his white moustache, and the dust would have created a faint film on his glasses.

The thought strikes her that those drawers must be full of spiders and small scuttling things, and webs and eggs, and she starts, realising that the air around her head is probably rigged with spiders’ webs, and that those webs will be vibrating with spiders and their moribund prey. She ducks involuntarily and steps back towards the door.

(1200 words)

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