Something else

My big, fat, miserable novel has been making me fat and miserable again, so I've shelved it (again) for a bit. It's 120k words now, so I don't think I can ever abandon it - there's just too much emotional/physical energy invested in it.

Anyway, I'm working on something else for a bit, and I'm going to post that draft material here. Enjoy.

00.00 Prelude

Two weeks into the winter freeze, the city is shrouded by a pall of fog and icy air that’s suffused with a faint gleam of cold grey light. By the time the muffled church bells strike three o’clock the semi-opaque sky is already dimming, deepening into premature night as the gloom of low cloud, mist, smoke, steam and the condensed exhalations of those toiling in the slush and fog damps the light out of the sky. It’s as if the half-light suspended over the city all day is slowly subsiding, with an exhausted sigh, down into the chilled earth and stone.

The lanterns have been lit down on the waterfront, their light flaring across the ice-clamped river, throwing wavering shadows off the low [contours? plateaux?] formed where the plates of ice have fused. The shadows and dusk seem to scuttle across the deep, dull ice, and little [flurries] of light snow skitter over the roughcast surface, twisting and jack-knifing, almost alive, [like the spasmodic track of a pursued animal].

On the other side of the river, between the ice-locked ancient oak piles supporting the jetties [and wharves], the vagrants are stoking up their braziers, filling the dark spaces beneath the frozen planking with heat, smoke, soot and an [oily? Bituminous?] light that seems to etch the vagrants’ bristly beards in dry point [?], and which fixes their rheumy eyes with cleaner, sharper, harder edges. Hyena-like dogs skirt the fires, all rib racks and scarred muzzles, watching for falling food scraps against the flames’ glow, listening for the rats that scurry over the frozen detritus embedded in the river bank, and remembering vivid blood-and-sinew dog memories of dead vagrants: fresh meat for the pack to sustain them through the long winter night.

In the riverside stores and bars higher up the bank, smeared around the dark flanks of the city, the lights are shining out yellow, smoky and warm, beckoning in the chilled workers as they make their journeys home. Time passes, the crowds gradually thin out, and the horses and carts that have plying the business streets disappear. Chimney smoke gradually pales against the sky as the darkness comes down, and frost starts to glitter on slate roofs. Windows are shuttered against the cold. Distant dogs bark.

In the dark and the haze of cold, the more distant lights of the city falter and twinkle.

01.00 Gabriella

Why do I keep letting myself get dragged down like this? Why does that happen all the time? It’s the little things. All the details. Christ, my nails… bitten ragged and sore again. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

This is all true. All of it. But I have some stories I tell myself – the ones that help me make sense of everything. So do you, though. It’s not as if you’re any different from me. So don’t judge me.

In the year they let me stay at the grammar school, our composition teacher taught – no, told us – some rules, one of which was don’t start your story by describing the weather. But I remember the weather, so fuck him. Fuck all of the teachers at that school, in fact.
I’ve forgotten places, names, people’s faces, whole years – but I remember the feel of hard rain on my head and the smell of the city under fog in the middle of winter.

The way into my childhood – into the winters when I was a girl – is the glow in the sky after sunset, seen through the kitchen’s high window, with the metal frame silhouetted against the chill sky – all faded blue, purple, turquoise. I’d have my supper in the kitchen after school – usually it was toast or bread and something: sardines, cheese, sausages. Monday night was boiled eggs…two of them. With white bread, buttered cut into strips to dip. That was my favourite meal.

Sometimes, in the winter rain or slush, my stockings would still be wet from the journey home. My mother laid out a clean pair for me every night after I’d gone to bed; I didn’t have access to the clothes cupboards, and had nothing else to change into in the evenings before my bath. So I’d sit with damp feet until the grey school stockings dried out. I’d twist my toes against the wet wool, and they’d get sore and itchy. I remember a funny feeling when I curled and arched my toes in a certain way, and the bones seemed to lock, seize up. It gave me a funny mix of feelings – hurting and laughter-inducing together. That kind of feeling – like when you’ve got an insect bite that you have to keep scratching, even though you know that it’s going to hurt like hell when you stop – always makes me think of that little kitchen with the yellowish lamps lit and my mother stirring something on the electric stove, and me at the table reading the labels on the sauce bottles or jam jars, or looking up at the window and seeing the kitchen lights reflected there, high up, and the roofs of the houses opposite, dark at the bottom of the window, and the lighter sky above.

Trying to remember those evenings, to search out the details and bring them back – capture them for a moment and look at them properly in the right light – is like scratching that itch: trying to bring the thing to completion and hold off the moment when you stop, and it disappears back into the fog. I remember trying to see the world outside and the kitchen reflections at the same time, trying to make my eyes register both things at once – but I never could: it was always the reflected yellow light, ceiling and cupboards, or the roofs and the paler sky.

My room was right at the top of the building, up several flights of bare wooden stairs, separate from the kitchen and the bathroom on the ground floor. The staircases were gloomy even on summer evenings, and almost lightless in winter; in winter, I felt my way slowly up to bed, my feet probing the tread distances and my palms skimming the banisters, walls, and doors that acted as my landmarks on what sometimes – only sometimes, though – felt like a long and frightening journey through the dark.

The staircases and landings were shared with the other roomers in the building, so I heard different voices as I climbed the stairs, the sounds seeping through the gaps at the bottom of the heavy wooden doors whose sunken panels were so familiar to sight and touch. (When I think of those doors, I can still feel the little mental lurch I got when the panels dropped away from my fingertips, leaving me adrift for a moment.

Different smells dominated different landings, and different stages on the climb: floor polish, pipe tobacco smoke, boiled ham always on the second floor (where you had to take care not to knock over the precarious stack/tepee/pyramid of umbrellas and sticks), stale fat and fried onions. On the last half-landing below my little room there was a funny sweet scent like incense and rich ladies’ perfume and creamy vanilla candles. In the winter, when the landlord’s men sealed all the windows shut, that rich smell stayed in my nostrils even after I’d climbed into bed under the cold, stiff sheets. Sometimes I’d wake up in the night and it would still be there, up my nose, even under the covers, lingering in my snot and little hairs.

One winter night I was waiting for the bed to warm up, trying to keep my arms and legs motionless so that they wouldn’t touch any of the still-chilly cotton beyond the outline of my body. I remember that there was a little bluish moonlight showing at the top of the heavy curtains, and I knew that there was already ice inside the window – a thin patina/layer on the glass and a smooth beading where the glass met the frame. I’d looked before I got into bed, and felt the beaded ice melt flat against my fingertip. The moon had been higher up then, full, and very white and strong in the cloudless sky. That whole side of the sky was so brightly lit that I couldn’t see any stars, just a big sky of graduated grey blue, with the dazzling moon at the top of it. The frosty rooftops stretched away, slates and ridgelines crisp like cast metal edges in the clean light, and here and there I could see yellowish lights in tall towers, [mesmerically attention-drawing] against the silhouette backgrounds of dead stone and brick. From my bed, when I looked at that silvery [gauze] of light above the curtain, I pictured all those roofs, and the great blank light glaring [dumbly] down on them, and I thought that all those roofs would have rooms like mine stacked beneath them, with children in them trying to keep warm in cold beds, and adults in the rooms below, eating their dinners and talking in and out of the sound of metal knives and forks on thick china plates, their voices rising and falling, the words always unclear to the children upstairs; just the rhythms and tones of familiarly indistinct, distant voices lulling the children to sleep.

I was jealous of all those other children, who had a mum and a dad to listen to through the floor – when I just had my mum . Remembering this, and picturing my little girl self, I’m tempted to see chill, reluctant little tears glinting at the corners of my eyes in the faint light. That would be a lie, though – a self-pitying adult invention projected back onto little me. As far as I remember, I was just jealous. Not sad.

Lying in the cold and dark I felt – just for a moment, but very clearly – the memory of warm sunlight on the skin on the inside of my forearm, and smelt the smell of sun-warmed skin, that dry, [intoxicating?] odour of spring. The sense of being back there in the [warmth] of May was so real that I thought I could almost see the sunlight on the wall at the foot of my bed, an even spread of light on the custard-coloured paint. Then the [sense-] memory was gone. Trying to recreate the sensations by focusing on the light, the wall, the separate feel and smell of skin, I found that I could bring back each element in isolation, but never conjure them up simultaneously in a single assembly that suddenly locked [in focus] and vibrated, alive and whole, in my mind. I circled round these fragments as they snapped in and out of [apprehension/comprehension], each fragment of lost attention careening away from my fragile grasp, immune to my appeals for it to stay.