Anyone else found anything interesting
during a Covid clean-out? Like, for example, their own completed novella
manuscript buried in a back room drawer? Well, that was what I found. I'd put
it away, after too many publishing rejections, in 1997. A bit disappointed with
myself, I shook the dust off and returned full time to my proper job as a
secondary English teacher. Hadn't read my novella until recently. It's a bit of
a time capsule and I can well understand the rejections and why a trusted
reader proclaimed it a draft short of complete. But rereading it, I didn't hate
it. Its themes are perennial and I am still interested in my protagonist's
story.
So during Covid-19 lock-down, amongst
other things I've been revising my novel. That means trying to improve my
fiction writing. Call it a project. It's not for anything but
it is creative and absorbing; good way to keep the black dog
at bay. (And believe me, I can see it straining at the lead in my peripheral
vision.)
You'd think that as an English teacher I'd
be able to write passable fiction, given I taught writing for years in
secondary school. Yeah? Well, no. Sure, I wasn't bad at encouraging others to
develop their ideas. Same with editing students' writing. I could easily
correct grammar and spelling, slash redundant expressions and suggest modifications
to anything clunky. I also had heaps of ideas as to how others could begin and
develop their stories.
And yet, I've struggled with this in my
own prose fiction.
Somewhere in my thirties, I think I was
trying too hard to be literary, or something. My fiction style became
ponderous, laboured . No one's ever enjoyed my fiction writing. There's been a
bit of damning with feint praise if not actually diving under bushes to avoid
my asking them what they thought of something I'd written and foisted on them for
comment.
However, with the help of a couple of
trusted, unpaid editors, I think I may be finally figuring it out. Of
course, one can Google all this stuff. Gems of wisdom are fed to me daily on
social media. But something clicked when my editor-sister - also an English
teacher - gave this piece of advice after she'd graciously suffered another
telephone reading. Get rid of the scaffolding, she said. Trust the
reader's intelligence. Let the reader make the connections. She demonstrated in
an example and, lo and behold, a veil fell away. Never mind that I'm a
fascinated wanderer as I detail what I can see in my mind's eye. It's not doing
it for the reader.
It's the basic 'show don't tell' thing.
And furthermore, don't make a ball of string out of a piece of cotton, which I
fear I may have just done.
My last post, Broken Glass, was a short story that I wrote in the mid-1990s
during my early try-hard literary phase. I've edited it, keeping my sister's
sage advice in mind. Is it any better? Perhaps. Think I was quite depressed
when I wrote it, having just lost a 39 year old friend to pancreatic cancer.
Didn't realise how prescient that whole experience would be, given how things
have turned out with the loss of our lovely 'son-in-law' to cancer last year.
Anyway, here it is Broken Glass,
version 2
The crash sent Rick's mind back to his
childhood, so he could almost feel the slippery opaque glass with its milky
surface, and regular pattern of tiny coloured dots. Holding it was dangerous,
but he'd wanted it.
Even his mother couldn't hold it easily in
one hand.
"That's too much. Here." Cross
again, she’d made a sucking snapping sound with her mouth. "I’ll do it. As
if I haven't got enough to do around here." She'd helped him."Why did
I buy these stupid looking things? I should throw them out." She kept
saying she'd get rid of them but she hadn't.
His mother was outside at the line when he
wanted a drink. Knowing he was supposed to have his drink in the kitchen, he
chose instead to sit on the floor in front of the TV in his nest of cushions
and blankets.
Despite his mum’s warning, he took one of
the greedy, slippery glasses from the back of the cupboard where they lived
with the Easter and Christmas mugs from his granny. "Cheap and nasty
rubbish," according to his mum when Granny wasn't around to hear.
With infinite care, he poured his cordial
from the heavy bottle in the fridge. It welled and splashed at first, but
he wiped it up. He avoided resting the container on the side of the glass in
case the glass tipped over. He didn’t completely fill it.
Holding the drink aloft, he walked in
concentrated slow-motion to the lounge. His eyes flicked from glass to doorway guarding
against a spill. Painstakingly pacing, his toes feeling the ground, he made
slow progress on the tortuous route to the next room, six adult strides away.
After a sip, he placed the glass safely
not near the edge but in the middle of the coffee table. He
remembered his mum’s lessons.
Pleased with himself for not bothering his
mother, he clambered into his nest.
Suddenly his mum shouted sharply,
"Rick! Get the door for me! Hurry up!"
In his haste to help her, he knocked the
table. The drink washed over onto the floor on the far side. Helpless, he
watched the slippery glass rolling across the table before smashing on the
hardwood floorboards.
"Rick? Rick! What have you done
now?"
He heard the backdoor and the alarming
rush of air and temper as his mum flew
into the room. As he darted around the
table, his bare feet lost their grip in cordial.
"Leave it! It's too late now! You've
done the damage. What have I told you
about those damn glasses?"
Her feet outside the puddle, she reached
out and dragged him back. He’d felt sharp pain in his bottom and
legs as glass jabbed into the ball of his foot near his little toe.
"Stop crying now. It's never as bad
as it looks." Crimson splats dripped on the floorboards as she'd hobbled
him back into the kitchen. She bathed his foot with cotton balls soggy from
disinfectant mixed white in her baking dish. "Oh, it's all right!"
Soothing, holding his face in her hands she kissed him and lifted him onto the
table. "Sit there and I'll get you another drink. Don't worry about the
rotten glass. Stupid looking things." She was quite sure she'd got all the
glass out.
The memory flashed through Rick in the
seconds after his son, Luke, accidentally nudged the wine glass off the edge of
the bench. They both looked blankly at the spreading red pool on the floor and
the glass, on its side, missing a jagged piece but with its stem intact.
Standing there, he remembered a few weeks
ago looking outside over someone’s shoulder and watching the celebrant. Her lacquered
dark hair was lifting slightly with the pace she was making. Brief case at her
side, she was probably striding off to the next job. That bit of hem on her
long black skirt was coming down. You'd think she'd have fixed it. He hadn't
been able to stop cataloguing the details and felt guilty.
"I think we're talking about a very
special person here," she'd said, her voice like liqueur. Her head to one
side, she'd slowly scanned the crowd. She'd timed the pause while the mourners
drew breath. Janine's sister in the front row released an enormous sob which
hung for a while like the dust motes visible in the sun.
Rick shook the memory away, crouched and
picked the two sections of glass out of the puddle which Luke was about to step
into. “Careful, mate. Go round that way and get the mop would
you?’
"Sorry, dad." Luke's eyes filled
with tears.
"Forget it, Luke. It was an accident.
It doesn’t matter."
Rick had only drunk a mouthful out of that
second glass and there was no more left in the bottle. He wasn’t sure he could
manage through the night without another drink. Rationing it, he'd saved some
from the night before. Sensibly, he’d consciously re-corked the bottle after
he'd had his two and a bit glasses.
'It's not a good time to give up drinking,"
some friend had told Rick, a couple of
months back. They'd shared a bottle of
wine on a Tuesday morning. Janine had been asleep and wine seemed like a good
idea.
He hadn't had such a hectic social life
since he was a teenager. The visitors with their cakes and casseroles had
propelled them along. But that had stopped now. Life was supposed to go on
after some respectful pause.
"I've got it dad." Luke mopped
the floor while Rick prepared dinner, wondering whether he ought to go out and
buy another bottle. Maybe later, after they'd eaten.
Alyse, Rick’s teenage daughter, had turned
silent. Like Luke, she was helping out. Doing the washing. Setting the table.
Taking over where Janine's mother had left off when she decided it'd be
better for all of them if she returned to her own house.
Alyse briskly set out place mats, cutlery
and serviettes like Janine had. Alyse's hair fell in golden glossy blobs. Rick
had helped her to get the knots out when she was little. She used to hold him
round the waist and press her face into his tummy while he smoothed out the
tangles. He'd held her head gently so he wouldn't hurt her. There'd be a hot
damp patch on his shirt where she'd been breathing. Now she glanced
up occasionally at The Simpsons on the television as she set
the table. They watched television while they ate.
Rick was still painting the house. He
hadn’t finished it in time, even though he'd
tried to. The garden was a clock,
every day reminding him as he weeded it. He'd never really bothered with
it except for this last year. He’d thought it would be good for Janine. Some
sort of compensation for their up and down life together for the last sixteen
years.
He'd really upset his mother-in-law when
he'd refused to go and have one last look at Janine in the funeral home.
He'd felt a curious ecstasy after the
funeral. He was ashamed of the feeling of relief after weeks of lying next
to his dwindling sedated wife, her body swelling hideously and her
bones sticking out, never sure when death would strike or whether it already
had.
The day of the funeral came blue and
sunny; odd vaporous clouds drifted in a warm deep sky; weird metaphysical
conditions that he couldn't help noticing. A compilation of Janine's
favourites blasted at the crowd as they gathered outside the bizarre
red-carpeted hopeless mechanised temple.
They'd all gone back to Rick's afterwards.
He didn't know who'd organised the barrage of food and alcohol but it had
all happened. The sun shone and he’d sat on the front veranda and held court with Janine's
basketball girlfriends. One minute he’d forget and be laughing and getting
drunk. Next he’d be slammed by violent engulfing waves of unthinkable loss and
that putrid jasmine blooming by the front door.
Sometimes it is as bad as it looks.
