An Extract from the opening chapter of my novel.

A novelist goes home to look after her ailing mother and is forced to confront questions of mortality and her understanding of what is real and what is imaginary. 

Luck According to Katerina Clarke

1.

A beech leaf committed suicide today outside my window. Detached itself from its mother’s apron strings and surrendered itself to the prevailing wind. Its mother did not mourn its passing. But then it wasn’t a violent death. It must have been a mass pact because there were hundreds of beech leaf bodies blown across the garden path, glowing gold and the muted muddied red of absent life. Leaves. Alive no longer. Their yellow spirits fled with the last lingering note of summer, leaving their skeletons to turn brittle. But my little beech leaf, littering the ground amongst the rest, is now enshrined between the pages of the complete works of Shakespeare and what with its being nestled between the words of the immortal bard and the martyr status it has achieved through its sacrificial death and my hurried tumble down the stairs in bedroom slippers that it might be preserved, I see no reason why its soul should not live on for all eternity!

I think you’ll agree, very droll. And yet, no, I am bound to say that I believe it to be true. I am idly humourless. How long has it been now? three weeks. I had to look at the calendar twice because I could not believe it. I had thought it had been twice as long. Time is nobody’s mistress and walks forever in spirals.

I sat at the kitchen table for an hour over a cup of tea and the Complete Works of Shakespeare, now amended on page 998. Stone cold Earl Grey is like drinking a disdainful older gentleman in a horse hair wig dunked in mud but I revelled in this new emotion. Revulsion. I almost made myself another cup of tea just to prolong the exquisite, pure, spine tingling taste of revulsion on my tongue. Convulsive. But it was already my third that morning. So I opened the Complete Works of Shakepseare randomly and read “The Tempest” for exactly 43 minutes. How apt, “The Tempest” that is, the 43 minutes merely being the time it took for me to want to strangle Miranda till the luminosity of her skin faded to dull white. Her naivety galled. Bled my patience dry. Her death would have been transformative. Made me remember my beech leaf. If only Shakespeare had written more about beech leaves, perhaps that was to be my legacy.

I inhaled. Let my eyes close. Exhaled. Forgot, for a minute, to continue breathing. My lungs laced and unlaced themselves over nothing till they began to burn, my entire throat scorched. I thought, oh yes, and took a bite out of the air.

I was hungry. Probably emotionally but bodily at that moment. I heaved myself up from the chair and went to the pantry for some milk and a box of cereal which was usually my preference for breakfast. Mum’s always been a toast kind of girl. But I found some shredded wheat and took it with me to the table. Got as far as pouring it into the bowl before I spotted the special, hand drawn, celebration, cut out golden carriage still trotting horseless across the back of the box. I stared. Mum couldn’t possibly have had this in the pantry for all that time. The queen’s coronation was over a year ago, I could remember seeing these limited edition packs in the stores in London. There had been a whole series to collect and arrange into flattened processions. Had my own carriage at home, cut out, as per the instructions, the contents consumed long ago.

I took a cautious mouse nibble. There was no satisfying crunch as my teeth sliced through the fibres, no crumble. As I suspected, it tasted stale and soggy, more like I had taken a nip out of the box it came in. There was nothing else. I’d have to content myself with toast. I put what was left of the shredded wheat into the bag of crusts mum kept for feeding the birds. Took out a pair of scissors and cut out the queen’s carriage, it was what you were meant to do after all, and crumpled the rest into the bin.

I sat down for another hour after that, piece of toast in hand, thinking nothing in particular, glazed eyes gazing out at the beech tree in the front garden. Eventually I was pulled away from my nomadic mind by the creak of bed springs. My call back to the world. My entire being was attuned so acutely to that sound that had I been dead I would have risen like a shot and with not a care for how thoroughly I had just undermined the miracle of Lazarus. Now, the effect was instantaneous. I hopped where before I had heaved, levied myself from the chair and scampered over the tiles to the hall, up the stairs and towards the second door on the right. It was ajar. Darkness spilled from within.

“Mum” I called as I entered.

At first I was swallowed in swaddling black but I was too accoustomed to the feeling to let it hold me back. I bent my step blind to the less night time square of black in the blackened room. Felt the stiff fold of mum’s paisley curtains beneath my practiced fingers.

“Stay where you are” I commanded.

I flung open the curtains with a rattle. Daylight deluged. Drank up the dark quicker than a desert does the rain. Mum, opposite of a flower, shrank from the bright onslaught.

“Ouch” she said.

“Nonsense” I replied briskly.

I turned to see her half way out of bed. Feet hung blankly over the side, hand shielded the weak blue watery worlds of her eyes.

“You’ll catch your death” I said, merely for something to say, and entirely false. She was so slow these days if death wanted her it would have to come and find her and she certainly wouldn’t be doing any of the catching. But it was chilly.

“Why don’t you get back into bed mum while I get your clothes.”

“Oh right” was all she said.

I took a skirt and blouse from the wardrobe, a thick jumper and some tights. Mum hadn’t moved. Like I’d said, she wouldn’t die.

I was a model of cheerful efficiency as I went about the task of manhandling mum into her clothes. She looked at the pair of tights with horror.

“What am I supposed to do with these?” she asked.

“Just put your left foot up. Your left foot. No, the other one mum, your left. That’s it.”

My mouth inhabited the voice of my old friend Bitsy, who used to be a nurse. Firm, decisive but chocolaty with cheer, never once letting on it was the third time you’d said, “left foot.”

She submitted quietly to my undentable lightness of heart, even, on occasion, revealed a jollity of her own.

“Never was any good at directions, couldn’t find left it I had to point it out on a map.”

This way we patiently pulled the wool over each other’s eyes and closed our own tight shut so as not to let on that the wool was not sufficient to make us blind.

“Let’s get you a nice cup of tea shall we?” I said because Bitsy would have.

“Oh yes please” said mum.

“Come on then.”

We went downstairs holding hands.

In the kitchen, in front of the stove, my happiness died a fraction more fatally then it had before. My face crumpled, bled for a moment, stopped. cup of tea. No need to shed tears over a cup of tea. I put out a second cup for me. Number 4? But who was counting? The china rattled in their saucers and the strainer clicked twice against the tea pot as I carried it through on a tray into the front room. It became a time piece for my thoughts: cup of tea, in time to the rattle, and no unhappy thought until the next click. I’m okay, I’m okay, cup of tea, cup of tea. Click. And then all over again. Even once I’d set the tray down. Even after I looked mum in the eye and asked:

“The pink cup or the white?”

We sipped our tea in silence. I searched for something to say and she forgot she used to care about such conventiality. We’d never let a lack of conversational topics stop us in the past. We bomb blasted our bold tongues through the bland detritus of triviality, in the past. No longer. Mum looked as if she were dozing. How is that possible? I found myself thinking, she could only have been up just over an hour.

The long line of her lips did a muted rainbow above her rounded chin. Her shoulders had balled themselves into an astonishing echo of the arc of her mouth. I couldn’t help staring. I mean, the symmetry of the body is really something.

But perhaps I should learn to see the bigger picture and not just the details, dazzling though they may be. When eventually I had the common sense to take a more general view of mum I realised she was shivering and that was only after she had awoken to say, “Did the fire go out?”

Her hand, when I touched it with my fingertips, was icy.

“You’re freezing,” I said, “sorry mum, how horrid of me.”

My graceless body leapt forwards, meteored towards the empty fireplace and began throwing twigs and old bits of newspaper into the grate like this was my last chance to ever light a fire and I had to make it last. Well big is certainly what I had in mind. Stupid woman, what kind of malfunctioning human being was I that I could let my own mother turn blue before remembering simple, easy precautions like striking a match over some dry wood.

We’d always had different priorities when I was growing up which seemed to widen as I moved into adult life. I always wanted to understand everything. If we were cold I wanted to be able to scientifically comprehend what external elements had triggered the internal symptoms that would allow us to conclude that we were cold and needed to get warm. I could sit and ponder this for hours. Mum meanwhile had leapt to make the fire even before I began noticing the goose pimples on my flesh. Because she had woken in the morning and it was the beginning of November so it was just a fact that the air would be nippy and the best remedy for a happy household was to keep it warm, ergo, light a fire.

Why wasn’t I a better person? Why did I still fail to notice these things? I was a practical failure in the most literal sense.

My large bundle of kindling pointed bony fingers of accusation as I struck a match and set it to the crumpled paper. Orange flame began chewing its progress across lines of smudged black text. I took another sheet of newspaper from my side and draped it over the opening of the fireplace, just like I had seen mum do every day of my winter time childhood.

“This is how to do it isn’t it mum?” I said.

“Yes lovely” she replied.

“Am I doing it right?”

“Yes you are hiding it somewhat but it doesn’t matter.”

“No, is this how to light a fire?”

“I don’t know how you tie it no. Why do you want to do that anyway?”

“No I, oh never mind.”

I’d only asked so that she could feel included; perhaps spark a conversation about the old days, for her sake. I knew how to light a fire.

“What did you say?”

My eyes marble rolled to the ceiling.

“Nothing mum.”

“Oh, I thought you said something.”

“Nope, nothing.”

I took a peep behind the paper curtain and saw that some of the twigs flared fitfully with flames. At least one spark I’d started had ignited. I took the paper down and put on a few logs. Leant back and watched the blaze grow. I became pensive. Craned my head to the ceiling. It was a way to dispel bad thoughts. Mean thoughts. About mum. I lay them on the beams so that they might be absorbed into the wood. I tried to remember her from younger years. Her vitality trained into usefulness, always doing. Up till midnight sewing costumes for the nativities, raising funds for the church roof, the restoration of the cloister and raising me. I loved her and hated her equally. I loved her industriousness and I hated it. I loved how indispensible she was to the community but loathed how dispensable that made me to her. She was the giver, I the taker. I took, took, took all the time while the rounded hill of her back shouldered another burden. How unbearably, oppressively strong those shoulders must have been. Now, how brittle.

Her face was alight with yellow that flickered, there and gone, like her thoughts. The shadows about her turned gold. She looked saintly, or, in fact, more like a beech leaf, burnished and glorious, saving the best for its last falling grace, its final looping, luminous scrawl of surrender.

If only there was a way I could enshrine her like my beech leaf, immortalise her, embalm her essence, shield her eternally among the pages of The Complete Works of Shakespeare. In that moment she was a blaze of beech leaf beauty and I thought, please, please may this be the end.