Today’s challenge involves promoting a post of our blog. What’s interesting about this task is that Darren points out that sometimes as blogger we fail to realize that promoting the whole blog, or the front page of our blog might be counterproductive, as possibly it is too vague. So he recommends selecting one or two posts a week to which you can give an extra push. In his post on the theoretical aspect of this lesson, Darren suggests a variety of ways in which we can promote our blog post. Here are a few that I think I can do:

• Putting your post on Twitter or Facebeook – I use both of these social networking tools, so this is something I can do.
• Promoting the post on Digg or Stumbleupon – I have registered accounts with both, so I can do this too.
• Comment on other people’s blogs – in this case I would not actually insert a link into the post, but I would get an automatic link by leaving the comment. And if the blog uses Commentluv (a Wordpress plugin that automatically displays the most recent post the commenter published, but which allows them to also choose a different post) then I can select the post in question for display. If people like the title, they will click on it.
• Using your Newsletter – I have a newsletter, so I can send out my newsletter with a plug of that post so people will click on the link.

This is about all I can handle. I mention in the title of this post that this task is especially challenging for me. I am not very good at self-promotion. I would rather just do my thing and wait for people to pick up on it on their own. This blog is slowly climbing the Google Page Rank ladder. I already have a Page Rank of 3 (for those who don’t know what this means, Google has a complicated system based on incoming links and pages loads and a bunch of other things, that it uses to rank websites. It takes some time usually to just get a Page Rank of 1. The highest is 10). But I find it hard to say: hey, look at me, I’m so great, my blog is so entertaining and interesting and informative, you have to read everything I write, and subscribe and get the newsletter and give me lots of money through different channels… But I have to get over that to a certain extent, because I am trying to build an internet business. Turtle^haus may not be “it.” I may end up building another blog entirely (I’ve been thinking of a cooking blog lately, because I’m on a diet and can’t eat anything. When I’m on a diet I get the urge to cook like crazy, so I can have at least the vicarious pleasure of seeing my family and friends enjoy the food I make. And I love food so much, just handling it… well, you understand why I’m fat, don’t you?)

Oh, my post of choice… let me select one. Hang on, I’ll be right back.

Okay, the post I am going to promote is the first segment of my 3-part interview with my friend Amanda Ackroyd, of Leeds, Yorkshire, England. Amanda and I went to boarding school together and have recently found each other again. We are as close today as we were then, in fact I would daresay that we are closer now. She is a writer and I very much want to help her publish her novel. So, here goes, the post I am promoting is: Author Interview: Amanda Ackroyd – part I.

(By the way, a suggestion that is frequently given by Darren and other blogging gurus is to occasionally link to your own posts inside newer posts so as to lead your readers back into your archives.)

I will report back in a bit. Off I go!

Okay, I’ve done three of the four tasks for both blogs (this one and Life+Web), and the Newsletter will have to wait until after the family Easter get-together, for which I’m leaving right now! Happy Easter everyone (or happy whatever you celebrate)

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This is the first post of a series on bloggers who inspire me. It is also day 2 of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge, and today’s task is to write a “list post.” As far as possible, I have decided to adapt the tasks of the Challenge to the posts I had already scheduled on my editorial calendar. Since there are so many things about my friend Mario Kluser that I admire and find inspiring, I think it will be very helpful to take the approach of a list post.
I have already spoken extensively of Mario in this blog. I interviewed him with reference to his two novels (and there are podcasts to go with his interviews), and I have linked to his blog on various occasions. I have never talked in depth about our friendship or about our professional relationship, nor have I really spoken much about his blog.
His blog is called Mario LIVE! and the tag line is “The People Blog.” No tag line has ever been more apt. For those who may not be familiar with our history, as it is a good story, here’s a little background. Mario and I met on Twitter in November of 2007. I was new to Twitter and Mario was one of my first two friends. Both he and the other friend, an Italian, went on to become “real life” friends, and visited me in New York in 2008. Both will be friends for life. What induced me to ask Mario to be my friend was his tone. I could sense kindness, warmth, friendliness and a sense of humor in his tweets (amazing what 140 little characters will reveal about a person), and I was right. He is a kindred spirit, and as they are hard to find, it’s a good idea to befriend one when you spot one.


After a short while we began to correspond via email, and we soon discovered that we were in similar professional situations, both looking for work in our chosen fields and not finding it in the current economic climate, and both in the process of deciding to make our own fortunes so as not to have to live with the pain and suffering of depending on an employer. We would both rather depend on the world at large.

He was already experienced in internet marketing, with AdWords, AdSense, landing pages, squeeze pages, etc., but knew very little about blogging, having always been under the impression that it was for whiny teenagers who just wanted to put their “diaries” online, and things of that nature. I, on the other hand, had already had a very intense blogging experience and was in the process of launching what are my two current blogs, turtle^haus and Life+Web. I told him a little about what I thought blogging was and could be, and he was convinced. Thus, Mario LIVE! was born. Mario and I discovered that we have complementary skills in business and complementary work experiences, and decided to join forces on special projects. Now, in addition to our blogs, we are helping a few corporate clients increase their online visibility and bring more clients through the virtual doors of their companies.

So, without further ado, here are 6 of the many reasons why Mario of Mario LIVE! inspires me:

1. He is a DOER and not a TALKER. I told him I was launching a blog and he was still quite skeptical. Within two short weeks, his blog was up and running, with a dozen posts, active comments, and so on, while mine was still heavily in the “design” phase and only had two or three posts. He has now well surpassed 100 posts in 6 months, and has now started a lovely newsletter;
2. He is absolutely AUTHENTIC (an overused buzz word in the world of blogging) in a way that is difficult to find;
3. He is not afraid to EXPRESS HIS OPINION and has no concern for what others might think or whether they may disagree with him. Don’t misunderstand me, he is not defiant and “in-your-face.” Quite the contrary. He is willing to bare his soul and share his innermost thoughts and feelings with the world, and does not let fads, trends, political correctness or the media influence his voice;
4. He is GUILELESS, CANDID, and POSITIVE. This does not mean that he never has negative feelings or that he is immune from being a little depressed or overwhelmed at times, but he always bounces back, and has a SOLUTION-ORIENTED attitude. Rather than dwelling on what is going wrong, he very quickly focuses on HOW CAN WE FIX THE PROBLEM AND MOVE ON.
5. His sense of WONDER is still very much alive. This is perhaps his most unique characteristic and one I find very winning. In fact, I think it is what sets him apart from other bloggers and will ultimately make his success online. It is a CHILDLIKE (not to be confused with childish) quality that allows us, his readers, to see his eyes widen in the face of extraordinary events or personal actions, and our eyes widen with his.
6. He KNOWS WHO HE IS as a person and as a blogger.

As with most bloggers, Mario did not immediately know what his blog was going to be about, what his MISSION was. At first he had a ton of different categories. He still has several categories, but nowadays they are much more coherent and the parts meld nicely into a recognizable and very pleasing whole.

His blog is tagged as “the people blog” because Mario finds inspiration in the actions of others. And these others don’t have to be celebrities. Anyone is worthy of a blog post, even a conversation overheard at the bus stop can inspire a story. But what he has to say is always interesting. Human interest, I would say, is the main focus of his posts. His stories are always heartfelt and entertaining, and I am always sucked in right from the opening sentence.

An overview of the things that interest him:

• The human mind
• Hypnosis
• Depression and overcoming it
• Friendship
• Overcoming life’s obstacles
• Personal finances
• Curious, fun, amazing things he finds surfing the web
• Music
• Photography
• Videography
• Films – he writes regular film reviews
• Books – as a writer he also reads a lot, and writes book reviews
• Animals – he has a pet rabbit, some hamsters (or is it gerbils?) and a cat. His girlfriend has a dog. They are sometimes featured
• Twitter
• Social media
• Motivation
• Television shows (he wants to be a corpse on one of the CSI shows)
• Fulfilling his dreams – this is another reason I should have mentioned. He is not afraid of pursuing his dreams, and he puts them right out there in the universe. I have no doubt that he will achieve most if not all of them
• New York and Brooklyn (where I live, now a second home to him)
• People and their stories.

When I get discouraged or a little “blocked” with my blogging or our online ventures, he always knows what to say to encourage me and get me going again. We motivate and encourage each other, we are each other’s biggest fans. At the end of his visit with me in November, on the day he was leaving, he said, “From now on, if they ask me whether I have any siblings, I will say yes, two: a brother in Germany and a sister in New York.” That’s the kind of person he is.

I am proud to be his friend and adopted sister, and so very happy to have found him. Thanks, Mario!

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In Chapter 4 of this exciting novel, Harv has now discovered the identity of her biological father, or at least she thinks she has. Her feelings in a turmoil, she leaves her parents’ house without saying goodbye and sets off to at least get a glimpse of the last place where her father was seen alive. The plot thickens. Enjoy this new chapter.

Chapter 4

I slumped back down against the box, thinking about him, about my mother. I was confused, overwhelmed by a vacuous, empty sensation like something fundamental was being sucked from me. My head felt like a polythene bag full of water, blood thumping in my ears, I was holding myself tight, my forehead fretted until my head ached.
I knew I had to get away before Angie came home and without Ken seeing the trouble in my face. There was no way I could face them and a worse thought was swilling horribly into my consciousness; that it could have been Angie who had stabbed him.
It was crazy, but it would explain why she had refused to tell me anything, when it was now so clear that she had known the truth all along. It was not possible that she could have had sex with a man who was murdered almost immediately after he had supposedly dropped her off and that she would somehow forget about it. The press cutting in my hand, and the ones which I knew must have appeared afterwards, informed me of this truth. It must have been all over the papers at the time, including pictures of him. This murder would have been the total talk of a small town like Scarborough. There was no way that she could have missed it.
From the diary entry, it seemed perfectly possible that nobody who Angie knew, either friends or parents, had seen them together. No one had seen them as they drove through town and she had waited in the car while he went into the B&B. They had gone to a pub, but not locally, and had sat where no one could see them. The rest of the time they had spent in his car, her arriving home so late that her parents would not have seen her return, possibly on foot, possibly covered in blood.
These thoughts seemed ridiculous and dramatic but why had Angie not gone to the police with information? If she had, it would have become part of our shared history, something she could not have kept hidden from me; a huge and horrible and very public legend in her life. She was a key witness, maybe the last person to see him alive and definitely the last if she had been the killer.
It was possible that they had got into a fight in his car on South Parade, he might have pulled a knife, tried to rape her and she had somehow turned the knife on him, stabbing him and stabbing him until she managed to run from the car and home under the cover of late night, empty streets.
Maybe she had fabricated the details in the diary, so if the police discovered that she had been with him that night, she could show them the diary where she had already cleverly written her own girlish alibi, a clean and safe version of events, just in case.
I pushed these thoughts away; Angie was too lightweight, too transparent to have held or maintained a lie of this magnitude. But murderers came in all different guises and as long as no one had seen them together, Angie would have been a piece of hay in a haystack so far as anyone identifying her as the killer went. As long as she had kept her head down and clear, acted normal and said nothing to anyone, it was perfectly feasible that she could have got away with it.
No one would suspect a seventeen-year-old girl. She had washed away the evidence and the passing of time would calm her and allay her fear of being caught.
Angie must have calculated that to have come forward, would have splashed her face all over the papers to identify her with Myra Hindley style mug shot, as the cheap girl who had fast sex with a stranger in the back of a car four hours after meeting him in a Spar shop and that four hours after leaving him, according to her story, he was brutally murdered. If guilty, she would have been branded by the press as some kind of black widow spider; seventeen years old and pregnant by the man she had executed immediately after their casual mating. She would have gone to prison and I would have been born there. How would they have branded me? It was unthinkable.
If Angie had killed him, I wondered how she would have behaved the next morning, or where she would have hidden her blood soaked clothing. I imagined her sitting at the breakfast table, Brian reading the paper while his daughter ate toast and cereal self consciously wondering whether what she had done was written all over her face. Whether what she had done had made the early edition, and any minute now, her father would push the paper across the table at her to show her what she already knew. After breakfast she would have gone to work, measured feet and chatted about the weather, with the colours of a hideous death still hanging like a fresh bruise in her aura and perhaps, a crescent of dried blood screaming her guilt from under a torn fingernail.
Innocent or guilty, those few weeks of Angie’s life must have been intolerable. I wondered how a seventeen year old had found the resource to cope in the face of what had unfolded two days after that final diary entry.
If Angie was the killer, then the horror of her crime would have been painfully internalised along with the terror of being caught, scared that she would trip herself up with the lies which would have sounded to her so thin and obvious as she sidled them cautiously from her tight mouth. Every morning and night, her fingers panicking through rattling newspapers which appealed for the information that only she could give. Angie, wide eyed and waiting for the knock at the door.
If she was innocent, then she would have probably been scared and bewildered, her initial hurt at his not calling exploding to a heart sink of horror as she read the front page splash in the local evening paper. Maybe she had heard about the murder as a flutter of delicious gossip on the street. I wondered how she had found out and how she had set her face at that moment to mask her inner turmoil and how she had then decided what to do. Four weeks later, or thereabout, she would have been sure that she was pregnant. But what was she? A scared victim or a murderous receptacle?
I was horrified by the thought of his body cooling with death while his still warm and vital sperm were squirming and fighting their way toward Angie’s seed; bloated and ready in her hot, fertile young belly. Tiny energetic specks of half-life seeking to create a whole, as his own force ebbed away. I wondered if it were possible that he had died at the very second that the remarkable fusion had made me alive. It chilled me.
It was a lie. “I can’t remember. It was dark.”
I had to get away, to get some perspective. I felt raw, my emotions seething at the surface. I couldn’t grieve for a man that I didn’t know but I could grieve for the lost possibility and I could make Angie pay in some way. I didn’t know how yet.
Fuck her and fuck her lies. My rage toward her felt tight and white. Something had broken that would never be mended. Her lies had undermined the very foundation of our relationship. I was no longer sure of who she was and what I believed about her.
I tore the two pages from the diary, folded them around the newspaper cutting and pushed them into my shirt pocket. I wiped my face roughly on the striped cloth and wrapped the diary back in it, then repacking her Pandora’s Box, as accurately as I could remember, I pushed it deep into a corner, obscuring it with the heavy carton of pigeon magazines.
Grabbing the carton of photographs, I closed up the loft and quickly packed my weekend things into my small bag. I could see Ken with two friends in the garden; he was holding a bird, spreading one wing to full span while the other men bent intently, gazing at the fan of feathers as he explained something to them.
I scribbled a quick note and left it on the kitchen table saying that Philip had called and that I had had to get back to York quickly. I said that I hadn’t wanted to disturb Ken as he was busy and then I hurried like a thief to the car, chucking my stuff like swag into the back seat.
I revved the engine a little too hard, my tyres spinning gravel and pulled into the road, terrified that Angie would be just turning into the street to see me leaving, my face a seething sneer of resentment and my eyes flashing too much white.
At the end of the road, and without a plan, I turned my car away from York and toward South Parade burning up the hill toward the tourist side of town, the little engine screaming in third gear. I wanted to see the scene of the crime, sit outside The Golden Sands and walk over the pavement where he had stumbled to see if I felt anything, maybe a shudder or a warm connection.
I drove into South Parade and was confronted by a skein of painted signs, which stood at the gate of nearly every property, both right and left. They stretched the length of the straight road with the air force blue sea in the distance, a tiny block of horizon, like a full stop.
I drove slowly, my head scanning to and fro, and there it was, about half way down on the right hand side; The Golden Sands, painted toffee and white and insinuating itself boldly and bay-fronted onto the street.
I found a parking space just beyond it and pulled in, switching off the engine and turning to stared up at the windows, trying to make myself feel something. It was everything a Bed and Breakfast should be; a glass porch with a ‘vacancies’ sign and a spider plant, a small breakfast table in the front window and a compact and healthy palm tree in the gravelled front garden.
I sat there for about ten minutes wondering if he might have parked his car in this exact spot and sat exactly where I was sitting now, his eyes seeing the same view that my eyes were now seeing. Was this where he had defended himself from the cutter, scrabbling and struggling for his life? I got out of the car and went to the door.
As I turned the brass doorknob, I could imagine his hand unable to find traction, blood and liquid fingers sliding on smooth metal. Red smears and droplets on gold.
The hallway was bright and clean; practical patterned carpet and textured cream and white wallpaper. I thought about the smeary handprints, the ‘traces of blood found in the entrance’, which would have drivelled along the walls and up the stairs. They might still be there, hidden under layers of old paper and paint.
A gilt half-circle table with a glass top held a couple of letters and a silk flower arrangement in shades of peach. There was a small desk, more like a lectern with a lower shelf and a small brass bell with a galleon handle standing on a laminated sign, which directed you to ‘Please Ring for Attention’. I picked it up and shook it; its silvery ringing was strident in the deathly quiet and I waited. A fire door swung open from what I guessed was probably the kitchen and a middle-aged woman came out wiping her hands on her apron and smiling a smile of welcome. Now, I didn’t know what to say. I was aware that I was gaping and probably appeared confused and weird. We stood like this, for a moment, each of us waiting for the other to begin. She was pink and breathing heavily.
“How can I help you?” she eventually asked, still smiling. She wiped a clean red hand across her dewy forehead, “Sorry, I’ve just been kneading bread. Takes it out of me these days”
“I wondered if you had any rooms available next week?” I lied.
“Next week, next week, now let me have a look. Is it a double or a single, arriving when and for how many nights?” She reached a booking diary from under the counter and flopped it open to the following week.
I thought quickly. He would probably have stayed in a single, “A single, for two nights from next Wednesday if that’s possible?”
“Yes, we have a couple of rooms, but they may fill up quite quickly at this time of year.”
“Is there any chance I could see one of the rooms?”
“Of course.” My heart was thumping as she reached under the desk again and pulled out some keys.
As we climbed the stairs I built my story, explaining that the room was actually for my parents who were coming to stay in Scarborough for a few days. I was lying with the confidence of a used car salesman now but in my desperation to get up here, I had tripped myself up.
“Won’t they be wanting a double then?” she asked, looking bemused by my inconsistency.
“Yes, how stupid of me, sorry, they probably will. Well, they definitely will. Yes”. I felt foolish, was aware that I had flushed, and consciously decided to offer no explanation.
I was desperate to see the single rooms but at this point I didn’t really care what I was shown; I just wanted to be upstairs in this house, to get an eyeful of as much as possible. I kept talking and the woman kept answering, but it was as if the words were coming from outside of me, like I was narrating the scene from offstage.
I was detached, my eyes scanning the décor like I was scrutinising the accommodation for cleanliness, the woman obviously thinking that I was acting peculiarly. I was looking for a sign; a speck of blood on a skirting, a smear on a door casing or an indelible stain seeping through wallpaper. If I had found one there, what would I have done – asked if I could scrape up this tiny DNA daddy on a flake of paint and keep it close to my heart in a matchbox? Suddenly I felt mad.
The woman opened the door into a street facing room with plain nets blowing at the open window. I stood, wondering now what the hell I was hoping to feel or connect with. It was probably not the actual room and might not even be the right house. The original Golden Sands could have disappeared in a change of ownership, the name re-emerging here in a completely different property.
“My parents stayed at the Golden Sands on their honeymoon, twenty four years ago, and they asked me to see if it was still here. That’s why they’re coming back, for their anniversary”. This was my best lie so far and I hoped it would lead me neatly to the question which would confirm whether this was the right house.
“Oh, that’s nice,” she said, “I wonder which room they stayed in?”
“I’m not sure about the room but I think they said it was a Mrs Carr who was the landlady.” I tried to look convincingly vague.
“Yes, that’s right, she was the owner two before us; I think she went to live with her daughter in Sheffield when she sold up. That must be what…” she counted mentally,
”twenty years ago now, because we’ve been here nine and the people before us had it for about seven”.
I wanted to leave. Now I was here, the location confirmed, I felt nothing except sad. I asked for a business card and said that I would let her know about the reservation later in the day after I had spoken to my parents. Leaving the house, I felt a tugging and a pang of abandonment but I think that was because I felt obligated to feel something.

Stay tuned next week for the next installment of what is fast becoming a nailbiter. See you soon

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I had not seen Alessandro in about fifteen years, even though for a time he dated my historical best friend, Anna, in Florence and they have remained good friends to this day. Anna has kept me abreast of his general doings and goings on over the years, but I had no idea that, 1) he speaks near-perfect English and 2) in addition to being one of Italy’s top-ranked gardeners, he is also a writer.
On a recent trip to the U.S. to promote his book and re-establish some of his connections, he graciously agreed to meet with me at the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx and gave me a charming interview. Here is the first part of the interview, with some photos of the gardens he has worked in.

New York Botanical Garden

• Alessandro-Tombelli-18-minsAlessandro-Tombelli-part-I-11-mins

Ilaria: I’m here with my friend Alessandro Tombelli, whom I’ve known for at least 20 years or something like that, and he’s from Florence, as am I. He is an extremely talented and well regarded in international circles gardener. Recently he decided to write a memoir called The Garden Connection: Life and Adventures of a Tuscan Gardener. As I understand it’s a combination of a personal memoir and a professional memoir, is that right?
Alessandro: It is.
Ilaria: Okay, so, Alessandro, tell me a little bit about the genesis of the book. Why did you decide to write it, how long did it take you…? Walk me through the process.
Alessandro: I decided to write this book a few years ago, when I was in Texas. Thanks to my garden connections it happened that I was in Texas, working with a landscape architect from Dallas, and I got involved in all these travels and big projects in the area, and I was thinking about how a few years before I was in Italy, I was in Florence, doing some gardening in these historical gardens. And then I was projected in these big, big goings on in Dallas, Texas. I thought, well, you know, this would be a nice story. It would be a nice story for a book. And all the travels I’d done between and all the people I met. I was there because I met somebody, and I met somebody through somebody else. So there was a real garden connection.
Ilaria: That’s great. And between the time that you first thought of writing the book and the time you wrote it, what happened? Why did it take you several years to actually start writing it?
Alessandro: Well, it happened because I’d been thinking for so long but I was not brave enough to write it. And also you have to concentrate on writing. I remember when I was thinking about this book, when I was taking notes, I had some ideas… Oh, this would be a nice idea for my next book. But I kept it for years before I decided to write it. And one day I wrote something like maybe ten pages, and I kept it maybe for a year or two, I don’t remember exactly. And it happened that I was in North Carolina once, and I was taken to a readers’ group, and when I realized that I said, “Oh, listen, I’ve written something. I have ten pages of my book.”
Ilaria: Quote, unquote.
Alessandro: And this friend said, “Oh, you should bring it and read it.” So I had my ten pages saved on a thumb drive, so I printed them out, I took them to this reading group, and everybody was listening. They said, “Alessandro, we like it, you should write this book.” I said, “Come on, I’m just a beginner. Maybe I should have a ghost writer, someone who writes for me.” Because I’m not a writer, I’m not an author. And they said, “No, you have to write it down.” And my friend, this friend who brought me there, she was…she is a writer, she’s an author. And she said, “If you write the book I’ll edit it for you.”
Ilaria: Wow.
Alessandro: So that was a big kick. So I came back home and after a few months, we corresponded, you know, asking if she was serious about it. And she was committed to doing it.
Ilaria: That’s a very big commitment.
Alessandro: Yeah. And she had no idea, poor Jack, how big a job she was going to do for me. Because I do speak a little English, but my written English was terrible. Anyway, I spent one summer, I was home in my little apartment in Florence, and I started writing. Spending like six, eight hours per day, because I was committed to do it. I had to do it. And she said, “Alessandro, you must finish it by the end of August, let’s say.” So I did it.
Ilaria: And how long did it take you altogether?
Alessandro: Altogether a couple of months.
Ilaria: That’s not long at all.
Alessandro: Yeah.
Ilaria: That’s wonderful.
Alessandro: And many things happened in between. I mean, the computer crashed once, so I had to rewrite part of the book because I lost everything. And a few other things. But anyway, I did it.
Ilaria: It’s so funny to see this: “San Donato in Collina and England.” [Come dire, Compiobbi e New York.
Alessandro: No, fa ridere, eh.] It’s very funny. I tried to put some humor in it.
Ilaria: You know what’s so funny is that I relate to this so well. Because this is my life. I’m half Florentine and half New Yorker, and I can relate… and when I was little I lived on a farm, you know, where I picked the grapes and the olives…
Alessandro: So you know what I’m talking about.
Ilaria: …and the chestnuts. You know, all that stuff.
Alessandro: Were you there in 1985 when the big chill came?
Ilaria: I was. Oh, yes. When all the olive trees died.
Alessandro: They died. I remember at that time, I was not really involved in agriculture then, or horticulture either. But I remember the countryside around Florence had changed completely. Because if you look at Florence from the hills… Well, Florence or the Tuscan countryside… you have this kind of silver gray of the olives.
Ilaria: Of course, I know exactly what you mean, that silvery color.
Alessandro: The season after that big chill was brown. It was awful, awful.
Ilaria: I know, it was so shocking. All that snow. I had a Vespa then. It was buried under the snow, I mean completely buried, for three weeks. When finally the snow melted and I could get my Vespa out of there, I kicked it to start it, and the metal pedal [la leva della messa in moto, fatta di ghisa], it just broke in two from the freezing cold. It was so cold. The first few days there were no buses, because Florence was not equipped. Florence is not equipped to deal with that kind of snow.
Alessandro: Nowadays it’s still not.
Ilaria: Yeah. But it never used to happen like that.
Alessandro: No, it was a special year.
Ilaria: And I had to go everywhere on foot. I had to walk everywhere. I lived in, near via dello Statuto, in via Paoletti, and I had to walk from there to the University… which at least then the University was in Centro and not out in the middle of nowhere where it is now. So it was within walking distance but it took me three-quarters of an hour to go to school every day. Wow. So tell me a little bit about the book.
Alessandro: So the book starts about my life in Florence, the beginning of my horticultural interests, some friends, some private life, people that I met at that time, people who made me to be as I am now. And then from the time I spent in England. It was the year 1987 when I decided to spend some time in England. So I moved there and I worked for one year in a very important garden called Wisley Garden. And there the horticultural world opened for me. It was a revelation, you know. “Oh, I see what gardening is now.” It was not just for the plants, for the garden, but also the people. So I met all the gurus at that time of the English international gardening. People that I had never heard of before. And you know, together with the other students we were going to meetings, we were going to see gardens during the weekend. So it was an amazing year for me. So back from that time in England, when I was in Italy, I was a bit shocked, you know, because from the highest level of horticulture in the world, you go back to Italy, back home, and you do nothing like that. So I was doing some little gardens here and there, but nothing very important. So I spent a couple of years, I was quite depressed. And I wanted to go back to England, I wanted to go back somewhere else. I was thinking about Australia, I was thinking about South Africa, but nothing happened, until I had the opportunity to work in a rather well known garden in Tuscany. It’s called La Foce. So I was able to work in this place. La Foce is a garden in Tuscany. It’s in the Val d’Orcia, the Siena province, and it’s one of the most beautiful gardens in Tuscany, nowadays. So I became the head gardener, and there again I was happy. Because after my time in England I could do some practice. So I was involved in the restoration of the garden, in the upkeep of it, and I was absorbed in all these beautiful things I was looking at, you know there were concerts in the villa, nice people, interesting people, riding horses. So many things, it was really one of the best times of my life. And that opened another door. La Foce opened the door to Villa I Tatti, which is another important villa in Florence, which is owned by Harvard University.
Ilaria: Of course.

La Foce

I Tatti #1

I Tatti #2

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I am happy to present the second half of Chapter 3 of this riveting novel. In the first half of the chapter, Harv found Angie’s diary from when she was a teenage girl, and realizes that by reading it she may uncover the identity of her biological father, something which Angie has kept a secret from her for her entire life. Harv has always found this inexplicable and frustrating, and is determined to find out the truth. This is where events are irretrievably set in motion, and from here on out, there is no looking back. In the second half of this chapter, as Harv reads on, she makes a terrible discovery. Enjoy! And get ready to start biting your nails.

CHAPTER 3b

After this episode, the diary continued in much the same vein. I thumbed through quickly, seeing some empty pages, a sprinkling of capital HURRAH’s and the regular red asterisks.  There were some dull little write ups on nothing in particular and some containing more, deeply difficult to read descriptions of sexual forays, none of them any more sophisticated or satisfactory than the Gary Smythe affair.
Angie clearly hadn’t learned very fast. In fact it appeared that she hadn’t learned at all. She had ridden the exhilarating waves of teenage sex and carelessly given love, with a gung ho naivety, lining herself up again and again to be plunged into troughs of despair and disappointed tears.
I sat back and let the pages riffle through my fingers like a flick book and suddenly understood the significance of the red asterisks; each one flagged up a night when she had gone all the way, like notches on the headboard, keeping score. As I flicked through they flashed up with shocking regularity, about once a fortnight in fact.
It was like a competition. Had she and Sal and Janice just been going hell for leather to notch up the biggest number?  Did they all have a go with the same ones and compare and allocate points?  I felt sorry and a little sick.
I had been eighteen when I had lost my virginity and that had been to James, a serious boyfriend, and we’d waited for at least a month. Then for the next three years I’d only had sex with him. Now, here was my mother, going at it like it was a living, with all and sundry.
The first four months of the diary, she must have totalled what? I checked back, making a count of the asterisks, one, two, three, four, seven.  Seven – nearly one a fortnight.  I shook my head like a disappointed head mistress, appalled at the promising girl who has let the whole school down so badly.  It was no wonder that she had fallen pregnant with this level of reckless activity. For God’s sake, how old had she been? Fifteen? Sixteen?
I flipped back to the beginning, to see the year that the diary had been written, but could find no reference until I noticed two pages stuck together and reamed a fingernail around the gold edging, peeling them apart to reveal the year as 1974.
This was my apocalypse; a gasp escaped as if I had been shocked and an urgent plume of adrenaline fluttered its way from under my ribs to stroke at my heart with a hot, feathery rush.
If there had been a million red asterisks in the first six months of that diary, they would have paled into insignificance with the one that I thought might be twinkling on or around the top of pages dated mid June. I leafed slowly back through the diary turned Pandora’s Box; April, May, steeling myself for what I might find there, all the time knowing that the truth might be far more unsavoury than the fantasy, knowing that it might be better if I didn’t know the answer.
I had been born on Thursday March 6th 1975. Therefore, according to the conception calculator I had looked at on the internet, I had been conceived on or around the thirteenth of June 1974.   Apart from the fact that Angie was my mother, this was the only absolute regarding my conception; that, around the middle of June 1974, my mother had coupled with the man who was probably my father.  This date had secretly felt as significant to me in the absence of any other information, as a birthday.
Part of me hoped that this page of potentially huge implication would be blank and nothing would have changed.  The alternative might be the discovery that a goon like Gary Smythe had spawned me, with my mother’s revolting detail leaving me feeling like a seedy voyeur at my own grunting and youthfully enthusiastic fertilisation. I didn’t want to read that the residue of this disgusting mating had just been some ‘stuff’ which had been wiped off a moquette cushion in a dreary living room, that I was the bit that got away. If that was what I found there, I would have to live with that horrible truth and never be able to tell, and every time I saw Gary Smythe I would wonder if he knew, find myself looking for myself in him.  I would never go out in Scarborough again.
I began to turn the page, eyes half closed as if I could just feed myself a blurry half version of this enormous truth until I knew whether I liked it or not.
At the top of the page, blazing like a beacon was the red asterisk. Wednesday June 12, 1974.  The entry went on across the 13th and over to the 14th. There was a flattened cigarette packet, black and still shiny with a gold JPS insignia. On the white inside was written, ‘Angie, Easy Rider, get my dad’s special copy. I’m in it.’
The words were heavily underlined and there was a scribbly forward slanting signature that I couldn’t make out. I put my hand to my mouth and began tentatively to read.
‘It’s two a.m and I’ve just got home. Going to feel like shit tomorrow but I don’t care ‘cos I think I’m in love. AGAIN!!!  Had the weirdest night. Left work and stopped at the Spar to get some fags.  There was this bloke in there and he was absolutely gorgeous. He had on this shirt that made your eyes go funny and he smiled at me when I was buying my stuff at the counter then he smiled at me again when I left and said ‘bye’.  I looked awful. Had my shitty uniform on, but at least I’d rolled up the skirt a bit to make it shorter and tied the horrible shirt in a knot at the front. I hung around outside, waiting for him to come out. Pretended I’d lost something in the bottom of my bag. I really, really wanted to talk to him. Just as he came out, some Tampax fell out of my handbag. REALLY EMBARRASSED.  He was laughing and he came over and picked them up. He had a nice Newcastle accent and he smiled a lot. He said he was on his way to Hull and he had stopped off in Scarborough because he’d never been. He needed somewhere to stay. I started to give him directions to the B and B’s and all the time, he was staring at my mouth and his eyes were sort of twinkling. It made me feel excited and uncomfortable all at the same time. HE IS GORGEOUS. It was like he couldn’t take his eyes off me. It got me all confused and shy because he knew what he was doing. I kept saying ‘Stop it,’ and he kept saying ‘What?’ and smiling more at me. I felt like a little kid.  I said I’d show him where the places to stay were instead of telling him and he said he’d take me home after. We got into his car, it was better than dads and I took him through town. I was hoping that someone might see me in the car with him, but we didn’t see anyone.  Drove up to South Parade and he went into one and booked in, then we went for a drink out of town on the way to Whitby and had fish and chips at a pub. We sat behind a pillar so the barmaid couldn’t see me in case she wouldn’t serve me.  I phoned Mum and Dad and said I wouldn’t be in for tea. Told them I was with Janice. He’s really funny and into films and videos. I’ve never even seen a video machine.  Kept going on and on about Easy Rider. He says I need to see it.  Wrote it down on this fag packet so I’d remember the name of it. Kept teasing me that his dad had a special copy and he was in it. I don’t believe him but he kept saying it was true. His name’s Martin Simmons and he comes from somewhere near Newcastle.’
I looked again at the flattened JPS packet. Now I could see that the signature said Martin Simmons.
‘On the way home we stopped in Peasholme Park and he started kissing me, then we got in the back of his car and we did it, it was fantastic and he kisses really well.  Afterwards we stayed in the back for ages and he told me about Newcastle and talked about music and stuff.  He’s really, really sweet and gentle and he’s going to take me out again while he’s here. We smoked nearly forty fags and he had got some beer from the Spar, so then we went back in the front drank some cans and sat up at the park till half one. He wanted to take me home, but I got him to drop me near South Parade and I walked down the hill. Didn’t want dad to see me get home in his car. Said he’d ring me tomorrow. He’s got green eyes and long dark wavy hair and a really nice moustache. Had to sneak in so Dad didn’t know what time I got home on a work night. Think it’s O.K.  Can’t wait till tomorrow.’
There was the same unsophisticated giddiness in Angie’s telling of the story but none of the coarseness which had made some of her other encounters seem so unclean.  He had stayed with her for hours after they had ‘done it’ and they had shared cigarettes and beer and conversation. He had taken her to a country pub, he had fed her and at the end of the night, he had wanted to take her home and when he had left her he had done so with a promise of more.  I felt a sense of warm relief.  Martin Simmons from Newcastle with green eyes and a shirt that makes your eyes go funny is going to take her out again.
I quickly checked back through the pages, wanting to be sure there had been no other sex which might interfere with my now desperate desire that he was the man I had been looking for.  There was an asterisk a week and a half before, someone called John Clarke; I supposed that he could be a contender but it was more unlikely I convinced myself. I wanted Martin Simmons to be the one. The last sweet and significant piece of my jigsaw clicked into place, somewhere so visceral I couldn’t locate it.  It made me shudder.  My picture felt complete. This was all that I had needed; a few precise brush strokes and a name. I liked him.
What I now understood was that Angie, having committed this act to paper, must have known all along that he was most likely to be the father. So why had she refused to tell. When she realised that she had missed a period, she had to have known; the facts had been in front of her written there in black and white. I couldn’t understand why she had refused to tell me anything about him, given that there seemed to be a lot less to be ashamed of in this encounter than there had been with the rest of them.
I excitedly turned the page to the fifteenth and then the sixteenth but they stared back glaringly and humiliatingly blank.  He had let her down.
I felt as deflated and sorry and disappointed for Angie’s empty pages as she probably had.  They whispered a sad defeat. There was none of the excuses and angry expletives which had followed her earlier let-downs. He had been nice to her, he had been different and she wanted to see him again but he hadn’t phoned.
I turned the page, and another and another, wanting so badly to see one of her big, shouting HURRAHS!  Instead there was nothing but a piece of newspaper folded into a yellowing square.
I opened it carefully, the creases so well pressed that it threatened to break apart as I unfolded it; The Scarborough Herald; the top half of the front page with a colour photograph and a blaring headline, ‘Man found murdered in Scarborough B&B’.  The page was dated Fri. 14 June.
The newspaper picture showed a typical Scarborough guesthouse, but with two policemen standing guard at the wooden front gate.  A Ford Escort squad car was parked in the street. The pavement had been taped off.
I read the article. ‘The body of a man, not believed to be a Scarborough resident, was found yesterday morning at the Golden Sands Bed and Breakfast on South Parade.
The owner of Golden Sands, Mrs Edna Carr, who became suspicious when she found blood on the walls and in the entrance to the property on Thursday morning, made the grisly discovery at about 6.30 a.m.
The man who is thought to be in his early twenties and who, police report, was repeatedly stabbed, bled to death in his room.  Blood found in what is assumed to be his car, lead police to believe the attack may have taken place elsewhere.
Police say they have no clues at present although Mrs. Carr told police that she thought she heard him returning at about two a.m on Thursday morning.
The victim is 6’1” tall, of slim build, with dark hair and a moustache.  Police are appealing for witnesses who may have been in the vicinity of South Parade in the early hours of Thursday morning or who may have seen anything suspicious.’
And I knew it was him. Martin Simmons. I felt winded. I involuntarily stood up, my emotions oscillating between shock and disbelief and a selfish little thrust of horrible disappointment.  Within those two small pages he had been a possibility. Alive and warm, talking, laughing and eating and having young sex in the back of a car and with a turn of the page, he was dead. Not just dead, but murdered, stabbed repeatedly.  How many times was repeatedly?
The word ‘repeatedly’ hung in my head and suddenly felt sickening, the imagined sound of blunt fist and sharp blade again and again driving into the minced flesh and adrenaline engorged organs of the man in the shirt that made your eyes go funny, with his green eyes and dark wavy hair.
Had he put his hands up to protect himself while the blurry image of his murderer flickered before him like the fragmented frames of a terrible film?  I curled my hands to my chest, the backs of my knees zinging as I imagined the shear and sting of flashing metal as it slashed through the tautness of the tendons in his fingers, rendering them useless red jelly on bone.
I imagined Mrs Carr the next morning, knocking, ear to the door, calling with increasing urgency, her concern growing until unable to stand it any longer, she made a proprietary stand and gained entrance with her master key.
Did she find him lying across the bed? One dried up eye, a slit of white staring at the wall, cheek stuck to the pillow with a foamy splutter of bloody spume coughed out and fanning from his mouth and beginning to dry black at the edges.
Where was Angie in all of this? My head felt as if infused with menthol, airy and clear as images flashed graphically and in full, horrible colour. I shook myself to make the pictures go away, feeling nothing and yet everything, the silence of the attic roaring, as the man I so badly wanted to be my father died on the little piece of yellowing, dried up paper which trembled in my hand.

Stay tuned next week for Chapter 4, and don’t forget to comment.

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In Chapter 2 of this exciting novel Harv introduced us to most of the remaining main characters (the “good guys” anyway) and her friend Philip asked her if she could get her hands on any old photos for an art exhibition. In Chapter 3, Harv visits her parents and while rooting around in their attic for the photos finds a diary kept by her mother as a teenager. When she realizes that it must have been written around the time of her own conception, Harv cannot keep herself from reading, and is ineluctably drawn down a path of no return… In this post we publish the first half of this chapter. Enjoy!

CHAPTER 3

Home in Scarborough three weeks later I asked Ken about the photographs in the attic, explaining that Philip might be interested in using some of them for an exhibition.
Ken looked pleased, they had belonged to his father, Norman, collected over a lifetime of working as a patternmaker, crafting wood with clinical accuracy for metal casting. Patternmakers wore bowler hats to set them apart from, and above, the other shop floor workers and when I was a small child and he called at our house on his way home smelling of oil and pine shavings he would put his hat onto my tiny head and flick it so it spun round and round, whipping my hair into a dark tornado, and I would laugh. He had two gruesomely fascinating stump fingers on his left hand by which I was both mesmerised and repulsed. He had died on a bus going to Whitby just three years into his retirement.
It was a drizzly Saturday morning and Angie was going into town for what she called a ‘beautification’ which was about sleek hair and long nails and designed to coincide, with precision, the arrival of Ken’s pigeon buddies coming to swap magazines and discuss the merits of the various breeds; Jannsens, Dragoon, Smerle and carrier pigeon. Bricoux, Delbar and Catrysse; names which slipped off the tongues of these northern men like foreign jewels; names which I had heard a thousand times but was no wiser about now than I had been twenty years ago when they had first entered my life lexicon.
I waited for Angie to leave, having made an uneasy peace, then made myself a big mug of coffee, found a packet of biscuits and climbed the ladder into the attic. I hadn’t been up there for years.
Fumbling for the light switch, I pulled myself up into the gloomy atmosphere of the roof space, illuminated by a single tired bulb dangling from a roof timber.
Immediately around the hatch was cluttered with boxes and stuffed bin liners. Laziness had obviously dictated that, when stowing anything, you simply opened the loft and pushed for position, slowly moving the other, older junk further back.
Almost instantly, I found the box of photographs and was glad to see that they were exactly how I remembered them and just what Philip had described.
I pushed a few cartons away from the area round the hatch and put the photo box at the top of the ladder, then went back to investigate some other boxes brimming with childhood books and familiar toys which had caught my eye. My foot jammed against a polythene bag of exercise books from school with faded, regulation red, green and blue covers; half my life had been stashed up here; all these memories relegated to the cold and dark. It was exciting; these things were so old, that they were new to me again, enough nostalgia to fill my whole morning. I tipped out the bag of exercise books with eager anticipation.
I opened an English essay book marked with aggressive strata’s of screeching of red pen and no marks higher than a B+. There was a ‘See Me’ on one page. I had been worse than I remembered. It was astonishing that I had gone on to read English at university.
Underneath the bag was a cardboard sleeve containing some GCSE artwork, some of which wasn’t bad, and an autograph book with a bubblegum pink cover. Nearly the whole class I remembered, including the boys, had handed one round on their last day. All the girls had cried, hugging each other and writing sentimental promises of friendship forever. The boys had limbered up slippy lips, using our leaving as an excuse to give and get nasty, wet, experimental schoolboy kisses.
On the inside cover in pole position, the dull and friendless Jennifer Day had written, in a contrived and loopy script, ‘To one of my best friends. I will miss you’. Desperate Jennifer without an original thought in her head. ‘I hope you will still talk to us when you are a famous artist. Luv ‘n’ stuff, Jennifer Day’. I flicked on through, finding nothing which was any more evolved, just pages of practised and sadly extravagant signatures, ‘autographs’ in pathetic handwriting, underscored with even more pathetic flourishes. I still saw some of these people around in town and we barely had the will to acknowledge each other. Indeed we often didn’t.
Embarrassed and fascinated in equal measure by this trove of history, I pulled out a musty chair cushion which had been pushed into the dark eves, shaking it for spiders, and settled cross-legged, shuffling to get comfortable in the dim light. I opened the box of toys and books and discovered Proper Teddy and wondered why he was in the loft. I launched him toward the hatch and heard him hit the landing carpet with a strawy thump.
Underneath a jumble of knitted dolls clothes were some Enid Blyton books and a Barbie doll with biro on its face and red nipples unevenly marked with indelible felt tip.
Another box revealed a pile of Ken’s old pigeon magazines and photographs of him holding some of his best birds. Underneath, a stack of board games; Buckaroo, Mousetrap and a Twister mat with no instructions.
My grandparents’ wedding album captured my attention for ten minutes or so; the clothes were interesting but the bleak, black and white faces and formal poses belied the celebration and were somehow joyless and miserable. I slid it back into the carton.
I rifled through a few more boxes filled with ugly, newspaper-wrapped crockery and then found a sturdy sealed carton, with the name Angie written in biro on one of the flaps. All the stick had gone out of the tape and it came away, crackling like a yellowy, transparent scab.
In the top of the box was a folded T Shirt, with a message scrawled across the front and an autograph which I couldn’t make out; ‘To Angie, thanks for a great time, with love…’ I would have to ask her. Underneath were two cheap belts and a silk head square printed garishly with a Spanish Flamenco dancer. There were two T. Rex singles still in their paper sleeves, a folded poster of Marc Bolan in leopard skin, pouting like a coquette into camera and a pair of 1970’s nylons in their original package.
I was beaming, thrilled by this concentrated glimpse of the teenage Angie. I rummaged deeper and unearthed a piece of striped fabric folded tightly around what felt like a small hardback book. The unravelled cloth revealed a shiny orange diary, its contents protected by a security band with a small brass lock. On the cover was printed, ‘This Diary belongs to’ and underneath, a series of dots where Angie had filled in her own name in bold, red letters: Angela Pollard. I pushed the catch to the side, but it was secured.
I tipped the box toward me and heard the remaining scrappy contents slide to one edge then eagerly scraped through the gritty detritus and quickly found the tiny, uncomplicated key; a hairpin would have probably done the job. It turned loosely in the cheap lock, allowing the cardboard band to flip open. A glow of sneaking anticipation warmed my ears; the flush of a peeping tom. Feeling ashamed as I did this, I justified what I was about to do, salving my guilt by telling myself that Angie would do exactly the same if presented with my teenage diary. I would take it down with me and we would laugh about it together when she got home; re-bond our friendship.
Inside the front cover was written in official looking capitals with a lot of exclamation marks and a skull and crossbones, ‘Angie’s diary. Private and Confidential!!!!!’ I smiled and despite the warning, flicked open the first page.
January 1.
‘Really hung over. Brilliant night at the Crown, got to kiss Gary, it was fantastic. Janice was sick at nine o’clock but kept on drinking. Had loads of drinks bought and did loads of snogging at midnight. Wore my new pink dress. Ripped tights on way home. Sal had sex in car park with Ron, Janice and me caught them. Really funny.
This is my new diary that Auntie Betty bought me for Christmas and this year I’m going to write in it every day. Think I might be in love with Gary’.
I almost stopped reading at this point, embarrassed by her first gauche entry. I started to put it back in the fabric but now I had started, I somehow couldn’t stop myself; it was too compelling and too available. If I hadn’t read it then, I would have been back up there the following morning after a sleepless night of raging curiosity. I knew it was wrong – it was private, but it was old news. I shifted position, rested my back against the box of pigeon magazines and hunkered down to read some more.
January 2.
‘Go back to work tomorrow, so got clothes ready and talked to Sal on the phone. She wouldn’t tell me about the Ron thing, but said she didn’t really fancy him and he wasn’t that good. Mum made ham salad for tea and dad fell asleep in the chair. Read Marc Bolan annual. He is gorgeous and fantastic and my perfect boyfriend. Goodnight diary.’
‘Goodnight diary,’ I huffed a small laugh.
January 3.
‘I hate work, it’s boring and the customers are shit’.
This was all she’d managed for that day and then there were a few days with nothing at all. Typically of Angie, it had taken just three days for the novelty to wear off. I remembered that she had worked in a shoe shop between leaving school and getting pregnant, which had been just short of two years. I assumed that once she had started to look pregnant, Brian and Della would have made her leave, not wanting her to be fodder for Scarborough gossip. Even now, when either of my grandmothers mentioned anything to do with sex or pregnancy they mouthed it Les Dawson fashion, forearms jumbling. Back then, Angie’s ‘predicament’ or ‘condition’ would have been viewed by them as little short of The Devil’s work.
Not quite two years had been the extent of my mother’s career; any prospects in that department cut short by unmarried motherhood and her bloody lucky marriage.
January 6
‘Saw Julie Rawden in town, she’s knocked up!!!! Says she and Dave Pearson are getting married. Dave Pearson!!! UUUUGH he’s disgusting. Friday tomorrow. Hurray!’
January 7.
‘It’s midnight. Fantastic night!!!, Went to The Crown and then The Ship with Sal and Janice. Gary was in The Crown and then he followed us to The Fleece, he’s really, really good-looking. Went out to the car park and had a snog. He pinned me against the wall and put his hand up my blouse and rubbed up against me. IT FELT HUGE!!!
He wants to take me out tomorrow night; I’m definitely going to do it with him.
He was wearing these amazing jeans. He’s so gorgeous. Don’t know what to wear. Can’t wait till tomorrow’.
A red asterisk highlighted the top of the next entry.
January 8.
‘Went into Tickles at lunchtime and bought a new top, cap sleeves with a collar and a picture of Marc on the front in white. Met Gaz at the Fleece, he was with his mates but we went off to the Crown.
He said I looked really sexy. Had a snog on the way to The Crown, he’s a really good kisser. Felt me up again. Had two drinks at the Crown, Bacardi and Coke. Saw Sal, she said Janice had stopped in tonight.
Went back to The Fleece, his mates were still there. We all played pool and Gaz won. Talked to his mate Pete, who’s really nice and asked if he could take me out, but I don’t know if I’m going out with Gary so I said no. Quite fancy him though. He’s got really nice hair.
Stupid bitch Jane Hollis came in with Brian Carter, they’re still going out from school!!!! She’s a tart and I hate her.
Had three more drinks, felt a bit pissed then went back to Gary’s. His Mum and Dad were out till late. Gary put Deep Purple ‘Burn’ on really loud, it was really good. He sat on the chair and I sat on the settee. It was really embarrassing at first. Then he came over and kissed me and started feeling me up again.’
I put the diary down in my lap and tried to force myself into making a moral decision. I read on.
‘Took his shirt off, he’s got a really nice body, better than Tony Smith. Then he pulled off my jeans and chucked them in the corner and pushed my T. shirt right up and started kissing me all over. Took his trousers off and it looked huge inside his pants!!! It was really passionate, he kept kissing me, really big snogs and putting his hand inside the leg of my knickers and feeling me. When he took his pants off it was huge and it hurt a bit. He was fantastic and it went on for ages. Had to wipe some stuff off the cushions. Thank God his Mum and Dad didn’t come home. Got dressed and went home at about one o’clock. I LOVE GAZ SMYTHE.’
My hand was covering my mouth; I was genuinely, deeply shocked and didn’t really know why. This was nothing different to what I knew teenagers did every day and I recognised the language of crass, juvenile sex. But Angie, my mother, doing those things, writing them down and thinking she was in love with someone because he had nice trousers and bought her a few drinks while he played pool with his mates and took every opportunity that presented itself to get his hand up her blouse in every dirty shop doorway or car park.
I felt horrified that these things had impressed her enough to let him hump her, it was no more dignified than that. No romance, she just put her clothes on and walked home alone. There was no mention of seeing him again, he had offered nothing and she thought she was in love with him. Worse, I knew Gary Smythe, he still drank in The Crown, flicking his sad Peter Stringfellow hair and, although married and older than my mother, still behaving like a seventeen year old, smarming around girls who were little more than school leavers with a predatory and persuasive air. I would never be able to look at him again.
I was judging my mother’s behaviour like a disgusted parent might and for a few moments I actually felt justified in my tight-lipped and puritanical reaction. Then I realised that this was none of my business, I shouldn’t have read the diary; it was private. In reading it, I had sullied myself, spoiled something and reduced her in some way. I felt ashamed and embarrassed for her, for her sad language and her pathetic belief. I felt like she had let me down. But I read on like I was gathering evidence against her.
January 9, 10, 11 Angie had obviously gone to the pub on her own hoping to see Gary, but he hadn’t been there. There was a desperate edge to the little entries which all said the same. ‘Went to Crown. He wasn’t in. Came home.’ Then on the 12th, ‘I need to see him’ and the 13th, ‘He hasn’t phoned again. Spoke to Sal. She saw him in The Fleece last night with Dave. Will see him tomorrow night. I really miss him’.
All around the page were hearts shot through with arrows and his name in the centre or surrounded with more hearts and flowers. GAZ, GaZ, gaz, stylized, filled in and made fancy. It was like watching her walk into a trap. I wanted to shout like a pantomime audience, warn her that when she walked into that pub tomorrow night vibrating with excitement and love, he would pretend that she didn’t exist. That the blokes he would be standing with would know everything that had happened in detail. That the up and down glances which would be cast in her direction as she stood at the bar before she mustered the nerve to walk over, were not friendly, but asked a direct question.
Unsure of whether or not he was her boyfriend, naive Angie, tomorrow night, in public, would have her stupid, tender heart lacerated to the core and be left in no doubt that she was nothing more than a cheap joke.
The next page revealed what I had known, the scene playing out exactly as I had anticipated. Angie, all dressed up, had gone to the pub where Gary had been playing pool with his grinning mates. Her heart had soared but, not wishing to appear too keen she had given him a small, unacknowledged wave and hung around at the bar.
She had watched him with growing excitement and anticipation each time they cleared the table, waiting for him to come over and claim her but, as the hour wore on, she realised he was blanking her.
At 9 o’clock he had left the pub without a glance in her direction, although he had taken the time to stop and say goodbye to a couple of other people. Angie left straight after him, crying noisily before she had even got to the end of the bar, to run home humiliated and heartbroken.

Stay tuned for the second half of this chapter. And please leave your comments below. We thrive on feedback!

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2. Scarborough Baby – Chapter 4 Seized by a mass of conflicting feelings of loss, resentment,...
3. Scarborough Baby – Chapter 2 In Chapter 2 of Scarborough Baby, Harv introduces us to...

In Chapter 1 of this exciting first novel, we were introduced to the main character, Harv, a 24-year-old English girl who has never known who her biological father was. She is now financially independent, with a rather indifferent job, renting one floor of a lovely house from a gay friend. Her mother married her stepfather when she was a mere year old and he, the only father she has ever known, adopted her.
This week, we present Chapter 2.

CHAPTER 2

Home for now was York where I rented what should have been an unaffordable flat from Philip Sanderson, who owned the big Georgian house in which I had lived for the past twelve months. Handsome red brick houses perfect but blank in their symmetry, ran the tree-lined length of the street down to a small, dark, grassy square surrounded by railings and tall, stone terraces.
Philip lived on the two top floors, I had half of the second and on the ground floor lived Part Time Pete, who worked and lived lavishly in York through the week and went home to his wife and kids in London at weekends.
“Hi,” was about the extent of my conversation with Pete.  Occasionally I would bump into him either coming home late or leaving early with the kind of women whose attributes could undoubtedly offer warm and hearty solace to a man away from home and missing his wife and children. I would act like they were invisible.
It was a Monday morning and I was basking in great shafts of dazzling light in Philip’s flat; there was a sublime sense of cheating to be still in a dressing gown at ten a.m. when the rest of the working world was be-suited, be-frocked and behind a desk.
“So. Where have you been?”  Philip slumped down on the sofa next to me and plumped a cushion over his stomach, holding it tight like a security blanket.
“Scarborough.”
He waited. “And?”
“Saw some old friends on Saturday night, which was slightly less than O.K.  Fell out with Angie, sorry, I’ll rephrase that, really fell out with Angie, came back, did my shift at the Bar. That’s about it.  Oh, I bought you a crab. It’s in the fridge downstairs.”
Philip worked in the arts, mainly in London, connecting people and organising events. Our mutual passion for painting had begun and then lubricated our friendship.  We made each other laugh, I looked after his cats, Kipper and Morris, and his flat when he was away and went with him to show previews and openings; we were comfortable with each other.
“So what did you really fall out about?“
“Oh, just about which one of us is the real bastard,” I said cryptically, “but I don’t want to talk about it.”  I never talked about it.
“Fair enough,” He looked toward the window and mumbled “but I think I know the answer.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you say?”
He was laughing and cringing away, holding the cushion in front of him to deflect my blows. “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it.” We sat back, both smiling.
“Harv, when are you going to get a proper job?” He knew that this would irritate me.
“The Arts Bar is a proper job, I just never meant to be there this long, but I like it, it gives me free time to do other things, like paint.  Besides which, I like Johnny and I like living here and if I did something else, I might have to move on. Then who’d look after your extras?”
I had met Philip at the Arts bar where I had, at the time, hung a small exhibition of my work. He had admired one of my canvasses and Johnny, Philip’s friend and the owner of the bar, had introduced us, leading me in a fluster of embarrassment from the kitchen. Later, Philip bought the picture.
He had asked where I lived and about my studio space and when I explained that I was flat sharing with a girl I barely knew, our conflicting shifts giving neither of us space or privacy, Philip had said that he had a flat to rent in his house and I had laughed, safe in the knowledge that I could never afford the kind of flat that he would have on offer.
“Would two hundred quid a month mean that Johnny would need to give you a pay rise?” Johnny told him to go to hell and I went along with the joke. Then he had said, “Seriously. Two hundred quid plus extras.” And he had winked.
I had already guessed he was gay, so I was certain they weren’t the kind of extras that I would have to dress up or lie down for, so with half an idea that I was wasting my time but reassured by Johnny that I should go and see, I agreed to have a look.
I had wandered, excited and bemused through a big white sitting room, two big white bedrooms all with wooden floors, a stark, sexy bathroom and a steely kitchen with huge sash windows in every room, certain that, if the rent for this was only two hundred quid, the extras must come expensive.
The extras, as it turned out, were to look after his flat when he was away – which was often, feeding his cats, watering his rooftop conservatory plants, sorting his mail and making sure that there was milk and bread for him when he got home, none of which were in the least onerous as far as I was concerned.  Spending time with the cats meant spending time in Philip’s flat, which covered two floors and was an architectural ballet in white and sunshine with a splash of gin and tonic colonial
cool.
The huge sitting room, where we now sat, had been created from roof space, a whole wall turned over to glass. We gazed out across the early haze of the already hot city and over the clutter of red tiled Georgian rooftops toward the golden stone pinnacles and spires of The Minster.
He took another swipe. “Come on, you ought to get a proper job? You’ve got a degree.” Philip was needling me, but gently. Sometimes I wondered whether this line of questioning was his way of checking, without asking directly, that I wasn’t thinking of leaving,
“Yes, I’ve got a degree, so, that’s a job in a call centre then or another load of studying to become an English teacher. A bloody English teacher. I’d rather drink bleach.”
“Well what else would you like to do? There must be loads of things.”  He riffled his fingers through a silky tassel on the corner of the cushion.
“My problem Philipo, isn’t that I don’t know what I want to do, it’s that I want to do everything. However, I’m a brilliant starter and a very poor finisher.” I smiled sardonically.
I had toyed with all kinds of ideas after university, all of them seeming so absolutely achievable in my head. I had made tangible stabs at some of them with huge energy, loving the freshness of the new and the super propelled, self infecting tide which swept me to heights of giddy enthusiasm only to find my euphoria fizzling back to zero just as quickly, with me always thinking about the end result rather than learning to enjoy the process.  The only thing for which I had maintained enthusiasm was painting and I wasn’t sure that it would ever keep me.
As if he’d read my thoughts Philip slapped my thigh and sat up, “Well, what about the painting? You could develop that you know. You’ve got the talent; you just need to apply yourself. I could give you a leg up.”
“You can give me a leg up when I feel ready.  I haven’t got the confidence to show my pants and call myself an artist yet. I wouldn’t know how to put enough good stuff together to make an exhibition. Especially one that you’d be prepared to put your name to.”  I knew I was good; I just didn’t know if I was good enough.
“Well, let me know when you’re ready. Do you want some coffee?” He disappeared into the kitchen.
Despite the low level guilt I sometimes felt at the lack of achievement in a career, I genuinely enjoyed my un-loaded lifestyle. I liked the bar and largely the customers and, because of my shifts, I got blocks of time where I was free to paint; all the time I was getting better and I was selling, not the stuff that I really wanted to paint, but I was still selling.
I had always liked watercolours and the fine detail of still life but had, more recently, swapped paper for canvas, loving the invitation and challenge of the stretched expanse of white, the hefty brushes and the satisfying, greedy slarps of thick, forgiving, plasticy paint.  Mainly though, because it made me extra money, I painted pale York scenes for two local galleries, the Minster and the city walls keeping me busy for much of the summer and for a while at Christmas.
Letters which I wrote to Sarah, my closest friend from university, in which I saw a months worth of my news committed to paper, confirmed and crystallised my lack of achievement. In my own handwriting, laid out like an admission of guilt or idleness, I was forced to acknowledge the absence of anything exciting, exotic or dynamic in my life.  I could have almost sent the same letter month after month, just changing the date at the top.  At the age of twenty-four, it didn’t yet feel like an unsalvageable slide into the pit of a squandered life and an intellect wasted but I did see my friends from university in the heady ascent of career success, with me increasingly unable, or unwilling, to talk the talk or walk the walk.
Sarah was working for a multi-national, something to do with marketing, flying between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur with the kind of casual ease that I travelled on the bus between home and work. James, my very ex boyfriend from university was working for the foreign office in London and I was working in a bar in York, twenty miles from where I was raised and twenty miles from where I had gone to university; forty miles – for a Thursday’s child, I hadn’t come far.
Philip came back with two mugs of coffee and two sturdy cakes; great slabs of scone with crystallised fruit and nuts and slumped down heavily next to me.
“Don’t you get bored?” He asked. ”I mean, you work, you see me, you see that Eva girl who incidentally, I‘ve never been introduced to and you lock yourself up and paint. What about rumpy pumpy?  Here, have half of this: I don’t know why I bought us one each, they could choke a goat.”  I took the half cake, brushing crumbs from the front of my dressing gown.
“Well, it’s not always easy when you work in a bar. It’s not that I don’t get hit on but you have to remember Johnny’s hard and fast rule.”
“What’s that then?” Philip took a slug of coffee.
“Don’t poke the payroll.”  We both laughed a flurry of crumbs, Phillip nearly choking, and then we fell quiet for a moment, both smiling.
“Look at you, all curvy and sunny, most blokes will have you down as some sort of sexual athlete.”
“Oh yeah.” I felt embarrassed at the suggestion. I hadn’t had a serious boyfriend since university, despite a whole series of hugely embarrassing attempted interventions by Angie. She had once asked me if I’d ‘turned’.
For me, meeting people wasn’t that easy and some sweaty and uncomplicated fun would have been a bonus, but when you worked in a bar, the last place you wanted to spend time when you weren’t working was in another bar.  I did get asked out, quite often, but Johnny frowned on anything more than what he called professional flirting, so we, his staff, became masters of the gentle knock back, aware that rejection and alcohol made a nasty cocktail, so we played by Johnny’s rules or didn’t last long.  Beer generated compliments and offers were what we laughed about after hours, cackling and squirming over the worst and most clichéd chat-up lines of the evening.
“Does that gallery on Gillygate take anything?”  Philip was now picking the cherries out of his cake and sticking them onto mine.  “Give me that almond.”
”Get lost, the nuts are my favourite bit.  Yes, they do, but they’re only interested in the York scenes which I could do with my eyes closed. I’m so bored of them but they’re bread and butter so I have to keep on churning them out.  I ought to find another couple of shops, offer them something different. There’s plenty to go at, I’m just lazy.”
“So you’re not thinking of leaving me then?” His voice was small and he tugged at a length of my hair without looking at me as we sat shoulder to shoulder on the big white sofa.  In a photo, we would have looked like lovers.
“Are you feeling insecure?” I turned to face him, my eyes mocking but fretful, liking that he cared that I was there.
“Like Hell, I just need you to feed the cats next week, that’s all.” He beamed.
“Bastard.” I thumped his shoulder. “I’ll never leave you? We’re like parasites you and me.”
“Go on.” Philip at forty five was still boyish and well set with thick dark hair and a friendly, handsome face.
“Well,” I sucked in my cheeks and counted off on my fingers “You’re wealthy, gay, handsome and pretty cheap for a slum landlord.  You have a valuable and eclectic collection of art which I might stand a chance of inheriting and you don’t want fiddling with or polishing by a nosy cleaner or unknown cat sitter.  I don’t steam open your letters and if I do, I make sure you don’t find out. I muse correctly over your art and if I don’t get it, I don’t pretend that I do. I’m not a star fucker when you take me to openings; I act smiley, yet cool and I never kiss ass.”
“That’s true.”
“And, because I’m gorgeous in that long tall arty kind of way, it always leaves people wondering which end of the ballroom you really dance at.”
“Bitch.” He threw the remains of his cake at me. I caught it and ate it.
“So where have you been? What’s happening?”  I asked.  Philip always had the inside track on new exhibitions; those who were seeking funding and the, as yet, unknown artists who were up and coming. I loved his stories of how the London art scene worked and the people and politics that made it so mad.  He knew about paintings which were coming up for auction, the crazy amounts they would sell for, and the people who would be bidding.
He took a breath. “Well, I’ve been in London, I’ve been to two parties, three openings, four, no, five meetings and spent a day with my mother, some of it astonishing, some of it moribund and little of it interesting.  I met a Scandinavian who is hoping to get money for, what I would consider, an offensive installation involving animals and sweets; ‘The Confectionary of Life’ or ‘Living Confectionary’ or something like that.  I met a nice woman who produces these huge pastels of fruit and oriental rugs and I put up with a day of my mother’s extravagant smoking and swearing”.  He looked at me in a ‘how’s that for starters‘ way and poured himself another cup of coffee, proffering the pot at me. I shook my head and put my hand over my mug, too much of Philip’s strong coffee could leave me jangly for hours
“So how is your mother?” I lit the touch paper and waited.
“What do you want to know about, the pole dancing lessons or how she’s scared off the gardener it took me six months to find because she, and I quote, ‘was sexually harassing me’. I don’t want to talk about her.”
Philip’s mother, Stella, was loud, effected, over embellished and grand.  She dressed like a wedding marquee; all swags and swathes in hot North African colours. She smoked heavily and dirtily, pastel Sobranis through a ridiculous and extravagantly long holder and coughed like a consumptive.
Stella was a woman of huge impatience who, I suspected, spent a lot of time bellowing at, and breaking, inanimate objects and she never remembered my name.
She was both hideous and hilarious and Philip kept her downstairs because she made him want to kill her and he couldn’t stand the ashtrays, or the stink of her cigarettes and strident perfume.
“Never mind, she’ll die soon”, I comforted. “What about work?”
“It’s all a bit quiet at the moment but I had a meeting with Jonjo Porter from The Carling Porter Gallery, who’s interested in organising a sort of North and South divide exhibition. He wants industrial paintings and sculpture by southern and northern artists to make comparisons of how where they come from effects how and what they paint, that kind of stuff. They want to intersperse it with photographs of different kinds of factories and people working in them.  Might be interesting, so I need to start gathering some images and ideas, I feel a trip to some northern archives and museums coming on if you fancy it?”
“My dad had some old photographs like that in the attic at home. I haven’t looked at them for years, but I think there’s a box full of them and some albums which belonged to my granddad.  I could ask if I could borrow them. They might be O.K.”
“Yeah, bring them next time you go, it might fire my imagination and, you never know, they might be the very thing”

Stay tuned next Wednesday for Chapter 3. If you missed Chapter 1, go to the Series page and look for the Scarborough Baby series.

Related posts:

1. Scarborough Baby – Chapter 3a In Chapter 3 Harv visits her mother Angie and stepfather...
2. Scarborough Baby – Chapter 4 Seized by a mass of conflicting feelings of loss, resentment,...
3. Scarborough Baby – Chapter 3b In this post we feature the second half of Chapter...

Amanda Ackroyd

Finally we come to the end of the series of author interviews with talented British author Amanda Ackroyd. But this is also a glorious beginning! Starting with this post, I shall be publishing Amanda’s first novel, Scarborough Baby, one chapter a week. With today’s interview is the teaser and first chapter. Enjoy!

As always, you may listen to the entire interview or this segment, and/or download either mp3 file to your computer or mp3 player.

• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview
• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview-part-iii-12-mins

Ilaria: Well, I have to say that this ability of yours to pare things down is very evident in your novel. So now let’s move on to talk about that. You sent me this wonderful novel, Scarborough Baby, which I read in 24 hours, or 36 hours maybe. I couldn’t put it down, I found it completely enthralling. I really was sucked right in. I loved the beginning. For the readers I will introduce it by saying that it is a little bit of a mystery. The beginning is just lovely, I think. The atmosphere is very pleasant, relaxed, of life just ambling along at its regular, normal pace, nothing out of the ordinary. But the description of the life is very – the description of the way the main characters are conducting their lives brings them to life completely. They come right out of the page and I just feel like I’m sitting in their living room with them and watching them and interacting with them as they go about their business.
And then the protagonist, a young woman of 24, 25 years old, discovers a diary that her mother had written as a teenager, and in the diary she discovers the possible identity of her biological father, whom her mother has never told her about, has always refused to tell her about. So she has always been wondering, she’s spent her life wondering who her father really was. And of course everything begins to unfold from this moment forward.
Amanda, I think you’re very talented as a writer. I think you definitely must be published, and I’m going to endeavor to make that happen. And in the meantime I just would like to ask you, first of all, how you first got the idea for this story.
Amanda: Well, it came about during a conversation with a friend of mine, and she was telling me – Annie is considerably younger than I am – and she was telling me that she never knew who her real father was. And she had asked her mother over the years, just tried to get her to tell her something. And one day, when Annie was about 22, she said to her mother, “Come on,” she sort of tried to do it in a joking way, she said, “Come on, there must be something you can tell me, like the color of his eyes or his hair or something.” And her mother said, “I can’t remember, it was dark.” And when Annie told me this story I was just stunned. I was stunned by the insensitivity of it. It made me laugh but I was shocked. And I came home and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why a woman would deny her child, even a crumb of truth, and couldn’t stop thinking about it. And in an incredibly short space of time, because I think my imagination ran away with me, I started to build a story around the lie. Because it was – I can’t remember, it was dark – it’s a lie, like putting your hand in someone’s face. And one morning, sitting in bed, I penned the whole story from beginning to end. I wrote the reason why and how it unfolded and what happened. And it took me probably three hours of intense note-making. And at the end of it I knew I had to write it as a book, something I had never done before. And that’s where it came from.
Ilaria: That’s wonderful. I love how – this is what they mean when they talk about writers channeling writing, have you ever heard that expression? That the writing is sort of coming from another place and you’re just a channel for it. It’s just coming through you rather than out of you.
Amanda: It felt so much like that. That’s a perfect description of how it felt.
Ilaria: As if you were sort of taking dictation from some plain that’s invisible to the naked eye, but from somewhere, it’s just coming to you and the words are flowing through you and out of your fingers, you know?
Amanda: Yeah, it’s exactly how it felt. And I still have the notebooks where I penned it, and it’s full of arrows that refer back. It was almost like it sort of formed itself, not just in general terms, but actually in – there was sort of chronology in the detail and, you know, and referencing, even in those notes, so that I wouldn’t miss that, or that this would be understood. It was actually quite an astonishing couple of hours.
Ilaria: That’s amazing. I love this story, this is wonderful. Okay, and so at that point you knew that you had to write it as a book. How much time went by between this morning that you spend writing the outline of the novel and when you actually wrote it?
Amanda: Virtually none. And there was a reason for that. And the reason was that just prior to my starting to write this novel I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And suddenly my life was completely taken over by the process of surgery and chemotherapy and I had stopped work because I wasn’t tolerating the treatment well at all. And so suddenly I had this huge amount of time on my hands, and it was almost like everything fell into place at the right time, and it wasn’t just that I had the time. I needed the time to write the book, but I needed the book to fill the time. And so it worked absolutely perfectly. And when I couldn’t sleep because I felt sick, I would get up and I would write. And if I was lying awake in the night because I’d slept through the day, my mind would be racing, and I would be thinking about what I wanted to write. And sometimes I would just wake up and be so excited by the next bit that I wanted to write, that I would just have to get up and write it. And it filled my days, and it filled my nights when I couldn’t sleep. And it was just the most wonderful escape and focus during what was a pretty hard time, really.
Ilaria: That’s a wonderful, wonderful story, and the way you tell it is so wonderful.
Amanda: Well, it actually felt very positive, which was great. It made the time feel like a gift, rather than something terrible. It became a gift in a way.
Ilaria: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And tell me, the entire process of writing the first draft of the novel took how long?
Amanda: It took me about seven months.
Ilaria: And when you were finished, were you also finished with your treatments?
Amanda: Yes, just about. Although I did have more reconstructive surgery to come. But I also had a friend, Jake Arnott, who had already successfully published one novel certainly, He Kills Coppers, and Jake was absolutely fantastic. He kind of mentored me through the process and I spent time in London with him, in Soho and learning about the vice squad in London during the period that the events in the book happened. And he was just fantastic in terms of research. And I spent time in Amsterdam researching. So there were all sorts of things going on throughout the process. And when my treatment finished that input remained, because I then started sending drafts to Jake and he would go through it and say, “This is fantastic, this is dreadful. During this bit I was absolutely losing the will to live, there needs to be more of a major dénoument at the end.” And through him and other readers I then started to cut and pare and polish and get rid of. You know, anything that I looked at and I was utterly beguiled by, I just cut it out. I sort of got to realize that anything that I loved too much was written purely for the pleasure of writing, rather than it being relevant to the story. And there was an awful lot that went that was just me being self-indulgent really. So the writing, the first draft was finished at the end of my treatment, but the process went on for long after that.
Ilaria: Well, what you sent me feels very much like a finished book. I find very little fault with it at all. I think it’s tight, I think it’s full of tension from beginning to end. It sucked me in and it never let go until I finished. So, thank you so much for the opportunity of reading it and publishing it. And I really hope that we bring it to the public at large, because everybody should be able to read it.
Amanda: Well, thank you. I’m very excited at the prospect of you publishing it. And I’m very excited by your enthusiasm and positivity. And I really hope that whatever happens, it’s great, the whole process. And I’m just glad that it’s out there and people can read it, and make up their own minds.
Ilaria: Me too. I think it’s just criminal that it’s been sitting in your drawer all this time.
Amanda: I’m sure there are millions of fantastic books sitting in drawers all over the world, so maybe you should make it your life’s endeavor to get them all out and get them published.
Ilaria: Well, that’s precisely what I intend to do, believe me. Obviously I can’t do all of them, but I’ll do as many as I can.
Amanda: Well, I suspect that you could probably do an awful lot, Ilaria. You’re something of a dynamo.
Ilaria: I wish I felt the same way about myself, but thank you very much for the compliment. Okay, so this wraps up our interview, but don’t hang up the phone. Thank you very much for talking to me today, and for telling me about your writing process. I find it absolutely fascinating.

Scarborough Baby – by Amanda Ackroyd

“Joe, NOW. The keys. Where are they?” I was shaking with fear, reaching and turning in an uncontrollable dervish.
Still he gazed, as if he had momentarily short circuited, then suddenly my fear touched him and he sprang from the chair and began frantically rifling his empty pockets then running his hands pointlessly across the table, his face twisted, white with wide-eyed alarm. I grabbed the phone and dialled 999. Still Joe flailed around, panicking for the keys.
A woman’s voice, “Which service do you require?”
“Police, now. People are coming. I think they’re going to kill us. Please hurry. NOW.” I was screaming.

CHAPTER 1.
I was once asked to leave a cinema when the man in the seat behind me complained about my persistent glancing.  I have, many times, changed direction in the street, barging my way down busy pavements so I could turn and examine a man who had just passed me by.  I once approached a complete stranger and asked if he had ever known Angela Pollard. I have spent a large part of my life looking into the faces of men who shared my sweep of cheek or tilt of green eye and wondering if it might be him. I never knew who my real father was.

I am twenty four, it’s a summer Sunday in Scarborough and I’m having breakfast with my mother, Angie, in her conservatory. At the bottom of the garden, I can see my stepfather, Ken, tending his pigeons.  I am pretending to read the papers, but my eyes are focussed somewhere above the page.
Emboldened because of the companionable hour she and I have spent together, I am searching for the words to begin. Hot little jets of nasty anticipation are needling in my stomach like slivers of glass. I steel myself for the excruciating tip-toe into our mostly silent conflict.
Angie and I have been doing this dance for as long as I can remember; me disgusted by my apologetic whine and vile obsequiousness, the corners of her mouth tightening and twitching as soon as she knows what I’m up to and, if I push too far, she will lose her temper and I might cry.
I take a deep breath, words flitter in my mouth like dry butterflies, my heart feels squeezed, I cringe, “So, come on, my dad, there must be something you can tell me, the colour of his eyes, or hair or something.”  I try to adopt a conspiratorial air, leaning in toward her, making my eyes sparkle, wanting her to look at me.
She inflates, sighs and looks up but not at me, just somewhere into middle distance, her face bored and irritated. Then she turns, looks right into my face, lip curled, sneering, and says with a sing-song, sarcasm, “I can’t remember. It was dark.”
She gets up, casting me a look of hateful contempt, that I should force her to behave this way, and leaves the room.
***
Like two positives we repel. We collide with jerky joy and quickly clash, bouncing away like we’ve been burnt. Our spats don’t last long, we’re just different.
To look at, there can be no mistaking that we belong to each other. Whoever my father was, I have no doubt that I’ve inherited more of my mother than of him, but in spirit, I’m more watchful, more careful with people’s emotions.
Angie is sexy and compelling in a rough around the edges way.  She has a vanity gene like a barn side which is why, at her instruction, I call her Angie and not Mum – she likes to think people might mistake us for sisters.  Men like the flash of her green eyes and the thickness of her shoulder length dark hair. She’s coltish, strong, curvy and slender, a Peter Pan woman of dizzy tangents who is not quite joined up. She kind of pushes and pulls you, she’s warm and cold, funny and sharp, forty two but sixteen; a compassionate bitch.
I was conceived in Angie’s seventeenth year, in Scarborough I have always assumed. The reality I had designed for myself in the absence of any information was that the identity of the man I sought had been lost to her in the sheer volume. If I had lined up the men of the town, of a certain age, and asked my owner to stand up, how many, I wondered, would have risen sheepishly to their feet.
I was born on the 6th of March in Scarborough Hospital, unplanned but wanted. I was to have been called Deborah, but was named instead for the Welsh midwife who delivered me; Haf; that was her name and that was how it should have been spelt; pronounced with a long, curling welsh A and a soft Welsh F. Angie never thought to ask and by the time it was pointed out, Harv was on all my papers. So Harv I was, Harv Pollard, but not for long. I was a one year old in a pink Crotchet dress and white sandals when Angie married Ken Marvin, who she had known for just six months, changing me into Harv Marvin; a name that could only happen when things weren’t joined up.
The lucky marriage was captured in now yellowing 1970’s Polaroid’s, with everyone looking older than they did now, and Angie’s parents Brian and Della looking relieved. This wedding made them respectable again, made a successful coup out of a teenage disaster and positioned their slut of a daughter in the aspiring middle classes, with a husband who had just taken over his small, but flourishing, family business, a home in a larger than average semi and a Ford Capri gleaming in the drive.
Everyone suspected that she would prove too fast for the steady Ken, but hoped that he would calm her down; settle her. It made him sound like a remedy for indigestion. Twenty three years later, they are still in the same house in Scarborough, still in love and still, I’m sure, having sex more often that I do, with Angie settled, but not calmed down.
Ken’s passion are his pigeons or ‘filthy flying rats’ as Angie refers to them. The fancier’s magazines which strew every room in the house, offend her in a way that a pile of XXXX Hustlers never would. He loves his birds. He wins no more races now than he ever has, but with his passion undiminished by his disappointments, he continues to strive for the perfect specimen and tends and encourages them like children.
Angie views pigeon racing as a working class habit.  Ken defends his position by pointing out that these aren’t pigeons in the Town Hall sense. “Listen, during past times, it was contrary to law for a common man to own pigeons, they were the birds of kings, little warriors of the airways, the ultimate communication tool,” he told us indignantly as we sniggered behind our hands. “If it hadn’t been for pigeons, Rothschild would never have made his fortune.”
“Rothschild?” Angie had roared. “It’s a long way from a shed in Scarborough. Where’s the bloody fortune Rothschild?” She had laughed tartily, her palm outstretched.
“It’s not a bloody shed, it’s a loft.”  We infuriated him.
***
Angie returns, tossing her hair, defiant and injured and begins flicking through a magazine as if I am invisible. It is only eight thirty, but already the voile morning sunshine has made the air in the conservatory heavy and treacly.
I get up and open windows a little too aggressively then stand, my arms crossed, staring tight lipped out toward the eastern edge of the garden where the sun has not yet lifted over the limes and where, in the dappled shade, Ken tends his pigeons, sloshing sparkles of fresh water and filtering golden grain. I watch him turn a bird in his hands, see his intense gaze as his mouth forms the gentle pout of a shhhh.
Outside I contract, my arms tightening across my chest, whilst inside my anger and frustration swells until I feel I might explode. ‘I can’t remember. It was dark’, is probably her worst and most insensitive dismissal ever. This from the woman who wears her every emotion, idea, or thought, like a gaping wound; she’s an open book pushed right in your face, what goes through Angie’s head, comes straight out of her mouth, but ask her a question about my biological father and she clangs shut like a cell. She has, through the years, blocked me, humiliated me, slapped my face, and denied me any corner of truth until I seethed to know.
The bird flashes mauve, silver and green, like a spiv’s shot satin suit as he rolls it gently over and over, its little bead eyes, unperturbed, flicking like tiny camera shutters, head cracking back to eyes front like a pirouetting dancer as it slowly spins. I know the corky feel of a bird contained between firm hands, the silky sprung ness of quill and feather and the extreme musculature of the wing and breast. When you handle them, you are struck by the sense of power, yet the muscle is not hard, but soft and elastic.
Angie is still ignoring me despite my glances in her direction.  I can’t leave it alone and I don’t care now if I wreck the day and storm back home. “So, that’s all you’ve got to tell me?” I trample in again.
She doesn’t even look up. “Make another cup of tea Harv love.” It’s like I haven’t spoken.
“So that’s it? All you’ve got to say? ‘I can’t remember. It was dark’.” I am aware of spit of my words and the hurt that is thrumming nastily in my solar plexus, but this time I won’t cry. She still doesn’t look up, just continues flicking through the magazine, except now she’s humming as she scans the pages, a way of putting your fingers in your ears without putting your fingers in your ears. It fills me with the petulant emotions of my six year old self and makes me want to scream and smack her blank, stupid face.
This time I leave the room, childishly sweeping the papers and magazines from the table as I go. I pack my things, slamming doors behind me and drive away, determined that however desperately I want to know, I will never ask her again.
I wish it had been that simple.

Look for Chapter 2 in next week’s installment. And please comment on what you’ve read so far. I find this story irresistible. Thank you, Amanda!

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I am sure all you readers have already read and appreciated Amanda’s first short story, and I am thrilled to publish a short-short story of hers, accompanied by a fittingly short-short podcast interview. As always, you can listen to the entire interview, to this segment, download either to your mp3 player, read the transcript and of course, read the story! So, without further ado, after this short-short intro, here are the interview and story:

• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview
• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview-part-II-3-mins

Ilaria: So let’s talk about the other short piece. Because that one, you sent it to me without telling me anything about it, and so I don’t know what it was for. But I understand that it too came from something that had a limit of words, right? It was only 250 words. Is that possible?
Amanda: Yeah, that was just a 250-word story.
Ilaria: Was that part of a competition also?
Amanda: No, that was actually written purely as sort of a discipline piece, taking a sort of an idea and then having to create a story in a complete round in a very tight – within a very tight discipline. So it was purely for my own pleasure. And also it was kind of a lesson in disciplined writing.
Ilaria: What made you decide that you needed to do this experiment in discipline?
Amanda: Well, some of it was – I don’t know if you remember, going back to our school days, but we had an absolutely fantastic English teacher called David Day, who would occasionally make us do précis work. And it took me a while to actually get the hang of doing that, where you would pare and pare and pare something down, without losing the sense of it, into something concise and clear, but still, you know, something that possessed a sort of a creative edge. And I think in terms of my other writing, which is purely something that I absolutely enjoy doing, in terms of just practicing writing, I think it’s very interesting for me to do that. And it’s something that I do practice, is the taking of an idea and boiling it down into something which is sort of sharp and spare. And that’s the reason I do it, really. It teaches me. I learn when I do it. And I quite like the process of going back, back, back and seeing where it was wrong and where I can make it better, but without becoming overly wordy. That’s why I do it.

250-Word Story Number Two

She flashes him the Monroe smile balcony to balcony across long drop and metallic city air. In her twenties he guesses, white teeth, neat nose and giggly eyes, with a chuckle like Betty Boop. She works in the centre as a warden for the old folks.
He beams back and gives her his air force salute, pulling himself tall, feeling his waistband slip a little as he drags in and up.
At night, lying awake, he wonders how her body might feel sliding across the satin sheets which, some days, slink weightily on her retractable line and thinks about running his hand up the unfeasible curve at the back of her waist, her nipples hard and bright as red liquorice torpedoes, her breath warm and puttery like a pony.
By day, he is drawn toward the window, ashamed and pained by this obsessive and desperate checking. He has filled pots with geraniums allowing for prolonged bouts of watering and compulsive dead heading, his mind and eyes never fully on the job.
Does he stand a chance? She looks over often enough and there is definitely invitation in her backward glance as she turns to go inside and once, three years ago she had, at the centre, held his hand, nuzzled her lips against his cheek and whispered, “Happy birthday” as she revealed the cake into which she had, with skilled fingers and faultless symmetry, inserted through the smooth fondant and deep into the yielding sponge, his eighty five candles.

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When I was young I lived alternately in Florence, Italy and New York City on the Upper West Side. At the age of 9 I settled with my family in Florence, but for two years, from 1976 to 1978 I alone left Florence and went off to England to boarding school. How we settled on the particular school I went to is a long and interesting story that I will save for another day. Suffice to say that we settled on a Quaker school (in large part because it was coeducational) in West Yorkshire, outside a small town called Pontefract (from the Latin, “broken bridge”).The school was called Ackworth (and still is, though now I understand things have changed quite a bit from the way they were back then).

At Ackworth I made a small group of lifelong friends, three fellow students and two teachers. Amanda was one of my fellow students, in my same year. We were part of a group of four girls who did pretty much everything together. We used to sing in the hallways, and it was wonderful because the acoustics of the stone walls and cavernous halls were quite marvelous.

About 10 years ago we were back in touch briefly on the occasion of a reunion at Ackworth that I was sadly unable to attend. And then, as these things often go, we lost touch again. Then in November, one morning I receive an email saying, “I’m coming to New York on business, I’m arriving today. Can we get together?” Well, it was wonderful. It felt like no time had passed and at the same time it felt as if a lifetime had passed. The affection and connection between us was, if anything, strengthened and made more mature by the intervening years. This is what I mean by lifelong friends. Whether or not we see each other physically is immaterial. We can pick up where we left off and fill in the blanks as we go. And that is what we proceeded to do in the four or five days she was here. It was glorious!

Below you can listen to the podcast of the entire interview, of this first segment, or download either to your MP3 player. You will also find the transcript of the first segment of our interview and then…. Amanda’s short story The New Scarlet Dress, a retelling in contemporary style of a Canterbury Tale, one of the 7 winning selections out of 17,000 submissions to a competition sponsored by the BBC.

• amanda-ackroyd-interview
• amanda-ackroyd-interview-part-i-10-mins

Ilaria:   Hello, everybody. I’m here with my friend Amanda, and I’ll just give you a very quick background. Amanda and I went to boarding school together 30 years ago in West Yorkshire, in England, and she is from Yorkshire… right, Amanda, you’re from Yorkshire?
Amanda: Yeah, I was brought up in London, actually. I was living in London at the time—or just North of, when we were at school together.
Ilaria: Oh, okay. But you live in Yorkshire now, right?
Amanda: I do, yeah, and have done for a long time.
Ilaria: Okay. So, we were out of touch with each other for 30 years – well, we did get briefly in touch a few years ago, didn’t we?
Amanda: We did, yeah.
Ilaria: Oh, there was supposed to be a reunion, right?
Amanda: Yes.
Ilaria: Right. But then we lost track of each other again. But anyway, we never saw each other for 30 years, until just recently, when – was it in December that you came? [2008]
Amanda: No, just before Thanksgiving, in November.
Ilaria: In November, just before Thanksgiving and for just a few days, we got to spend a little time together, and we could not talk quite fast enough to summarize 30 years of living in those four days or however many days it was. But at least we got to see each other again, rekindle our friendship. You got to visit my home, meet my children, and I got to find out all about your wonderful husband.
Amanda: Yeah.
Ilaria: Okay, so you have been so kind as to send me three wonderful pieces of your writing, and I would just like to introduce my readers to you as a writer and to have a little background on these three stories. Let’s start for the piece that you wrote for the BBC, and just tell me first what kind of a competition it was that you participated in and how it all unfolded.
Amanda: Well, this was probably, I don’t know, five or six years ago now. And the BBC were running a series of Canterbury Tales, dramatizations of Canterbury Tales, but done in a contemporary style. And at the time they had a fairly major project running to look – it was to encourage new writing. And they put a call out for people to write short stories which followed the lines of a Canterbury Tale. And it’s so old now that I can’t even remember which Canterbury Tale I followed. But I wrote The New Scarlet Dress, which is what I sent to you. Can you hear me?
Ilaria: Yes, yes.
Amanda: And that was basically the competition. So I wrote the story and sent it in, and it was selected as one of the winning entries, which was fantastic. Out of 17,000, I think.
Ilaria: Wow! Out of 17,000 how many did they select?
Amanda: I think they selected seven stories. And out of that selection I think they broadcast three. Unfortunately mine wasn’t one of the ones they broadcast.
Ilaria: I can’t imagine why they would not broadcast it.
Amanda: No, it was very strange. And I did sort of follow it up and try and chase down why they wouldn’t have done that. And they did send me a pen, a cheap biro, which I was completely stunned by. But when I sort of tried to find out why… You know, my feeling was that if they were going to select three and broadcast three, then that’s what they should have done. But to select seven and only broadcast three seemed like a very bizarre way of working things. But I couldn’t seem to open any dialogue with them about why that was.
Ilaria: Was there a money reward involved, or not?
Amanda: No, there was no financial reward at all. And I think the BBC are quite famous for this. It’s that they pay lip service to the idea of encouraging new writing, but when it actually comes down to it they’re really not that interested. And I have to say, given my experience… I’ve got a telephone ringing in the background here.
Ilaria: That’s okay, unless you want to answer it.
Amanda: No, I’m going to cut it off. Given my experience on that occasion with the BBC I would never take part in anything that they…
Ilaria: Sponsored, again.
Amanda: Yeah. Never again.
Ilaria: I don’t blame you. So anyway, so you can’t remember which Canterbury story you were adapting, as it were, or rewriting.
Amanda: No.
Ilaria: That’s very interesting.
Amanda: Well, it’s slightly shaming, I think.
Ilaria: I found the story a little bit frightening.
Amanda: Did you?
Ilaria: I found it very well written and compelling, and I couldn’t put it down, the same as all your other writing, but I was a little scared by the intensity of the feelings. Obviously the situation in the story would lead to that, would lead to very intense feelings. But I was nonetheless a little frightened by them.
Amanda: Well, I think in terms of the story, what I wanted to get over was the bleakness of life in the Yorkshire Dales. Especially in a Dale like Swaledale. The Dales in Yorkshire are named for the rivers. So the River Swale runs through Swaledale and the River Wharfe runs through Wharfedale, and Swaledale is one of the most bleak and cheerless Dales, certainly in the winter when it becomes very snowy and you can see a long distance down this valley. It’s very inhospitable. And to be farming in somewhere like Swaledale would have been, and still probably is… You’re working on land at the end of its tether, really. And this in a way was what I wanted to portray, was life at the end of its tether. This is the story of a woman who married for all the right reasons a man whom she believed she could make something of. That between them they could create some warmth. But actually he was brutal and cold and singular. He didn’t want to share his life. And it’s really quite a sad story, about a woman who is completely deprived of any joy or affection or warmth. And that plays out in the whole atmosphere of the farm and her life. And her ultimate revenge. And so, whilst it’s kind of bleak and brutal and paints a very stark description of a sad life, there is also a wonderful justice at the end.
Ilaria: Definitely. I agree.
Amanda: It sort of pleased me. It’s almost a joke. She almost has the final laugh.
Ilaria: The last laugh, yes. She definitely does. Although she’s been deprived of so much – I mean, the last laugh can’t quite make up for all those years of suffering, but… Still, it’s a new beginning for her.
Amanda: It’s a new beginning. And I don’t define, I don’t think, how old she is, and so, you know, she could have 30 years of new life.
Ilaria: And I hope she does.
Amanda: Me too! Me too.
Ilaria: I really hope she does. I think that you showed great talent in that story and I’m not surprised that it was selected. But it’s still very nice to know that it was selected among 17,000 entries. I mean, that’s pretty amazing.
Amanda: It was a fairly significant thing. I think the interesting thing about writing that, as well, there was I think a 1,200 word count. And to tell a complete story from beginning to end in 1,200 words takes a lot of polishing.
Ilaria: A lot of chiseling.
Amanda: Yeah, and discipline. And when you’ve got three words over and you’ve polished so much you don’t know where you’re going to lose those three words from, it’s quite interesting. But I really enjoyed writing that.
Ilaria: Well, it’s very good and I’m very pleased that you’re allowing me to publish it.

The New Scarlet Dress

Standing in the kitchen window, she watches him with interest.  She looks him right in the eye, staring him down with blend of curiosity and encouragement in her face and continues with the washing up.

She watches with fascinated pleasure as he clutches at his ropy brown neck and drags at the buttons of his work shirt, clawing at his chest, his mouth opening and closing like a crooked barn door. Throughout his monstrous stumble across the yard, he keeps his eyes on hers, disgust, hatred and frustrated rage still presenting through the fear, which flashes and glistens in his watering eyes. She knows that he is imploring her with gurgling ratchety gasps, but she cannot hear him now that she has closed the window. She gives him a final sunny smile and turns away, quickly drying her hands and lifts her bag and the keys to the old Land Rover from the hook by the door.

She steps over him in the yard, he has fallen now and one outstretched, sinewy hand is weakly flexing and grasping toward her sturdy ankle. She hears him whisper, “Please” and feels gratified that his final word to her is one, which he hasn’t spoken in forty years of marriage.

Bouncing down the farm track, tooting a jaunty good-bye on the horn she clicks on the dusty car radio, – The Archers, was this how she had imagined farming life would be when she had married him?  Harsh years have blotted out any memory of youthful hope, but now on this unexpectedly joyful morning, she can feel the long forgotten but familiar and beautiful rush as a plume of adrenaline rises up and tickles excitedly at her soaring heart.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

He had made her life an unrelenting hell of spite and emotional deprivation, with the occasional end of a blunt rolling pin jammed hard into the soft of her waist or a push in the face thrown in for good measure.  Absorbing the crushing force of his verbal and physical assaults, she never answered back, but she refused to cower in the face of his hateful disregard.

When she met him he had been quiet and stern, traits she had misread as shy and measured. He had barely left the remote farm, the benefit of schooling limited by the seasons of lambing, haymaking and inclement weather. Now she knew that he would have had neither the time nor personality for playmates or play.

In common, they shared no siblings and older parents, hers brittle, his joyless and mean in their isolation. She had been twenty-eight, old for those days to be unmarried. He had been her one boyfriend and she had believed in her inexperience that she could soften him, make him shine, that together they could make something warm and wholesome of their lives, like good bread.

They had married on the second Saturday in January.  Just six of them and the Minister shivering in the inhospitable Methodist chapel, his father refusing to pay extra to have the lights switched on, the date chosen because it wouldn’t interfere with farm work.  They had spent one fumbling night in a Bed & Breakfast further up Swale dale and then had moved on the Sunday morning into the farmhouse, a coffin of damp and silence, which she was to endure alongside his chilling parents.

Grudgingly, he shared his boyhood bedroom, cold and shabby with twin beds and sad wallpaper. One mean chest of drawers, a narrow wardrobe and a strip of scrim on the linoleum floor furnished their loveless nest.  She recalled her new mother-in-law snorting with astonished derision when she requested more hangers for her clothes.  “You won’t be needing dresses round here. I should stack your fine stuff at the bottom of the trunk in the box room.”  She had not lied.  In forty years, she had never been further than a village dance, the last time thirty-five years ago.  She had never danced. Not ever.

His parents had lived on for twenty unkind years and then both died within six months; his mother quickly of cancer and his father she had found folded and cold in the chair by the pale, used ashes of the fire on Valentines day.  Her heart had soared a little on that February morning, it had been the best and only Valentine gift of her life.

Once she had tried to leave, to despondently re-insinuate herself into her parents dispirited home, but they traditionally believed that you made your bed, and jeered in disbelief when she had tried to tell them how her life was.  “Don’t be ridiculous Margaret,” her father had said dipping another plain biscuit into his tea and turning back to the Sunday evening church programme.

She had trudged her way through forty years of misery, every hideous second marked by the mocking metronome of the kitchen clock ticking the bleak rhythm of their existence, while she imagined a life that she saw only through other peoples windows. He had made for her a plateau of grey, punctuated by black pits of sadness and mountains of bleak despair.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

She parks in the market square and goes shopping for the things that she will need over the next few days while it will be unseemly to be seen out and about. Simulated grieving won’t be necessary, she doesn’t really know anybody and those who might observe, once the news of his death gets around, will read her calm as quiet dignity. As for the funeral, she is sure that she will be the only person in church. She’ll need a new dress. Not black, it will have to be something she can wear again.

She drives slowly back to the farm, rippled ice cream, pasta and Belgian chocolate biscuits, three things she has never bought before, brightening the basics in her bag.  He lies where she left him, his arms and fingers stretched toward the house.  A piece of straw has lodged in the corner of his sticky, contorted mouth and a few blades of grass mingle in his wispy hair. A fly sips at one corner of his drying eye, which stares opaquely at her brown sandals.  She looks down at him for a few moments and nudges him with her foot, the fly circles and settles again.  She contemplates a sharp kick in the kidneys but then thinks better of it, instead, humming, she unlocks the house, puts her shopping on the kitchen table and phones the doctor’s surgery.

The doctor arrives ten minutes later followed by an ambulance; its blue lights make a strange stuttering strobe against the stone farm buildings. The doctor, realising there is nothing to be done looks into her face with pity and puts his arm around her shoulder, she adopts an attitude of resigned blankness.  Inside, he makes tea whilst she stands at the window watching the men lift him onto the stretcher and cover him with a blanket, feeling contempt for the tenderness with which they handled his vile, wiry body.

The doctor asks if she has someone who could come and sit with her.  She says no.  He stays an interminable hour, sympathising with the horror of finding him dead, insisting that her lack of tears indicates delayed shock and leaves three sleeping tablets, telling her to call the surgery if there is anything she needs.  She stands in the doorway, arms folded until certain that he has gone, then goes upstairs and lays her dead husband’s only suit on the bed ready for the undertakers.  Everything else she stuffs into bin liners, handling his spent possessions between pinched fingers, her lips curled in disgust.

Moving from room to room, she throws wide windows and curtains, thinking of his mother who had kept them closed, insisting that it faded the wallpaper. The same dark discipline was maintained even after the poisonous old bitch had died.  She revels in the pure smoothness of her forty year old, but still new, cotton wedding sheets as she makes up the big bed in the best room.

Picking Chrysanthemums from the garden, she arranges them in a crystal vase from his mother’s cabinet and places them on the best linen cloth now spread defiantly on the scarred kitchen table.  She gets out the silver and the fine china, throwing the plain stuff in the bin and tunes the radio to a music station.

The kettle whistles on the battered cream Aga and a clean breeze filters through the kitchen as she places six chocolate biscuits on a plate, determined to eat every one as she remembers the time he had hawked and spat into the leftovers of a rice pudding.  “Fat cow,” he had muttered, sneering as he had closed the door behind him.

Pushing the last of the biscuits into her mouth and releasing a sigh of delicious satisfaction, she makes her way to the boot room and retrieves the key he had artfully hidden, but not artfully enough, from a groove in the top of the doorjamb. She drags the blanket box into the light, its scraping across the flags a now familiar sound.  This same scraping, years before, had drawn her from her bed one night and she had walked in on him, bent over the open trunk and rifling through the pile of rough blankets like a nesting rat. He had stood quickly the tin which he held fell to the floor and opened, spilling tight rolls of pink and green.  He had grabbed her, squashing her compliant cheek hard against the wall, pinching with vicious fingers “It’s mine,” he hissed and foamed, “You will have none of it. This goes with me. Do you understand you hateful silent bitch? Or I’ll haunt you to your grave.”

Just once when he had been out for the day at a county fair she had looked, running her hand across the bumpy ridges of the neat rolls of notes. It had felt like freedom. She had been scared then that he would know what she had done, until she heard the scraping of the trunk several nights later and suffered no retribution.

She tips the tin with a flourish onto the kitchen table, rolls of money running onto the floor and finds a note, written in his coarse hand, which reads.  ‘This money belongs to Jack Barker and its total value will be buried with him. This is my final and solemn wish.’  She opens the Aga door and throws the note into the flames.

The inquest showed that he had died of a heart attack, the undertakers had collected his suit and he had been spruced up for display at the chapel of rest.

He looks as foul in death as he had in life although they have straightened his face.  She leans over the coffin beaming at him and taps his hard cold cheek. “Just thought I’d pop in. Let you know, I’m going to sell the lot, the farm, the furniture, all of it.  Should see me right for the rest of my days.  The money in the tin, I counted it last night, sixty three thousand four hundred and twenty seven pounds. And I found your note. Although I hate you with every last morsel of my being, out of respect, I agree with your final wish. It’s only right and fair.”

She reaches into her new handbag and draws out a folded piece of paper. With one hand she prises open his right eye, peeling it apart like a dry wound. With the other she unfolds the cheque and holds it close before his captive stare. “See now. Sixty three thousand, four hundred and twenty three pounds exactly.”  She folds it again and tucks it into his inside breast pocket, pats the outside of his jacket and then flicks the end of his nose hard.  “There you go Jack.” She says smiling as she smoothes down her new scarlet dress.

Can you tell which of the Canterbury Tales inspired this excellent story of Amanda’s? I will go back to my copy and see if I can figure it out. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more inspired and inspiring surprises from this highly talented new author!

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