Bolter: a novel extract*

The engine rumbles below, they chug forward, squat-grey buildings, patches of dull green grass, the plane picks up pace and ascends, pressed back tight into her seat, the neat fields, roads, rivers below shrink. Her inner ears compress and she sucks on a ginger chew till they pop. A patchwork of fields and concrete, then a wisp of ashen cloud. 

---

 Ensconced in the liminal freedom of a grounded Boeing 747 she scrolls onwards, her grip on the world below loosening. The pretzel and drinks trolley inches closer and her body begins to unfurl. Ally McBeal, Seasons One and Two. She gazes at the thumbnail of a tiny pouting Calista Flockhart. Over a decade on since she’d graced Lorna’s childhood television screen.

‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ looped the question over and over. The children she now found herself asking seemed to flit easily through possible futures, one week ‘astronaut’ the next ‘ice-cream seller’ the following ‘fashion-designer’ but she had answered ‘lawyer’ for the whole five years of Ally’s run. Ally drank canary-yellow wine at night and frothy coffee from paper cups in the mornings, gorgeously painfully thin, she won onerous court cases, had hallucinogenic visions, wild, wild mood swings, romantic troubles, and sharply tailored Calvin Klein skirt-suits.

Image: FOX image of Ally/Calista Flockhart in a tiny skirt, taken from this piece.

(‘But, like, what did a woman ever invent?’ Katherine, her original best friend, had asked as they changed out of their school uniform and into their sport’s uniform. 

‘The mini-skirt, it’s genius. Must have been a woman,’ replied Danielle. 

‘You shave your legs yet?’ Katherine had asked and squinted at Lorna’s limbs as she pulled her gym shorts up over her only slightly downy legs.

‘No they’re just like this.’

’What about your eyebrows?’ 

‘Shaving?’ 

‘Plucking. Not funny. Idiot.’

‘No.’

‘Lucky,’ said Danielle, ‘doesn’t need to. Once you start you can’t stop. Like ever.’ 

‘She does. What about there?’ said Katherine and pointed above Lorna’s eyes.

‘Oh yeah and there…and there,’ added Danielle.)

   Lorna had watched the first two seasons of Ally McBeal with Katherine, and the last three with her true-blood sister Isabelle. Isabelle had transferred from a school two towns over during their final year, a private school where she was being bullied and had developed anaemia as a consequence of a mild eating disorder. A hum surrounded her, a low, subtle vibration of vigilance and intrigue. Within six months Lorna and Isabella had cut small nicks into their pale wrists and mingled their blood, covered their cuts with matching Hello Kitty plasters. She and Isabelle had learned that synchronised Barry White routine from Ally, had drunk their first cup of coffee because of her, kissed each other with tongues because of Ally and Ling, and taken a train to the city without permission, because of her. 

    Grounded after their trip to the city was discovered. 

  ‘You could have been… alcohol on your breath,’ her mother said. And an hour after her first coffee Lorna experienced a debut migraine. 

Yet as Ally sipped her crack-of-dawn coffee at the firm of Cage and Fish she would ‘ooooo’ and ‘ahhhh’, the men watching her from the sidelines. Ally ‘No Pants’ her male colleagues named her. She danced in the basement bar below the office in her tiny skirt, displaying her spectacular legs, like a muscled bird. Dimly lit with a purple glow, massive, shiny wine glasses on every table. Ally danced with a man she was ‘seeing’. She was by a twist of fate, also, accidentally ‘seeing’ his father. This was the kind of thing that happened to Ally.    

‘The stuff you decide you like between the age of thirteen and twenty one will shape you for the rest of your life,’ she recalls their chubby but handsome History teacher state. 

Lorna pushes the recline button and inserts her ear-buds, presses play, the opening vocal acrobatics of Vonda Shepard pour into her ear, the pretzel-drinks trolley now just two seats ahead. 

*This is a modified extract from my work in progress novel. The novel is only partly about the TV show about Ally McBeal.

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