Photo: Me at the Maza Art Auction in Madrid, Spain last Spring. Artist unknown, please comment below if you know.
Hello there to new Subscribers, of which there has been a few lately, how exciting! More about this newsletter and some suggestions of what you might like to read on it can be found here. Many of these new subscribers I feel are thanks to friend, fellow Substacker, writer and animal advocate Kim Stallwood’s recent interview with me which can be found here. THANK YOU Kim!
Now for something completely different please do enjoy the below extract from one of my ‘work in progress’ novels/novellas. I am currently finishing off one novel, some extracts of which can be found here, and have now begun another, see below! Some writers do not like to share their work till perfect or published by the powers that be, I am not one of them it turns out, and am indeed absolutely fine with you critiquing and commenting on it it as per the gentleman above!
All you need to know to enjoy this excerpt is that the protagonist is a young woman living with her ailing grandmother in a rural English setting. Thank you very much for reading!
Once I reached the steps I paused, mop gripped in hand and listened. Upstairs was silent. Though not. The house was never truly silent; there were just then for those months, very few human sounds, bar me. There was yet the sound of pipes gushing, old-house lurching, sounds that amplified at night, but now mid-morning were but a backdrop. Groans from inside the thick plaster walls where the wood cracked and creaked with every slight change in weather and humidity, on the upper-upper deck (the attic) the skittering of mice, possibly other creatures, pigeons flapping in the open water tank, a hum of masonry wasps. The house’s song. Once like something from a horror movie, a hum had begun to pervade the attic room, we had opened the white latched door and in that instant a horde of them had pushed out of the attic and down through the hallway, had been drawn to the light of the bathroom -here they had entered the fittings on the ceiling light, stung themselves against the bulb and died inside the glass, dozens of tiny bodies preserved inside the fixture. They had remained there for weeks until we had found the screwdriver and the moment to open up the light and let them fall to the ground, there to be swept into a kitchen towel, into the toilet bowl and flushed. I crept up the stairs slowly, the third steps creaked, in every old house I have ever been in, it is the third that creaks. I carried a yellow duster and as I go and swished it along the wood bannister, across the top of the framed Serenity Prayer, the framed sixtieth-wedding anniversary commemorative embroidery, the image of Christ on the Cross and the glass front of the family photo collage. At the top I moved across the landing, her door is propped open with a brass wedge, she is a small mound beneath flowery covers. At the door frame I peered in, she breathed heavily, surprisingly forcefully considering she was so shrunk, her mouth open, a little red, a puff like a cartoon person in deep slumber.
Morphine sleep.
Grey short hair at angles on the pulpy pillow. Her knobbled, swollen fingers clutched the duvet. At the window I opened the mustard curtains, swiped the window-ledge, pulled across the stiff inner glazing and then pushed open the old latticed window. Shook the dusty cloth into the air. White motes diffused in the pale light. (Eighty-per cent of dust is human skin cells, a fact embedded by Mrs Taylor, my primary school teacher, who had also dissuaded me from biting my nails: ‘there are trillions of microbes on the human body’ she had explained, ‘when you bite your nails you are eating THAT many bugs’. ‘I don’t dust, I will not dust,’ said a friend of a friend recently, big gay Al, ‘it is because I do not want to be cleaning myself away’.) I stuck my head out of the window, eye-stinging light, fresh air, twittering. The basic human needs were what I then supplied for her. Nourishment, ventilation, some movement, liquids, comfort. The basic needs of an animal, human, or non. But she had too much comfort. The too soft-padded world of that bedroom. Four plumped pillows, an enormous cushion for propping up, a pillow the size of a small child, double-duvet, knitted blue-blanket, stitched pastel and cream eiderdown. A muggy heat within the room whatever the season. At least now when she did wake there would be be pure air, the sounds of wild things. In the summer if the day was hot enough even the light Turkish- Delight scent of the pink rose that climbed the trellis at the front of the house, occasionally even a bee or moth would even enter the room and join her. On good days we discussed the benefits of bees versus wasps; would we totally get rid of wasps if we had God-like powers? Would it be fair, in everyone’s interests? Grandmother would like to eradicate all cruelty and pain from the world, including what we might call the natural kind, a lion killing an antelope for example, a wolf hunting a hare. She cannot watch nature documentaries for this reason. But there were contradictions here. The week before I had investigated the shed. Amongst the rakes, mowers, spades, trowels, countless pots, composts and trugs had been an excess of rat poison, bottle after bottle of Rentokil, slug and snail repellent, dozens of sticky fly traps, a cache of Raid aerosols, fast action mouse killer (‘each box kills up to 50 mice’ boasted the box), seventeen bottles of various Round Up weed, grass and ivy killers. Down with Dandelions! said the back of one bottle, eradicate unsightly clover from your lawn, said another. She had arranged for a tree surgeon to remove a pear tree two summers ago because, she said, it scattered too many messy leaves onto the lawn.
Once more thanks for reading and for passing along this Substack to interested parties; Substack is quite a different beast from other types of online/social media and tends to grow best through grassroots recommendations, forwards, and Notes so it really does make a difference when you do this. 🙏 🙏 🙏
I’d love to hear too what you’re working on fellow writers and wonder how you feel about sharing work at various stages of the process? So please do…
Thank you for reading,
Love Emma x o x o