Sleeping diagonally...

the second extract from my 'work in progress' novel

Photo: in a forest in Finland contemplating my next sentence. Credit: Alexander Story. Lakeside Gloaming / Summer 2019/ 35mm Kodak Gold / Pentax P30

‘Back to sleeping diagonally,’ Lorna said to her mother. 

   For the first three honeyed months of their relationship she and Finleh had shared a single bed and for the next few a double and a room; two of his female friends slept topless in a queen-size across from them. The toilet of the flat in their labyrinthian Kilburn rental was full of cigarette butts and mice scuttled from kitchen to lounge in the small hours of the morning. Piles of people slept in each room, lawyers and architects from Italy and Spain who worked in Costa and Starbucks in London.

They never quite managed to live alone together till towards the end.

  ‘You need a normal life, just the two of you. To really, really know,’ her mother told her when she expressed doubt.

   ‘Like something pedestrian. Buying an iron and investing in Le Creuset kitchenware, couple dinner parties, comparing washing powder brands,’ she said.

      ‘You can be a real Judgy Mcjudgerson. We all end up wanting the same things in the end. You’re the same.’

The same as who? Muttered Le Petit Gazelle, the tiny petulant beast that lived inside her chest. 

  ‘Like we’re all one and interconnected?’ said Lorna out loud.

       Finally, alone together, with no topless housemates and no rodents, her parents had brought over housewarming gifts; champagne flutes, olive oil and balsamic vinegar decanters, a chest of drawers. Despite the hope of these gifts their bed was still a lumpy, dusty mattress on the floor. (Afterwards she filled the slender champagne flutes and handed Isabelle a glass of yellow fizz, said, ‘I need to invest everything we used together with new memories, cheers!’)   

    In that last year laid on that mattress sometimes she would kick Finleh’s shins. Sharp small jabs with her toes. She confessed this to Isabelle as they walked the circumference of Alford Lake. It was late July and teenagers released from school were out en masse, trawling in wooden row-boats, swigging vodka, clouds of B & H. Isabelle told how she liked to throw things at her husband, how she once hit him on the top of the head with the spiked heel of her stiletto. Lorna confessed to Isabelle about the time they were camping in an Australian rainforest, how in the middle of the night she had slapped Finleh hard across the face. 

   ‘When I talked about the trip later it sounded fun,’ said Lorna ‘you know, we were out in the wilderness, protecting the old growth forest from the loggers, rednecks, they’d drive by and shout abuse at us, it was like Fern Gully, they were dumpster divers, Finleh’s brother slept in a tree, we ate organic beans from cans and sang around a campfire! That was the story.’

     She had enjoyed parts. Squelching deep in the thick mossy forest, the scent of wood-smoke but mostly she’d felt cynical, found the people ridiculous, the liberal hippie men with their good, green views, their anti-establishment ideas but who knew little of women, would talk over her head about how pretty someone’s sister was, if it bothered the brother that all his friend’s fancied her, she’d felt awkward and diminished, had submerged herself in a Hanif Kuerishi novel and ignored them.  

  ‘White people with dreadlocks, one was actually called Air, Air Ripper was his full name, it’s true,’ she told Lorna Isabelle. On their last night in the forest they sat around the bonfire till late, huddled around the warmth, yellow, amber and fairy-green sparks, rustles, squawks, the occasional rattle of a loggers truck passing, Air and the others swigging from a silver goon bag, ripped from its box, the word Sunnyvale emblazoned across the maroon cardboard that now sizzled in the fire, a bucolic image of vine-pickers in the sun. The taste was saccharin and chemical. 

  ‘Too much blood-sugar spike,’ she had said after the second paper cup of it and switched to Tooheys beer. After her third, finding herself unable to say a word of contribution to the group of people who squatted and balanced and strummed guitars around the flaming pit she’d slunk off to bed, lying down on the hard, cold, metal back of Finleh’s father’s Ute, whilst pulling herself into her sleeping bag in the pitch-dark she’d gulped from their water bottle, swilled the cloying wine from her teeth, had slipped and spilt half of it, soaked both sleeping bags through, had wrapped the drier one around herself like a burrito roll and curled up tight, fell asleep to the sound of slurred chatter and hooting owls.

‘Anyway that’s why he started ranting and raving, when he came in,’ Lorna explained.

‘Because his bed was totally wet,’ said Isabelle.

‘Which was fair, I know. But the way he was talking, drunk and hoarse and useless. I’d heard everything he had to say before. Dumb. I put up with…and he could not, like, handle a soggy blanket.’ 

   They had reached the play area of the Heath by the time she got to this point in her re-telling, and both sat down cross-legged on the rusting orange roundabout. She described the sound of the thwack of the slap as it landed on cheek, even with his beard it had made a sound.

‘Like a Silverscreen one, like Joan Crawford or something.’

Stretched out one foot from under her and pushed off, the roundabout creaked as they slowly circled, scorched trees, brown water, the car-chocked causeway, the red rocking-horse, the swings, all looped blurrily. 

   ‘If he were a woman he might have left me after that. I mean it would be the right thing to do.’ 

 ‘Men and women are different,’ Isabelle had said. 

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

---

To read an earlier extract from this work in progress novel see here. To read about why I started this Substack in the first place click here. I’m also gathering poetic offerings from readers in the ‘Comment Section’ here and here- I hope that you will be inspired and contribute too!

Finally, please do pass along this (or other) posts, comment, like, share, and all that, it really helps this thing grow. And who doesn’t like growth?!

Thank you very much!

Emma x o x o