I'm taking a break from my main WIP as it's causing me grief, so for a little relief I've started a new novella. This is the third in a series of novellas I want to publish on the theme of modern urban mythology and magical realism in major global cities. This one is set in Madrid, and is presently untitled.
Would love to know what's working, what's not working. Fire away.
~
Dear Emma,
By now you’ll doubtless be racking your limited imagination for ways in which to weedle Great Aunty Baby’s secret hiding locations for her inheritance from her increasingly dribbling daydreams. I can bear the tragicomic scene in my head no longer; please desist from your fruitless interrogation of the mad old bat. Once I discovered the whereabouts of the great wad of cash I took the whole sorry lot and carted myself away from the dark Satanic skyscrapers of London as fast as public transport would allow. God bless her senile and utterly understandable mistrust of banks!
Feeling the jouissance of the fugitive coursing through me, I stuffed the whole lot in a suitcase, along with my sketchpad and pencils and a few other essentials, and took it to the Eurostar at St Pancras; as I suspected, the glassy-eyed automata didn’t take a second glance when I popped it through the scanning thingamawotsits at the station. They remind me, with their perm-agog mouths and proficiency in neither English nor French, of those monsters from that TV show we used to watch, the one about the dead rising from their graves for God-knows-what reason. Christ, but can you imagine the groaning hordes of the jobsworth junta breaking free from the train station and running amok? Another reason to get out of that God-forsaken city. London’s a bloody fire hazard.
Others might apologise at this point for the whole abandonment thing, but I’m past that, old girl. I can withhold the reason no longer: you broke my heart, Emma, not once, not twice, but in ways too innumerable to count. Don’t blame yourself. It’s me. I’m a damned coward. Rather than have it out with you, I took the money and ran. I know I said we’d spend Great Aunty Baby’s cash on island-hopping in Thailand, and on our own Grenache vines in the Dordogne, and on sacks of Pyrenees duck fat so we might make our own Foie Gras and eat ourselves to a hideous, glorious death, but frankly, the thought of all that fills me with the sort of singular dread usually confined to ISIS’s closet homosexuals.
I am consumed by grief for what once was, and shame for not fighting for it, and rage at my many humiliations, and sadness that you never once realised it. Perhaps now I’ve gone you will understand. Perhaps not.
So I’ve retreated to Madrid. That’s the one in Spain, not Alabama. I confess, it’s not particularly imaginative of me, but it’ll do. And despite your misgivings about my being poor judge of character, I predict I know enough about you that Madrid will provide sufficient time and distance for me to drink myself to death before even you can summon the will to abandon Great Aunty Baby to a slow, unpleasant death of starvation and an unwiped arse. And then, once I am gone, you’ll have no need of the inheritance anyway, unless you’ve taken up with one of those fancy boys you so like.
So far my desires have not been fully sated. I intended that blow the cash orgasmically, licking Chateua d’Yquem off the nipples of the sort of prostitutes normally to be found in Saudi oil palaces, but alas, the resources of Eurostar were not commensurate with my aspirations, and I had to make do with a vile bottle of beetroot-coloured limescale remover (apparently grown in the Barossa!) and a packet of oversized cardboard pills that tasted of salted feet. Worse still, the cardboard feet things made me yearn ever more for the beetroot limescale remover. And that was in Standard Premier! I stayed off the poisonous plonk after that, deciding that if a glorious, bibulous end were to be mine, I should at least procrastinate in favour of something worth dying for. I changed trains at Paris and headed south through a grey France in an almighty, half-sober huff. Tried sketching some of my predictably tiresome and empty-headed carriage companions, but they all ended up looking like Magritte’s Son Of Man, only I was more interested in the apple. Armed with only pencil, it’s beyond even my ken to capture the soul of an obese financier drinking battery acid on expenses. I might as well cut paper angels out of a copy of the FT.
The clouds dissipated as soon as I arrived in Madrid, in more way than one. See, the queerest thing happened to me, which is what compelled me to write to you.
First port of call was the winery at Salamanca, where I relieved the aching burden upon my pockets by a few grams by sampling a bottle of 1997 Rioja Gran Riserva, which went some way to dispelling the rank finish of the limescale remover. I thanked the portly owner of the emporium by parting ways with another hundred Euros for a bottle of Jerez blanca, as dry as a witch’s gash stuffed with woodlouse husks, decanted it into three hip flasks, and set off to the Museo del Prado. Unlike the Eurostar, the pinch-faced wombles on security actually collectively formulated the gumption to query me about my hip flasks (as I suspected, the art world seeks a better class of security ape to guard its treasures than the boxcar monkeys attending public transport), and smiled when I offered them a taste of the good stuff. I withered my way through the triptychs of Bosch, always amusing, the frescoes of Fra Angelico - important, but tiresome - and the divine portraits of Raphael - and made merry my way to Room 67, slumped myself down on the bench int he centre and began sketching. At first I lazily sketched some of the tourists flitting in and out, smiling, stalling, attempting to think, and as the Jerez took effect, I began sketching the black space around the tourists; the room itself became my sketch, while the tourists were just blank areas of paper, flitting impressionistically with hints of movement, while it was the room I allowed to breathe. I took a moment to blink, pinched the bridge of my nose, and heard a loose, rattling cough behind me.
At first I didn’t react, and continued my sketch, but after a second a voice called over my shoulder, “Es un cliché que haces negro el foco de tú boceto en salon 67. Pero, ¿es el negro el salon, o tú mismo?”
Without turning I gritted my teeth, shook my head and hid a disgusted half-smile at the old fart’s tired and unwanted analysis. “No hablo español,” I lied.
“Inglés?”
I let out a curt laugh at the old man’s tenacity, turned around to admonish him, and to my surprise found the words caught in my throat. Would it shock you, Em, dear old thing, to learn that standing there, observing my sketches and commenting on the cliché of my work was none other than Edouardo Bosques. Don’t let the sheer envy of the whole thing make you choke on your Capstans, Em, old fruit, but it’s true. Large as still life. I struggled for some words, but - oh, the horror of it! - made a humiliating sort of clucking noise, as if I were the one choking.
Would love to know what's working, what's not working. Fire away.
~
Dear Emma,
By now you’ll doubtless be racking your limited imagination for ways in which to weedle Great Aunty Baby’s secret hiding locations for her inheritance from her increasingly dribbling daydreams. I can bear the tragicomic scene in my head no longer; please desist from your fruitless interrogation of the mad old bat. Once I discovered the whereabouts of the great wad of cash I took the whole sorry lot and carted myself away from the dark Satanic skyscrapers of London as fast as public transport would allow. God bless her senile and utterly understandable mistrust of banks!
Feeling the jouissance of the fugitive coursing through me, I stuffed the whole lot in a suitcase, along with my sketchpad and pencils and a few other essentials, and took it to the Eurostar at St Pancras; as I suspected, the glassy-eyed automata didn’t take a second glance when I popped it through the scanning thingamawotsits at the station. They remind me, with their perm-agog mouths and proficiency in neither English nor French, of those monsters from that TV show we used to watch, the one about the dead rising from their graves for God-knows-what reason. Christ, but can you imagine the groaning hordes of the jobsworth junta breaking free from the train station and running amok? Another reason to get out of that God-forsaken city. London’s a bloody fire hazard.
Others might apologise at this point for the whole abandonment thing, but I’m past that, old girl. I can withhold the reason no longer: you broke my heart, Emma, not once, not twice, but in ways too innumerable to count. Don’t blame yourself. It’s me. I’m a damned coward. Rather than have it out with you, I took the money and ran. I know I said we’d spend Great Aunty Baby’s cash on island-hopping in Thailand, and on our own Grenache vines in the Dordogne, and on sacks of Pyrenees duck fat so we might make our own Foie Gras and eat ourselves to a hideous, glorious death, but frankly, the thought of all that fills me with the sort of singular dread usually confined to ISIS’s closet homosexuals.
I am consumed by grief for what once was, and shame for not fighting for it, and rage at my many humiliations, and sadness that you never once realised it. Perhaps now I’ve gone you will understand. Perhaps not.
So I’ve retreated to Madrid. That’s the one in Spain, not Alabama. I confess, it’s not particularly imaginative of me, but it’ll do. And despite your misgivings about my being poor judge of character, I predict I know enough about you that Madrid will provide sufficient time and distance for me to drink myself to death before even you can summon the will to abandon Great Aunty Baby to a slow, unpleasant death of starvation and an unwiped arse. And then, once I am gone, you’ll have no need of the inheritance anyway, unless you’ve taken up with one of those fancy boys you so like.
So far my desires have not been fully sated. I intended that blow the cash orgasmically, licking Chateua d’Yquem off the nipples of the sort of prostitutes normally to be found in Saudi oil palaces, but alas, the resources of Eurostar were not commensurate with my aspirations, and I had to make do with a vile bottle of beetroot-coloured limescale remover (apparently grown in the Barossa!) and a packet of oversized cardboard pills that tasted of salted feet. Worse still, the cardboard feet things made me yearn ever more for the beetroot limescale remover. And that was in Standard Premier! I stayed off the poisonous plonk after that, deciding that if a glorious, bibulous end were to be mine, I should at least procrastinate in favour of something worth dying for. I changed trains at Paris and headed south through a grey France in an almighty, half-sober huff. Tried sketching some of my predictably tiresome and empty-headed carriage companions, but they all ended up looking like Magritte’s Son Of Man, only I was more interested in the apple. Armed with only pencil, it’s beyond even my ken to capture the soul of an obese financier drinking battery acid on expenses. I might as well cut paper angels out of a copy of the FT.
The clouds dissipated as soon as I arrived in Madrid, in more way than one. See, the queerest thing happened to me, which is what compelled me to write to you.
First port of call was the winery at Salamanca, where I relieved the aching burden upon my pockets by a few grams by sampling a bottle of 1997 Rioja Gran Riserva, which went some way to dispelling the rank finish of the limescale remover. I thanked the portly owner of the emporium by parting ways with another hundred Euros for a bottle of Jerez blanca, as dry as a witch’s gash stuffed with woodlouse husks, decanted it into three hip flasks, and set off to the Museo del Prado. Unlike the Eurostar, the pinch-faced wombles on security actually collectively formulated the gumption to query me about my hip flasks (as I suspected, the art world seeks a better class of security ape to guard its treasures than the boxcar monkeys attending public transport), and smiled when I offered them a taste of the good stuff. I withered my way through the triptychs of Bosch, always amusing, the frescoes of Fra Angelico - important, but tiresome - and the divine portraits of Raphael - and made merry my way to Room 67, slumped myself down on the bench int he centre and began sketching. At first I lazily sketched some of the tourists flitting in and out, smiling, stalling, attempting to think, and as the Jerez took effect, I began sketching the black space around the tourists; the room itself became my sketch, while the tourists were just blank areas of paper, flitting impressionistically with hints of movement, while it was the room I allowed to breathe. I took a moment to blink, pinched the bridge of my nose, and heard a loose, rattling cough behind me.
At first I didn’t react, and continued my sketch, but after a second a voice called over my shoulder, “Es un cliché que haces negro el foco de tú boceto en salon 67. Pero, ¿es el negro el salon, o tú mismo?”
Without turning I gritted my teeth, shook my head and hid a disgusted half-smile at the old fart’s tired and unwanted analysis. “No hablo español,” I lied.
“Inglés?”
I let out a curt laugh at the old man’s tenacity, turned around to admonish him, and to my surprise found the words caught in my throat. Would it shock you, Em, dear old thing, to learn that standing there, observing my sketches and commenting on the cliché of my work was none other than Edouardo Bosques. Don’t let the sheer envy of the whole thing make you choke on your Capstans, Em, old fruit, but it’s true. Large as still life. I struggled for some words, but - oh, the horror of it! - made a humiliating sort of clucking noise, as if I were the one choking.
.
