Hello.
I'm starting the fifth (sixth) rewrite of my first novel. After very helpful beta feedback from VenusianBroon, I've got plenty of pointers for improvement.
In the old versions, one of the protagonists, Redd, has lost her children a couple years before the story started. I realised I needed to bring this to a more recent time.
So, now I have written a new beginning for her - which may be the beginning of the book - where I'm going through her grief - and her slow return to life. It's informed by my own experiences so it might be a bit dark - and it has some adult content.
Redd Sommer waited for the two detectives to walk down the short, red-bricked pathway leading to the front gate of the cottage before she closed the front door. Despite everything, she felt stupidly compelled to display decent etiquette as they left. No tears - she couldn’t even if she wanted to - and no weakness. It was a ridiculous act, and one she couldn’t explain. But grief made fools of the bereaved, she supposed.
Grief.
The word itself was insufficient. Too small, too contained and precise. Grief didn’t come close to describing the roiling sea inside that was at the same time a stagnant, flat, unplumbable lake. Losing the twins - not knowing where they were - was more than a stupid ****ing word.
Grief.
So easy. Such a trite way of defining loss. It was what you had when Grandpa died at ninety-one, or when the old duchess who sat everyday at the Wilts & Dorset bus stop for the X1 to Loewe, one day stopped showing up. It was the loss of the family golden retriever after eighteen years.
This wasn’t grief.
It was violation. It was hate - for her and Bo, not from them. It was the gears of reality meshing so the cogs ground each other down and placed good people in the unimaginable. It was proof that life was made up of equations and numbers, and nothing else. No God. Just an eternal entropy.
‘Baby,’ Bo said, appearing from behind and curling a thickly haired forearm around her belly. She leant back into him, staring through the warped bullseyed glass of the front door, and breathed in the stench of weed as he exhaled.
‘They’ve gone,’ she said, needlessly, nodding to the amorphous blue smudges through the glass. She didn’t trust herself to say anything else. What was there to say? At least Bo wasn’t trying to reassure her after four days, James and Jillian would show up at the front door.
Tricked you, mummy!
She turned in to Bo, trying to bury her head in the nook between his jaw and shoulder, her eyes as dry as his were wet. Outside the sounds of the odd car trundled past, down Gorse Lane on its way to Christchurch or Loewe, probably after a day out in the New Forest with the kids. Or the crunch of its tyres on gravel as they pulled into the Kynge’s Inn that sat opposite the cottage at the crossroads that was Gorse village. She couldn’t even hate those families.
Bo said nothing. And that reassured her in a small way that she still felt something. Her love for him. He knew her so well, knew that there was no point in doing anything other than being together, silent. The pair of them observing each other and just being.
Is that what grief was? Being?
Without words they both turned and made their way up the crooked, precipitous staircase to their bedroom and fell on the bed together, a pair of still bodies in foetal contraction and she waited for the being to finish.
###
Redd stood in the small front garden at the small borehole well that plunged to unknown depths.
(Does it go to Australia, mummy?)
Sure, the well had been checked by the police but she knew the twins weren’t down there even before they’d confirmed the thing empty. James and Jillian had always been careful; they called it their magic pot, but still kept a fair distance from it. The thick carpet of tiny green leaves that covered the low wall was now dotted with similarly tiny, white flowers the kids had called ‘Star of Bethlehems’ which had always driven her mad.
“Stars of Bethlehem, sweetheart, not Bethlehems.”
Stupid.
At least she could think of them now. It had been eight months of walking through an eternal foggy night. In fact, she’d not even really walked through life, just… just nothinged through it, listening to the words of friends, family, even her business partner:
It’s the biggest cliche, but time heals…
Just try to think of your life in two halves now…
You never know what’s around the corner.
They’re in a better place now.
She’d sat and nothinged all those platitudes, nodding I knows so much it was a wonder her ****ing head hadn’t fallen off.
At some point she’d realised her and Bo’s loss had become about their friends’ efforts to try and say the right thing without feeling bad, or awkward; like their feelings mattered more than her and Bo’s. She was giving all her grieving away to other people, so out of touch with her own loss she couldn’t even feel it. And that was when she’d finally taken Bo’s advice and sought help, counselling, therapy… better living through chemistry.
The Praxetol had kicked in after about a month of taking two of the green and white capsules a day, and the therapy had kicked in around ten weeks after. Cogs in her heart started to move again. Slowly at first, timorous, but definite.
The strange thing about her grief was that now, as the winter jasmine stars colonised the little well, she’d started to feel guilty. The guilt itself was stupid, and she knew as much intellectually - and Katherine was such a phenomenal therapist they’d worked through it anyway - but it was hard not to feel guilty when you sensed your life returning after the loss of children; she should never feel happy again. Never feel ‘better’.
Katherine had asked her if that might be the best way to honour their memory; give up, live a life of penitence. It was a simple question that had really shaken the guilt from her. It was far too similar to living a monkish lifestyle, and if there was one thing she wasn’t going to emulate, it was the historical mythology of Organised Religion. She’d had enough of that through childhood.
###
The February snows came and covered the house, the garden, the chicken run, and office in a magic white duvet that somehow was right in its timing. Birds returned as the snow thawed and the foxes became more ballsy now the whiteness was gone and they could melt into the bushes easier.
She was fighting a wash load with the cat when Bo came into the kitchen from his office in the garden.
‘What you doing, baby?’ he asked.
‘The bloody cat! Gettout!’ she cried, and Bauhaus jumped from the laundry basket onto her shoulder.
Bo took the cat from her and nuzzled him, ‘She’s a horrid old witch, isn’t she Baz,’ he said.
‘Say that when you have cat hairs tickling your balls,’ she said, flapping some boxer briefs wildly before folding them on the work surface.
As she continued folding the wet laundry Bo paced behind her slowly, more nervous than when he’d proposed in Macchu Pichu. She stood with a groan, hands on her hips and asked him what he was up to.
‘I have to go into Loewe, baby,’ he said, ‘for a meeting. It’s a big deal…’
‘Good. When’ll you be back?’
‘The meeting’s Friday. I wondered if…’ he shifted from foot to foot, looking down at the tiled slate floor.
He wanted her to go with him…
Strange that the anxious chill the thought of going anywhere beyond the local market did not manifest. In fact…
‘You want me to come?’ she asked.
‘Only if you’re ready.’
She started laughing. It was a proper laugh, not a socially-expected reaction to some misfired joke Bo had tried to make; not a practice laugh, the real thing.
‘Why’re you laughing?’
‘Because, yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, I’d love to!’
He hugged her, and as he did she had another new reaction.
She wept.
I'm starting the fifth (sixth) rewrite of my first novel. After very helpful beta feedback from VenusianBroon, I've got plenty of pointers for improvement.
In the old versions, one of the protagonists, Redd, has lost her children a couple years before the story started. I realised I needed to bring this to a more recent time.
So, now I have written a new beginning for her - which may be the beginning of the book - where I'm going through her grief - and her slow return to life. It's informed by my own experiences so it might be a bit dark - and it has some adult content.
Redd Sommer waited for the two detectives to walk down the short, red-bricked pathway leading to the front gate of the cottage before she closed the front door. Despite everything, she felt stupidly compelled to display decent etiquette as they left. No tears - she couldn’t even if she wanted to - and no weakness. It was a ridiculous act, and one she couldn’t explain. But grief made fools of the bereaved, she supposed.
Grief.
The word itself was insufficient. Too small, too contained and precise. Grief didn’t come close to describing the roiling sea inside that was at the same time a stagnant, flat, unplumbable lake. Losing the twins - not knowing where they were - was more than a stupid ****ing word.
Grief.
So easy. Such a trite way of defining loss. It was what you had when Grandpa died at ninety-one, or when the old duchess who sat everyday at the Wilts & Dorset bus stop for the X1 to Loewe, one day stopped showing up. It was the loss of the family golden retriever after eighteen years.
This wasn’t grief.
It was violation. It was hate - for her and Bo, not from them. It was the gears of reality meshing so the cogs ground each other down and placed good people in the unimaginable. It was proof that life was made up of equations and numbers, and nothing else. No God. Just an eternal entropy.
‘Baby,’ Bo said, appearing from behind and curling a thickly haired forearm around her belly. She leant back into him, staring through the warped bullseyed glass of the front door, and breathed in the stench of weed as he exhaled.
‘They’ve gone,’ she said, needlessly, nodding to the amorphous blue smudges through the glass. She didn’t trust herself to say anything else. What was there to say? At least Bo wasn’t trying to reassure her after four days, James and Jillian would show up at the front door.
Tricked you, mummy!
She turned in to Bo, trying to bury her head in the nook between his jaw and shoulder, her eyes as dry as his were wet. Outside the sounds of the odd car trundled past, down Gorse Lane on its way to Christchurch or Loewe, probably after a day out in the New Forest with the kids. Or the crunch of its tyres on gravel as they pulled into the Kynge’s Inn that sat opposite the cottage at the crossroads that was Gorse village. She couldn’t even hate those families.
Bo said nothing. And that reassured her in a small way that she still felt something. Her love for him. He knew her so well, knew that there was no point in doing anything other than being together, silent. The pair of them observing each other and just being.
Is that what grief was? Being?
Without words they both turned and made their way up the crooked, precipitous staircase to their bedroom and fell on the bed together, a pair of still bodies in foetal contraction and she waited for the being to finish.
###
Redd stood in the small front garden at the small borehole well that plunged to unknown depths.
(Does it go to Australia, mummy?)
Sure, the well had been checked by the police but she knew the twins weren’t down there even before they’d confirmed the thing empty. James and Jillian had always been careful; they called it their magic pot, but still kept a fair distance from it. The thick carpet of tiny green leaves that covered the low wall was now dotted with similarly tiny, white flowers the kids had called ‘Star of Bethlehems’ which had always driven her mad.
“Stars of Bethlehem, sweetheart, not Bethlehems.”
Stupid.
At least she could think of them now. It had been eight months of walking through an eternal foggy night. In fact, she’d not even really walked through life, just… just nothinged through it, listening to the words of friends, family, even her business partner:
It’s the biggest cliche, but time heals…
Just try to think of your life in two halves now…
You never know what’s around the corner.
They’re in a better place now.
She’d sat and nothinged all those platitudes, nodding I knows so much it was a wonder her ****ing head hadn’t fallen off.
At some point she’d realised her and Bo’s loss had become about their friends’ efforts to try and say the right thing without feeling bad, or awkward; like their feelings mattered more than her and Bo’s. She was giving all her grieving away to other people, so out of touch with her own loss she couldn’t even feel it. And that was when she’d finally taken Bo’s advice and sought help, counselling, therapy… better living through chemistry.
The Praxetol had kicked in after about a month of taking two of the green and white capsules a day, and the therapy had kicked in around ten weeks after. Cogs in her heart started to move again. Slowly at first, timorous, but definite.
The strange thing about her grief was that now, as the winter jasmine stars colonised the little well, she’d started to feel guilty. The guilt itself was stupid, and she knew as much intellectually - and Katherine was such a phenomenal therapist they’d worked through it anyway - but it was hard not to feel guilty when you sensed your life returning after the loss of children; she should never feel happy again. Never feel ‘better’.
Katherine had asked her if that might be the best way to honour their memory; give up, live a life of penitence. It was a simple question that had really shaken the guilt from her. It was far too similar to living a monkish lifestyle, and if there was one thing she wasn’t going to emulate, it was the historical mythology of Organised Religion. She’d had enough of that through childhood.
###
The February snows came and covered the house, the garden, the chicken run, and office in a magic white duvet that somehow was right in its timing. Birds returned as the snow thawed and the foxes became more ballsy now the whiteness was gone and they could melt into the bushes easier.
She was fighting a wash load with the cat when Bo came into the kitchen from his office in the garden.
‘What you doing, baby?’ he asked.
‘The bloody cat! Gettout!’ she cried, and Bauhaus jumped from the laundry basket onto her shoulder.
Bo took the cat from her and nuzzled him, ‘She’s a horrid old witch, isn’t she Baz,’ he said.
‘Say that when you have cat hairs tickling your balls,’ she said, flapping some boxer briefs wildly before folding them on the work surface.
As she continued folding the wet laundry Bo paced behind her slowly, more nervous than when he’d proposed in Macchu Pichu. She stood with a groan, hands on her hips and asked him what he was up to.
‘I have to go into Loewe, baby,’ he said, ‘for a meeting. It’s a big deal…’
‘Good. When’ll you be back?’
‘The meeting’s Friday. I wondered if…’ he shifted from foot to foot, looking down at the tiled slate floor.
He wanted her to go with him…
Strange that the anxious chill the thought of going anywhere beyond the local market did not manifest. In fact…
‘You want me to come?’ she asked.
‘Only if you’re ready.’
She started laughing. It was a proper laugh, not a socially-expected reaction to some misfired joke Bo had tried to make; not a practice laugh, the real thing.
‘Why’re you laughing?’
‘Because, yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, I’d love to!’
He hugged her, and as he did she had another new reaction.
She wept.
