Fiction Extracts

Getting Away

The breakdown happened on the tenth day. For nine days I'd been happy. It had all seemed so effortless. It's like that sometimes, smooth and easy; days when your legs feel powerful and tireless, when the road unwinds mile after mile and you could just keep going forever. I loved the bike and the road and the blank December countryside. I loved the cold air that burned my face. I loved the long damp nights in my comfortless tent and the smell of earth and the sound of other creatures moving furtively outside, away from their own homes. And of course, I loved the fact that I was moving away from her. Every day was taking me a bit further away, stretching the ties. I could hear them creaking and complaining; sooner or later they were going to snap like old elastic. Maybe they'd catapult me over the horizon into a new life.

I didn't know where I was heading and I didn't care. I just got up every morning and packed away my tent and pedalled until I reached the evening. I didn't have to think about time or directions. I just watched the world rolling past me backwards and was glad I was leaving it behind. I saw an early Christmas tree trapped behind a window and was glad I was free.

Sometimes people stopped to watch me passing - a streak of bright green and yellow, like an exotic bird in that bleak landscape - and I wondered if they envied me. I didn't envy them. The houses all looked so smug and self-contained, just like my mother's house - stifling and seductive. People get seduced by warmth and comfort. It sucks you in until you can't see out any more. I'm glad I'm on the outside...

(Opening of a short story published in 'Raconteur' anthology, 1995)

 

Meeting Margaret

 

When I pushed myself, black boots first, off the bridge, I knew my mother wouldn't have approved. She had always wanted a ladylike daughter, a girl in pink frills, and I hadn't turned out that way at all. She would have hated those boots. I looked down at them and smiled as the moonlight caught their polished tips and they smiled back.

 

This time I was going to do something right. I'd planned it all carefully - written my note, cleaned behind the cooker, thrown away all those embarrassing diaries, and bought the boots. I'd left nothing to chance. I'd never learnt to swim - one of the earliest of a lifetime's bad decisions - but I couldn't trust my body to sink without putting up a fight. Who knows what instinct might suddenly surface when I hit the water? So I bought the biggest, heaviest boots I could find with hundreds of eyelets - my body would never be able to get them off in a hurry. And there they were, leading the way to the river, when everything seemed to stop and there she was - me!

 

Not the familiar me in the mirror, but the lopsided me of the family photographs. And she was wearing the kind of clothes I wouldn't dream of wearing - cream court shoes and an apron. My mother would have loved her. And in her right hand she was holding a large knife...

 

(Opening of short story published in 'Me' magazine, 1992)