What am I writing?
Sunday //
I thought I would share a little bit of my book with you. That’s the point of a writers newsletter no? We are in the summer of 1970 and 14 year old Marisol Brown is taking her newly born daughter to an emergency social services meeting. This is the first time she is seeing her mother, Shilly, since having the baby.
I’m on the last phase of pulling together the first draft draft. What a journey! I honestly cannot wait to have it done. FYI - grammar and mistakes all my own. Self editing is not my strong point!
Extract from Chapter 6
In an attempt to make herself more comfortable Shilly shifted her weight from side to side on the hard-plastic orange chair as she sat in the waiting area outside ‘Meeting Room 1’. She wasn’t really sure if she was uncomfortable or anxious as no amount of resettling or resting one ankle on top of the other made a difference or brought any comfort. While she fidgeted, she tuned into the silence, waiting to hear the familiar sound of her daughter’s footsteps along the corridor leading to the cluster of chairs where she was sat. Her head tilted slightly to the right straining to hear the small gait, the light step, the quiet rhythm she learned from listening to Marisol as a toddler when getting out of bed in the middle of the night to go and take a pee and from creeping along the hallway at the crack of Christmas Day to see if Santa had been. A cadence Shilly missed for many years when Marisol was left behind in Jamaica and a beat that in recent times she had learned to fear.
What drama would come with those footsteps she would inwardly sigh when she heard teenage Marisol walking up to the front door? Late home from school again, pushing her key into the lock and with click of the latch opening bringing with her a world of chaos. Today though, Shilly just wanted to hear the familiar footsteps, she felt joyful as it meant her child was still walking and despite it all, was taking steps into her future, whatever that may be. And she didn’t have to wait long before hearing the echoes of a small cry from tiny lungs along the corridor, and getting closer to the waiting area with its very disagreeable chairs.
An emergency meeting at Social Services offices on a Saturday morning was not how she would have chosen to see Marisol or meet her granddaughter for the first time. But she didn’t have the energy to complain when she was summoned to meet with Miss Seymour and Dr Bell to discuss Marisol’s latest outburst.
Before the heavy double doors opened Shilly stood to be ready to welcome her girls. Seconds later her arms were full of a newborn and her first born safety nestled within the tiny space, the span of her hug, that she could control. She held them as long as she could before Marisol squirmed away, out of breath. “See how much hair she has Mummy; doesn’t she look like a doll?”
“She does, I bet her nappy isn’t so sweet though eh? You sleepin’ alright, you look thin. She feedin’? You bind your belly like I showed you?”
So many questions that there was no time to answer before the mothers were invited into a beige meeting room and asked to take their seats around an equally colourless formica table. Shilly observed the room was almost windowless, the window it did have was small and set high up the hessian covered wall so it was impossible for anyone to see in or out and the little daylight it offered was shielded by a badly fitted venetian blind, covered in a layer of dust. It was a sad room where no delight had ever been.
Still holding Eloise, Shilly paused on another uncomfortable chair, this one metal with a brown padded seat, to commit to her memory the delicate frill of her granddaughter’s soft white socks and the smell of her milky breath before looking across the table at the red bristling faces of the social worker and her colleague waiting impatiently for her to focus on them.
***
I’ve got a couple of says off this week to work on my book, next week I’ll let you know how that goes.
Hope your week goes gently.