Fiction #3, Ordinary Woman Turns 30
My novel trilogy in progress
Another month, another opening chapter (two, this time) of a novel. When my agent, the other Abi, and I, spoke about my return to publication after baby loss, I wanted to be sure, as a mid-career writer, of our strategy. Remontada is a much easier book to sell, in some ways. It’s short, cheap to print, propulsive, and concise. It’s about baby loss and grief, but it dips gently into these topics rather than faces them head on. In a way, it’s the book I needed to write, first. I know readers, like myself, who have experienced trauma can find it comforting to read about someone who is living as they are—always carrying their dark reality—but that it’s also hard and potentially triggering to read about a harsh reality when living one. Like Fresh Water For Flowers did for me, I hope Remontada both comforts and makes the unlucky—we who live on the other side of fortune—feel seen. Ordinary Woman Turns 30 is, I think, also in many ways a gentle book. It’s funny, thoughtful, and forgiving. But it also dives a little deeper into an age old question—how should we be happy without the things we thought would make us happy? Here is the prologue, and first chapter. I hope to have more news for you on the release, soon.
PROLOGUE
Aged 25, Paris, 4 AM.
Dark waters of the Seine. Cool stone pavement. Barefoot, heels in hand. Making out, slow, sexy, practised, passionate. You lift my legs. Wrap them around you. Make it perfect, make it smooth. I squeeze your sides with my thighs; it always makes you sigh. Charming.
You drop me. Unceremonious. Come on.
What? Where? Delight in my lips as they bud together, tweak at the corners. I’m not afraid of you. I’m young, aren’t I? I skip after you. I bounce.
You: easy smile, gregarious, handsome, movie star-like, wearing sunglasses under lamplight. I booked us a room at the Chateau.
No!!! I squeal and a male voice nearby shouts, ta gueule, putain! (Shut up, whore!)
We cackle wildly.
Ever been in love with your best friend?
Happy birthday. You kiss me. Prince of Paris. Adored. Semi-famous in a local sense. I’m just a girl from a field. Country girl.
What’ll you do for my 30th?
Something even bigger, of course.
Ha! I bet. Can’t wait.
Grand. It was grand. In Love. It all ahead of us. On the Escalator. I don’t believe in God, but sometimes I get on my knees and pray to get back on that path.
PART ONE
29 AND 3/4
That summer, my new doctor finds a lump in my left breast.
“Have you noticed it before?” she says.
“No. Does it feel like cancer?” My mum had breast cancer when she was 47. Stage three. Thankfully, she survived. Of course, it’s made us both a little paranoid. But just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean anomalous cell-divisions aren’t after using up your glucose.
“Do you regularly check for lumps?”
I explained I had tried before but I had not found any area of my tits that didn’t feel like a tumour.
“Well, there’s a lump there. I’ll refer you for an ultrasound. You’ll get an appointment within two weeks.”
“Two weeks?”
“Yes, two weeks.”
“That seems quick. As if it were serious.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m sorry. I was raised to ignore bad behavior. It feels like giving the lump attention encourages it.”
I walk away from the clinic, through a car park, alongside a housing estate with laundry drying on balconies above me. Hear summer sounds: families and flatmates living half-outside, the day nowhere near end at 5 PM. Leave the estate; enter a path between a disused pub and a chain-link fence. Through the chain-link: an old piece of railway line, green bushiness, buddleia, birds. Exit the path.
The pub’s boarded-up windows, empty eyes, clock me as I cross Downs Road at the north-east corner; step onto footpath, then lawn, feet relieved at the give in the ground, stomp of dust, whispery crunch of dried-out summer grass. I enter Hackney Downs, a park in East London.
A down is a gently rolling hill. It comes from the Old English word, dūn; a hill. Just a tidbit. My mum says everyone likes learning something new.
To my left, a small road slips past the church to the grocery store and another small park; this one with benches around a pond and a little arching wooden bridge where I sometimes squat by the water and watch grandparents and toddlers, tired men with building dust hands eating sandwiches staring at nothing, very full ducks. London is the second-greenest city in the world (#1 is Tokyo). Most evenings I walk the parks, dream, think, wonder about getting a little something, usually a coconut milk hot chocolate from Palm 2 to drink by the pond, before heading home past My Neighbours The Dumplings, past the Round Chapel, past the tacos and margs bar. Other days I head home south-east from Hackney Downs, past Black Cat Cafe and the house that made me move to Lower Clapton, where a woman my age-ish with a honeyed, moneyed accent showed me around her terra-cotta-tiled kitchen/living room, her lovely garden, her supper club stews with names I didn’t know, and her boyfriend, who liked me too much, as her eyes narrowed and I knew I wouldn’t get to live in her spicy, earth-colored rooms. From her road, I can get home via Amhurst road, curving past the camera shop, Hackney Public Baths, the bus stop, the local offie where we buy Coronas and limes, and then crossing the street, to the PVC door that never quite closes.
Hackney Downs is mostly green grass, mown low for sports. It has a little playground. I like to go on the swings when there aren’t kids around. My favorite part of the park is an area of long wild grasses, with fallen logs, where nature has been allowed a little freedom and you can hear crickets at night in the summer. Dogs like that part, too.
It’s a wide park. It opens up the sky in a way that’s rare in the city. Where I grew up, the sky is literally half the world. It’s a dome, and it comes all the way down to the ground, in a miles-wide circle with you at the centre. I always notice it when I’m driving in. There’s a lot of blue up there.
In Hackney Downs, it’s not the same, but it’s a big sky for London. The open space of the park allows the sunlight a decent shot at the buildings on the park edge. At sundown, the facades are orange and the sky is a very chill, very peaceable blue.
I walk and think about the lump. I am twenty-nine. I wonder if I died within the next two years, what three things I would like to get done beforehand. I think I would get laser eye surgery, write a book, and live in a houseshare that has, not just a kitchen to hang out in, but an actual living room.
Jas is home, in her room, studying. I take her Jasmine tea and walk a steaming cup into my bedroom, where I sit on the edge of the bed and slide my legs under the desk, which is jammed between the end of my bed and the wall. It’s not that comfortable. Mostly, I write in bed.
I open my laptop. Close the window with Buffy The Vampire Slayer open on it. I have committed to writing about turning 30, for an alternative lifestyle magazine, but I keep getting nowhere. My pitch was that turning 30 is not a big deal and that any age- or milestone- related panic results from internalized sexism. It will be a positive! and upbeat! article about how life starts at 30! and the best is yet to come!
And it is, right?
The backyard neighbours are having a screaming match again. I look out the window, checking that their kids aren’t out there with them. I rub my eyes. I squeeze the lump. I’m tired. I miss…
…
My mind goes blank, like a computer erasing files, and the thing I miss is gone.
I sigh deeply, sip my tea.
Life used to be easier than this.
But this tea is lovely!
So there’s that.
30! I remind myself, drawing my attention from the yard. I raise my arms, trying to gee up enthusiasm. Woo, 30!
I stare at the screen. Close the file. My 30th birthday is in October. I have a while to write the article. I pick up my phone, look up, “nearest laser eye surgery”. I open my Spareroom account back up and pay the monthly subscription. I open a new Pages document. Type, Things to do before I die.