E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten
Hailey The Silence Project
Main
ISBN: 978-1-83895-607-3
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The ultimate unique compelling gripping page-turning Kindle No. 1 bestseller from Carole Hailey
E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-83895-607-3
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Carole Hailey completed the six-month Guardian/UEA novel writing course taught by Bernardine Evaristo, who imbued Carole with such a love for writing fiction that she abandoned her career in law to undertake an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, followed by a PhD in Creative Writing at Swansea University. Carole was a London Library Emerging Writer 2020/21. The Silence Project is her first published novel and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award 2020 and highly commended by the judges. She lives in Wales with her husband and two rescue dogs. Instagram: @carolehaileyx
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1.
On Saturday 24 May 2003 – the day of my thirteenth birthday and 3,082 days before the Event – my mother left home.
She didn’t go far. After dragging assorted metal poles and canvas paraphernalia past the people enjoying drinks in our beer garden, she managed, with a considerable amount of effort, to pitch a tent beside the stream that marked the boundary between our bottom field and a small wood. At first, I believed the most important thing was to find out where my mother had got the tent, because we had never owned such a thing. However, it wasn’t long before I realised that the tent (which had been abandoned in our garage by some campers the previous summer) was the least significant part of the story.
I really wanted to have my thirteenth-birthday party at Hollywood Bowl in Basingstoke, but we couldn’t afford it. Instead, my parents had agreed that to mark my entry into touchyteensville, as Dad insisted on calling it, our pub would stay shut until 2 p.m. My party would begin at 11 a.m., so my friends and I would have the run of the place for three whole hours. For me, the pub wasn’t an exciting place to spend my thirteenth birthday. I was as much of a fixture as the 1998 Beer of the Year calendar, which had been hanging above a shelf of glasses for almost five years. It was perpetually turned to November’s offering, which I can still remember word for word: . Clearly the brewery marketing department had employed an aspiring poet in love with the adjective.
Although I would rather have been somewhere else, my friends had worked themselves up into a frenzy at the idea of a party in a pub.
‘JD and Coke, Nick, and hold the ice,’ Sarah Philips yelled at Dad as she ran into the pub on the dot of eleven. She was so excited that I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find out she had spent the night sleeping outside. She shouted the same thing several times more, pushing her chest forwards and her bum backwards to such an extent that she looked deformed. At some point in the last twelve months, flirting had become one of our most popular hobbies, but Sarah hadn’t even been in the pub for five minutes and she was already crossing a line. Fortunately, Dad was completely oblivious to Sarah’s contortions, even though, as Gran was fond of saying, Sarah Philips was thirteen-going-on-thirty.
‘What about brandy?’ suggested Bea Stevens. ‘Mum always lets me have brandy when I’m upset about something. She says letting me drink a little bit now means I won’t be an alcoholic when I’m older.’
Bea’s mother might have had a point, but nowadays I cannot bear the stuff. Ever since that police officer put some in my tea on 31 October 2011, just the smell of brandy is enough to make me gag. I did wonder afterwards if she had taken one of the bottles from the bar downstairs or whether all police officers carry a hip flask around with them, just in case. She made us sit at the kitchen table while she busied herself with the kettle, murmuring, ‘It’ll take the edge off,’ as she poured a great big slug of brandy into each cup of tea. She meant well, but it didn’t help. Nothing could. And it tasted revolting.
My father stood firm on the subject of alcohol at my party – we were only thirteen, after all – but, being Dad, he did his absolute best to make sure we enjoyed ourselves. He piled fifty-pence pieces on the ledge by the jukebox, and although the machine was full of all the old music that he liked, that didn’t stop us queuing up to pick songs, self-consciously shuffling our feet while doing bad lip-synching to bands called Human League, Culture Club, ABC and Howard Jones (who Mum always used to joke was Dad’s twin, because they had the same long face and floppy hair). There were no boys present. They were the main topic of conversation, obviously, but there was no way I would have invited an actual boy to my birthday party because I would have literally died of embarrassment.
Dad had given in to my endless pleas to let us use the pool table, although he said the darts were strictly out of bounds. ‘It’s bad enough in here on match nights with darts flying around all over the place. Sorry, Ems, but no way am I going to let your lot loose on them.’
He always grumbled about darts evenings, but I knew he didn’t mean it because of how often he said we relied on the money from match nights. Apparently it was good for our bank balance when the Boar’s Blades won, because the better they did, the more they would drink. The team was named after our pub, which was called The Wild Boar, which was itself named after the huge white boar carved into a hill just outside Chalkham, which, as everyone knows, is where we lived.
So, no darts on my birthday, but the pool table was a great hit, despite everyone initially pretending they had no interest in playing. By the time Dad had wiped clean the blackboard and written down our names, our excitement, fuelled by the limitless supply of fizzy drinks and crisps in five different flavours, had reached fever pitch. Dad rode the wave of our enthusiasm, holding a rolled-up magazine against his chin like a microphone and commentating as if we were at the Embassy world snooker championships.
‘And as we watch newcomer to the game Olivia Taylor lining up on the stripes,’ he half-whispered, rasping his voice as if he had a fifty-a-day habit, ‘all her opponent can do is hope she misses… But Olivia strikes it well…’
Olivia – Livy – who by then had already been my best friend for eight years, really did not strike it well – she was far more interested in making sure that her hair fell the right way, so it would look just as good to everyone standing behind her as it did to those standing in front – but that was my dad all over, always the peacemaker, the pacifier. My wonderful father. The consummate pub landlord.
Once the tournament was finished – I have absolutely no memory of who won – we again congregated in front of the jukebox until my mother made an appearance, carrying a large chocolate-caramel cake that Gran had spent all of the previous day making. My face burned with pleasure and embarrassment as everyone sang happy birthday. Afterwards, we ate slabs of cake, then everyone was given a bag of their favourite crisps to take home, the pub door was unlocked, punters started arriving and my party was over.
If I look over the top of the sofa from where I’m sitting at the table I’ve commandeered as my writing desk, through the window of the flat, and wait for a gap in the passing traffic, I can see the building on the opposite side of the street. Although it’s an old pub in the middle of London and completely different to The Wild Boar, the sight of the sign hanging outside takes me back to my childhood: the beer wheezing out of the pumps and into the glasses with a splurt, the ever-present cigarette smoke (my nickname at school was Ashtray), Dad’s terrible music, Mum ringing the bell for last orders and calling time.
It is tempting to write about my life before I turned thirteen, but this is a book about my mother, the choices she made and the consequences of those choices, so I have decided to begin with the day of my thirteenth birthday because, as far as I am concerned, that’s when everything changed. Before then, my mother had just been Mum; it had simply never crossed my mind that one day Mum would become somebody else.
At first, I thought my mother had planned the whole tent-by-the-stream thing as a sort of birthday treat, that we would camp out together under the stars, which would have been entirely in character for her. When people ask me what she was like before she left, before her silence, before the Community, they almost always begin by asking what she was like as a mother. ‘Tell me about her ,’ they say and I know they are expecting me to reply, ‘Well, it was all there to see in my first thirteen years, if only I’d known what I was looking for,’ or, ‘Looking back now, it’s obvious what she was planning.’ But that’s bullshit. I mean, she was my mother and it’s not like I had another one to compare her to. Honestly, the only thing I can really say about Mum’s parenting style was that occasionally it was a bit wearing trying to anticipate which mother would make an appearance on any given day.
For example, sometimes on weekends she would come into my room, snuggle under my duvet and gossip about my friends. Other times, she’d be all bossy and nitpicking, demanding to see my homework, going through it line by line, questioning and criticising, although the rest of the time she displayed little interest in my education. Occasionally, confessional mother would appear, and she would tell me things I didn’t want to know, like the time, when I was about ten, when she decided to confide in me in detail, and I mean detail, about how, when and where she lost her virginity.
The incarnation I most disliked was counsellor-mother. Mum would sit herself down opposite me and demand that I tell her my worries. Back then, my anxieties usually revolved around my appearance, or which boys hadn’t talked to me, or which boys talked to me, and what they’d said. I didn’t want to tell Mum those things, though, because when she did finally force me to confess them, she would laugh at me and say, ‘Lucky you, Emilia, if...
