THE WORD MOUNTAIN

© Martha Swift 2004

29 March 2004

I've dreamed of today for years. What was meant to be my first ever day of sitting back and letting life throw its delights at me has brought me within an hour of waking to screech through my front door at a complete stranger.

Even though I went to bed last night knowing I'd wake to a new and different world, I stirred this morning at precisely my usual time: quarter to seven, not because my alarm clock went off - I gave mine to Niece years ago - but because I always know what the time is. Someone once suggested I must have swallowed a clock, like the crocodile in Peter Pan. (I once wrote something about crocs and clocks in one of my short stories.)

I can tell it's fine today without looking. Grim weather sounds moist, sticky on the road, with voices out of tune. Snow muffles everything. But sunny days advertise themselves with a flourish even before it's light with birdsong you can hear from miles away, and a feeling of crispness that's peculiar to Britain.

For a few moments I lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling, something I've not done since I was a child. Shall I stay in bed?

No point. I can do nothing just as effectively upright as lying down.

So I got up, not a decision, more a fact. I wandered about upstairs, not hurrying, nothing in mind, a meander through familiar places, pausing to notice things I'd never bothered to stop and examine before.

Like the shaft of light that comes through the Venetian blind on the balcony window, slicing through a hole where a chord fastens a slat to the chain, angling down to an ellipse on gold on the carpet. There must have been a million motes drifting in its beam. We go around breathing in things like this all the time, even slivers of skin and hair like the ones that coat the arches of the London Underground, black with age and dying DNA. It made me think of how often I'd considered getting out of London for good. I dismissed the thought. Today's the day I start making no decisions. I'll let them make themselves, as my grandmother used to say.

I pushed my finger into the beam of sunlight. If they were like the tadpoles in my pond they'd flee. They didn't, but just swum around like potato peelings in a washing-up bowl when you stir the water. The light was warm. I never dreamed I'd find myself doing something so trivial. I hadn't planned it, it just happened.

Everyone dreams of having nothing to do with no time constraints. There's a myth life used to be that, some kind of idyll of idleness. The Eden story, fruit there for the plucking. Sunset was bedtime, sunrise time to get up and busy. It's rubbish of course: everyone had to struggle to survive unless they were powerful tribal chiefs with others to do the work and the hunting. As for keeping time, human beings have worked at counting the hours, days, weeks, months and years ever since they worked out they could.

I was reading my grandmother's diary last week while I was packing her things away to put in the bank (just in case Niece wants it when she has grandchildren herself.) Gran's parents had no clocks, just one windup between them. It was broken, and there was no money to get it mended. Great-grandpa once took it apart to fix it, but when he put it back together left several bits out on a kitchen tray. One by one the little wheels and springs and screws disappeared, and no-one ever dared mention the word clock again. But the tray was still around in their house when I was little, stowed in the back shed with a single gearwheel in its centre. Don't meddle.

If you've got eleven children waking at the right time is quite an art. Daylight to my grandmother's family was irrelevant. Their cockerel was too early, and the babies at sixes and sevens over their first feed of the day. So Grandma's parents would rely on hearing their neighbours stirring, and the first train coming up the line from the harbour. Her mother would get up to put on breakfast for her husband then dress in the kitchen by the range. He made a point of watching her struggling to tighten her corsets as he devoured his fried egg and mash. (One good reason for never marrying is having to be watched doing intimate things like that.) The younger children were called when the woman next door went down the path clattering her milk cans. Everyone else put theirs on the platform by the gate before bed. Not her. You never know, the spiders might get in and there's all kinds of germs from the night soil. It was years before I understood how Gran's lavatory down the garden used to get cleaned out.

The difference for me this morning is that it didn't matter about waking up, or the time, or what anyone else was doing. I'd planned this for nearly five years.

Nothing in the pipeline, everything stacked away, books that bore me sent to Oxfam, bills paid, my address book slimmed to the bare essentials so that I wouldn't be tempted to contact anyone, photo albums sorted, most gone to the tip, phone disconnected. Old clothes gone, one change (more for undies) of each type in the drawers upstairs. And on the top shelf of the fridge, bundled together with a green rubber band inside a used envelope, my birth certificate, passport, pension prediction, one cheque book and a debit card.

Clean slate. Nice feeling. Unbelievable. My dream begins.

I went downstairs in bare feet and dressing gown, and gloated over the emptiness. One dining chair. One table. One recliner. No TV, no computer. I even nearly had the carpets taken out and the curtains down, but if I have to sell up (I'll let that decision make itself) the house will be easier to get rid of with them in place. Besides, I'm not sure what is under the carpet. I always pay other people to see to things like that.

My recliner (I believe in comfort) is by the French window at the back. I took coffee and drew my dressing gown round me. I leaned back. Nice. No rushing out to work.

Outside, a female blackbird was treating herself to a dew bath inside a border geranium. I've never seen anything like it. She knew I was watching, but shivered her wings and dipped up and down in a riot of enjoyment.

It reminded me I hadn't even combed my hair. I felt my cheeks. Rough, dry. I hadn't showered yet. And today I wouldn't be putting on makeup. I smiled at the blackbird and felt reckless and a bit anti-social.

There was a sound outside the front door. It puzzled me. It happened again. I turned my head to hear better and ran through a checklist in my mind.

I haven't had a paper delivered to the house for years because I used to get The Times free at work, on my desk each morning. And I've always fetched my own weekend papers until this week when I cancelled them. My milk is never delivered. And I've filled in the forms to have mail forwarded to my brother. He's got a cheque book to pay my bills and compensate himself for his trouble. I've told him to throw everything else away.

I have no cat. I have no friends among my neighbours. Correction, I have no friends at all because I've worked at ditching them. It's taken me five years.

There shouldn't be anyone coming to my door. No Gaynor, sliding inside and lighting up a cigarette then scuttling to the back doorstep to taunt me. No Brian, trying to grab me and persuade me to go to a dinner party or the theatre, Glyndebourne, the Albert Hall, a few days at the Edinburgh Festival. Covent Garden on Saturday. I can't imagine why he thinks I'd find any of those more attractive than a good book.

Then a small knock. Like a child. A gap of two or three seconds, then another. Someone trying to push open the letter box. I've jammed it shut with a block of wood and screwed it firmly in place with a crossbar.

I'm tempted to peer past the curtain beside the door but stay where I am, not wanting to give myself away. The knock again. Then a thump as though someone has made a fist and turned it on one side so as not to hurt. A woman. A woman's voice. Open, please.

It occurs to me it could be the police. Only the police wouldn't have fiddled around. I'd have heard their radio, there'd be two, an authoritative knock I know. I once heard it here in this very house when my mother and sister were missing.

It's a young woman. She creeps backwards down the steps to the pavement with an air of apology. She looks scruffy, maybe poor and cold. Badly cut beige mac over jeans frayed round the ankles. Grimy trainers. Hair round her shoulders, mousy, a bit greasy, hands stuffed in pockets. A slash of pink lipstick. In her mid-thirties, I guess.

She frowns, then glances either side, up and down the street, as though not wanting to be seen or heard. 'Can I come in?' I shake my head. She screws up her face. 'I do have to talk to you.' Standard English, no regional accent. Educated, probably. The emphasis on 'do'.

I don't move. People say I can freeze the earth over with my stare. 'No, sorry. What can I do for you?'

Her eyes smile. 'I think I am your daughter.'

My first reaction is to say, 'What?' and laugh. 'Don't be silly.'

I find myself back indoors, the door slammed, my back to it, right hand on the knob to stop the woman from forcing her way in. I hear myself shouting, 'Go away, please.' I see the blackbird rise to land on the window ledge, looking for toast.

The woman has come back up the steps. She's jammed her mouth against the crack between the door and the frame. 'Veronica, I really do have to talk to you.'

Veronica? She knows my real name?This is insane. I hear myself laughing. I open the door.

She balances on the first step, scraping her hair from the sides of her face. Her eyes are full of tears yet not a single drop spills down.

I go to shut the door. 'Look, it's impossible, please do go away.'

She flings herself towards me with such force that she falls between the door and the frame. I hurt her. She yelps. I let her in.

She is not my daughter and she's obviously unhinged. Without asking me, she sits on my dining chair. I don't want her to stay so I don't offer her coffee. I bring her the last from the bottle of water in the door of the fridge.

She clasps the tumbler as though her life depends on it, and drinks with her head down. I stand over her. She hands back the glass half full then stuffs her hands back in her coat pockets. I go and open the door. 'Now it's time to leave, please.'

She shakes her head. 'I've got to talk to you.'

'Please go.'

She stands up, as wretched a figure as I can imagine. She tries to say something but it comes out in a stutter, so she shakes her head. She raises her face to me and her eyes are brimming over. She's almost as tall as I am with a fine bone structure and eyes that slant slightly down at the corners. They're a clear soft blue but the whites are red with tears.

When she looks down I see a lashes in a crescent, like on a beach. In a different situation I'd call her pretty. She looks as if no-one has ever told her what the world is about.

I try coaxing. 'Come on now. You're upset. Please do go home.'

She turns her head away so I can't look at her, she sighs, wipes the back of her hand across her eyes then begins to sob. She's choking into her palms.

I leave my post by the door and ease her her towards it with one hand between her shoulder blades and the other on her shoulder. There's not a scrap of anything over her skeleton. I toy with giving her money but know she'd come back for more. She resists the pressure very slightly.

'Now you go home,' I say. 'I am not your mother. Get help. See the doctor. A social worker. But leave me alone.'

She allows me to steer her outside. A number 11 bus grinds by. There's a boy wobbling towards her on a bicycle with stabilisers. She takes the steps to the pavement in one bound, then speeds off, racing the boy. I think he might be hers until I hear a woman call after him. 'Jules.' I can't see my visitor with a child called Jules.

As I shut and lock the door, it comes to me that if she's been casing my house for a robbery, it will be the smallest haul ever. Yet she hadn't seemed to see her surroundings. She was hunting for a lost mother.

The feet come pounding back. She's banging on the door, 'How do you know I'm not your daughter?'

This makes me feel angry. I get behind the door. 'Because, if you must know, I am a virgin.'

There's a silence. 'What? That makes me Jesus Christ.'

Now I am truly angry. I go upstairs as fast as I can and take my time over a shower with the knob turned to red. I wash my hair without shampoo and I wonder why I've never done it before. Today I'll wear no makeup. None of that ever again.

I get into my new jeans and trainers. I've never had them out of the bag before, and it's a strange feeling not putting on stockings or high heels on a Monday morning. Just a big hand-knitted sweater with a peacock pattern. Expensive but fun. (They said to wash the jeans before wearing them, and I can see why. They feel rough against my legs although the fabric is smooth under my fingers. So it should be:they cost well over two hundred pounds.) The trainers are roomy. I flex my feet and stand on my toes, and remind myself this how I use to abuse my body, wearing 4-inch court shoes for work. I should really be able to run in these.

I tug at my hair and decide to have it shorn. No, sod it: I'll wait until someone offers to cut it for me. I laugh to myself. The sun has moved round already. Before I know it I've pulled back the curtains. She hasn't come back.

The traffic was solid outside the house when I left for a wander. It's still gridlocked outside the café where I'm sitting writing this. There are eight machines, all used bar two. I've heard of these places but I've never been in one before. I've not needed to: I had a choice of two computers at work, a Mac and a Dell, plus my laptop at home. It's packed by the door to go to Niece.

I didn't decide to do this thing, sit and write about my weird visitor, my strange start to retirement. (I like typing that word. It feels more like a commitment to being a hermit than deceleration to the grave.) The café leaped out and grabbed me. I tripped over a board they'd parked outside on the pavement, so went inside and complained. Jonafon, lisping, offered me all day 'fwee' if I didn't do anyfink about it, meaning report him to the council for illegal advertising.

'Deal,' I said, settling down at the VDU furthest from the door. Jonafon brought me a mountainous cappuccino, black on top with chocolate.

Someone once said to commit to paper anything that bothers or puzzles you. Put it all 'out there'. The process has made me wonder if I dreamed it all this morning. And I won't be printing it out. It's going to stay out there, really out there.

I feel as if I've just walked into Aladdin's Cave. I do what I like on this piece of kit, any time, any day. And I write what I like, within reason. There are, Jonathan told me, rules about what people can get up to in his Internet café. (Note, no capital 'I', no acute 'e'. I'm learning.)

It's matey in here. There are six of us who for reasons best known to ourselves don't use a computer at home. Or don't want to have to book a slot at the library and feel the next person breathing down your neck. I've heard about that. This is more my style. Unlimited, pay as you go.

We're sitting very close together. The woman beside me must weigh 25 stone. I'm terrified she's going to keel over and squash me, or give me a deep vein thrombosis by leaning on me all day. But she told Jonathan she only wants to pay for an hour. [Passage deleted here 30th April 2004. Gaynor accused me of being Fatist.] The bloke on the other side of her sniffs as if his nose is a dripping tap. He smells of coal tar and looks like an out-of-work jockey. He hardly touches the keyboard. Deep thinker, still waters.

I care not to wonder how they'd sum me up. Probably somebody's mutton dressed as lamb. A granny sorting out a date in a chat room.

The anonymity is great. Perhaps we're all nursing secrets and want to prowl the city's cybercafes, a different one every day. At work I always knew someone was snooping on my mail. At home, well, I didn't bother. Who does if you can do all your mail at work?

Here, there's no-one trying to see what you're writing, and no one is going to tell me I've got it wrong or I can't do it this way. That I'll upset a customer, or jeopardise an account, or enrage the Junior Minister responsible for funding our next project, or I'll get into trouble for using company time. No more headaches on that front.

The delectable Jonathon, green eyes, fluffy beard, long T-shirt almost to his knees with a dragon design, is going to show me how to push a key, and away my blog will go. I didn't even know such things existed, but when he saw me writing page after page, he asked me if I was a blogger. My education has just put on seven league boots.

So why am I doing this? I want people to know what it's like to have a stranger show up at your house one sunny morning and try wreck the rest of your life with a masterstroke like this: I am your daughter.

And how does she know my real name any more than you do?

31 March 2004

The reason it's been two days since I wrote is that nothing extraordinary has happened except two sequels to the visit on Monday morning.

I went straight home after sending my blog away. On the front door was a sheet of A4 paper with a photograph in the middle. The paper was fastened in place with Sellotape all round. The photo was glued on with little dobs. It was in faded colour and of a baby, sitting up, staring at the camera. I didn't let myself look any more.

She had decorated round the edges of the photo with roses done in felt tip. There was a thin line drawn as a border outside this that looked suspiciously like computer ink. I licked my forefinger. It didn't smear. Laser. I felt my stomach tighten. This woman is no dumb idiot.

When I eased the sheet away from the door, the Sellotape stripped away several patches of paint. I tore the photo in four, folding the image inside so that I couldn't see it. I walked to the corner shop and let it fall in the bin.

Brian pulls up. It's not my way to be rude to old friends, so I smile, wave and walk on. He cruises behind me. "Aren't you going to say hallo? Like my new car? Want a spin in it?"

He makes me laugh. "You never miss a trick, do you Brian? I'm just off shopping. Got to paint my front door."

"Again? At the shops? Hey, you look terrific. I like the new you." He won't go. He parks illegally and insists on bustling with me, looming like a brown bear, talking about things I don't remember. I don't tell him about the woman because I prefer not to think about her. But I quite like him being there and wonder how he's never felt too hurt to give up on me.

"I have a door to paint. I have paint to buy."

He turned back.

Gaynor, looking raddled, arrives before I finished painting and hangs around smoking.

She's pleading with me to go and have a Caesar at the new salad bar in the shopping centre, or a swim before her badminton match. I don't feel like talking, let alone start my retirement tagging along with Gaynor. "Sorry. And when are you going to give up that filthy habit?"

"Never." She grins. Her teeth are stained. "I can take a hint." She leaves saying over her shoulder, "Back tomorrow, sober sides."

I go inside and sit at the French window watching the birds. I fall asleep. I sleep most of the afternoon, then half of the evening. I go to bed at my normal time. I wake at 2 and watch the traffic from the downstairs window. The moon creeps across the sky and I feel about 90 years old. I put on my jacket and went to the corner shop to see if the bin has been emptied. It has. There was a youth in short sleeves and jeans, scuffs the kerb on the corner and smokes. You can see he's freezing. Tyres screech close by. The youth watches me go.

There is a box wrapped in shiny paper on the top step, about the size of a square football. The label says, "Veronica/Lucy." I take it to the corner bin and drop it inside, feeling dirty. And angry again. The youth is still there. I hear him make for the bin as I turned the corner and wonder why he can't go home.

At home I hack off my hair in the kitchen. It looks terrible.

Yesterday I didn't wait for Gaynor. I found a local hairdresser with a woman in the back room with no appointments.

She reminds me of Mrs Baker in Happy Families. Tutting and grumbling she takes an hour to reduce my hair to a cap of silver. "Your roots need doing." I start to leave all the same once she's patted it into shape. "Blow dry?" she says as I hoist myself up. I shake my head. She tuts and goes to the desk to take my money and fetches my jacket. I don't let her put it on. I don't think she deserves to feel she's been done down.

I take a walk in the park afterwards and pick a daffodil. No one sees me. I don't think about it, but it seems absolutely the right thing to do when there are thousands of them in a long brilliant ribbon beside the path. When I sit on the bench under the cherry tree a woman with a small girl in a buggy comes and settles beside me. I wonder if she waited before deciding to join me. If she'd speak I'd be pleased, but I'm not taking the initiative. This is a perfect test. Let life force me, as I always planned. She's here. She's not forcing me.

But she does turn and smile when her little girl waves at me. Once, I found a very interesting piece in a newspaper about strategies for life. A long study in some university. The only thing that stuck in my mind was the strategy that came out tops. More happy, adjusted, successful people ran their lives on the 'tit for tat' principle. What this means is that you basically do unto others as they do to you. The woman smiles, I smile back. So I smile. Her face breaks into a huge grin. I've made her day. The kid waves, so I wave back. She goes all coy. We all grin at each other.

The mother speaks. "Lovely day, isn't it?"

"Super, super," I say. The wind ruffles the child's hair where it sticks out of her hat. If she'd been my child, I'd lean over and tuck it in. Heaven knows why. Just a tidy and motherly thing to do. It makes me think of the woman and her box and photo, and I wish I'd not let my mind run along that track.

My body stands up. "Bye," I say. "See you soon."

I think about coming back to drink more of Jonathan's coffee. Paying this time, of course.

That's all.

Jonathan greeted me. "Hi, Lucy. Want cappuccino?"

I've played Solitaire for the last two hours since I finished today's diary, which I suppose this is. There's been no-one in here but me.

Doing this is making me wonder about myself - and about other people. I know someone who storms through the kind of life anyone might hold up as an example. She plays Solitaire before bed every night. I have a friend with a Maths degree from MIT who spends hours on her laptop every day playing a children's game called Doubles, trying to cut her time down to below 30 seconds.

Wandering and loitering in the neighbourhood has been an interesting experience. As I think I said two days ago, I notice things I'd never give attention to in the normal way. Perhaps I'll make some mental notes and write some of them down in my next blog. Someone might be interested. The sort of people who sit around playing Solitaire and growing old?

Or should I write about how I'm still a virgin? Is that the kind of thing people 'out there' are interested in? Should I stay a virgin, or let it happen. Would it hurt? And who'd want to do it. I'm past that, well past it.

Or should I stick with my original idea and not plan to do anything? Just let things happen.

It's time to go.

5 April 2004

I've just got myself a website. It seems daft to be sitting in relative discomfort in a draught (on a chair that's stained by other people's bums) when I can be at home with my laptop (no longer going to my niece). That means, of course, reconnecting the phone so that I can get online. BT said it would happen within the week. Upstairs point, ex-directory. I'm going to work in the old back bedroom. From there I can watch other people through their own back windows.

The other thing of course is that I've had no more unwelcome visits, packages, or anything untoward. This morning is the first time I go out without checking up and down the street through the upstairs windows. Maybe she's got the message.

Brian took me out to dinner last night and brushed his moustache over my top lip when he showed me to the door. I wouldn't let him in. He looked so forlorn, so I jollied him up by asking what his wife would say if he was even later than this. He grinned. "She doesn't even notice," he said. "She's fast asleep from nine on, reads, drifts off. She's bored out of her frigging mind."

His moustache looks bristly, but it's very soft. It tickles and makes me laugh, but that seems to make him even more amorous. I honestly can't imagine taking my clothes off and getting into bed with him. With his clothes on maybe, as long as he keeps them on. Why do people do it? I've never understood it. My grandmother used to say it was the funniest thing to do, a man putting his thing inside a woman. She used to shriek about it, a terrible old lady cackle. When I asked her why she let Grandpa do it she shrugged, pulled a face, said if she didn't she'd be in hot water, and maybe he'd cut her money. Meaning he'd give her a smaller share from his wage packet. It makes me shudder to think of it.

There's been a sea change for me. My intellect is quite up to working out that there is a central dilemma in my position. If I'm trying to avoid decisions then I will die. I decide to eat. I decide to step here, think this, look at that. Today, for example, I've made probably over two hundred decisions without either wanting to or thinking about it. Including doing this.

There was something I saw today on the Internet at Jonathan's place (his coffees are getting smaller by the day) that makes me think I can make some decisions that will feel very comfortable. I like writing. I've always written. I come from a family of scribblers, hoarders, people who write to everyone in the family. One of my second cousins even has a family Bible where at the end of each chapter the scribblers have been writing in the family news, going back two hundred years. They're at it even these days, postcards, little thank you letters, annual Xmas bulletins photocopied and flooded into every family postbox worldwide. You can see why I'm not keen to get tangled up in that kind of exercise.

All my short stories, written in my lunch hour, at times of boredom or exasperation, I took to the recycling centre. As they were part of my past, which I've unshackled myself from, it felt good. I even stood and brushed my hands off, thinking, That's that.

I have to admit I'm loving this. Not writing for a few days felt like a tooth missing, but I had to go to Jersey for a funeral (another decision) and that hacked a few days out of the week. It brought my mind into focus, though.

All the way on the ferry I am prowling round looking for the woman. There are only a few places she can hide if I'm quick and clever, and those are the staff areas. Being a conforming sort, I don't go inside them. But I did watch like a hawk while I was boarding and I'm checking every car that's ahead of me while people are fussing around prior to disembarkation. When I'm off, I pull up on the exit road to watch. Cars, pedestrians, contractors. No sign of her. That's how it's got me. Paranoid.

But to return to what I saw on the Internet, there's a full-time one-year course for the MA in Creative Writing at our local University. It's only six miles away. I rang for the brochure. They're interviewing now for next September. It strikes me I'll have to give up writing in clichés, although I don't see why. It's been a welcome change after the cleaned-up text of report writing to relax into putting down on paper the way my mind works, and the way I'd talk to a close friend.

Now was that life thrusting itself at me or was that a decision? When life dishes things to me, I can't abdicate entirely. Not to react is a decision, after all. The linkage feels comfortable. Yet it's going to be quite a struggle, this one. To do or not to do? I'm wondering how on earth I explain my decision to telephone the faculty and ask for their brochure. They'll all say, Told you so.

Or do I start leading a secret life full of covert decisions? Perhaps I'll stop thinking about it and listen to my body.

6 April 2004

It would be easy to have a rant about the English weather. I woke this morning with the sun pouring in (this is beginning to sound like a 'Lucy' theme) and I leaped out of bed to look at the sky. Clear blue. Yippee! How glorious not to have to zoom off for the train before eight. The day was my oyster. Gardening.

I have a little patch at the back which I call garden where the birds come to feed.

I tiptoe to the pond so as not to alarm the goldfish, all of whom have names, who are shy chaps. Hardly any tadpoles. I strain to see. Maybe half a dozen where there were dozens.

While I'm lounging with coffee on my recliner, I see why. A blackbird, probably the mate of the female taking a dew bath the other morning, is up to his ankles in the shallow water at the side of the pond. This is the spot where I put stones I take (illegally) from the beach at Eastbourne, tucking them into my pockets to bring home. They make a huddle, just covered by water, where beasts, including the tadpoles, cluster to feed.

The blackbird is dipping and pecking, and definitely not drinking. This is a sleek snatch, gulp, shake, then peck again. When he's taken water he tilts his head up to swallow.

The rotten thing has eaten the lot. It changes my attitude to the dawn chorus. We need our frogs. I need my frogs. I like to see them up in the vegetable patch watching over my purple sprouting broccoli when I can't be around. It's the only vegetable I know how to grow, and I'm mighty proud of it. It's fabulous steamed and served with butter, quite as good as asparagus or samphire.

Today, I'm going to get my stories back from Niece. The Faculty of Literary Studies wants to see completed samples of my writing. My niece says she kept them because she hasn't had time to read them. She puts it rather well, that she is storing it all up for her own retirement. What she really means is she glanced at them, they're rubbish, but she's so terrified of me she dare not throw them out. Just as well, as it happens, but I won't bother her with them again.

What a pity these fancy folk at universities who set themselves up as authorities can't take you on trust, judge your imaginative flair and literacy by your covering letter. Or even take a view based on the way your mind works at interview.

After all, anything you submit for a course like this might have been written by someone else. Indeed, you could get someone to write every single piece of work you hand in on a course like that. The brochure says The degree is awarded on the basis of assessments of work submitted through the year for workshops and for Projects A, B and C. Who do they think they're kidding?

The thought came to me that if these people were really any good at writing (they list their works in the brochure) they'd be living in central London rather than a downbeat second-rate jumped up Victorian suburb, and taking tea daily with publishers and editors. Or they'd be in Hollywood writing scripts for movies. One way or another in the headlines all the time like Fay Weldon or Salman Rushdie.

I've never heard of any of this bunch of PhDs from nowhere. One of them trumpeted her role as 'biographer' and 'broadcaster'. I suppose I could say the same. I've given more radio interviews over the years and written more biographical notes for various committees than she will have had bowls of muesli for breakfast. She doesn't lead a healthy life to judge by the photo, and juggles part-time work with raising her family. So what?

I'm not exactly in the right frame of mind for this caper, but it's all good fun. And I think I can write. I used to win competitions at school.

My body is urging itself to exit the house and head for Milton Keynes to Niece's place. Why is it sometimes, without thinking, I feel I must stand up, or sit down, or even lie down, or jump and down. Run even. This morning I caught myself running. Strange feeling. No reason for it. My body said, Run, so it did.

It must have been like this once all the time when I was a kid.

7 April 2004

A quick dash to Jonathan's place, as much as anything to say cheerio. My reconnected phone line is in, but my laptop is playing up. I'm getting Brian to come and sort it out for me this evening. I've got a new phone number. I'll kill anybody who tries to find it out. Strictly for this bird.

My niece was a bit odd yesterday afternoon. She was lurking behind the door, I swear. She offered me a cup of tea, but I could see she couldn't wait for me to be gone. Strange. I've never seen her be so inhospitable. Usually she's full of woes and sits me down, and goes on and on and on about them, until I start creeping out of the room. She's unhappily married, and she's got a teenage loutess who has ganged up on her with her father. More on that amusing topic later. It makes me feel quite smug, although very sorry for her. I've never had to confront that.

Wrong. I had a loutess banging on my door, claiming she was my daughter. No sign of her since though.

With my folder of stories in hand, I went through the MA brochure again. It really is the most terrible hype. Pages of rot about their wonderful students' accomplishments, all the novels that have been published since the MA. I bet they'd have been published anyway. How can you ever be certain the course did the magic for them? Universities ought to be banned from putting that kind of claptrap in the brochure. It's a form of fraudulent advertising, because let's face it, they make money out of bums on seats. Anyway, I've never heard of any of these young hopefuls (they're all under 45). Probably the only publicity they will ever get is in that brochure.

Naturally, this makes me wonder why I'm thinking of doing this. For the company? More likely hoping I'll meet someone famous and admirable that I'll fall for (I have those kind of tastes) who will fall in love with me right back (it's never happened yet). Take my virginity at last, romantic candle-lit bar-snacks in the pub, that kind of thing. Literary creativity flowing with the bodily juices. Dream on Lucy.

I'll think about why it appeals to me and write about it.

Gaynor struck yesterday evening. She is a very clever woman. I met her at the Department of Trade. No-one looking at her now would think she used to be a high-flying Assistant Secretary. She was eased out when they thought she might be the source of leaks to the Press. She didn't fight it, and retired on a pretty fat pension.

She took me dancing.

She's done up to the nines, long ear-rings - diamonds with a Pacific drop pearl on each. High heels with a strap, made of twinkly fabric. Her make-up is even more garish than usual.

I'm going because this is life shoving itself at me. Besides, I am curious to know what goes on in places like that. I took ballroom lessons for four years between twelve and sixteen. We all did. Good fun. Waltz, quickstep, tango, foxtrot. Not much Latin.

She waits for me while I look for something suitable. Nothing. She drives me furiously to Tescos, the only place open at this time of the evening that sells clothes and shoes. She sorts out shoes, a skirt and a top. She makes me try them on, right there in the shop. It definitely does something for me, I don't know what. She picks up a bottle of New Zealand white, the cheapest on the bottom shelf. We leave the place giggling.

It's a terrific evening. Salsa. Absolutely nothing like anything I've done before, but it makes us both laugh.

There isn't much to it, a couple of dozen variations, jigging swivels and switches, twists and turns. But it's quite sexy, I suppose.

What is most interesting is the mix of people there. Mostly in their forties, with a few couples who look around my age, then a group of teenage girls. The forties are all single and for reasons that escape me completely they are all dressed in black, top to toe. Some of the women have obviously come straight from work, black jackets and trousers or skirts. The blokes are plainly hunting.

If we go again, and I suspect Gaynor won't give me any choice, I'll have a closer look. One, who wears a moustache that looks remarkably like Brian's, is an absolute charmer, well-spoken and bright. He holds court in a most engaging fashion. Gaynor tries to get me to ask him back to her place with us both. She wants him, she says, for her toy-boy.

My reaction causes her to berate me again. Sober-sides, fuddy-duddy, dull, brain-dead. But she is rather pickled.

Fat lady's here gobbling some kind of crispy thing from a shiny packet.

It's strange to think I won't be in here again, at least not to blog. I'll probably drop by to have a coffee, one I pay for, heaped in a big hump with cream and chocolate. It will be interesting to study the inmates. I can't think of any other word for them.

I've been tempted while I'm here to rewrite one of my stories but I wouldn't be able to take it home with me. Correction. I see there's a floppy drive on the machine. Jonathan would sell me a disk.

It is a very salutary experience to re-read work done years ago. Some, I like. They romp along nicely, full of colour and spirit, dreadful sentences here and there that I'd take a knife to. It would be interesting, now I think of it, to sit and read, scissors in hand, and hack out the bits that are bad or not necessary.

Others are so awful I find myself squirming. Over-written, loaded with adverbs and adjectives so your eye stops to think about why that word was chosen rather than another. Not a cliché in sight, which makes it look rather staid.

I've noticed how that international standard of good written English, The Times, allows reporters and columnists to write much as they might talk. Maybe this is the impact of technology - copy phoned in from all over the globe rather than telegraphed or telexed. Maybe this is forcing the kind of cultural shift that changes language. Maybe I'll be allowed at this tin pot university to write in clichés.

We'll see. Farewell hot seat, awful keyboard, sticky mouse, dirty screen, espresso machine, Jonathan.

We'll meet again. I'm shutting everything down now.

8 April 2004

Maundy Thursday. I wonder where the Queen is doing her stuff today. Wretched newspaper headlines. Lurid photographs, ochre, sand and blood colours, Iraq. Hardly my greatest preoccupation though, I am ashamed to say. It was obvious it would happen and I'm powerless to do anything about it myself. My grandfather, before he died, said if he was Prime Minister he'd nuke France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, China, Australia, America and Madagascar. I didn't bother to ask him why, but I could write to Tony Blair and suggest he puts that in his next Queen's Speech and that my Grandpa said so. Grandpa even looked like Alf Garnett.

As for my own news, the good news is my laptop is fixed (more later on that topic), and I am up again, blogging.

I'm not sure about the bad. Bad news doesn't feel like news. So how does one define 'news'? Dictionary.com says this: pl.n.(used with a sing. verb) a. Information about recent events or happenings, especially as reported by newspapers, periodicals, radio, or television.

b. A presentation of such information, as in a newspaper or on a newscast. 2.New information of any kind: The requirement was news to him. 3.Newsworthy material: "a public figure on a scale unimaginable in America; whatever he did was news" (James Atlas).

I get the feeling that good news is good for everyone: the teller, the listener, and maybe those in the thick of the original event. Maybe the 'good' evaluation is to do with the majority.

Bad news wouldn't apply to what happened to me next after I'd said goodbye to Jonathan and his inmates at his cybercafe. It was bad for me, good for her, so no majority to vote it bad or good.

I made for the cybercafe door, feeling quite cheerful, looking forward to this, ie my laptop at home, getting up on to the web and blogging away.

The doorway is blocked. She is here, in my way. Not in the beige mack today, but an orange fleece and black trousers (making me think she'll turn up at Salsa next in the black top that's almost certain to be under the fleece.)

I plough straight on. I have to act in every way as if I haven't seen her, and that includes maybe colliding with her. Turning sideways, she takes one step back. She's done this before. It has a touch of deference about it, as though I am her mother. Which she claims I am, of course.

I am soon a couple of meters away, my back to her, heading for home. She's calling out. I get the feeling she's laughing at me. "Hey, Mama Mia, hey Lucy. Do you like the photo? That one I stuck on your door?"

My trainers, built for running, come into their own. I feel as if I've got seven-league boots on. It occurs to me that if I ever had a daughter I sure wouldn't want her behaving like this in public. She must be angry, really angry.

It is impossible to say how that nasty little episode makes me feel. I couldn't sleep last night.

Brian cheers me up. I tell him something singularly unpleasant happened which is of no consequence to anyone, a brief encounter with a passer-by, all of which is true.

"Oh, all right," which is his stock response.

He fusses around, fetches a bag of computer wires and plugs from the back of his car (parked illegally), and boots up the laptop, pokes around with the keys, the connections, boots it up again, brings up a black screen. "That's the DOS prompt," he says, pointing to C:>. Types and fiddles again.

I go and make him a coffee. He refuses it, saying, "It keeps me awake and all I can think of is you, which won't do my marriage any good."

I ask him why he's here, then. "Because you asked me," he replies. He turns round and beams. "Done." It's booting up. It's fine. He plugs in the modem, checks it dials up okay, then turns round again. "What's my reward?"

"My survival."

We go out for a drink. I don't let him into my house when he drops me back although he comes up the steps with me. Odd, but I don't feel at all mean about it.

He stays there on the top step for a while. I peer at him through the curtains. He's wrestling with whether he should knock and try his persuasion techniques, which don't work on me. It's a brilliant night. Saturn is due south, like a sulphur lamp. Even I can tell it's yellow. And off to the right is Venus, a little dazzler low in the west sky. It ought to be romantic out there, but I've forgotten what it feels like, and it's got to be the right bloke.

I love Brian in my way, but the arrangement we have is best left as it is. And he is married, and I don't believe in having it off with married men. My grandmother used to say, They're the worst. They're used to having sex just whenever they please.

Even if he wasn't married, he could only ever be a friend. My best friends have always been men. My mind works the same way. Maybe that's why I've never married. I'd rather have a man as a friend than in my bed. Grandma said they leave their pubic hairs all over the place, including on you, and that's the worst thing, almost. I wouldn't know, and I'm not rushing to find out.

My folder of short stories mocks me from the table upstairs. I've arranged my laptop alongside the window so the sun doesn't fall on the screen. The drop-leaf which I decided to hang on to (in case I ever needed firewood) comes in handy.

I've laid the whole lot out on the table. Forty-five short stories, not a single one published. I've never dared send them in. Besides, it has always been a problem for me admitting who I am. They are all written under a variety of pen-names. Someone once told me I ought to be ashamed of myself, hiding behind a pseudonym. Be proud. Stand up and be counted. I'm glad to say a great many very famous authors wrote under noms de plumes. In my case I had little choice. Publishing satirical short stories isn't exactly encouraged in the circles I was moving in. Quite frankly, it could have wrecked my career. I pull no punches when I get going.

I've decided to bung some of my stories, however bad, but ones that amuse me, on the web. I'll put a link into my blog so anyone who is feeling brave can copy and paste and look.

There's A Woman of This Kind. I once read it to Gaynor and she laughed all the way through. Maybe that doesn't say much about it, but I'll put it up anyway.

At a glance, they all need a lot of work doing on them first, but I'm game. In the meantime, as a priority, I have to choose two to send in with my application. I don't have much time left.

On second thoughts, I'm going to tag A Woman of This Kind on here. It won't be going in my folder for the Faculty. There must be something I can make of that dreadful term. It needs jazzing up.

A WOMAN OF THIS KIND

Drusilla changed her mind about Achilles less than half an hour earlier. It took only one sentence, tossed into their conversation as an observation.

At first it merely stung her and in her usual way Drusilla let it pass. In time she wouldn't even remember it, she knew, much less feel hurt. But this time it was different. His words went on running in her head. She was so absorbed thinking about them that she lost all sense of time, and suddenly realised she must make an effort to watch the overhead display, and listen for announcements, otherwise she'd miss her train if it came in on the other platform.

A woman of this kind. She couldn't get the expression out of her head. The trouble is, she asked herself, what kind of woman am I? I know what Gordon thinks. I know what I think. Achilles plainly thinks he knows, but he's not saying, not really. Just hinting, that I am a type of person, and as such certain things are bound to happen to me. If anything ever sounded defeatist, that does, as if there's no way of avoiding what fate lines up for me.

Her sense of injustice at being lumped together with other women rankled. She liked being different. She was very aware of it. When she was a child people used to tell her she was 'unusual', 'not like the others'. I like it this way.

It was why she so badly wanted children, the mingling of genes in a unique fusing, to make new one-off people.

Achilles this morning made her invisible, one of a set of clones.

His room already seemed a long way off, yet it only took five minutes to run down the hill and cross the bypass into the tunnel that led to the station. Up in his eyrie, where Achilles presided over the lancing of pain at sixty pounds an hour, the sun felt strong through the window. It fell on her eyelids when she shut her eyes to think.

Achilles settled in his seat this morning in his usual way, checking his watch and clearing his throat before turning to gaze out of the window.

Drusilla began with her usual opening: 'I don't know what I'm going to say this week.' He smiled back at her and adjusted his waistcoat round his melon gut. So she recited the events of the past six or seven days, gazing down at the pattern on the carpet, following the lines of the paisley design. That red. It's like blood. Blood stirred into cream.

She found herself thinking about a day in her early childhood when she saw her mother cut her finger undoing a parcel in the kitchen. She was standing over the mixer, beating butter and sugar for a sponge. The drops of blood hung, elongating, on her finger before dripping into the bowl and swirling with the butter and sugar. It didn't seem to occur to her to snatch her hand away. At this distance, Drusilla could see that she had been terrified, appalled by the sight of her own blood. Eventually she moved, switched off the machine and took her finger to the sink. Drusilla went to peer over the edge of the table. She felt nothing, merely noting the pattern, the colours, like now with Achilles' rug. She often saw and heard things that bothered other people, but felt nothing. She wondered whether Jean felt things or didn't feel things.

"I was thinking about Jean. And my childhood.

"Does Jean make you think about your childhood?"

"No. What is my childhood to do with that nasty woman? She's the problem with my life. Leaving silly notes on my computer screen. Back at 2, see you then. Bring me THE file at 10 promptly. See if you can get hold of a conference room."

"What does your husband make of that?"

"He's catty about it. He says Jean's obviously smarter and stronger than me, and I shouldn't let her do it."

Achilles smiled and turned away. "Is Gordon right?"

It all made her feel as if she wasn't sure what she thought any more. He laughed and said something about paranoia and not taking Freud too seriously. Then they laughed together.

She loved it when he was merry. His guffaw made her want to kiss his mouth. It was so neat and perfectly small. She did sometimes on her way to the door when he clasped her to his chest and she felt his beard against her closed eyes. Then he would tuck his finger under her chin and kiss her. His breath tasted of fresh wood. He made her feel safe. She would have given anything to stay but knew that his next patient sat outside watching the clock on the wall.

Then of course going home was horrible each time. Gordon would grill her and go on at her. You're a wimp. And you're bloody boring. It's not as if you work for Jean whatsername. I'm only paying for you to sort yourself out, not because I believe in therapy and that lot, but because I've got sick and tired of living with a dishcloth. She felt too guilty to complain.

The train arrived and waited, shuddering on the platform. There was a delay. Drusilla took her seat. The guard began to work his way through, checking tickets. He came to stand near her, so close his jacket brushed her shoulder. He smiled. He had two top teeth missing. His eyes were blue. He winked.

She smiled back thinking, I am put upon. I am manipulated. By everyone. Have been all my life. She had a sudden image of bursting through bonds, cracking open straps that held her tight. Ties binding her eyes and mouth and pinioning her arms. She had to tear the binding from her face. She could imagine not knowing where she was.

She could easily behave as badly as Gordon, coughing and burping and farting just wherever he liked. People can bugger off if they don't like it, he said And I don't like it at all, Drusilla thought, which is why I sew toys for charities in the little back room upstairs, and wait until he goes to the pub then come down for a sherry, and watch TV and ring Mum. But he hasn't been like that for ever, she reminded herself. Only after no babies came.

She wondered if Achilles burped and farted in public. Of course. Everyone does. As for behaving badly, his words that morning were sly. "And is Jean bullying you?" He dropped the words into the silence with whispered precision.

She looked up, surprised. If a snake could speak he would sound like this. Eve must have reached for the apple on a day like this, the sun pouring through gaps in the leaves, the light dazzling her, the seductive voice feet away, mouthing suggestions. Easing into her awareness so she soon forgot where they came from.

"Is Jean bullying me?" Drusilla felt suddenly unsure. Maybe Gordon is right, she thought, and I'm imagining it. After all, it had taken six months to talk about Jean in her sessions with Achilles.

He shrugged his shoulders the way the French do, mouth turned down. "To best guide you, I really do need to know you first. In every sense. You see, Jean is a woman of a particular kind, to judge from what you say."

The guard slammed the doors shut. A local voice through the loudspeaker spelt out the route for the train.

Do all men talk about women this way? Shoehorn them into categories? Does Gordon talk about me like that behind my back? Or is it just me, because I'm me? And what about Jean with her own unspoken agenda, the meaning behind her flattery? You are such a nice accommodating lady, dear Dru. But Drusilla knew Jean was really thinking how useful little people like Drusilla are for the nastier chores.

The guard blew his whistle outside. The train juddered and heaved into motion. It accelerated to swing round the bend, flinging her against the window frame. She pulled away. The glass was covered with sticky finger-prints. She saw a rabbit take off from the base of a hedge and canter, zigzagging, to his hole in a bank. I have to do the same: evade and lose myself out of sight. The idea at first struck her as comical, then took root so that five minutes later she fumbled in her handbag for her mobile phone and diary.

Achilles' line rang three times. He answered. Not a hiss, just smooth, like glue. She said his name quietly, unsure how he would react to what she intended to say. When he went on talking across her she realised she was listening to a recorded message, so she waited then offered an apology: 'Sorry, I won't be coming any more after this week, that's all.'

There. That feels better, like clearing the dinner scraps into the bin.

What next? Gordon? Or Jean? Gordon and porridge for breakfast, chips for supper, lager and doughnuts before bed, a wad of cash in his back trouser pocket over the bedroom chair for the speedway and the betting shop at weekends, and the huddle of underpants kicked under the wardrobe. She wondered whether he would even notice if she never came home again after work, or quietly died one evening in the sewing room upstairs. She surprised herself with her bitterness. It would never be any different, she found herself thinking, then felt a rush of guilt. I do it too. I categorise, I judge. I shouldn't do that. Surely Gordon can change? But why should he? He has it easy.

The train, now at cruising pace and rocking slightly, eased its way along the coast. To her right, a fan of breakers scattered a white border across glistening sand. She watched a flock of terns dance over the crest of a breaker. The man behind her struck up a conversation with an elderly woman, their voices a soothing background.

Gordon, Jean. It all has to end.

Opening her handbag, she took out her wallet, unpopping the small brass button. A cascade of plastic cards flopped out across her lap. She realised that she was smiling down at them as if they were small animals. She took them out, one by one, and examined them. Twisted them to look at the hologram, slanting it so that the sun danced on the surface. She felt the wrinkles of the embossed numbers, ran her nail along the edges and let her mind cruise. Credit here on this, credit on that one, debit, savings accounts, five thousand, six, seven and ten, fifteen and twenty. Being an accounts clerk has its advantages. Endless possibilities. It took seconds to swiftly compute and play with the options.

Replacing the cards with a flourish, she took out her mobile phone and dialled work. For once her heart didn't leap into her mouth when Jean answered.

'It's Dru.'

'Will you be back early enough to clear out the filing cabinet? I ran out of time. Something came up.'

Drusilla took a breath then formed her mouth as neatly as Achilles might and said, 'No.' It felt like saying an expletive. When she closed her mouth her lips felt full and plump and tingling. Like strawberries.

'Something wrong? I do hope not.'

'No.' Drusilla surged with pride at her own boldness. There it was again, the strawberry feeling. She licked her lips.

'Oh? Hurry back. I've a stack of things piling up.'

'No.'

A woman of a kind I recognise, Drusilla thought. She heard Jean inhale. Today I judge. Tomorrow I am at liberty to change my mind, like about Achilles this morning.

Jean said, 'I'm not sure I understand.'

'I'm not coming back.'

'Never?'

'No.' This time the word exploded like a pea from a shooter, directed precisely to enter Jean's bejewelled left ear and register in her brain. Drusilla was tempted to say it once again, right away. Should it be softer or louder? It seemed ludicrous that there were so many choices for delivering the second shortest word. She tussled with indecision for a few microseconds, then with a sense of jubilation acknowledged it as her new bloody weapon. She could imagine Jean's shock.

She thought about how Achilles' mouth had curled up at the edges before he pronounced his verdict on Jean: A woman of that kind would put upon a woman of your kind, he said, loosely cupping his fingers with their neat white nails, his green eyes meeting hers.

In a single sentence Achilles had packaged her, bundling her into the same parcel as Jean. Two kinds of women, that kind and your kind. Women sorted, judged, dealt with accordingly. An image rose of her shackled to Jean in an endless waltz of control and subjugation.

Drusilla said it again. 'No. Never.' Snip with the scissors, severing the string of the parcel that Achilles had wrapped round her, type casting her the way her father did.

'No, Jean, I won't be coming back.' That's satisfying, she thought, minded to say it again, feeling the way she did one day when Gordon brought her a triple brandy after a meal out.

'What? What's going on here?' Jean gasped.

Blood and cream? Or strawberries and cream? Snip. The blood began to drip. Cream next.

'Oh, come on now, Dru. Do stop messing me about.'

She could imagine it: Jean would get up from her chair, pull down her skirt with long, lacquered nails, pat her hair, prod the eyebrow she used to advertise contempt - plucked and permanently raised like a flag.

Drusilla giggled. 'No, Jean.' Snip. The wrapping fell off the parcel. More blood swirled into the cream. She leaned her head against the window and tried to imagine flying like a tern into the wind over a wave. Oh, the glorious feeling of freedom. I want to go, I want to soar and glide and tilt and hurtle without a thought in my head. And eat strawberries and cream every day.

'I beg your pardon,' Jean shouted. 'Are you ill?' She paused. 'And I know where you've been going every week,' she said more evenly. 'Gordon explained.' She paused. 'Just let me shut the door. I want to talk to you, Dru. We don't want to fall out just now, do we?'

Gordon? What? Drusilla recoiled. 'No, Jean. You heard me,' she said, sickened. How could he? She clicked off the phone, cutting Jean off mid-sentence: 'Now let me tell you...'

Her mobile rang almost immediately. Achilles laughed. Oh how she loved the soft cadences. It encouraged her through the bleak hours of self revelation. It sounded in her head after each session, in moments of despair in the night. And each week when she came to his door, shaking just a little. Even this last time as she left, full of horror and doom, he had laughed. He went on smiling while she closed his yellow gate, and when she looked back at him in the doorway he was nodding, smiling, like one of those dogs on the window ledge of a car. She so wished he didn't. It was painful.

And now this bonhomie on the telephone. It seemed unreal, from a time suddenly gone. 'Done it?' he said cheerfully. 'Of course you won't be coming back. No need in future. Eh, Drusilla?'

'No. How can I? After today.'

'So I'll meet you...?' His voice trailed off.

She laughed. 'As you suggested?' Not on your life, Achilles.

'Good,' he said. Like patting her on the head. Patronising monster.

'No, actually,' she said, with a small feeling of regret. 'I can't.'

'Oh, Dru. Oh, my dear Dru.' Was he hurt? Would he avoid her for ever? Would he forgive? 'I thought that might be the case.' He sighed. 'Of course, a woman of your kind could hardly do other than retreat to safety. Good luck, Drusilla.'

She waited. She had nothing to say just then. Labelled again. As Gordon said. Timid.

'Pity, Drusilla. We were well suited, a woman like you and a man like me. Let me know if you change your mind.'

And again. He's even bundled himself up. 'You shouldn't have suggested it.'

He sounded upset. 'I've obviously done something to upset you.'

'Achilles, you keep telling me there has to be death before rebirth. This is it.'

He sighed, laughed a little, waited for a long time. Then he spoke in a tone she had not heard before. 'I have to say, Drusilla, you have surprised me. Very much indeed.'

'I've got to go, sorry.' She rang off, her eyes misting. Fancy surprising Achilles, who understood everything, saw through everyone, was supposed to sort her out.

The train drew in. Gordon was waiting on the platform, his anorak zipped up, his mouth pinched. She smiled to herself. How many more snips with the scissors, blood into cream, now I've seen it all so clearly?

He searched her face. She smiled. Ah, Gordon, let's see what you make of the surprise when it happens.

'Ready for work?' He seemed jittery. It was almost as if he was expecting her to reach out and bite him.

'No,' she said, 'and what's bugging you?'

'What?' He turned, taken aback, but he recovered quickly. 'Where to? Work?'

'No.'

'Home?'

She smiled again. What was home after all? A hotel for Gordon with her as chambermaid, cook and cleaner. To reinforce the point, she shook her head .

He winced. His eyes bulged a little and she noticed he'd washed his hair. It was still slightly wet, lying flat on his head. 'What are you playing at, Dru? You really ought to get back. You might get the sack. Then you'd be in a pretty pickle, wouldn't you?'

'No, Gordon.' Strawberries. She reached up to kiss his cheek. It was warm and moist. He's had a shower, minutes ago.

'Don't kid yourself,' he said. 'Losing your job will give you no end of grief.' He put out his arms. 'Come here, luv. It's important.'

She evaded him and began to walk towards the car. No, Gordon, and no again, she thought, savouring the word. Her mother used to smack her for saying it. Her father would fetch the cane. She set off for the car as fast as she could.

'Hold on, Dru.' He pounded after her. 'I want to talk to you about splitting up. I've found someone else.' He said it in a rush as if he had rehearsed it. 'It's Jean, if you want to know.'

Drusilla froze. After a time she said, 'I don't want to know but I just worked it out.' Jean told him. Jean went and told him and they saw they had time to go to bed before the train got in. Drusilla felt like laughing. They must be panicking. 'In fact, Gordon, it's been obvious all along. Can't think why I was so slow to cotton on.'

'Jesus!' he said, blanching. 'And we've been so careful. Aren't you bothered?'

'No.' She allowed herself a chuckle. No, she thought. I really am not. Then a pulse began to beat in her throat while she calculated how long it would take to count one-hundred-and-fifty thousand pounds in fifty pound notes, and whether they would all fit inside her handbag alongside her passport. Above all she wondered how Achilles would react when Gordon told him that Drusilla had cleaned out their joint account, hocked her own half of the house, borrowed to the limits on his credit cards and disappeared overseas to serve strawberries and cream to the English on the Costa del Sol.

But, as a kindly and mild woman, Drusilla merely asked Gordon to take her to the hairdresser.

He grimaced. 'OK, if it suits you. But when you get home...'

'Fine.' Her mind was already working on whether she could get round to the building society, the job centre, the dress shop, the solicitor, the shoe shop and the travel agent in one afternoon after getting her hair done.

A nice little flat near the Mediterranean, a little job doing something easy. Sunshine. Strawberries and cream. That will do perfectly for a woman of my kind.

11 April 2004

Brian brings me an Easter gift on his way to church. His wife Marianne sits in the passenger seat and gives a child-like wave, fingers crunched then released. She's wearing a small hat. And a fixed grin, poor thing.

I wave back. Brian scuttles down the step, and I'm just about to go down to have a word with her when he zooms off.

Ah well. It's my Christian best. There was a time when I'd be off to the Cathedral in my best hat, high heels, ceremonial baptisms-wedding-funerals coat, longish skirt, joining the gaggle of my mother's cronies.

My faith evaporated sometime between the Vietnam war and the Falklands. My faith is always evaporating. Maybe death is when the last of it goes.

I open the monstrous box, sliding a kitchen knife under the tape to loosen it.

It's not an egg. It's not even chocolate. It's a crystal vase, filled with glass beads.

I take it to the kitchen and tip them into a saucepan. Out slips a package, tied with a purple bow.

The fraud.

If I didn't have some kind of fellow-feeling for Marianne, I'd package it all up again and send it back, recorded delivery, so she can see what he gets up to in his spare time.

I go to my recliner and unpick the package. It's soft, thick with tissue paper inside.

A ring, white gold, set with a heart-shaped ruby. Ah. How sweet. I try it on all my middle fingers. It doesn't fit any of them, and it's too sloppy on my little one. I take off my slippers. It fits my third toe perfectly. Well, not really. But that's the idea.

Last night I spent a bit of time cruising round the Internet again, checking out creative writing courses. I have to say, their websites are some of the worst I've ever seen. One even has spelling mistakes on the front page. Several of them don't work, meaning the site won't open, and those that do on the whole tell you bugger-all about what the course really offers. None of them I've seen so far, I'm pleased to say, trumpets the past achievements of their students, although there are hints dropped around on other sites. Could that be because they don't have any successes?

I count the universities and then give up. Page after page. Universities I've never heard of. Universities and colleges that used to stick to things they were good at, like bio-chemistry or genetics or European History.

Again, lists of names, 'tutors' to the courses, non-entities. Most don't have PhDs either. Even UEA has several monikers that have never filtered into my consciousness. Their own webpage is a laugh a line. The front page is full of hype about how the course came into being. Talk about name-dropping. Who cares? It's what happens now that counts, and that is pretty hard to discern from the labyrinth of pages to get lost in. Others though were crisp and factual, and gave a real sense of what they had on offer.

What is plain is that there are many ways of skinning the MA in Creative Writing cat. I notice most courses are full-time, two terms of attendance, compulsory workshops, some even assessed for your contribution. Good thing too. If you're going into that kind of world you need to know what you're talking about, and how to be constructively critical, and above all articulate.

Several do odd combinations, such as a bit of distance, the rest 'residential', so to speak. My own outfit (I notice I call it that) has a little note I hadn't noticed before on a second page that hangs below the main entry. They're tinkering with an experimental format, and inviting applications.

I open the pages. Just the job. No waiting until October. One term, the summer term, of taught courses. The Theory of Narrative, Development of Creativity, Study and Practice of Novel Writing. Then one from a clutch of options. I'd go for Short Story Writing. Practical workshops, essays, the usual stuff.

You're then turned loose for a whole fifteen months to write your novel, July to October the following year. Then two terms back in-house, one reading it to everyone and having it torn to bits (and presumably reconstructing it), then a final term of learning about editing, broadcasting, interview technique, reading one's work aloud, how to present oneself generally, marketing, desk-top publishing, and so forth. Culminating in being wheeled out to meet agents and publishers.

Good. I'll go for that. If they have places left. I'm a bit late, I suspect.

I must set down here one of the strangest things about my scout round the web. I've just been back to see if I can locate the site again, but I can't recall what search terms I put it. Anyway, it was a site with a title something like postgraduate feedback MA Creative Writing. It looked promising. I tried to open it, a page appeared saying it had either been removed by the site host or by the url owner. It then crashed my laptop. I bet the content was too hot to publish.

We shall see.

My stories are giving me indigestion. Most of them. Niece was right, they are indeed rubbish. So I've got to sit down in the next couple of days and write some more. Fifteen pages requested, a mix of fiction and critical comment. Nothing to it, says she.

I had to go back over today's entry to take out some of my more florid comments on the websites I saw. Would these have done for 'critical comment'? Would they have burned a hole in the envelope? Probably.

I worry just a bit about whether I'm capable of detaching myself enough to be fair any more. One of the problems of going for the idea of not making decisions is that things tend to flow in an uninhibited fashion. Cerebration doesn't come into it.

So I've gone back through everything I've written so far and removed names. This could be Brighton, Bournemouth, Bath, and a whole raft of others. The Faculty isn't really called that, and you won't see a 'real' name anywhere here. Jonathan explained: Blogging is a dangerous craft. You can get yourself sued.

Point taken, Jonathan.

The Faculty takes nearly fifteen minutes to reply to my query. I am put on hold, Mozart's Trout Quintet in the background, put through to this secretary, that course leader, the lodge who say they are security, the switchboard, then finally to the course director's assistant.

She is most helpful, and says she was going to do the course herself as she was 'only part-time'. I tell her she's got a friend for life as I'd just about decided (yes, a decision) to ring off and give up.

'You're in luck,' Sheila says. 'Just wait.' I can hear her rustling around. She comes back to the phone. 'I thought so. We've got interviews next Friday afternoon. Someone dropped out. I'm sure, if you come along, they won't shut the door in your face. I'll pencil your name in and talk to Dr Godfrey.'

Hey, a real Dr.

'PhD doctor?'

'Er yes. He's Mark. He's really nice. He's the course director. Do you have a first degree?'

'Oxford, modern languages.'

'Er, that will be fine, I'm sure. Have you got any writing you can bring with you? Better still make some up in a folder with a covering letter and post it to Dr Mark Godfrey, Course Leader, St Thomas Building. The rest you know. Mark it MA in Creative Writing, Experimental Format, Late Application. No more than 15,000 words.'

I smile to myself. 'Yes, I've got some writing.' I'll bamboozle them, I'm wondering whether I can get my own book out of the library, and drop it in front of them, saying A trifle over 15,000 words. If the local library's got it.

Or should I swallow my pride and take a couple of crap stories from my archive? Maybe even A Woman of This Kind.

Sheila says, 'Must go. We're closing the office for lunch. Three-thirty, St Thomas building. I'll ring security to issue you a pass. Name please? Address, phone number?'

I give her my name.

'Oh, that would look marvellous on the spine of a book.'

She forgets to ask me again for my address and telephone number. I have no intention of making the decision to ring her again.

My niece is on my doorstep, with her little boy Tristan, by the hand. 'Hope you don't mind.' She comes in leaning forward, she's so keen to get inside. 'Can we stay overnight?' She's been crying.

Tristan turns round and looks across the street. He's spotted the newsagents.

It's midnight, and I've just taken them up to the Travel Inn. I don't have the beds for them, so I rang and booked her in.

This little event, an evening of tears and tissues, with Tristan slumped on my recliner, kicking his heels in frustration without TV or video, has made an important point that I hadn't thought through before.

It is all very well to say you'll stop taking decisions and let life come at you, and react as you need to. It's equally all very well to assume that life's events are going to be of a kind that you are equipped to deal with. But when you've no prior experience to shape your reactions, other than when they're instinctive or a reflex, what do you do? If you've not had the experience, first you don't know how to construe the event, and even once you have, you've no knowledge of what works and what doesn't work.

It reminds me of that strange term distance learning. I've been tussling over the concept since I saw it so often on the web today. It beats me how one can learn at a distance, when my own experience tells me that all my learning has been through hands-on trial-and-error, often with someone (or some device) at my elbow to make it clear what is going to work and what isn't, and why.

When Niece and Tristan arrived today, I was completely unequipped. She has never been to my house before. I have never met the child either. I deduced he was Tristan because she told me she had a nine-year-old boy.

Before today, sitting in her kitchen in Milton Keynes with one eye on the door left me with a way out, literally. Today there are none of the elements I am used to. I didn't plan this, I made no decisions to do with it. It happened, and I'm feeling completely helpless.

I have nothing to offer my niece. I can't house her, I can't fund her. I can't advise her.

I ring the Samaritans, aware I'm probably waking some poor sod up. She's good about it, and persists with a very reasonable question.

'Lucy. What do you want to do about it?'

'Get rid of her without hurting her.'

'Do you think you can do that without hurting her?'

'No.'

'Then which is more important to you? Not hurting her or getting rid of her?'

I ring off, knowing the answer, and deciding, yes deciding, I'm going to pick her up in the morning and take her to the station.

12 April 2004 Easter Monday.

Gabrielle and Tristan have gone. She rang me from the train. I've incredibly relieved. She said Omar phoned her in the middle of the night, in tears, begging her to come back. I'll cross her off my list for tatting. Come to that I'll leave Brian off too because he's helping himself to tats all the time by keeping in touch.

That leaves Pee Eye. PI. I'm not entirely happy with calling her that. It's not fair to someone who's plainly in a state of mind that needs a charitable response. But it does make me think I should confide in Gaynor and chew the cud with her, as my grandmother would say.

I've phoned her at home. No reply. No reply from her mobile. She's obviously completely absorbed in something. Maybe the exercise machine at the gym, if they're open on Bank Holiday Monday.

The radio is playing some dithering piano piece on Classic FM. They play an increasing proportion of dithering music. Contemporary composers with three or more entries on the Hall of Fame list. His second CD to be released. Live concerts in Britain. Is this dumbing down? I switch it off, and wish I hadn't sent all my CDs to Oxfam and given my stereo to Gabrielle. I know I could hunt around for what used to be Radio 3, but I can't be bothered.

To return to PI. Looking back over my blogs for the last few days, it's plain to me I've been distracting myself from dealing with something that is a major event in my life. PI is not my daughter. I am a virgin, that I can be sure of. To be heard is the least I can do for someone at this Christian time of the year. I may no longer go for the idea of a Great and Almighty Being, although I'm utterly convinced Jesus gave the world the best advice ever in his sermon on the mount. So what would he have said to me? I have no doubt whatsoever. He'd have said, sit down with her and listen, and relax.

It plays on my mind that she burst into my life, found her way into my house, left me a gift, tried to convince me with her photograph, followed me to the cybercafe, and has since left me alone. The silence from her shouts at me. It worries me too.

Perhaps all this is forcing me to anticipate her coming again, think about how I might react, rehearse my choices. Then what? I hear a small story in outline. Two people. Protagonist and antagonist. Someone does something or not, something happens or not, which leads to something happening or not.

I'm the protagonist, the subject of the story, PI's the antagonist. She makes the precipitating incident happen. I've opted not to do something. This leads to......

So the big question is, so far as the story of PI and I is concerned, what is the outcome going to be of PI precipitating an event, and Self, the Protagonist, doing nothing?

I'm having another scout in background mode on BIG STORY plotting. Dozens of sites. One offering a piece of computer software to use as a kind of knitting pattern, a framework to write within. I might get it for fun.

In the meantime, stories for the University. My interview (I count on my fingers) is just three days away, not counting today, and not counting Friday. Which says my stories need to be in the post tomorrow if Dr Mark Godfrey is going to have enough time to read them through, and absorb their finer points, before I sidle through the door at St Thomas building on Friday afternoon.

I don't think I can go on calling the place 'the University', so how about the University of West Dorset, based in Lyme Regis? I'll refer to it simply as West Dorset and to the location as Lyme. Needless to say there isn't such a building as St Thomas, although I could be wrong.

My body is urging a tour of the garden. Last time I was out in my little backyard, my lilies, some a foot high with plump shoots still bursting through the ground, were littered with lily beetles. When they first appeared I assumed they were ladybirds, and gave them a big welcome. On closer examination, I found them longer, slimmer, no spots, and remarkably tough to squash. According to an article I read they have an endearing habit of squeaking if you hold them close enough to hear. It's supposed to scare you off. Their grubs, on the other hand, which filigree the leaves until they look like lace, cover their backs with their own excrement. Apart from squashing them between your finger nails, there's no answer but to spray the lilies with systemic insecticide and dose the ground nearby with the beetle equivalent of cyanide.

You'd think they have more sense than to kill the plant they live on, but they do, then take flight and look for more. It makes me think of PI, and wonder who she'll move on to when she's finished me off.

Today is a holiday, although you'd never think so to judge by the racket going on in next-door's yard. I always thought noisy activities were banned on Bank Holidays. There are two men there from Sunworthy Landscapes, hacking down a couple of trees with chainsaws and shredding the bits with a machine they must have bought in hell.

When they've taken themselves off, if I don't kill them first, I'm going to let my brain boil some ideas for stories. I keep thinking about some of the tales my grandmother told me. Now she was a complete natural. I didn't believe half of them. One of her favourites started with waggling her little finger at me. I had a kink just over the middle joint.

She and her sister were chopping bits of firewood to light the range. Her sister deliberately took a swipe at her hand in a fit of temper. My grandmother ran inside with her little finger hanging by a bit of skin. Used to much more serious accidents, her mother washed it, stuck it back on and wrapped a splint round it. It grew back. I never thought of asking what the punishment was for her sister. Probably having to do the washing up for three months.

Truth or fiction? I'm going to write now, and let the first thing that comes into my head precipitate me into getting on with it.

13 April 2004

I'm chickening out of writing new stories. Two of the old ones will have to do. The Bear is from probably ten years ago. And Honey, Honey, is from the same era, only later.

I rang our local library a few minutes ago. I had to dial enquiries for the number, my directory having gone to the paper bank with everything else.

They do have my book and will hold it for me.

I'm surprised, in truth. When I took it down there a month ago during my big clear-out, the girl on the desk pulled a face, looked at me with an air of astonishment, said Did you really write this? As I was 'local' they said they'd keep it on their shelves 'for a while.' A while is obviously more than a month.

Who in their right minds in this suburb would be the slightest interested in Women in the British Public Services: A Short History. Five Hundred Years of Sacrifice?

And I'm not a feminist, believe it or not. I saw a gap, I was intrigued. I am one of a long line of women who have committed themselves to public service in one form or another (nurses, teachers, civil servants, volunteers, the military, even some kinds of industrial and commercial enterprise, research institutes, and so forth) and woken up at 50 realising that a slice of human experience has passed them by. I need say nothing further at the moment.

But WBPS, as I call it, should impress them on Friday. That reminds me of PI, perish the thought.

I really must give up using initials. They always need de-coding for other people, and that takes longer than saying the whole unexpurgated thing.

Off to check out the lily beetles, then down to the library.

Gaynor rang. She's picking me up at lunch-time. Confession time in the offing.

I'll slam The Bear in here.

THE BEAR

The bear stared back, incongruous among the bottles in the window. Almost as out of place as the Christmas fairy decked with tinsel. Whose idea of window dressing?

I scanned the bottles, not really understanding the labels. They all looked attractive. Whisky, port, gin. Wine, red, white, pink. Big golden tops. Champagne. I fastened on one with golden writing on a black background of the label then changed my mind. I'd never be able to open it on my own.

Port. My mother used to drink port at Christmas. One of those, maybe. One of the best, to get me off to sleep.

The door clicked overhead as I opened it. It was years since I'd seen one of the old-fashioned clips above a door. They used to set off a bell. I stepped in. The pad beneath the mat started a furious buzzing at the rear of the shop. The man came through. I didn't look at him. I felt suddenly tongue-tied and stood on the mat staring around.

Bins stacked to the top with green bottles and day-glo labels proclaiming their contents: Christmas Sherry, £6.35. Special Offer. Special Shipment. £4.95. Bordeaux. You bet, I thought. Scrapings from the barrels of some ropey vineyard, vin plonk ultra ordinaire. Not that I'd know. He always did, though. He used to talk about vin plonk, and ultra ordinaire. He knew words like that. Where I came from we just said things like cheap and very plain.

"Yes, ma'am. What will you have?" The man smiled at me.

Panicking, I looked about. "Oh, I don't know, really. A good whisky." Port had completely gone from my head.

"Come on in, and shut the door," the man said. "It's draughty."

I moved to the counter. He beamed at me. "Whisky? Over here." He moved to the other end of the counter. Behind him on shelves to the ceiling were ranged bottles and bottles of whisky. "Which one?" he said.

The door burst open. A group of young people fell inside laughing over some joke I would never hear. I turned away. I didn't want them to see my face. "The best,'" I said.

"Best Scotch, ma'am. There are these, pure malts." He pointed to a whole shelf of them. "Or blended. Several. All prices. As you please. Some of the blends are better than pure." He ran his hand along the edge of a shelf. "These are all our best-selling top blends."

"That one." I pointed. I didn't really care.

He took my card. The machine whirred and clicked. The young people quietened down and prowled the shelves talking in low tones.

As I passed the window, I looked again at the teddy bear. He stared across the street, his black eyes gleaming, an arrogant kind of stare, with just a touch of pathos.

I hurried on. He wasn't the kind I would buy for my grandchildren. Too bristly, squat and old-fashioned. Staid even. An unpleasant reminder of my husband. A tartan bow tie and huge ugly stitches for toes. He wore tartan bow ties. And yet the pathos touched me for a fleeting moment.

The drizzle had flattened my hair by now, and my fringe hung lank over my forehead. It hadn't occurred to put on a waterproof, I'd been in such a hurry to get it over and done with. A passing car splashed my legs and when I looked down my tights beneath my skirt, they were splattered with tear-shaped streaks. My shoes gleamed with mud. Damn. Oh, what the hell.

What a time to go. How could he? Two days to Christmas. All the children abroad ski ing. All the grandchildren too. He said it wasn't because of me. That could only mean one thing.

"Don't think about it," Audrey said when I rang her. "You'll probably never know. Come over on Christmas Day." I blew my nose again rather than reply. I couldn't bear any more sympathy. It only made me cry. I was too exhausted for that.

The house seemed deathly still when I opened the door. Thank God for the old clock. If it wasn't there to tick and boom all night I'd go mad.

I turned on the TV. It was Match of the Day. How I hated it, the roaring, the blaring racket. It was always my signal to retreat upstairs. He'd accuse me of being narrow minded. I countered by calling him a boor.

I switched over. Some daft comedy. Nothing. I turned it off.

Oh well. Bed with a book. What am I doing? It's only 7 o'clock.

I stood for a while considering my options. Bed and book, or more vile TV. Another walk in the rain. Ring Audrey. Sit in the front window and watch people going by. I felt prematurely old.

I stood for a while in my silent house, silent except for the regular tick of the grandfather clock. Interesting. I'd never noticed before that if you stand perfectly still the world is full of sounds that usually go unheard. Overhead a lone jet at height. A motor scooter buzzing along the road outside then fading. Rain dripping on the window ledge in a rhythmic patter. Dum, pause, dum dum dum. Dum, pause, dum dum dum.

I pulled on my coat again and locked the door behind me. This time I walked slowly, feeling the rain on my face as I looked up at the street lights. Each lamp was surrounded by an orange halo of moisture, a fizz of brilliance that seemed to electrify the winter trees and the pavement.

Yes, that's better. I retraced my steps, tasting the rain as it ran across my top lip. Watching a Mars bar packet float along the gutter. Walking so slowly that the evening seemed to reach inside my coat and speak to me.

As I put my hand on the door to push it open, the licensee lifted the black and white sign to turn it round. CLOSED. His eyes met mine and he saw my dismay. He smiled. He opened the door to let me in, locking it behind us. He pulled down the blind and drew the shutters across the windows.

I smelled his aftershave and found myself strangely excited as if about to open a Christmas present or take possession of a large lottery cheque.

"This way," he said and went ahead of me. I saw the fabric of his trousers move across his buttocks. Small and neat. "What's your fancy?"

I didn't answer. I pointed. He smiled. "Your word is my bond."

The rain had stopped by the time I put the key in the door lock. I sat him down on my grandmother's button-back chair. He would have overflowed its contours

When I brought in the tray and the bottle, my visitor was still sitting where I left him, perfectly still, bright-eyed and smiling. He looked peculiarly at home. He stared at me pleasantly and I smiled back. A lounge lizard. A perfect gentleman. Every woman's dream. Quiet, smiling, natty.

I read him two chapters and he seemed quite happy to lie beside me, his head on the pillow. The great clock chimed at the foot of the stairs and I turned to switch off the light.

The street lamps shone through the gap in the curtains and lit up his smile. His eyes were wide open.

"Time for sleep," I said. He didn't comment.

I lay down and nestled into the pillow facing him. It didn't seem to disturb him at all, so I pulled him close, so close I could see his eyes and feel the bristles around his mouth.

I kissed him slowly, savouring his unfamiliar smell. Musky. A little sweet. Then a strange scent, as if he had been washed by someone else or held in another woman's arms.

You'll do.

I untied the ribbon around his neck and removed the price tag.

***

It's nearly midnight.

Today has been a revelation.

Gaynor knocks on the door. I race to get my handbag, check I've locked the French windows, then fling wide the front door. There are two people waiting. Gaynor, standing, to my right.

And someone crouching, back to me, on the top step. My first thought is that this is yet another drug addict, rolling a spliff.

Gaynor is lounging against the railings, one leg tucked over the other from knee down, sailor-fashion, an arm along the top rail, her head back, cigarette in her mouth. She reminds me of a book someone gave me in my smoking days, Les Femmes aux Cigarettes. Many were portraits of 1930s blonds with long cigarette holders, head tilted back, lipstick you could have polished your car with.

'Wall, hallo,' she drawls. 'You have a visitor.' She tilts her head.

PI , also smoking, is picking at her nails. She doesn't move.

'I've been talking to your daughter,' Gaynor says, grinning. 'She snaps upright and looks down at the hunched figure on the step. 'Bellamy, your mother's here. Aren't you going to say hallo?'

Bellamy stands up and tosses down her cigarette then grinds it underfoot. She's wearing a sheepskin coat with a fur edging round her neck, a knitted cap pulled down to her ears. No make-up today. She stands taller than me in high-heeled boots. She smiles. 'Hallo, Mummy.' Her eyes dance.

I'm thunderstruck. All I can think of saying is, 'I thought Bellamy was a boy's name.'

She shrugs. 'You should know. Bel as in belle, the French word for beautiful, B, E, double L. Amie as in female friend, A, M, I, E.' She pauses. 'Don't I get a kiss this morning?'

I go back inside, leaving the door open. 'Gaynor. Not you, sorry, Bellamie. I'll be back out.' As soon as Gaynor is inside I shut and bolt the door.

Gaynor stands with one hand on her hip, her handbag slung over her shoulder, her cigarette raised and trailing smoke into my house. 'What's this about then? Since when did you collect schizophrenics on your doorstep?'

'Don't say that about yourself.'

She's laughing. 'You know what I mean.'

'I haven't the faintest who she is, but she's utterly and absolutely convinced I'm her mother. What do I do?'

'We take her to lunch and give her the hard word.' She looks around. 'Anywhere I can sling my ciggie? I take it we're going in my car.'

We don't talk. I don't know where Gaynor will take us. I sit in the passenger seat while she drives. It's not a safe experience so I stare sideways out of the window, aware that Bellamie is immediately behind me and could put a knife to my throat. I consider asking Gaynor to stop somewhere and let me swap with Bellamie, then think that if she's armed she could force Gaynor to drive us all into a wall. At least that would solve my problem.

The route Gaynor takes, straight along the dual carriageway, suggests we're not going to her usual haunt, a Bistro by the river that serves a good range of dishes, and a nice place to hang around in afterwards, with lawns down to the water.

'Am I right we're not going to La Casa?'

'Right.'

We pull in at Tesco.

'What?' I say.

'Perfect,' she says.

Bellamie looks bewildered. 'Are we going shopping?'

'Come along,' Gaynor moves away at a pace. Bellamie and I follow, like schoolgirls after a teacher. Gaynor heads strait for the cafeteria, and the only table that's free. 'Sit down,' she orders Bellamie. 'I'm bursting for a pee.' She heads off.

'So am I.' I skitter after her but she has such a lead she's already inside a cubicle when I get there.

I call out. 'Gaynor, I need to talk.'

'Wait a bit,' she says, so I hover near the basins.

The cloakroom door opens. I turn, expecting Bellamie, but it's a woman with a child by the hand. She takes the child inside a toilet. I wait.

Gaynor goes to wash her hands. 'Look, Lucy. Do you need my help or not?' She takes a paper towel from the dispenser and turns to give me that appraising glare I'm so familiar with.

I say, 'I don't want you to take over and foist her on me.'

'You didn't answer my question.' She finishes with the paper, and dumps it on top of an already full container, then shifts away from the basins. The woman is steering the child towards them.

I think of an excuse for having run away from the problem for days. 'The trouble is, I don't know what it's all about, but I want her out of my life.'

'Answer me one thing. Is she right?' Gaynor is suspicious, I can tell.

'Of course not. She's wrecking my retirement. I want to get shot of her now, yesterday.'

'Why such haste? Me thinks thou protesteth too much.'

'What are you implying? That I'm fibbing?'

She shakes her head. 'Okay, fine.' She turns for the door. 'Actually, Lucy, my gander is well and truly up. Bellamie was sitting on your doorstep when I arrived. She was rude, she's surly, she told me basically to piss off. I don't want to feel I can't come to your house without running a gauntlet of psychos.'

'You said something about schizophrenia.'

She opens the door and speaks to me half-way through it. 'Wake up, Lucy. Haven't you heard of delusions? Mistaken identity? False memory syndrome?'

'Yes. But short of getting her locked up, what can I do?' I think about my earlier conversation with myself on Easter Sunday. I've never thought of Gaynor as a Jesus figure, advising me to do the Christian thing. 'Okay, okay. I'll sit down and listen to her.'

Gaynor is nearly back to the cafeteria with me close behind. She stops with her hand on the door. 'At least you'll know what you're up against. Tell you what, to make up for missing lunch, meet you tomorrow night for dinner. Monte Cristo, eight-thirty.' She smiles with Colgate teeth as if she'd just been voted top retiree of the year.

The door opens from the other side so that she has to move. It's Bellamie. 'Aren't you two coming back?'

Gaynor Colgates her. 'What do you think we're doing coming in this direction?'

Bellamie shrugs. 'I just thought you might have gone out the other way.' She looks as if she's been crying.

'Now would your mother do that?' Gaynor says. I feel like hitting her.

Bellamie smiles. She looks quite coy. I see the blue of her eyes again. She slides past us. 'Back in a tick. Just going to the loo. I asked a lady to hang on to the table for us.'

The table has been taken by a woman in a wheel-chair, a younger woman and two small boys.

There's a note on the table, written on the back of a glossy flyer from the photography desk. One of the boys sticks his finger on it. 'She said, she said,' then trails off.

Gaynor reaches over to pick it up. 'Excuse me.' She reads it then passes it to me. 'At least she's capable of being civil,' she mutters.

Bellamie's ballpoint pen hasn't coped with the glossy surface but it's legible.

LUCY AND GAYNOR

I'm sorry I seem to have embarrassed you both. I didn't want to gatecrash. Lucy, please leave me a note on your doorstep about when we can meet. Thanks for the invite to lunch, but no thanks.

We go to La Casa and stay there until past four. I tell Gaynor the whole story, not that there is much more to say.

We walk around for a while in the garden, and find a free bench under a palm tree that's always intrigued me. It's made up of fans of green that spring from the centre. I've watched this one grow for near enough twenty years. A couple of starlings fight over scraps of bread someone had tossed out for them.

Gaynor gives me short shrift, not that she ever does anything other. 'You're your own worst enemy. 'If you'd given her a fair hearing the first time she turned up on your doorstep you might at least have had a strategy for handling it by now.'

I don't tell her my strategy is to do nothing. So I say nothing, merely letting the first thing that comes into my head do its stuff. 'What's the Latin name for this palm tree?'

'It's probably the Chamaerops humilis, almost certainly the cerifera variety.'

'I thought so.'

'You lying cow.'

'Ditto.'

I sit and worry for a while about Bellamie. When Gaynor and I left Tesco's car park, she was waiting for the bus back to town. It made me feel pretty rotten.

Leave her, Gaynor said. She doesn't want this, so don't try to change her mind.

She was right, I know, but that mind-set is foreign territory to me. All my working life, which has been the biggest part of my existence so far, it was my job to manage everyone around me. Bellamie, I say to myself, needs sorting out. But that ain't my job any more.

The revelatory aspect of today has been that I've worked out Bellamie's obsession must not govern my life, and that if I deal with her sensibly, there's not a problem.

I've looked over The Bear and Honey, Honey, and decided not to submit either to Dr Mark Godfrey at UWD. The Bear was written for a bet. Honey, Honey for Gaynor's grand-niece. Neither came from my heart.

On Friday, I'll turn up, dump WBPS on the desk and take it from there. I looked through it, thinking My God, did I really write this? I quite impress myself.

Before I blog off for the night, I have the extraordinarily logical solution to my dilemma about how to avoid making decisions.

The random calculator, otherwise known as the binary choice mechanism.

A coin. Tails I do it, heads I don't.

Brian's ruby ring. Do I wear it? I toss a coin. Heads.

I'll give it to Bellamie.

Not really.

That's all.

14 April 2004

Bellamie's request for a note on the doorstep telling her where we can meet plays on my mind. Decision time, I tell myself.

Heads I comply with her request and leave a note. Tails I don't. (Tails is always what my wish is.) I toss. I get heads. I leave a note.

Sod it. I don't want to, so where does tit-for-tat fit in?

Tit-for-tat says I do as I am done unto. Bellamie left me a note, so I do have to tit for her tat. I leave a note. Sod it again.

As for my 'no decisions' approach, that's simple. No note, the consequence of doing nothing.

Sum total: two to one say Leave a note.

My brain gives up, so I turn my attention to my garden. I see an image of lily beetles.

In my 6 by 4 greenhouse I pot on some geranium plugs, and split up four azaleas that someone has crammed into one pot for maximum commercial effect. I hadn't the heart to send them to the tip in my grand clear-out, so tucked them in a sheltered spot outside. They've been a mass of crimson and white ever since.

I'm aware of a sound outside and overhead. It's nothing like anything I've heard before in this area. We get jets on their way to Heathrow, helicopters approaching Northolt, police, ambulance, and civilian. Birds, sometimes huge flocks of geese making for the old gravel pits along the Thames corridor.

This is a small aircraft buzzing back and forth as though patrolling the streets. I shade my eyes against the sun. I can clearly see the black snout of a high-powered camera.

They're filming again. In a few months' time someone will knock at my door and try to flog me a photograph of my house for sixty quid.

Being under surveillance makes me think of Bellamie, so I go over in my mind what I might say in my note.

She refused lunch, so why, if I'm titting for her tat should I agree to lunch? That's the first decision taken for me. I do not offer lunch.

But what do I put in this confounded note? I summarise what Bellamie has so far done to or for me. The only things that come to mind are a) she's presented me with a total bombshell, and expected me to react, and b) she's been to my house four times.

If I knew where she lived I could go to her house, demand to be let in, return to leave a photograph on her door, then a box on the step, and come back a fourth time to sit picking my nails and smoking on her top step while I wait for her to come out. While I'm doing this I can tell whoever passes by she is my mother.

What might be a bombshell to Bellamie defeats me. Tell her I know I am her mother and that I abandoned her at birth, and that I've had my spies watching her every moment of her living life?

It soon gets ridiculous so I turn to analysing her action. It lies in a belief, ie something in her head. And it's not true either. I can do that too. I have things in my head that aren't true all the time.

So I'll print out Honey, Honey, and put it in an envelope addressed to Bellamie and leave it on my doorstep.

God, this has got monstrously complicated.

Now for Brian. I'm going to ask him to run me on Friday to St Thomas building at WDU.

That's his present for this week. He's master of his lunch hours so I'll have time to wander round the campus because he'll probably drop me there around 2. I know the place vaguely. I once went there about six years ago to give a careers lecture.

The thought of Dr Godfrey makes me feel guilty. Strictly speaking. I ought to send in a sample of my writing. The prospectus says to submit samples of fiction and criticism.

Hunting through my book, I come across a nice little set of passages where I review Martineau's doctrine on the education of women which she wrote in 1822. Roughly 6000 words. That will do nicely.

Oddly enough, I have no trouble remembering one passage from On Female Education in its entirety. It still rings in my ears:

I do not desire that many females should seek for fame as authors. I only wish that their powers should be so employed that they should not be obliged to seek amusements beneath them, and injurious to them. I wish them to be companions to men, instead of playthings or servants, one of which an ignorant woman must commonly be. If they are called to be wives, a sensible mind is an essential qualification for the domestic character; if they remain single, liberal pursuits are absolutely necessary to preserve them from the faults so generally attributed to that state, and so justly and inevitably, while the mind is buried in darkness.

It occurs to me that Harriet Martineau might have been more influential on me than I'd like to admit.

I go back into my fiction archive from Niece's collection. They're all too light-weight, too frivolous. What is needed is something dark and memorable. The most dark and memorable tale I know is of my mother's death.

It takes nearly two hours to convert it into story form. I surprise myself by not crying.

I print it out, scoot to the corner shop, copy the pages from my book, buy a big brown envelope, slip my covering letter, the death story and the excerpts from WBPS inside it, then go next door to the post office.

There's an application form for the course on the doormat when I get home. The compliment slip is handwritten. I glance at the signature. Sheila Glascock.

Dear Lucy

Please fill this in, make a second copy, attach two passport size photos, and bring it with you when you attend interview with Professor Glenda Forthworth and Dr Mark Godfrey at 3.45pm Friday 16th April 2004. St Thomas Building, room 204.

Good luck. I'll wait for you. I'm off duty at 4.30. The change in hours is because there's been another late applicant. She says she knows you. Bellamie Marriott.

Sheila Glascock

PS Bring your book with you.

I ring Gaynor about Bellamie Marriott. She comes straight round. She drags me outside to sit in the sun and lights a cigarette.

I tolerate the smoke hanging around us because I need to talk. 'What do I do? How does she know I've applied there?' I spot a lily beetle and step with one foot on to the flowerbed. I pick it up and show it to her.

She almost ignores it. 'Maybe she's bugged your house.' She's completely sanguine about it.

I squash the beetle between my fingernails. Its innards are orange and it tries to wriggle away. I toss it down. It creeps along, leaving an orange trail.

'Look,' Gaynor is saying, 'why don't you just accept that this woman thinks this thing, and let it ride? She's what, in her thirties? So she can't want you to breast-feed her or support her through college, or anything like that. She's pretty cookie, plainly, but she could be quite a nice friend to have, and if you do this ridiculous course then you've got a couple of ready-made buddies, haven't you? Her and that woman whose doing your application.' She smiled. 'You certainly know how to make friends in the right places.'

I'm forced to talk about the course. She listens and nods. Then simply says, 'Well someone like you has to keep her mind busy. I suppose. You can do something like that standing on your head.'

'Like what?'

'Exams.'

'No exams.'

'What? How on earth can you get a degree without exams?'

'They mark your work.'

'Continuous assessment,' she stubs out her cigarette alongside one of my re-potted azaleas. 'I get the drift.' She pushes her legs out and stretches like a cat. 'Like modern schoolchildren. Get your parents to do your coursework.' She laughs. 'Will you let me write some of your stuff for you?'

I'm shocked.

'By the way,' she says, hoisting herself up and tidying her skirt. 'I looked up Bellamie Marriott in UK Info Data. You know, the CD of the register of electors. She lives round the corner from me. I parked outside on my way to you for a couple of seconds to look the place over. I think she's in a relationship. Man and baby came out.' She laughs. 'Congratulations Grandma.'

'Oh bugger off, Gaynor.'

'Dinner tonight,' she reminds me. 'Why don't you bring Brian?'

I think about it for a split second. 'His wife does do a basket-weaving class on Wednesdays. It's possible.'

Brian leaps at the chance. He likes Gaynor. He flirts more with her than he does with me.

He breathes so heavily down the phone I wonder if he's got a cold. 'No,' he says, 'just eating a bloody good Bowers pork pie. I had my mouth full when you rang.'

I love that guy. He's priceless. What a pity I've never felt the remotest tingle of sexual attraction.

My mind turns to Dr Mark Godfrey. Good Germanic name. I go to my computer and hunt around the Internet. There was a clutch of Mark Godfreys in Nottingham in 1881 when the census was taken. Occupation FWK, whatever that is. Should my opening gambit at the interview be Are you a FWK?

I have a look at the 1901 census. The Mark Godfreys have scattered to Devon, Essex and London, but there are still quite a few in Carlton, Nottingham. They're skilled tradesmen on the whole.

God I must be bored. But I can't resist checking Professor Forthworth. No such name in the 1901, nor the 1881, nor the GRO online, nor on the Mormon site. I browse to see what her credentials are. Nothing, except working at WDU, and something about mature students.

I miss work.

If I say it often enough will it force me to do something about it, apply for a job instead of committing myself to £3000-worth of unexamined goods, a pig in a poke?

Before I log off I hunt around for the meaning of FWK. Framework knitter. Reminds me of the CD I saw advertised for creating novels, and I order it online.

The usual crowd are at the Monte Cristo, a cross between a night-club and a restaurant, along American lines. It's a touch above Brian's wallet, but if we all chip in for the meal, it shouldn't be a problem.

Gaynor's idea is to tank Brian up then go Salsa dancing, so I come forewarned with my Tesco sandals, and my skirt and top. Gaynor looks me up and down disapprovingly. 'You could have lashed out and bought another outfit,' she says.

I'm not prepared to tell her that I'd have spent half the day tossing coins, subjecting it to my tit-for-tat analysis, then probably opted for doing nothing.

It's easy to work out which I plumped for. 'This is it, and it'll do,' I say firmly.

She tells the waitress we want to be served and out in no more than 90 minutes. The girl gives her a frosty look, but says all the same, 'I'll make sure the chef knows, madam.'

I order Potage Ambassadeur, Feuilletés de Saumon aux Asperges, and keep my eye on the trolley where I spy Chocolate Meringue Cake Filled with Chocolate Mousse. I know I won't have room, but it's a nice thought.

I tuck into my split-pea soup and think about my grandmother. She taught me to make it with lentils. Soak a ham bone, and go from there. As for salmon in puff pastry cases, I'll go straight for the salmon and leave the puff pastry alone. It's only so much puff anyway.

Gaynor wastes no time while our meal is being prepared. 'Lucy is being hassled by a nut-case who claims she's Lucy's daughter. As you and I well know, Lucy is the archetypal spinster and a virgin.'

'Worse luck,' says Brian, clearing the last of his terrine. He breaks some bread, heaps butter on it and stuffs it in with great skill so that his moustache is as pristine when he's finished as when he started.

'The law is quite clear,' he says. 'If the woman is harassing you, I can get you a court order.'

I'm horrified. 'She's just nutty. I'd hate to do that to her.'

Brian eats with great concentration, barely looking up, asking me questions that make me fumble for words, and listening to my replies without a flicker. I've never seen this side of him before. It frankly impresses me.

Someone's smoking close by, making my nose run. I take a Kleenex from the little pack I keep in my handbag, accidentally tipping my lipstick out on to the table. Gaynor pounces on it like a vulture.

'No. 7? You use this? I never realised.' She takes the cap off and winds it up. 'Go for a gloss. And you need a liner. You shouldn't use that light colour anyway. They make your lips look too big.'

'Mm,' Brian says, eyes down, as though he's just seen something nice on the table.

Our main courses arrive. He can't leave the subject of Bellamie alone. 'You just have to swallow your pride, or whatever's causing you to avoid her, and get the facts from her. A to Z. What is her proof? If she can't tell you, then you know what you're dealing with. If she produces proof, then it's a matter of unravelling it and disproving it.' He wipes his moustache on his napkin. 'But I can always send her a frightener.'

'Gaynor?' I say.

She sticks her tongue out at me.

Brian twinkles at me. 'Right, what's this about dancing?'

We go to the dance school. There's half an hour left before they finish. The teacher gives us an old-fashioned look, but takes our money all the same.

Toyboy with the Edwardian moustache and the repartee isn't there. I'm disappointed, and so, plainly is Gaynor.

'It's Easter week,' she says, and gets wiggling. 'People are on holiday.'

She drags Brian off to the floor. I find a corner seat out of the way and fetch a glass of wine. Brian astonishes me by dashing about in a convincing manner. I puzzle about where I've seen the steps he's doing before.

Rock and roll. I'm laughing and find myself thinking about Martineau's view of the state of single women. I reckon we are both, Gaynor and I, playthings. And it's very good fun playing like this.

That's all. Tomorrow, nothing.

15 April 2004

Yesterday evening finished with Brian falling asleep in Gaynor's car after Salsa. He's a heavy man, and sleeps heavily, at least so it seems.

I've only ever seen him like this once before, and that was when I went camping with him and Marianne and their kids well over twenty years ago. On that occasion, he'd been to the local pub and someone had fed him scrumpy. He'd taken a short-cut through a churchyard in the dark, and we found him slumped against a gravestone in the moonlight.

Tonight he's responded in much the same way to four or five glasses of wine.

'Silly sod,' Gaynor says. 'He didn't have to drink them all. Tell you what, I'll leave his door open and turn the windows down and see what fresh air can do.' She pushes the buttons and all four windows slide down. Then she's outside opening the door.

Marianne appears upstairs at the window. She's in a white nightdress and sure enough, in her right hand, is a book.

'Hey, Brian,' I shout. 'Wake up. Your wife is looking for you.'

Brian comes to with a start. 'God, we're home already?' He organises himself to get out, grinning and yawning. 'Sorry, ladies, must be the exercise.'

I decide to stay put, and watch him open his wrought-iron gate. Gaynor's lit a cigarette and is lounging against the car. I'm half tempted to walk home alone, but don't think that would be a good idea.

Brian turns and comes back, and sticks his head inside the car. 'Lucy, Gaynor told me while you were jigging around back there that your Mellamie Barriott asked you to leave a note for her on the doorstep. Don't. Don't do anything. The more you respond the more you'll encourage her. And if it ever comes to litigation, then you are in jeopardy.'

I'm almost beside myself with joy. Legally sanctioned to do nothing. Gaynor is coughing and laughing.

'And by the way,' I say cruelly, 'you do realise you just called her Mellamie Barriott. She's Bellamie Marriott.'

'Is she?' He looks puzzled. 'Ah well, there's many a slip between tongue and lip. Bye now.' He's gone.

Somewhere during that exchange, Marianne has gone back to bed. Gaynor climbs back in and we drive to my house via Mellamie's to have a look at it.

Four-square, ex-council house, curtains shut, no lights on. No babies crying. Front garden with a few straggling daffodils with dead heads. Nothing to tell me anything new about her.

But she's not well enough off to be spending £3000 writing 5000 words a week for other people to mangle.

Brian's marvellous advice is in my head. I know nothing about harassment so take a canter round the web. There's a British site, yourrights.org.uk which has a long screed in miniscule script (I find and use the zoom to 150%). Tucked away on the front page are these rather choice phrases:

This means that there must be at least two incidents representing harassment - i.e. more than one telephone call - and the person who is carrying out the harassment must know or ought to know that it would amount to harassment. Although that is to be assessed objectively so that persons with psychiatric illnesses will not be excluded from the effect of the Act merely because they did not think that their behaviour would amount to harassment.

Hate mail is usually anonymous, but if it can be traced the sender can also be prosecuted under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 . This makes it an offence to send a letter or other article which conveys an indecent or grossly offensive message or a threat, or which contains information known to be false and the purpose of the letter is to cause distress or anxiety.

Bellamie, it seems to me, has worked out that she's a pain in the neck, witness her disappearing act at Tesco. So Brian is talking very good sense. If I do nothing, and she starts up again, then we might have a case.

Only, since when has it been an offence to try to make contact with your mother? Even when said mother finds it distressing? Dodgy, border-line, I'd say.

I'm mindful, and I forgot to mention it to Brian (although I'll sure Gaynor filled him in while I was 'jigging back there'), that Bellamie is apparently going to be at UWD tomorrow afternoon. I have a brainwave and ring Sheila to see if she can give me another interview day. Fleetingly, I even consider pulling out altogether. I could go and join Marianne basket-weaving instead, or simply write at home and get my own website up.

'Thanks very much for the confirmation, Sheila. I was intrigued to see your note about the other late candidate.'

'Oh? Who was that? I forget.'

'I think her name is Mellamie, sorry, Bellamie Marriott.'

'Ah yes. I remember now. She said she knew you.'

'You mentioned me?'

Sheila is very quick. 'No, seriously. She saw my appointment, my interview, list. She came in here to pick up her application form.'

'Ah.' I'm wondering why she went in there. Did she know I was going to do the course or was it sheer coincidence? What is this woman about?

'Do you know her?' Sheila sounds anxious, as though she thinks she's slipped up.

'No, actually.'

'Maybe she's heard of you or read your book,' she says. 'By the way, Lucy, she isn't coming to interview after all. She's decided to give it a miss this year. She's going to have another baby. Only just got confirmation.'

'Ah.' This juicy morsel of information is one I'll be keeping from Gaynor. 'See you tomorrow.'

Sheila suddenly sounds more cheerful. 'Oh, Lucy. Your package arrived okay. I hope you don't mind, but I read it. Why on earth do you need to come on a course like this? You're published already, and you write like an angel.'

'Good question. I expect I'll be asked, so today's job is to try and work out why.'

'I know the feeling,' she says. 'I've been getting short stories published in magazines for years. Everyone says the same to me.' She sighs. 'Hey ho. It's just a feeling.'

16 April 2004

Brian drops me at the campus at about 1.50. He's looking the worse for wear, not because of the wine last night, rather the ragging he got from Marianne for coming in so late. He hadn't told her, the silly man, he was going out with the pair of us.

I ask him what excuse he offered. He told her about Bellamie Marriott. Marianne, being a good old friend to me, was full of sympathy.

I am not at all nervous about my interview. It's a matter of indifference to me in many ways, but I am curious to see Dr Mark Godfrey, knowing that he's likely to be descended from FWKs who hailed from Nottingham. I probably won't ask him about it, not yet at least.

The grounds to the university are rather like a public park on any sea front. Orderly beds of tulips and wallflowers just coming into bloom. The public are allowed to wander around part of it, but the fence that security has mounted to stop prowlers is 8 feet high, spikes on top and dotted with cameras that rotate and follow as you pass.

I ask the guard why. 'There's been a few assaults. Couple of rapes in the last ten years. You know.'

No, I don't know, never having been raped or assaulted. I can't imagine ever letting someone whose credentials I wasn't pretty sure of get that close to me. And I can run like the wind, my kick is vicious (I'm a very out-of-practice brown belt), and so forth.

I've brought a book and find a seat in the warm. It's tucked along a wall, perhaps part of some old building. It's made of soft limestone, gloriously worn, and there are wild wallflowers doing their proper stuff where they are meant to grow. There's a wisteria above me that's sprouting long flower heads. In a month they'll be hanging down in purple racemes, and scenting the air. It's altogether a pleasant enough setting for the bald new buildings and the old prefabs that utterly ruin it.

St Thomas building is one of the ugliest. Plain glass windows, brickwork, flat roof. Smells like a railway station, a slight pong from lavatories. Half-empty plastic beakers on window ledges. Usual student rubbish, in short.

I'm shown to a plastic bench and wait. Five minutes early, a tall man lopes along and stoops over me. Flabby hand, long fingers. Mark Godfrey.

'Lucy.' He sets off without saying another word, out of the building, round to a back entrance. I bustle after him.

The room is on the right. It's so small it must be a converted book cupboard. It has a tiny slit window, very high in the wall. Someone has left a blackboard up. I take in the scrawl. Post modernism, Derrida, then various things that don't capture my interest sufficiently to lodge in my memory.

They are perching opposite me side by side at a plastic topped table with a metal frame. They seem very uncomfortable at such close quarters.

Professor Glenda looks about twenty-five, wears spectacles and sucks her top teeth over her lower lip. Mark's either seen a ghoul, or not slept. He's dark, bearded, and ultra-thin. Both don't really have their minds on the matter, giving the impression they can't wait to go because it's Friday afternoon.

Mark shuffles through the papers on the desk. 'Er, we understand you're a late applicant.'

'Yes.'

'We don't have an application form.'

'I've brought it. I wrote to you.'

'Ah. I haven't seen it.'

Glenda speaks. 'Can you tell us why you think you're qualified to do this course?'

'I'm not sure I follow,' I say.

'Do you have a first degree?'

'Yes.'

'Good. That's fine.'

Mark takes over. 'Have you ever written anything?'

I root inside my bag, put my book on the desk and sit back. He stares at it, looks at me, and says, 'I mean written, not read.'

'I wrote it.'

He leans forward and stares at it.

Glenda is smiling. She has a puckish air and I keep thinking she'd go down rather well at the Salsa class. 'Perhaps you'd like to explain.' She reaches out and grabs WBPS with a sense of glee, flicks through it then goes to the frontispiece, running her finger down it. 'Second edition.' She sucks her lip. 'Good. Well done. But it's not exactly creative, is it?'

'What's creativity?' Mark says and leans back laughing.

I'm mighty cross about this exchange. 'Maybe not creative in the sense you're looking for, Professor, but you asked in your prospectus for examples of critical writing, so that's it. And I also sent you a short story. About a death.'

'Did you?' She looks at Mark.

He stoops and drags a briefcase from under the table by his feet. 'Just a tick. Sheila said something.' He hoists it to his knees, then pulls out a pack of envelopes. He thwacks them on the desk. 'I expect it's among these.' He leafs through them. 'Which one is it?'

I peer then point, recognising my own. 'That's the one.'

'Ah, good,' he says. 'It's open so it has been read. We operate as a team. Two by two, like the Ark.' He smiles and shuffles the pack of envelopes back into his bag. 'That's fine then.'

There is quite a long and jolly exchange about the grounds, the flower beds, the buildings, Lancaster University, UEA, Cardiff, Bath Spa, Tyneside, and other places that also run courses. I get the feeling I might as well be anyone - the cleaner, a third-year student asking for a year off, or an applicant for the PGCE. They both fiddle with their fingers and their pens. I can imagine they have a 15-minute slot for me and they have to fill it.

Glenda leans forward. She interleaves her fingers and props her forearms on the table. 'Tell me, what do you think you can gain from the course?'

This is the question I've prepared for. 'I'm hoping to sit at the feet of famous authors. I'm looking for individual tuition, for informed criticism, for guidance on plotting. It's my weakness, I know. I'm also pretty worried sometimes that I'm incapable of creating characters who aren't frankly pretty nasty people, so guidance on character development. And I'm looking for a course where the program will fit in with my lifestyle.'

Mark leaps in. 'You do get individual tuition. That's to keep you on track during the year out, for writing. You are entitled to three individual one-hour face-to-face tutorials.'

I know I'm supposed to be impressed, and think about my undergraduate days. Two tutorials a week was our normal quota. I say nothing. 'And what about meeting famous authors, and learning from them?'

'Of course, of course. One a week in the last two terms.' He beams. 'Really excellent lectures, usually.'

'That's fine, then.'

Glenda looks at her list. 'Any questions?' She doesn't wait for an answer. She has her pen poised over the list. 'We can offer you..'

Mark cuts her short. 'No, we have to see the complete list first.' He turns to me. 'Don't forget to let me have your application forms.'

'When can I expect to hear?' I push the envelope across to him.

He ignores it. 'By Tuesday. We start the new term the following week. Off to a cracking start, hard work right through until the summer school is over.' He smiles. 'Then it's up to you.'

'Summer school?'

'For this trial course, we hold a three-week summer school in Dublin.'

'Do I have to go?'

He looks at Glenda and doesn't answer my question. Glenda is already on her feet, heading for the door. 'I'll get the next applicant, Mark.'

She shakes my hand. Mark shakes my hand. As I leave, he's getting out his mobile phone.

I've been seen, done, found adequate because I can write something and have a first degree. So another bum on a seat, £3000 to the university, another member of staff secure for half a day a week. Looking back at the interview it was about as thorough and selective as applying for the Brownies.

Sheila, good to her word, is waiting outside. She's rounded and motherly, and reminds me that Gabrielle, my niece, will look just like her in another fifteen years. I know she's Sheila because she's wearing a badge, and has her pass slung round her neck.

She unclips my temporary pass from my lapel, and tows me to reception to sign out. 'How did it go?'

She has the kind of face that encourages confidences, but I keep my counsel. 'I expect it's all right. How can anyone ever know?'

'I'll know. I'll read their notes on you.' She laughs.

'I was only there about ten minutes.'

'I was never even interviewed.'

She takes me for coffee to the JCR where there several coin machines. I get a black, no sugar, in a white beaker. It's hot, so I park it on a formica table that is littered with crisp and sweet packets.

This apology for a common room has two battered low chairs and a line of orange plastic ones with black metal frames. It's not much bigger than the room where my interview took place.

We talk for nearly an hour as far as we can get from the door which is constantly opening for people who come in and hang around the coffee dispenser, queuing and begging small change.

I'm going to find Sheila's company very pleasant indeed, almost as relaxing as Brian's. She's candid with me. 'You know, this course isn't very well thought of in the other universities. No one really believes the hype. The best all go to UEA.' She smiles to herself. 'Want to know something interesting? We turned down someone three years ago who was accepted afterwards by UEA.' She laughs. 'Booker long-list. Not bad for a beginner.'

I laugh with her, but it's not really funny. 'So why are you doing the course if it's such an indifferent place?'

'I don't think it's indifferent. Some of the staff are first class. But they're not top writers, inevitably, or they wouldn't be here. You don't have to be able to do something perfectly yourself to know how to teach it.'

I don't want to pick an argument with Sheila today, but I'm reluctant to accept that. 'So why did you apply?'

'Because among the sixty or so they take in each year, one or two might get published one day in something other than women's magazines like me. But it is true, no really big writers have ever come out of these mini-university courses. I could be wrong, but I don't think so. UEA yes.'

'So why then?'

'The point is, I've read every single application for all the courses here for ten years - short stories, clips from novels in progress, critical reviews, poetry, biography, you name it. You can spot the really good ones a mile off. I want to get right close up and see them working, hear the way their brains work, and find out whether I've got it in me to do the same. I'm not looking for the big time. I just think it's a convenient way to learn something.' She smiled. 'I'll tell you what I've learned when I graduate. Besides, I want to be able to write MA after my name.'

I'm saddened, but I smile at her. I don't blame her. I've never had to worry about that. 'So what's your first degree in?'

'I don't have one. You don't have to have one as a mature student.'

This leaves me stunned but I try to hide it. 'So you don't think you'll learn from real experts, the horse's mouth?'

She's silent for a moment. 'Look, Lucy. I work here. My lips are sealed, but just run your eye down the list of staff for this department.'

'And?'

She looks around the JCR, as though checking for eavesdroppers. 'One lecture in year two from Margaret Atwood isn't going to teach you how to become a Margaret Atwood, is it? And there are no Margaret Atwoods at UWD.'

So I'm back to square one, worrying again about whether I'm off my chump even considering doing an MA in Creative Writing.

Maybe I should seduce Brian and run off with him to the Maldives and teach people scuba diving.

20 April 2004

The post has just come.

I toyed with the idea yesterday of ringing Sheila to ask her what was in the letter she would almost certainly be posting out that day from UWD. I intended to spend a day in the calm before the storm. But Gaynor wrecked it.

I was talking to her over coffee about the MAICW. I lounged (I never give up my recliner if I have company) and she sat on the floor cross-legged. (She does Yoga, so has no trouble tying herself in knots and says she likes it down there. It keeps her young. I remember sitting on the floor a lot when I was younger. Lying there even, reading, watching TV. When I stopped doing that I have no idea, but sometime in my thirties. Maybe I became too dignified once I'd pulled off my major career moves and been promoted to senior management.)

Gaynor, whose brain is as incisive as my wickedest Sabatier kitchen knife points out that I'm scarcely equipped for studenthood, having sent all my books to Oxfam.

She leaps to her feet and drains the last of her coffee saying, That was perfectly ghastly, Lucy. Have you given up decent coffee? Are you too mean or too poor now you're retired? She frog-marches me to the door. Takes my mug from me, fetches my handbag, throws open the door and tells me I'm a wimp when I complain about the rain.

Within minutes she's flitting along the bookshelves in Waterstones and it's done. At the desk she takes my handbag from me, ferrets in there for my purse, snatches the one and only card from it, and I'm stuck with it. I'm no wimp, but I'm a cissy. I sign.

The letter offering me a place at UWD has a form attached to fill in. I put it on one side. I want to have a really good think about this. There's a date for response. Return by next Monday 26 April. The first session, an information meeting and informal snacks lunch party, is on Friday 23 April. This week. There's a second form asking for confirmation on the options chosen. I haven't the heart for this, so go back to my lovely websearch.

I'm trawling through women+literature. It puzzles me that so many men write about it. One site attracts me. It's American. Domestic Goddesses, a.k.a. Scribbling Women. It's full of guff about women who write about domesticity. I have a look to see if Harriet Martineau is in there, which she shouldn't be. There's no list for searching that I can find, so I give up, irritated by the black background with the white text. It's impossible to read in more than short bursts, so I don't.

After weeks of trawling around the web, I'm more convinced than ever that the good old-fashioned medium of black on white is the best and easiest ever. Maybe our brains are conditioned by the printed word from an early age. I wonder if anyone has ever done research into that? The nearest I get is a Canadian website (a dot-ca) that says:

Your best bet is to provide enough luminance contrast between your foreground and background that the text can be read easily, pick colours that go well together (and with your media), and use fonts that are clear and uncluttered.

You can tell I'm considering having a website.

I'm reading. I'm reading Gaynor's books. I know they're really mine because she forced me to pay for them but they were her choice, so I think of them as hers.

I have no feelings about them. I watched her picked them out with a sense of detachment, being more interested in her public behaviour than in what she was looking for. It was a demonstration of intelligence and skill with a touch of elegance. She flicked them off the shelves with her finger-nail, like a magician. Hook, twist, into her hand, tucked under her arm. I swear she didn't look at any of them, but went on the blurb on the spines.

She's smart, well-read, and would run rings round anyone working at UWD. Since she was chucked out of the civil service at 43, she has had fifteen years to read her head off, in between seducing toy boys, hitch-hiking along the silk road on her tod, and studying the history of the cartoon.

My favourite so far in that neat glossy pile is The History of Contemporary British Literature. It's my favourite because I didn't get past the fly-leaf and the back cover, and I like books that turn me off quickly. Long slow reads are my idea of an early death. I really should not have let Gaynor bully me into this.

The word 'tod' has made my auto spellchecker see red, as does the word spellchecker, but I can forgive it the latter as it has no insight.

Dictionary.com has all kinds of offerings on 'tod' to do with bushes and brushes, but nothing to do with on one's tod. However, G Swithenbank, on a private website at tinyonline says this, and I say, thanks G Swithenbank for a super little site.

On one's tod - alone

Rhyming slang: on one's own = on one's Tod Sloan = on one's tod. Sloan was a famous American jockey who first rode in England in 1897 after several highly successful seasons in his homeland. He was very popular, and rode King Edward VII's horses, but faded from the public eye after being banned by the Jockey Club in 1901.

Pity there's nothing there about what Tod Sloan did to so upset the Jockey Club. Probably being American was enough in those days.

Anyway, I'm instantly back onto my theme of using slang in writing. Writing as you speak. I hunt again. I find Fowler online. Nothing about slang until I search on the front page and there's a link. Guess what? It takes me straight through to a whole page on blog language on yaelf.com

Now there's a thing. I'm in heaven. I'm good at fisking, I discover, ie deconstructing in the systematic manner of Robert Fisk, a frequent hate-topic in the blogosphere. I bookmark the page and enter a new state of mind.

Bellamie recedes into the past. Gaynor's like the weather, coming and going and making me notice her. Brian is background music. Niece is a place to go for an outing. UWD looks more and more like an unnecessary peroration. My spellchecker doesn't even object to peroration. I wonder why the 'oration' in peroration as my Latin says it has to be something to do with the mouth, os, oris. Dentistry? Per+orate, Latin to speak.

I was wrong. To perorate may involve wandering off the path, which was what I was trying to say, but it shouldn't, as it can also mean to summarise. Pity. Digression is what I'm thinking of. Sharpen up Lucy.

UWD and the MAICW (quicker than writing MA in Creative Writing) is a digression. I'll let it decide itself.

I put the UWD forms on the floor by the French windows and don't think about them again but I do wonder why I wander, and start to look around the web for research on the psychology of purposelessness. The first hit is a site on existentialism, and I kick myself for getting rid of my philosophy books.

Going to Gaynor's pile of shining new MAICW-lit on the kitchen surface, I go through them. Nothing on philosophy, which strikes me as a little strange. Surely some kind of appreciation of philosophy is a prerequisite to mastery of the art of creative writing, or am I bonkers?

As a side thought, it strikes me as the most monstrous assumption about the human condition that has ever been made is to link purposelessness with meaninglessness, and with alienation, destruction of the self, and so forth as so many websites do. Pure Weber into dysfunctionality. I resent the implication that my own purposelessness means I'm one of that vast collection of miserable humanity which has preoccupied sociologists for decades. I'm with the hippies, I suppose, a pretty nice and well-adjusted crowd, and it wasn't all down to LSD.

What about the other notions? Living for the moment, savouring each second, going with the flow. And what about the executive monkeys who died of stomach ulcers because they were forced to make decisions day in and day out within tight time frames?

I'll go with this flow. I see the UWD forms and see through them. I'll let that decision make itself. My grandmother was the wisest woman in the uncivilised western world.

I'm on my last lap at Tescos, looking for my favourite toothpaste. Bellamie is right in front of me, frowning at a shelf at about thigh height. She hasn't seen me. My head finds itself full of Brian's advice.

She's got her baby with her, on the other side of her, in a buggy, and is jiggling it as though rocking to comfort it. I go round and look. 'Hallo Bellamie? Boy or girl?'

She smiles. She has the most marvellous even teeth. 'Oh, hallo Lucy.' She looks down. The baby is a girl, I can tell. She looks about one or two, at least not a baby-baby. Bellamie addresses the child. 'You're a girl, aren't you?' She doesn't even raise her head when she delivers this little bombshell: 'I've called her Veronica Lucille, after you, but we call her Ronny.'

My embarrassment must be obvious. 'Sorry,' she says. 'I didn't mean to upset you.'

I smile. I know it's a grim smile because my mouth feels uncomfortable. 'Oh, don't worry about that. Can I get you a coffee?'

She looks thunderstruck. 'Just a tick,' she says, and whips a toothpaste box into her basket. 'I thought I'd give my teeth a dose of whitener. I was looking for the own brand. It's cheaper.'

She's dressed in flat shoes, not her scruffy trainers. Little slip-ons, and jeans under her grimy white-leather coat. Her shoes look new. She's tied her hair back with one of those fabric-covered things little girls use, that look as if they've been round the cat's tail for five years. Her ears stick out but they're pretty, and small.

We walk side-by-side down the aisle, Ronny in the buggy ahead of us. She's facing away, so I'll have to wait to have another look at her or talk to her.

'Sorry I ran off last week,' Bellamie says. 'I just didn't know how to handle it. Your friend is a bit powerful, isn't she?'

I smile to myself thinking that's an understatement of the effect Gaynor has on people. 'Don't let it worry you. I think I want to hear what you have to say, Bellamie.'

My stomach is churning. I feel mildly sick. I'm hating this.

We find a till that's almost free and go through checkout. It feels perfectly comfortable. She scrutinises my purchases with interest, and I log hers in my mind. Stuff I'd never touch with a barge-pole. Oven meals. Bag of frozen chips. Pasta. Pizzas. Crisps. Multi-packs of chocolate bars, miniature Mars bars, Crunchies, Bounties. An avocado. That's more like it. Two tins of cat food. Baby food. A pack of nappies. Cans of lager. A tin-opener.

'Good,' she says, choosing a table and swinging the buggy round beside her so that Ronny can see her. She sits down, and I find myself genuinely curious.

I don't sit, but park my bags on a chair. 'Coffee? What will it be?'

She grins and jiggles the buggy. 'White, please.'

'Anything for Ronny?'

'No thanks. She's got her magic cup.' She goes into a kind of net behind the buggy and pulls out a plastic cup with a spout and two handles. She fiddles with the top, then passes it to Ronny. She's getting up to take off her coat, then changes her mind. I can see she's thinking of another smart getaway, although with her cargo of plastic bags hooked over the handles of the buggy, it might be physically impossible.

I set off for the counter, then remember my manners. I call back. 'Anything to eat?' She shakes her head.

As I queue for our coffees, I'm wondering what the hell I've got myself into. This could easily become an uncomfortably close re-run of The Niece and I.

We don't begin to talk about why Bellamie contacted me until we've both finished our drinks and Ronny begins to wriggle. She's a quiet little girl with the first beginnings of phrases. Words linked together in threes and fours. She's 15 months old.

'I gather you're having another?' I say.

She laughs. 'How did you know? But yes. Just. Fingers crossed. So who told you?'

'I heard from someone at the university. People do talk.'

'Oh.'

There's a pause, so I launch the question that's been plaguing me for days. 'Why did you apply for the course there? Was it because I was going?'

She nods and looks down. 'I couldn't think of another way of getting close to you as you won't talk to me.'

'I'm talking to you now.'

She nods. Her eyes fill with tears. 'It's been hard.'

'I can see that. Me too. I don't find it easy. I've been a career woman all my life. I've never married. I've no children.'

'You have.' She almost snaps at me. 'Me.'

'Hold on.'

She turns her head so far away I can't see her face.

'Bellamie. You asked me to write to you. I didn't but I'm here now. Can you do something to help me understand? Can you write me a note, put down all your reasons for thinking I'm your mother, and put it through my door? I must know.'

She turns back and wipes her nose on the back of her hand. She giggles a little. 'Sorry, that wasn't very nice.' She uses the napkin that came with her coffee and blows her nose.

Now she's on her feet. 'All right, if that's what you want. But please don't set the law on me. I've been very thorough, long before I got this far.' I freeze. She sees it. She whips the buggy round and she's leaving. 'I knew it,' she mutters. 'I knew you were the sort of person who'd do that.'

I grab my bags and go after her. 'Bellamie. I'm not setting the law on you. I've never hired a solicitor in my life except when I bought the house.'

She swings round. 'All right then. But you've got to promise.'

My head has to work at the speed of light. I don't want to dig a hole for myself. 'I can honestly promise you, Bellamie, that I won't sue you, I won't take you to court, I won't do anything to upset you as long as you don't break the law.' That should fix it.

There's a long pause. 'Cool,' she says. 'I'll bear that in mind. Now leave me alone.'

It comes to me as she disappears through the doorway that I forgot to ask her how she knew I was thinking about the UWD course in the first place. I barge out with my bags, looking for her. She's at the bus stop. 'Bellamie. Please.'

She turns with a frown. 'Oh you.'

'Just one question. How did you know I was considering the MA?'

She smiles. I can't imagine why she needs to whiten her teeth. They're perfect. 'I was coming to see you and the postman was trying to stuff some big envelopes in the letter box. I told him I was your daughter and I'd take them in.' She smiles again.

'You are,' I say, 'a pretty determined young woman aren't you?'

'Yes.'

The bus comes. I know I could drive her home, but I've had enough of Bellamie for today. She picks Ronny out of the buggy and passes her to me. She's heavy and smells of hair shampoo. She clings round my neck and I'm afraid I'm going to drop my bags, but she puts her legs round me and grips fiercely. I resist the temptation to kiss her.

Then it crosses my mind that Bellamie might just do a runner and leave me with an even bigger problem, so I put down my bags, and wrench Ronny off. I hold her out, like a cat that's about to throw up.

Bellamie folds the buggy, hoists it on to the step, then humps her bags on-board. The driver hops down and takes them up inside. Bellamie turns to take Ronny back. 'Thanks. See you soon, Mum.'

I push Ronny at her. It's not often I feel like hitting people, but right now I feel a whisker short of whacking her mother. 'Bye, bye, Ronny,' I say.

The child stares at me as if I were a TV screen.

22 April 2004

It's a glorious day today. That sounds like an opening line in a song, but it really is a super bright morning. The weather man, Whatsisname Fish, says we're in for a few mild days.

I eye my garden through the French windows. The fish are cruising, brilliant as road workers in tabards. When the sun shines on the shallow end of the pond, they snake around then line up like taxis and bask.

I have it in mind to sow a few seeds alongside my purple sprouting, which is sprouting famously. Yesterday I bought a little pot of sweet peas from Home Base. (Decisions, decisions. No actually, they walked into my hand. They looked lush enough to eat. Dozens crammed into one pot.) I'll split them up and pot them on, as Grandma would have said.

She's in my mind a lot at the moment. When my mother died, she was already too old to be 'doing with other people's problems'. She seemed to shrink inside herself. It was the ultimate blow. She said You've no idea what it's like to lose your life partner, then a child. She was right. I've never had either. Mind you, if Bellamie has her way, I'm about to find out about the latter. I squash the thought and get back to my sweet peas, and think I might go through the seed-racks in Tesco and see what leaps into my hand, like the peas.

Grandma had an annual ritual. Two weeks before Christmas, she'd plant pots of pea seeds saved from her own garden. She'd mark the date on the calendar and get her potting compost ready (her own from the garden, finely riddled) then hit the job on the due date. The seedlings would struggle through sometime in January, then battle would commence. A long cold spring would leave her wrestling with dozens of thriving plants that were dashing ever skywards, tendrils waving, side-shoots lurching forth. The clever trick was to keep pinching the tops off to stop them from growing too tall too quickly, yet stop them intertwining in an unravellable (if there's such a word) tangle. Every window-ledge in her little house was covered with them in long plastic trays.

They were, I concluded, surrogate babies. Once the weather was warm enough out they'd go out alongside the path to her back door, just the way she'd park her sleeping babies outside in their prams. My grandmother had twelve children. She could never understand me.

Gaynor's MAICW-lit mocks me from the kitchen surface. I haven't touched any of them since the first day. MAICW-lit doesn't have the same ring as chick-lit, does it? And it's a heckuva lot less enticing than Bridget Jones.

The reason I've even let my mind wander to it is that Sheila rang this morning. 'Did you post your forms?'

'What forms?' I know exactly what she's talking about as I say it.

'You know. The ones that came with your offer.'

'No. Should I? I thought, if I came tomorrow, I could bring them with me.'

'If? Aren't you going to do the course?'

'I haven't decided.'

'I'll pick you up, if you like. Do come to the lunch. They don't make you pay until next week when you register.'

'Ah.' I see the light. I like parties.

'Fine, if that's what you want to do.'

'I do,' she said, and laughed. 'I've a few things to tell you that might amuse you.'

My sweet peas are split up. I think I've probably lost a few when they snapped off. They already had their little fingers into each others' hair, so even though I took the kitchen scissors to the tendrils (it made me think of cutting the eyes off snails), it was still pretty tricky. Young life is so fragile.

That makes me think of Ronny and Bellamie, and then of Niece Gabrielle and Tristan. It occurs to me that if Bellamie could prove she is my daughter, which she won't, then she and Gabrielle would be first cousins. The thought amuses me. They have a lot in common.

This sticks in my mind alongside Grandma, my fish and sweet peas, and I wonder what I used to think about when I was at work. Work, I suppose. The next meeting, the next stratagem to deploy, the next shift in my position. I was a horribly political animal, that's for sure, and the vacuum in my life created by not having this to occupy my head yawns.

I miss work. I want to go back to work. I want the validation, if that's the word, that it used to give me. I was someone. I mattered. People listened to me. Now I'm just an old biddy in a queue to hear someone else's verdict on my work. Past middle age. Done for. Invisible in shops.

And I'm wondering whether the MAICW will give me that validation again. I'll ask Sheila tomorrow. At least Sheila thinks I'm worth talking to, and so does Gaynor, and so does Brian. And Niece, and Bellamie.

Maybe that's all there has to be. There's no label on my door any more.

I've got it!

Bat lit. That's it. Fiction for old bats by old bats.

23 April 2004

Gaynor and I missed Salsa this week, and I didn't even notice. My lily beetles, despite all my spraying, are multiplying faster than rabbits. It's been a fabulous day. I climbed up and hacked back next door's Leylandii which are threatening to close out even the stars above the back wall.

Today was the lunch/information session at UWD. I bowed to pressure from Sheila and went along with her. The only trouble was Gaynor came too. It reminds me of the Don Maclean song, 'and her mother came too'.

And Gaynor came too. She was at my place when Sheila turned up to fetch me. She was bossing me around, going through the forms, telling me what I ought to write. Gagging for her next cigarette too, as I told her I'm fed up with finding her fag-ends in my flower pots.

Sheila works the oracle and gets security to give Gaynor a pass, so we all roll in, all three of us together, three old bats.

The room is in the old building which used to be a kind of folly for a London gentleman. Mock Gothic, hideous Victorian, but a heckuva lot more tasteful than the prefabricated rubbish most of the rest of the university is housed in. And the monstrosity where they interviewed me.

Here, there are creepers on the outside walls, leaded glass, wooden floors. Several trestle tables sag under plates of food and bottles of drink.

Sheila introduces Gaynor as her guest, and I come as a 'new student'. She tows us straight to the course director, a small red-head with a beard. 'Angus, this is Lucy.'

He ducks his head and seems to examine my hand. Then he turns, makes an excuse, and is gone. The next thing he's filling his paper plate with sandwiches. I half-wonder whether he's got a doggy-bag somewhere, then dismiss the thought. The man is plainly shy.

He sidles up to a group of young men and offers his plate around.

'Who are they?' I ask Sheila.

Gaynor leers. 'Don't be stupid.'

'Finalists,' Sheila offers. 'BA in Creative Writing. They're coming on the next full-time MA. They're all heading for Firsts.'

'Ooh,' I say.

Gaynor says, 'Don't be catty.'

I have to say they're a nice crowd at UWD. Plenty of smiles. More significant, maybe, a lot of sidelong looks, but that's writers for you, Sheila tells me. Envy is king. It's allowed. It spurs writers to better and better effort.

Some of the women are very young. They look as if they're just out of school. I find myself talking to one who can't speak English as I know it. She's got a thick Birmingham accent (nothing wrong with that - I was born there), and says, 'You know, know what I mean, sort of, dunno, er,' and various other choice indicators of IQ.

No-one knows anyone else except the BA finalists and the staff, so Sheila and I (and Gaynor inevitably) rather stand out.

There's a lot of milling around, balancing of plates and drinks glasses. Someone once told me about research into stranger behaviour in a given space. People choose a spot and head for it, then stand there. Gradually there's a process rather like cells clinging together in a fluid medium, a form of clumping. Eyes meet. A smile. An assessment takes place. Something gells. Similar age, similar hair-do, clothes. Three or four clump together.

That's soon happening. People are clumping. Some don't clump, but stand quite still in their chosen spaces. Perhaps they're rogue organisms like phages, looking for victims.

Sheila drifts off to fetch coffee. Gaynor latches on to a very good-looking man of about 35 with a huge crest of blond hair. He's flashing smiles at her, and I realise she knows him.

Close to me is a very tall girl, probably about 6 foot 12 inches high, as my grandmother would have put it. She has a head out of proportion to her body. It gives her the appearance of a nine-pin. She's very sweet. She smiles at me and her eyes crease. 'I'm Willow,' she says and it seems to me that she must have come out that whippy shape, and that's how she got her name.

She's hot from Oxford. I'm very curious. 'What on earth are you doing here after Oxford?'

She shrugs. 'Daddy is a novelist. He asked his agent. He said he could get me in. UEA's too much of a hot-house.' She smiles down at me and I can see she's looking to see if I dye my hair. 'Are you on the staff?' she says.

I'm flattered. 'No, I've applied for the course.'

'Oh.' She puckers her forehead.

'Why oh?'

'I thought, er. I thought people came straight from first degrees.'

I'm dumbstruck. I take my leave, telling her I like her name. I go and stand in a corner.

There's research on that too. Using corners increases flow in the centre of a pigsty. Groups also can form more easily in corners or against walls. So if you want a party to 'clump', put your refreshments at the edges. Those who wish to wander around have more space to do so, while those who wish to huddle, can become pally around the troughs.

I stand in my corner, and think of the hymn Grandma used to sing. Me in my small corner and you in yours. I whistle under my breath. Jesus bids us shine with a clear bright light. Like a little candle burning in the night. Willow has moved back against a wall. Our eyes meet. We're helping the flow for others.

But it's also a good place to watch from. I watch. I've got to decide, God help me, whether I join this bunch or not.

I begin my analysis. Tit for tat. Do nothing. Toss a coin.

First, though, I want to size up the staff. I begin to cruise, and feel like a shark. I'm in feeding mode.

I'm walking around, sidling between the clumps, looking to see if I can spot the staff. Easy. They are the focus of attention in each group. They're nearly all in their forties. I listen to probably twenty or thirty statements with about as much significance as, 'This is the first day,' or 'We usually have our finals party on a Thursday,' or 'The noticeboard is in B level 4a,' or 'There's a coffee machine in the corridor in C 5.' Very important stuff, really.

I'm looking for Professor Glenda. No sign of her. Then I see Dr Godfrey come in. He doesn't so much enter as snake through, leg first, hand on the edge of the door, head then the rest of him. He's plainly wishing he didn't have to be here. He's fixed his eyes on the trestle tables, then he draws himself upright. He's tall. He's almost as tall as Willow. He seems to be scanning the crowd, perhaps forty of us, looking for someone.

Quick as a bird after my goldfish, I dart for him, hand out. 'Oh hallo, Dr Godfrey.' I nearly say Dr Framework Knitter.

He drags his attention from above the heads and glances at me, then resumes his scanning. He dabs his hand into my outstretched palm. 'Pleased to meet you, excuse me.' He's already going.

I put my hand on his arm. 'We met.'

He turns to me. 'Oh did we? I'm afraid I don't remember.' Then he angles away, without looking at me, saying, 'Sorry, got someone to find.'

I retreat to a wall and observe, contemplating why the brush-off. He has absolutely no recollection whatsoever of having interviewed me. I watch his progress.

There's a bunch of chicks, probably aged around 22 or 23, and the youths from the BA, clumped in a loose group of eight or nine in a niche between the trestles and the window. Godfrey plunges into their midst. Greetings. Names. Pumped hands. He positions himself. He's grinning as if he's won the lottery. They're all tilting their heads towards him in the subservient manner of the deferential.

I glance around. Same for Angus. Now he's towing his little gaggle of youths to join Framework Knitter's gang.

The party has partitioned.

I count. Of the thirty or so students, more than half are over fifty, a small number more, perhaps as old or older than me. All women. They've drifted together like flotsam on a beach.

There are three men in their forties. They're clumped. The remainder are all callow kids. Tomorrow's talent. Like iron filings to metal, they're sticking with the staff.

There are six staff. Angus, having dumped his acolytes with FWK, has gone to centre top, boss zone.

Tap, tap, tap. A knife on a glass. 'Welcome.'

Angus repeats more or less what's in the prospectus, but asks the staff to identify themselves. I was right. Young. There is one exception, a woman in her late fifties who's introduced as a 'visiting' professor, a crime writer, name something like Floss Artishank. Another, a man with a crutch, the writer in residence, publishes science fiction. He's called called J. C. Loth, or something that sounds like it, and I find my mind wandering to the strategic challenge of deep-space cleansing. He's Guardian short-listed.

We are treated to a recitation of their published works. Never heard of any of them, nor has anyone else to judge from their expressions. We applaud.

There's no sign of Gaynor, but Sheila appears at my shoulder. 'I've got to go to my office for a tick. Want to come?'

I don't say what I'm thinking. Get me outa here.

Sheila does her stuff in her office, which seems to consist of making up a few bits of mail and walking with me to the post room. We look around for Gaynor and find her smoking behind the boiler house with a very young woman. They are laughing.

She introduces us. 'This is Susie. She's pulling out.' Susie wears her hair in red sprigs with ribbons.

'Oh, why?' The words slip from my mouth.

Susie looks like a doll that's been left in a cupboard for decades, its eyes stuck open. 'No reason. Just don't like it.'

'Is that all? Any particular reason for not liking it?'

Sheila is beside me, listening with every cell in her body

'I've wondered,' Susie says, 'but I talked to a couple of the staff.'

'You did?' I say. 'How did you manage that? They were scarce as rocking-horse shit where I was concerned.'

'Ah well, you know,' she says. 'They're kind of, you know, partisan.'

'Meaning?' I say. Gaynor's smirking behind her and grinding her cigarette butt beneath her sole.

'They like poets, they like very attractive girls, handsome mysterious blokes, gays, people who're published already.' She makes it sound like a personality trait.

Sheila's itching to say something. I grab her hand to silence her. 'And what about old biddies like me?' I say.

Susie smiles and laughs.

'You'll get a fair deal,' Sheila says, as she guides us back to the car park. 'They can't do anything else. The person they rubbish today might hit the big time tomorrow. They never fail anyone. They never say what they really think, but they'll make small points that people nearly always find helpful.'

She watches while Gaynor folds her legs into the back, then shuts her in. She comes round and makes sure I've got my seat-belt done up.

She takes the wheel. She's smiling. 'Told you it would be fun.'

'Home James,' I say. 'I'm convinced.'

What I don't say is that I'm bored. As Brian would say, I'm bored out of my frigging mind, and this lot look like good fodder for a novel.

Jesus can bid me shine all he pleases. This little light ain't going to illuminate any corners. But this little light can have a lot of fun at the expense of other people.

That's not a decision. It's an observation. I still have to make the decision. Over 50 and finished before I've even started. Another observation, put so nicely by Willow. Oh, she said.

I call Brian from my mobile and tell him my laptop isn't working.

Not true, but it's a good excuse for coming round this evening.

Gaynor digs me in the ribs. 'Salsa, Sunday at the Palace,' she says. 'And leave that poor man alone, or I'll tell his wife.'

'You rotten cow,' I say.

Sheila laughs from the front. 'You two old friends?'

I'm thinking, if Gaynor came on the course with me, we three could have such a ball writing bat-lit.

27 April 2004

I am in hot water with Sheila, with Gaynor for ducking out of Salsa on Sunday, with Brian for being beastly to him, and with Bellamie, inevitably. My niece is very quiet, so I'm assuming there's some kind of honeymoon period afoot in Milton Keynes.

Looking back, it's surprising Sheila didn't ring me yesterday. She must have known before she left work that I'd not returned the form for the MAICW course. (Those initials torment me. My Grandma found a new brain-teaser in her last years. Sitting in my passenger seat making up words and phrases to match the number plate on the car in front. I find myself thinking Make Worse for MAICW.)

Anyway, Sheila's on my doorstep at 8.30. When the knocker goes I assume it's Bellamie delivering her next little bombshell about why she thinks I'm her Mama.

I peer down through the curtains, slide into my dressing-gown and pelt downstairs as fast as I safely can. I can't go down in twos and up in threes any more. I suppose my main terror now is slipping and taking days to die on the floor downstairs, the real mark of an old bat.

I'm calling out as I go, trusting she'll hear over the rush-hour traffic. 'Coming, Sheila, coming.'

She steps right in. 'Morning. Hope you don't mind. I'm on my way to work.' She's got an envelope in her hand. 'I'm assuming you've lost your form. We didn't get it yesterday.'

'Coffee?' I turn and lead her through, calculating how to get out of this one. 'Quite honestly,' I say, 'I forgot.'

'Thought you might have. I've filled this one in for you. All you've got to do is sign. And no, I don't have time to stop. Would love to.' She's looking around, appraising my naked dwelling. 'Love the décor,' she says. 'I've always thought I'd like to go for a minimalist approach myself. But where do you keep everything?'

'I don't. I've slimmed my life down. It's glorious.'

She's on her way back to the door. 'I'll drop in at lunch-time and pick up the form. Okay?'

I nod and wish she wouldn't. I'm feeling hassled.

Back to DAS, my decision-avoidance stratagem. Tit for tat won't work, unless I fill the form in and return it by hand, but tomorrow rather than today (ie one day later.) That would work.

Doing nothing won't, unless I accept I'll be forced to explain my prevarication. Tossing a coin will work. Heads I fill the form in (the option I least desire), tails I don't, which allows me not to take the decision.

I toss. It's heads. So by TFT (tit-for-tat) and by the toss, 2-0, I sign the form.

I sign it.

Gaynor is annoyed with me because, she says, I've been avoiding her. I haven't actually. I've been enjoying the glorious sunshine and having a glut of lily-beetle massacring, planting up the annual beds, counting the surviving tadpoles (fifteen yesterday), and clearing out a lot of old flowerpots.

I've found two whopping common frogs (the Internet says they're on their way to extinction), two tiddling little ones, incredibly perfect and bright, with shining golden eyes, plainly last year's babies, and millions of vast snails of the edible kind.

Apparently the Romans brought them here, and the big ones that I find on the walls behind the shrubs are perfectly good to eat. You just need to take care they've not been snacking on pesticides. Sad. I chuck snail bait around all the time, and spray everything in sight, I so hate my lily beetles.

The Internet says a snail can slide over a razor blade without cutting itself. I go out and hunt some and look at them with new respect. Maybe I'll stop using toxic substances and go in for eating them. According to Shakespeare,

Love's feeling is more soft and sensible

Than are the tender horns of cockled snails;

I've got one on a saucer, admiring it, when Gaynor turns up. She spits expletives at me and rants until I take it outside.

'You're turning into a disgusting old freak,' she says. 'I think you're losing it, Lucy. You were quite normal while you were working.' She won't give up. I pass her coffee and go to my lounger. She follows, ranting. 'You're having a break-down. That's why you left work, isn't it?'

'No, actually.'

She goes outside for a smoke. She's poking around in the flowerbeds. She picks up a snail and waves it at me, leering. I point to the saucer. She drops it there and goes to wipe her fingers on a leaf from a centaurea that's rushing heavenwards.

She's back inside and heading for the toilet to wash her hands. She comes back and starts all over again. 'Well, what is going on? Aren't you doing that course?'

'Yes.'

'Don't be so limp.'

'It's not limp to say yes.'

'Okay. So when do you start?'

'Friday.'

'Let's go out to celebrate.'

I say nothing, just smile.

'There you go again,' she accuses. 'You are being limp, you are, you are.'

I smile. My mind is wandering to my writing. Truth to tell, apart from my jaunts around my garden and sitting in the sun, and loving not having to work or to do anything, I've been writing. I've dug out two of my old novels which I wrote about thirty years ago and completely forgot. I've seriously revamped one, and I'm probably about quarter-way through another.

It's a strange feeling to read stuff I wrote and not even remember writing it. Some of it's quite good, so I tidy it up with my fresh and critical eye, and move on. More than anything I'm finding too many adjectives, too many adverbs, too much inner meandering. Out of every ten pages, I'm probably removing up to half. I'm very pleased with myself indeed.

'Do shut up, Gaynor,' I say. 'You can sometimes be a pretty big bore. Amuse me please.'

'I want to see your writing,' she says, so I take her upstairs.

Big mistake. She's got my laptop open before I've caught up with her. She's spotted the phone point. She's bloody furious with me for not giving her the number. She rings her mobile and holds it out to me. 'Okay, 46589. Gotcha, Lucy.'

'No point in that,' I say. 'I'll stay on line all day and all night if you try to ring me.'

'I hate you,' she says, and goes home.

She rings me seconds later. I know it's her because I do a 1471 and it says 'We do not have the caller's number,' which is code for 'mobile phone.' No-one has rung so far on this number so it has to be Gaynor.

It occurs to me that she'll drive straight round to Bellamie and give it to her.

I hate her, I tell myself, and find myself writing this blog because my friend Gaynor never fails to amuse me.

Upsetting Brian was even easier. He came to my door as well, and I didn't let on I was there. He cast around for a sight of my car, spotted it, stamped up and down on the top step, then went away, hands in his mac pockets, head down. I felt like a heel.

He was harrumphing, I could tell by the way his shoulders moved. Only men harrumph, and then it's only certain sorts of men, with big chests and beefy faces, and huge hairy moustaches. Can you imagine a little skinny-wigger with a thin face harrumphing? It's not physically possible.

Brian went off harrumphing, and I almost ran after him and flung my arms round him and said, Don't hurt so. I have to be the way I am after five decades of being the way my role made me be.

It's a familiar theme in the psychobabble industry, but it's real enough. Ask people how they define themselves and they almost invariably do so in terms of their roles in relation to others. For me, daughter, sister, grandchild, scholar, student, recruit, trainee, this job, that job. Now I'm not yet in the geriatric group although I draw a pension. So what am I?

A bat, yes. But how would a newspaper headline describe me?

Spinster, middle-aged. Retired spinster.

Student has to be better than that.

As for Bellamie's missive, which will surely contain her own definition of me, I'm not exactly holding my breath with excitement. It's even occurred to me that I could seal up the letter-box again. I forgot to say in my blog that I'd relented and taken the bit of wood off after Gaynor and Brian told me I was mad.

So there's the usual daily delivery of flyers from local retailers or double-glazing companies, or people who haven't noticed I've had my fascias replaced, or the walls treated, or the slates redone on the roof.

But nothing from Bellamie. I rather think that the terms I dictated for our future relations stuck in her craw. I wish her no ill, but if that's so, good.

Gaynor's right. I am changing in ways that other people can't understand. For one, I'm becoming a recluse. Is being a recluse, or having a big streak of that inclination, a prerequisite for taking to writing? Is the Make Worse course designed to turn its students into apprentice recluses?

I have three days of freedom before I begin to find out. I'm going to razzle with Gaynor and Brian. I could even get Bellamie to join us. I'm going to go out, every day, all day, every evening. I'm feeling just like a student about to go up for her first term.

Here I come.

30 April 2004

Today was the first day of the Make Worse course at UWD.

Boring in the extreme. They took our money off us in another cupboard, this time in a basement of a building that would have been quite at home somewhere in Baghdad, sent us to the photographer who operates in a prefab, to the Students' Union to register (I didn't bother), then to Admin (normally Sheila and her cronies) to pick up our ID cards which had been processed in the blink of an eye. We were handed a 'pack', a wadge of paper said to be 'information'. No-one seemed particularly to want to see us, there were no teaching staff to be seen, no welcoming smiles. All very sanitised. I felt as if I had just been admitted to a mental hospital and turned loose as a voluntary patient. We weren't even told to go away. We could roam around the walled and fenced compound. I chose to escape.

We report back Tuesday 10 am to be addressed by Angus. Fierce pleasure!

I didn't see Sheila, I saw only a few people I recognised, nothing of Professor Glenda or Dr FWK, and learned nothing except that I am now £3241.74p worse off.

On the plus side, I now possess a hideous little plastic card with my mugshot on it that has the usual stuff on it. Bar code, signature, name, various numbers, name of the course and, naturally, the logo for UWD which is a black heron.

I nearly put it in the bin. It seemed unnecessary. They'll let me know if they really need me to have one.

I'm going to take my niece and her unwilling son out for the day on Sunday. She asked me to tea, but I thought I couldn't stand so much time in her poky house with her husband lowering in the background.

As that leaves me with a day to kill I thought I might just take a small bag, point my car vaguely in the direction of Milton Keynes and see where it takes me.

Salsa on Wednesday was a dead loss. They cancelled it. Something about the teacher going to Torquay for the weekend. Gaynor took me to a bar and spent most of her time over three gigantic gins baiting Brian by mobile phone. I eventually dragged her away. She slept on my sofa.

She then put the mockers on Thursday in much the same way. What on earth is one supposed to do about someone like Gaynor? I decided she's a one-woman sheet anchor.

My pre-enlistment razzling consisted of two days studying contemporary literature. First, I went through the bookshelves in the library picking out the most thumbed volumes, checking the dates of publication. Thrillers, sci-fi, romance. Children's books. Harry Potter. Even in the adult sections. Did Victorian adults read The Water Babies?

I then went to Waterstones and did the same there, making it a little sociological study. I hovered and watched who gathered in greatest numbers along which shelves. Reference was tops, especially travel. Then the crime section. Romance was visited by women of a certain age and men in their late thirties and early forties. Others went in with a determined eye, scanning for certain authors. I saw one woman flick along the shelves rather in the way Gaynor had, finger out, nail gleaming, hooked over the top of the spine. Yank, drop. Yank, drop. She finished up with a pile of about fifteen in the crook of her arm. That would, I reckon, be about a fortnight's reading. I strained to see the authors. Trad female Brits like Fay Weldon and Margaret Forster. Almost all over forty and many between fifty and eighty.

Yippee!

Ghastly weather again today. I went out for a long walk last night with my new pedometer on. That's another story, though, and I have to pack.

4 May 2004

Hurray, hurray, the 4th of May. This ought to be a significant date. Someone's put a thing on the web about Space Day, May the Fourth be with you. I'm in good spirits. My niece and Tristan declined to go away with me so I headed for Ascot and looked up cousin Percy. He fed me claret and Madeira with salmon and crêpes suzettes smothered with cointreau. He's the only person I know who has genuine feather mattresses. He spent Sunday morning showing me all his oil paintings, again, and a small garden bed full of different kinds of myosotis (forget-me-nots to most people, including me.)

Sheila's parked outside, waiting. She's taking no chances with me. She's not even turned the engine off. It takes me back to starting secondary school and going up to university. Amazingly, given today's climate of paranoia about girl-snatching, my parents expected me to cycle to school on my first day, go from our home station with my trunk and bags to Oxford on my own, and left me to it. A postcard a week. No phone calls. The odd food parcel. None of this modern namby-pamby stuff.

The feelings are the same but this time I'm being 'taken'. Like an inmate out on a 'pass' for a weekend from prison, being returned safely to the compound.

I don't say anything to Sheila about my thoughts. It would be hard to see her as a mother figure. Far better to be mates going off to uni to start a Master's course. She's smiling like someone who's leaving for a cruise.

Security spot Sheila at the wheel and wave her by.

'Did you bring your pass?' she says.

'I gave up carrying plastic.'

'Ah. I expect they'll get to know you soon enough.' She drives straight to the building where she says we are to be addressed by Angus.

'What's he going to say?'

She laughs. 'What he said last October and will be saying next October, ad infinitum, until they find another job for him or he goes somewhere else.'

'That bad?'

'That bad.'

'How do you know he won't change his tune?'

'Every time, year after year, I print a copy off for him to remind himself. It's always the same. He's a scared little bunny and likes his routine.'

'Give me a summary.'

'Welcome. Enjoy yourselves. Get your work in. We fail no-one. If you're already published you automatically get a distinction. Now shove off.'

She leaves me at the entrance to J Building. 'See you at the first session. Eleven o'clock. This building, second floor, room 14. I'll fib for you.' She pushes her mobile phone towards me. 'I'll call you if there's a problem.'

I take a walk round the grounds. The wind is flinging rain at everything and the blossom is being blown from the trees. There's a sodden carpet of pink under the cherries, and the last of white and red tulip petals have been ground into the path.

I find a magical little corner, a kind of summer house with leaded windows and a door that's rotting along the bottom, but it's waterproof. I sit on the wooden bench at the back with the door open The seat is dotted with ingrained bird lime from being left open to the elements.

How did I come to make this decision? I get nowhere with the question because Bellamie heaves herself into my mind. I'm feeling bad about her, about Brian, about Gaynor and wonder whether I haven't been tempted too far.

It's not hard to spend half an hour thinking something over. My determination not to make decisions is complicating my life ridiculously. As things were left with Bellamie, I was to expect a note from her setting out why she thinks I'm her mother. I'll talk to you to, I said, if you promise to do nothing illegal, the implication being I was talking about harassment. But she went off in a huff, saying she didn't trust me not to take her to court anyway.

Once, someone said something about marriage, and how arguments start. Negotiation from fixed positions is no basis for a relationship. Perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut and been less businesslike, but it comes hard after years of working in a context where all relationships are defined by anticipated outcomes.

As Brian pointed out, I really do need to know what she is on about. I phone him. His mobile is switched off. I leave a message on his voice mail.

It's still raining. I sit and watch people scuttle by hunched under umbrellas or pulling hoods over their heads. One man sprints past in a drenched T shirt and shorts, his trainers squelching. It makes me think of cycling to school in the rain. We used to change our sodden clothes and wear our chemistry overalls while the caretaker dried our tunics and coats in the kitchen. They'd never be allowed to do that today. There'd be a tumbler dryer somewhere, or we'd have to suffer. Or Mummy would make sure not a drop touches flesh.

I used to love the rain on my face, running into my mouth. I still don't mind it, and consider whether I should walk in it and turn up to the first session saturated from head to foot.

I give up wrestling with the idea because Brian rings. He's between clients. He seems pleased I rang. I explain.

He's even more pleased. 'Why don't you let me take you out to dinner tonight and I'll advise you on Bellamie?'

I decline, and he says I should swallow my pride and contact her, and make it up with her, but very very carefully.

He sounds just like my father, so I bait him the way I used to lead my father on. 'But Brian, why so carefully? Why not just say get your butt round here and explain?'

'Because she might accuse you in turn of harassing her.'

'So how do I do this? Draft a letter and pass it round the neighbourhood and get a vote on whether it's careful enough?'

He sighs, so gently I barely hear it. 'I could write it for you, a hidden question, saying how worried you are about her and how your last conversation with her ended.'

I'm laughing at him. If he were here he'd be reaching out to try and kiss me. 'Not on your life, Brian. I have to do this myself. Besides, I don't want to encourage her to see me as the all-caring nurturing mother-figure. Frankly, I don't care. I just want her to leave me alone.'

'Then you've two choices. Enjoy the peace and quiet. Or stir things up, by sending her a nice little card enquiring when you might hear.'

He is just like my father. So sane, so measured. It occurs to me to wonder whether my father had a hidden side that I was incapable of envisaging. I was at a dinner party a few weeks back when a highly respected personage, a local figure, pillar, JP, patron of this and that and the other, revealed he'd been locked up during National Service, been on charges, and had narrowly escaped imprisonment for 'borrowing' the silver from the officer's mess for a party, and seducing the COs daughter. Only don't mention any of this to my grandson, will you? he said. He might think it's acceptable behaviour.

There's a lull in the rain and I make my way to J building, hit the coffee machine for a hot chocolate that tastes like cardboard, and prop myself against a window ledge, waiting for 11 am.

Sheila comes down for me. 'Small departure from the usual,' she says, handing me a piece of paper. 'They took a poll, a show of hands, on changing the delivery of the modules.' She's looking very serious and I wonder what really happened at that meeting.

'So what does that mean?' I say.

'Less teaching, more work-shopping. More preparation. You have to read set texts, prepare written work, circulate it to members of the workshops, discuss, dissect.'

'Bugger,' I say.

She pauses. Her eyes open just a bit and I know my swearing has surprised her. 'What's wrong Lucy?'

'Workshops are a very tricky teaching medium.'

'They use them a lot here.'

I decide to say nothing further and study the sheet of paper.

'They're very popular,' she persists. 'People like them because they're informal and they can chat and get to know each other.'

I decide to say nothing and study the sheet of paper. But my mind and body don't keep it up for long. 'When I was working, I had to investigate the efficacy of workshops in our internal training school. We came up with a decision to abandon them as a teaching tool.'

'Christ,' she says, and it's my turn to be shocked. 'You'd better keep that to yourself here. It's the cheapest way of using staff time. And they say students are better motivated in workshops.'

I think my decision to say nothing was absolutely spot on. 'Right, where do we go?'

Sheila's got her teeth into me. As she steers me upstairs, she says, 'Go on. Why did you abandon workshops? '

'Mentoring is more effective. People wanted one-on-one from someone they respect, not from their peers. Learning was almost zero in workshops. Besides, the cost of training people who were experts in a subject rather than people managers was too high.'

'Oh. Training?'

'Yes.'

The door to our room is shut. Sheila opens it and whizzes in ahead of me. 'This is Lucy.' She heads for a space on the far side of the table.

I'm left with a choice of three empty seats near the door. The table is made up of four wooden ones pushed together with a gappy array of all round. There are two low seats in a corner with a coffee table between them. I'm tempted to go and recline but think it might be misunderstood.

'Hi.' A tall woman with short dark hair, angular and cheerful, greets me with outstretched hand. She's half-standing and has to turn round to see me. 'We were just about to introduce ourselves. I'm Paula Bailey. I'm lecturer in Contemporary Fiction.'

'Great,' I say. 'Did you read my stuff?'

She looks puzzled. 'You wrote something?'

'I sent it in. I assumed if you were teaching me you'd read it.'

'We work as a team.' She sits down, back to me.

I sidle round her. 'Great. What's your specialism, Paula?'

'Narrative structure.' She's smiling. 'A very contentious area.'

'Perfect,' I say, aiming for the middle one of the three chairs.

'We'll see,' she says. 'Let's start. Hi, Sheila. Nice to see you've made the leap.' Everyone turns to look at Sheila.

People begin to recite their little bits of patter. I've done this dozens of time when I was working - I'm Lucy. I'm Head of Logistics. My team, da-dee-da-dee-da.

The line-up opposite me, all of whom I recognise as acolytes of Framework Knitter, comprises six young women, three straight from first degrees in English, two have worked for a few years, one as speech therapist and the other in a stables. The third has spent a year in hospital having treatment for a tropical disease she picked up in Ghana. There's a woman who's been a cookery column writer for a local paper and a man who's taught creative writing at summer schools since he retired from teaching, then Sheila, and an ex-sailor, and last before me a part-time estate agent. They all look pretty friendly although the girls, as I shall call them, look terrified.

I tell them I used to run a big department in a major commercial enterprise before I retired, that I've written fiction for fun since I was eight, that I'm a published writer. They all start looking through their bits of paper, as does Paula Bailey. When I tell them I once had tea with the Queen, they perk up, and they're soon smiling at me. It's not true, but anything's better than getting heavy.

The estate agent says, 'Lucy, I can think of only one reason why you're on this course. You just need more confidence in yourself.'

Answering candidly would have seemed unkind. Self-confidence, or lack of it, is a concept I have no understanding of whatsoever. It's rather like telling me I have a diseased appendix. I'm told there's one inside me somewhere, but I've never seen it or felt it grumble.

Paula hands round sheets of paper with her idea of what we'll be doing. Ten weeks of sessions on various aspects of narrative theory with practical exercises. 'Anyone brought anything to read to us?'

Estate agent drags a bundle of sheets from his briefcase.

'Jolly good,' she says. 'Sheila, would you mind nipping over to admin and getting this lot twelve times. Coffee everyone?'

Without glancing in my direction, Sheila takes the sheets away.

We troupe downstairs to J building coffee bar and queue for the machines. I prefer water.

One of the girls (Fedora, I think) is ahead of me in the cloakroom. She's blond, and as wide as she's tall, not because she's anything other than very very tiny, well under five foot. 'You're very powerful,' she says. 'Don't you feel rather out of it here?'

'No.' I'm considering what on earth that all means. 'A, I don't feel powerful. I'm at the beginning of a new career. And B, I suppose as new girls and boys we're all 'out of it' here until we get 'into it.''

'True.' She wipes her hands on a paper towel and dumps it on top of a very full bin. 'But you said a new career? Aren't you retired?'

'When I was your age,' I say, smiling my lardiest smile so that she won't think I'm patronising her for being so young, 'we were always encouraged to think that writing was a uniquely human activity rather than a role in life.'

'Isn't it a strain?'

'I suppose I'm increasing my chances of snuffing it sooner if I switch to fiction.'

Her eyes are glazing over. She smiles. 'Oh, that's so interesting. I write poetry.'

'Poets die youngest.'

'Perhaps I'd better give it up.' She takes out her cigarettes and offers me one.

Sheila has balanced a coffee and the armful of paper and is ahead of me though the door. 'Give us a hand,' she says. 'Put these round the table.'

We are doling out the papers, placing them on the table in front of each chair when the group traipses back in. They are jovial and already in little cliques which are the same, so far as I can recall, as they formed at the introductory buffet lunch.

Paula is ready and smiling. 'Right, ten minutes to read, then we'll start.'

We read in silence. Estate agent has brought the first chapter of a dark and rambling novel. Spelling errors, idiosyncratic punctuation, lashings of adverbs that don't exist, asides in brackets. It's excruciating, except that I'm intrigued for the first page and a half. Five minutes crawl by and now I'm bored. I smile around. Everyone's smiling around, heads down, eyes flickering. No-one sniggers. Estate agent gnaws the quick of one fingernail.

'Ten minutes.' Paula kicks off by saying we will go round the room, give our views, she'll give hers, then we'll see how the time is going. 'I'll limit us to five minutes each. Lucy first.'

Estate agent, a man with a face like a sack of corn that's slumped because it's half empty, places his forefingers on the bottom corners of his top sheet of paper and sits transfixed throughout the whole process. He's hating every minute of it.

I take pity on him. It's early days. 'It's very good. I like it. I got a bit lost at the end but it's quite intriguing. I like all the adverbs. Very unusual some of them.'

He looks up for a moment. 'I like them too.'

I say no more, the critique continues round the table. His writing is shredded with varying degrees of kindness and thoughtlessness. One of the girls says she can't understand any of it, hates the main character, can't tell the difference between him and the other man. Estate agent flushes purple. His eyes water. His forefingers mark the paper where his nails bite in.

The next girl shrugs. 'Well, nothing to see, you know what I mean, really. I want to read the rest before I comment.'

She's the last. Paula leans forward, arms on the table. She reminds me of my old gym teacher at school, skin shining like a polished apple. 'Tell me, Clive. How do you see this first section in terms of plot and structure?'

Clive is taken aback. 'Er, gosh. I dunno. Er, I don't have a plot.' He laughs. 'I don't know what's going to happen. That's my problem.'

Paula smiles even more. 'Oh good. A lot of writers write like that. What does anyone else think about Lucy's point? Adverbs?'

There is no reply. Then two of the girls smirk at each other. One, Zilla I think, says, 'Er, we was told at Birmingham to leave out adverbs. Know what I mean? But I don't fink that matters. It makes it more interesting, if you get what I'm saying.'

'And adjective,' the other girls says, Hilary, I think.

'Ah thanks,' Clive says and he seems to puff up a little.

I think of Brian who puffs up when he's pleased and know I'd rather be with him that here.

We finish promptly. Sheila runs me home and relieves me of her mobile. I looked after it and wondered whether I'd done the right thing getting rid of mine.

I dig out Bellamie's address and pen a little card. It's a print of a water colour of Canterbury Cathedral.

Dear Bellamie

I'm wondering how you are and when I might hear from you with your thoughts .

All the best

Lucy

*

My afternoon is spent chasing up the texts on our list. The set book for the Narrative workshop knocks me back nearly £35. Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction.

I look it up on Amazon and it's a 5-star winner. Even people who teach creative writing at universities come out from behind their wraps and eulogise. I turn to our text for the week: Chapter 1. Story form and structure.

I'm hooked.

I haven't posted the card to Bellamie, so when I take my pedometer for its daily walk I slip her card into the post box on the corner.

As I approach my door, I look at my pedometer. Only 6163 steps. I'll punish myself tomorrow by doing 13837.

That means trotting to somewhere a couple of miles away. Bellamie's? Gaynor's? The shops.

Brian is at my door. My niece and Tristan are in the back of his car. Gabrielle is crying. Tristan is playing with his Game Boy.

As I get to the steps I see Bellamie behind Brian. She's so much more slender than him she has been hidden from me. It begins to rain.

'Never rains but it pours,' Brian says. He's grinning as he's about to let me into a circus.

I hop up and kiss him on his cheek. 'Glad to see you.'

'Go on, flower. Open up.' He takes me by the elbow and puts his hand out for the key.

I catch sight of Bellamie. She is smiling towards Gabrielle and her eyes are glistening. She has the profile of a china doll.

12 May 2004

The idea of writing a blog is palling. It upsets me to know that I can't keep it going. Bellamie, Gabrielle and Brian between them have taken up most of my spare time in the last week. It's no good saying I've got work to do because that would let the cat out of the bag. I'm not prepared to make it public that my decision not to take decisions is fraying at the edges.

I've taken to reading in the loo, sneaking out at dawn and walking to the station to lurk in a cafe when I need to spend several hours deep in thought. As for writing, I've had to go back to Jonathan's place.

My room upstairs has proved as impervious to the depredations of Tristan as my lilies still are to the beetles. He spotted my laptop and it was lost to me.

And my ruby ring has gone. Gabrielle went out leaving the house open. She swears that's true. Short of searching her, or calling in the police what do I do?

Madam, you leave valuable jewellery outside a safe?I can just hear it.

As for my course, Study and Practice of Novel Writing, in the first workshop last week - which now feels about a year ago so much has happened in between - was a truly enlightening start to my literary education. Prof Glenda came and did her stuff with her teeth and lower lip, also with wit. And, I have to admit, with immense erudition that made me reevaluate her. She didn't get her PhD through knowing the right people. She has a list of credits longer than the very small table we sat around. The least popular course, several students came in late then found reasons not to return after coffee break.

Two days later, Short Story Writing was taken by my heart's delight Framework Knitter himself, Dr Mark Godfrey. He's a laugh a minute, as Sheila put it. The place was crammed. There must have been thirty of us, with no chance to get near the table for the bulk of us, bulk being the operative word. Most of us were over fifty and there was not a single man among us.

Today is the day when I take Niece back to Milton Keynes and go straight to talk turkey with Brian about Bellamie's bombshell.

It has given me nightmares. I've dreamed of my sister for the first time in over thirty years, and I've spent countless hours in my sleep roving landscapes that would do credit to a sci-fi horror movie.

17 May 2004

I'm embarrassed. According to Jonathan, whom I met at the newsagents, people are reading my blogs. And I've done nothing for days. I have to go into my own blogs to find out where I've got to.

The last one was 12th May. That's Wednesday last week. Brian was on my doorstep, Bellamie behind him with her note. In Brian's car were Gabrielle, peering round to watch me come up to my own front door, and Tristan with some gadget or other. I had work to do for my course and I didn't much relish this collection of humanity on my doorstep. They took over my whole existence for five days.

Today, for the first time, I've had some space, as people term it, to myself. I was watching a program this evening on TV (Brian brought in a portable to 'keep Tristan out of your hair'). It was about celebrities - never heard of either of them, and thought Caprice was a way of playing music or a perfume - who agreed to be disfigured for a while. All very altruistic, and I'm sure they meant well at one level, but it's dosh, publicity, and makes it plain just how super they both normally look.

My point is that they gained space by being disfigured through clever make-up. The cameras told all. People steered clear, as if they'd got leprosy. It occurred to me that this has to be instinctive. The tribe won't survive if it carries the physically compromised.

So what am I doing wrong, to attract this bunch of misfits who arrived like a clap of thunder on my doorstep? For a split second I wondered if someone had set up a branch of the ministry for jobs and welfare, with Brian the welfare officer.

So they've all gone, and it's a shining day. My lady blackbird came and put on a fabulous exhibition in my fish pond. Her squire showed her to the shallows and the beach stones where the tadpoles hide, as if ushering her to a red carpet. He ducked away and lurked in the undergrowth beneath the acer. She stood on a rock, looked, bobbed, pecked, probably had a go at the few tadpoles that are still around (now growing lumps where their legs will be), then darted looks about her. We greeted each other with female beady eyes.

Splash, flutter. An amazing sound of plunks and whirrs. I grew bored and looked at something else. The white lilac shouting at the purple. The wallflowers, old plants I've cut back every year for their seventh reappearance. Only I know they're really perennials and no-one needs to go out every year and buy new ones. There are self-sown stocks, white and purple. Very scented. And the first roses. The wisteria about to dangle its purple cones above the honeysuckle.

My book lies open on my lap. Donna Tartt. We've been given a chapter to dissect for style and content for our second workshop on the Study and Practice of Novel Writing. We're being taught how to write carefully. Sounds like a good idea. If we are to write novels, then we need to at least be able to study our own choice of expression.

Prof Glenda (the newspaper says biting the bottom lip, as she does, is a signal of genuine feelings, like Bill Clinton when he confessed) gave us no specific guidance, just a generic instruction. Read this, she said, and examine each and every sentence in the whole chapter. This is the microlevel.

I'm doing just this. Donna Tartt litters her work with adjectives. Plenty of adverbs too. So much for Birmingham University. Moreover, nothing happens. Chapter by chapter, nothing happens except the protagonist has pneumonia and the others starting acting oddly (as if they aren't odd already). But we know Bunny got killed, and we've a fair idea of the other three who are involved, other than the main voice.

Ms Tartt, damn her good looks, writes like an angel. But a very old angel, a hermaphrodite freak from some other time and place.

Gaynor came in that evening and took a hand in sorting out Gabrielle. I must say she surprised me. She arrived with two boxes, white and sagging, lashed up with green fancy ribbons, full of cakes, and a new-fangled torch for Tristan packed in a jiffy bag. He was vastly amused, and snooped round with it, peering into every corner. I could see Gaynor was bursting to tell me to bugger off and leave her to it. She plainly had her plan.

She swept them away today. She and Gabrielle have been walking a lot in the park, with Tristan trailing behind in a desultory fashion, poking at his mobile phone or thumbing his Game Boy. Sometimes looking around him as if half-expecting some young female to arrive and seduce him away. He's good-looking and bright, if rather sallow, and way too tall for his age.

Brian has hung around, dropping by most mornings, doing lily beetle duty. I daren't tell him about losing my ruby ring. His mind is elsewhere. He carries Bellamie's letter everywhere with him and picks at his right ear, and runs his forefinger around his waistband, staring out of the window. And he's bothered. He makes coffee almost every half hour.

My grandmother used to have that marvellous expression, chewing the cud. Brian is chewing the cud.

Meanwhile I'm having nightmares about my sister. I dreamed the phone rang. It was Christine.

Vicky. (I used to be Veronica, then Vica, then Vicky.)

She sounds weak. She sounds as if she's a thousand miles away. Is that Vicky? I see her in a rubber dinghy. It's half full of water. Her face is waxy and white, her eyes brown and staring. I want to come home. Speak to me.

I vomit over my shirt, the pillow, the bottom sheet, then finally on to the floor.

That was last night. I'm afraid to go to bed. And Sheila and I have our workshop tomorrow. I'm not prepared.

I lie on my back with the sheet off. Gave up duvets long ago. There's no moon, and it's as hot as mid-summer. There's a nightingale in Bedford Gardens, so loud I can hear it over the traffic which has just about died down.

My blog awaits. I hoist myself out of bed, and clear off the junk Tristan's put on my laptop, like a Spiderman screensaver, and a game that automatically starts up if you so much as look at the mouse.

I'm at it.

I've finished. I'm very tired. I'm going back to bed now. If I dream about Christine again, I'm going to (make a decision to) do without sleep. I've plenty of ways of spending my time other than in a semi-comatose state with my brain rambling around areas of my past I learned to make no-go territory long ago.

But it bothers me that Brian has refused to tell me what Bellamie wrote in her note.

Time enough later, he says. Get the other things in your life in perspective first.

26 May 2004

It's been so long since I've been near The Word Mountain that writing my last slab has taken on the feel of some other life, in some other place, a kind of dream. I have no idea, without checking, what the date was, except that it was sometime last week.

I check. It was the 17th May. When I look back I know precisely why I've not been near it. I've been thinking about my sister, and that is always something sure to cast me into a pit, chewing bits out of me, smashing to smithereens my ability to deal with the rest of this great big confusing blooming thing called living.

Apart from having food poisoning through eating a bad pork pie, I've been seeing Gabrielle into her new home, organised by Gaynor, for which I am truly thankful. She's so damned efficient she makes me feel like a bumbling idiot.

Simple. Gaynor was wielding next door's Yellow Pages and flicking through the pages. She rang Bedford rental agents and had a place to view the same afternoon. I skipped my Tuesday workshop with Glenda, and rang Sheila to make my excuses. I went zooming up the motorway with Gaynor and paid the deposit, taking the key and the contract for Niece to sign. All within an hour. Possession next morning.

Niece and son were installed by 2pm (another skipped workshop), in their newly sanitised quarters, reeking of Jeyes and furniture polish, blazing with sun through huge plate-glass windows. Light bouncing from every plastic surface. It makes my own little place seem dark and poky, and I'm wondering if Omar will stump up to pay this. Gabrielle reckons he will, out of pure guilt. She doesn't care where the cash comes from. He has ways and means, she said darkly.

Tristan liked the view from eight floors up and went to lean against the window, hands outstretched, so that his imprints were left hanging in space against the blue of the sky.

The excursion, three runs in total, between Milton Keynes and Bedford, left me hungry. Where Gaynor can survive on black coffee and a small bag of almonds, I have a trice-daily need for protein. Try and buy protein, nice sliced ham or corned beef or good cheese, in a modern city dedicated to whistling cars as fast as possible from ring road to shopping mall or out-of-town complex, to motorway, and away for good. I went until nearly 4 pm without eating.

Gaynor angles out and minces into the Esso petrol station shop, legs shining brown in the sun. She comes back with the new tabloid-size Independent under one armpit, a bottle of Chardonnay under the other, a can of fly spray in her left hand, and a small pork pie in her right hand. She crooks out her middle finger to undo the door, then flashes me a smile as she slides behind the wheel and thrusts her purchases into my lap. 'Here you go, your poor old cow. Get your mouth round this.' She sets off home.

The M1 is murderous, whining and flicking under our wheels, the roar of solid strings of lorries along the inside and middle lanes, lunatics trying to overtake at 100 mph in the fast track. Gaynor slaps the window cill in time with F.U.R.B. going full blast.

I hate it. It makes my head buzz. I'm full of thoughts about the workshop I'm missing. I'd prepared my work, too, as I did for yesterday. Donna Tartt's The Secret History has credits that go all round the world when butted end to end. Sure, it's accomplished, all those things. It's lofty and at the same time rooted in a believable student context, like any modern clap-trap university. I like it but I loathe her synthetic cleverness. But that wasn't my task. We were given Chapter Three. Long chapter. All her chapters are long. Everything is too long. I've just read Bunny's funeral. Donna should have buried it. She had a rotten editor.

Taking to pieces a bunch of her sentences was great fun. She has a favourite word. 'Start'. Her characters are forever 'starting', in the sense of being startled. I found a couple of short paragraphs where the word appeared three times. As for redundancy, we know her characters are talking, so why tell us?

But I'll bore my own readers. My point is I'd done my homework and was looking forward to giving young Donna credit where due and pointing out that she Could Do Better. I could be annoyed with Gabrielle for bad timing, but if having an aunt around has a function, then I'm there to do that. After all, she's suffered enough by having as her mother my sister Christine.

Gaynor has already turned onto the M25 when I unpick the greased wrapper from the pork pie. It's a brand I've never seen before. I ease off the side crust and sink my teeth into the meat. Funny taste. Herbs? Spices? I have a sudden image of hitting the window button to pitch it outside as from a canon, but we're in the outside lane, and I can just see the headline. M1 PORK PIE BOMBER FINED.

I'm ravenous so I plough through the horrible lumpen mass and put away the paper with a feeling of disgust.

That night I'm sick. I'm sick for fourteen hours until the contents of my upper intestinal tract have been scoured out, my liver has exhausted its capacity to excrete bile, and my head hurts as though someone has sawn the top off, like opening an egg. I also have a temperature and go to bed with my clothes on.

It makes me think of being sick after I dreamed about Christine. Christine was my big sister. She was three years older than me. There were two brothers ahead of her and me, but they both went abroad. They don't speak to each other, and they don't speak to anyone in the UK other than occasionally, say every four or five years when they fly in, spend their time touring and visiting everyone they know except their own relatives, make a few phone calls, then swan off. They made it clear they were getting out, to get away. What from they never said.

I knew, but I never asked. I didn't much care. I was too enmeshed in my own world, going to Oxford, getting my first position in London, working a fifteen-hour day and a six-day week, eating, drinking, dreaming and breathing my work. I barely noticed they weren't around.

But home life before Christine left was stamped indelibly into the way I think about families, and may well explain all on its own why I am still a virgin. Christine was the architect, quantity surveyor, engineer, project manager and executrix of my own young life. She caused me to do everything I could to make myself invisible. I couldn't bar my door, my personal possessions were trophies she'd carry away and hide from me, my time was commandeered from the moment she got in from school, and my wishes were trampled under the feet of her own self-willed blind purposes. She had no more idea how she appeared to other people or how insane some of her behaviour was than a child of about two. My mother used to call her 'an inconsequential child', meaning she couldn't predict the consequences of her behaviour. The Times ran an article the other day about insanity, saying that the truly insane will continue to do the same things repeatedly assuming that the outcomes would someone how be different, meaning better for them, next time. By that reckoning, Christine was insane: she expected people to someday feel sorry for her, which perhaps they once did when she was about two.

Yet poor Gabrielle isn't at all insane. How anyone so steady, so reasonable, so ordinary could have sprung from Christine's poor sick being defies understanding. I like Niece, you see.

Probably my talent in managing my life by numbers, making my decisions according to a rule-book, dates from that time at home when Christine reigned as the power behind my parents' throne. They hadn't the faintest idea she was there either, pulling the strings. I'd make my plans, ie construct my own rules for the next day, before bed, write them down in code, then live the next day strictly according to plan. Christine would hunt around for my notes, tear them up, chew them into soggy crinkled pads and spit them out at me. She'd spit in my eyes, with or without chewed-up paper, dribble wee into my bed so I'd get into trouble, and pull faces at me when I was feeling most vulnerable. When she got her first boyfriend, she brought him home and made me sit on my bed, then made him take his pants off so that I could see his willy. I shut my eyes, and she had a tantrum. I left the room, so she punished me by chasing me round for weeks with a pin, and prodding me. When I complained to my mother, she said, 'Oh, little birds in your nest agree,' as if I was imagining it.

On the other hand, if I was ill, Christine ministered to me. She'd manage me like a pet, deploying her own unique and tormenting remedies. Just drink this, Vicky. She'd warm it and bring it in, stirring it, smiling, sickly sweet. Marmite, salt, sugar, orange juice, aspirin. I used to wonder if she'd made me deliberately ill so that she could be in charge and impress everyone with how generous and helpful she'd be. My mother was too up to her eyeballs with her job and the house to notice these small acts of manipulation, all designed to keep me under my sister's control. Yes, my mother worked, a small solicitor's practice in the side street where we lived.

Christine was every small girl's nightmare, a witch, yet my own flesh and blood. But when you know nothing else, you put up with it. My brothers closeted themselves in their rooms with boy things and steered clear of her. I couldn't. I was small and powerless. When I escaped to London she consumed herself in the fire of her envy. Lucy has everything. The house, the job, the friends, the education, the looks. Look at me. I've got nothing. Poor me.

Christine was expelled from school, ran off with a man from Barbados who was a glorious golden colour but according to my father BLACK, and upset both of my parents in perpetuity. I'm not sure whether home life was miserable because of the way they reacted to her or because of her innate self, the genes she inherited and turned to her advantage. In my years as a professional people manager, I've known a lot about people like Christine. I've sacked more than a few. Years before I came to recognise the type, Christine was my first experience of the serial bully, attention-seeking type. Manipulative, charming, self-seeking, self-pitying. She bullied her teachers, my father, my mother, me, the neighbours, her patrol at Guides, her fellow students, her husband, her sons, poor Gabrielle, her friends. She was still at it in her fifties when she died. It's all on the web as I find by hunting around. This is Christine to the last dot and crossed 't' on http://www.bullyonline.org. I'm reminded of some of her tricks.

Here I stop. Why am I bothering to write this down? Why should I care? I'll tell you why I care. She hijacked my girlhood. Then a woman came and stood on my doorstep and tried to hijack what's left of my adult life. They're connected, I know it. Bellamie and Christine.

By far the biggest thing around now, where perhaps it ought to be Gabrielle and her separation from Omar, is once again Bellamie, my beautiful friend. She appears like a wraith, a sprite, in the supermarket, along the street. She waves and smiles and I think again how pretty she is and how motherhood suits her, and wonder if she had really been mine who she would have resembled. Perhaps my Scottish great-grandmother. Or my father's sister, Marion.

Bellamie's bombshell is still on Brian's desk at work. He has been to see me several times, always sweating and earnest. He has a way of twisting his fingers round each other as if to crack the knuckles, then kneading one palm. I feel sorry for him. He's acquired my burden and wears it as Bellamie will wear her own new pregnancy, right out front, conspicuous, a bulky unforgettable bundle of future problems.

He showed me her letter with its enclosures. Adoption certificate, birth certificate, revised birth certificate, a very poor photocopy of several sheets from hospital records, social services letters. My name was on her birth certificate as her natural mother. I felt sick just looking at it, dazed, then contemptuous. Rubbish.

Brian shook his head. 'This, Lucy, is going to be a long job.' He slid the papers back inside the envelope and clipped them away in his briefcase. He smiled, his moustache bulging out as he tightened his lips over his teeth. He patted my left shoulder. 'Leave it with me.'

I did leave it with him. I'd still rather leave it with him. Someone, I thought is good at forgery.

Workshops this week were interesting. Paula's on Tuesday comprised a debate, going round the table in turn, about our reading. It would have rated overall 2 on one of our own training evaluations at Debreys. Shocking, really to charge for this. Read on.

There were two absent, as I recalled the group from a fortnight earlier, and one new member, lovely Willow. Willow and I almost collide in the doorway. She's wearing a flowery frock and a little sun hat made of white straw with a small rose on a band. It's a gorgeous day, and most of the group are sitting outside waiting on the grass, in a haze of daisy white and little things like dandelions that make it look as someone's sprayed it with English mustard. There are viper's bugloss in there too. Most of them are smoking. Two of the men are swigging from the tops of lager bottles. The air hums with bees. (I'm chary about bees, having reacted badly to my last sting on a beach in California, of all places. My friend placed her 'healing hand' over it, and sure enough the pain began to ebb and the swelling go down.)

Willow shoots a look at me from under her brows, the way Princess Diana used to eye the camera. 'Phew. Too hot for me.'

I smile. 'Yup. I'm going to look at my notes. What happened last week?' I know actually, because Sheila came round and left a hilarious record of proceedings on my doormat. Paula, she said, came in shorts and a crop top. She'd tied her hair back and found a long pair of jet earrings. Jolly good, Paula began, five minutes each. She then sat listening, watching the clock, while each member of the group said what they thought about Chapter 1. After each comment Paula asked the group to comment on the comment. Every five minutes Paula conjured the next to take their turn. With a twenty-minute break, it took up one hour and fifty-five minutes.

My turn now, Paula said. Sheila's final sentence, followed by three exclamation marks was this: She said she agreed with us all!!! Good work. Chapter 2 this week. See you next Tuesday. Ciao, guys. Got to get back to my writing.

Willow doesn't answer my question. She has placed herself at the far end of the table. 'I'm sitting here.'

'Why there?' I'm dumbfounded.

She's spread her books and papers in front of her and is sorting them into tidy piles, each in line with the edge of the table. 'I dunno. Just where people sit. Where do you sit?'

I incline my head and go to the coffee table and put my stuff on it. The seat I am about to take is low, frayed, ground deep with something that's either a dead Mars bar or chewing gum. I take the other. Its springs have gone and it sags to fit round my bum almost comfortably. I can't see Willow from here, so I shuffle it round and it scrapes the floor with a low rasp. 'I'd hate to take anyone's place.'

'Don't blame you.' She's staring down at the table. 'I'm not looking forward to this.'

'Oh?' My interest flares. 'Why? I thought it was rather a good chapter.'

'My father says it's all rubbish, so I'm feeling rather confused about it.'

'Your father being a novelist?'

She raises her eyes. She has a sharp bright look. 'Oddly enough, I'd rather be writing than reading things, you know.'

'Aren't you writing?'

'Yes, for the short story workshop. You done your thing for it?'

Christ, I think. I forgot. 'Yes,' I lie, thinking I'll write about the two cats. 'Just a very short one, a kind of fable, a little moralistic thing.'

I go home and write it. Here it is.