Warren retired from the West Midlands detective team in 2019. He wasn’t getting any younger or fitter. Of the ninety-two murders he’d investigated over seven years, all but one ended in the killer’s conviction. These days he works mostly from home, assessing officers for promotion. He passes on his experience to junior colleagues, future detective inspectors some of them, so that his knowledge will survive him. So that, in his own modest way, he’ll leave a name that’s worth remembering.
Naoise
Once I write this sentence I hardly know where it will take me, she thought as she sat at the crowded desk by the window and lifted her pen optimistically. All night she had slept on the sentence, which, she could see now in the frank light of day, was a definite improvement on its predecessor. And so she crossed out words long worked over and beneath them jotted down their betters, killing her darlings without qualms or regrets, for after all, as she often told herself, perhaps a little too often, they were only words. Head bent, busy pen in hand, she hoped to sit like this throughout the remainder of her time alone. But after an hour or so she felt her mind begin to wander. A daydream came between her and the pages, the last draft of her first novel, Edith and Julian, to which she was applying the final touches.
She was on the guest list of some swanky literature festival, perhaps up for a prize – this was a daydream, wasn’t it? There she went, picture it, swanning her way to the entrance, dressed for the occasion (less so for the Tube rides) and already tasting the bubbly when she bumps smack-bang into the doorman. A smile. That is, a doorman’s smile, the least smiley-looking smile around. ‘Name, please.’ That’s what doormen say. Not hello or good evening. Name, please. A glance down at his list. ‘Nee-sha Dolan,’ she’d say, to which she’d get a perplexed, ‘How do you spell that?’ That’s when she’d know she was well and truly out of Terenure. ‘N-a-o-i-s-e.’
She shook her head then and found herself once more in the flat she shared with an asset manager who doubled as her best friend. They’d met at a university debating contest and got on so well that they had known straightaway they’d be in each other’s life forever. Both now entering their late twenties, they had in common a certain estrangement, a sense of not quite belonging or fitting in. Both were new to London: his family were British Indian; hers, Irish. He fell in love with men; she, with women. Neither had what you might call a typical mind. ‘Off in her own world,’ people had always said of her, although her mother preferred to say ‘imaginative’. She’d hid from schoolmates her swotty summers at the camps organised by the Dublin Centre for Talented Youth. It’d been a relief not having to hide any of this from her flatmate-slash-best friend – he’d earned eighteen A-stars at GCSE. A precocious history buff at thirteen, he’d volunteered to spend three weeks living in 1941 for a British TV documentary series. Smothering blankets. Tripe for supper, and stodgy apple pie. No computers or mobile phones. No communication with the outside world. It had been his idea of fun. Naoise, when told the story, thought it sounded like way too much trouble. She had also lived immersed in the forties, incommunicado for weeks – it was called reading a Jane Bowles novel.
Oh, but, this was no way to be working. Daydreams and distractions. Allowing her cloud-like thoughts to drift. She retrieved her pen and again faced the typescript pages and the emendations in her neat cursive. She felt she knew all these pages by heart. She knew where the words were long and made the reader pause, where laughs were caused by this scene or that pun. She knew the polished parts that had taken ages and ages to get just right. The wry observations on money, sex and class. The exchanges where she showed how her generation formed relationships, how they text-messaged, how they spoke. She saw the gap here on this page that no one else would know to see, the edited-out sentence (another darling gone) that had once filled it:
‘He’d had a habit of cutting short whatever you were saying to go, Yeah, yeah, yeah, like he wanted to be agreeable but wished you could be slightly more economical with his time.’
Economical. It was her style as well.
She read over the pages, but she had not written in pages. She’d written paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word. Each one a swaying bridge to the next. All through the writing she’d avoided ideas of plot or character, but simply cultivated both as they’d grown out of the words that she selected – they were what happened when the words acted on one another, influenced one another, made sense together. Not once had she imagined a scene in order to write it, the shape of a table or the dimensions of a room or even colours – she didn’t see red when she wrote ‘red’, rather she saw what writing ‘red’ would do to a sentence, and what the sentence would do to a scene, and what the scene would do to the story. In this associative, cumulative, almost magical way she had composed and now revised this debut novel of hers. It was how she knew to write.
To which genre, she wondered with some dry amusement, would critics assign Edith and Julian: Literary fiction? Young adult romcom? Highbrow chick lit? Chic lit? Aut lit? (Recently she’d had it confirmed from doctors that she was autistic.) She could be as ferocious with herself as with her words.
Dark humour – that ability to make light of yourself, of circumstances beyond your control – it had helped to save her more than once, growing up. Came with the family back in Ireland. Speaking of whom, what would they make of these pages once they were published next year? The book, they would call it. Never the novel. Your book. Her book. She could imagine her mother’s friends sighting it in Eason’s, saying to her mother afterwards, ‘Hasn’t your one done well for herself.’
Had she, though? She could not be so certain. She had the very bad habit of being hard on herself and here she went again. Two hundred or so pages. A slim novel. Versions of which, at least the earliest scenes, dated back four years. Four years, and this was all the writing she had to show for them. But this was unfair. It was her nature, and her wisdom, not to rush. And she was forgetting her piece of travel writing which had appeared in the Irish press. Not to mention her poem, ‘Seasonal Fling’, all seventeen lines of it, published by a culture website in her last year at uni. She had several short stories ready to go. Essays, too. And literary criticism.
Publishers were interested, that was the main thing. Seven of them in Britain had just bid for the rights to her novel.
The alarm on her phone alerted her to a coffee break. Gladly she took leave of the desk and made for the kitchen, suddenly recalling her legs. Bloody pins and needles. She hobbled over to the kettle, thinking it was a good thing the jar of instant hadn’t moved. Where would she be without it? Not at this cupboard, that was for sure. From a low shelf, she fetched down her usual mug.
She was a creature of routine. A stickler for it, she might say. Every day began with her toothbrush, and afterwards there would be coffee but neither too soon – for then her enamel might stain – nor too late, lest she should grow too tired and headachy to do anything with her morning, including going out for coffee. That was why she always allowed thirty minutes – not twenty, or forty – between her tooth-brushing and her coffee drinking. Time enough to dress for the café and to rehearse ordering her customary soy flat white to go, and the trip to said café which would get her walking and the walking get her dopamine flowing through her brain. A long sip back at her desk, or two, or three, and she’d feel ‘on’, open her email briefly, then spread out her pages like a general with a map.
Quite often, though, the coffee wouldn’t behave. It wouldn’t want to stay put in the cup; it would dribble down the sides, spatter her skirt and leave moist brown rings on her manuscript.
Some days the novel had needed six cups or eight, other days, ten. All in all, gallons had gone into the book, she could have bathed in the stuff, like Cleopatra and her donkey milk – with the difference that coffee, at least, really was rejuvenating.
No coffee, no novel. It was as simple as that. Also: no reading, no novel – for reading had always seemed to her as vital as eating, and, as it happened, she trusted her own good taste in literary influences. Jane Bowles. She’d read, and reread, Two Serious Ladies during the months that she wrote an early draft, and taken from it various lessons in dialogue. And she’d paid just as great attention to her dog-eared Oscar Wilde, because could that Irishman write! Those plays, the evergreen wonder she’d found in them as a teen, the wonder of being initiated into other people’s thoughts. She loved how Wilde’s prose bared a character’s innermost urges, condensing them into pithy phrases, excelling in telling without a story’s saids and dids.
Nabokov. Another treasured model. The émigré’s sharp eye and sure feel for language. Whenever she’d become despondent, mid-second or third or fourth draft or later, wondering if there was any point to what she was doing, or trying to do, with a sentence structure, or some allusion, she’d had only to revisit his Lectures on Literature to quell her unease.
‘The inner texture of life is also a matter of inspiration and precision.’
She thought that she would like to travel again, once she had finished digesting these and other influences; she would like to drink cappuccinos in Florence and then take off wherever her public readings might lead her. Although these plans wouldn’t be actualised any time soon. The publication date – April 2020 – seemed to her an eternity away. Scheduled for the week she’d turn twenty-eight – she hadn’t long been twenty-seven. So, really, an eternity away! And nerve-shredding to imagine all that might come between her and the novel’s release, between now and that faraway then. Her publisher might go bankrupt (though there was no reason in the world to think it would); global war might shatter cities; some third-floor piano, with Chopin open on it, might crash from a window onto her passing head. Odder things had happened, indeed were always happening somewhere.
Curious to think that copies of her novel would be read by perfect strangers up and down the counties of Ireland, across Britain, North America, and still other lands. Strangers who, turning its pages, might linger over this scene or sentence, that paragraph or chapter, and find them good. Better than good – striking, moving even.
She did not know if she believed in an ideal reader – and certainly did not write for such a person. She wrote for anyone who would read her with care.
Out of her difference, her singularity, she would speak to theirs.
✲
Ask anyone in Dublin and they’ll tell you that Terenure – in the Southside – is a grand place to live. Not far from Rathgar, where, in Jimmy O’Dea’s lyrics, even those who can’t afford it have a car.
People from Kimmage, though it abuts Terenure and is said to have gone up in the world in recent years, will agree that the latter is rather posh.
Quiet, Terenure’s residents will say to describe the place. Boring more like it, grumble their teenagers. The sort of place where nothing much happens, young and old agree, though what each means by that is rather different.
Naoise’s parents still live in the sought-after red-brick where she and her siblings were raised. Her father worked for the Electricity Supply Board. Her mother was a teacher and aromatherapist. Both parents valued the arts and there was always music in the house, the notes mingling with the bright smell of lavender. The music came especially from Naoise’s mother’s side, Longford people who sang in choirs and squeezed accordions. Her mother played the French horn and taught her shy daughter the euphonium.
All cows eat grass, her mother said. She was teaching Naoise to sight-read. A C E and G were the space notes: A(ll) C(ows) E(at) G(rass).
The euphonium took some learning to handle; it was a big brass instrument for a small girl. Doubtfully, Naoise brought the mouthpiece to her lips, puffed out her cheeks and blew for all she was worth. The euphonium seemed almost to hesitate. Then up writhed a lazy note, part complaint and part whisper, like the last breath of a deflating balloon.
She tried again and again and her face grew very red, a picture of furious concentration. Her stubbornness endeared her to any teacher. Did that girl ever persevere!
Then, one day, her hands warming to the brass, she poised her fingers on the valves and summoned her deepest breath. The note sounded deep and clear. A jolt of surprise went through her; she hadn’t known her own eloquence.
With time and practice she spoke more fluently in the instrument’s rich voice. Her intonation and phrasing improved. When she got to be good enough she played in a concert band and conversed with the trombones and promptly answered the clarinets.
None of this surprised her mother. Naoise had an inborn ear for rhythm, which had spurred her special gift for language. When still a toddler she would time her mother’s index finger as it travelled the width and length of her bedtime story. If the finger lagged she squirmed, if it ran ahead she whimpered. She was placated only when finger and voice remained in tempo.
Soon after, she had learned to link the letters’ shapes to their sounds; to read along, then, alone.
She would open her storybooks on her knees and read aloud to the empty bedroom, performing the stories’ music in a solo recital. Lips pursed, she blew b’s – like how her mother blew into a French horn – and the b’s called up bats, and pulled down the black curtain of nightfall. Then she sucked in a lungful of air to sound the o’s and raise the moon. Tongue behind her front teeth, she played the l’s and stars gleamed and sparkled and twinkled.
It seemed to her that the variations she could play with twenty-six letters were infinite.
Stories are infinite but not storybooks, which is why Naoise could soon be seen – though not heard – in the musty hush of the local library. On her first visit she stood two bookshelves tall, and feared she’d never reach the higher titles. For the longest time imaginable she was no taller than Religion. Astrophysics was way above her head. So was James Joyce.
