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CLAVOS VALLEY

 

(novel in-progress)

 

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In the south-eastern uplands of the United States lies the suffocatingly forested Clavos Valley, and within that, The Box, an entirely glass-walled house. The building is of state-of-the-art design but already has history.

 

When an overweight, world-weary Englishwoman arrives to sit the house, she has no option but to study her own reflection every night in the vast black windows. Weeks then months of solitude pass and the woman comes to dread another image which increasingly appears beside her in the night-time glass; the figure of a musician - young, slim and merciless.

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extract from CHAPTER ONE

 

 

'Which mountains?' I asked.

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Henny, an American from university days, one of the few who'd made the effort to keep in touch, knew nothing about that part of the country and very little about Jon, the owner of The Box, this despite Jon being a friend's brother. 'The usual mountains, I guess,' he said. The line buzzed.

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The only thing Henny proved right about was the architecture. This is a glass cube, a cube that's been pulled up at one corner for run-off, but also, I'm convinced, to goad the viewer. Whether this is to admiration, rumination or unease I can't tell. Almost, but not quite, a perfect cube in a headlong valley which is nearly - but of course can't be - untouched by man. There are still places like that in America; folds, stretches, swathes even, where you can pretend that you're alone.

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So why would I refuse?

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WILLOW KNOLL

(novel in-progress)

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Jonathan MacKenzie (Iagan MacCoinneach), a native Gaelic speaker from Kintail, was profoundly in love with Madeline Thomas at university. Madeline was outspoken, Jon diffident, yet they came from similarly hopeless-seeming rural backgrounds. Now Jon is a middle-aged man and a father, long married to another woman. Walking in a rainy Highland glen, the sun appears on a distant hillock. Jon sets out for the knoll knowing the sunlight will have faded by the time he reaches it. As he travels across the rough ground, at times doubling back, losing his way and finding it again, he recounts to himself, and not always honestly, the tale of his and Madeline’s passion and of why he destroyed their relationship. But there's another story in Jon's head: that of his growing obsession that a woman he sometimes glimpses on a station platform from his commuter train is Madeline.

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extract from CHAPTER FOUR

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One night Madeline explained how she’d worked her way up to the sitting room. A Jewish family had owned the flat from the end of the nineteenth century. Generations of neatly built people squeezed around dark, over-sized furniture and gilded mirrors - a neighbour had related this to her - until the last of the family cracked his skull on the edge of a towering, black credenza, here in this very room (I didn’t ask her what a credenza was). After that, a minister’s wife had taken the place on, renting it to a rolling programme of undergraduates.

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‘I started out in the cupboard Kerry’s in.’ Kerry was Australian. I remember her as being much older than the rest, about forty maybe, breastless, colourless, always with a headache coming or going, and a plastic beaker of diluted orange in her hand. Maybe it was living in the boxroom that had done it to Kerry. ‘First chance, I snatched a room with a window, the one Dave’s in just now. Hideous wallpaper in there. Have you seen it?’ 

 

I shook my head. I must have seen it, of course; the door to Dave’s room was open most of the time. I vowed to study the wall coverings the next time I could. 

 

‘But offset by the vista of the drying-green,' she said. 'Though the sashes rattle like death in there, and I got woken up most nights. Never thought I'd have the chance of this lovely.’

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We both looked up to the confection of a cornice cornice.

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‘Do you ever dust that?’

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‘Are you insane, Iagain?’

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‘Fair enough.’

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She stared at me.

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‘What? No. It was just a passing thought, that’s all.’

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‘Let your thoughts pass undisturbed next time, a bhalaich.’

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She turned over then, and almost immediately fell asleep. The feeble central light in its paper globe hummed at the edge of hearing. We’d got back too drunk to bother groping for the switch on the bedside lamp. At some point, I’d have to get out from under the duvet and into that perpetual tenement chill - Edinburgh or Glasgow it makes no difference, a stone flat is a stone flat. The bay window behind its shutters juddered as a lorry or two, and what might have been a night bus, passed beneath it. Between the vehicles, there was nothing but the muffled sound-mash of a city at its ebb, 4am maybe. I could have checked my watch - it lay on the packing case she used as a bedside table. I’d forgotten to put it on when we’d gone out; all I had to do was stretch out my hand. But I was trapped between movement and stillness, wakefulness and sleep, taken up into the thin, stale-ish air of the room. 

 

Overall, it was a tidy room for people of our age, and naïve I suppose, with patterned cloths and postcards of dramatic scenery tacked to the junk which constituted the furniture. But it was also seedy and slack, the colourless paper - which the tenants weren’t permitted to cover with pictures - curled up an inch from the skirting and had peeled from the cornice, drawers wouldn’t close fully, the wardrobe gaped the plastic strap of a bag and the cuff of an arthritic fur coat Madeline had been given by someone’s mum. It could have been the room of a woman in poverty-stricken old age. At long last, the tip into slumber arrived, but with it something sharp, nipping me awake. It was the pinch of realisation. About the room we lay in. The old Jewish sitting room. It was still the room of an exile.