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Tuesday 3 July 2018

A fragment of fiction


I’ve been roaming through my old writing, bits and pieces of stories I abandoned years ago. The piece below is twelve years old and where it was going has leaked from my memory. I can’t even recall who the characters were supposed to be, yet whatever ideas were floating around in my mind would have been driven by those characters.

No great surprise of course. Ideas can be annoyingly ephemeral unless linked to something already familiar - which probably  explains a chunk of the human condition. Use it or lose it really does seem to be the message. The title of this fragment was Johnson.

Johnson
“We have to be careful.” Johnson stood by the window in familiar pose, staring at a thin line of distant sea. We were on the fourth floor of the Tower and the window was dusty. Beyond the second floor all windows were out of reach of any window cleaner – because of the blades. The sun shone brightly, Johnson squinted and rubbed his chin.

“What shall we say to the others?” Johnson spoke like that – as if he valued the opinions of the people he was talking to.

Somewhere upstairs the Master Lavatory flushed. Pole the Butler must be using it. Using the Master Lavatory while the family was away was one of Pole’s perks – one of a series of perks he had devised for himself after he rose to the long-coveted status of Butler to the Tower. As the Master Lavatory sluiced and gurgled to silence, Pole’s heavy tread trundled back downstairs to his lair on the fifth floor. Pole never used the lift.

“I said what shall we say to the others?” Johnson repeated. One of the turbine blades sighed past the window squirting a few more watts into the National Grid.

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