The Mists

Help! from Easter sun and beer in the garden, we have plunged into early morning fog and cold, grey days veiled in mist. (Well at least that’s how it is in the North, I think the weather down south is considerably more clement. )

I’ve been out once already, early this morning, to take my car to the garage and although I’ve come back in, and been sat here some time ,I still have my coat on  – so that should give you some idea of how chill the wind is.

Still, for all my discomfort, I can’t help it – there’s just something about mist I LOVE!  Maybe it’s because I’m a flatlands, Somerset girl at heart; maybe it’s the mystery it evokes, the possibilities that it conceals, the way it can thread itself across the land sitting just above the course of  a river snaking through the valley.

Then there is the lifting to reveal a new country, ‘It was too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now and the world lay spread before me.’  – Charles Dickens – Great Expectations. My daughter must have sensed something of my affinity with mist because when she was younger she made me a beautiful bookmark with this quote on the back.

In the first chapter of my novel The Sweet Track – Lilli has just left the seasisde town where she has been looking for a job and is cycling home through the mist…

As she cycled home a mist rose up from the rhynes *and ran across the surface of the pasture. It spread across the fields hanging a foot or so above the land, rising around her and obscuring her pedals and boots. It enveloped her and wrapped itself round like a winding sheet; like a shroud. By the willows cattle were gliding through the gauzy vapour only their heads and backs visible, like targets on a fairground shooting range. The sky turned pink as the sun fell and the moon rose, as Lilli moved through the landscape travelling over the ancient pathways and disappeared tracks once laid across the inland sea. She knew them by instinct; she walked them in her sleep while the land turned to water around her.

*Rhyne is a west country word meaning ditch

Somehow I always sneak the mist in – just to prove the point here is an extract from the beginning of my latest novel Bad Girl… 

Not a wisp or a curl, not a trail or a smudge, not a trace of cloud, only blue. But you can never see the whole of it. Not from this window…

They call me Theresa. Theresa Darling, that’s my name, T for short, sometimes, especially when I’m in jail.  My mother chose it. It was after her favourite saint, the “Little Flower,” Marie Françoise Therese Martin. My mother worshipped her and kept her picture next to the bed in a pink plastic frame decorated with roses.

She lived in hope that I would grow up sweet and pure just like saint Theresa. Well I hate to disappoint but pure I most definitely am not, and I’m no sweet pea either. Bless her, but what the fuck did she know?

      When my mother gave up, when she finally abandoned her hope, like a beaten up old box left out in the rain, she abandoned me, or to put it another way, she passed on, as they say. She died. By then I was fifteen and old enough to look after myself so that was okay and besides I’d met Asif and we’d set out on our summer of love. But that’s not to say I stopped missing her or that I ever stopped loving her or wishing it had been different.

      So, how come I’m such a sinner then, such a bad girl, what with my holy name and all? What makes someone like me the rotten apple, the black sheep? I can’t answer that. I don’t go in too much for all that psychobabble. The way I see it, it’s my responsibility to look after myself and keep things right and if they’re not, well I’m the one to blame, no one else.

      Saint Theresa promised the world a shower of roses when she died. She died young, she was only twenty-four. I’m twenty-three and I’m promising nothing. Not that I’m planning on dying, not yet, anyway, but in Longmoor – believe me – in that place, death was only ever a breakfast away.

     Longmoor, east of the city, sat out on the flat lands, beside the river. It was hot, hot as hell, on the inside but cool on the out, like an ice cream pie, the kind you bake, only the other way round; inside out, if you know what I mean. Outside, damp morning mists wound round like the confessional lace. Inside the temperature was turned up to the max, to keep us switched off and slow, to keep us sweet while we wilted under the screaming light. What was I doing there? Well I kept that to myself. We all had our secrets. We needed them, although you got to know soon enough. Wait. It was all about waiting.

Well mist aside I think it’s time to make coffee, warm up and get writing!