The house on the hill is entirely hollow. No windows, no floors, no stairs, no doors. You can see the moon above while you sleep. All that resides there now are spiders, memories, birds nests, teenagers, ghosts, dust, leaves, dreams, rust, love.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on the 2nd of August, 2022
1. Kitchen (breakfast time)
Ethel: Someone’s eaten my yoghurt!
Tina: Someone’s drunk my milkshake!
Daniel: A milkshake is a yoghurt in a bottle.
Ethel: Mum! Someone’s been eating our food?
Agnes (from the garden): Was it Claire?
Claire: NO!
(pause)
Daniel: A yoghurt is a milkshake in a pot.
2. The Hall (lunchtime)
(phone ringing)
Agnes: …Yes? Hello?….Oh, hi Mum. How are you?… Well, if you want me to answer faster why don’t you ring my mobile instead of this old thing in the hall? I was upstairs… We have a lot of stairs, remember? Actually I think we’ve got even more now since the last tme you stayed… Yes I know how far away you live, Mum… and I know how much it costs!…. I wasn’t complaining at all…No, everything’s fine here, Mum. I don’t know what the children have been telling you but really he’s just this totally unremarkable man. I barely even know he’s here. I see that boy in the mirror more often than I see him… He is not a ghost, Mum. We’ve been over this before… He’s just a delayed reflection… Well, you believe what you want and I’ll believe the truth, okay?… Fine… Yes, okay, I’ll tell the children you called…. No I won’t tell the children WHY you called…. Goodbye….Bye…. Yes, bye Mum….You’re always welcome here, Mum, you know that…. Of course I mean it!… Okay, bye…. Speak to you soon….Bye… [click]…Urgh…
3. By the swing (after school)
Claire: I’m the oldest. I should go first.
Ethel: You’re not the oldest.
Claire: Well I’m the biggest. And the loudest.
Tina: That’s not the same thing.
Ethel: At all.
Claire: It is.
Ethel: It isn’t.
Claire: It should be.
Ethel: It still isn’t.
Claire: Well someone has to be the oldest and it might as well be me.
Tina: None of us are the oldest.
Daniel: We’re twins.
Claire: But there’s four of us.
Daniel: Twin twins.
Ethel: We’re all the same age.
Claire: That’s stupid. One of us must have come out first. And I bet it was me!
Tina: None of us came out first.
Ethel: We all came out together.
Claire: How could that work? We wouldn’t fit! It’s not like they sliced Mum open and pulled us out all at once.
Tina: I think that actually is what happened.
Ethel: That’s why Mum’s got that big scar.
Claire: That’s disgusting! (pause) How awful. Poor Mum. (pause) I’m still the oldest I just know it.
4. Dining Room (dinner time)
Agnes: Now I spoke to Christopher and he said it might have been him who ate all your yoghurts and drank all your milkshakes.
Claire: See?! I knew it! I hate him!
Agnes: Might have been him, Claire. And if it was he apologises.
Claire: He hasn’t apologised to me!
Agnes: Claire! He didn’t even eat anything of yours so I’m not sure why you’re so angry about it all..
Claire: Only because he forgot to look in the freezer.
Tina: What?
Ethel: What are you putting things in the freezer for?
Claire: I’m allowed to put things in the freezer if I want.
Daniel: A freezer’s a fridge that freezes food.
Tina: Not if it’s bread.
Ethel: Or cornflakes.
Claire: I didn’t put bread in the freezer. Or cornflakes! What sort of idiot would put cornflakes in the freezer?
Daniel: A fridge is a freezer that foodens the fridge.
Ethel: Well what are you putting in the freezer then?
Claire: I’m not telling.
Tina: We can just look you know?
Agnes: Yeah, what exactly are you putting in the freezer, Claire?
Claire: It’s a secret.
Ethel: I’m taking a look.
Tina: So am I.
Agnes: Be careful you two! I don’t want one of you falling in there again.
Claire: Ha! I’ve never fallen in the freezer at all!
Tina: It’s okay Mum we’ve got a stool.
Ethel: See!
(pause)
Tina: My milkshakes!
Ethel: My yoghurts!
Claire: They’re not yours. They’re mine. I put them there.
Agnes: Well, they’re everyone’s now. You’ll have to share.
Claire: I don’t want to share.
Agnes: Claire…
Claire: Fine!
(pause)
Agnes: And you know Claire, you really shouldn’t put cornflakes in the freezer.
Claire: I didn’t put cornflakes in the freezer. I already told you that!
Agnes: Well someone did. And so much bread!
_________
Notes:
1. Written in May (2, 3) and July (1,4) 2022
2. There’s a chapter in An Escape that has the same name, very similar illustration as this.
3. Although I think the tapes there are probably nicer looking.
Daniel showed the cat his moves. No one else was allowed to see.
__________
Notes:
1. Written April 2022
For reasons unrelated to anything but my own diligence and professionalism (and also the only review of this on goodreads being 90% about the typos made me feel all self-conscious), here is a slightly updated version of last year’s smash hit super sensation of the literary world, Female Kill Machine, which is still, I’m afraid to say, an ultraviolent cyberpunk atrocity of a novel.
Available now on Amazon (£2.99, or free on kindle unlimited) and Ko-Fi (pay what you want).
1: Poetical Complaints
“Claire, you’ve stolen my poetry books again!” Tina said. “Stop stealing my poetry books!”
“I have not!” Claire said. “I don’t even like poetry.”
“You do like poetry,” Tina said. “You just pretend you don’t because I like poetry.”
“That might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Claire said. “The reason I don’t like poetry is because it’s stupid and you’re stupid and I didn’t steal your poetry books anyway so who cares what I think of poetry!”
“Well if you didn’t steal them who did?” Tina said. “And don’t blame Daniel or Ethel because I already asked them and they definitely didn’t steal any.”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Claire said. “Maybe no one stole them. Maybe you never even HAD any poetry books in the first place and you’ve made all this up to annoy me.”
“Of course I had some poetry books,” Tina said. “I write all my poems in them. Which is why I want at least one of them back right now, Claire! Because I just wrote a poem.”
“Well you don’t need your poetry book back then,” Claire said. “Seeing as you’ve already written this one down somewhere else. Use that as a poetry book instead.”
“But I can’t. I wrote it in my head!” Tina said. “I need to get it out of there as quickly as possible!”
Claire snorted at this in derision. “The only thing worse than poetry,” she said, as she stomped down the stairs. “Is poets!”
2: Technological Complaints
“Have you seen my phone, Oya?”
“No. Actually, I was just going to ask you if you’ve seen mine.”
“I haven’t. I was planning on using it to ring mine.”
“And I was planning on using yours to ring mine.”
“I told you we should buy a spare one for emergencies.”
“Wait, I told you we should buy a spare one for emergencies.”
“If only we’d listened to each other!”
“But then what if we lost that one as well? How many spare ones would we need before it was physically impossible to lose all of them at once?”
“We could glue one of them to the desk.”
“That’s not a bad idea actually. Maybe tape another one to the wall.”
“It’ll be like we’re living in the 80s!”
“One of us could have a pager!”
“I don’t even know how pagers work!”
“They’re like twitter I think. But just one message at a time. And the message is a number that you have to decode.”
“That sounds brilliant.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“Why don’t we still do that? Imagine having to take out a little notebook from your pocket every time you get a message just so you can look up what it means and who it was from!”
“Not a notebook. A filofax!”
(laughter)
“So anyway, I wonder where our phones went.”
3: Artistic Complaints
“Mum, have you seen our paintings of the whale that we made?” Ethel asked
“The whale AND the penguin,” Daniel added. “And a heron.”
“We were going to show them to Lucas,” Ethel said. “But now we can’t find them.”
“Weren’t they hanging from the washing line?” Agnes said. “That’s where I saw them.”
“But we looked there and the only thing on the washing line is some sheets,” Ethel said.
“And some of our paint,” Daniel said. “Which is now on the sheets.”
“So our paintings are back to front!” Ethel said. “We can’t show Lucas back to front paintings.”
“Maybe Lucas will like that,” Agnes said. “Considering you keep telling me he lives in the mirror.”
“But we painted them back to front because he lives in the mirror,” Ethel said.
“So now they’re front to back,” Daniel said.
“Which will be completely back to front by the time Lucas sees them,” Ethel said. “It’s a disaster!”
Ethel and Daniel put their hands in the air and ran out of the kitchen screaming in unison.
“You could turn the sheets round,” Agnes called after them in her ever practical way, but Ethel and Daniel were having none of it. Panicking was too much fun.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on the 18th and the 19th of May, 2022