Pseudotooth

Verity Holloway

Description

The debut novel from Verity Holloway, Pseudotooth is an adult take on 'portal fantasy', boldly tackling issues of trauma responses, social difference and our conflicting desires for purity and acceptance.Aisling Bloom is a young woman beset by unexplained blackouts, pseudo-seizures that have baffled both the doctors and her family. Sent to recuperate in the Suffolk countryside, she seeks solace in the work of William Blake and writing her journal, filling its pages with her visions of Feodor, an East Londoner haunted by his family's history back in Russia.The discovery of a Tudor priest hole and its disturbed former inhabitant lead Aisling into a meeting with the enigmatic Chase and on to an unfamiliar town where the rule of Our Friend is absolute and those deemed unfit and undesirable have a tendency to disappear into The Quiet...This bold new work of literary fantasy blurs the lines between dream and reality, asking troubling questions about those who society shuns, and why.

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Unsung Stories
• Date de parution: 06 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781907389429
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Also available from Unsung Stories
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The Arrival of Missives by Aliya Whiteley
Winter by Dan Grace
The Bearer of Grievances by Joseph McKinley
The Speckled God by Marc Joan
The Dancer by Rab Ferguson
Pseudotooth by Verity Holloway
You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin
The Best of Unsung Shorts
Pseudotooth
Verity Holloway
Published by Unsung Stories, an imprint of Red Squirrel Publishing Red Squirrel is a registered trademark of Shoreditch Media Limited
Red Squirrel Publishing Suite 235, 15 Ingestre Place, London W1F 0JH, United Kingdom
www.unsungstories.co.uk
First edition published in 2017
© 2017 Verity Holloway
Verity Holloway has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work
This book is a work of fiction. All the events and characters portrayed in this book are fictional and any similarities to persons, alive or deceased, is coincidental.
Cover Artwork © Christina Mrozik
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-907389-41-2 ePub ISBN: 978-1-907389-42-9
Editors: George Sandison and Gary Budden Copy Editor: Momus Editorial Designer: Martin Cox Publisher: Henry Dillon
For Jenny, my mum
A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Love in the Asylum

Dylan Thomas
1
And of course, the weather turned Dickensian. The East Anglian horizon was crowded with low, goitrous clouds, ballooning out like new bruises. Aisling rested her head against the window of her mother’s Ford Fiesta, studying their swells through half-closed eyes as the windscreen wipers gave out their rhythmic shrieks. The late sun cast an unnatural orange glow over the thatched rooftops of another unfamiliar village. Such forceful colour seemed impossible in the drizzly Suffolk countryside, and as the car turned off on to another empty stretch of hedge-lined road, Aisling wondered drowsily if the houses were on fire.
Two weeks since the hospital. The time had passed in a succession of telephone calls, rucksack-packing, and microwaved leftovers. In her journal, Aisling reminded herself in red biro that two weeks ago the world was in the warm embrace of late summer and her mother had worn a terracotta sundress that burned brightly down fluorescent-lit corridors. Now Beverley sat scrunched in the driving seat, her shoulders thrust forward under her black mackintosh as she negotiated a cluster of puddles.
Along the muddy-guttered lanes, Aisling kept herself calm by gathering the features of each passing village. As if she were a child still, and not drifting towards eighteen, she tried to turn it into a game, imagining she were a traveller moving into unknown territory: that rural Suffolk was a foreign country, with customs and sigils that she, with her suburban upbringing, must quickly decipher if she were to survive.
In Woolpit, the tall village sign showed a lone wolf guarding a pair of green children. A knight’s shield heralded the flat farmland of Thorpe Morieux. Twin carved friars ignored them as they entered the pretty, gentrified village of Monks Eleigh where the Tudor cottages were daubed in that strange, traditional mixture of buttermilk and pig’s blood. In the flooded lanes of Semer, where their Ford was overtaken by gleaming 4x4s, the village shop offered knitted witches alongside the Daily Mail and sticks of gum.
Endless stretching fields. Black earth. Road marked SLOW.
They weren’t far from their two-bedroom semi in Bury St Edmunds. They hadn’t even left the county. But to Aisling, the journey felt like the closing of a door.
As the car lurched over a pothole, the small boxes in the bag on her lap gave an insistent plastic rattle. She pulled her sleeves down over her cold hands and closed her eyes.
It was too serious a thing to turn into a game.

*

Neurology – Clinic 2 – Third floor. A youngish consultant for a change: Doctor Ross, a Scotsman with the kind of reassuring smile that made Aisling uncomfortable. It had a soothing effect on her mother, though, and for that, at least, Aisling was grateful. ‘It’s Beverley Selkirk. Miss, not Missus,’ she said, as if she hadn’t just spent twenty minutes in the waiting room compulsively folding and unfolding Elle Macpherson’s face on the cover of ;Tatler
The screen displaying Aisling’s latest scans hung against the white wall. While this new doctor fetched her mother a chair, Aisling sat herself down and felt distant, perfunctory relief. ;Hello, brain ;. No massive growths. Nothing brutal.
More interesting was the row of ornaments lined up on a shelf above the screen: a ceramic Greek comedy mask, a lucky coin-eating Chinese frog, and two carved Hawaiian surfers with straw hair about to ride the crest of her parietal lobe. Trinkets that were meant to say: ;I am a well-rounded human being – you may relax with me. ;
It would take more than a few nick-nacks to accomplish that. Folded in Aisling’s lap were her pale hands, blotted and sore. Around one wrist, the plastic shackle bearing her name and number remained.
‘So!’ Doctor Ross took his place behind the desk. ‘You’re seventeen now, Aisling. How’d you celebrate the big day?’
‘Quietly,’ said Beverley. ‘Just the two of us in front of the telly. I thought it was best to avoid too much hoo-ha.’
‘Oh, certainly. She’ll have plenty of time for teenage kicks when we’ve got all this under control. You’re probably looking forward to that, aren’t you?’
He was trying to catch her eye. Aisling resumed her examination of his carved Polynesian tiki grinning down with eyes of shell. In nineteenth-century Tahiti, healers used sharks’ teeth to drain the bad blood from their patients’ foreheads. Aisling’s satchel was pendulous with ;National Geographic ; magazines. She might have mentioned it to the doctor, but her own head was muggy after a bad night, and Beverley wouldn’t like her bringing up sharks and blood in a hospital like some ghoulish little boy.
Doctor Ross wouldn’t be interested, anyway. He thumbed Aisling’s notes, a tome that grew fatter each time she saw it, and hummed tunelessly as he skimmed through it. There was a slight quirk of the left eyebrow, then nothing.
‘Hmm.’ He shut the file. ‘Your middle name ought to be “Hmm”, shouldn’t it?’ A second’s silence. He turned and jerked a thumb at the screen. ‘Delightful scans, though. No lesions, no abnormalities. Nice brain. Good girl. Hang on to it. However, this does rather put us back at square one.’
Beside Aisling, Beverley began to pluck at the shoulder strap of her dress. The doctor’s sincere array of teeth widened and Aisling noticed for the first time the glossy blue letters of a leaflet lying on the desk:

ESCAPE YOUR MENTAL PRISON!

A pretty girl in a yellow dress stood open-armed, Sound of Music -style, on a grassy hill. She was shouting something triumphant at a cloudless sky stamped with the Mental Health Trust logo.
Somehow, despite everything, she hadn’t expected it. Slowly, so as not to seem agitated, she slid her arms around herself and squeezed.
‘I know you’ve hoped against hope that Aisling’s difficulties had an underlying organic cause,’ Doctor Ross said. ‘Something we could tinker with in a mechanical fashion. However, as delighted as I am to confirm that she’s structurally sound, this result forces us to return to the examinations of my colleagues in the other departments.’
‘She’s not schizophrenic,’ said Beverley quickly. ‘They said so.’
‘We know what Aisling isn’t, Miss Selkirk. Her last spell as an inpatient showed my colleagues very little other than her understandable unhappiness. We can now say that the seizures are not neurological in origin. This is not epilepsy. Defining what it is, however, has proven more troublesome than we anticipated.’
Aisling stared hard at the tiki, trying to banish that last test, the one with the sticky pads all over her head. ‘ Go to sleep ,’ they told her, as if a night on a mixed ward wasn’t a nightmare in itself. ‘ And get the sheet off your face. You’ll dislodge the wires .’ All night: snoring, machinery, beds rolling down corridors. Between the nurses’ rounds, something blunt like flesh jabbed Aisling in the head and she stopped breathing.
It isn’t real , she told herself. I’m not here .
It was meant to be the last time.
Aisling picked silently at the remains of the indigo polish on her well-bitten nails. She knew what would happen next: Doctor Ross would laugh apologetically and refer her to another specialist as if her presence in his office was a clerical error. They always laughed. Then, another office, another new prescription, and another month would pass by unchanged. A sliver of nail polish fluttered to the floor.
Had Doctor Ross been to any of the countries his ornaments suggested? A thorn of jealousy lodged in her throat. If she were a grown man with a big, reassuring smile, she wouldn’t sit in an office all day. She would buy a bundle of airline tickets and fly to every unpronounceable city on the map. When one region was explored to exhaustion there would always be another, until she was too old and feeble to mount the steps to the aircraft. Go to sleep? She wanted to wake up.
‘At Aisling’s age the world is a confusing place,’ the doctor was telling Beverley. ‘Humans establish security by pinpointing the threats of our environment and protecting ourselves against them. The symptoms of Aisling’s condition make this very hard for her. Her anxiety runs amok, and, to counteract this, her imagination embellishes information in an attempt to create a more manageable environment. I understand my colleague explained to you how strong the power of suggestion is in a creative person like your daughter. Sometimes this impulse becomes too intense. The mind is forced to take evasive action – brings down a big, black curtain, if you like. Have you heard of a condition known as PNES?’
Beverley frown