Fragile

Jae Watson

Description

Following the breakdown of her marriage, in desperation Beth Swann uses a donor bank in her hometown of Liverpool to start her family. 18 years later, her daughter, Julia, increasingly intrigued by the identity of her biological father, goes against her mother's wishes and returns to Liverpool to complete the jigsaw of her background. Julia finds that not only Liverpool has changed but also her character, as she is drawn into an increasingly fraught and passionate journey that will turn her life upside down. 

Fragile follows the lives of Beth, Julia and Jack, Beth s ex-husband and closest to a father figure for Julia, on a rollercoaster trip search for understanding and love but, firstly, their identity.

Sujets

• Siblings
• Women
• Sibling
• General officer
• General
• Family Life
• Liverpool
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Legend Press
• Date de parution: 27 juin 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781907461026
• Langue: English

Extrait

Legend Press Ltd, 3rd Floor, Unicorn House, 221-222 Shoreditch High Street, London E1 6PJ info legend-paperbooks.co.uk www.legendpress.co.uk
Contents Jae Watson 2009
The right of the above author to be identified as the authors of this work has be asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
ISBN 978-1-907461-02-6
All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.
Set in Times Printed by JF Print Ltd., Sparkford.
Cover designed by Gudrun Jobst www.yotedesign.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
For Jim
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my family who have supported and encouraged me without fail; my patient friends who have endured the anti-social tendencies of a writer; and my publisher who believes in me. For information and inspiration thanks to Liverpool Wondrous Place - music from Cavern to Cream by Paul Du Noyer and Greenham Common: Women at the Wire by Barbara Harford and Sarah Hopkins, and special thanks to all the fragile people who inspired me with their stories.
Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviours, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited. Margaret Mead, Anthropologist (1901-1978)
PROLOGUE
July 2003
The light was hopeful. Julia Swann moved along the bow of the Royal Daffodil, taking in the intensifying scene: a forest of red, white and yellow cranes soaring above the skyline, jutting at inelegant angles over warehouses; tower blocks; two cathedrals, like prehistoric creatures emerging from extinction, bellowing into the evening skies. She read them as a good sign; this was a city rising to meet the challenge of a new millennium. Even the ferry was in collusion, slicing mercilessly through tea-brown waters to carry her to her purpose.
The sun, which had scorched the day, was now low, turning the city pink and casting a spotlight over the surprising grandeur of the Three Graces: the Cunard Building where travellers had once waited with great expectation to purchase transatlantic tickets; the Port of Liverpool Building, inspired by Italian Renaissance palaces, and, most striking of all, the Liver Building, stretching up into gull-startled skies, standing steady under an impossible cornucopia of turrets and domes. Perched at the very top of this colossus, balancing one on each of its arms, she saw the legendary Liver Birds, wings stretched ready for flight, one facing out to sea the other towards the city. She had heard it said that if the Liver Birds ever fly away, Liverpool will cease to exist. She imagined that these unclassifiable creatures, neither Cormorant nor Eagle, had strained at their ropes more than once since they d been hoisted to the top of Britain s first skyscraper a century earlier. They had certainly seen a few sights in their time: from bombs to Beatniks; doomed transatlantic passenger ships to the gaunt faces of dockers. Nevertheless they had stayed, unable to resist the will of a determined people; or perhaps out of loyalty to a city that, at the very least, is never dull.
As the ferry reached the granite lip of the waterfront, serenaded by the swoop and cry of gulls, it seemed to Julia that she had travelled much further than the small wedge of the Wirral Peninsula - lying barely a mile across a bronze scimitar of water. With the first step on dry land, a thousand voices lured her into the blushing streets. The voices whispered of rebellious politicians and political poets; they promised to reveal their secrets. But more persistent for Julia than the call of the city was the cry from within herself. It had always been with her, growing louder with every passing year, until it had become almost unbearable in its intensity, rising to a deafening wail, a primal scream, and she could resist it no more.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Prologue July 2003
Chapter 1 November 1983
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7 December 1983
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11 September 1984
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part II Chapter 14 August 2002
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17 July 2003
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part III Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
CHAPTER 1
November 1983
People don t walk in straight lines. This thought returned to Beth Swann over and over again that day; she even found herself whispering the words until they became a nagging motif; an insane soliloquy. She was staring out of her third floor office window at the dark figures weaving their way through Williamson Square. What strange creatures, she thought; backs hunched against the winter wind, some walking purposefully, only swerving to avoid collision with other strange creatures; some turning on the spot, eyes raised towards street signs with brows drawn into puzzlement. The wind lifted hats and teased strands of loose hair; it tore at several stray pages of the Liverpool Echo , whipping them into a frenzied dance around dark columns of legs.
Beth had once read that when running from danger, we have a tendency to turn left, eventually returning to our own starting point. We don t walk in straight lines; we make patterns - curves, zigzags, messy diagonals, great flourishes, tight circles - and each line in the pattern is fragile and mutable; it can easily be shattered, or be sent careering off course. She wondered if, at the end of our lives, we could see the patterns we ve made and what they would tell us about the sort of person we have been, the kind of life we have lived.
It was on this same day in November 1983 that a single sperm battered its way into one of Beth s last frail eggs. All morning she d visualised the sperm s journey, hoping that its route would be straight and determined so that it could accomplish its mission before being swept, defeated, from the hostile environment of the cervical canal. Unconsciously, her hand dropped to her abdomen and she tore her eyes away from the scene in the square, back to the work on her desk.
She shuffled a pile of papers and randomly selected one sheet, covered in messy scrawl, and placed it on a stand in front of her. From another pile she lifted a virgin piece of A4 and slid it expertly into the typewriter so that the top was perfectly in line. She stared at the blank sheet for several minutes, thinking about her life and how it had turned out. She whispered a barely audible Gosh! as reality finally bit.
Not only the reality of what she d done but the fact that not one single person in the office, or in her life for that matter, knew that on the previous lunchtime, rather than cut diagonally across the square to Sayers where she usually sat alone in the functional caferia eating an egg and cress sandwich with a cup of strong tea, she d made a great sweeping curve in the opposite direction. Nor did they know that she d popped into a clinic, a hunched, grey building, where the sperm of an anonymous donor had been injected high into her vagina using a large syringe. The procedure had caused mild discomfort and some embarrassment but Beth was able to shut her mind off from what was happening down below and focus on six, dull strip-lights set in a yellowing ceiling. After only a ten-minute rest she slipped off the bed to make room for the next customer.
She still had time to pop into Sayers for a sandwich on the way back to the office. She sat all afternoon, legs crossed, imagining the sperm swimming with all their might up her fallopian tubes; she had chosen an athlete from the discrepant list of donors to give the sperm the best chance of success. Now she just had to wait.
After work, Beth waited outside a flaking red telephone box, stamping and shuffling against the wind; her home telephone was on the blink, yet again. Once inside the narrow cubicle she took shallow breaths so as not to inhale the smells of ash and urine and last night s curry and chips. She allowed the phone to ring fifteen times before placing it back in its cradle. She felt the need to tell someone what she d done and Jack was the only person she thought would understand. She felt mildly annoyed that he didn t answer, imagining he was out with some new woman, gallivanting under the bright lights of London where he d moved six months earlier.
She left the phone box and jumped on an 86 bus, climbing to the top deck and claiming the front seat. As they moved away from the city centre she leant her head against the window, absently taking in the scene and was overcome with weariness. For the first time Beth noticed the shabbiness of her city; it was as if something had shifted in her so that she could stand back, look at things anew. In the 60 s Liverpool had been the apple of England s eye, but the media, which had once loved and courted her, simply could not get enough of her, now painted her as a slag, a thief, a scallywag. This angered Beth; she knew the reputation was largely undeserved, although she did know there were things wrong with her city, very wrong. She thought again of her father s words - she d been thinking about her parents a lot lately - and one of his oft repeate