Courting Rendition

Maggie Allder

Description

A sleepy Hampshire cathedral city, a remote cottage in centralWales and a small town in the forests of east Texas - these are not locations where one might expect to find social unrest, political intrigue, or calculated injustice. Set shortly in the future, in 2030, Courting Rendition takes the form of a journal which follows the life a woman as she moves from the predictable and the pleasant into subterfuge, confusion, catastrophe and, perhaps, redemption. A seemingly 'ordinary' woman, she belongs to a community which looks for an inner light which is as tangible and as real as the Anti-Terrorist TaskForce.This gripping novel has a profound and open spirituality underlying it - giving a dimension to the story that is both unusual and convincing. Both exciting and challenging, Courting Rendition provides a new perspective on integral social and political issues. Inspired by authors such as Chaim Potok and Robert Harris, the author compares her work to a varity of books, including I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. Courting Rendition will appeal to fans of spiritual fiction.

Sujets

• Political
• Politics

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 06 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784627874
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2015 Maggie Allder
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1784627 874
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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
To my parents Brenda and Tony, who gave their children love and security, and the freedom to be ourselves.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Epilogue
CHAPTER 1
Monday September 5 th
I’m settled at the open door of my Juliet balcony, looking out on the garden below, thinking how much I love Mondays, and feeling a huge surge of contentment within me. The sun is still very low, the trees are casting long shadows over the grass, and there are dead leaves on the lawn, a reminder of the winter to come. Soon, though, it will be bright and sunny. I think I will walk across the park when I go into work later today. The children will be back in school now, their uniforms clean and new, the teachers mostly rested and enthusiastic, the mothers off to work, if they have work, sighing with guilty relief that their children are out of their hair. I think I will walk the long way through the park, by the river, where there used to be picnic tables under the trees until the council moved them at the beginning of the summer. There were two or three tents there when I walked past with Sky last week, and we wondered if we were seeing the beginning of a tent city. It is not a good place for homeless people to set up camp, it’s too obvious and too many public-spirited citizens, less devastated by the changes in our society than those setting up camp, are likely to see and object. On the other hand, it is a convenient place, close to town and especially to the feeding centre down by the bridge, and if there are any children there they might be allowed into the local school. Sky, who works Fridays and Saturdays at the centre, told me that somewhere in this area there are now over two hundred homeless families, and that the two schools which have been taking them are overwhelmed, and looking for ways to refuse new applicants.
The wonderful thing about Mondays is not that I have such an enjoyable day ahead – an hour or so of housework, a walk into town for early lunch with Jo and then an afternoon at the charity shop – but that I don’t have to go to work. Okay, I call my various volunteer activities ‘work’ but they are not, and compared with life at the chalk face (although it was really the whiteboard face long before I retired) it is all so stressless. We get some pretty awkward customers at the charity shop, it’s true, and recently it has been hard dealing with threadbare people who want to sell us their cast-offs instead of donating them, but it is nothing like the worry of anxious and assertive parents, Ofsted inspectors, performance management and, in my case, increased suspicion directed towards me because of my all-too-public opposition to the direction in which we could all see the country is going. I had ceased to be the ideal teacher some time before I left.
The contrast between Mondays then and Mondays now is huge. It starts when I wake up – because my body wakes me up, not because an alarm insists that I open my eyes. It continues with a slow breakfast eaten comfortably over a good book – or uncomfortably if I’m reading, as I increasingly do, about the effects of recent legislation on the poor. Then I write this journal, and that is the biggest difference of all. For the first time since my student days I have time to consider each day at the beginning, thinking about what it might contain, holding it, as my community says, in the Light. It calms me, writing things down. I think I am less reactive than I used to be, more prepared for what the day might hold. Karl is concerned about my journal. If I were using my DeV47 he would be even more worried, but even these handwritten books make him anxious. I don’t know if he has ever read any of them. It wouldn’t surprise me if he has (he might read this in a few days or weeks, for all I know) but he has asked me to be careful, not to use people’s names, not to exaggerate my opposition to current trends in society, not to be too radical. It is hard to take Karl’s warnings seriously. I was born and brought up in this country, I have lived here most of my life, I find it difficult to believe that by expressing outrage about government policy or alliances with disreputable foreign powers, I might be putting myself or anyone else at risk. Yet I do know that certain left-of-centre websites are being discredited in many ways, and there is a campaign against the perceived bias of all sorts of media organisations, especially what is left of the BBC.
Karl is one of two mysterious men in my life. No, I made a firm decision when I settled to write the first page of my first journal two years ago, that I would not exaggerate or be melodramatic. I do have a streak of melodrama in myself, I know. It is only partly true that Karl is mysterious. That we should be friends at all is probably the really odd thing, but we have been friends now for so long that it seems natural, even though it was so unpredictable.
Karl, of course, is politically opposite to me. He works in one of those uniformed organisations which is neither police nor army. I have no real idea about what he does, although he insists, if we ever get anywhere near to talking about it, that he is involved in saving this country from forces which would destroy us. Karl is not a right-wing fanatic. He is an intelligent man, definitely brighter than me, with a quick grasp of situations and a phenomenal store of general (and not so general) knowledge. He read politics and economics but his knowledge of history (which I read) is greater than mine. I never see him read the classics, he reads all the time but usually it’s detective novels, yet he can talk about any author and almost any book.
I don’t often see Karl in his uniform although he was wearing it when we first met. There had been some trouble with two of my Year 10 boys. The school was never told what had happened, but we were contacted by the ATTF and asked to make an interview room available. They were in my year group, so it was my office which was used. Karl was not one of the interviewers, he arrived afterwards, when the parents had come in and they had all – boys, parents and interviewers – left together. Karl had come into my office and asked if he could just check some facts from the records. He was wearing a khaki uniform, very smart, and a peaked cap of the same colour with a deep blue band round it. There were lots of shiny buttons, and shiny black shoes which should have looked wrong with the khaki, but didn’t. I was disinclined to trust Karl. The whole ATTF thing was very new and there was a lot of discussion on radio, TV and on various blogs about civil liberties. We didn’t need an anti-terrorism task force, so the argument went, we needed a fairer society. I suppose Karl was charming, but not in the sense that the romantic fiction I used to read in my teens suggested. He looked around my office as if he were genuinely interested in the pictures and documents I had on the walls and on my desk, and he asked me questions about my photography before he asked to see the kids’ files. I had been taking pictures looking through windows or doors, I was interested in transitions from dark into light, and from cool to warm. I remember one of my pictures was taken from inside a church in rural Brazil, looking out at a very hot, sun-bleached square. Karl seemed to know a bit about Brazil, we talked about the way Roman Catholicism was being challenged by new religious movements coming in from America, and how it might affect their politics. Then Karl looked at the kids’ files, asked to have some parts printed off, and left.
I need to be careful. This journal is not here for me to reminisce, but to work through things in the present, and to help me to live a more focussed life. I will spend a few minutes in silence now, trying to concentrate on the goodness I see all around me, then I will hoover the flat.
Tuesday September 6 th
Yesterday gave me a lot to think about, and I am glad to be sitting here with this rather nice pen in my hand, and time to reflect.
I hoovered right through the flat, even the spare room which doubles as an office for me. I have come to really like it here, although I had some doubts when I moved. I always thought that eventually it would be sensible to relocate to somewhere without the steep stairs of my last house, but I had no intention of moving quite so soon. I had just retired, and I feel more fit and healthy now than I have felt for years. Then these flats were built and Sky and I decided to look around them, and it just seemed ideal. I thought I might miss my garden, not because I am a very good gardener, I’m really not, but because I so like sitting outside. This flat is upstairs (there is a lift but I refuse to use it while I can still use the stairs, which could be for years, even decades yet) but I have French windows onto the Juliet balcony and free use of the garden, which is maintained by a couple who come i