Mondays are Red

Nicola Morgan

Description

A highly unusual novel about a boy recovering from a coma and dealing with the synaesthesia that confuses and changes him. Power, temptation, guilt and fire - all these Luke must deal with if he and his friends are to survive. This new edition contains extra material from the author.

Informations

• Publié par: Crabbit Publishing
• Date de parution: 10 janvier 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908886262
• Langue: English

Extrait

MONDAYS ARE RED
by Nicola Morgan






“An outstanding novel that rewards rereading.” The Guardian
“This is a stunning, extraordinary debut.” The Sunday Herald
“… among the “Best 0f 2002” The Observer
“… a novel to brood over, written by a new and original talent.” The Independent
“A chilling modern take on the Faust story by a stunning new literary talent. Books magazine
“An astonishing novel, which I read in one sitting stretching deep into one night. It is beautifully observed and ingeniously plotted …” Paul Augarde, Augarde Screen Productions





MONDAYS ARE RED
EPub edtion
EISBN: 978-0-9570153-2-6
Original edition copyright © Nicola Morgan 2002
This edition copyright © Nicola Morgan 2011
Published by Crabbit Publishing
Crabbit Publishing was created by Nicola Morgan

Cover design by Andrew Brown of Design for Writers
Ebook creation by Zebedee Design
All rights reserved.
Nicola Morgan asserts her right always to be identified as the author of this work. No part may be copied or transmitted without her written permission.
All characters in this work are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.





About the Author
Nicola Morgan is an award-winning and best-selling author with around ninety books to her name. Her latest young adult novel, Wasted , was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and won or was short-listed for many other awards. Thanks to the grumpily honest advice to writers on her renowned blog, Help! I Need a Publisher! , she dominates the Google rankings for the phrase Crabbit Old Bat. Nicola has been Chair of the Society of Authors in Scotland, an English teacher, dyslexia specialist, entrepreneur, professional cook, pillow-case repairer and trainee turkey plucker (failed).
Follow Nicola on Twitter as @nicolamorgan
Author website – www.nicolamorgan.com
Mondays are Red page





By the Same Author
Novels: Fleshmarket, Sleepwalking, The Passionflower Massacre, The Highwayman’s Footsteps, The Highwayman’s Curse, Chicken Friend, Deathwatch, Wasted
Non-fiction: Tweet Right – The Sensible Person’s Guide to Twitter, Write to be Published, Blame My Brain, Know Your Brain, The Leaving Home Survival Guide, Curses, People who Made History in Ancient Greece
Early learning: I Can Learn (series), Learning Rewards (part series), Thomas the Tank Engine books, and many others





In memory of Alison, whose belief in me was everlasting.

This new edition is dedicated to my agent, Elizabeth Roy, with enormous gratitude.





TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Praise
Copyright
About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION
SECTION ONE – Illness
SECTION TWO – Back to School
SECTION THREE – The Fightback Begins
SECTION FOUR – In the Woods
SECTION FIVE – All Over
EXTRA BITS
About synaesthesia
Where did I get the idea?
Alterations from the first edition
The work of St Laurence School, Wiltshire*
Acknowledgements




INTROD UCTION TO THE NEW EDITION
Mondays are Red was my first novel, published in 2002 after many years of effort, and has a special place in my heart. It was published by Hodder Children’s Books and translated into several languages. It’s an unusual book – some might say weird – and requires readers to let their imaginations fly, but the response I receive shows that this is exactly what they very often love to do.
The first teenagers who read it are adults now and I’ve had emails telling me how much it meant to them as a younger reader. Lots of adults love it, too, often talking about its refreshing exuberance. It’s certainly not a novel that holds back! Although it went out of print a few years after publication, I still receive emails and letters from keen readers, including schools wanting to know how to get more copies. So, my agent and I got the rights back and now we are publishing it ourselves, under the umbrella of my own Crabbit Publishing.
Writing this new edition gives me the chance to include some extra information for you. At the end, you’ll find facts about synaesthesia as well as my answer to that regular question, “Where did you get the idea?” Also, I made a few very small changes to this new edition of Mondays are Red and I’ve included notes about that at the end, to show what I changed and why.
Finally and importantly, you’ll find feedback and creative writing from one of the many schools where pupils work with Mondays are Red. The English department at St Laurence School in Wiltshire contacted me to ask where they could get more copies, so I told them I was on the verge of republishing as an ebook. We’ve ended up corresponding quite a bit since then, in a project which I hope will be ongoing. I think you’ll agree the work they’ve produced is wonderful. I am also working on free teaching materials for Mondays are Red: do keep an eye on my website for further details.
To say that I’m delighted to bring you Mondays are Red once more is an understatement. I hope you enjoy it!




SECTIO N ONE – ILLNESS




CHAPTER ONE: A KALEIDOSCOPE IN MY HEAD
Mondays are red. Sadness has an empty blue smell. And music can taste of anything from banana purée to bat’s pee. That’s what I need to explain, starting with the day it all began, the day I woke up in a hospital bed with a kaleidoscope in my head. I discovered later that I had almost died from meningitis but I remember nothing about that bit. My first memory is the dizzy waking up part and my soggy muddled head. My second memory is how, bit by bit, I began to realize how much my world had changed.
* * *
A volcano spat me furiously with a roar from its mouth. Bagpipes whined in my ears as I shot head over heels through the watery darkness, spinning fizzy. Away from the purple pain, too fast to breathe, blood cartwheeling in my veins. Floating somewhere, anywhere, until suddenly with a magnesium flash I was lying white on a bed and I knew immediately that I was in a hospital. How cool! How dramatic!
I struggled to focus on the people around me. There was Mum. A salty brightness in her smudged eyes. Dad was shouting for a doctor or a nurse or anyone.
“Come quick! Luke’s awake!” And the girl with wasps in her straw-straight hair was Laura, my older sister. Two ugly years older. A perfect age for poisoning. If I had felt strong enough I’d have tied her by her hair to a chair and put a spider down her neck while a forest fire raged outside her prison hut. A huge soft spider with hunched-up sticky brown legs and deep alien eyes.
I felt odd. Floating. With weird words in my head and unnatural pictures behind my eyes. What was happening?
A yellowy doctor with weedy glasses spoke. Was that a weasel watching me carefully from behind his eyes?
“Hello, young man. Can you remember your name?”
“Rumpelstiltskin, stupid!” spat a cobra from my mouth. The doctor flinched and pinched the edges of his smile, a spasm jerking his blobbly neck.
“Luke!” gasped Mum.
“Well, I see we’re on the mend then!” He laughed as he made some notes on the chart in his hand. I could see Dad trying to read what it said. Laura was picking at a lilac finger-nail.
My head throbbed black slime and I wished they all would go. But, as Mum stroked my hand, strawberry music flowed from her fingers, softening my muscles. My vision went limp, spiralling into my head, and my eyes started to fog over.
What happened next was extraordinary. Even I knew that, drowsy as I was.
Have you ever done one of those magic eye picture puzzles? Where you look at the pattern and force your eyes to relax, lose focus and go cross-eyed? If you succeed in this almost-impossible letting go, you suddenly see deep inside, behind, beyond the picture and a whole new world appears. That’s what happened to me.
It was then that I properly noticed the wasps in Laura’s hair, at the same time as realizing that they shouldn’t be there. They couldn’t be there, but they were. They crawled around her face and into her nose. And around and about I could see rows of flowers of every possible shade of every imaginable colour. Musical notes danced as they sang, each with a smell and a taste. Several brushed over my tongue like cobweb candy-floss. I saw the tips of my fingers start to soften and swell, as weird insects fluttered out and lined up to the right. I could see every colour, taste, smell, song, idea, possibility, feeling, wish. I could have whichever one I wanted.
It was as if a huge transparent computer screen had been put really close to my face. In fact, it was more like being IN a computer and looking out, so that I was seeing first the things on the screen and in my head and then everything outside the computer, the real, other world beyond. Distantly, I could see the washing-up liquid green walls of my small room, the curtains with headachy corkscrew patterns, a bag of liquid dangling above me and a monitor with zigzag lines I didn’t want to look at. This was all hazy through the screen, whereas everything on the screen was now sharply in focus.
In the top right corner of my vision sat the most extraordinary creature you could imagine, even if you had the most extraordinary imagination in the universe. Hunched and shapeless, it brooded, waving countless writhing arms. Acrid yellow steam rose from its armpits. Yet, when I looked more closely, curiously, it seemed to change somehow and I could see that its face was almost human. Long white hair, perfectly