White's Novel

Peter Bourne

Description

White's tale is about most of us: we come and go from the world without really, at any stage, trying to affect or change it, despite dreaming of what we would do if we had the chance. White has that chance. White's Novel is about what happens as a result of him taking that chance. And, in the end, is he really so very different than the rest of us? He thinks he is!

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 31 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781645366959
• Langue: English

Extrait

White’s Novel
Peter Bourne
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-03-31
White’s Novel About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © 1 – All Sorts of Stuff 2 – The Very Start of the Story 3 – First Diary Entries Diary Entry: June 1st Diary Entry: July 15th Diary Entry: July 30th Diary Entry: August 5th Diary Entry: September 10 th 4 – The Plot Thickens 5 – The End of Annie 6 – And the Rest Too 7 – Kelly Joins the Fray 8 – Devonshire Closes In 9 – Final Diary Entries Diary Entry: November 16 th – December 13 th Diary Entry: December 1 st Diary Entry: January 27 th – February 12 th 10 – Inevitable Final Stuff
About the Author
Peter Bourne has lived for the past decade in South London, where he writes and paints. His first published novel, The Deserter , was set in Israeli-occupied Palestine in the early years of this century.
Dedication
To all of those who have not worked hard enough at achieving – and now regret it.
Copyright Information ©
Peter Bourne (2020)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Bourne, Peter
White’s Novel
ISBN 9781643781198 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781643781204 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645366959 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020902758
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
[e-mail]
[phone]
1 – All Sorts of Stuff
It was mid to late September, yet the sunlight that year, on those days when the sky was clear, that customarily flooded White’s south-facing front yard with a fading, hazy warmth, was still surprisingly bright and hot most mornings. As a consequence, White would often doze as much as he wrote, as he sat at his glass-topped writing table.
“On that particular morning, though still not quite ten o’clock, his head had drooped already, his hand had flopped, and his pencil, just recently pilfered from a local hotel’s lobby, had rolled perilously close to falling off the table’s edge and down on to the slabs that he told friends, who occasionally called by, had been laid by his boys for his birthday, not long after he had moved into the house in North Street.”
What a fab sentence. Like a snake. Seventy-six words! I must read it again. Read it again and…savor it…!
“On that particular morning, though still not quite ten o’clock, his head had drooped already, his hand had flopped and his pencil, just recently pilfered from a local hotel’s lobby, had rolled perilously close to falling off the table’s edge and down on to the slabs that he told friends, who occasionally called by, had been laid by his boys for his birthday, not long after he had moved into the house in North Street.”
Ah, what a sentence!
For a good twenty minutes, his body sat crumpled and slumped. He then jerked awake, annoyed with himself for dozing off. Shaking his head, he began to write again.
"I must try and write more slowly and more cautiously. I don’t want to make careless, unnecessary mistakes. I don’t want to see, over the next weekend, too many of Di’s corrections. What a nice little number it is for her: every Friday. Friday after Friday after Friday. Sometimes, I have written barely anything for her to work on.
‘Anything for me to transcribe into WORD this week, Mr. Whitehead?’
She makes it sound as if she’s translating precious texts from Ancient Greek. Quite right too. What I write may not turn out to be precious to anyone else, but it’s very precious to me.
Yet even after one of those quite frequent, barren weeks, I still pay her a day’s money just for coming in, don’t I? I never put her off. Here’s hoping that by treating her so fairly, she’ll have been, all this while, developing some sort of loyalty towards me, which might, in turn, cause her to overlook some of the racier material that appears here and there in what she copies and corrects for me each week; in this stuff I’m writing.
I quite like Diana Fielding, but she can be very tiresome. When she’s in full swing, she doesn’t only change the odd word here and there, correct spelling, or divide the text into more logical paragraphs, but she sometimes changes whole phrases. She really has got a bit of a nerve. I haven’t yet caught her out in changing a whole sentence but I wouldn’t put it past her. I’d never admit it to her but occasionally, some of her changes are better than what I’ve come up with. And I do leave those in, don’t I? I am not proud. Well, I am. Most people are, to some extent, about something or other, aren’t they? Even if it’s only about their profile from the left. But I’ve had no illusions about the extent of my literary abilities. So any help I can get…and from wherever it comes…I’ll take it! Needs must."
That morning, White was a bit stuck about what to write. It happened. From time to time. He told himself that was why he was always dropping off: because he was stuck. Nevertheless, he was still slightly alarmed that he was dropping off quite as often as he was.
“Lots of ways to escape reality, to escape defeat, to escape from apprehension. Sleep’s always been the easiest route for me. Especially from apprehension, to escape from fear, fear of inadequacy, or just simple fear, because I’m frightened or scared of something or, more often than not, in my case, someone.”
White tapped his pencil to a vaguely military rhythm on the table top.
"So, what was it I wanted to write about this morning? Something to do with…I can’t remember… What was it now? What was it I wrote about yesterday? I can’t remember that either. Getting old is such a drag. Short-term memory loss and all that. It’s not a myth. It seems to me we don’t have to be that old either. My short-term memory started getting patchy in my early forties. Even then, I had started to have to search sometimes for the odd word over four syllables. Annie used to say I was imagining it, that I was as obsessed about age and declining powers as I was about size. In relation to the size, I do have understandable reasons to be concerned. No one could possibly quarrel with that. The forties do seem though a shade early – for a diminishing mind. They do say though, don’t they, that complex mathematical questions can’t be solved after twenty-eight? How very, very depressing that is!
Perhaps it’ll remind me about what I want to write about today, if I take a look at what I wrote about yesterday. OK then. Read through what I wrote yesterday. Let’s do that. It’s a plan, if nothing else.
‘That it was a baby’s head, was not immediately clear to me.’
Ah! It was about the kids. That’s right. I remember now. I was writing about the kids. But what was it about the kids? Was it all to be about them? Or was it to be about me too, as well as them. If people are going to read this, they should know something about me as well. At the very least, they should know I’m not completely barking.
‘That it was a baby’s head, was not immediately clear to me.’ Though, when it finally broke clear of Annie, I realized immediately that what I had been looking at was the top of a head, just as the midwife had been telling me. The top of the head of my first child, hair matted and sticky. Lots and lots of hair, not bald like the other new babies in the hospital nursery: thick hair, with a tight whorl at the crown, and sleek sideburns, right from the off, like some nightclub singer about to croon.
I was waiting to gather the child up as it emerged. The cord was cut by the midwife and the tiny creature, my first child, was suddenly in my two hands: slowly and carefully hugged to my chest.
‘Is it a boy?’
And this, from the woman who had said, throughout her pregnancy, she didn’t care. Coming from a family of three sisters, she cared very much. It is Mrs. White.
‘Can I have him?’
‘Of course, you can, love. You’ll have to let him go, Mr. White. Thank you!’
Midwives are always so bossy. I had to give him up before I was ready.
‘Our name’s Whitehead. It’s my name that’s White,’ I growled at her.
She wasn’t listening to me, didn’t hear a word: too busy wiping my son’s hair clean, quiffing and arranging it, before she handed him over to Annie."
No, “growled”? Not right. “Murmured”? Don’t much like that either. Why not just, “said”? Let’s see if Diana comes up with anything better.
He underlined “growled” and put a question mark.
“David peed right across the delivery room, just as she took him from me and just before she dumped him in Annie’s arms. In protest, I’ve no doubt, at being taken away from his father and being given to his mother so abruptly and too soon. There were a couple of student nurses in the delivery room. They giggled in delight as they dodged his arched stream.”
"Why do you women get such excitement out of catching sight of any male member doing what it’s supposed to do, however far away it may be from being mature enough to be of any possible interest to them. Envy? A woman urinating is such a non-event in comparison to a man.
I smoked in those days, so I probably went outside for a cigarette. The excluding, self-important woman’s world that always surrounds pregnancy and small babies, I’ve always found very irksome."
"The message I sent to our friends and rela