The oddly dressed man sat in the pews on the right of the chapel. I sat on the left, next to Sheena, who had left space for a thinnish person between herself and Tam. There was organ music, but it was coming over a PA-system. No-one sat at the organ off to the side of the lectern. The music wasn't a hymn, but I couldn't place it. Perhaps it was the organ arrangement, or someone had dramatically changed the tempo of the tune. It nagged at me. A man seemingly dressed as the Pope stepped up to the lectern: I looked over at Tam. He shrugged. Da had believed the Wee Free an ostentatious religion. To tell the truth he had had no time for religion at all. Mam had attended the local Presbyterian, whenever the bruises were under her clothing.
The high-church fellow began saying the usual things: a full life, taken unto God, sadly missed. I looked down, there was a minuscule ladder in my stocking. I drifted off, only coming back when the man of God announced that -as was customary- a family member would be stepping up to say a few words. Tam didn't move. Neither did I. A flash of hounds-tooth caught my eye and I realised that the stranger was making for the lectern. Perhaps I'd find out who he was.
He had a faded elegance about him, and if the contrast between the black and the grey in his hair was a little too sharp, who could blame him? The look suited him. As did the eccentricity of his dress in general, it had to be said. A century and a half ago they'd have called him a fine figure of a man, he was perhaps a little corpulent for modern tastes. Ah.. but the voice. Basso profundo and warm as a fur coat. The faintest Edinburgh accent and a musical lilt. It was the voice of a lover or the devil and I could scarcely follow what it said. I concentrated harder:
'Cousin Tam, was not a conventional man. How could he be, being kin of mine? We were not close, but we had dealings in the past. Agreements that bind beyond the mortal coil.'
It was all I could do not to laugh. In fact I may have let something slip, since Tam gave me a sharp look. I shivered, he'd looked just like Da, for a moment.
The seductive voice continued with veiled hints and platitudes until he himself had had enough.
He stumbled on stepping down from behind the lectern, as though he had trodden on the tail of a morning coat, although of course he was dressed in nothing of the kind.
The over-dressed clergyman stepped up to the mark once more and offered up a short prayer. The same music began to play and the conveyor-belted coffin began its journey to the flames. The name of the tune came back to me as the curtains closed behind it. 'Horo My Nut Brown Maiden'.
Da had sung it to me from age five to eleven, until I had escaped to The Senior School at Loretto near Musselburgh. The bursary had been from a private endowment. My father had fought against accepting it. I myself was so glad of it that I did not enquire too closely into its provenance - and I had avoided returning to the house in Coalburn whenever I could.
Comments
h jenkins | February 2, 2010 - 11:58
I really like what you've written so far. Each piece is beautifully constructed, full of nice little similes and metaphors. I get the feeling of someone speaking to a friend, sharing confidences.
But somehow as a whole it seems to me kind of staccato, the pieces slightly disassociated from each other.
Perhaps it's a function of how one has to write when being limited to 1500 words or so per posting. I've resisted putting longer works on here myself for that very reason. The separations tend to become somewhat arbitrary.
What I think I'm saying is that you may be writing in order to fit the structure of the site rather than the potential structure of the novel. If a chapter or an episode needs to be 3 or 4 thousand words, that's what it needs; you shouldn't trim it for the sake of criteria imposed from outside.
Of course, I could just be being ultra sensitive to the issue and other readers may not get the same impressions as me.
Anyway, I hope you don't mind me saying this. I re-iterate what I said at the outset - I like your style and delivery very much indeed.
Helvigo Jenkins
Ewan | February 2, 2010 - 12:02
The staccato effect is probably more a symptom of struggling to write at all at the moment. I've written longer things where it made no great difference what length the individual pieces were and the whole tended to flow more naturally (I think, perhaps it didn't at all! :-)) Thanks for reading and confirming a suspicion I had in any event.
tcook | February 2, 2010 - 14:55
I'm with Helvigo on this - it doesn't have the flow of Gibbous House, for example, which you wrote in smaller sections. I think I need to read it all in one, rather than bit by bit separated by days if not weeks to give a better overall assessment.