Friday Fictioneers is on Facebook hosted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. You can read other stories or, better, join in and write your own at https://rochellewisoff.com/. A complete story in 100 words in response to a photo prompt.
This is unsettling, she thought, but art can do that.
She preferred Exhibit Pepsi, or the Virtual Visits Corp. thing she’d seen last year. That was good.
Here, the material was grey and ragged. How could anyone not know about auto-white and auto-mend?
The oddest shapes. Hollow bones? But of what? Roofs full of holes?
Much later, she remembered a story one of the elders told about birds (like dragons but real), and how there were once transports – the name eluded her – when there were great stretches of natural water: oceans.
I was born in London and have lived there most of my life.
The old John Barnes department store on Finchley Road just up the road from where I grew up
I grew up in West Hampstead, where the streets were full of big, shabby houses that were then mainly flat or room rents. I was the child of two very different immigrants, two runaways. My mum left Shropshire for London at sixteen, determined never to return. My dad left Karachi in the newly formed state of Pakistan in his mid-twenties to come and study. Both of them fell in love with a certain idea or dream of London. For myself growing up it took the form of walks on Hampstead Heath with a stop at the Coffee Cup cafe in Hampstead, and croissants in the Cosmo coffee house on Finchley Road, lots of museums and art galleries which I resented.
The Cosmo Restaurant on Finchley Road.
At school I was very, very good – till right near the end – and just brown enough to be one variety of the distinguishable different. At home I was bookish, always reading, always writing. English and history were the subjects I really loved and for a long time they competed painfully. I studied history and then English at Cambridge and then linguistics at Strathclyde in Glasgow. Over the next couple of years, I did a variety of short-term jobs while everyone told me that time was running out and I needed to decide who I wanted to be. On what appeared to be a whim and perhaps to avoid more prodding, I decided that I would do a PhD and become an academic. After some scary part-time teaching in Goldsmiths’ English Department at the University of London, which gave me a serious case of imposter-syndrome, I got a job at Middlesex University where I taught more or less happily for a number of years.
The beautiful Trent Park was one of the campuses where I taught
Protest against the closure of the philosophy department, 2010.
Over time, as has become familiar in many universities, our working conditions were severely degraded and when we were required – forced – to reapply for our jobs for the third time, I think, in less than five years, I decided to take voluntary redundancy and take the plunge into a new world.
At that point I had already started Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves, so the plunge wasn’t quite as cold as it could have been. I don’t think I knew it was going to be a novel then, but I was already obsessing about a world that was solid – there were books, articles, records, documents – and elusive. I was trying to ‘discover’ two women, one of whom was my grandmother, who were publicly writ large and clear for one very particular and extreme moment, but who spent most of their lives invisible. Writing a second novel now, which I am finding if anything more difficult than the first, I have finally recognised that this space where there is at once an abundance of detail and record, and also nothing about the exact world you wish to write about – because it doesn’t exist yet – is the place where I feel most uncomfortably at home.
