Something on
|
Writing extracts by Rosa Barbour |
Something on
|
Writing extracts by Rosa Barbour |
Briar was particularly pissed that night. Undiluted Chambord. She was playing ‘Watching the Wheels’ on repeat and gurgling happily to herself about ‘divine timing’, as if John Lennon had somehow written the song specifically for her, to let her off the hook for her fifteen-year strong period of creative malaise.
On the fifth play, Marius wandered into the room, his hands clasped together in front of him like he was trying his best to imprison an unruly fairy. Ignoring us both, he paced the room impatiently, looking for something, then stopped to watch his mother slurring along to Lennon. I held my breath, watching his face as he registered the same fallacy in Briar’s line of thought that I’d been keeping to myself for the last forty minutes. ‘He wasn’t, though,’ he said mildly as he continued to hunt the skirting boards. For the first time since he’d entered the room, Briar’s eyes slid to meet his. ‘Who wasn’t what?’ ‘John Lennon. He wasn’t just watching the wheels. Not really. I mean, he maybe wrote the song about a brief period of time when he was, sort of, dossing… but if you think about it, the very existence of the song means he wasn’t watching the wheels at all. He was creating. He was writing, and producing.’ Briar’s soft drunken smile turned to stone. Marius, unperturbed, opened his thumbs. The translucent pink heads two miniscule baby birds poked through the opening between them. ‘He was the wheels, arguably,’ said Marius, holding the birds up to his ear. In the few seconds between the fade of the fifth play and the intro of the sixth, I heard the eerie, barely-there sound of cheeping. Ghost babies. Shadows of a sound. ‘Revenue,’ said Marius sagely, before his eyes finally fell on what he was looking for: a packet of sunflower seeds. He bent to the countertop, picked it up with his teeth and stalked out of the room, his mother’s eyes on his back. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the look that was in them – wounded, vaguely confused. It was as if she was trying to pinpoint the exact moment in time the goblins had swapped her son, the sweet baby who had who stared at her with such fuzzy-eyed, obedient adoration, for this sharp, strange, clever changeling… this alien adolescent who would challenge her, and doubt her, and break her spell of denial in a way nobody else had ever dared.
0 Comments
|