Sandy Town

 The beaches of Sandy Town were, naturally, sandy and so Mr Parquette was unsurprised to see footprints in the sand when he arrived at East Beach for his morning perambulation.  What did surprise the middle-aged, somewhat flatulent, gentleman was the depth of the footprints in the sand and the number of toes each foot appeared to have had.  He stopped, though if he were to admit it he was already out of breath and relieved to be able to stop and recuperate, and used the stem of his pipe to gauge the depth of a footprint.

“My word,” he said, with just a hint of a grumble in his voice, “a three inch depth suggests that someone very heavy indeed left these prints!”

Impressed with his own cleverness, and having no-one around to relate this to, he took the trouble to examine the seven-toed footprint more carefully and determined that while the toes were abnormally excessive, somewhat long, and squashed out a little as though the foot were perhaps of sesquipedalian width, they were, more importantly, webbed.

Janet O’Steen, Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian and most-famous mother-hater, sat back from her typewriter and re-read what she’d written.  Then she read it again, counting the number of commas that she’d used and wrote that number down in a tiny black notebook she kept for the purpose.  A reviewer, some years ago, had commented on her predilection for punctuation (in that exact phrase) and she now obsessed over proving them wrong.

“Acceptable,” she said to the empty room.  Sunlight came in through the window, though it was weak thanks both to an overcast sky and the sun coming at angle.  By the evening the sun would be round the other side of the house entirely and she would need to light the lamps in the room.  They were the original gas lamps that had come with the house when she’d bought it and had delicate glass covers and little warning labels about ensuring that the carbon monoxide alarm was working properly before lighting the lamp.

“What is?” came a voice from another room.  Janet stiffened, instantly alert to her audience and mentally reviewing what she’d just said.  Then she relaxed again, remembering that her nephew Edward had arrived the previous evening and invited himself to stay for a couple of days.

“I’m writing,” she called back.  “Are you really only just awake?”

Edward walked into the room wearing only boxer shorts.  He was short, hairy and, while not fat exactly, had a little ripple of excess flesh that wobbled gently over the waistband of the blue paisley-patterned shorts.

“Yes, auntie,” he said.  He stretched, raising both arms to the ceiling and revealing bushy armpits that made Janet think of hedgehogs.  “I’m on holiday; I’m hardly going to rise with the pigs and goats now, am I?”

“What pigs and goats?”  Janet’s house was on the outskirts of a medium sized town and was far from rural.  There was a garden of moderate size that she ignored until the neighbours complained and then cut back viciously to the point of exfoliation and a few more rooms than she really knew what to do with but there were certainly no livestock.  Or even pets.

“It’s a saying, auntie,” said Edward.  “How’s the writing going?”

“Put some clothes on,” said Janet.  Her authorial brain was already considering how to use Edward in her novel: all of a sudden she had the idea that Mr Parquette, whose overall aim was the development of a tourist industry for Sandy Town, might open a small safari park and populate it with dwarf gorillas with mange.  “I might have guests later and you in deshabillé would be immodest and unbecoming for a lady of my stature.”

“I thought that was a euphemism for fat?”

“Deshabillé?”  Janet started reaching for her dictionary; an abused book that she wrote corrections in whenever she resorted to looking words up in it.

“Lady of your stature,” said Edward.  He had, unfortunately for him, not spent a lot of time around his aunt and so never saw the dictionary coming.  It hit him spine-first on the nose and between his eyes and he keeled over like a cow in a slaughterhouse.  He hit the floor first and the dictionary followed him and Janet picked the book up and checked it for damage before kicking her nephew in the ribs to see if he’d wake up.

She’d written another page detailing Mr Parquette’s discovery of the footprints and his decision to publicise them in the local paper as belonging to an aquatic form of Bigfoot before Edward stirred, sat up, and rubbed his bruised face.

“Ow,” he said, probing his nose gently with one hand.  “What hit me?”

“Chambers,” said his aunt unapologetically.  “Thirteenth edition.  Also known as the Big Red Book.”

“You threw the book at me?”  Edward snorted, initially with laughter but then with pain.  Blood trickled from one nostril and he wiped it away with his hand.  “Good shot auntie, I suppose, but I’m meeting Deborah Truitt this evening and I think I might just have to call it off.  Do you have a mirror so I can see the damage?”

Janet snorted as well, but tried to convert it into a cough as the name rang a bell for her.  Deborah Truitt was the daughter of Jack Truitt who ran a small independent publishing house and Janet, while having a publisher, wouldn’t say no to having a secondary one for the books her agent refused to handle.

“In the bathroom,” she said.  There were mirrors in almost all the rooms of the house but sending Edward to the bathroom until he put more clothes on seemed both practical and modest.  “I should think Deborah has seen worse that you though, so long as you keep your clothes on around her.”

“Yes, auntie,” said Edward as he picked himself up off the floor and adjusted his boxer shorts so that Janet had to avert her eyes.  “It’s not a Tinder date, you know.”

“A what now?”

“Online dating,” said Edward.  He walked out of the room and then called, “which bathroom?”

“Any of them.  And put some clothes on while you’re in there!”

There was the click of a door closing and Janet looked back at her manuscript.  Yes, a safari park would fit nicely, and perhaps Mr Parquette could try and capture Bigfoot to put them in the park as well.  Only, of course, for Bigfoot to eat his mother after a home invasion….

Janet sighed and tried to scrub the idea from her mind.  She didn’t need any more reviews harking on about the silly idea that she hated all mothers everywhere.

William Sewell

There was absolute silence for a moment; even the owls fell silent and the wind stilled.  Then there was the soft tread of a shod foot on grass, and a young man walked into the circle of light cast by the candle.  He had floppy dark hair that fell over one eye, but his other eye was glinting and mischievous even in the candle-light.  He was wearing a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and a soft red jacket that might have been velvet and was definitely too thin for the chill night air.  He showed no sign of the cold, and it was only when he turned his head to look at both of them that Janet saw the bullet hole behind his ear.

“Who commands me?” asked the young man in a voice that was both quiet and chilling to listen to.  Janet shivered, feeling as though cold fingers were walking along her spine, and her legs and arms felt unnaturally heavy.  “I am William Sewell, and I am here.  But I ask, why am I here?”

The séantist pointed a dirty finger as Janet.  “She bids you come, she would question you,” he said, his voice still firm and resonant.  “She would hear a dead man’s answer.”

“And who are you, chick?”  The man had an Irish accent she realised, but it was mostly hidden under a learned pronunciation.

“I am Janet O’Steen,” she said, lifting her head and jutting her chin forward.  “I am–“

“Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian,” said William, and there was a hint of admiration in his voice.  He smiled, his teeth dazzlingly white.  “I have heard of you, of course.  I am flattered that you would ask to speak with me, though this is hardly the way I would have chosen to meet you.”

“You shot yourself,” said Janet.  “It’s not like you didn’t have a choice now.”

The séantist started coughing violently, doubling up as his did so, and Janet shot him an annoyed look that he missed.  William Sewell looked a tiny bit taken aback and brushed the hair away from his face.  When he did so it revealed that his other eye was missing, all that was left was the dark socket and skin patterned as though with sooty ivy.

“I rather believe I did not have a choice,” he said, and Janet cut him off with a snort.

“Of course you had a choice,” she said.  “You had a fiancée and a brother, for all he’d run off with the fairies, and you had a wee addiction to laudanum, which I found is nothing but wine and painkillers.  You could have put the drink down, picked the pen up, and written some more.  The reviews of your poetry were getting hysterical at that point, your public would have bought any old crap you’d written.  You could have sold your shopping list for all the taste and discernment they were showing!”

“I did used to write them in hexameter,” said William nodding.  “But the addiction was a real and terrible thin–“

“It was a painkiller addiction,” snapped Janet.  “Good lord, these days everybody and his mistress has had at least two by the time they’re thirty, and there’s clinics to sort you out and send you back into the real world with a certificate to say you’re a bona fide celebrity now.  You were already a celebrity, all you had to do was put the cup down and write!”

“There were no clinics in my day!”  William was shouting now, both hands on his hips, and his hair was being mussed by a wind that neither Janet nor the séantist could feel.  “I was desperate and I was exhausted!  I didn’t want to be there anymore!”

“So you ran away and left your poor fiancée to rot in that house on the high fell, until your brother came home and married her out of sympathy.”

“What is your question, woman?  Have you summoned me here simply to berate me for the choices I made in my life, a life that is now over by fifty years, I might add?”  Out of the corner of her eye Janet could see the séantist nodding, while holding his hands over his mouth.  She suspected that his earlier coughing fit might now have been just covering up laughter.  She put her own hands on her hips, and stared William Sewell directly in his eye-socket.  Something white, it might have been a maggot, moved inside it.

“Before you died,” she said, “ you wrote a last manuscript, a suite of poems that described your feelings and why you made those choices.  That manuscript was posted to your fiancée who showed them to your brother and to a couple of other people, mostly low-class men that she was sleeping with for money, and then she put it somewhere safe.  So safe that no-one’s found it since.  I want to know where that manuscript is now.”

“Why don’t you summon my fiancée and ask her?”  William stared back at Janet, determined not to lose the staring contest.

“She did,” said the séantist suddenly, his voice still deep and resonant.  “And your brother.  And then your father, to complain about your brother.”

“You’ve spoken to daddy?” William looked suddenly uncomfortable.  “What kind of woman are you?”

“Determined,” said Janet quickly, getting in before the séantist.  He looked slightly crestfallen.  “So where’s the manuscript?”

“Why was poor Clarissa sleeping with low-class men for money when she was married to my brother?” William looked as though he was only just hearing what Janet had said for the first time.

“He ran straight back off with the fairies,” said Janet.  “He only married her so that the family name wouldn’t be tainted by your killing yourself.”

“But what he was doing was–“

“Aye,” said Janet.  “But that was less shameful, at least in his eyes.  The manuscript, ghost.  Where is it?”

“If I tell you, it cannot be published like it is.  It must be edited first.”

“Of course!  I’m not releasing the unedited version, that wouldn’t make me any money.  I will edit them myself.  You were always sloppy with your metre anyway, and I wouldn’t want to be associated with anyone who tried to make brougham and croon rhyme.”

“You have a wicked tongue in you head, chick.”  William shook his own head.  “Well then, I shall tell you, and you shall promise never to summon me back from the dead again.”

“Fine,” said Janet.  “Hanging around graveyards in the middle of the night isn’t my cup of tea anyway.  Tell me.”

Dead men's answers

There was a rustle nearby as some small mammal scurried through the bushes, and then the noise of traffic passing on the road beyond the wall.  Janet checked her watch; it was fourteen minutes past midnight, and to her mind there was something immoral about there still being traffic on the roads.  She adjusted her little camping stool – the kind that folds up into a set of connected plastic rods with a bit of tarpaulin wrapped around them and took her thermos out of her bag.  Uncapping it she poured herself a cup of tea; milky like cataracts and sweetened with six spoons of sugar.  She sipped it and checked the time again.  It was now sixteen minutes past midnight.

“To-whit! To-woo!” said a hoarse voice behind her.  She jumped, her arm stiffening, and the contents of her cup flew backwards and splashed on something.  There was a cry of surprise, and possibly pain, and a crash like someone falling over something in the bushes.  On the road, more traffic went past, seemingly all in the same direction.

Janet stood up and turned round, holding her thermos like a billy-club.  She could see a pair of Wellingtons sprawled in the bushes behind her, and hear a faint groaning.

“Who’s there?” she hissed, trying to sound authoritative.

“Me, you stupid cow,” said a hoarse voice.  “I said I’d make an owl-call to let you know I’d arrived!”

“That was an owl?  It must have laryngitis then.”

“Well what sound do you think an owl makes?”  There was a rustling and the sounds of breaking branches as the boots disappeared from sight and the bushes shook violently.  Janet hooted obligingly, and a moment later got an answering hoot from somewhere up in the trees.

“Smarty-pants,” said the hoarse voice.  “How did you learn that then?”

“My sister kept owls for a few years,” said Janet.  “She’s… odd like that.  But she makes the best colcannon this side of Dublin.”

“Colcannon?  That’s that big sword isn’t it?”

“No, that’s a claymore.  My brother, the blacksmith, makes them occasionally.  If you pay him.”

A man emerged from the bushes, his jacket disarrayed, his face scratched where it was covered by a thick brown beard, his trousers torn at the knees, and his boots covered in mud.  “What’s a colcannon then?  A type of gun?”

“It’s food,” said Janet sounding annoyed.  “Everyone knows that.  You can sit in any restaurant in town and order it and eat it for yourself.  I’m not here to talk about food.  I want answers.”

“Right, right.” said the man.  He looked at her.  “You’re a big overdressed, aren’t you?”

“What?!”

“Well, we’re supposed to be here on a date if anyone finds us.  You don’t look like you’re on a date.  You look like you’re looking for people who are on a date so you can arrest them.”  Janet was wearing a Barbour jacket that had belonged to her great-aunt and had seen the raising of nearly sixty litters of puppies and eight generations of horses, a sheer skirt of heavy wool, heavy leather shoes, thick woollen socks and a woolly hat.

“It’s my first date,” said Janet, and the man decided to leave the conversation well alone after that.

“Ok,” he said.  “Let’s go then.  We’re going this way,” he pointed, “to the grave of William Sewell.”  He set off towards the nearby path through the graveyard, and Janet fell into step behind him after picking up her stool.  They walked briskly for five minutes, feet crunching on the loose gravel of the path with the hoarse man picking the path out when it diverged, or at one point became a large circle for cars to turn in.  Finally he turned down a tree-lined path where the light from the stars and moon all but disappeared, and halted in a shadow so deep that Janet couldn’t see him any more.

“This is William,” said the man.  “His mother still tends his grave, you know.  She’s here every Saturday and Sunday tidying it and laying new flowers.”

“She should grow them on the grave itself,” said Janet.  “Plenty of good soil, and he’ll be contributing to it.”  The growing silence meant nothing to her, so the man gave up disapproving.

“What’s the question?” he said.  “Let’s get this done before the caretakers come round.”

“Ah!  No, I’ll ask the question to William.  I know what you séantists are like, if I tell you now you’ll think of an answer and I’ll never actually get through to William.  I want the answer directly from him.”

The man sighed.  He’d tried telling Janet several times now that someone conducting a séance wasn’t a séantist but she’d apparently decided that this was the word she was going to use.

“Fine,” he said.  “As you will.”

There was a short pause, and then the sound of a match striking.  A tiny flame appeared in the darkness, sputtered for a moment, then grew, revealing a slender white candle in a tiny brass holder.  The man set the candle down on the grave, now scarily sinister in its pale yellow light, and then held his hand over the flame.  A needle appeared in his other hand and stabbed inwards, then a drop of red blood bubbled out of his thumb and fell through the flame and landed on the grave.  Janet squeaked, unable to hide her momentary fear.

“William Sewell?” said the hoarse man, his voice suddenly deep and resonant.  “William Sewell, are you there?  William Sewell, I command you.”  The candle flame suddenly burned a brilliant red and Janet squeaked again.

Distillation

Distillation, not accumulation.  The words were scrawled on the white tiles of the kitchen wall, about three inches from the floor, in blood.  Perhaps an inch and a half away from the words was a hand which appeared to have been physically torn from an arm; the stump was ragged and tendons and other bits of dark red tissue stretched out behind it in the general direction of the living room.  The fingers were blood-stained too, and it would appear that the author had used the hand as a pen of some kind, though where the blood they’d used as ink was now was anyone’s guess.  Detective Lindsay checked the sink, looking for signs that it had been poured away, while Mrs. Elizabeth Bennett stood and shuddered at the horror of the scene.

“It looks like it might be murder, ma’am,” said Detective Lindsay.  She’d found only old crockery and a bristleless brush in the sink, and it was reminding her of a modern art installation.

“I do hope not,” said Mr.s. Bennett.  She sounded oddly determined.  “That’s my mother’s hand!”

Janet O’Steen, Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian, pushed her chair back from her typewriter, got up and went to the kitchen, got out a rough cloth and wetted it, and started rubbing the tiles walls down.  This was the fourth time today that her writing had gotten to her enough to trigger her slightly obsessive desire for cleanliness, and she knew she’d know no peace until she was sure that her kitchen walls were spotlessly clean, and she checked all the corners for discarded hands.  She sighed as she scrubbed, aware that what she was doing wasn’t quite normal, but equally aware that fighting it just made it worse.  She’d tried hiring a maid to do these things for her a couple of months ago, but the girl had first quit and then tried to take her to a tribunal claiming that her demands were unnatural and inappropriate.  The court-room had been brown and drab, and the lawyers had been young, well-scrubbed, and somehow depressingly eager to see a fair resolution for everybody.  The clerk of the court had been an alcoholic she was sure, she had smelled the fumes of Uisghe on him when he came into the room, and his typewriter didn’t have enough keys to hold the whole alphabet.  The judge however… well, her first thought had been to dismiss him because he was clearly a pervert, but then as it became clear to everyone that he had been hoping the case was about predatory lesbians and the kinds of things that only happened in smutty movies she had warmed to him.  With every new revelation his face would brighten and he’d ask questions like, “Did you expect her to clean in the nude?” or “And did you insist that she rub herself with the brush first?” and, at the end, “Couldn’t you have even asked her to take her socks off in front of you?”.  He’d shuddered quite a lot with that question, and then he’d seemed to relax somehow.

“Case thrown out,” he’d yelled.  “There is clearly no case to answer for.  How dare you all waste my time by bringing this before me!”

“Expenses, milud?” Janet’s lawyer had said quickly.

“For the defendant,” snapped the judge.  “Doubled if the prosecution wants to complain.”

And that was that, except that she still had no-one to keep the kitchen appropriately clean, and she was trying to write a detective novel.  She could see it might be a long process.

The novel was intended to be a prequel to Bride of Prejudice to explain to people why the protagonist’s mother had deserved such unpleasant things to happen to her.  Janet was tired of turning on comedy shows to find them still satirising her works, and of turning on the radio and finding reviewers still discussing her alleged mother-hatred, and even of going to the university as a guest speaker and being asked leading questions about the untimely and slightly mysterious death of the major reviewer of her works.  To set the record straight at last she intended to present the story of Mrs. Elizabeth Bennett and why the wretched woman, after giving birth to an unwanted child, had deserved to end up a sex-slave at the bottom of Ireland’s last coalmine and then drown to death when the miners inexplicably struck oil.

“Though,” she muttered to herself as she scrubbed the gleaming white tiles, “I would have thought it obvious that she just deserved it!”

So Mrs. Elizabeth Bennett was, in her very early twenties, a detective working on a small-town police force in rural Ireland, expecting the kinds of crimes you get in places where there are only forty people, one school, eight hundred head of cattle and no cars.  She worked with Detective Lindsay, who had all the imagination of last winter’s potato, and she found herself embroiled in an Ireland-wide conspiracy to resurrect the infection agent responsible for the Potato Famine and transport it to the food states of North America.  Janet intended that Elizabeth’s actions would cause the deaths of innocents, which would in turn justify the horrible end that she came to in Bride of Prejudice.  

“They won’t be able to criticise me after this!” she muttered, her teeth gritted as she tried to shift entirely imaginary bloodstains.

Finally satisfied that the walls were clean enough and the dark corners were free of severed appendages, she sat back down at the typewriter.

“Your mother’s hand?” said Detective Lindsay opening the oven and peering inside.  “Why would she leave it here?  Do you think she knew Mrs. O’Green?”

“We all knew Mrs. O’Green!”  Mrs. Bennett contemplated hitting Detective Lindsay with the greasy frying-pan sitting on the counter and claiming that it had fallen off.  “Mrs. O’Green ran the General Store for nearly fifty years before her son made her retire last year!  There’s no-one living in this town who hasn’t bought soap or condoms from her!”

Detective Lindsay straightened reflexively and caught her head on the oven.  She cursed like a nine-year old, and backed more cautiously out of the oven.  She rubbed her head, glaring at Mr.s. Bennett.

“The Pope has banned condoms!”

“Mrs. O’Green was Protestant.”

“Did you buy condoms from her?”

Mrs. Bennett looked at Detective Lindsay and wondered what the poor woman thought she would do with condoms and no boyfriend in a town this small.  The fourteen-year-old boy who’d had sex with his second cousin last week in a hayrick was currently the hot gossip topic, and he’d done that at midnight two miles away.

“No,” she said patiently.  “And neither did my mother.”

“Oh!  Your mother’s hand!”  Detective Lindsay pointed at the hand on the floor, and Mrs. Bennett sighed heavily.

“Yes,” she said.  “Oh dear.  I think I’ve just seen her other hand behind the door.”

Janet sighed as well, and got up to check behind all the doors in the house.

The assassin and the tea-master

Janet O’Steen, Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian, sat down on the only free table in the small café.  She put her handbag down on the table, knocking the laminated menu to the floor, and looked around her.

The café was full, but not quite crowded; the management had laid the tables out with a little space between them, foregoing the opportunity to cram as many people in as possible in favour of giving their customers a pleasant enough experience that they would want to come back.  The counter was against the back wall of the room and had the usual glass display cases housing pastries, pre-sliced cakes, and baguette-style sandwiches that hadn’t been there long enough to start looking wilted yet.  A huge chrome coffee machine took up about two-thirds of the space, and the baristas were constantly dancing around trying to tend to both it and the customers without collision.  The smell of roasted coffee beans was a permanent, mingled with a smell of damp (it was raining outside), and an occasional gust of baking bread from the ovens in the back room.  Janet inhaled deeply, hoping for bread and getting only damp.

Most of the tables were fully occupied, though perhaps ten percent of them, like hers, had a single chair free.  One or two had two chairs free, and Janet couldn’t help but give their occupants a reproving look that they were wasting space like that.  The occupants stoically ignored her, in most cases not even realising that the pinch-faced woman with the glare was looking at them.

“What will you be having then?”  A waitress had appeared at her elbow while she was glaring at the other customers, and was standing, poised alertly with her notepad at the ready and her pen aimed dagger-like at the page.

“Tea,” said Janet clearly.  “As black as a mother’s heart, with a small jug of sweet milk on the side to temper her wrath.”

“Sugar?”

“Yes, thank-you,” said Janet a little bit put-out that the waitress had ignored the way she’d phrased her request.

“And for your guest?”

Janet narrowed her eyes at the waitress, wondering what mysterious slight this was intended to be, and started to gesture at the empty seat across from her.  Only it wasn’t empty any more.  Sat there was a man with long chestnut-brown hair, a hook-nose, and gimlet-like eyes that might have been yellow.

“Ask him yourself,” said Janet, faintly surprising herself that that was the response she’d intended to give all along.  She toned the sarcasm down a little though.  The waitress turned to the intruder and raised an eyebrow.

“Tea,” he said in a deep voice that made Janet think of chocolate.  “Served in bone china, with a slice of lemon on the side.  Do you have hibiscus-tea?”

“Sure,” said the waitress, making a couple of notes on her pad.  She turned away to place the orders, and Janet glared at the man who had sat opposite her.

“It’s considered polite to ask before you sit down,” she said stiffly.

“It would be polite of you to clear the table before the waitress returns with our drinks,” said the man.  He put a hand on her handbag, and Janet immediately slapped it.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“I’m an assassin,” he replied.

Janet picked her handbag up and placed it down beside her chair, making sure it leaned against her leg so that any bag-thief would have to alert her to his intentions.  She didn’t take her eyes from the self-proclaimed assassin while she did this, relying on the comforting weight of the handbag to know that she was leaning it against the right leg.  For a moment she was distracted, thinking that she should create a character for her next novel that had a false leg and so had to constantly look at what they were doing with it.  Perhaps they could have an elderly mother in a wheelchair who was attempting to dominate their life still, until there was an accident… no, wait, her critics were still harping on about matricidal storylines, so perhaps the mother could be sent on a Saga holiday to get her out of the way while the protagonist found romance.  With… with a man who’d lost both of his legs to a landmine accident while on holiday with his sister, who’d lost both of her arms in the same accident and couldn’t hug her only child….

“What were you thinking?” asked the assassin.  The waitress laid a bone-china cup containing a fragrant orange liquid in front of him.  “Your eyes were slightly glazed and your heart-rate increased.”

“I was planning a new novel,” said Janet.  The waitress placed a mug of thick black tea in front of her, and banged a little white ceramic jug on milk next to it.  “Why are you sitting at my table?  Why have you not left when I pointed out how rude you have been?  I have cleared the table when you pointed out how rude I was being.”

“I am here to kill a woman,” said the assassin.  He sipped his tea, and smiled thinly.

“I see,” said Janet.  “Do you need some suggestions?  I have a list.”  The assassin paused, his cup halfway to his lips again, and lowered it.

“You have a list?”

“Well yes,” said Janet.  “I have been wronged, slightly, and improperly criticised.  I should think all authors have lists they’d be happy to have someone take care of for them.”

“I’m not here for you to hire,” said the assassin.  He removed a tiny knife from somewhere beneath his coat and laid it on the table.  The blade was as long as a finger, and the handle was barely long enough to grip in two fingers.  It gleamed.

Janet sipped her tea and sighed with pleasure as the hot liquid warmed her throat and stomach.  “Then why are you still at my table?” she asked.

“You are a very single-minded woman,” said the assassin.  He tilted his head, looking intently at Janet.  “I am impressed.  I – what are you doing?”

Janet pursed her lips.  “Stirring my tea,” she said.  She had picked the assassin’s knife up and was stirring a few drops of milk into her tea with it.  Then she skewered a sugar cube from a bowl on a neighbouring table, ignoring a soft gasp from the man at the table, and stirred that in too.  “I shall clean your knife, don’t worry.  But that slattern of a waitress has forgotten both my sugar and any spoons.”

The assassin stared at the knife, still whirling away in the mug of tea, his eyes large and shocked.  “How will you clean it?”

“There’s a ladies’ room over there,” said Janet, gesturing with the knife.  A few hot drops of tea flew from the blade and landed in a cup on the adjacent table.  The assassin’s face turned ashy-grey.

“That’s quite alright,” he said, tossing back the rest of his tea in one gulp and standing.  “You may keep it.”

Janet looked down at the knife, whose blade was no longer gleaming but jet-black and spotted, as though something coating it had reacted with the tea.  When she looked up, the assassin was gone.  She put the knife down, and picked her mug up, and then paused and laid down again.  The man at the adjacent table had just sipped his drink again and was now coughing in a most alarming manner.

That which is measured

That which is measured, improves.

Janet O’Steen, Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian finished typing the sentence and then sat back.  She looked at her laptop – new – and admired its sleek keyboard, its polished screen, and its attempt to be so thin as to be considered anorexic by other laptops.  Then she looked beyond it, at the word-processing program on the screen, and considered the sentence that she’d just typed.

She’d spent the morning measuring for curtains, and she was a little worried that the old curtains might have improved by the time she returned home, at which point she might have to keep them.  That would save her money, true, but she had seen some rather nice black and red curtains that reminded her of a sunburned tiger (she still swore that she’d seen one in the County Kilkenny Safari park one summer in the 1970s), and liked the idea of having a tiger in the living room.  Still, she had now committed to buying the curtains in her mind, so perhaps if the old curtains had improved she could move them to a different room.

“Oh, what a lovely sentiment!”  The soft, polite voice was like nails on a blackboard to Janet, reminding her far too much of her mother.  She controlled a snarl and turned in her seat to see who was talking.  Behind her, facing away from her, was a young woman holding a broken fortune cookie in one hand and a little strip of paper in the other.  To her side was a proper pram, an actual perambulator that was as big as a small woman and could fit six babies at once with a little bit of tetris-style packing.  Naturally it was blocking the aisle of the coffee-shop, occluding access to the tiny toilet, and contained only one small child.

“What’s a lovely sentiment?” asked Janet, torn between annoyance that the speaker hadn’t been reading over her shoulder and relief that she now didn’t have to explain what she meant to anyone.  It was, in her opinion, the reader’s job to work when they picked up a book.  Modern authors, who stopped and explained all the difficult words to their readers, and put in glossaries and appendices and maps and translations were, she felt, pandering to the thick, unwashed masses; the common quagmire.

“This fortune cookie,” said the young woman, half-turning to face Janet.  She held out the strip of paper.  “Look, it says that I will meet a gentleman in distress today!”

“It’s a fortune cookie,” said Janet, her annoyance growing at what was obvious credulity of the part of this woman.  “They’re randomly generated by computer somewhere.  They’re utterly meaningless.”

“To you,” retorted the woman.  “I intend to make this fortune happen, and then I can be pleased that it came true.  If I ran home and hid until tomorrow then I’m sure you’d be delighted to meet me here and point out how you were right; will you now meet me here tomorrow and be shown that you were wrong?”

“No,” said Janet swiftly, spotting the trap.  “You’re going to go looking for a gentleman as soon as you leave the shop, aren’t you?”

The young woman laughed gently.  “Aye, that I am,” she said.  “And then I’ll run over his foot with my perambulator and to be sure, he’ll be in distress then!”

Janet smiled despite herself, finding a kindred spirit with this woman and her quiet, pleasing baby.

“So now you know that I spend my time running over members of the gentry and then boasting about it in coffee shops across the county,” said the young woman.  “So what is that you do then?”

“I’m an author,” said Janet immediately, who believed in self-publicity, all the harder since her publicist had contracted mouth-cankers and had gone on long-term sick leave.

“Are you writing at the moment?”

“Of course!”  Janet looked slightly put-out, and then seeing an opening to start talking about herself, seized it.  “I’m writing a new book at the moment that shall be set in Canterbury and will follow the trials and tribulations of a young girl born into a society family who nevertheless dreams of being a surveyor.  Her mother, who in her youth seduced minor members of the nobility and contracted a slow-acting, drug-resistant form of syphilis, is in the third, brain-eating stages though and won’t hear of her daughter doing anything other than coming out with the other young girls at the Debutantes Ball.  Jane, the daughter in question, fears that her mother intends to set her up with a syphilitic noble son as a means of controlling her, and longs to find a way to leave home and join the Ordnance Survey.  She has romantic notions of sharing a theodolite with a handsome young man with a November beard, and sleeping in a quiet tent some hundred yards away from him at night. When she’s lonely, she cuddles her ruler.”

The young woman’s eyes had grown wide as she listened.  “You wrote Bride of Prejudice!” she said suddenly.  “I read that book so many times!  It was my absolute favourite for years.”

“What’s your favourite now?” asked Janet, unable to accept a compliment if she could dig up an insult.

“The cat that walked into walls,” said the young woman.  “Only two parts have been serialised in the magazines so far, but it’s absolutely amazing.  Arbutternot is almost a hero of mine.”

“Sounds like something to go on toast,” muttered Janet, her heart only slightly bitten by dark jealousy.  “Jane, in my story, finds that the only way to improve things is to measure them.”

“Sounds kinky,” said the young woman with an approving nod.  “I bet her young man enjoys that!”

“With a theodolite!” snapped Jane.

The young woman got up to move her perambulator out of an agonised-looking gentleman’s way, somehow managing to run over his foot in the process.  He yelped, hopped briefly, then flushed crimson as something started leaking down his trouser leg.  He raced for the toilet, leaving tiny golden puddles behind him.

“That sounds painful,” she said, sounding a little thoughtful.  “There you go, my dear, one distressed gentleman.”

A natural death

Janet O’Steen, Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian, tapped her pen meaningfully against the newspaper.  A little way away from her, in an uncomfortable chair designed especially for public libraries to keep the homeless and illiterate from taking up valuable space for any length of time, an ill-shaven man with wild-eyes and a breathing problem looked nervously around.  His eyes darted frantically, hunting for a librarian who might be sufficiently enraged by his appearance to come over and demand that he leave, but before he could find one, Janet spoke.

“This crossword is wrong,” she said, her pen tapping steadily against the paper.  “The answer to A work of outstanding nautical fiction featuring a man and a surprisingly big fish is clearly Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, yet the grid provides space for only eight letters and claims – hah! – that the answer has only two words.”

“I can’t read, mum,” said the ill-shaven man, his eyes now firmly downcast and his hands, clad in filthy fingerless woollen gloves clutching one another as though trying to pull themselves to pieces.

“When you have to read rubbish like this,” she shook the paper at him and he flinched back in his seat, “you should be grateful you can’t read!  I can’t believe that they charge money to read this thing, it’s quite frankly communist composting paper and nothing more!  You should hear what they had to say about my book Bride of Prejudice when they reviewed it.”

The ill-shaven man looked truly terrified after a couple of seconds, when he realised that Janet had said ‘hear’ and not ‘read’ and that she might actually intend to the read the review to him, undoubtedly with added commentary from the author.  And while there were surely people who would be thrilled to get such a reading, he had been on the end of several of Janet’s harrangues over the past few weeks and was desperate not to have to sit through another.

“I’ll find it,” said Janet, her gripe with the crossword now forgotten.  “Just you sit still there, I know it’s in the coffee section somewhere, because the illiterates who put this thing together wouldn’t know a book if it bit them, so it’s far too much to hope that they have a book review section.  Hah!  Heaven forfend!  What is the matter with you?”  She stopped rustling the pages of the paper and stared at her reluctant audience.  The ill-shaven man had decided to throw away any dignity he had had left and was faking a heart-attack.  His hands clawed at his throat, and his dirty, torn fingernails were already raising blood, while he enthusiastically choked and gagged.  His eyes bulged from his face and his feet drummed on the floor.  When he finally slid off his chair and rolled from side to side half-under the reading desk, a librarian came over, summoned from her cubicle of quiet book-repair, and looked first at Janet and then at him.

“What have you done?” she said to Janet, her tone of stern reproof making it clear that she felt Janet was guilty.

“I offered to read to him from this paper,” said Janet, waving the crumpled edition at her.  “I’m not at all surprised that he’s taken ill.  I would too, were I not accustomed to the drivel they print on these pages.”

“You’re not to read to the patrons,” said the librarian in the aggrieved tones of someone who’s had to say the same thing a lot.  “And you’re not to fill the crossword in in pen, it’s not your paper.  It’s the library’s.  Photocopy it like anybody else and fill in your photocopy.”

“No-one else would want to read it,” said Janet, a little hotly.  “And the crossword is appallingly wrong.  The setter has no clue what a decent book is, let alone how to write proper clues.  A five-year old could solve these, if the setter had only known the answers he was asking for.”

The librarian went a little cross-eyed as she tried to work out what exactly Janet was trying to say and then gave up.  She bent down and poked the still-thrashing ill-shaven man.

“Get out,” she said.  “Go on, off with you, or I’ll let this nice lady read to you again.”  He leapt up with commendable agility for someone in the throes of dying, and departed the library with a grateful smile on his lips.

“Be quiet,” said the librarian to Janet.  “Or I’ll throw you out too.”

“You can’t throw me out!”  Janet was scandalised.  “I wrote some of the books you have in this library!”

“Doesn’t matter,” said the librarian.  “There are some books that libraries are improved by not having.  That paper you’re so cheerfully turning into a crumpled mess that no-one else will be able to read put it rather well in a recent review: ‘any library would be enhanced by the absence of books by this author’.”

“They were reviewing my book!”  Janet turned pinkish purple with shocked outrage and finally let go of the paper, which slid off the reading desk and onto the floor.

“Well then,” said the librarian unfeelingly.  “Be quiet or I’ll throw your books out instead.”  Janet’s mouth opened and closed like a goldfish with Alzheimer’s.  “Bear in mind,” said the librarian turning away now that she’d restored order to the library, “that at the end of that review the reviewer opined that it would be a tragedy if society allowed the author to die a natural death.”

Janet squeaked, the most she could manage with her throat so constricted with rage.

“That reviewer died, you know,” said another voice, this from a middle-aged woman standing at the nearest shelves, seemingly waiting while he son picked out novels by William Burroughes.  The librarian arched an eyebrow, and the woman continued, “It was in the papers – not that one, mind you, far too gruesome for that – she was beaten to death with the dug-up remains of her own grandmother.”  The librarian halted in her tracks, staring disbelievingly.  “Oh yes,” said the woman.  “Macabre and mysterious!   The police are saying as they think it was a woman who did it, but there’s no motive.  Except, I suppose, if you’d got a bad review.”

“That’s preposterous!” said Janet quickly.  “No author would bludgeon an interviewer to death, and especially not with her grandmother’s shin bone.  I mean, how would they find out where the evil old biddy was buried in the first place?”

“Interviewer?” said the librarian looking puzzled.

“Shin bone?” asked the middle-aged woman, looking gleeful.  “Ooh, I hadn’t heard that detail!”

“I meant reviewer,” said Janet, recovering herself.  “And the shin bone… well, that’s a Mark Twain quote isn’t it?  About wanting to beat someone over their head with their own shin-bone.  Though I don’t know how he’d do it, they’re far too fragile.  Upper leg’s the bone you want, the hip joint at the top has a nice heft to it.”

She paused, aware that everybody nearby was now looking at her.

“Research,” she said, a little hopefully.  “For… for my new book.  I’ve just started writing it.”

“What’s it about?” asked the librarian.  Her face had relaxed a little.  “I read Clementsy a while back about the murderous meth addicts.”

“That was a classic love story!” Janet snapped.  “Um, the new one, is, um, well, I don’t like to talk–“

“Oh come on,” said the middle-aged woman’s son, smiling.  “You’ve just told us all about researching beating people to death with their own limbs, I think you have to tell us what the new book is about now.  Zombies?”

“Why is it always zombies with you?” asked his mother.  “If it’s not weird novels that don’t make any sense when you read them, it’s zombies.”

“Er, yes,” said Janet, thinking hard.  “It’s going to be… a revisit… of Sense and Sensitivity… but with zombies!”

“Which one was Sense and Sensitivity?” asked the middle-aged woman.  She screwed her face up as she tried to remember.

“The one about the murderous sisters who kept their mother’s remains in the bath,” said the librarian who’d read them all.

“That was a study of traditional family values!”  Janet looked more outraged than before.

“And matricide,” said the librarian.  “I’ve read all your books, you’ve never met a mother you wouldn’t murder, have you?”

“Oh my!” said the middle-aged woman stepping smartly behind her son, who looked unimpressed.

“The alleged issues regarding the strong female characters in my books have been discussed,” said Janet, hoping they’d infer “from serious works of literary criticism” from her unfinished sentence.

“On the Jeremy Kyle show,” said the librarian.  “And in several of the trashier celebrity gossip magazines.

“But they’ve been discussed.”

“In disgust.”

The librarian and Janet glared at each other like cats on opposite sides of a mesh fence.  Slowly, without breaking their staring match, Janet muttered, “I should be getting on, zombies won’t rise from the grave and write about themselves.”

“I’ve got books to shelve,” said the librarian equally slowly.  Without actually agreeing it, they averted their gazes at the same time, and then pretended that the other wasn’t there.

Per version

Janet O'Steen, Ireland's foremost logodisciplinarian cracked her boiled egg open with a silver teaspoon reserved especially for the purpose.  It just felt wrong to use anything else to open hard-boiled eggs, and when, on holiday once, she'd had to watch a retired Colonel carefully slicing the top off with a knife, she'd run screaming from the breakfast room.  The next day she'd been met at the door to the breakfast room by a woman with more muscles than the female of any species should possess and steel grey eyes who suggested that she should eat breakfast in her room.  Alone.  She levered the cracked fragments of shell from her egg and let them fall onto the plate below, nudging them into a tidy pattern with her finger.  Once the shell was right she could salt her egg and finally eat it.  It was often cold by then.
On the table next to her were the pages of the eighteenth chapter of her current novel, which she was revising.  The first page was already covered in notes in a blue pencil in a cramped hand, with words moved, replaced, and on occasion excised with force, holes torn in the page.  Most of the notes in the margin were about the novel itself, but now and then a note would simply accuse Janet of stupidity, cupidity and other words ending in -idity.  She'd written them all herself.
The novel concerned a young woman whose domineering mother refused to let her marry a Navy Captain because all men in the Navy were known to be Sodomites, Gomorrheans, Syphilitic and Decadent.  The young woman, who Janet wanted to call Janet but suspected that this would cause comment from her critics so had called Malice for the nonce, felt that her mother was overgeneralising a little, but could not bring herself to disrupt the social order and stand up for herself.  Her father, a gentle man who ran a grocer's shop and sold short measure to everyone, was suffering from Alzheimer's, though no-one in the time the book was set had heard of such a disease, and was generally considered to be an idiot, not least because he rarely recognised his wife or his daughters.  As his disease, and the novel, progressed, he began to do odder and odder things because he couldn't remember from one moment to the next what he was supposed to be doing.  He would regularly wash his hands sixteen times, forgetting as he turned the tap off that he'd already washed them.  His wife considered him to be suffering from perversion, with a desire to be more holy and devout than her, and so redoubled her own efforts, going to church so often that the vicar thought that she was stalking him.  He began to seek out ways to avoid her, which led to her believing that her husband was conspiring with the vicar to condemn her to hell and so she began to seek out evil wherever it dwelled, expecting that she would necessarily catch the pair of them plotting against her.
Malice, surrounded by the insanity of her parents, continued to wish that she could step away from her parents and go and accept the love of her Navy Captain.  However, in chapter 17 he took another wife, accepting his rejection by Malice, and deliberately picked one that would have to annoy her.  In chapter 18, despite her numerous revisions, Malice encountered the Captain for the first time after his wedding.
"I married a woman," said the Captain with a supercilious smile.  "She's got everything you could look for in a woman, and the word No crosses her lips so infrequently that I would swear she's the friendliest, most helpful woman in all Christendom.  I should thank you more, Malice, my dear.  Without you I would never have been driven to the Singaporean Entertainment venue where I met my sweetheart."
"You were in Asia?"  Malice was surprised, and a little concerned.  Was it possible that mother had been right and the Captain was indeed a Deviant?
"Of course," said the Captain, smiling again.  "I was posted there for fourteen weeks this last year.  I took the opportunity to buy a necklace of pearls for my sweetheart, something that she could wear while she was performing.  It was hard to find anything that she would be permitted to wear."
"I had heard that the women of Asia are very hairy," said Malice who had heard no such thing but was trying to make conversation.  She thought that maybe mother had told her than the vicar had said such a thing as she chased him into the belfry to ask him about the use of the Communion Wafer for curing rashes in the nether regions.
"Perhaps some are," said the Captain looking a little taken-aback.  "I'm sure that they're very warm at night though, and who wouldn't want that from a woman?"
Has he married an ape? wondered Malice.  He was still tall, impossibly handsome, and appeared to still have all his own teeth.  "I would very much have liked to come to the wedding," she said, thinking all the while that she'd have liked to have been there as the bride.
"Oh, I don't think so," said the Captain dismissively.  "Hardly a place for a chit of a girl like you."
Janet finished her egg and finished reading that line.  It wasn't really abusive enough.  Perhaps the Captain could slap her about a little for her impertinence in wanting to come to the wedding.  Split her lip maybe, or mildly concuss her.  Yes, concussion would be good.  Her father could find her and assume that she was a street-girl laid out after an altercation with a client and pack her off to Bedlam.  Then her mother would find out and fear for her own safety, so refuse to go after her.  Writing eight chapters in a madhouse would be rather easy, and would serve Malice right.  She could eventually persuade the doctors to let her have a visitor, which would of course be the Navy Captain who'd been looking for her ever since she'd disappeared.  She'd confess her love for him, and he'd confess a love for his cabin-boy and that his Singaporean bride was in fact a complete fiction and they could enter into a loveless marriage together.
Janet paused for a moment, realising that she was radically rewriting the novel, and then shrugged.  Logodisciplinarianism wasn't easy, but it was worthwhile, she was sure of that.  Now, she thought, how could she punish Malice's mother a little more?

After Clemethtine

Clemethtine had gotten the chop.  Over a cream tea in Miss Angry's tearoom, Janet O'Steen's agent had explained to her why Clemethtine had to go.
"She's just too much of a downer," she'd said, slurping her tea.  Janet forced a smile on her face, and stabbed her scone with a butter knife.
"What do you mean?" Janet asked.  "She's different, she's an outcast, and she provides a reason for the family to leave the countryside."
"Yes, and that's the problem," said her agent, still slurping her tea.  "She's far too interesting and vibrant. Your readers will have conniptions when they read about her."
"They'll have to look up what conniptions are first," said Janet, still bitter that her language and erudition were considered too high-brow for her readers.  "Then they might be able to have some.  If they try hard.  For a long time."
"Janet, darling," said the agent putting her teacup down at last.  Janet was furious to see that it was still half-full.  "Look, you're a very clever girl, and you could write some very interesting books, but would they sell?  Would anyone want to read a book that, at a fundamental level, tells them just that you're very clever?  No.  They want to read about mild families with problems they can relate too, they want to read about daily drudgery and the monsters that are locked up behind smiling, happy, child-abusing faces.  When they're not reading you they're tsking over stories in the Daily Mail that you and I know are fabricated out of whole cloth using a cookie-cutter and big plastic safety-scissors, but that they think are the real thing and genuine threats to society.  Some of them have had their window-cleaners sacked for being not-English-enough!"
"Clemethine is a modern-day issue," said Janet obstinately.  "She's got all the classic problems with a modern twist.  She's Juliet in a world where Romeo deals meth and death to the landed gentry, she's Smurfette when the Smurf village gets an anthrax infection and they have to repopulate, she's... she's... she's Lady Gaga to a gay nightclub!"
"And your audience think that Shakespeare was too difficult and fail to understand how he enriched the English language; they think that anthrax is something that you post to your MP when he tries to put you in the congestion zone; and they have conniptions, whether or not they know it, when they hear the word gay.  Damnit Janet, you're writing pastoral!  Your characters are supposed to suffer in bucolic agony.  Read some James Herriott, for God's sake!"  She picked her cup up and slurped her tea, not noticing Janet once again stabbing her scone with a butter knife.
"Fine," said Janet in the tone of  a woman severely put upon.  "Fine.  I'll lose Clemethtine.  I was going to suggest conjoined twins with the whey-faced Emma, but I imagine that would be a step too far, even in the countryside where misbegotten animals are a fact of life."
"Even a small teratoma would be too much," said her agent.  "Look, give me the Waltons the way I ask for it, and I swear we'll write the book you want to next.  We'll pick a pseudonym for you so you don't damage your brand, and I'll push it to every other publisher you can think of.  You want to do rough animal bondage?  I'll see if that erotic Mills&Boon imprint will take it.  You want to do political humour?  I'll see if Private Eye will review it.  You want to do a Jacobean tragedy?  You're pretty much on your own there, but I'll be nice about it, I promise."
"Really?"  Janet laid the butter knife down, but mostly because her scone was just a pyramid of crumbs.  "You mean it?"
"Yes," said her agent.  "But finish the Waltons first."
"Why?" asked Janet.  "It's a thoroughly miserable novel, and I'm looking forward to most of them dying of tuberculosis at the end."
"I think we all are," said her agent with unwarranted honesty.  "But I've already sold the film and television rights."

Clemethtine

Janet O'Steen, Ireland's foremost logodisciplinarian, stared at the white powder laid out neatly in lines on her desk.  Her OCD was making her twitch like an underdressed epileptic in a snowstorm and her fingers kept pinching together in a claw-shape.  She badly wanted to clean the table, then clean the cleaning cloth, and finally clean her hands.  She struggled to resist, also wanting to try and get inside the mind of one of her characters.
She had been listening to the radio earlier in the day and a Radio Four documentary about Negro Spirituals had come on, and as she'd half-dozed in her chair, her cup of Ovaltine placed carefully on a placemat on the floor by her feet, she'd started day-dreaming a little about the circumstances which the radio presenter was claiming brought about the songs.  She had a feeling that she might not have woken up until after the first documentary had finished and a second one had started, but she also didn't think that was worth worrying about.  She'd woken up with a new back-story for a minor character in her novel The Waltons.  To her annoyance, her agent was insisting that she add another sister to the brood that had a broader appeal.
"Think sex appeal, but without the sex," said her agent, sounding depressingly chirpy on the phone-call.  "Or possibly without the appeal."
"Wouldn't that be unsexy and unappealing?" asked Janet, aware that her agent had only a passing acquaintance with sarcasm.
"Yes, but you've already got two sisters like that," said her agent breezily.  "The butch lesbian and the one that becomes a prostitute."
"How can an unsexy woman become a prostitute?" asked Janet, astonished by the very thought of it.  "Surely there has to be some attraction there for her cust–, her cli–, whatever you call the men who visit prostitutes."
"Sex on demand, if you've got the cash," said the agent.  "That's got sex appeal.  Your whore can have one leg and birthmarks all over her body so long as she's cheap enough.  In fact, didn't you already write about that?"
"There's no lesbian in The Waltons," said Janet, not wanting to get side-tracked.  She had made her main character's mother essentially a cheap whore in Bride of Prejudice and she was still sensitive about the reviews that book had received.
"Well ok, make the lesbian the new character," said her agent, and the call drifted aimlessly on a little longer before Janet gave in.
So when she'd awoken, she did so with the knowledge that the new sister was supposed to be called Clementine and was named for her mother's favourite Negro Spiritual.  There was a nagging thought in the back of her mind that since the mother had grown up in rural Bath she might never have encountered such songs, but she was trying not to think about that until she had the character right.  The vicar, at the girl's baptism, had had a bad cold and a lisp and so the child was actually named Clemethtine, and in a fit of nominative determinism when she turned fourteen, as she would at the start of the novel, she would run away from home and shack up in a meth lab with a young man who had abandoned his dreams of becoming a groom (second class) to peddle drugs to the local landed gentry.  Between them they would mix up a patent cough mixture that contained the active ingredient methamphetamine, which, though not fixing the cough at all did at least give the user the energy to get things done even when their cough turned out to be consumption.
The lines of white powder on her table were castor sugar, but she was trying to get a feel for how Clemethtine would react when Philbros, her ex-groom, showed her that he'd crystallised the cough mixture and intended to press it into tablets.
"Look, Clemmy!" he said, forgetting that she hated any diminuation of her name.  "The calexis worked!  All those bottles for the cough-mixture – we don't need them any more!  You don't have to lug hundredweights of glass around on your back now!  We'll just press the crystals into tablets and people can eat them like sweets."
Clemethtine, whose back ached abominably every night and every morning, actually sighed with relief at the thought of not having to work like a donkey any more.  "Is it safe?" she asked. "How much cough-sryup do you have to evaporate to make one tablet?"
"Of course it's safe!  It's just energy in a more convenient form!  We'll be rich!"
Clemethtine, being more practical than Philbros picked a tablet up and handed it to him.  "Show me," she suggested.
Philbros would die in a couple more pages, and then Clemethtine could discover her lesbian tendencies with Philbros's mother, thought Janet.  Then she needed to find a way to getting the story back to Janet and the family living in Bath still, some way that seemed natural.  Although their departure now to the city could be in part because they were fleeing the heavily addicted clients that Clemethtine was no longer supplying.
The white lines were too much for her now.  She swept them quickly off the table and went to start the cleaning process.

The Waltons

Janet O'Steen was not having a good day.  First a pipe had burst shortly after she'd gotten up and she'd had to make small talk with her neighbour while he fixed it.  She knew that this was much cheaper than getting a plumber to do the work, and that she'd have had to make small talk with the plumber as well, but it still felt like an intrusion in her day.  No sooner was the pipe bandaged up ("leave it like for six weeks," said her neighbour, "and then see if it's healed alright, so you do") than there'd been a kerfuffle outside and she looked out of the window to see two women in the street outside her front door throwing apples at each other.  Apples that they were seizing from Janet's apple tree.  So, of course, she'd picked up a convenient broom and run out to chase them off, but the excitement of that, and from nearly twisting her ankle stepping on a crushed apple, meant that she couldn't do any writing at all until that evening.
Now, she had four pages in front of her in which her main character's father gave his shoes away to the orphans, forced his housekeeper to take a cold shower until her skin was blue, told two of his daughters that they were adopted and the other two that they were born biologically male, and hired a bagpiper to pipe at all meals.  She sighed heavily and dropped them in the bin.  It was her own fault, she knew she shouldn't have watched the X-Factor before starting to write, but the alternative was Songs of Praise, and that was no more helpful to the writing process.
She picked up her pen again, deciding that she'd get four pages written before she went to bed, pages that she wouldn't have to immediately drop into the bin.  Her pen hovered over a fresh page of her notebook as she wondered what her main character and her family would really do at this point of the novel.
Another problem, she thought to herself, not really aware that she was procrastinating again, was that this wasn't the novel she wanted to be writing.  Her agent, a normally very pliable woman called Arthuria, had completely rejected the concept of a novel called On death and dying: rebellion in a Chinese room.  "It just won't sell, dearie," she'd said over and over again.  "You have to look at your target audience; they want pastoral scenes of family life.  Something with so little tension that they can sleep easily at night, but not so interesting that they wish they were there, or that their lives were different."
"You mean people read my books to feel like their miserable little lives are better than nothing?"  Janet had been incredulous, but Arthuria had nodded solemnly and made her feel slightly bad about getting upset.
Back to the writing, she thought.  Her main character was trying to resolve her father's decision to move to another town in the context of her own life.  He was proposing to move to a grand house that she worried they wouldn't have enough money for if there were to be any accidents, and her mother and her three sisters were all thrilled about it and constantly talking about how their prospects would be improved.  Her main character, called Jane, conceded that there would be fewer cows and other obviously rural things about, but was not at all convinced that her prospects would improve just because she was walking muddy streets instead of muddy cart-tracks.  Finally inspiration struck.
"Daddy," said Jane, trying hard to sound like a strong, modern woman and forgetting completely that Daddy loathed people who had opinions other than his, "Daddy, may I speak with you a moment?"
Her father laid his Bible aside, smiling at her like he smiled at his Sunday congregation: all teeth and no good humour. "Of course, sweetie," he said, struggling to remember her name.  Why had he been cursed with only daughters?  "What bothers you?"
"If we should move to Bath–" she began, and he cut her off, placing his palm firmly across her mouth.
"When," he said.  "When we move to Bath.  It is God's will."
She waited for him to let go of her face, and continued bravely on.  "When we move to Bath," she said, "what will become of us if something becomes of you?"
"Do you mean, if I die?"
"Well yes, Daddy.  Or if you run off with a common street-slattern, or take up with a Chineseman and spend your evenings and your money in an Opium den, or if you are run down by a carriage and the doctors announce that you must spend your days in legless solitude, or–"
He stopped her again by placing his hand over her mouth.  "Do you spend all of your time thinking up ways for me to be injured or killed?"
Janet stopped writing and re-read it.  No, those last few lines would have to change; perhaps tomorrow would be a better day for writing after all.  Bedtime.  Ah, thinking of which, there was a little more she could write, though she'd have to find a proper home for it in the novel.
"Bedtime!" shouted Theresa-May excitedly, and everyone scampered off to bed.  "Goodnight Mother," called Antoinette, and her mother good-naturedly shouted "Goodnight!" back from her room.  "Goodnight Annie," called Florence, "goodnight Theresa, goodnight father!"
More cries of goodnight echoed throughout the house, and though Jane buried her head under the cold, lumpy, mildew-smelling pillow she could still hear them, until finally she sat up in bed and shouted, "Oh shut up all of you!  I'm trying to sleep!"

Dial Emma

Janet O'Steen, Ireland's foremost logodisciplinarian was sat in a rather uncomfortable, broken-springed, once-plush armchair in a bookshop just off Tottenham Court Road.  In one hand she clutched a plain white mug of coffee; she'd asked for a latte and the scrawny woman with bad teeth had hissed like a broken steam pump and said something in French.  Finally Janet had pointed at the Nescafe and accepted that the brown sludge in the cup was what the woman thought coffee was.  In the other hand, she held a pen, delicately gripped between her forefinger and middle finger like a surgeon might hold a scalpel.  It was poised above a pad of paper balanced carefully on her knee; her knee was raised by the expedient of resting her foot on the back of a small child that was playing with toy cars on the floor.  So far no outraged parent had appeared to complain that their precocious offspring was not a footstool, and so Janet was trying to plot her new novel.
Coming to London for a weekend to immerse herself in book culture for a while had seemed like a great idea until she'd reached Dublin airport after what felt like hours in traffic.  "Tunnel's closed, my dear," the taxi driver had explained, his rheumy eyes undoubtedly the reason he kept veering across lanes of traffic whenever there was a space and nearly killing them both.  "It's the rain, you see."
Janet didn't see, she was sure that Ireland of all countries knew how to deal with rain, even when a month's worth fell in six hours.
At the airport she found that it was being remodelled in places, typically the places where she chose to sit and try and think.  For half-an-hour her new novel had featured the brutal murder of men in loose-fitting jeans and hard-hats who shouted things across terminal seating and dropped spanners, hammers, and just about anything else they could find in their tool-boxes.  She'd eventually screwed those pages up and left them in a convenient bin.
Now in London she was finding it to be full of tourists, annoying people, and children.  She felt she would have done better at home.  She sipped her horrible coffee and thought some more about her novel.
The heroine of the novel was to be an Agony Aunt called Emma, who wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column and hosted a radio phone-in show three time a week: Monday, Tuesday and Friday.  The show was called Dial Emma, obviously, and people would call up with their problems.  A team of screeners would make sure that only interesting problems got through to Emma, in particular those that positioned the questioner as caught between two equally hard solutions: those caught on the horns on a dilemma.
Janet was determined not to mention Emma's mother anywhere in the novel, especially since the back-story that she'd already designed suggested that her mother had died of the Black Death in a whorehouse in Belfast, to a round of applause from a collection of meth-addicted prostitutes.  Although essentially to the development of Emma's character, the phrase 'mother-hater' was becoming just a little too bandied about by Janet's critics.  Or so she felt.
What would make the novel interesting, Janet decided, was if Emma often tried to resolve the dilemma on behalf of her callers, to the extent of visiting people to make impassioned pleas for reconsideration, writing anonymous threatening letters, blackmail and, if necessary, attempted murder.  Emma viewed herself as a kind of vigilante, a modern-day superhero with an underwired bra and an eight-inch-bladed knife.
"You see," said Emma, plunging the knife into Ross's arm again.  He screamed, but not so loudly now.  The pool of blood reached her shoes, and she realised, belatedly, that she should have worn galoshes.  Or Wellingtons.  "You see, you should never have left Cecily.  She's a good girl, from a Catholic family, and there'll be hell to pay for her now that you've just run off, gallivanting with an older woman."
"She cheated on me first," said Ross, though it more of a groan that anything.  "With fifteen other men.  At the same time."
Emma paused, unsure of herself.  "What?"
"I came home from work and found eight naked men in the sitting room.  Most of them were... well, aroused.  There were another six in the bedroom, queued up, and one in the bathroom, shooting up.  Cecily was working her way through them."
Emma stuck the knife in Ross's shoulder without thinking about what she was doing.  He just groaned.  Was it possible that she'd not done enough research this time?  Was she getting carried away, saving victims and redeeming the drowntrodden?
She looked down at Ross and realised with horror that his white pallor, rolled-up eyes, and blue-tinged lips were all indicators that he'd likely just died on her.  She'd definitely never meant to kill him!
As the novel progressed, Emma would have to both hide from the police, who took a dim view of vigilantes, and from Cecily who was bipolar and psychopathic as well as sex-addicted, drug-addicted and mildly dyslexic.  However, to avoid suspicion falling on her too strongly, she would still have to conduct her day-to-day life as though nothing was wrong.  As things got more tense, Emma would call into her own radio show rather than risk going to the studio and outsource her newspaper column to the local primary school when she was forced to hide in a Wendy-house there for two weeks.  In short, Emma would find herself hoist on the horns of her own dilemma.
Janet smiled to herself, and shifted her feet, accidentally kicking the child in the side of the head.  The novel was coming along after all.

Coathanger Abbey

Janet O'Steen, Ireland's foremost logodisciplinarian, made angry tea.  The reviews of her latest book were out, and they seemed to mostly fixate on what they referred to as her Electra-complex.  Not only did it annoy her that they were ignoring the subtle nuances of plot and the delicacies of character creation, but it annoyed her all the more that she had no idea what an Electra-complex was.  Having reached fever pitch, she was now refusing to do anything to find out, petulantly insisting that if her critics couldn't be clear, she certainly wasn't abetting them in their character assassination.  Tea leaves spilled across the floor in a fragrant spray like confetti on a disastrous wedding day, and hot water jumped from the cup to splash across the counter top.
When she'd finally got enough tea in the cup to be worth drinking she retreated to the living room and put the newspaper under the couch cushions.  Perhaps if she punished it enough it would start behaving, retract its foolish review and produce something more acceptable.  More in favour of her work.
She looked over at the typewriter sitting on the ceramic-topped table and felt a brief stab of pain.  Using it at the moment would only bring forth the wrong kind of story; something that wanted to please her critics, to beg their forgiveness and beseech kind words from them.  And there was no way she was giving in, letting her words become slack and undisciplined, yielding to the critics' scourge.  Instead, she picked up her pad of paper and continued making long-hand notes on her next novel.
Coathanger Abbey would be her first novel in which nobody's mother died.  Her critics seemed obsessed with matricide and its presence, however necessary for the plot (as in Bride of Prejudice and Sense and Sensitivity), in her books, so she would show them all and write a book without a mother-murder.  It wasn't easy; she'd already had to scrub out fourteen pages of ideas that ultimately revolved around the death of someone's mother, but at last she thought she had an idea that would work.
The eponymous Coathanger Abbey was the first legal government brothel after the government legalised prostitution and criminalised abortion.  By night, it was a brothel catering to slightly unusual tastes, and by day it was an illegal abortion clinic, though masquering as the brothel of its night-times.  Women would arrive, dressed in clothes that concealed their gravidity, and perhaps made them appear a little more masculine, and they would leave looking drawn and haggard, perhaps with scratch marks on their face or whip marks on their wrists.  They would be thinner, and no longer pregnant, but this would be less interesting than the notion that they were attending a lesbian dominatrix brothel.
The story would really begin when a young woman called Judy arrived at the brothel, scarred both physically and emotionally, and in the late second trimester of pregnancy.  Her malnutrition and general unawareness of her health would put her at risk of death if the child was aborted, so she'd scraped together the money for Coathanger Abbey and its skilled doctors and nurses.  Janet intended to spend a hundred pages or so building the back-story for her character, her courage in the face of extreme adversity, and describing the strange society that had produced Coathanger Abbey.  She might have ten or twenty pages in there as well describing some of the more interesting acts the lesbians got up to at night, but only in the interests of verisimilitude.  She told herself.  Then the story would get interesting.
One of the doctors attending Judy would recognise her.  She would question her, puzzled that someone working there would know someone like her, and he would reveal that he'd treated her mother.  As she puzzled over what he could mean, he would reluctantly explain that her mother had been one of the first to arrive for abortion, but was too far gone in the pregnancy and so they'd induced labour and delivered the baby.  To everyone's astonishment, the baby survived.
"You mean my mother never loved me?" asked Judy, her eyes wide, too astonished to cry.
"Well... I don't know if I could honestly say that," said the doctor, feeling trapped in revelations he could no longer control.  His pulse beat erratically as he measured it with two fingers on his wrist.  "When she heard you'd survived she was inconsolable, she cried for days.  Her eyes were so red you could calibrate a printing press from her.  Eventually we fostered you out and told her that we'd given you to the alcoholic janitor as a little gift to abuse, and then she cheered up enough that we could discharge her and send her home.  Obviously we spanked her a little first and shaved her head so that people would believe she'd been visiting a brothel."
"But... my scars!" said Judy.
"Yes," said the doctor.  "We think she'd tried to abort you a couple of times herself before she came to us."
There, thought Janet, a thin, satisfied smile curling her lips.  Not a single mother dying anywhere.  Let's see what my critics have to say about that!
She laid down her notepad, wondering how the story would end – no revenge killing, as the mother mustn't die – but perhaps Judy could have a daughter of her own and give her up for adoption, only to find out years later that her mother, in a fit of guilt, had adopted Judy's daughter and raised her as her own.  Then she pulled the newspaper out from under the couch cushions again and began to methodically tear it into small squares.

Logodisciplinarian II

Janet O'Steen, Ireland's foremost logodisciplinarian, sipped her cup of milky tea and frowned.  She set the cup down with a tinkle on its saucer and picked up her pen.  In front of her, on the ceramic-surfaced table she used for working, were two dictionaries; the latest edition and the previous edition.  She was carefully going through them, page by page, comparing the entries and highlighting the changes.  She was not happy about the words that had been omitted from the latest edition.
She circled the word celaxis in the previous edition and then carefully wrote it in in the new edition, at the foot of the page with a little asterisk marking the point at which it should have appeared.  In fact, it hadn't appeared in the previous edition either, but had been copied in by Janet when that had first come into the bookstores, and likewise had been copied from the dictionary before that as well.  She couldn't exactly remember how far back the word had been dropped from everyday use, but she was determined not to lose it from the language.  It was just too useful.
The egg time dinged in the kitchen, so she bookmarked both dictionaries and stacked them neatly on one corner of the table.  It was time to get back to writing.
She was working on the plot for her next novel, which she planned to call Sense and Sensitivity.  It was the story of twin sisters, one whose common sense was her most notable feature and the other whose exquisite appreciation for social niceties and the intricacies of etiquette made her a delight to be around and who would be invited to every party and debutante ball there was, just so that the host and hostesses could be sure that they were doing everything right.  Sadly, sister Sensitivity was acutely aware that her gifts made her more attractive than her sensible sister, and so she refused to court any romantic attention until such time as her sister found love and accepted a marriage proposal.  Sister Sensible however, perceived that she would always be seen as second best while her sister was single, and so refused to countenance any chance of romance until her sister was married off.  The net result of all this was that the two sisters were heading fast into spinsterhood, both firmly believing that they were doing what was best for the other.
The novel opened on the morning of the twins' thirty-seventh birthday to the noise of their best friend, who had been staying with them to help prepare for their birthday party, falling down the stairs and breaking her neck on the tiled floor at their foot.  Sister Sensitivity, ever alert to the social issues, pointed out that as their friend was well known to be staying with them with the expressed intent of helping out with the party, they would need to find some way of articulating the corpse, and perhaps a pliable ventriloquist, until after the party was over.  Sister Sensible thought they had just enough time to bury the body in the woods at the back of the house and hold the party, telling people that their friend had received bad news and left immediately.
"This is just like when we lost mother," said Sensitivity, clutching a perfumed handkerchief alternately to her nose and bosom.  She inhaled deeply, and fluttered her eyelids as though she were going to swoon.
"Mother floated out to sea on a homemade raft of gin bottles and lace petticoats," said Sensible, her face twisting into a frown.  "She only drowned because she couldn't remember which bottles still had gin in them."
"And we spent fourteen weeks pretending that she was just always in the bath whenever people came to visit," said Sensitivity, fluttering her eyelids more, wondering why Sensible didn't take the hint.
"She was just in the bath," said Sensible.  "At least until she went soupy.  Then we pulled the plug."
Janet paused in her writing for a moment and wondered why all her mother characters had to die as part of the story, and then found herself wondering how easily a decomposing body would go down a plughole.  Presumably the bones would need to be dealt with some other way... used to make the crib in the nursery, perhaps?  A hint that the sisters were finding their lifetime together a little hard, a suggestion of the madness that she had planned for later on?  Or was that too unsubtle?
The egg-timer dinged again and she put the novel aside and went back to the dictionaries.  She hated words being out of place.