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!"