As always, we had a great time. Mary Pullen planned our activity, which was a really good eye opener for me. Given two people, a lake and early evening in the summer, we were asked to write for fifteen minutes from the perspective of one of the two people. After that, we wrote for fifteen minutes from a limited third person perspective and finally we wrote for a further fifteen minutes as an omniscient narrator. It was a really interesting exercise for me. It had never occurred to me before to examine one scene from multiple viewpoints. I enjoyed the activity very much and I was pleased with what I wrote, which is below.
An Early Bath
by Annie Bell
“Come on
Janie!” Simone called. I was struggling. A beery lunchtime at
Colchester Free Festival had led into a cidery afternoon and now my
head seemed to be trapped in its own personal waltzer. Trying to
catch my wicked friend – the one who had encouraged this foray into
an afternoon of ad hoc boozing on an empty stomach, I staggered from
left to right, right to left – or was it? I could've been marching
diagonally into the sky for all I knew. Bang! I hit a bin,
careering off it like a pinball, giggling hysterically. The music
was still banging in the background.
Simone
appeared ahead of me; an impressionist blur of blonde hair, pink and
green with legs, somewhere in the centre of my soft focus beer
goggles, dancing wildly. “Yowzers!” my drunken mind slurred to
itself. "She's even more drunkerer than I am might be.”
“Want to
be Tom Daley!” Simone called out. What the pants was she going on
about? My wibbly brain did not compute. Simone staggered further
and I was dragged after her, both of us giggling completely
hopelessly as our legs worked against us like those weird bikes at
fetes which steer left when you want to go right.
Eventually,
we came to an expanse of water.
“We're
here!” Simone announced as though we had completed a marathon. I
looked around. The boating lake. What were we doing?
“Aargh!”
Splash!
“Simone," I yelled. "Are you ok?”
* * *
“What numpties.” Dave thought. In all his time as a Journalist
for the Gazette, he had never seen such stupidity. He knew people at
the Free Festival would be drunk but this was really funny.
Two obviously inebriated females: one was blonde and slightly crazy,
the other, with her short dark hair, was much more wobbly than her friend as they staggered from the beer tent, knocking a few toddlers over as they
went. They seemed utterly unaware of the carnage they were causing.
The dark haired one seemed to be struggling with her sense of direction. She took
over five minutes to cross the lower Castle Park, staggering in a
random zig zag from left to right, right to left in pursuit of her
friend. Dave watched as she careered inexorably towards an
overflowing bin, and was pinged off in yet another direction.
A bit further on, her blonde friend was dancing like a demented
ballet dancer, her mint green dress billowing out as she pirouetted
randomly across the park.
“Want to be Tom Daley!” she yelled at no-one in particular. She
then ran over to her partner in crime, almost knocking her over as she overshot her
target, grabbed her limp hand and dragged her down to the edge of the
boating lake.
Dave ran forwards as the girls staggered onto the jetty, unwittingly
shoving a couple of small children aside.
The dark haired one stood, blank faced, confused, oblivious – her face faintly green,
as her friend adopted an overly elaborate supposedly professional diving
pose, before plunging, belly first, into the lake. Dave pulled his
camera out just in time to capture the moment. The readers would
love this. The bloody Olympics had a lot to answer for.
* * *
Simone could not know the ramifications of her drunken moment of
comedy genius. When she leapt off the end of the jetty, her cider
befuzzled brain had no logic. It did not think of practical issues
like the depth (or lack thereof) of the water. She was unaware of
the horrible slimy mud, which lurked a foot beneath the surface of
the water; an intoxicating mixture of rotting duck poo and leaf
mould. As she landed with an almighty thud, the realisation may have
dawned upon her but not in any concrete form. She hadn't seen Dave,
capturing the image of her almighty collision with the water, with
his quality DSLR. She also remained unaware of her sozzled friend
Janie, who, too drunk to remain standing, slipped sideways off the
jetty and into the same sludgy soup as her friend.
Neither one knew that the legacy she would leave for the great 2012
summer of sport would be a full front page spread in the Gazette and
public humiliation.
At that moment, they just lay back, muddy, trying to float in the
water as though they were in a swimming pool in the Costa del Sol and
laughing hysterically into the evening breeze.
© Annie Bell 2012
If you are interested in writing, come along to WriteNight. We meet on the second and fourth Mondays of the month at 15 Queen Street, Colchester.
No comments:
Post a Comment