THE SOUL ROOM
CORINNA EDWARDS-COLLEDGE
Storyland Press
February 2015
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First publication 2015, Storyland Press.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Corinna Edwards-Colledge was born and brought up in Chorlton-cum-Hardy in southern Manchester. She spent many happy childhood Kendal-mint-cake-fuelled hours exploring magical local sites like Alderley Edge and Stile Woods; and has taken an enduring love of the natural world into her writing.
She studied English and Media at the University of Sussex and went on to a diverse working life including running art activities for kids on play-schemes and a few years in a local TV newsroom. The stage also beckoned, the highlight of which being a raucous tour singing and acting in a play written by and starring the late Brian Behan.
Writing has been a lifelong passion, including poetry, short stories, screenplays and Corinna’s upcoming second novel, Return of the Morrigan. For the past twelve years she has managed a scheme for the local council, which encourages people to walk more for their health and wellbeing.
She lives in Brighton with her husband, and a loving if sometimes hectic, patchwork family including two kids each, a dog, two cats and a tarantula called Doris!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To Vee, Maggie, Rashmi and Jill in my writing group I offer great thanks – you have heard every word of this novel and helped it grow. Most of all, thanks to Todd Kingsley-Jones, novelist and tutor for the group – what he doesn’t know about the craft of writing isn’t worth knowing!
Thanks to my first readers: Gabrielle, Rebecca, Sally and Beth for their invaluable feedback and suggestions. Particular thanks to my fellow writer and friend Shani Struthers, who has been hugely generous in her advice and help in establishing myself as a new author; as well as administering the metaphorical ‘cattle-prod’ and making sure I’ve got this story out and being read.
The Literary Agent Judith Murdoch also gave me valuable encouragement and constructive advice that helped shape this version of the novel. Some of the suggestions were painful to carry out, but I know a better story emerged because of them.
And last but not least – to Jim, Saul, Jed, Roz and Alex. The baseline of love and fun you give to my life make everything possible.
To my husband, Jim,
who believes in me always.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Italy 2006
Italy 1977
Italy 2006
Brighton 1982
Italy 2006
Brighton 2006
Italy 1984
Brighton 2006
Brighton 1988
Brighton 2006
Brighton 1990
Brighton 2007
Italy 2007
Brighton 1992
Italy 2007
Brighton 2004
Italy 2007
Brighton 2005
Italy 2007
Italy 1977
Italy 2007
Brighton 2007
Brighton, seven years later
Italy 2006
The shock of the heat when I left the plane at Rome airport was like a blow to the chest, knocking the breath out of me. I gaped like a fish, trying to get enough oxygen into my lungs, as I stood at baggage reclaim, watching the rucksacks and suitcases move inexorably around the conveyer belt. An hour and a half later, sweat was still running down my back as the battered old Mercedes taxi rumbled up the dirt road towards Amarena’s vineyard. It was a beautiful landscape, at least, my intellect told me it was beautiful; but my heart was still disconnected from the rest of my senses, and I studied the green and terracotta slopes and topaz sky with the detachment of someone flicking through a friend’s holiday snaps.
It was strange returning to this place after over twenty years. We had holidayed here a couple of times when I was a girl, but I had only the vaguest memories of it. Mostly I remembered playing with the Amarena’s children, and the food; my favourite was a pudding made with milk and spices. I felt uneasy, but unease was so much a part of me now, it had become a kind of emotional tinnitus, noticed mostly on the rare occasions that it was absent.
‘Venti Euro per favore.’ We pulled up on a small gravel driveway, avocado trees had grown unchecked by the gate, and one of the branches, weighed down with fruit, was knocking on the roof of the taxi. I paid up and ducked down as I opened the door. The taxi-driver got my bags from the boot, and put them just inside the gate. ‘Amarena’s?’ he said, inclining his head towards the small farm house at the end of the drive. Half of the frontage was covered in scaffolding.
‘Yes, part of the estate. He’s going to rent it out as a holiday home when it’s finished.’
‘So you not on holiday?’
‘No, I’m working here.’
‘Working?’ he said with mild incredulity, looking me up and down and taking in my summer dress and flip-flops.
‘I’m a…at least I was a…I’m a gardener. I’m going to live here for the Summer and do the garden while the builders finish off the house, then Amarena can rent it out next year.’
‘Ah, si. I hear in the village that he is away for the Summer, for business.’
‘Yes, I’m hoping to surprise him, have the garden finished, for when he gets back.’
The taxi-driver put his greasy cap back on his head, but didn’t quite make it back into the car. ‘He’s a big man.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘Signor Amarena. I just say, he’s a big man in these parts.’
‘Yes, I know he is, I came here a few times, as a little girl.’
The driver nodded his head slowly, got into the car and did an expert three-point turn on the narrow road. Within seconds I was on my own, and the sound of the retreating car was slowly displaced by the discordant, grating music of grasshoppers, playing their fiddles as if their lives depended on it.
The next morning I woke up with a headache. The air-conditioning wasn’t working yet, and the fan above my bed wasn’t particularly effective. I could almost hear the heat knocking at the shutters on the window, which fitted well, but left just space for a white filament of sunlight to escape where they met the frame. My skin prickled, I threw the slightly damp sheet off me and on to the floor. I looked marooned in the bed, my thighs incongruously plump and pallid. Mornings were often the worst for me, unwanted memories leaking in as consciousness returns, plunging me into a pit of self-loathing. I managed to drag myself to the shower and the simple satisfaction of the cool cleansing water on my body helped to shake off my dark mood.
I spent most of the morning acquainting myself with the farmhouse. I located all the crockery and cutlery; found the cleaning cupboard, and a pantry well-stocked with pickled vegetables, pastas, grains and spices. In the garden (at this moment not much more than a tangle of wiry weeds, flattened earth and builder’s detritus) I found a neglected shed, modestly concealing every garden tool I could possibly need. They were all brand-new and of excellent quality and I couldn’t help but feel a little rush of pleasure. I picked up a pair of mahogany-handled secateurs, opened them and tested the cutting edges against the pad of my thumb. They were lethally sharp. I made a mental note to be careful, to make sure I always closed them before putting them in my pocket. The sense of self-preservation inherent in the thought surprised me. I had been flirting with suicide for a while now, being slightly careless when crossing the road, leaning a little too far over a friend’s balcony at a party, low-level, but still enough to frighten myself.
I walked out of the cool gloom of
the shed and into the throbbing heat. The neglected garden stretched out before me, intimidating in its chaos, my head hurt just thinking about what it would take to make it right. I could go home, could just go home. It would be a bit embarrassing, but that was all. It would be easy to call back the taxi-driver and his old Mercedes. No, I said to myself. Not this time. This garden is a world of possibilities. It’s showing me places that can be filled, transformed, brought back to life. It would be hard work, impossible perhaps to make real the picture I had conjured in my head, but I decided then that I was going to try.
My arms ached as I jabbed at the earth with the small pick-axe, upending the straggly but almost indestructible weeds from the baked earth. They had taken hold of the area that I wanted to change to a small lawn and had to go. Mostly the heat made grass impractical, but I had sourced a hard-wearing drought-tolerant seed and designed a buried irrigation system that would use waste water from the house.
I found myself remembering the small garden I’d had at the house I’d bought with my husband over a decade before in Brighton. It had been totally neglected, and I had rescued it from a four-foot deep tangle of bramble, ivy, and stunted lilacs. Every square foot of earth had had to be turned over and the weeds removed. My step-daughter would squat on her haunches beside me, picking out the spaghetti-like bind-weed roots with her slender fingers. That Brighton garden, small, damp, surrounded by flint walls, could not have been more different from this large, sun-drenched spot, but I could almost feel her next to me. Her fair hair hanging down, curtaining her face; the way she would look through it if I asked her a question. The delicacy of her light-brown eyelashes, the freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks. We had become close by the time she had died, she had just started to refer to me as her step-mum. I felt a pang deep in my chest, as if I was hollow inside except for one visceral thread that had been painfully pulled.
Grief had allowed my depression to sneak up on me, like dry rot. Everything looked OK on the outside, but the longer I left it, the longer I pretended nothing was wrong, the worse it got. Then one day I peeled back the surface, and found that everything in my life had lost its solidity and become unfamiliar. Even the shadows left by objects in my flat had taken on a disorientating, slightly sinister, otherness. I was living behind a grimy veil - tissue thin but sinuous. I couldn’t reach others through it, particularly those I loved, and they couldn’t reach me.
The area was clear. I raked it, picking out small stones, broke up the bigger clumps of soil with the heel of my shoe; raked it over again until it was a fine tilth. The structure of the garden was taking shape. There was something deeply satisfying in the sheer physicality of bringing it to life; the digging, weeding and building of raised beds and steps. Soon I would be able to indulge in the more genteel pleasures of planting out. I decided that I would treat myself to a visit to the nursery the next day, start to research what plants would work best in this sun-drenched corner of the world.
I lay down on the grass, exhausted. It felt good to be so weary; not sleepy, wide awake in fact, and to feel my muscles sighing as they relaxed onto the hot earth. I’m getting better, I know it I thought. Colours had become brighter, sounds sharper. I’m starting to feel again. Something about this place, or maybe just because I’d been so busy and distracted from the monotonous self-critical dialogue that had filled my mind for so many months. The sky was entirely clear. It was infinite, perfect, pulsing with heat. I smiled and closed my eyes.
Italy 1977
The sky is blue, so so blue. Are there skies this blue in England? I don’t think so! Heat sandwich, I am a heat sandwich! Sun hot on my face, hot through the red soil, hot through my back, my legs, even the bit where my ponytail is pushed against the ground by my head. My toes seem a long way-away, I think I have been growing again. I like wiggling my toes, mum painted them coral pink this morning and they look really pretty with my new sandals. I liked the woman in the shop in Rome. She was so perfect; her lips so red, her hair so glossy black, like Rose Red: her hair like ebony, her skin like ivory, her lips as red as blood. ''Bellissima!' She said to me and her voice sounded like a bell, 'Molto Bellissima bambina!' Then she tickled my toes and made me laugh!
I am an explorer, this is a new world. I am the first to come here. The earth is red and the air is full of strange smells and the grass is full of tiny aliens. They sing and sing out to the stars but no-one hears them. I am the first to hear them. I have come to set them free. The sun is so bright I have to screw my eyes up really tightly. Right on the edge of where I can see, if I lie very still and don’t turn my head, there’s a grasshopper, Collette calls them cavallettas. He’s clinging hard to the top of a really long piece of grass, he looks like a man stood on the top of a skyscraper. He is the same colour as the grass and his legs have tiny muscles on them and he is twitching his feelers as if he’s looking for something in the heat. Here is the king of the cloud jumpers. He comes to talk to his people. He tells them: she has come to help you, this giant. Do not fear her. We have talked and shared food and I know that she means to help us. Come, gather my friends, gather and join our new protector. My eyes are aching from having to squint all the time, I’ll shut them for a bit and just listen. The Cicadas sing, a mini orchestra, I can feel their instruments through the soil underneath me, and in the sun too, the sun is so white, even through my eyelids. We hear you oh King, we come! I can hear someone walking up to me, their feet slapping on the hard soil. All is not well in this hot red land. I have tried to save them but will they listen? Come oh great one, we must show them the way!
‘Maddie, do you want to come play with my dolls?’
I open my eyes, the Cicada king has hopped off his blade of grass onto a new one, and it’s even thinner than the last, he becomes invisible when he moves across the the sun. I’m tired of his kingdom now.
‘Yes, I’ll come Collette. But can I be the blonde one this time?’
‘No, of course not, you have brown hair.’
‘But you have black hair.’
‘But it’s my doll.’
Collette can be really stupid sometimes, it’s because she’s so pretty. It’s the same in England, pretty girls are always more stupid. I think it’s because they spend too much time looking in the mirror when they could be reading or climbing a tree or something. Her mum is pretty too, and her dad is really big and handsome and has a hairy chest and talks in a big deep voice like he’s a lord or something. Sometimes, when they’re all together, they don’t look real, like they’re people from a story book.
‘I’ve decided what game we’re going to play. We are lost princesses, lost in a forest and there is an ugly witch trying to catch us.’
‘Does she want to eat us?’
‘Of course she wants to eat us. Because we are beautiful and she is ugly. She thinks that if she eats us it will make her beautiful.’
‘Witches are stupid.’
‘Ugly things are always stupid. All they can think about is trying to be pretty, so they don’t learn anything except how to do bad spells and catch princesses and things like that.’
Collette is being nice today. I put my arm through hers. It is very brown next to mine, and thinner. My arm has freckles on. I hate them. Mum says one day, when I am a woman, I will realise how silly I was to hate my freckles and I will love them. Sometimes mums can be stupid too.
I think that Collette has everything. She has two Cindy dolls - a Disco Barbie with the castle and the posh car (I’ve only got the wardrobe and a castle my dad made out of cardboard boxes but it’s not the same) and she’s got a box of lego so big you can climb into it – but it’s only house lego, there’s no space bits to make rockets so it’s a bit boring – and she’s got a dressing up box that’s full of dresses and hats and gloves and they’re made out of silk and have sparkles on like her mum wears at dinner at the weekend – and she’s got a Sinclair Spectrum and you can do this thing where you make a garden on the screen – and she’s got Simon Says �
� and she’s got lots and lots of teddies and cuddly animals (but I think she’s a bit mean to them because she doesn’t let them in her bed at night, they stay on a shelf all the time, and I think what’s the point of them if you don’t cuddle them?) and she’s got so many clothes for herself too that she has to have a whole room just for them. Sometimes I feel like it’s not fair, but dad says it’s just the way it is, and he and mum aren’t rich like the Amarenas because my dad just helps Mr Amarena know how to grow good grapes, but it’s Mr Amarena who owns the grapes, and the wine that comes from them. They all seem to like wine, every night they stay up after we’ve gone to bed and drink wine and their voices go all high-up and fast and silly. Dad says that when I’m grown-up I’ll realise that it isn’t money that makes you happy. I’m not sure that that can be true, because Mr and Mrs Amarena are always laughing and smiling and look perfect, and mum and dad are a bit scruffy and sometimes look quite sad.
It’s so hot in my room tonight. All the grasshoppers are scratching away and it’s like they’re getting ready for something and it’s making me feel funny. I think of the Cavallettas’ King so little in the big air. The wind is coming, hide my people. Climb down from your grass towers and into the caves. She will guard you from the wind beasts but you have to hide. I wanted to sleep with Collette in her room again tonight but she didn’t like it that I was the one that rescued our princesses from the Witch using a magic potion I had been given by a fairy when I was a baby. Collette wanted a prince to rescue us but I thought that was boring. And anyway, she didn’t have a Ken doll or even an Action Man, just an old Cindy that she’d cut the hair off so it felt silly.
The Soul Room Page 1
