A few years ago I wrote several fragments of writing entitled The Face in the Wall.
I enjoyed the idea of a mean house being scrutinized by a sentient face imprinted within the plaster on a wall. This ‘face in the wall’ provided emotional support to a young boy called George who was mourning for his favourite Aunt who has died under tragic and mysterious circumstances.
And then as the story began on its way, I decided the face needed magical helpers to intervene between their gaze and the fallen house/world: so I gave George the task of creating Plasticine figures who helped the face in his quest for fairness, justice and even revenge!
The figures are mavericks, who enjoy an independence and ‘joie de vivre’ that rejuvenates the cynicism of the face and the melancholy of George-or that was my intention!
Plasticine is interesting as it anchors readers to childhood through at least one strong sensory impression.
The take over of the Plasticine characters and the differentiation between each one seemed tinged with both the comic and a hint of the macabre!
It was a mean house nowadays. Even when the rooms were filled with visitors, laughing and eating, there was this deposit of smallness on everything, like cold fat after cooking. Plants rarely survived, they couldn’t breathe here. There was a queue of dead things in pots by the last shed in the yard and George couldn’t walk past without apologizing to his Aunt. He had tried watering them but he wasn’t here all the time and when he asked the others they just looked at him as if he was asking for money, or had scratched one of their precious cars.
Most plants were now made of cheap coloured silk as her relatives waited for a someone they could persuade to buy the place and set them free from this old fashioned collection of rooms and passage ways best suited to another time. Her pictures of course they could tolerate. They were different and Julian Simmons had been only too pleased to suggest a special showing at his gallery in Chipstone. Such a view of the river too and all those people from London who would be already encircling the date, cheques ready for battle.
Cousin Pat was chewing white toast in the back kitchen when Carla found her. Each mouthful revealed dark red jam like a taunt to the small scarlet Plasticine figure who had crawled all the way from a special interview with the Face, just to do what she was about to do. The mouth on this over-painted woman kept smiling to itself the more she ate. Carla watched the mouth fascinated by the mushy lumps doomed for Pat’s stomach and even worse. The bathrooms stank in this house, even with the linen air sprays donated by George’s father. Everyone was holding on to something in this house, so even the bathrooms suffered each morning and at night. It was as if the house was full of dead things, buried out of sight, faintly corrupting the air.
Carla edged across the worktop and then sat upright opposite Pat, dangling her legs, waiting. It was just a question of the breath. As she watched, she blew Pat a kiss. The sound made Pat pause as she was fishing out another piece of toast, knife ready with a lump of red jam. The kiss travelled like the anointed arrow the face had told them that it would. It carried the messages to Pat as her heart began to clench and shrink and words like remember and why danced into her mind burning away at her forgetting, so all that was left for her to do was to fall down onto the lino floor remembering. and her body started to weep for the things she had not done…