English Tuition Bolton Manchester: Creative Writing Challenge ONE!

As I was looking over some creative writing tips for the Bolton School Entrance Examination, I found a series of bullet ideas arranged under the title ‘A Significant meeting.‘  It was a very odd experience to read over these ideas and feel that they were written by another person! Such is the effect of time! Anyhow I liked the chronology of the ‘list’ and decided to give myself a new challenge this January and write  a story inspired by the forgotten list.

Agitation into creative  action for the New year! 

So I will take a couple of lines from the list each day and endeavour to create a continuous story that matches the original dictates of the list.

Consequently,  here is the list again and I will begin..

 

• A dark November morning.
•  The clocks had altered.
• Lost my trusted watch.  Felt oddly out of time.
• Rain seemed sharp.
• Almost too wide awake?
• Musty smell as I climbed on the bus. No one waving. Everyone slumped dozing  except me.
• Steamy windows. Words scribbled on them seemed to make no sense.
• The bus crowded with damp human beings at 7-30am.
• Smell of shampoo and then something odd.
• Patchouli oil on a leather bag a woman with crimson nails.
• Woman  carrying the bag very closely.
• Her name embosssed on the leather handle.  
• Evangeline Markham.
• Secretive.
• Reading a book with gilt letters and that strange smell again as if something escaping as she reads.
• One eye different colour than the other.
• Restless feet.
• Some thing stirring in the bag.
• As if it liked being read to?
• The bus journey went on and on.
• Time stretching out so the woman can read to the hidden, murmuring  creature.
• As she reads, the sound in the bag is increasing.
• Humming. Music starts to make the letters on the window make sense.
• I can read the message.
• It’s my future name. My destiny.
• With a date!

My new provisional title to  displace ‘the significant meeting’ is ‘Evangeline’.. It may alter as most things do! 

• A dark November morning.
•  The clocks had altered.
• Lost my trusted watch.  Felt oddly out of time.

I was out of step. even my shoes knew it. They would have moaned about this strange route to my new bus stop if they could speak. But they were too conventional,too well trained;  a present from my Aunt who lived above us and liked the idea of my reforming into a ‘proper’ girl’one day.

‘Those shoes will take you places Sydney. Built to endure anything.. Yet respectful too.They have a quiet dignity about them.’

Naturally I said thank you and grew to accept their plainness  because winter was cold that year and the next and the next…

I had  a brand new job, so shiny in my mind that I felt dazzled, oddly out of all time. I had misgivings, but ours was a hard up house and I liked the responsibility of being the ‘one’ who worked,  so the morning that began it all, I walked behind the old Palace cinema and then alongside the  sheltering row of shops. Only one place had any lights on, open as usual, because Miranda sold coffee throughout the night, preferring the conversations of the sleepy, over the apparently wide awake. ‘Sydney, the sleepy take me else where,  away from myself,’  she said her long hands stretched perfectly still across the bar.

Miranda was the tallest woman I knew. She smoked small cigars and detested milk. ‘It makes you sleep and who wants to sleep?  We’re dead enough, soon.’ No one argued with her. Her mournfulness was huge enough to swallow whole towns. ”Saudade’ she used to sigh and would turn her music on  a little louder. Every customer knew her favourite fado. It was as if we belonged to a club. I’m still surprised we didn’t greet each other with a melancholy sigh and an odd tear.  I loved her cafe though. When home seemed too small  I would repeat just three words over and over again in my head like a spell:’cigarillos,  tobacco, espresso’.  As soon as I heard them, something in my head would just open up,and the pressure of  everything flew away: just let go of my hand.

Miranda was not her real name of course. But what was real after all? The coffee tasted of chocolate and the smoke smelt of nuts. Miranda changed her nail colour each day and her temper too. 

‘You have a boys name Sydney and yet you are a girl.Yet you are real. More than real I think because you have been sad.   Our world is different yet our words are the same. ‘

I wanted to help Miranda when she looked sad, but something about her inky dark eyes made me shy. And there was too much company there in her cafe each evening for her to have need of a young person who was just finding her way. She rarely served me personally, except to hand me sugar after Alfred used their huge machine. The machine would hiss and a shaker would slide towards me across the wood. I didn’t take sugar at home but in the cafe it felt part of the whole story of the place. The first time I went there  I was finishing my course. I mumbled and barely lifted my head. Now I was a regular, my head held itself high. 

‘You’re early Sydney.’ announced Alfred as I walked in that November morning. 

‘I’ve lost my watch.’

‘Careless girl’ said Alfred and winked. 

 ‘ You can have one of mine’ said Miranda from the end of the bar and she opened a drawer beneath the  counter.’

‘Gold or blue Sydney?’

‘Blue please.’ 

She gave me gold. ‘Goes with your hair and makes a good impression when you’re just starting out.’

‘So now I’m taking gold to the Labyrinth:  Miranda.’

She laughed at my long pause, and then waved at the cafe and the world. ‘MY  gold is built to last. Survives earth quakes. SHE  knows  all times Sydney,  Keep checking her and  you will see.

‘Her?’

‘Trust me.’

I wanted to and For some reason I did. i put the gold watch on and it immediately told me I had to leave. 

‘Courage’ said Miranda and lit a cigar. 

The rain felt sharp outside the cafe. I stood and waited for the special bus, a no 23 which stopped  half a yard from the side door of The Labyrinth. I wasn’t Ariadne and my boss, Dr Wolsey didn’t resemble a  Minotaur, but then after the first interview I still felt relief to be back out on the street.

‘You’ll get used to it’ said my brother Tom. ‘Everything becomes a habit in three weeks.’ 

I didn’t  see the other candidates. Apparently they were keen too. Dr Wolsey just told me that I stood out from the rest. ‘You’re careful. We like care here. We like to feel safe. ‘