NaNoWriMo 2006 -- Part One

The following is my attempt at National Novel Writing Month for 2006. I make no guarantees nor apologies for its (lack of) quality. Nor will I claim that my novel is appropriate for all age groups. This is a first draft, and as such is completely unedited. This is also a work of fiction. Names, characters, places which bear any resemblance to any real person/place/thing is coincidental and should not be read as if it has any significance whatsoever. Should you continue to read, you do so entirely at your own risk.

You must love danger:-)

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Just how E had entered the darkness, she did not know. She could not remember arriving, only being here. And not being frightened. Intellectually she thought it odd that she wasn’t frightened by this absolute absence of visual stimuli, but she tried to silence her inner complainant so she could focus on the world around her. For while she had no idea where she was, she sensed that she was definitely somewhere and that this place was not just a room. This place was vast. She had no thought that she’d be able to walk to a wall and feel her way out. Well, she did have that thought, but she dismissed it as unlikely. But she tried anyway.

E stood, arms outstretched. Fingers reaching for surface. Finding only space. She waved her arms around her, not in panic, but in curiosity, before venturing to take a step. It had not occurred to her that the vastness of space around her that she felt so strongly might include the possibility that she was standing on the only space of floor. She took one step forward. And fell.

This was not the determined fall of a skydiver. Or the panicked fall of the murder victim. Or even the resigned fall of a suicide victim. This was the oddly welcoming fall that she had experienced over and over in her dreams. The type of fall where she could look out over all the world and revel in it grandeur. The type of fall where just as she began to close on the ground, and panic began to rise in her chest, she would suddenly discover a natural ability to fly.

But there was no world to look out on. Just black. No ground to sense approaching. Just black. No ability to fly. Just black.

The black reality of it all grew on E. The somewhat sudden realisation that she was utterly alone left her hollow. She could deal with the black. But alone? She’d never been alone in her life. Not for one day. In vain, she began grasping around her as she fell. Grasping for someone to hold onto. To save her from this isolation. To tell her what to do, what to think. But she fell. Alone.

There was a time when E would have given everything she had to be alone. To be free of the human relationships that she felt weighed her down, but from which she could not be released. While she loved her family, she had begun to hate the fact that they all seemed to need her so much. To rely on her.

She was oldest. Smartest. Most reliable. Most selfless. Most without a self. She had devoted herself to keeping the family together. Despite her father’s drunkenness, her brother’s addictions, her mother’s illness. She had held them all together. And in an odd way, they had kept her whole. She had no idea what it was like to not be needed. To do only what she wanted. But she didn’t want. She just gave. Herself. Her time. Her love. Her money. Her life.

When she was small, E always dreamed of running away to the circus. She wanted to be the pretty girl on the trapeze. She got to fly and spin to roars of applause. So E practised spinning and swinging on the cherry tree out back of the old house. She could even swing off upside down and land on her feet. But mostly she loved just hanging upside down looking at the house.

The house had been in the family for three generations. Great-Grandfather Wilmingstead had built it all by himself. He started with what was now the study. It was in the center of the house. It was a small room with a wooden stove and chimney and in the first days of the house, it was all there was. But it had a roof. And heat. And that was all Great-Grandmother had said she would need before she would come to the new world. So he had built it on the land he’d won in the poker game. Of course, he never told her that’s how he got it. He had “found gold and decided that land was a less dangerous way to hold capital”, so she’d sold the gold and bought the land. No one ever questioned the legend. He had all the papers. But Great-Grandma always knew. He never could really lie to her. Not really.

So the house started small. And each year, if the harvest was good, Great-Grandfather would add a room. First the bedroom – now the den. Then the kitchen. Great-Grandmother wanted a real kitchen. And an icebox. She was tired of having to trek out to the cold-frame to get her food, only to find that the foxes had found a way in again. Next, they added the front porch. And a bathroom… with plumbing! And a second bedroom. For the kids. Then they extended the porch. The dining room came next. Great-Grandfather was becoming quite the local celebrity. He’d just been elected to council and Great-Grandmother insisted that she couldn’t hold the dinner parties expected of them in an old, lean-to kitchen.

When Great-Grandfather died, the house was fifty years old. Great-Grandmother couldn’t run the farm alone, so her oldest son, E’s grandfather, stayed on. When he got married, he decided the house was too small to raise another family, but Great-Grandmother wouldn’t let him move. So, just like his father, he added onto the original. Only this time he built up. Grandfather built the second floor, one piece at a time.

E’s father, D, used to tell stories of the year that the staircase went up to nothing. No door, no second floor, just the rafters. Seemed Grandfather could afford to build the stairs that year and nothing else. D used to hide up there when his father started drinking. The harvest had been bad that year and he had promised Grandmother a new bedroom upstairs, but he just couldn’t deliver. He was frustrated. And took it all out on those who ‘cramped his space’. Grandmother used to send the kids outside when he got into one of his moods, but it didn’t always work. It’s hard to run outside when there’s two feet of snow. So they’d hide in the stairwell to nowhere.

The next year, Grandfather ‘came into’ some money. Grandmother used to say that he’d sold part of the land. But Great-Grandmother said he just started playing poker like his father. Said she made him quit after he’d won the jackpot. So he started working on the house again.

Unlike his father who had built the house to meet the needs of an increasingly larger family, C built because he couldn’t bear sitting around. He needed to do something. Great-Grandmother wouldn’t let him gamble. Grandmother wouldn’t let him drink. The kids wouldn’t let him be. So he locked himself up the stairs and built.

Great-Grandmother had only wanted a bedroom, but her husband was determined to give her much more than that. Each evening, after he had worked all day on the farm, Grandfather would skip up the stairs and start banging and sawing away. He wouldn’t let anyone help. Or see what he was doing. He had covered the outside with tarpaulins, so from the yard you could only tell that the house was getting taller. He would work up there for hours after supper. Until bedtime. He’d call down a good night to the kids from above their bedroom, but he wouldn’t leave the top floor until his lamp burnt down. Then he’d faithfully lock the door and creep quietly down the stairs to bed.

The day that Grandfather finished the second story was one that E had heard about her entire life. It was the bane of her father’s existence. He moaned about it every time he got drunk. He’d talk about how the birds sang more sweetly than ever. The way the sun glistened on the dew. The way the air smelled fresh and new.

Grandfather invited the family into the yard for the unveiling. He let the kids pull the rope on the tarpaulins. They fluttered in the breeze, then dropped to the house’s foundations. And there, above the old, lovingly pieced together first floor, was a Victorian second story. Complete with gingerbread accents. It was remarkable. Grandfather had carved every intricate detail himself. Hammered every nail.

The neighbours didn’t know what to think of this Victorian level perched upon the old family cabin style first floor. The family just wanted to see inside. Grandmother was allowed up the stairs first. She had no idea what awaited her behind the door. She climbed the stairs carefully, making sure to hitch her skirts out of the way. She inserted the skeleton key Grandfather had given her and turned the knob. As she stepped onto the landing, she gasped and the kids rushed forward to see.

The landing was bathed in sunlight. Looking up, the kids expected to see a lightbulb. Instead they looked up, and up, and up. The skylight seemed so far away. The landing was flanked by six doors. Each one a different colour. Each one bearing a name. One room for each of the children, one for their parents, and, most thrilling of all, a second bathroom.

The extra rooms meant that Great-Grandmother, who has persisted into her nineties and still lived with the family, would finally get her own room back on the main floor. No longer would she have to share with her four grandchildren. Nor would they all have to scramble to share the same bathroom that Great-Grandfather had built sixty years before. At last they could all have some privacy.