1970: Prologue

{Some fiction for today- the prologue to the novel I'm scratching out... Anya is not her real name. She is a real person, interesting, to me, as someone who epitomises the mining of strength from difficult circumstances. You don't have to suffer to find strength, that's not the message I want to promote. I loathe drama, actually, but for a story conflict is useful and since it all happened in real life it's a kind of recycling. The constant renewal of a determined life, that will be the crux of it. 1970 is the year, not the title. Finding a title has taken as long as writing the book, so I am being mysterious about it.}

The curtains are closed. A breath of night air flares one edge, unnoticed. The windows always rattle. Ink scrawls, slowly, over paper.

‘In the myth of Sisyphus, it says he is condemned to pushing a boulder up a mountain, watching it roll down again, and pushing it back to the top, he has to do this task forever. His story symbolises hopelessness, frustration, hard work, work that is never finished, it just goes around like the eternal boulder.

I think. In my opinion. It could be seen as?

Moss- something about moss not smothering the stone????’

Anya pauses the pen. Her eyelids are sliding. This essay is not going to get finished.

‘Getting my stuff done is a MYTH- unfinished stuff is a SYMBOL.’

She zips the pen into a cloth pencil case, shuts the rough-work notebook, shoves both into the gaping mouth of a school bag. She checks, again, the timetable she has taped to the edge of the dressing table mirror. Science. Magnificent. An unfinished write up on catalysts to hand in to another disappointed face. She looks in the mirror. Behind her she sees a closed, white gloss door: an impressionist reflection of a girl locked in solid paint.