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I’ve had a few challenges of late, not least because, for some reason known only to the gods of dubious decisions, I chose to do my Return to Nursing Practice while still working full-time for City of Edinburgh Council. I had some fool notion that I could utilise prior skills to help out during the recruitment crisis but ultimately discovered that, while I credit the NHS with shaping who I am (the good and the bad), I no longer feel I belong.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs lists love and belonging after physiological needs (e.g. food, water, shelter) and safety and security (health, employment, property etc.), thus highlighting the significance of feeling connected and valued. This month I’m asking you to write no more than 500 words on Belonging.
Dig deep. Voice a character’s fear of never belonging, or celebrate with a character whose search for connection has been realised.
Over to you.
My route.
Life’s not so bad. Not anymore. Not now that I’ve got a job and a place to live. The job’s easy enough. I have a route and a barrow. I wheel the barrow to the start of the route and then I clear the rubbish along the whole of it. Some people here don’t manage it for long. They say it’s too tiring, or too boring, or we’re expected to do it too fast. I get along with it okay. Sometimes people talk to me. I don’t always understand what they say though, because they’re usually in a hurry and if I don’t catch it first time, they’re off and gone. Once or twice people have stopped to talk. One time it was a man who smelt of beer. He smelt really bad, and I didn’t understand what he was saying. I just smiled and nodded. After a while he got angry and started tapping me on the shoulder and pushing me. I didn’t understand. Then two more men who smelt of beer came. They wanted him to go with them. He went away.
Where I live is okay. There are two other men living there and sometimes a woman is with one of the men. I don’t follow what they say that well, so mostly I smile and nod and go to my room. I have a radio. I like to lie in bed and rest it against my ear and listen to the voices. It’s like having a friend with me. Other times, when I get paid, one of the men called John helps me get money from the post office for food and to pay my rent. John takes the money for my rent. He told me not to let Garth or the woman called Irene do my rent because they are gamblers, he said. He said I wouldn’t see much change from my wages. And he laughed. John is okay.
Sometimes we have a meeting before we start work. I don’t always follow what’s going on, but Mr Addison always tells me if there’s anything different I have to do, or if there’s instructions so I don’t get in trouble. We have a meeting when the routes change. I wish I followed more. I wish I understood more.
My route’s okay now, but not as good as my last one. At the end of my last route, I could see over the town to the woods and the hills after that, where a skylark rose fluttering and chattering until it vanished in pure happiness. While my eyes were still high, a warm breeze from the west hurried over the hillside and fell through the trees, pushing past branches and rattling the leaves. Then it raced through the evening streets and up the slope where it hurried around me filling my ears with tales of the adventure it had been on.
I wish I had the words. I wish I understood how to tell people.
498 words
Mishaping to fit
Only as he pushed open the door into Haugesund’s Folkepuben, his mind occupied not only with what he needed to establish with Lars Sigmundssen but also a slightly fearful curiosity as to how Lars would react to his having slept with Maja, Lars’ current woman, was Rick Thorssen reminded, by the roar of convivial conversation, that last time he was here he’d been deemed invisible for longer than he was used to. For reasons unknown, the bar presence he’d long taken for granted had somehow been forfeited. A check in the mirror behind the bar showed him Lars and Lars’ usual group of friends, none of whom were notably taller, blonder nor more blue-eyed than he.
From habit, he studied them, needing – still! – to measure his success in eradicating his father’s attempts to create Richard Thorn II. Supplanted by a more satisfactory second son he’d modelled himself on his mother. She’d insisted on him being Norwegian-born and soon decided he needed also to be Norwegian-bred. Took him – never Hal – with her on her solo trips ‘home’. He saw, how, even before they boarded the plane – she became a different person. Quieter. More self-contained. He understood she was de-Americanising – de-toxing – herself and immediately began to do likewise – stepping away from his father’s unending pressure for him to become the All American Jock his younger brother so willingly embraced.
Thereafter she took him with her whenever she visited Norway. By the time he enrolled at a university there, his father had given up on him; by graduation folk rarely took hm for anything other than Norwegian. Then, an enforced return to America – his mother ill and pleading for him to come home which went on long enough for him to take an undercover role with the FBI, combating the Northern European drugs trade, in the course of which he had met Lars Sigmundssen.
Whose face he now checked again. Now talking with Maja. Still smiling. Not even asking, if his lip-reading was good as it used to be, ‘Was he as good as me?’ Seemingly unworried by her reply.
Which further confirmed the necessity of utilising Lars’ services. If he wanted to properly fulfill what had in the last two years, become a mission of revenge against the man who got him ejected from the FBI, something more than mere appropriation was required. Some more damaging refinement – such as inextricably linking his name to the drugs trade. His delivery of death and disgrace a couldn’t-fail combination.
He allowed his imagination to picture, as closing image, her funeral. Camera closing on Hetherington’s face – a manacled mourner, so damaged, so devastated by grief as to be oblivious as the credits rolled up, Music, initially sombre, becoming increasingly triumphant. ‘Mission accomplished’.
Maybe then he’d been recognised for his capabilities.
[474 words]
Not Date stamp Approved
I am waiting in a line of silent people.
Through the high-domed crystalline crown of windows, pale light, drifting like blossom in the air, reflects a gauzy veil of sleepy light and a comfort blanket of warm, mysterious, air coils softly with it.There is a sense of waking on a limp summer morning coated in the scent of flowers and I feel comfortable.
I’m not sure how long ago I was told to join the queue but I remember it barely reached to the middle of the white foyer where the echo of buckets, pushed by antiseptically precise cleaners, clanked as they mopped and polished the bright, bleached, floor and pillars of pristine marble.
Now the line stretches into the street and fades away along an ice-fogged sidewalk. Cold air seeps, like a memory, around those closest to the doorway and those waiting around me, stand, faded as spectres held together by the ragged breath of time.
A clock ticks in conflict with my heartbeat and my head begins to ache with the sound of it.
Something is not right.
The waiting seems never-ending and I can’t remember what I am waiting for.
A rainbow-suited man, who reminds me of a peacock wanders into view. He moves down the line, passing out something to those waiting. Two ticket machines swing at his waist, each containing reels of tickets. He seems to favour one reel over the other because the blue reel is almost empty the green one less so.
Suddenly he is in front of me ‘name please.’
I panic because I can’t remember.
Seeing my alarm, he takes my left hand with his and touches my forehead with his right.
He frowns and the tone of his voice changes, ‘oh dear this isn’t right. Not right at all. You don’t belong in this queue my friend, you don’t belong here at all, come with me, please.’ He grips my hand so tightly I have no choice but to accompany him.
He hurries me to a screened corner of the foyer and ushers me behind the curtain.
A motherly woman in a white sarong stands beside a revolving door.
‘Another one without a date stamp,’ Peacock man tells her.
The woman shakes her head, ‘admissions needs a shakeup, this is the third one this week, you know. Here you are dearie, this way please.’
I shake my head, ‘I’d rather not if you don’t mind.’
Her voice is firm, ‘Nonsense dearie, no queues, no waiting. It’s where you belong.’
They are both stronger than they look and manhandle me into a frosted section of the revolving door.
I think the woman pulls a lever because the door spins wildly until I feel sick with the speed and motion then, with a wrench, it jerks to a stop and I fall out into the harshness of a bright place where everything is all noise, urgency, and activity.
A harsh voice cuts though the racket, ‘We have a pulse, doctor.’
(500)It’s a while since the 1980s
And why come back? Why, exactly, limp along these corridors after decades, and stop to look at dormitory doors and classroom doors all shut for the summer holiday. There’s no one else in this building – a giant bungalow with many arms – except the senior school secretary who has shown me old records and left me to find my way out. I said I could leave by myself. Go out the way I came in, I said. I’d already lied about this being my first visit; now I’m walking round the school, the areas away from her office.
If the teenage me loiters at all on a bed or at a desk, it will be clenched with alarm. When I unpacked the first time, when I was twelve, I hung my blouses and skirts in a narrow wardrobe and tucked my pyjamas under the pillow of the bed which was to be mine, and I moved through this official routine – everything felt official to me, a new girl. Sadness rose and clung, a miasma which I at first called homesickness.
My parents had followed advice. The hospital doctors told them that the school’s architects had thought of everything; flat corridors – no steps! – for girls to wheel and limp along. They didn’t say, because they didn’t know – though couldn’t they have guessed? – that some teachers wore glazed faces as they stood at blackboards and talked at us. We sat in rows, my friends and I, the friends I’d gained here. We were alarmed. Our futures were limited. We sat with knees under old, lidded desks, lids which not every girl could open without help though I was lucky and could open mine for my textbooks, pens, pencils, ruler. We had the props of a useful education though we couldn’t quite believe in it. Nor could some of the teachers. They went through the motions, they received salaries, they wrote on the boards and picked up the board-rubbers and left chalky sweeps where words had been. They didn’t think many of us would earn salaries of our own.
I’m a researcher, here for a project I’m paid to work on: special schools, the history of. I’ve been to other specials schools and could have done my job just as well without this one, but I’d have felt half-finished.
Lots of tech in the classrooms, the secretary had said, and some in the dormitories. That’s why, out of school time, the doors are locked. In the corridors I look at the walls and doors; they’re brighter than in my day. Sky blue, spring green, sunny buttery yellow, and covered with schoolwork and mementos of outings: paintings, photos, cartoons, poems, cheer expressed in smiles and jaunty words. I wonder how deep this enjoyment goes.
It’s a mistake, this coming back. My future turned out alright but history is settling itself, despite me telling it there’s no need – it’s over. But I’m losing perspective. In a cloud I’m isolated.
(493)
Sorry! I haven’t forgotten, just waiting for a break in the clouds.
If I don’t have time tonight, then results will definitely be posted tomorrow when I’m off.
Thank you for your patience.Honestly, I’m sorry this has taken me so long…
All the entries left me wishing I’d given you more words to play with since each of them teased with hidden depths.
Ath – so easy to read (as ever!) Engaging, apparently effortless writing, but so many questions! Who was this man? Where did he come from and where would he end up? More importantly, was John to be trusted?
So much said about the character in so few words.
Sandra – What started as an introduction to a seemingly harmless character developed in mere paragraphs to a portrait of someone with a bitter axe to grind. I love these snapshots into your ‘love triangle with murder’ album. It’s like adding colour to a black and white photo.
Terrie – I love a good setting (as long as it’s short and relevant!) and this was a beautifully descriptive passage with some breath-taking turns of phrase. Who couldn’t love ‘held together by the ragged breath of time’?
Libby – Yours gave me the feeling there’s more to be unpacked here. Memories. Motive. Truth. It fills me with a sense of disquiet and unfinished business.
Thank you for taking the time. I loved all your entries and your insights; they widened my perspective and gave me elements to ponder.
For May’s comp, I pass the baton to Ath.
Seagreen, thanks so much. A brilliant prompt for April. Thanks also to my co-authors. There were some great pieces of writing.
Sea, thank you for the useful challenge, especially because it helped me formulate my character as well as sparking such a brilliant range of responses; I wouldn’t’ve liked to choose a winner.
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