An Inferno Of Literature

Another Novel Idea so Please let me know what you think of this prologue: 

Lies are bitter things. Pellets of piercing, malign malice. As a child, lies were petty and insignificant; lies about a square of chocolate or a Crayola star on the magnolia walls. In the years betwixt ages I considered them just as inferior to other principles of life. In the hazy fun, the seemingly endless summers of young adolescence lies were as everything else was. Non-existent. That was until I was old enough to understand. Old enough to comprehend. I knew that things had happened as I grew up, but never why. Not until I understood lies. You see, lies are these interesting creatures; brimming with enmity and lust for sanity. You don’t see them at first, latching onto your shoulders or burrowing into the nerves; you only notice once they’ve finished macheting their way into your consciousness and have nested there. When they line your thoughts with ire and your limbs with led. They paint your thoughts with acid and feed you ricin. What would you do, honestly; if lies were the core of your existence, your family? Do you think you’d confront, hide. Kill?

When I was six, my mum built a room of books. A fortress of literature, coiled in there were the distant whispers of the greats; musings of Dickens and mutterings of Tolstoy. She hid away in there. To withdraw from the world. The problem was she took me with her in the reclusion. I was to be the witness to the demise. She was her own judge, jury and executioner and I was merely looking on, through the looking-glass. Utterly paralysed, as we all are in childhood; paralysed by ignorance. Each day was a concatenation of desolate events, each separate and isolated; only interconnected by their fractious pains. She would sit there, a sculptured bird; not the accipitrine creature she used to resemble, no longer a magnificent goshawk circling the skies; anthropomorphic. She was now a finch, desperately flapping her flailing wings in her self-induced twilight. To a six year old, this catatonia was utterly inexplicable. To any other human the misery would have been palpable, but to my immature eyes it was simply odd. A metallic tang at the end of each day, a frost in the air that practically sublimed oxygen to a foil of sea-fog. If nurture is the supposed key to a child’s mental development, perhaps that was the first clue. That growing within a cave of stale narcissism was the first seed to germinate inside me, the first drop of antipathy to flourish.

  

Acrylics And Warmth

Acrylic. That’s what the sky was. Acrylic. The clouds danced in and out of one another in rivulets of thick sunset tones. He imagined what the clouds would taste like at this moment. Marshmallows. Fruit salad. As he inhaled gradually, savouring the aroma of the forest, he felt the caress of pine scents and damp soil. It felt of nature.

He was tugged violently from his vivid ponderings as the girl said something. It was muffled, indistinct; he could hear it no more than he could be bothered to try to. As she tried desperately to tear the gag with her words, he looked down upon her. God-like. He was God, God to her at this moment anyway. He had the power over her breathing, her blood flow. Everything was his. He delicately brushed away pieces of bark stuck to her cheek, grazing her warm flesh with the tip of his finger; leisurely tracing a line down to the screaming pulse in her neck. In the years to come of his life, people would wonder how rapidly his composure snapped and morphed into pure, sharp malice. Only she, Lia, would have been able to tell you that it was like the attack of a snake. Quick, unexplainable, vicious. That calm trailing of her neck mutated into two fierce hands gripping her throat, his muscular thighs straddling her torso; claiming complete authority over her final seconds. He felt his chest rise and fall as hers slowed and her face reddened. Her last specks of life blew from her chapped lips and he felt something he had never experienced, a penetrating and searing feeling. Something with no word, no emotion to pin it to. It was just a warmth.

That was the first time he killed.

Because Dorset Is Home

This is the prologue to a possible novel i'm planning, so any comments/ideas would be appreciated.

Summer seems out of place in the city. There’s a bizarre corruption in the July humidity, the gigantic grey shadows of the tower blocks are penetrating the sunbeams and stealing the innocence that the light brings; replacing the freedom with the defeating reminder of reality. It’s this exactly that instils such joy in me about returning to the country. London can be placed on pause for a while. The eager bustle of the urban life, the underground serpent, the caffeine-driven energy of it all; everything can be pushed aside for the summer. Replaced by the subtleness, the contented ease of the West-country. Even the smell of the salt-tainted air and the incessant cries of the gulls instantly lulls me into a sense of calm. At long last the sleepy security of Dorset has reclaimed it’s estranged child, albeit for far too short a time.

“Cup of tea.” Mum chimed, scuttling around the Aga. Nothing had changed, nothing does here; as if everything is caught in a comfortable time lock.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked, a bite of my digestive dissolving into a cascade of crumbs.

“He’s picking up Jack. And a crate of wine probably.” The used tea-bags seemed almost despondent in the china bowl. My family was relatively ordinary I suppose. As ordinary as a slightly-self-sufficient-ex-hippie couple with two bowler-hat-wearing offspring can be. Firstly, there’s mum. Lynn. A sentimental, spherical woman. Who’s existence was driven by cheesecakes and T. S. Elliot. She was eternally available for a leisurely chat or a rant about the ‘1984-esc society’ of the 21^st century. Then of course there’s Dad. Phil. A lecturer who’s retirement has been spent filing receipts and losing at chess. My parents were two opposites. Opposites who seemed to fit together, tight and secure in their different worlds. Then, leaving out the chickens and Ebony the Labrador, there’s Jack. My sister. A, how can I describe her? This bizarre-foreign creature who, in a household of sensibility and initiatives exists in French films and a near-dyspraxic clumsiness. She has been and always will be, about the most beautiful human in the world to me. And finally, there’s me. Elcy. Too short. Too plump. Too, well… ‘me’. The youngest of the Hampton clan. My existence is predominantly controlled by Supertramp vinyls and ukuleles. After leaving at eighteen for a gap year in which I pottered around parts of Mexico and blogged about the poverty of LED countries, university life engulfed me. The craze of London and the instant reality check of how little I can afford whilst still contemplating paying back my student loan hit me. My life in London is the usual pointless day-to-day mull, with far too much time spent hidden in a bowl of supernoodles whilst puzzling over Morse. A usual family, a usual life and a usual girl.

Sit On Your Feelings And Swallow Your Secrets

People are colours.
Smells.
Images.
If I had to describe dad, he would be camouflage green. He would wear the scent of tea-tree and transform spontaneously into Kermit the frog. It's fragments of people that cement the foundations of a life that we lay, the people that guide us step by step up the ladder rungs of childhood.
     It was whilst climbing such a ladder rung that I swallowed the perplexion of something i'd never had to stomach before. Secrets. A word that grins a cardboard smile and taints the relationships we build. I hadn't realised of course, but I was seconds away from being eaten alive by this concept. Devoured by ideals and adult morals that had never hit me until that Monday. It was a frozen day, the air was skulking up my eight-year old flesh and burrowing into my unformed bones. I was standing beside a doughnut stand with a school friend, my auburn curls in ironically-innocent pigtails; my torso so bulked in layers I could barely inhale. I was kicking sludgy-snow with my heel whilst deciding whether to punt for a custard or chocolate filling for my carbohydrate-disc of childlike wonderment. After asking in my best polite voice for a custard centre, I turned from the man who smelt of stale cigarettes and carried disappointment on his breath; anticipating the virginal nibble from my treat I glanced across the snow engulfed street, as if gazing through a snow-globe. My eyes caught a glimpse... but surely not?... he was at a work conference in Swindon... my father, buttoning his beige jacket, puffing wisps of billowing cigar smoke that ascended to the sky as if they were painted with oil paints. I was about to call out, to run across the tarmac and return to the safety of his grasp when a woman walked, no practically swayed, up to him. They exchanged words I couldn't decipher, he held a look in his eyes. A warm immersing glow that I had only seen him exude when staring down at me. In trepidation, I kept watching; awe-struck, unable to turn my mind to something of a different nature. To dismiss the simmering emotions and boiling concern that was rising and stamp it with a perfectly reasonable explanation. But there was no explanation, not reasonable anyway, his rosy head lowered and their lips intertwined. My stomach flipped, my breath became cluttered, I was frost-stricken.


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"Mum..." I began cautiously, my fingers picking anxiously at the quick of my nails.
"Did you know that they're building a tattoo parlour next door? I said to Maureen, I did, I said they'll turn us all into reckless Neanderthals if  they force all these drugs and ink-splattered bodies into our streets." She began, pacing up and down the kitchen; returning crockery to their snug wooden homes.
"Mum!" I barked, taking both her and myself off-guard.
"What?" She turned to me and levelled her serpentine pupils straight at me, they were so sharp and hot they seared you when you engaged in eye-contact.
"I saw daddy today..."
"Where? Of course you didn't silly, he's in Swindon. You monkey that's over a hundred miles away..." Her voice was so sure, so unstirred that it made me feel like the executioner.
"He was in town mum. With a lady...."
"Stop these disturbing lies young lady or you're grounded...."
"HE KISSED HER! On the lips... Like Leonardo and Kate...." My puerile knowledge of kissing, spat out at her like venom.
"In this family we do not tell lies, now you go sit up in that bedroom; you sit that bottom of yours on whatever you're feeling and you gulp down whatever lies you feel like telling next; you hear?" Her voice was a siren, piercing and shrilling until it sent me scurrying upwards.

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It makes you wonder, how far some families will go to keep up appearances. Whether she hid from reality to protect my eight-year old queries or simply because she couldn't face the truth in the ring and fight. All I could tell in the haze of frozen clouds, was the brown-shirted man and the red-lipped woman were certainly happy with the truth; it was just a different version than mum and me had been a party to.