9780415317856_the_routledge_creative_writing_coursebook

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www.ATIBOOK.irFiction 111they take up an equally huge proportion of Melanie’s private thoughts. The writerintroduces a gap between what Melanie does, and what is really significant in her life.We know she’s avoiding several sources of pain; among the harshest is her mother’sdeath. At moments her thoughts take a direction Melanie would probably have resisted,which is why Jackie Kay needs third-person narration for this story—to take us where thecharacter herself won’t go. Kay, whose ethnic background is part Nigerian, has chosen acharacter of mixed race, and this is another potently troublesome note:Her mother was from Ireland, County Mayo, and her father was fromTrinidad and when she looked in the mirror, the pair of them were behindher, mixing themselves up in her face. [Her mother’s teeth] had filled herwith a nameless worry. A feeling of everything not being right in theworld. A sense of unease. So that now the two were mixed up in her mind:her mother’s stained teeth and her mother’s dark death.(Ibid: 68–9)Such excursions into her family past intensify our interest in this troubled character,while not quite fully arousing our sympathy, for Melanie’s brittle determination to avoidthe past trivialises a dull existence where she only functions as a consumer. Stories, as weknow, usually begin with a trigger event, an inciting incident causing time to be shapedin a new way, and in Melanie’s case this happens when she unexpectedly receives a letterwhich turns out to be from her father.‘She read somewhere that people who manage time well suffer less stress’, and time inthe story moves us through points in her routine day—from early shopping in a Hackneystreet market, to her office job. Here we have the only inclusion of dialogue—she withsome clients and then with her female colleagues—but again the details are there to showus Melanie-type attitudes as they ordinarily recur. She, of course, relishes thisordinariness herself, occasionally spicing it with a treat, and trout on Friday will be themeal she cooks and eats alone at the end of each week. However, this particular Fridaywill be different. On the table as she cooks her trout the letter lies unopened and at thispoint she doesn’t know (nor do we) who it’s from. After performing her elaboratecooking ritual, (we hear about this in lavish detail) she opens it as she eats. It’s from herfather who left home when she was four years old—she hasn’t seen or heard of himsince—and who is living not in Trinidad as she imagined but some streets away, inTottenham:The letter said he was sorry to hear her mother had died. Only just heard!Yet the news was four years old. He said he wanted to meet her and seewhat she had turned into and maybe she could cook him a nice meal.Melanie clapped her hands. ‘Oh that’s rich,’ she said aloud. ‘That’s reallyrich.’ She opened up her silver foil parcel. She was determined not to letthe letter spoil her trout. She slid it out of the foil carefully and onto herplate. It was perfect, silver and pink and blue…. ‘Take a running jump’she said, as she thoughtfully tasted her tomato and chilli salad.(Ibid: 80)
www.ATIBOOK.irThe routledge creative writing coursebook 112Her thoughts at this point are decisive, unrelenting:She took her last bit of trout. She struggled for a minute trying to imagineher father sitting opposite her eating dinner with her. Would he mind herhaving a glass of wine? In a way, the picture of Melanie and her father atdinner was quite romantic, but something made her shudder Somethingrepelled her It was too late, somehow, to have dinner with her father‘Nah’, Melanie said to herself. Leave him like that Leave it out.’ Shepoured herself another glass of white wine. It was crisp, cold, elegant Shetried to think of more wine words she had read. Fruity. Buttery. Bold.(Ibid: 80)This is how Jackie Kay ends her story. The trout and letter both have a meaning, each isattached to a separate series of events, and together they compete for Melanie’s attention.But we as readers participate in the making of meaning here. Does the letter stand forcontact, warmth, restoration, or for deception and betrayal? The words of the storydeliver both options to us. And with the trout—does this suggest a trivial consumerism,spoilage (‘A few bones stuck to the flesh. She picked them off one by one’) or does itsignify Melanie’s boldness, feminine independence, her ability to spoil herself, and whynot? Not just at the end, but all through, we’ve been drawn into the story, not into aposition of abstract judgement.This summary leaves out other successful effects: the travel agent’s desk view ofresorts, given in a exotic lists, along with the way people plan holidays and why; themore personal issue of global distance (Trinidad, Tottenham); the sense of thecontemporary—family life and death, gender and independence, mixed-race origin,consumerism; the reader’s sense of Melanie’s voice through a third-person narrator. Butmost important of all from the viewpoint of writing is how the shaping of time in thestory relates to its distribution of detail. The character—Melanie herself—seems to be thedecisive factor here. We are, for its duration, in her consciousness. She is the focaliser,thus time appears to us as it does to her. Time reaches back to her earliest memory of herfather, to her happy relationship with her mother. The father of the child she lost isreferred to cursorily only once. The largest part of the narrative represents thesememories and the events of a typical week, then a typical day in the life of Melanie. ‘Shethought of her father, once a month, on stuff-your-face Sunday because that was the dayher mother told her he had left.’ From years, months, weeks and days, as the story movesforward these time periods get shorter, so that in the concluding section we hear aboutonly the trout and the letter, finally the wine, then nothing. These periods form the firstsentences of paragraphs: ‘Every Friday she bought a fresh trout at Ridley Road market, inthe morning before work… She came home with her fresh trout in her bag… Now to thetomato and chilli salad.’ Remembering the longer, earlier time periods meaning iscompressed into one or two details: her father’s hands, her mother’s teeth, the behaviourof customers. These details figure more as images than as re-creation. In the shortestperiod of all—the forty-five minutes or thereabouts which it takes to prepare, cook andeat an average-sized trout—meaning develops through moment-by-moment realisation ofconsiderable amounts of close-up detail. From entering her flat to the second glass of
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www.ATIBOOK.irGlossary 190a piece o
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