'As Yet Untitled' Extract 2

A Liverpudlian suburb.

Old photos scattered over the table, Hilda’s eyes glowing like strange owl bulbs in the light of her laptop. A small white TV stands on a small, rickety chest of drawers in the corner of the room, blaring Wimbledon. Andy Murray is playing Djokovic as Edith sits in her chair by the window, a cup of tea in her hands, feet in burgundy velvet slippers curled up behind her. I immediately check for signs of loneliness around her watery eyes as a tiny Andy Murray runs back and forth across her glasses, but she looks perfectly content, if a little dazed. There is something vaguely worrying about my immediate assumption that my old and wizened aunt must be locked in a cage of sadness. I picture an old mind struggling to reconcile her burgundy velvet isolation with happy moments in her past. I suppose it would make me feel a bit better if the grey days I know will follow could be somehow twisted into a gorgeous plotline. My angst is slowly de-knotted, my great aunt’s senility overcome, as we engage nightly over Earl Grey and tales of her childhood.

I trudge upstairs into the bedroom to find Hilda spread out generously on her single bed, her Kindle high above her head and bits of paper with scribblings about Jess Rankin piled high on the bedside table. It’s a very Hilda-at-night-time scene, one that would continue in the same vein until at least four in the morning if I wasn’t bunking by her side. It’s quite comforting, really, to think that she’d rather be in her own room too. This has something to do with my phobia of sleeping at friends’ houses in Primary School, in the days when my eyes would fill with tears when 9pm came and someone else’s mother helped me brush my teeth, and something about the sight of my little friends’ pink or silk pyjamas would seem horribly alien and terrifying. In those moments, I felt that nothing could be lonelier than wishing to go home while my friends plotted midnight feasts of chocolate that fizzed in their mouths and Rainbow Drops that stuck in their teeth and kept their eyes open past eleven. I never felt more different as I lay in the darkness, my face hot and heartbeat heavy as I struggled not to cry.

At least Hilda won’t pester me for ghost stories or give me vinegar crisps that burn my lips too late at night.

‘Hello, just ignore me,’ I say, crumpling down onto the creaky single bed. The sheets are a strange, starchy, almost thatched material, with a 70s wallpaper pattern. Brown and orange.

‘Mmm… Just finishing my P.D. James.’

The same P.D. James she started yesterday morning, I think. Hilda reads 100 pages an hour, taking everything in. Her assertiveness in everything she does allows for this level of concentration when reading. It wouldn’t be worth her while if it was any different. I think of happy afternoons spent in the Borders café, endless streams of Paninis and hot chocolate and wedges of rocky road as she devoured chapter after chapter of whatever chunky, thick book she’d bought herself. I could have anything I wanted, and would always choose a poster-paint Jacqueline Wilson paperback, which she’d swap for the hardback as she approached the counter, ignoring my father’s protests as they tumbled from my mouth and assuring me the hardback version was ‘much nicer’. As I skirted my fingers over the laminate illustrations of the cover, feeling their contrast with the matte background, I privately agreed.