One Ordinary Life.
Four Novels.
Alan wants to give his wife something extraordinary for her retirement: a novel drawn from a life she insists has been nothing special. See how that one life can become two fantasy adventures and two science-fiction journeys.
A fictional sample commission. All names, answers and events are invented for demonstration.The Extraordinary in the Everyday.
Alan Hutchinson commissioned this novel for his wife, Bev, to celebrate her retirement. In his words, “Nothing much has ever happened to her. That’s sort of the point.” Bev grew up in Middlesbrough under the glow of the steelworks and watched the moon landing on her nan’s black-and-white television when she was six. She left school at sixteen to work on the counter at Boots, met Alan at a disco and married him two years later. They spent their honeymoon in a caravan at Whitby, where it rained all week and a goose chased her round the harbour. She raised two children, moved to the Yorkshire Dales for Alan’s work, and was a dinner lady for ten years. Then, at thirty-seven, terrified, she applied for a job on the front desk of the local GP surgery, and stayed there for twenty-six years. She passed her maths GCSE at forty-five. She retires at Christmas. She says she has only ever answered the phone.
Each of the four concepts below tells Bev’s whole life, from the steelworks lights to retirement, and turns it into a novel with wonder, danger and real stakes. None of them depends on a dramatic event, because there isn’t one. That is the point of a Dreambrewer novel: the adventure comes from the transformation, and the truth comes from the life.
Two parts of the questionnaire shape every concept. Bev’s animals appear in each novel, transformed but always recognisable: Pip, a bossy border terrier the size of a loaf; Shep, the collie she once carried down off Penhill in a snowstorm; and her nan’s sausage-stealing ginger tom, Captain. And her dreams decide where each story goes. At six she wanted to be an astronaut. She has always wanted to see the Northern Lights, and the reindeer under them. There has been an Open University prospectus in the kitchen drawer since 2011. And, in Alan’s words, she wants to be “useful and free at the same time”. Those dreams become her arc, and every ending is built to fulfil them.
Before the Magic, the Memories.
Selected answers from Alan’s completed Dreambrewer questionnaire. His words reveal Bev’s personality, priorities, dreams and boundaries.
What First Inspired You to Turn This Life into a Novel?
She retires at Christmas after twenty-six years on the front desk at Leyburn Medical Practice. At her leaving do the senior partner said she’d ‘run the place for a quarter of a century and let the doctors think they did’. She laughed it off. She says she’s ‘only ever answered the phone’. I want her to have something that says otherwise.
How Much of Your Life Would You Like the Story to Draw Upon?
All of it. Middlesbrough, me, the kids, the Dales, the surgery. It’s not an exciting life, I know that. Nothing much has ever happened to her. That’s sort of the point.
What Is the Most Important Truth You Want This Novel to Express?
That an ordinary life, lived kindly, is the bravest thing there is.
What Are Your Weaknesses or Less Flattering Tendencies?
She can’t sit still or accept help. Short temper, shorter apologies. She won’t go to the doctor, which after twenty-six years in a doctor’s surgery is quite something.
What Distinctive Habits, Sounds or Routines Does Each Animal Have?
Pip barks once, very sharply, at exactly half past five, because that is when Bev comes in from work. She knows the sound of Bev’s car from the end of the road. She sleeps in the airing cupboard if anybody leaves the door open. Shep used to bring Bev one of her slippers every morning, never both. Captain stole sausages off the plate of anybody who wasn’t looking.
What Roles Should the Animals Play, and What Boundaries Should I Respect?
Pip should be by her side. No animal is to be hurt, ever. She’d never forgive you, and neither would I. Shep has gone, but please don’t show it.
What Are Your Greatest Ambitions Now?
She won’t say. I think she wants to be useful and free at the same time. I’m guessing, but I think she’d like to do a degree with the Open University. The prospectus has been in the kitchen drawer since 2011. And see the Northern Lights before her knees go.
If the Fictional Protagonist Could Undergo One Extraordinary Transformation, What Would You Choose?
To realise she was the hero all along, and see the sky light up.
The Same Life.
Four Different Worlds.
Each tab reveals a complete novel premise, its four-stage story arc, the real-life details behind its fictional transformations, and the original opening pages. These are proposed full-length stories, not four finished 80,000-word manuscripts.
When Bel Coulson is six years old, the first dragon in three hundred years lands on the great forge-tower of Ironmouth, and she decides on the spot that she is going to be a rider. Girls from the Cinder Streets do not become riders. Bel becomes an apothecary’s counter girl, then a wife, a mother, a school cook and finally the doorwarden of a healing house in a small hill-town, where everybody who is sick or frightened passes her desk. One winter, someone leaves a cold dragon egg on the step. Nobody can hatch it. Bel keeps it by the stove in the waiting room for twenty-six years.
From Life to Page
How familiar memories take on new meaning within this fictional world.
See the remaining 6 transformations
The Shape of the Story
Four stages of a proposed full-length narrative, as described in the supplied concept.
The dragon lands, a girl looks up, and the world tells her no. Nan’s ginger tom watches from the windowsill and yawns.
An apothecary’s shop, a carpenter, a wedding, a honeymoon in the rain and two babies. The move to the hills, where nobody knows her name, and the first friend she makes there is a black-and-white hill-dog who follows her home from the market and stays for fourteen years.
The healing house, the egg by the stove, and a quarter of a century of noticing. The night Shep goes missing on the fell in a blizzard and Bel goes up after him in her slippers and carries him home. A plague season she holds back through nothing but organisation and nerve. Her mother’s death. The examination at forty-five.
On the day she hangs up her keys, the egg hatches, for her. The dragon is no bigger than a loaf, the colour of a border terrier and extremely bossy, and Bel names her Pip. Pip grows into her opinion of herself just as the dragons are needed again. Bel becomes the oldest rider in history, at sixty-three, and learns to fly with grey in her hair.
Where Her Dreams Lead
Bel’s arc is the dream she was told to put away at six. She doesn’t become a rider by being chosen. She becomes one because twenty-six years at the door have made her the only person in the hill-country who knows where everybody is, who needs what and how to get them there. When the Long Frost comes down from the north, she saves the town the way she always has, by organising it. This time she does it from the back of a dragon, with Shep’s ghost running ahead of them through the snow to show the way. Her second arc is learning to be less hard on herself, and to accept that she can be useful and free at the same time. At the end of the novel she is offered the post of Mistress of the Riders’ School, and turns it down to enrol there as its oldest student. Then, at last, she and Pip fly north to the edge of the world, where the reindeer move under a sky on fire with green light.
The Opening Pages
Read the beginning in the original voice of the sample novel.
Part One · Ironmouth
The night of the Landing, the 20th of Hay-month, 1969 of the Forge Reckoning
Bel Coulson was six years old the night the dragon came, and she was supposed to be asleep.
She wasn’t. She was sitting on the end of Nan’s bed in her nightie, with her feet tucked up under her because the floor was cold, watching the sky out of the attic window. Captain, Nan’s ginger tom, was sitting on the windowsill with his tail wrapped round his feet, watching it too, or pretending he wasn’t. You could see the whole of Ironmouth from Nan’s attic. You could see the chimneys of the Cinder Streets going down to the river in long black rows, and the river itself, black and shining, and on the other side of it the Works. The Works went on for miles. There were furnaces and foundries and rolling mills and great iron towers with pipes running between them, and at night every single one of them was lit up, orange and gold and white, so that the whole sky over Ironmouth glowed orange from one side to the other, all night long. Bel’s dad worked in the Works, on the night shift, at Number Four Furnace. Bel liked to look at Number Four and imagine him in there, tiny as a beetle, doing something important with a long iron pole.
‘You’ll catch your death,’ said Nan, from the bed. ‘Get under these covers.’
‘I’m watching for Dad.’
‘You can’t see your dad from here, pet. He’s inside.’
‘I can see where he is,’ said Bel, which was true, and which Nan couldn’t argue with.
Continue reading this opening
Nan sighed and lifted the edge of the eiderdown, and Bel crawled under it, and they sat together with the covers round their shoulders and looked out at the Works. Nan smelled of peppermints and coal tar soap. She had been reading Bel a story about four children and a magic wardrobe, but she had stopped halfway through a sentence when the bells began, and now she was sitting perfectly still, with her hand on Bel’s back, listening.
The bells had started about half an hour ago, and Bel had never heard anything like them. This wasn’t just the bell on the chapel at the bottom of the street, or the bell at the Works gate that rang for the change of shift. It was every bell in Ironmouth, all of them at once, from the big cracked bell on the Guildhall to the little tin one outside the corner shop, ringing and ringing. And under the bells, people were shouting in the street. Bel could hear doors opening all along the terrace, and feet on the cobbles, and somebody laughing, and somebody else crying, and a man’s voice shouting, ‘It’s true! It’s true, I tell you! They’ve seen it from the coast!’
‘What’s true, Nan?’ Bel asked.
Nan didn’t answer at first. Looking up, past the chimneys and the Works and the glowing orange sky, she seemed to be searching the dark place above it all where the stars would be, if you could ever see them over Ironmouth, which you couldn’t.
‘They say there’s a dragon coming,’ she said at last.
Bel stared at her.
Everybody knew about dragons. There were dragons in the stories Nan read her, and dragons on the old tiles round the fireplace in the Guildhall, and a dragon in the window of the chapel, all red and gold glass, with a man on its back holding a sword. Everybody knew that once, a long, long time ago, before the Works and before Ironmouth and before anything, there had been dragons all over the world, and people who rode them. Then the dragons had gone away, nobody knew where, and nobody had seen one since. Not for three hundred years. Dragons belonged with the giants in the Wold and the sea-people in the old songs. They were stories, that was all. Weren’t they?
‘A real one?’ Bel said.
‘That’s what they’re saying.’ Nan’s hand had tightened on her back. ‘Coming down out of the north, they say. Over the sea. They saw it from the lighthouse at Saltburn an hour ago.’
‘Where’s it going?’
‘I don’t know, pet. Nobody knows.’
Turning back to the window, Bel looked for so long and so hard that her eyes started to water, and still there was nothing to see except the Works and the glow and the smoke going up into the dark. The bells rang on and on. Down in the street someone had started singing, an old song about the Kindlers and the first fire, and other people were joining in.
Then the Works went quiet.
Bel had never heard the Works go quiet in her whole life, and neither had anybody else. The Works never stopped, not on Sundays and not on feast days, not even the night old Mr Harker fell into the cooling pond. It ran all night and all day, every day, clanging and hissing and roaring. That noise was the sound Bel went to sleep to and woke up to, as much a part of her as her own breathing. Now, all at once, it stopped. The great hammers in the rolling mills stopped. The whistles stopped. Even the bells seemed to stop, one by one, until there was nothing but a long, ringing, enormous silence, and the orange glow of the furnaces on the underside of the smoke.
‘Nan,’ Bel whispered. ‘Nan, look.’
Something was coming down through the smoke.
At first it was only a shadow, a dark shape where the glow was, moving so slowly it hardly seemed to move at all. As it came lower, the light of the furnaces caught it, and Bel saw that it was enormous—bigger than the chapel, bigger than the Guildhall. Long and dark and gleaming, it was the colour of the iron in the Works when it first came out of the fire, a deep dull red that turned gold at the edges where the light touched it. And it had wings. They were so wide that when it spread them, they seemed to cover the whole of the Works from one end to the other. They moved slowly, once, twice, and Bel felt the air from them shake the window in its frame.
Where was it going? Bel saw, a moment later, that it was coming down onto the Great Tower.
The Great Tower was the tallest thing in Ironmouth, the old furnace-tower right in the middle of the Works, with the Guild’s iron crown on top. Bel watched the dragon settle onto it. It curled its long tail round the chimney and folded its wings, and the whole tower seemed to lean and groan under its weight. Then it lifted its head and looked out over the city, and Bel could see its eyes. They were furnace-gold, and they were looking at everything. They looked at the Works and the river and the long black rows of the Cinder Streets, and at the people on every rooftop and in every street, who had stopped singing now and were standing perfectly still.
On the windowsill, Captain yawned.
There was somebody on its back.
Bel could see them quite clearly against the glow. A small figure, sitting just behind the dragon’s head, with one hand on the great curved neck. As she watched, the figure stood up, slowly, the way you stood up when you had been sitting for a long, long time. Then it raised one arm, high above its head, and waved to the whole of Ironmouth.
‘A rider,’ Nan whispered. ‘Oh, my word. There’s a rider.’
Bel didn’t say anything at all, because she couldn’t. She was kneeling up on the bed with her hands pressed flat against the cold glass and her breath steaming it over, and she had never wanted anything so much in her entire life.
She was going to do that. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name. One day she was going to sit on the back of a dragon, and stand up, and wave to the whole world.
‘Nan,’ she said, without taking her eyes off the tower. ‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a rider.’
Nan didn’t laugh. Bel would remember that for the rest of her life. Nan didn’t laugh, and she didn’t tell her not to be daft. She just put her arms round her and held her tight, and they knelt there together at the window, watching the dragon on the Great Tower and the rider standing on its back, in the orange light of the furnaces.
Her mam was the one who said it, the next morning, when Bel told her.
Mam was at the range with her sleeves rolled up, stirring porridge, and Dad was asleep in the chair by the fire after his shift, still in his work boots, with his mouth open. The whole street was still talking about the dragon. Bel had been out on the step since six, telling everybody who went past.
‘A rider,’ said Mam, not unkindly, and tapped the spoon on the side of the pan. ‘Don’t be daft, pet. Girls from the Cinders don’t become riders. Girls from the Cinders go into the Works, or into service, or into shops. Now eat your porridge.’
Bel ate her porridge. She didn’t argue, because arguing with Mam never got anybody anywhere.
In the chair by the fire, Dad had opened one eye. He didn’t say anything, not while Mam was there. But later, when Mam had gone out to the yard with the washing, he beckoned Bel over and pulled her up onto his knee, boots and all, and she smelled the Works on him, hot iron and smoke and sweat.
‘I saw it too, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘From the top of Number Four. Closer than anybody.’
‘Was it beautiful?’
‘It was,’ Dad said. He was quiet for a moment. ‘Your mam’s only trying to keep you from getting hurt, pet. That’s all. There’s a lot of folk in this world who’ll tell you what you can’t do. Don’t you go believing all of them.’
But that night, after Nan had read her the rest of the story about the wardrobe, she lay awake in the attic and looked out of the window at the Great Tower, where the dragon had been. It was gone now. It had gone at dawn, back up into the smoke and away to the north, and nobody in Ironmouth knew where.
She would not see another dragon for fifty-seven years.
In the kingdom of Northmarch, magic belongs to those who can afford to learn it. Gentry children go up to the Collegium at Hildscar, the great university on the sea-cliff, and come down licensed mages. Furnace-ward children make do with kitchen charms, if they have the gift at all. Bev Coulson has it. She discovers it at seven, when a candle lights itself while she is reading a library book under the covers, and she is told, in no uncertain terms, that girls from the furnace wards do not go up to Hildscar. So she teaches herself instead, for fifty-six years, from library books, market-stall pamphlets and anything else she can lay her hands on. She becomes a remedy-shop girl, a wife and mother, a school cook and, for twenty-six years, the clerk at the front desk of a country mage’s practice, quietly doing half his work for him. Then, in the week she retires, a letter arrives from Hildscar. They have a place for her in the Leaf-fall term.
From Life to Page
How familiar memories take on new meaning within this fictional world.
See the remaining 8 transformations
The Shape of the Story
A year at Hildscar provides the main narrative, with Bev’s earlier life woven through it in memory.
The novel follows Bev through her first year at Hildscar, from matriculation to the storm that nearly takes the cliff, and then on to her graduation. Her whole life is braided through it in memory. Each stage of the past returns when she needs it, so that the girl with the borrower’s token, the young wife on the hundred and ninety-nine steps and the clerk at Master Harker’s desk all walk into the present alongside her.
Matriculation, and a hall full of green candles. Bev, at sixty-three, is a first-year among eighteen-year-olds, sharing a staircase with Tansy Marr, a terrified scholarship girl from the furnace wards. She can’t follow a word of the High Arcane lectures, the gentry students think she is someone’s nan, and the geese have not forgotten her. In memory: the furnace wards, Nan and the night the mages walked on the moon, the borrower’s token and the candle that lit itself, and the careers mistress who told her to try the remedy shop. Then, in the Keeper’s library, Bev finds Nan’s ginger tom, Captain, asleep on a pile of books and not a day older than he was fifty-six years ago.
The Keeper of the Library takes Bev on as his only student of the old common tongue, which the Collegium abandoned three hundred years ago, and the professors make it clear they think hedge-magic is a joke. In memory: the remedy-shop counter, a millwright at a midsummer dance and the honeymoon in Whitscar, when she first climbed the steps to the Collegium gate and was chased all the way down by a goose. Two children, the move to Leyholt and years of teaching herself at the kitchen table after everybody else had gone to bed. As the winter storms begin, the sea starts taking the cliff.
The Founders’ Ward that holds Hildscar on its cliff is failing, and nobody in the Collegium can read it. In memory: twenty-six years as Master Harker’s clerk, the cases he quietly passed to her, the plague of curses she sorted out with a ledger and nerve, and the arithmancy certificate at forty-five. Then the night she called the blizzard off Penhill to find Shep, which is the only time in her life she has worked magic on this scale, and the morning a small, bossy terrier walked into the practice and chose her. On the worst night of the storm, Bev holds the cliff.
The Collegium tries to thank her with an honorary degree, and she refuses it. Three years of lectures, examinations and Tansy’s revision timetables later, she graduates.
Where Her Dreams Lead
This is the novel of the prospectus in the kitchen drawer. Bev’s lifelong dream isn’t a sky or a far-off place but an education, and the right to be called what she has always been. Her arc runs from the girl who was kept out of the Collegium to the woman who opens its gates. When the winter storms bring the cliff down and the Founders’ Ward begins to fail, the professors discover that it was never written in High Arcane at all. It was written in the old common tongue of hedge-witches and market pamphlets, which nobody at Hildscar has bothered to learn for three hundred years, apart from a sixty-three-year-old fresher who learned it from penny spellbooks. Bev holds the cliff, organises four hundred students like a Monday morning queue and, with Pip at her heels, walks straight through the geese. When the grateful Collegium offers her an honorary degree, she refuses it. She wants to sit her finals like everybody else. In the last chapter she graduates at sixty-six, with Alan in the front row, Pip on her knee and Tansy beside her. Then she takes up her new post as Hildscar’s first Warden of Common Craft, teaching furnace-ward children for nothing. She has finally learned to be less hard on herself, and she is useful and free at last.
The Opening Pages
Read the beginning in the original voice of the sample novel.
Chapter One · Matriculation
The Collegium at Hildscar, the first day of Leaf-fall term, 1026 of the Founding
There were geese on the gate at Hildscar, and Bev Hollin had been frightened of them for forty-two years.
There were seven of them, big grey and white brutes with orange beaks and mean little eyes, standing in a row along the top of the old stone wall on either side of the Collegium gate. According to the prospectus, they had been guarding it since the Founders built the place a thousand years ago, and Bev didn’t doubt it for a moment, because they had never once looked as if they enjoyed it. When she came up the last of the hundred and ninety-nine steps from the town, red in the face and puffing, with Pip under one arm and her carpet bag in the other hand, all seven of them turned their heads at once and looked at her.
The one at the end hissed.
‘Don’t you start,’ said Bev, under her breath.
Was it the same goose? It couldn’t be, of course. That had been forty-two summers ago, on her honeymoon, when it had rained for a week and Alan had been asleep in the caravan, and she had crept up these same steps at midnight in her cagoule, only wanting to stand at the gate and look through the bars at the lamps in the great hall. The goose had come out of nowhere. It had chased her all the way back down the hundred and ninety-nine steps and halfway along the harbour, wings out, neck stretched, honking fit to wake the dead, and she had told Alan she’d been for a walk. It had the same look about it, though, and geese didn’t forget. Nan had told her that, and Nan had been right about most things.
Behind her, Alan came up the last step with her trunk on his shoulder and stopped to get his breath back. He was sixty-six and had carried it all the way from the coach stop, because he’d said he would, and he was clearly regretting it.
Continue reading this opening
‘Is that it, then?’ he said.
‘That’s it.’
Standing together, they looked at it, because you couldn’t not look at it. The Collegium at Hildscar stood right on the edge of the cliff above the town, with the sea on three sides of it, grey and enormous and heaving under the autumn sky. It was all towers and spires, and in the middle stood the old abbey church that held the great hall, with its huge empty rose window and the gulls wheeling round it, crying. Bev had seen pictures of it all her life, and she’d had one torn out of a magazine pinned up over her bed when she was eight. Up close, it was so much bigger, and so much older, and so much more real, that for a moment she thought she might have to sit down on her carpet bag.
‘Well,’ said Alan, quite gently. ‘You’d better go in, pet.’
The porter at the gate was a big, square man in a black coat, and he looked at her over the top of his lodge counter in a way that Bev recognised at once. She had used it herself, at Master Harker’s, on people who turned up on the wrong day for the wrong thing.
‘Deliveries round the back, missus,’ he said. ‘Kitchens are by the east gate.’
‘I’m not a delivery.’
‘Visiting, are you? Grandson?’ He was already reaching for the visitors’ book. ‘Family wait in the outer court.’
‘I’m not visiting, either,’ said Bev. She put Pip down on the cobbles, and Pip immediately sat on the porter’s foot. Then Bev opened her handbag, took out the letter and put it on the counter in front of him.
He read it, and then read it again, more slowly, and then looked at her, and at the terrier sitting on his boot, and back at the letter. Bev knew exactly what it said. She had read it about four hundred times since it came, starting at the kitchen table on the morning of her leaving do, with her tea going cold and Alan pretending not to watch her from the doorway.
To Mistress Beverley Hollin, of Leyholt. The Fellows of the Collegium at Hildscar are pleased to offer you a place to read Practical Craft, commencing in the Leaf-fall term.
Underneath, in an old man’s spidery hand she knew better than her own, someone had added one more line.
About time, too. H.
Master Harker had been dead since the spring, and he had never said a word to her about it—not in twenty-six years, not once. She’d have bet her last penny he had known from the first day, when she lit the lamp on his desk at her interview without even noticing she had done it. He had looked at the lamp and then at her, over the top of his spectacles, and said, ‘You’ll do,’ and given her the job. After that he had sent her the cases he couldn’t manage: the farmers’ wives with the curdled milk, the children who couldn’t sleep for the things at the window, the old men whose hearths had gone cold for no reason anybody could find. He had never asked how she sorted them out, and she had never told him. And all that time, it turned out, he had been writing it down.
Twenty-six years of her case notes, the second page said, enclosed with the late Master Harker’s recommendation.
The porter coughed and gave her the letter back.
‘Right you are, madam,’ he said, in a different voice. ‘Great hall, straight across the court. You’ll want to hurry. They’ve started.’
Saying goodbye to Alan took longer than it should have, because he tripped over the trunk.
In forty-two years of marriage he had never once gone past a step, a doorstop or a piece of luggage without falling over it, and it had never once failed to make her laugh. He went over sideways onto the cobbles with his arms windmilling, and Bev laughed so hard she had to hold on to the gatepost. Then she found she was crying as well, which was ridiculous, because he was coming over on Saturday with a pie.
‘Give over,’ she said, wiping her eyes, when he’d got up. ‘Go on. Go home. Feed the hens.’
‘I’m proud of you,’ said Alan. He said it to the gatepost rather than to her, because he had never been any good at that sort of thing, and his ears had gone red. ‘I always was. You know that.’
She did. Picking up Pip, she turned round and went in through the gate without looking back, because if she had looked back she would never have gone.
The geese watched her all the way across the court.
The great hall was full of eighteen-year-olds.
Bev had known perfectly well that everybody else matriculating would be young enough to be her grandchildren, but knowing it wasn’t the same as walking into it. There were two hundred of them in long rows under the empty rose window, in brand-new black gowns, the sons and daughters of the best families in Northmarch. They had come up to Hildscar the way their parents and grandparents had before them, with their tutors and their trunks and their familiars, ravens on their shoulders and owls perched on the backs of their chairs. A tall boy in the front row had a fox curled round his neck. At the far end, on a high stone dais under the window, sat the Fellows of the Collegium in a long row, and in the middle of them the Chancellor, a tiny, ancient woman in a great black chair, with a wrinkled brown face and eyes that missed nothing.
On a table in front of the dais stood a single unlit candle.
Bev found a seat at the end of the last row, with Pip on her knee, and tried to look like she belonged there.
The girl in the next seat was crying. She was doing it quietly, with her head down and her hands clenched in her lap, so that nobody would notice. But Bev had spent twenty-six years noticing people who didn’t want to be noticed. The girl’s gown was second-hand and too big for her, she had no familiar, and her thin, pale face could have come from any street in the furnace wards of Tessend. In her lap, gripped so tightly that her knuckles had gone white, was a borrower’s token from a public library.
‘All right, flower?’ Bev said quietly.
The girl jumped. ‘I can’t do it,’ she whispered. ‘The Kindling. I’ve practised and practised, and I can’t ever get the words right. Everybody else has had a tutor. I learnt it out of a book.’ She looked at Bev properly then, for the first time, at her grey hair and her good coat and her reading glasses on their chain, and her mouth fell open. ‘Are you a Fellow?’
‘No, pet. First year, same as you.’ Bev held out her hand. ‘Bev Hollin. Leyholt, by way of Tessend.’
‘Tansy Marr.’ The girl shook it, weakly. ‘Tessend? Which ward?’
‘Number Four.’
‘I’m from Number Six,’ said Tansy, and something in her face changed.
Down at the front, the matriculation had begun. Called up to the dais by name, the students walked up to the table one at a time and spoke the Kindling, the first spell every student at Hildscar had cast for a thousand years, and lit the candle. Then the Chancellor nodded, their name went into the great book, and the candle was snuffed out for the next one. Most of them did it beautifully. The High Arcane rolled off their tongues, the flames came up gold or silver, the boy with the fox made his burn blue, and everybody clapped.
Tansy Marr was shaking. Leaning over, Bev put her mouth close to the girl’s ear.
‘Don’t bother with the posh words,’ she whispered. ‘You don’t need them. Think about it the way you did when you first learnt it, under the covers, with your book. Tell the candle what you want it to do. Nicely, mind. And then mean it.’
Tansy stared at her. ‘How did you know about the covers?’
‘Because that’s where I learnt it,’ said Bev, ‘fifty-six years ago.’
She had been seven, and she could still remember every bit of it. There was the borrower’s token, brand-new, with her name on it in the librarian’s best copperplate. There was the little book from the bottom shelf in the back room of the Tessend Subscription Library, which nobody had taken out for sixty years, according to the stamps in the front. There was the candle-end she had pinched from the kitchen drawer, and Nan’s ginger tom, Captain, lying on the end of the bed watching her with his yellow eyes. And there was the moment, about half past ten on a Tuesday night, when she had read the words out loud in a whisper and the candle-end in its saucer had lit itself, all on its own, with a small, steady flame the colour of new leaves.
Finding her the next morning, Nan had looked at the burnt-down candle, and the book, and her face, and sat down on the end of the bed, slowly. ‘You keep that quiet, our Bev,’ Nan had said. ‘Girls from the furnace wards don’t go up to Hildscar. They never have. Folk won’t thank you for it.’
‘Tansy Marr,’ called the Chancellor’s voice from the dais. ‘Number Six Ward, Tessend.’
Tansy walked down the long aisle with her gown flapping round her ankles, and the hall went quiet in a way Bev didn’t like. At the table, she stood looking at the candle for a long moment. Then she closed her eyes, and her lips moved, and the candle lit, a small, steady, slightly wobbly yellow flame.
The Chancellor nodded. There was a smattering of applause. Tansy came back up the aisle with her face on fire, sat down next to Bev and burst into tears all over again, this time with her mouth stretched in a huge, helpless grin.
‘Beverley Hollin,’ called the Chancellor. ‘Leyholt.’
Two hundred heads turned to look at her.
When Bev put Pip down on the floor and stood up, her knee clicked. Somebody in the row in front of her laughed, and somebody else said, not quietly enough, ‘Is that someone’s nan?’ She walked down the aisle anyway, with Pip trotting at her heels, past the boy with the fox, which took one look at Pip and climbed onto the top of his head. Then she was standing at the table, with the Chancellor’s sharp old eyes on her face.
She didn’t use the High Arcane, because she didn’t know it, apart from what she’d read, and she had never liked the sound of it anyway. What was the use of words that only rich folk understood? Instead she did what she had done that first night, under the covers, fifty-six years ago. She spoke to the candle in the plain old words from the little library book, the words she had read so often that she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known them, and she asked it, nicely, to light.
The candle lit. Its flame was the colour of new leaves.
So, a moment later, was every candle in the hall. All along the walls and in the great iron rings above the dais, they flickered and caught and blazed up green, all at once, until the whole of the great hall was full of a soft, clear, spring-green light, the light of a beech wood in May.
There was a long, ringing silence.
At the end of the row of Fellows, an old man in a dusty gown had stood up. He was staring at the candle with his mouth open. He was the Keeper of the Library, Bev found out later—and he had not stood up for anything in forty years.
‘Where,’ he said hoarsely, ‘did you learn that?’
‘Tessend Subscription Library,’ said Bev. ‘Back room, bottom shelf.’
The Keeper sat down again, suddenly, his legs giving way beneath him. Beside him, the Chancellor leaned forward in her great black chair, and for the first time she smiled.
‘My dear,’ she said, ‘nobody has spoken the Kindling in the old common tongue in this hall for three hundred years. We had rather assumed it was lost.’
Far below them, at the foot of the cliff, the sea drew back from the rocks and went quiet. Was it listening?
Bev Kirkby was six when she watched the first people walk on Mars on her nan’s television in a Teesside tower block, and she was told, more or less immediately, that girls like her didn’t go. For twenty-six years she has worked on the front desk of the Mars Emigration Office in Middlesbrough, processing other people’s dreams. Then, a week before she retires, the colony announces the Elder Programme: settlers over sixty, wanted for the hardest job on Mars. She has kept the application form in her handbag for three years.
From Life to Page
How familiar memories take on new meaning within this fictional world.
See the remaining 5 transformations
The Shape of the Story
Four stages of a proposed full-length narrative, as described in the supplied concept.
Bev’s seven-month journey to Mars is intercut with her whole life, from the arcology to the front desk, each memory echoing what she faces on the ship and the planet.
A crew who don’t want a pensioner aboard, still less her terrier, a ship that isn’t as safe as the brochures promised, and a woman who has spent twenty-six years managing frightened people in a waiting room. Pip, who has never in her life accepted that she is small, takes to low gravity immediately.
A dust storm, a failing habitat and three hundred settlers in an emergency shelter. Bev runs it the way she ran the front desk, and keeps everyone alive. When a party of children is trapped at the far greenhouse, she drives out to fetch them in Shep, the oldest rover in the colony, with Pip riding up front and barking at the storm.
When the storm clears, Bev drives out to the edge of the Tharsis plateau and sees the sky light up at last.
Where Her Dreams Lead
This is the story of the dream Bev was told to put away at six: going into space. Every other dream in her questionnaire is folded into it. Her lifelong wish to see the Northern Lights becomes the faint green aurora over Tharsis. The prospectus in the drawer becomes the colony exam she sits at sixty-three. Her arc runs from the woman who spent twenty-six years helping other people leave to the woman who finally lets herself go. The novel ends with Bev, useful and free at last, sitting on the bonnet of a rover named after her old collie, a bossy terrier in her lap, watching the sky over Mars turn green. Then she rings Kayleigh Morrow, back on Earth, to tell her the hydroponics course is worth it.
The Opening Pages
Read the beginning in the original voice of the sample novel.
Chapter One · Next, Please
Mars Emigration Office, Middlesbrough Arcology, Friday 19th December 2087
The girl at the front of the queue was nineteen, and she wanted to go to Mars so badly that Bev could see it from across the room.
She’d been waiting since before the doors opened. Bev had seen her through the glass at ten to eight, standing on her own in the rain on the arcology concourse with a plastic folder clutched against her chest and her hood up, while the cleaning drones went round her. She had been first in when the doors slid open. Then she’d sat on the end of the front row of plastic chairs for an hour and a half, perfectly upright, with the folder on her knees, watching the numbers on the board above the counter go up one at a time. She hadn’t looked away once. Did she think they might skip her?
Bev knew that look. She had seen it on a thousand faces in twenty-six years behind this desk—and once, a long time ago, in the bathroom mirror.
‘Number forty-two,’ she called. ‘Next, please.’
The girl came up to the counter like somebody walking into an exam. Close to, she looked younger than nineteen, with a thin pale face and bitten nails and an arcology accent so broad that Bev, who had been born four levels down from this same office, felt something tighten in her chest just hearing it. She put her folder on the counter. Her hands were shaking.
‘I’d like to apply,’ she said. ‘For the colony. For the next transport. I’ve got all my forms. I did the health checks at the clinic. I’ve got my qualifications.’ She swallowed. ‘Well. I’ve got some of them.’
Continue reading this opening
‘Right, flower,’ said Bev. ‘Let’s have a look.’
Opening the folder, Bev found it was all there, more or less, in the order the website said, which almost nobody ever managed. There was the application, the health certificate and the psych assessment. There was a reference from a teacher at the Level Nine Academy, written by somebody who obviously thought the world of her. And the qualifications, some of them, as she’d said. Good marks in biology and maths. Nothing in engineering. Nothing in anything the colony was actually short of.
She knew what the system would say before she put the forms into it. She had seen it say the same thing to ten thousand applicants. Insufficient priority skills. Application placed on reserve list. Estimated waiting time: indefinite.
Glancing up, she found the girl watching her with an expression of such painful, desperate hope that it was hard to look back.
‘What’s your name, pet?’ Bev asked.
‘Kayleigh. Kayleigh Morrow.’
‘And why do you want to go, Kayleigh?’
It wasn’t on the form. It wasn’t on any of the forms. Bev asked it anyway, the way she had asked it of every single person who had ever sat on the other side of this desk, because in twenty-six years she had found that it was the only question that really mattered. Some people wanted money, or adventure, or to get away from somebody. Some people didn’t know. But every now and then, maybe once a month, somebody answered it the way Kayleigh Morrow did now. She looked down at the counter, and then up at Bev, and went pink, and said, so quietly that Bev had to lean forward, ‘I saw the landing. When I was little. The first one, on the old screen at my nan’s. And I’ve wanted to go ever since.’
Bev sat quite still for a moment.
The first one. Of course it was. Bev had been six, and the screen had been an ancient thing with a crack across one corner, propped on her nan’s sideboard between the clock and the china dog. The whole of Level Four had been crammed into Nan’s front room that night, aunties and neighbours and kids on every knee, because Nan was the only one on the landing whose screen still worked. Bev had been sitting on the floor right at the front with her nose almost touching the glass. She had watched the lander come down through the pink dust, and the hatch open, and the first person climb down the ladder and stand there, on Mars, with the whole red planet stretching out behind them. Nan had cried. Her dad had stood in the doorway in his foundry overalls and said, ‘Well, I never,’ about forty times. And Bev had decided, on the spot, that she was going.
She didn’t say anything to Kayleigh, because she didn’t trust herself to. She put the forms into the system, one by one, and watched it think about them, and watched the answer come up on the screen exactly the way she had known it would. Then she spent the next twenty minutes doing what she had spent twenty-six years learning how to do, which was finding a way through when the system said there wasn’t one. She found the colony’s apprenticeship scheme, which nobody ever read about because it was buried four pages deep on the website. She found the bursary for arcology kids, which had a deadline in nine days and which Kayleigh had never heard of. She found the evening course in hydroponics at the Level Three college that would put her application on the priority list in eighteen months. She printed all of it out and put it in the folder and wrote her own name and extension number on a sticky note on the front.
‘Ring me if you get stuck,’ she said, and then remembered that after today there would be nobody at this extension to ring. ‘Actually, ring this lass.’ She crossed out her own name and wrote Shona’s, who was taking over the desk on Monday and was lovely and twenty-four and would do her best. ‘She’ll sort you out.’
Kayleigh Morrow took the folder in both hands and held it against her chest the way she had held it in the rain. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you. Really. Thank you.’
‘Go on with you,’ said Bev, and watched her go, out through the sliding doors into the grey December light of the arcology concourse, holding her folder against her chest with both arms.
How many of them had she watched go out through those doors? Thousands, she supposed. Ten thousand, maybe more. Engineers and farmers and doctors and dreamers, carrying their forms in their arms like that, and walking out into the rain, and some of them, eventually, going all the way to Mars. Every one of them had gone further than Bev ever would.
Then she looked down at her own handbag, under the desk.
She was sixty-three. She had been behind this counter since she was thirty-seven, when she had answered an advert in the arcology bulletin after ten years as a dinner lady at the Level Four primary, because Gemma had started secondary school and Danny was nearly grown and Alan said she was wasted wiping tables. She had been so frightened at the interview that she had answered the first question before they asked it. They had given her the job anyway, and she had never been entirely sure why. Twenty-six years, and she had never once been late—not in the floods of ’79, not the week Gemma had chickenpox— and never once lost a form, and never once let anybody leave this office without at least one thing that might help them.
The form was in the inside pocket, where it had been for three years. Bev had picked it up off the display stand by the door on a quiet afternoon in 2084, when the Elder Programme was first announced. Reading it at her desk on her lunch break with her heart going much too fast, she had folded it in four and put it in her bag, where it had stayed ever since. She took it out every now and then, on bad days, and read it again, and put it back.
THARSIS ELDER SETTLEMENT PROGRAMME, it said across the top, in the colony’s blue lettering. APPLICATIONS INVITED FROM CANDIDATES AGED SIXTY AND OVER.
Then, underneath, in smaller print, came the part she knew by heart.
The Tharsis Elder Settlement offers experienced citizens the opportunity to contribute their life skills to the development of humanity’s first Martian city. Candidates should be in good health and able to demonstrate significant experience in one or more of the following: medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, administration and crisis management.
Applicants should be aware that the Elder Settlement is a hazardous posting.
Why had she never filled it in? She had always told herself there was no point. She was a receptionist, and she had left school at sixteen with nothing. She had spent twenty-six years telling other people why they couldn’t go to Mars, and she was sixty-three years old. She had grandchildren, and she had Alan, who got seasick on the arcology ferry and had once fainted at the dentist. She had a bad knee and reading glasses and a cupboard full of commemorative mugs. And she had been told, at sixteen, by a careers adviser who had not even looked up from her screen, that girls from Level Four did not go to Mars.
‘Girls from Level Four go into the foundries,’ the careers adviser had said, ‘or into the shops.’ Bev had gone into a shop.
Looking at the form for a long time, she found her eyes going to the clock on the wall above the door. It was four minutes to five on her last day at work. In four minutes she would put her coat on and turn off her screen and walk out through the sliding doors into the concourse for the last time. There would be a cake upstairs, and a card, and some speeches, and on Monday Shona would sit at this desk instead and call the next number.
Administration, said the form. Crisis management.
Bev thought about twenty-six years of frightened people on plastic chairs, and of every one of them she had sent home with the right forms in the right order and somebody’s name on a sticky note. She thought about a girl of six on her nan’s floor, four levels down from this same desk, watching the first people walk out onto the red ground of Mars on a flickering old screen, and deciding there and then that she was going, whatever anyone said.
Then she picked up a pen—her own, the blue one, not the office biro on its little chain.
At two minutes to five, Bev Kirkby filled in the last application of her career. She put it through the scanner herself, and watched the system think about it, and watched the screen flicker and change.
APPLICATION RECEIVED, it said. PRIORITY REVIEW. A REPRESENTATIVE WILL CONTACT YOU WITHIN 24 HOURS.
Underneath, in smaller letters that she had never once in twenty-six years seen on that screen, there was one more line.
URGENT: THARSIS SETTLEMENT REQUESTS ALL CANDIDATES WITH CRISIS MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE. PLEASE HOLD.
The Assessors of the Wider Galaxy have one question to answer before they decide whether to make contact with Earth: is an ordinary human life worth anything? To find out, they select the most statistically average person on the planet and review her entire life as evidence. Bev Hutchinson is abducted from the bread aisle of the Leyburn Co-op on the Monday before she retires. She is not average, and she has no intention of being reviewed without having her say.
From Life to Page
How familiar memories take on new meaning within this fictional world.
See the remaining 5 transformations
The Shape of the Story
Four stages of a proposed full-length narrative, as described in the supplied concept.
Bev, a prosecuting Assessor who believes ordinary lives are worthless, a defending Assessor who is new to the job and terrified, and a courtroom the size of a moon. Each session replays a chapter of her life, and Bev keeps interrupting to explain what really happened.
Every replayed memory looks small from the outside: a Saturday job, a disco, a honeymoon in the rain, a job interview she nearly didn’t go to. Bev shows the tribunal what each one meant, and in doing so, starts to see it herself. Then a teleport malfunction delivers a furious border terrier into the middle of the courtroom, and Pip immediately takes against the Prosecutor.
The prosecutor has a reason to want humanity rejected, and Bev is the only one who notices. The turning point comes with Exhibit 1,206: a woman of thirty-eight in a dressing gown and slippers, climbing Penhill in a blizzard to carry home a dog that nobody else would have gone after. The whole moon goes quiet.
Earth is welcomed. Bev is offered a permanent post on the galaxy’s front desk, two days a week.
Where Her Dreams Lead
Bev wanted to be an astronaut at six, and she gets to space in the end, by being exactly who she has always been. Her arc is the one Alan asked for: realising she was the hero all along, and being allowed to be less hard on herself. The verdict fulfils the rest. Asked what humanity’s representative would like by way of thanks, Bev considers it, says it had better be something useful, and then changes her mind. The Assessors put her, Alan and Pip down in the Arctic for a week, among the reindeer, under the Northern Lights. On the last night, the lights spell out the verdict across the whole northern sky. In the epilogue, she starts her degree with the Open University, two days a week, around the galaxy.
The Opening Pages
Read the beginning in the original voice of the sample novel.
Chapter One · Medium Sliced White
Leyburn Co-op, Monday 14th December, 5.47 p.m.
Bev Hutchinson was abducted by aliens at thirteen minutes to six on a Monday evening in December, in the bread aisle of the Leyburn Co-op, while she was trying to choose between a medium sliced white and a seeded batch.
She would always say afterwards that it was the seeded batch’s fault. Alan liked the white. Alan had liked the white for forty-two years and had never once, in all that time, shown the slightest interest in anything with seeds in it. But their Gemma had been on at her about fibre since the summer, so Bev was standing in the middle of the aisle with a loaf in each hand, weighing them up, when the lights went out.
It wasn’t only the Co-op. She could tell that straight away, because the big front window looked out onto the Market Place, and the Market Place had gone dark too, the Christmas tree by the cross and the lamp posts and the fairy lights strung along the front of the Golden Lion. The fridges stopped humming. Halfway through a sleigh bell, the Christmas song on the tannoy stopped. Somewhere behind the tills, Darren, who was seventeen and had only worked there since August, said a word that Bev decided not to have heard.
Then the light came back, though it wasn’t the Co-op’s light.
It came down from above, straight through the ceiling, which shouldn’t have been possible, a soft, steady, faintly greenish light that didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular, and it lit up the bread aisle and nothing else. Bev looked up into it with a loaf in each hand. Was it a power cut? Was it a fire? Was it one of those flash mobs she had read about in the Darlington and Stockton Times, where people burst into song in the middle of shops?
Her feet left the floor.
Continue reading this opening
She didn’t have time to be frightened, which was the strange thing, she thought later. She had time to notice that her feet were dangling, and that one of her shoes was coming off. She had time to see Mrs Iveson from Wensleydale Road standing at the end of the aisle with a basket of sprouts, staring up at her with her mouth open, and to think, quite clearly, that Mrs Iveson would have it all round Leyburn by the morning. Then the light got brighter and brighter until it was all she could see, and there was a roar from somewhere overhead that put her in mind of the world’s largest vacuum cleaner, and the Co-op went away.
She came down in a white room.
Enormous and spotlessly clean, it had a white floor and white walls and a white ceiling so far above her that she couldn’t see where it ended, and it was completely empty except for Bev, a medium sliced white, a seeded batch and a single chair. The chair was one of the blue padded ones from the waiting room at the surgery. Looking closer, she saw that it wasn’t only the same kind of chair. It was the same chair, down to the little rip in the seat where Mr Thwaite’s walking stick had caught it in 2019.
Bev looked at the chair for some time. Then, because her knee was playing up and she’d been on her feet since half past seven that morning, she sat down on it.
‘Right,’ she said, to nobody. ‘Well.’
The voice, when it came, came from everywhere at once.
‘SPECIMEN SEVEN BILLION, NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY-ONE MILLION, FOUR HUNDRED AND TWO THOUSAND, THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX,’ it said. ‘YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED.’
‘Selected for what?’ said Bev.
There was a pause. It had the feel, she thought, of a pause in which somebody somewhere was looking at a piece of paper, finding that it didn’t say, and turning it over to check the back.
‘YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED,’ said the voice again, slightly louder.
‘Yes, I heard you the first time, love. Selected for what?’
Another pause. Then a door slid open in the wall in front of her, although there hadn’t been a wall in front of her a moment ago, and something came through it.
The creature was about the height of a ten-year-old and roughly the colour of a lavender bath bomb, and it seemed to be mostly arms. Bev counted seven before she gave up. Every one of them was holding something. There was a glowing slate, a stack of files, a pen, a cup of something steaming, another slate and something she decided not to ask about. On top of all this sat a round, soft, anxious face with two great dark eyes on short stalks, and the eyes were swivelling in every direction at once, the way Pip’s did when the bin men came.
‘Oh,’ it said, in a small, high, breathless voice, nothing like the one from the ceiling. ‘Oh, you’re awake. Oh dear. You weren’t supposed to be awake yet. They told me you’d be… I haven’t even got the… hang on.’ It dropped one of the slates, caught it with a different arm and dropped the files. ‘Sorry. Sorry. It’s my first day.’
Bev knew a first day when she saw one, having seen twenty-six years of them at Leyburn Medical Practice: new receptionists, new doctors fresh out of the hospital, and a locum who had once locked himself in the staff toilet for forty minutes rather than face the Monday morning phones. Putting the bread down on the floor beside her chair, she got up, ignored her knee and started picking up the files.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Give us those before you have somebody’s eye out. What’s your name, pet?’
The creature stared at her with both eyes. ‘Nobody’s ever asked me that,’ it said. ‘Not on a case.’
‘Well, I’m asking.’
‘Quillon. Assessor Third Class Quillon of the Seventh Hatching of the Ninth Brood of the—’
‘Quill,’ said Bev. ‘Lovely. I’m Bev. Now then, Quill, what’s all this about?’
Quill explained. This took a while, because Quill had a habit of starting sentences in the middle and then going back to the beginning, and because every few minutes the voice from the ceiling announced something in capital letters and made them both jump. But Bev had spent twenty-six years getting the point out of people who had come in about their bunions and really wanted to talk about their marriage, and by the end of it she had the gist.
The Wider Galaxy had been watching Earth for some time. It had been watching since July 1969, as it happened, when a signal had come drifting out across space from a little blue planet nobody had paid any attention to before, showing two men in white suits bouncing about on a moon. The Assessors had been impressed. They had also, Quill admitted, been slightly worried, because it was a long way from bouncing about on your own moon to bouncing about on other people’s, and the Wider Galaxy had its rules. Before any new species could be invited to join, a tribunal had to sit and answer one question.
‘Which is?’ said Bev.
Quill checked its slate, hoping, she suspected, that the answer had changed since it last looked. ‘Whether an ordinary life is worth anything.’
‘An ordinary life,’ Bev repeated.
‘Not a special one. Not a king, or a… what do you have… a footballer. Anybody can make a special life look good.’ Quill lowered its voice, and both its eyes swivelled nervously towards the ceiling. ‘The Prosecution says a species is only as good as its most average member. So we went through all of you. All eight billion. We ran every number there is. And the most statistically ordinary person on the whole of planet Earth—’
It stopped.
Bev looked down at herself. There was her good winter coat from Marks’s, the one with the toggles, and her sensible shoes, or one of them, because the other was still somewhere in the bread aisle at the Co-op. There were her reading glasses on their chain round her neck, which Gemma said made her look like a librarian. There was her bag-for-life with the turkey on it.
‘Me?’ she said.
‘You,’ said Quill miserably. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Bev sat back down on the chair from the surgery, quite slowly.
She found, to her surprise, that she wasn’t upset, though she supposed she ought to have been. She had just been told by a lavender bath bomb that she was the most ordinary woman on Earth, and somewhere a Prosecution wanted to use her to prove that the whole human race wasn’t worth bothering with. But the thing was, she had been telling people for years that she was nothing special. She had told Alan, every time he went on about her. She had told the girls at the surgery last week, when they started planning her leaving do and asked what she wanted in her card. ‘I’ve only ever answered the phone,’ she’d said. Hearing the galaxy agree with her was a funny feeling, and she didn’t like it much, if she was honest.
‘What happens now?’ she said.
‘Now there’s the tribunal.’ Quill shuffled its files. ‘They review your life. All of it, from start to finish. Every bit of it is evidence. The Prosecution goes through it and shows the Assessors how ordinary it is. And then I’m supposed to—’ Quill swallowed. ‘I’m supposed to defend it.’
‘You’re my solicitor?’
‘I’m your Defending Assessor,’ said Quill, and then, in a voice so small she barely caught it, ‘I’ve never won a case.’
‘How many have you done?’
‘This is the first.’
Bev looked at Quill, and at the seven arms full of files, and at the eyes on their stalks, which had stopped swivelling now and were fixed on her with an expression she knew well. It was the look of somebody who had sat in a waiting room for an hour and a half and was frightened that nobody was going to call their name.
‘And what about my Alan?’ she said, when she could trust her voice. ‘He’ll be wondering where I’ve got to with his tea. And I’ve got a dog that wants feeding, and I’m at work in the morning. It’s my last week. I can’t just not turn up.’
‘Oh, no, that’s all right,’ said Quill, brightening. ‘No time passes on Earth while you’re here. When it’s over, you go straight back to the bread aisle, exactly where you were. Nobody will ever know you’ve been gone.’
Thinking of Mrs Iveson and her sprouts, Bev doubted that, but she let it pass.
‘How long does it take?’
‘As long as it takes,’ said Quill. ‘Your life, from beginning to end. Sixty-three years. We have to go through all of it.’
Sixty-three years. Turning it over in her mind, Bev thought about her nan’s front room in Middlesbrough, and the steelworks lighting the sky up orange over the river all night long, and the library on Victoria Square, and the six years behind the counter at Boots. She thought about Alan at the disco in 1982, with his terrible moustache, and the caravan at Whitby in the rain, and Danny and Gemma, and the night she phoned Alan from the car park at forty-five, screaming, because she’d passed her maths. She thought about twenty-six years on the front desk at the surgery, and every patient who had ever rung up sounding wrong.
Was any of it worth anything? She honestly didn’t know.
There was only one way to find out.
‘Right,’ said Bev, standing up and taking her reading glasses off their chain. ‘Give us those files, Quill, and let’s have a look at what we’re up against.’
The courtroom was the size of a moon.
Bev wasn’t exaggerating, being a woman who didn’t hold with exaggeration. Quill told her afterwards that it was in fact a moon, a small, hollow, grey one that the Assessors had been using for tribunals for about four million years. From the doorway she could see rows and rows of seats going up in great curving tiers into the distance, so many that the ones at the top were lost in a sort of haze, and every seat had something sitting in it. Some of them had tentacles and some had wings. Some were the size of a bus and some were so small that she only knew they were there because they glowed. Every one of them, she realised, was looking at her.
In the middle of it all, on a platform raised high above the floor, stood the Prosecutor.
Tall and grey and extraordinarily thin, it had a long neck and a long, narrow head and no mouth that Bev could see, and it looked down at her in a way she recognised at once. It was the way certain consultants at the Friarage looked at receptionists.
‘THE SPECIMEN HAS ARRIVED,’ the voice from the ceiling announced, and a ripple went round the moon.
‘Her name’s Bev,’ said Quill, quite loudly for Quill, and then went bright purple and hid behind its files.
Ignoring this, the Prosecutor raised one long, grey hand, and a screen appeared in the air above the courtroom, so large that it filled the sky.
‘SPECIMEN BEVERLEY ANNE HUTCHINSON,’ it said, and its voice came from everywhere, cold and flat and bored. ‘SIXTY-THREE EARTH YEARS. NO DISCOVERIES. NO INVENTIONS. NO WARS WON OR LOST. NO WORKS OF ART. ONE QUALIFICATION IN MATHEMATICS, OBTAINED AT AGE FORTY-FIVE. EMPLOYED FOR TWENTY-SIX YEARS ANSWERING A TELEPHONE. IN SUMMARY, NOTHING OF ANY SIGNIFICANCE HAS EVER HAPPENED TO THIS HUMAN.’ It paused. ‘THE PROSECUTION WILL NOW PRESENT THE EVIDENCE. WE BEGIN WITH EXHIBIT FOUR HUNDRED AND TWELVE.’
The screen flickered into life.
Bev knew what it was before the picture had even settled, because she would have known it anywhere. There was the harbour at Whitby in June 1984, grey and wet and pouring with rain, and there was a young woman in a yellow cagoule running along the quayside as fast as her legs would carry her, shrieking. Behind her, wings out and neck stretched and gaining with every step, came the largest and angriest goose in the whole of North Yorkshire.
Forty feet high, in front of four million years of galactic justice, Bev Hutchinson closed her eyes.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ she said. ‘Not the goose.’
What World Could Your Story Become?
A love story. A life’s work. A thousand ordinary acts of courage. The moments you bring are the beginning. The adventure is what we can make of them.
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