J. S. WATTS - ECHOES IN THE GLASS

J.S.Watts is a British poet and novelist. Her poetry, short stories and book reviews appear in a variety of publications in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the States including Acumen, Envoi, Mslexia and Orbis and have been broadcast on BBC and Independent Radio. J.S. has been Poetry Reviews Editor for Open Wide Magazine and Poetry Editor for Ethereal Tales. Her poetry collections and pamphlets include: Cats and Other Myths, Years Ago You Coloured Me, Songs of Steelyard Sue and The Submerged Sea. Her two novels, A Darker Moon - dark literary fantasy and Witchlight - a paranormal tale, are published in the US and UK by Vagabondage Press. For further details see: www.jswatts.co.uk

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ECHOES IN THE GLASS

June 1991
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​It’s raining. It’s raining heavily and the rain outside her study is pouring down the windows like waterfalls: like rivers, like rivers of tears, like angels’ tears, like water running over a black rook’s wings as it sits on a weeping stone angel, like…
Emma throws down her pencil. Like too many things, too many images; each one forcing itself into her head and multiplying there like algae, like viruses, like gangrene, like all the things she wants to forget and yet here she is, doing it again, multiplying her thoughts like it’s nine thirty in the morning and she is back in Miss Edward’s multiplication class.
The pencil rolls across the desk and onto the floor with a small thud. Emma stoops to pick it up and this, at least, breaks her chain of thought, along with her multiplying misery.
It is June, for Heaven’s sake, and it shouldn’t be raining like this. It should be warm and sunny and she should be walking along the Backs, sunning herself and delighting in the many, summery images and experiences Cambridge has to offer. She’s a writer and writers need to observe, to experience, to gather; not just sit moping and watching the rain running down the windowpane like curtains of watery naiad hair, like…
Emma throws down her pencil once more and stomps downstairs to the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee.
She fills the kettle, gets the mug and jar of coffee from their respective cupboards, fetches the teaspoon from the drawer, puts the teaspoon in the coffee, puts the coffee in the mug and waits. Whilst she is waiting, she is trying hard to ignore the open and half drunk bottle of white wine on the kitchen work surface. The wine just sits there, trying hard not to be ignored.
The kettle isn’t boiling. The wine bottle is still sitting there. The kettle isn’t boiling because she has forgotten to turn it on. With a snort she flicks the switch on the kettle. She will now have to wait again whilst the kettle boils. In the meantime, the bottle of wine is waiting too.
Emma would like a drink. The kettle is taking forever to boil and she would like a drink. The bottle of wine is already open and the glass she was drinking from last night is standing washed and dry and ready on the draining board. What would Sarah do in these circumstances? She would pour herself a glass of white wine, that’s what. Emma picks up the wine glass, picks up the bottle of wine and pours herself a glass, which she drinks quickly before the kettle has a chance to come to the boil.
The kettle boils at last and Emma makes herself a cup of coffee to placate her sense of guilt, but she also pours herself a second glass of white wine and takes both the wine and the coffee back up to her study where, without really thinking about it, she resumes her scrutiny of the rain drops as they continue to slide effortlessly down the glass.
 
Emma has hit The Wall. Also known as the Writers’ Wall, the Wailing Wall and Limbo, but when she is there, up against it, it is just The Wall. This time she has been at The Wall rather too long and the distorted images seen through the rain-washed glass are preferable to the absence-of-everything she sees at The Wall. She has made another journey back down to the kitchen and finished the bottle of wine before she decides to see if she can break down The Wall by channelling Sarah.
 

June 1960
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​It was summer, the sun was shining, the flowers were blooming and Sarah’s favourite pink rambler was opening the first of its pale, delicate roses to greet the morning rays. Sarah was totally oblivious to all this, however, and would be so for some hours to come. The two bottles of red wine she had drunk the night before had yet to flush themselves through her blood stream and, in the meantime, the oblivion she so frequently craved these days still had her in a tight embrace.
The morning, when she eventually came to terms with it, was far too bright and far too loud. Songbirds were fine as poetic devices, but were bloody awful in reality when your hangover was determined to beat out a funeral march for your brain cells.
Had she been able to think clearly, Sarah might have been marginally surprised to note she could still manage to produce a hangover of such vehemence. Okay, along with the two bottles of red wine the previous night, there had been a couple of stiff gin and tonics to get the party going and possibly a scotch or two at the end, by way of a nightcap or several, but given her level of alcohol consumption over the last few months, she had thought her body was sufficiently and permanently steeped in alcohol to avoid the hangover experience. She realised this was not the case at the same time she concluded she needed a handful of aspirin and a bucket to throw up in.
 
 
It was summer. No longer morning, but the sun was still shining, the birds were still squawking and the flowers were continuing to flower industriously by the time Sarah had reclaimed the inside of her skull sufficiently to make her way to her study to start the afternoon’s writing. Despite the drinking and the hangovers (or even the usual lack of them, which should probably have been more alarming) she knew she was writing well. The ideas were flowing effortlessly like water down glass. The poems were taking shape quickly and easily and they were powerful. They would make her name, she was sure of it.
In moments of mellowness, usually occasioned by alcohol, she internally acknowledged she had Tom to thank for her current creative fecundity. It was her anger and bitterness at his betrayal that were pouring themselves into her work, giving it life and substance and it was his absence, inherent to his betrayal, that was giving her the time and space to write without interruption. It was also giving her the time and space to drink without interruption, but, as booze seemed to aid the creative process at this current stage in her life, she would worry about that later. In the meantime, fame and fortune beckoned for as long as her bile and inspiration mixed their acids together and burnt up the page. Today’s poems would show Mr Thomas Martin Edwards, and the whore he was parading around London’s literary salons, that there were others who had equal, if not better, claims on the literary laurels he had draped round himself. The publication of her first book of poems nine months or so later would prove her right.
 

June 1991
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​The day has grown darker as the rain continues to run down the streets of Cambridge in the same way it runs down the windows of Emma’s house. It washes away accumulated grime and brings temporary clarity. It shifts abandoned debris and moves it on, but in the process brings with it its own detritus. Sitting on the floor of her lounge, surrounded by a circle of candles alternating with jasmine scented joss sticks, Emma is seeking inspiration and guidance from the memory of Sarah Lucas, famous award winning, but rather dead, poet, sometime wife of the equally famous award winning and not yet dead poet Tom Edwards and, according to Emma, the source of her own poetic inspiration and creative drive.
Emma was born thirty one years and eight days after Sarah and if those numbers do not seem that significant, it may be worth noting that Emma thinks differently and places great importance on their shared birth month of June. She places even greater importance, however, on the fact that she was born nine months and twenty days after the untimely and tragic death of Sarah Lucas on one of Britain’s railway lines. Emma, whose middle name is coincidentally Sarah, feels she has a strong and unique connection to the first Sarah; not just shared naming and significant anniversaries, but also physical appearance and poetic inclination. A shared, essential… something.
 
Emma Sarah Smith is five feet tall, seven and a half stone and blond with grey eyes, although it must be said that the full-on blond effect has been given a boost away from Emma’s natural British light mouse by the regular application of chemical assistance. Sarah Lucas, prior to her untimely death, was five feet two inches tall, a little over eight stone and blond with blue eyes. Sarah’s blond was the natural legacy of two American Aryan-German parents. Emma sets much store by this close physical resemblance and by the ever so slightly quirky fact that both women have/had a small dark mole on the nape of their respective necks.
Emma, a journalist by trade, is a poet by self-selected vocation and is anxious to see her first collection of poems published. Sarah, who spent many wasted hours of her relatively short life trying to write commercial and saleable prose, was a natural and instinctive poet with many individually published poems and four collections to her name, albeit posthumously in most instances.
Emma idolises Sarah and, if truth be told, would like to have been her. Given the nine months and twenty days gap between Sarah’s death and Emma’s birth, in some of her more extreme flights of fancy Emma has concluded that she could be Sarah reincarnated.
It is for all of the above interesting and colourfully imaginative reasons, plus a growing, if unclear, sense of personal desperation, that, in times of uncertainty, Emma’s first thought these days tends to be, “What would Sarah do?”
It is doubtful that, given a case of writer’s block, Sarah Lucas would have sat in a circle of candles and joss sticks, seeking to channel the spirit of a poet who has been dead for almost thirty-one years. To be fair, she would have enjoyed the floral joss sticks, jasmine was one of her favourite scents, but otherwise, and especially after the break up with Tom Edwards, Sarah’s predilection for alcohol becoming something of an amour fou, her first, second and last solution to all difficulties would have been potable. Moreover, as someone who dabbled meaningfully with the occult and things mystic, Sarah would have thought it stupid to seek to channel a spirit you believed already reincarnated, let alone in your own body. Channelling might work for the incorporeal dead, but was pointless, if not a little risky, when dealing with a re-embodied spirit.
Emma has enthusiastically embraced Sarah’s fascination for the occult without her study or detailed knowledge of it. It is therefore as an amateur working from colourful imagination, vague instinct, the viewing of one too many horror films and half a bottle of room temperature white wine, imbibed on an empty stomach, that she is sitting on the floor of her lounge surrounded by a circle of lit candles, alternated with jasmine scented joss sticks, chanting the name of Sarah Lucas.
 
 

July 1960
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​Sarah was unhappy, which wouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who knew her after the break up of her marriage and, probably, would have been no less of a surprise to those who knew her before Tom walked out. Sarah could never be described as having a sunny disposition. She was, however, particularly miserable today. Her thirtieth birthday had recently been and gone and, as if no longer being in her twenties wasn’t bad enough, being thirty and without a man was particularly abominable. To be achingly specific, being thirty and without Tom in her life was the bottom of a very empty pit. Yet, to be thirty, not have Tom and then, just a few days after a landmark birthday, which he had apparently forgotten, to stagger across him parading the Whore around a drinks party at their mutual publishers, dug several foot down into the bottom of the pit and unearthed something putrid.
This distressing combination of occurrences had caused her to hit the bottle again with an enthusiasm only otherwise evident in her life with regards to her poetry. Sustained consumption of alcohol had not done much for her complexion. Being thirty, but looking significantly older, was not going to make her life feel any better. Did she even have a life? What was left apart from the poetry? Sarah threw the mirror compact she had been scrutinising at the wall with some force and heard the arrival of even more bad luck fanfared by the crack of its glass. Fortunately the glass hadn’t shattered, but it had cracked in two and her disjointed self peered back at her from the compact, multiplying the bags and shadows under her once bright blue eyes.
It was odd, this split-image: one face, but two no longer conjoined halves. The glass had shifted within the compact frame and, as a result, had spawned two not quite identical images of the same object; her. She couldn’t capture the precise difference between the two images, but, as she shifted her focus from one half to the other, the difference was certainly there. Two distorted facets of the original her and neither quite right somehow. She stared harder, but still couldn’t work out where the images differed. Every time she shifted her perspective, her reflected selves shifted their position too. She was conscious of her head nodding back and forwards like some demented Chinese doll and the mental image this created did nothing for what little was left of her self esteem.
Sarah closed the damaged compact with a sharp click and at the same time heard a softly whispered “Sarah”. Life seemed to pause for an imperceptible second before she spun round hoping to see Tom walking back into the room, but there was no one there. She paused consciously to deal with the acid disappointment this had caused and immediately thought she heard her name called again, but the room was as empty as before. Great, on top of everything else she was having to deal with, she was now starting to hear things.
Sarah walked back over to her desk, sat down and started typing. Over the clatter of the keys she could have sworn she heard her name called for a third time, but when she stopped typing there was just silence in response. She resumed her work only to hear her name called yet again, faintly audible over the racket of the keys, but when she stopped there was just more of the same nothing. This was stupid. It had to be Tom. Perhaps he had let himself in downstairs? Maybe he was outside the front door and calling up to her to be let in? She hurled herself down the staircase and across the hallway. There was no one at the front door and it was still bolted from inside. Despite this, she checked all the empty rooms in the house. No one. Could he have been trying to call her on the telephone? An illogical sense of hope caused her to check the phone was on its cradle. It was. There was no opportunity for lost voices to creep out of the handset without the phone first ringing audibly to announce their call. There was no one and nothing in the house, or directly outside it, that could have called her name, or even made a noise which her wishful emotions could have misinterpreted as someone calling to her. She was apparently hearing things, or developing degenerative tinnitus, neither being a welcome thought.
Oh well, now she was downstairs she might as well get herself a drink to take back up to the study. Alcohol wouldn’t cure either tinnitus or loneliness, but it could stop you caring about them, for a little while.
 

July 1991
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​The weather today is unimportant. Emma is sitting at her dated, yet far from antique, dressing table and staring at herself in triplicate. She has far more important things on her mind than the world around her. The world doesn’t matter, only the space she is occupying within it has her attention.
Currently there are three Emma sized spaces in her consciousness, albeit only one in reality. The one is the Emma space she is actually sitting in, although that is one she is not entirely conscious of. The three she is focussed on are the triplet images she is scrutinizing so intently in her elderly dressing table’s tri-partite mirror: one head-on Emma and two opposing semi-profiles, although the latter annoyingly insist on moving every time she tries to view her profile and simply confront her head-on, the same way their middle sister has only a split-second earlier. At least the sherry bottle in front of the mirrors remains constant to its trio of images.
Coincidentally, there are three reasons for this outburst of narcissism. The primary cause is the pair of bright new contact lenses that the real Emma is wearing and which have transformed the eyes of her three sister selves from rain grey to dazzling sky blue. This, combined with now obsessive attention to her roots with a bottle of yellow chemical dye, has created the golden girl image she has hankered after for some length of time. She is supremely conscious that her self-perceived resemblance to Sarah Lucas has increased considerably and is trying to strike a typical Sarah pose in the mirror to enhance the similarity still further.
Secondly, staring into her dressing table mirror is preferable to staring at the Wall, which has grown and solidified over the last month, so that any thought of writing creates a blank expanse of nothingness in her head. The blankness relates to all forms of writing: poetry, prose fiction, the journalistic prose that is meant to pay her bills. Her resultant lack of output has become a cause of some concern at work, as have the increasing signs of highly regular alcohol consumption which have accompanied the creative fallow period; as a remedy, as far as Emma is concerned, but as the likely cause of her problems in the opinion of her colleagues. Indeed, Sarah is currently on leave of absence whilst, in the words of her boss, “she gets her head sorted out, dries out and gets some decent words out and on paper”. The presence of the almost empty sherry bottle on the dressing table is indicative that the process of drying out has, to date, not been entirely successful. If truth be told, the sherry bottle, and its predecessor, is the third reason for the extended mirror gazing session. In her now permanently mellow state, her current occupation seems like a perfectly reasonable way of passing a large chunk of her time.
Somewhere in the depths of both the sherry bottle and this intensive self-scrutiny, Emma concludes the three images are not identical. At least one of the women looks a little less Emma and a little more Sarah. How did that happen? She stares into the bright blue eyes, so assiduously returning her gaze, in search of a simple explanation or some profound missing truth; either will do. Is the Sarah-Emma moving slightly out of sync with her two sister selves, or is the real Emma imagining it? Who can tell, certainly not Emma, but she looks all the harder into the mirror in the hope of seeing through things to the truth beyond or at least to the bottom of the sherry bottle; either will do.
 

August 1960
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​Sarah needed time, clear uninterrupted time in which to write and focus on the poems. She needed them to flow unhindered, a purging torrent to wash away all the garbage trapped in her head. It was supposed to happen, the cards had predicted good times coming, but, somehow, it never did. Her mother would ring, a neighbour would call round, nature would demand her body eat something (although that was an increasingly infrequent annoyance: her body was getting used to doing without regular solids). Irrespective of the source of the distraction, the outcome was the same, the poems themselves log jamming and creating their own build up in her head, along with the garbage she was trying to shift. She needed to write her way out of this; she just needed space to think and write.
The telephone rang. Screaming inwardly, she stomped into the hallway and picked up the handset. It was Tom. No, of course he wasn’t interrupting. No, it wasn’t a liberty. Yes, she would like to speak to him too (this at least was true). Yes, it would be really good to meet up. This afternoon? The usual place? No problem. She could be there in a couple of hours. See him there, then.
The poems instantly forgotten, Sarah slammed down the receiver with a triumphant yell and rushed upstairs to run a bath. There was just enough time to wash her hair, put on her make-up and dig out a decent dress to wear before she had to leave. It was going to be just like old times.
 
 
Washed, dressed and made-up to perfection, she arrived at their old rendezvous spot with fifteen minutes to spare. She ordered a martini and waited impatiently. She was looking forward to seeing Tom. It would be just like the old days. He had asked to see her, to talk to her face to face. It must be important. He sounded so happy. It would be good news. She was happy just to be seeing him. She was really looking forward to being with him again. Her thoughts chased themselves round and round her head like exuberant puppies. It was his choice of their old meeting spot that convinced her she had something good to look forward to. They had gone there on their first date, the first time they had talked of love, the night he proposed. It was a good omen; a sign their relationship was not over. This was what the cards were pointing to. Their hearts’ core was still there. They could make a fresh start. Today. It would be the beginning of them getting back together. Her thoughts continued to race joyously, if repetitively, around her head, both for the fifteen minutes she was early and for the next thirty minutes that Tom was late. Despite her initial impatience, this didn’t bother her as much as it might have as the puppies and the martinis were keeping one another entertained.
The entertainment, however, came to an abrupt stop when Tom finally turned up accompanied by “her”, The Whore. There was a pile up of puppies, thoughts and martinis as the initial shock that he was not alone ran into the realisation he had brought that woman to meet her at their private place, gave way to the seemingly infinite agony of unwanted and cruelly unsolicited information about his happy news, her pregnancy, their future together and the need for a divorce.
She endured it all for almost half an hour, holding herself rigid as Tom’s words became increasingly jumbled in her head, until the build up of unwanted detail, dead puppies and stale martini cocktails became too much and she ran.
The running went on for some time. She was not really sure for how long or where. She just ran and ran and then threw up and then walked and then it was over and she was back home. There had apparently been rain and she had got wet, but the rain was now on the other side of her locked front door and on the outside of the glass and she was inside, her distorted and bedraggled reflection staring back at her from the darkened window. Inside was safe. She was safe. Now she just needed time, clear uninterrupted time, in which to absorb what had happened and to think.
 
 

August 1991
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​Emma is writing; not poems, not stories, not income generating work, but her diary. It helps her to think, to put things into perspective and draw out the pattern and purpose of events she would otherwise miss. She believes that seeing the pattern is important. She hasn’t done enough of it in the past and therefore got confused. It is important not to get confused, to remember who she is and where she is and why she needs to do certain things. She isn’t going to allow herself to get confused anymore. She will think things through, analyse things slowly, look for the patterns and act accordingly.
Sarah kept a diary. In it she said the act of writing it and the poems kept her sane and helped her to think. Emma is not writing poetry, or indeed anything else other than her diary, and so maintaining the diary is important. She sees it as part of the pattern that ties her to Sarah.
As she glances up from her notebook, she catches sight of her reflection in the darkening window. It is a typically Sarah pose. With her very blond hair and alarmingly blue eyes she could be Sarah: Sarah writing in her book, just like the photograph that appears in all the biographies. Emma likes the thought of that. Whilst she continues to write her own diary, she can’t resist casting occasional, and not so occasional, glances at her reflection. It is as if Sarah is in the room with her, or she is in the room with Sarah, watching her write the poems that are going to make her name and turn her into a myth.
Sarah-Emma stares intensely back every time she looks up. Emma scratches the tip of her nose and so does her double in the glass. She writes. The double writes, but what the double writes will be sublime, unlike her dross. It is like having another self, but a self that is as much Sarah as Emma. As Emma finally and reluctantly gets up to draw the curtains, the double gets up too. They both walk around their respective tables and as the double’s image walks out of her line of sight for a few seconds, she wonders what she is doing and where she will go when the curtains have been closed. As they approach the window together, she thinks she catches a look of relief on the other’s face; relief that she is now free to get on with her writing, without being gawped at like an object in a freak show, and to do the things she needs to do. So what are the things she needs to do without Emma seeing? What is it they can’t share? They are both Emma after all, the one behind the curtains and the one in front of them, although one or both might also be a bit Sarah, maybe once was Sarah. Could both selves be becoming Sarah, or is it just one self and, if only one, which one? Which of these ones is the true self?
 

1st September 1960
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​The start of a brand new month. In the past, Sarah saw the first day of a new month as an auspicious date, latent with the possibility of starting again with a fresh slate. She and Tom had met on the first of the month and got married on the first of another month, but that was now history. The debacle that was their last meeting had scarred her. There could be no fresh starts for her and Tom. Even the thought of their last encounter caused her to curl up inside herself and howl. She and Tom were dead to one another. From this month onwards, the omen of the first day would be its oneness; one like she was one, single and all alone and ever more would be so.
All Sarah had left were her poems, pouring out onto the page like acid onto an etching plate. They were powerful, they were glorious, they would brand her reputation into literary society for all to see and admire and yet…? And yet these sublime marvels shrieked of vengeance, of victory and through it, a kind of rebirth Sarah knew could now never be real for her. Her poetic persona emerged glowing from the fire, a golden phoenix who, with a clap of her wings, could ascend triumphantly to the heavens. In reality, Sarah had seen the remnants of her cold world crumble to ash. There could be no glorious resurrection from that, just yet more grey dust in an already dusty and colourless world. The only things keeping her from the ash were the poems.
Whilst she was writing them, her poems brought colour back into her life. When she wasn’t writing, she needed a drink more than ever to make the drabness of existence bearable. Sarah was scared she would not be able to maintain the purifying flame of her current poems indefinitely. Once they had burnt out and their colours had died, what would she be left with: just more grey ash and a build up of dull, hopeless thoughts, with no way of exorcising them from inside her head? Not even booze would be able to affect a long term escape from that. She would be trapped within herself, with no way out.
 

September 1991
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​There is no way out. She feels the panic rising within her again and reaches for the little blue pills her doctor has prescribed for her. There is still no real way out, but the pills muffle her panic and make the cage marginally more bearable for a while.
She is still unable to write. Even self-expression in her diary has become impossible as she has started to struggle with whom that self actually is. Without a way out, her thoughts are trapped within the glass bubble of her head, multiplying there until, at times, it feels as if her head is going to explode. She, whoever she is, is as trapped in this world as her thoughts are trapped within her. As the pills kick in, she wonders if the world might one day explode too, like the fragile glass bulb it is and whether that would actually be such a bad thing?
The people at work have dispensed with her services. She can hardly blame them. Who would employ a journalist who can’t write? Their comments on her drinking still smart, however. It is not as if she is an alcoholic. She managed to cut down for a few days when the doctor first prescribed her the little blue pills. It’s just the booze makes for a comfortable numbness that mostly keeps the panic at bay and kills off enough brain cells to limit the multiplication factor of her thoughts.
Sometimes a bottle of cheap wine not only helps control her thoughts, but will give her enough space inside her head to develop some insight as to who she actually is. At those rare times, her true self is clear to her. At other times, it feels as if her selves have multiplied within her and are struggling for space, struggling to take charge, but with all the infighting, there is no one in command of the ship and she is just drifting apart. If she becomes aware of the drifting, the panic sets in. There is only ever one self who panics, but when the panic is subdued it is all too easy to let her thoughts multiply and then the drifting starts again. It is a constant cycle from which she longs to fly away, like a phoenix from the wreckage, but the phoenix is never free from its true wyrd either. The inside of her head feels like an arrangement of mirrors where each mirror reflects the other and reflects the other and reflects the other for eternity, endlessly multiplying as if there is no tomorrow, because there never will be.
 
 

9th September 1960
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​It was the day after yesterday for Sarah. Yesterday had been a glorious, burning revelation. Today was ash in comparison.
Yesterday had seen the culmination of seven days of shining Technicolor poems. Her head had burned with rainbows and the words had flooded across their arches and onto the page, poem after poem after poem. Huge, crystal clear, burning poems: her legacy and her name, her life transformed into literature and myth.
Yet Sarah was not happy. If she had just poured her whole life onto the page, what was she left with? Maybe this was just a natural reaction to her efforts of the last seven days; the literary equivalent of post coital sadness, a real anti-climax, but Sarah felt more than just sad. She felt burnt out, empty, hollow, as if she had emptied herself of all the words in the world and in so doing had emptied herself of life. This burning deluge had produced her rainbows, but there was also ash from the conflagration and the ash was floating back to her to fill up the void she had created inside herself.
Without thinking about it, she reached out towards the nearest bottle. For the last seven days she had managed to control her drinking; not stop it, but moderate it sufficiently to prevent it from getting in the way of the writing. Now she needed desperately for it to get in the way of the ash ghosts trying to invade her and drown her in their dust-grey despair. She wanted to cling onto what little light and colour remained in her world, even if had to be via the bottom of a bottle and a constantly full glass.
Inside, the grey was continuing to build up. Out there, in the world outside, there was sunlight and brightness and wherever there was brightness, there would be colour.
Sarah grasped the neck of the bottle, which glinted encouragingly in the sunlight shining in through her lounge window. With the bottle gripped firmly in her hand she staggered to the front door, undid the bolts and the lock that had been keeping the world at bay, pulled open the door and went out into the daylight for the last time.
 
 

30th September 1991
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​It is raining, raining heavily and the world is a subdued and monochrome place. The thirty first anniversary has come and gone and nothing has happened; no revelations, no insight, just tomorrow sidling into today and then sidling on again into yesterday. Sarah Lucas has died. Emma Smith has at some stage been conceived and born and still nothing has happened. Everything is a pointless anti-climax and her head is now jammed so full of pointless shit, she can no longer think. Ironically, this is something of a blessing, but a heavily cursed one. If she cannot think, she cannot write. If she cannot write, she cannot unblock her head. If she cannot unblock her head, she cannot think, or write and so forth and so on and she needs to write to keep the bailiffs from the door and pay her off-licence bills. At least the drugs are free with the best wishes of the NHS.
She has to wash away all the stuff in her head; flood it with pure surging rivers of creativity, weep it away through her blocked up tear ducts, bathe it with healing angel tears.
The water pouring down the windowpanes is mocking her. There is water in abundance in the streets and waterways of Cambridge, but not enough to shift the accumulated debris in her head and soul; she can’t even manage to cry.
She is trapped; sealed up in the tomb of her house in the same way her life’s garbage is sealed up within her. The house is an airtight container, a stoppered bottle with the healing liquids on the outside and all dry as ash within. She will have to break open the bottle, get out there onto the street in the purifying rain; out there where other people are functioning and working and living and life is getting on with its business without her.
She throws and breaks the empty glass she has been holding, grabs the bottle of pills and walks purposefully to the front door. Bolts shift. The door opens. Outside, all is wet and flowing, but life, as others seem to be living it, is intent on scurrying home under an umbrella as fast as it can.
 

9th September 1960
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Sarah walked, soaking up the warmth and the brightness of the late summer sun, along with the entire contents of her bottle.
History and an over abundance of literary biographies would come up with a multiplicity of conflicting reasons as to what happened next and why. What were Sarah Lucas’s intentions as she took her ten minute walk to the railway line? What was she thinking as she clambered, possibly fell, down the embankment onto the tracks? Why did she then walk along the tracks for up to half a mile before the express from the mainline station down the line ended her journey and created the most written about literary legend of the Twentieth Century?
The words she left behind her were dissected and scrutinised and analysed until their meanings became totally subjective, but no clear, wholly unambiguous indication of her purpose was ever extracted from under the microscope’s glass. Indeed, even thirty seconds before Sarah and the ten thirty-two made history, whilst unmaking her, Sarah could not have made things any clearer. All she knew was the morning sun was bright and blindingly glorious. Strict geometric lines and patterns appeared and disappeared in the brightness, shimmering and glinting with unknown metallic colours. As she followed the lines and walked into the sun, her bright blue eyes swam with colour, washing away the ash and the despair to lift her triumphant into the burning sky.
 
 

30th September 1991
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​She walks; for how long or initially where, she cannot say, but she walks, letting the rain pour its blessings upon her, letting the moisture soak into her. She is soaked through, but her head remains jammed with dried up thoughts, like a psychic head cold. At some point in her journey, she hears the sound of trains and heads towards the railway lines, but then is distracted and wanders away from them and towards the river, across Midsummer Common, Victoria Avenue and Jesus Green. Half way across Jesus and the rain is stopping. The sun is reclaiming its hold on the world and its control of the sky. There might even be a rainbow. The puddles shine and glint with rainbow-like colours of refracted light from oil and other urban pollutants.
She walks for a while along the side of the river. At the straight line of the lock, she stops and peers down into the water below. The sun shines back up at her, blinding her with its brilliance. Rainbows shimmer on the water’s surface. As she reaches out and down towards the comforting brightness, she is briefly reflected in the purifying waters that wait beyond and beneath. She can see everything so clearly now: the stupidity of where she has been, the clarity gifted by her true reflection, the colours she has been missing. She stretches out, straining precariously over the patient depth, towards clarity, colour and the welcoming light.
 
 
 
                                                                        The End