A215 - Exercise 5.1

As part of my OU CreativeWriting course there are some set exercises. This one asked for a character study based on a list of random artefacts owned by a single person.

The story is somewhat longer than 250 word limits suggested, but I was quite pleased with it.

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Geoff walked gingerly down the stairs. Old socks and half opened mail were strewn on the lower steps. He really needed to tidy the place up. It was probably starting to smell.

He checked his shirt as he buttoned it. It seemed ok.

“Ouch” he cursed as he tripped over the withered poinsettia on the lowest step.

“It’ll cheer the place up, dear” his Mother had said when she’d brought it round after Christmas. It just made the place look more depressing now.

It was nice, in a way, to know that she cared, but at 32 he thought it was a bad sign that she needed to cheer him up.

She wasn’t the only one who’d offered to help him get over Cindy, but he’d been hoping for rather more than the little bottle of herbal sleeping pills that Dolores had given to him. They’d spent a lovely afternoon drinking coffee together at the little café off the Edgeware Road. She’d talked about astrology and he’d offered to do a tarot reading for her. He liked his Tarot deck. It was in the old Swiss woodcut style. Classic rather than any of that new age rubbish. They helped him to organise his thoughts. Sometime he did readings for himself, but the outcomes followed his moods. He knew better than to take them seriously, but it was hardest when he allowed himself to hope.

Twenty minutes ago his clock radio alarm had gone off and in his morning stupor he’d knocked it off the bedside cabinet. It had fallen between the wooden backboard and the pale violet wall. If the sound had gone off he might have left it there, but the buzzer kept buzzing, louder and louder. He leaned over and reached down into the narrow space. His forearm scraped against the rough wooden edge of the cabinet as he yanked the clock up by its power cable. As he raised it up, the flickering red light of the clock picked out a shape among the dust that lined the skirting board. He switched off the noise and put his hand back into the gap. After a moment or two of fumbling he pulled up a length of silver chain and small heart-shaped locket. He held it in his hand for a moment, caught by surprise as the tears welled up and his body heaved in breath-wracking sobs.

The wave of feeling passed as quickly as it came. He washed and dressed and picked his way downstairs.

After breakfast, he chose a fresh pencil from the jar on his bureau, checked the battery on his new laptop was charged, picked up a fresh batch of business cards and packed them into his briefcase then left to catch the morning train.

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