Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Posts

This is a piece on a character I keep coming back to. This is a scene that may or may not be in a bigger piece. A story I am playing with…

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‘You have no memories.’ The woman said. That was rubbish, because Mrs Dove could remember just fine. She could remember where she lives, she could remember her way to the corner shop for her favourite tipple which she remembered was Glenlivet, No ice. Where she also bought her woodbines where Vance stocked them solely for her. She remembered she hated the bloody bingo, which the persistent Mrs Argle, convinced she was pining away from loneliness had insisted she try. She did it once and decided never again. She might be seventy-one, but she wasn’t a bongo type gal thank you very much. Mrs Argle had persisted some more until only bluntness would do. ‘I hated the bloody bingo. I was never so fucking bored in my entire fucking life. I am never going again.’ And she had shut her door on Mrs Argle’s shocked face.

Relations had been frosty ever since.

This scene comes from an idea I have for a thriller which I shared a bit of last time we met.  It is about identical twins born to a surrogate for a rich couple who have paid for a designer baby. One twin is chosen by them to be their daughter, and the other is rejected to an uncertain fate. The surrogate rescues the rejected twin and brings her up as her own. This scene comes after the rejected twin, Jo, has discovered that she has an identical twin and tries to find out more about her and her life.

Jo stared at her laptop screen. How was she going to find her twin when she didn’t know anything about her? She typed “how to find someone?” into her browser and scrolled through the links displayed. Several were Police or Government sites giving advice on what to do if someone had gone missing suddenly and unexpectedly, and she quickly discounted these. Instead, it was the ones concerned with finding and reconnecting people with lost family members that grabbed her attention. That was exactly what she was trying to do, wasn’t it? She clicked on the first link. Reading through the criteria to be eligible for their help, her heart sank. “You must know the full name and date of birth of your family member”, it stated. Of course, she knew her sister’s date of birth as that was the same as hers, but she didn’t know her name, let alone where she lived or anything else that might be useful. She clicked on the next site and the ones after that, but the criteria were the same. Without, at least, a name and a date of birth, they couldn’t help. She sighed, frustrated; it was impossible. Or was it? A fragment of a TV drama she had watched a few weeks ago surfaced in her mind. She remembered the “spooks” in the show using facial recognition software to find a terror suspect from his image caught on CCTV. They were identical twins, weren’t they? Their features were identical, so if such technology could find her from an image, it could also find her twin. The question was, was such technology available to the public? She searched again, this time for “facial recognition”. Links to many different sites offering to trace a person from their photo appeared. She sat back, relieved. That’s it. Finding her twin was going to be much easier than she had first thought. It seemed that she simply had to upload a photo of herself to one of these free facial mapping sites and press enter.

The eldest son sits hand resting on the tiller.

He is alone.

And today that is okay.

The sky is bright and the breeze is warm. Clouds lay scattered across the blue.

He sees a jagged line of darkness separating the sky from the shifting grey green waves. It is a familiar coastline, rising slowly out of the sea like memory. A story, oft remembered, of when the eldest son walked this shoreline with his father. Long, long ago, or so it seems – in his middle age the eldest son knows that time, more often than not, is a bastard. He sails on.

He returns here often. He has recalled and replayed this memory so many times now that what was once a thorn has become a soothing balm. As he has aged this memory has changed. He understands, or so he hopes, what this moment means. The eldest son regards this as the best day, the truest day and yet also, one of the worst days. This is the closest he ever got to knowing the man behind his father. Yet, as wonderful as that thought was when it first struck him some years ago, he knows that time is not only a bastard but also a trickster and a thief. Some details remain, others have faded or been replaced. Read a story as a child and you delight in the hero and the adventure and the victory. Reread that story as years later and you see the hardship and the struggle and the pain.