Books of Lost Stories

A week had passed since the funeral. Jo adjusted her dust mask and wished again that she hadn't put this off until the last moment. Mum had lived in the sitting room for the last three years, and had fought off any offers of help, as if pretending she could cope would mend a broken hip as well as a broken mind. All the upstairs rooms were filthy with dust, fleas and cat piss. Jo had gagged when she entered the house and wondered how her brother had failed to notice. Or perhaps he had but still believed mum's word was law. Jo silenced the voice that said she should have been around to prevent this herself. Now the house was to be emptied and sold and Jo had the long drive north ahead of her that evening.

Only an afternoon to salvage the past. For the twins, of course, it wasn't the past. Holly had salvaged a collection of Bobbsey Twins annuals and Alex an old wooden train set with all the novelty of a visit to Toys R Us. Jo hadn't seen anything she wanted. Memories of mum and dad and growing up had a way of sticking that didn't need momentos. This was the last room, her old bedroom. The curtains hadn't rotted but only because they were that horrible synthetic material popular in the 70s but the room smelled strongly of urine and mould. It was only a sense of duty to completeness that made her open the wardrobe where an archive box balanced on top of piles of unfolded sheets. Dusting off the spider webs, Jo removed the lid and looked inside. There were about a dozen large hardback notebooks covered in red insulating tape. Opening the first one, Jo recognised her own teenage handwriting but couldn't immediately think what they could be. Glancing at her watch, she decided this was enough. The box would come home with her. It was at least intriguing, not revolting.

A week of two in the airing cupboard surrounded by clean newspaper dried any damp out of the books. Jo suppressed a surprising curiosity until the day that the pages finally separated with the crinkle of biro-coated paper. Once the children were in bed, she poured herself a generous glass of red wine, piled the books up on the sofa beside her and started reading.

They were stories. All written in the space of a year roughly at age sixteen if the dates were right. Flicking through, it looked as if most of them were fantasy, with heroines with amethyst/ruby/sapphire eyes, silver/red/jet black hair and psychic powers/dragons/enchanted weapons to be used on a mysterious and portentous quest to save the world. One or two of the latest ones were very Judy Blume and one of the earliest was a clumsy Enid Blyton style school story. It was perversely entertaining to cringe at her younger self as she fumbled for words. A bad habit of flipping right to the end showed all of them were incomplete. Each at a similar point. Where the heroine met the hero and went to give herself to him. Where the teenager decided to sleep with her boyfriend. When the schoolgirl went to kiss the boy. In one or two of the books, an attempt at Anne McCaffrey style porn-lite had been attempted and emphatically scored out so that the subsequent pages were unusable. Mostly there was nothing. 

Pouring herself a second glass, Jo made herself think back through two decades wondering why she had left this writing obsession behind. She nearly choked on a mouthful of wine when she remembered why. Sex. She'd wanted to write it convincingly but since she'd believed a good writer writes about what she knows, she couldn't write it until she wasn't a virgin. As if a lack of sex scene, not the overblown phrasing, cliched plotting and wooden characters was the flaw. She shook her head in amusement about the immense significance sex had assumed for her young writer self and at how everything she had learned and done since then failed to fit the empty spaces in the stories.

Sex was a first, messy, awkward yet fun experience in college. It was a former friend fucking her way through half a football team yet still  hating herself. It was the quiet blonde girl from that first job who always wore polo-necks confiding drunkenly at a Christmas party about being raped the year before. It was desperate guys and cheesy chatup lines. It was oblivion and sensation. It was Holly and Alex, conceived in a gap between business trips before the marriage ended. 

It was not a reason to stop writing. It was not something on which  teenage dreams should have faltered. It was not going to move those stories forward. Jo knocked back the remains of her wine, slammed the books shut and piled them haphazardly as far away from herself as possible. Lost stories best stayed lost.