Day 2
903 words tonight / 4,006 words total.
A real quick one today – I started just before 1am, it’s 1:49am now but I’ve managed to bang out 903 words. A power-write! That’s put me over the 4,000 word mark, which is up on where I should be after two days and about on par with where I was this time last year.
I only wrote one scene. It’s about Sara and it’s basically just a personal rant. I like cold winter mornings, and I hate having to work and the London Underground, so I wrote about those things. I also wanted to sketch the character for my own reference, too: she’s going to develop into someone who’s eternally stuck in a rut, cares about some things to the point of obsessive / compulsive but doesn’t care about other things at all, and believes most people have their priorities all wrong.
Also, she hates being told what to do but almost always does as she’s told which I’m hopefully going to be able to build on as I go through.
5. The Commute
After watching her mother clean for a little longer and polishing off half of the block of cheese, Sara went for a shower. It was already after 7am, but she was in no rush. Sara wasn’t the kind of girl who was ever in any particular rush to do anything. In any case, she had every intention of quitting temping altogether soon anyway, so it didn’t matter if she was a few minutes late today.
The bathroom floor was soaked, due to the blocked toilet. Her mother had warned Sara to be quick in there. Mr Wallace the plumber was charging double to come over and she didn’t want him waiting around while Sara “did whatever it was she did for all that time in there.” It seemed to Sara everyone in the house was obsessed with her bathroom habits. It was true that Sara was capable of spending an inordinate amount of time in the shower. But there was nothing untoward going on—not that she could be bothered to explain that to anyone. It simply wasn’t a big deal. She just loved the sensation of ice-cold water shooting down the back of her neck. She had been known to stand under the shower for up to half an hour, prone, with her head titled slightly forward and her black hair hanging arrow-like, pointing down towards the plughole.
But today, in accordance with her mother’s wishes, she was out in ten minutes. It took no time to choose what to wear, it was a grey shirt / grey skirt combo day. Sara had a total of ten outfits that she cycled through regularly. Never since the onset of puberty had she deviated from the same pattern. Every six months she would go out and buy up to a dozen different outfits. Even when people bought her clothes or accessories as gifts, she would give them away—usually to Camille. “There are important things, and there are unimportant things,” she liked to say, “and clothes are unimportant.”
Mr Wallace had arrived by the time she had dressed, she passed him on the stairs. He was a tall, slim, bespectacled man with a sloping smile. “Good morning,” he said, nodding at her as he came up the stairs. She didn’t reply. Neither did she reply to her mother’s cheery “Have a good day!” as she left the house.
The bitter morning air outside did much to raise her spirits. She pulled her long black coat tightly around her and turned up her collar. The sun was swiftly making its way up behind the shops at the end of the street, threatening to melt away the fog.
The underground was running slow. That meant, as was so often the case, that when the next tube did come, there were no seats. Three or four stops on, Sara found herself crowded in on all sides, cramped up against the doors. Not for the first time, she wondered why she bothered to do any of this at all. That plumber Wallace, she thought, hasn’t got a bad job, really. Not compared with this.
The expressions of her fellow commuters said it all. The man standing next to her was only inches away. They were face to face. She could feel his breath on alternate exhales, hear the tinny bass from his headphones, see all the spots, shaving nicks and other skin imperfections on his face. It was times like this she wondered why she had stuck with the succession of short-term temping jobs at all. She seemed to do little more than spend her time figuring out new routes to new workplaces—new routes that carried new faces, but faces that wore those same weary expressions…
Kings Cross was her stop, and it was coming up next. At least half the people on the carriage would be getting off there. If only she could stay on, she’d certainly get a seat. She could stay on all the way to Heathrow, she could get a last minute flight. Where would she go? Sweden, perhaps. Or Greenland. She had the money, that was for sure. She could—but no, those were fantasies, just fantasies. She didn’t even have her passport with her.
But if she did, she could. Couldn’t she?
Kings Cross came and Sara filed out with everyone else. She stayed in line behind the man she’d shared air with a few moments before, staring at the back of his head all the way to the exit on the Euston Road.
Outside, the icy air enveloped her once again, exhilarated her once again—the sun appeared to have been smothered by the low cloud, there was no chance of a warm day. How she loved the cold! She just had to make the most of it. The office was a five minute walk away but she made it last ten.
She shared a small office on the second floor with her boss. However, when she got in there was a note on her desk telling her that he had called in sick. That meant she would be alone all day.
To celebrate, Sara looked up last minute ticket prices to holiday destinations all over the world and turned the air conditioning down as low as it would go. She passed the next eight hours emotionally frozen, in a state of reluctant contentment.
