That Leaving Look

~: In The Room With Three Doors - new audiobook: adbl.co/38g6S5g :~

Time to make that move? You know the one. The thought of it comes and goes in the back of your mind like a stray cat. A new job, new lover, new place, new you. All so stray-cat vague, never quite... You forget it for a week, a month, then there it is again, eating your tuna. ‘Prrr.’

Some of us never do it, make that move that is. We just don’t, can’t, or won’t. It’s not in us. We want to, or think we do. But we don’t. That grass over there �" biscuit brown. We, the gladly-sads, regret it, forget it, deny it.

Others, serial winners without the flair to fail once in a while, plan their metamorphoses with obsessive attention to every step of their ascent and know exactly what will emerge from their puritanical pupa.

Sometimes we change because we must, in a heartbeat, or the stopping of a heartbeat, as life beats us in ways beyond our capacity to conceive, which only life �" only life! �" in its mad caprice can devise, as if to amuse itself, watching its own suffering with lifely fascination.

A young woman loses her twin sister in a cycling accident at London’s Old Street roundabout, where she is hit by a taxi, her head striking and shattering its windscreen. Her neck is broken and she dies, though not straight away. Life can’t take its eyes of such suffering.

~ : audiobook (pls PM me for promo code) : adbl.co/38g6S5g :~

London, to the surviving twin, becomes the killer. In her grief, it is London, the callous city, a ruthless idea, that drives people to live such frenzied lives, too much, too fast. Accidental deaths don’t just happen out of nothing, do they?

The young woman can’t go on. She has to leave, escape, change everything.

And so in the middle of Blackfriars Bridge, at the heart of London, she harangues her two boyfriends on how the three of them have done nothing in their seventy-five years of life, works herself into a storm, seizes their mobile phones �" and hurls them into the Thames.

Is she mad? Imagine it �" your phone flying up into the midnight air, hanging there for an instant, beyond your grasp, before plunging into the witch-blood waters below. Your phone, the one in your hand right now. The panic, the fear.

But what’s this? Giddy liberation? You can’t believe it. You should be stricken, but you’re not. You feel wild, oh so wild, and free. From what? Yourself? Or IT? Whatever IT is.

Can you imagine detaching, becoming yourself, fully yourself, going your own way? Rhiannon Smith can �" and does. And she takes Matt and Jamie with her, into the room with three doors, where all three doors open into a love from which there is no way back for any of them.

Friend Jake, is horrified when Matt tells him the three of them are throwing their jobs up, leaving London to grow �" you’re joking me! �" watercress in Hampshire.

Jamie’s dad undergoes his own catharsis to make Rhi’s dream a reality. And even arch-laddo Jake finds his life transformed in the wake of Rhi’s reimagining and relaunching of her own life after the loss of her twin, who was herself on the point of leaving London for a job back home in Wales.

Death changes everything, as does the onset of motherhood and brave new life among the verdant watercress beds, until, inevitably, another departure breaks the spell binding Rhi, Matt and Jamie together.

A RARE MAGIC

Perhaps some future archaeologist will discover three phones buried in the sediment of the river near the site of Blackfriars Bridge and ponder why and how they came to be there. Sacrifices, offerings, or just throwaways?

We have, after all, been throwing things into the Thames for thousands of years: bread for the deities; charms; curses; trinkets; shields; axes; swords; relics; rubbish, heads �" some bronze, others severed.

The waters mesmerise us with their constant motion, drawing eye and mind, to look and wonder, perhaps to ponder the ebb and flow of our own lives, with their shallows and whirlpools.

How much of significance in our lives can we ever truly change?

Everything, some will say, everything. Given vision, will and work, there’s nothing we can’t do if we strive. Take Rhi, who bends people and situations to suit herself, and in so doing makes things better. And why not? It’s a rare magic.

In the Mabinogi of Welsh myths, Rhiannon is a fey goddess, clever, resolute and beautiful in equal measure, who suffers and overcomes tragedy, and rides a white horse �" with a Celtic gleam in her mystical eye. To Stevie Nicks, in the Fleetwood Mac song, ‘She is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness.’

Coming and going, ebbing and flowing. Life and fate. Rhi-aaaaaaaan-on.

~ : audiobook (pls PM me for promo code) : adbl.co/38g6S5g :~

A little like Cath Palugu, the great Welsh cat of myth, who haunts the Isle of Anglesey where she kills 180 warriors when Sir Kay comes hunting. A water cat, Cath Palugu, who is want to turn up in a fisherman’s net.

Or near a watercress bed in a mythical Hampshire valley. Water, yet again.

What do we ever know of our deeper selves, for all our deeply shallow study? Of what are we able? What is within us? What drives us? Stories and myths run deep within, working their way down through our souls, like Hampshire rain, accumulating goodness deep within �" to spring forth, when the time is right to be transformed into verdant beds of peppery cress.

A rare magic all this romance, coming and going like a stray cat.

One going I will never forget took place after a visit to a hospice, where my mother was a patient. I recall her standing, frail and alone in her thin olive cardigan, just outside the front door of the hospice, her arms folded in front of her in a desperate sort of way.

Seeing her so reminded me of how she would watch me from the end of the garden path, by the gate, when I was leaving to go to college. She’d stand where she could see me for the longest time before I turned a corner and was beyond her motherly vision.

When I left her standing alone in the light spilling from hospice, I tried not to look back, but I did. She waved and gave me a weak smile. I waved back without breaking my stride. I was set on not looking back again as I headed towards the canal bridge and a train back to London.

But I did look back, just in time to see her slender frame walking back into the hospice. It was my turn to stand and watch, as she walked away and out of my life forever, one of those drab November days, about four in the afternoon.

There were no mobile phones then.

THAT LEAVING LOOK

You have that leaving look,

That yellowing look,

That look of dying leaves look,

That summer’s over look.

You can’t hide your look,

That autumn look,

That soon to be winter look,

That hateful, icy look.

You can’t escape your look,

That unseasonal look,

That curling at the edges look,

That cruel, cutting look.

You can’t help your look,

That separating look,

That hankering to be away look,

That love’s over look.

Audio samples for Audible.co.uk and Audible.com to be found via the links below. Pls PM me for your free UK or US promo code.

https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B086961CW6/?source_code=AUKFrDlWS02231890H6-BK-ACX0-188044&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_188044_rh_uk

https://www.audible.com/pd/B086963XKZ/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-188044&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_188044_rh_us

Reviews

[Neville]

Calling all my Café palls each of ye old and new & yet to be... Come thee hither and take a peek @ wot me old mate R.J Askew penned a while back and has since added sound to .... The book The Room With Three doors is bloomin good and well worth buyin .. Go check out my review on Amazon (but writ in me missus name) coz at the time I never had an Amazon account.. Anyway, wots stoppin ya from giving it a bash.. I guarantee you wont be disappointed .. Ron has even provided the appropriate links .. drop him a line here c/o the Cafe and he will let ya have a promo code .. Why not treat ya self eh..Tis well wurth a listen... coz ya worth it :)