Proudly Alone

By L E Bulstrode

Laurelle Davidson, a woman in her thirties, discovers a terrifying truth behind her parents' death twenty six years ago: they are alive. Her sister Irma Neville lied to her. They did not die in a car accident; and this truth was kept from her because the reality was more horrific. And now Laurelle struggles to face it. She is barely pleased to go on a date with Patrick Chadwell, keeps cancelling it, buries herself in websites stories, online fandom, which sets off an obsession for William Black, a radio presenter who has a wheelchair bound brother Jeffrey Black and is suing his girlfriend Annette Jupanville for breach of contract regarding the adoption of a boy. All the while, she ponders an important question for her: Will she gain anything by meeting with her biological parents, or should she continue her life as if nothing was different?

• Language: English
• Publisher: L E Bulstrode
• Release date: Sep 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393543480

L E Bulstrode

L.E. Bulstrode was born in France and worked as a French teacher in London for many years where she lives with her partner. Her first book, Minor Holidays, was published on Amazon this year. Sandston is her second novel.

Book preview

1.

The moon sang to a glittery audience (there, begin the gift of this story as it happened to her, or at least of what her sister said, and health willing (and the excitement in writing this for her), the work will reach completion and hopefully reach her letterbox, if lucky enough).

Further below, inside a south London flat, a human cub descended into the blackness of a rapid-eye-movement. Laurelle Davidson accommodated him. He galloped about her home on a discovery of his legs. Tippity tap. Wallop! Khikhikat! He giggled away escaping her pursuit. The gallop accelerated between her ears. Laurelle pushed off the rim of her duvet and snapped her eyes alert. The room concealed no one but herself. Down the curtains a gunky daylight seeped in and cast the furniture in their rightful positions over the carpet. She set her head sideways onto the pillow. Meshes of the dream radiated with the magic of the toddler aware of her in the corridor. He sprung like a thoroughbred ... and sounded near enough a cavalry.

A sneak at the clock and she lifted her laptop computer from its footstool beside her bed.

- d-r-e-a-m––boy, dream boy; the search engine selection brought quite an eclectic list of entries. At the top ... Wikipage. RRRhhh.  La-di-da ... it’s a book ... about a young gay Nathan. 1995. Hm! old. And the plot is. La-di-da ... not plausible––what a shame, too many heights between characters. Go back. Erase boy. c-a-v-a-l-r-y. A selection of paintings. Bodies like limbs mounted with stewpot hats. Hugging uniforms. And such weaponry held proudly. Soldiers looked straight at her erect atop their mares––seemed to propulse them. There was no tenderness in them. Evil is an energy. And considering the events of the world evil always wins. Click on text entry. La-di-da ... a promotion in your work. La-di-da ... a sign of good fortune in your love affairs. Some––guidance. What if love means fiction to you? Okay let’s continue anyway. personal advancement and distinction! This dream is an all-rounder pill! What of––click back. Type the keywords and ignore the autocomplete: d-r-e-a-m-i-n-g-o-f-a-a-l-i-e-n.

The alarm went off on her telephone for her usual time to awake. An interpretation of the dream did not justify a lateness at work. She prepared to go, filed into her coat, whose wool garment descended flimsily along her limbs. A cardigan, and a visible shirt underneath it, thinned her shoulders, yet her neck rivered frank and sturdy. She tied her grey scarf manly down with one knot, adjusted meshes of her brunette crop of hair to her upright rather than curved forehead, then grabbed her bags. Her eyes bore awareness of the world at large with soft browns.

On public transport, flashes of the toddler compelled her to mull over the dream sequence. But it was not until that moment of break among queries at work, of when her trusted colleague Dorothy Smith finally reared herself down onto her desk chair and her shoulder-length hair stagnated, that Laurelle mentioned the dream to her. A sash of quietude reverberated the floor supporting the shelves of books, and the shelves were shadowless. Some readers were sat over texts in a nap, some in deep thoughts then flicked a page abruptly.

- Perhaps it alludes to a weakness, Dorothy began. Unbothered attitude or irresponsibility.  

- And my psyche is tutting. A weakness in this age of strength. Laurelle are you crazy?

Having childish behaviours. Not acting grownup. She had heard them all, and from ever since she was a child (if I well remember). She was such a dreamy and pensive toddler!

- It could be the individualist society we’ve inherited from Thatcher.

- Goodness I havent heard that name in ages, Dorothy said. You will think me funny when you hear this Lau, Dorothy pursued, but. When you described your dream at first a funny image dropped into my head.

- Go on tell it then.

- A woman beating her breasts together. Like a man beating his chest?

- Awh I’m not sure I like that image.

A woman goading a crying baby in a pram passed by; she had a motherly tone, bent over the baby, and her tone hinted at the most prevailing link in the world, the oldest devotion. Laurelle did not know if the woman would lull her baby to sleep so she would study while her baby napped. She had never seen this reader before. A chronic brooding bound her: I belong to no one. I still belong to no one, like the Arctic belongs to no one.

- I’ve not been explaining myself properly, Dorothy said. She does it to celebrate the birth of her child. What’s with you?

Laurelle seemed hypnotised, aiming a straight line.

- Everything alright? Dorothy asked.

- That’s not it at all, Laurelle said toward a serpentine course of short bookcases where tongued an eggshell-coloured card out of a cover.

The stigma of procreation, the female’s craving to conceive, she had put it to rest long ago. Baby fever could not be the answer, it just could not. Strange diseases blighted newborns. Schools were oversubscribed. Suicide decimated adolescents. Resources for survival were scarcer by the day. The planet was over flooded with suckers of its riches. The capacity for happiness was decreasing. No, she had quashed the baby fever long ago––something transited inside her abdomen.    

She halted in front of the bookcase of OVERSIZE BOOKS and, disobeying her duty to unhinge the book and to glue the card back into place, pushed the borrowing card further inside the volume.

- It’s as though you would take decisions according to external things, Dorothy said.

Laurelle tut-tutted.

- Our display table is already a mess. We’ve barely gone half-way through the day. Look at our highlights, she said. They’ve knocked the books off of their stands and made a mess of the leaflets already!

Dorothy watched Laurelle step off toward the display by the library entrance, then went extracting the book she had seen Laurelle push the card of absentmindedly. What memory could have distressed her so ostensibly? Dorothy put the book onto the desk and opened a drawer.  

At home in the evening, Laurelle switched on her computer and scrolled down her internet history. She read from where she had stopped on the interpretation of the dream. But a name tinkled the corner of her eyes. William Black. She typed a search then hit the image bank. The university professor! His lectures were grisly entertaining. A ThinkTank channel offered them on Labyrinth videocommune. There stood a man with guts, framed in his dashing ubiquitous green suit and topped with his cosmos of blond curls ever so youthful for a theologian. Or more precisely: Professor of Cultural Theology – a combined discipline to trace the contribution and influence of religion on culture. In a childlike available curiosity as she has always had, Laurelle traced a few hypertexts, trailed the reason William Black pertained her search results for dreaming of a boy. The quest soon plunged her into the rocky shards of her vacant family cast.

In his book ‘The scaffolds of Love’, Keith Botan – novelist and screenwriter – had shone a beam on mister Black intimacy with Colombe Jupanville, a Professor of Feminist Philosophy. In theory the perfect couple, the writer noted on his blog. Aged twenty-nine Colombe Jupanville supervised a department she created with international ties for the cross-disciplinary research and teaching of gender equality. A monumental endeavour since the number of people going through trans-sex surgical operations had increased. Last September miss Jupanville had secured a five-year grant for her department, had grown it into delivering three Honours Degrees, and to affording a full time secretary. A few years into their pairing, William Black, now chairless and the host of a weekly literary programme on Panteon Radio, served an action in a court of law against Colombe for breach of a sentimental contract as the press quoted it. A press in which miss Jupanville labelled mister Black a pesky masochist for his delusions of gender.

A sizeable bit of dialogue between the aliases of William Black and Colombe Jupanville  – Wilfried Hungerford and Annette Lowell in the novel, indented the pages the screenwriter had obviously scanned. Forgetting her own coupling with Patrick – nonexistent and in need of planning: where they would go on their first date, what she should wear, the topical conversations she should not tolerate, instead of a focus, Laurelle strayed into the novel.

Annette could feel the rant in her throat, the sentence Are you out of your mind on its roll. I know what you’re doing, she said. You’re sweetening him so he’ll trust you and follow you wherever you go, like a puss. She paused, then added, It’s your turn.

My turn? Wilfried said.

Yes, absolutely. Yours.

Would you care to tell me what’s on your mind?

I had him for a week and an half she stabbed. 

A gong escaped Wilfried.

What could I possibly do with him? He glanced her, truly puzzled.

You have been rather busy with him since you two met.

There’s nothing I can do with him. He paused. Isn’t it a school we should think about?

It’s too soon.

Listen to yourself.

What? Annette heaved in distraught. The future of the child was none of her business.

They were frozen in a sinking silence.

The real life background stunned Laurelle: the couple was discussing a boy Colombe had bumped into on her doorstep, and who had lived hidden in her flat until William had dislodged him.

A delicate sniff, and another, tantalised his wit.

I think seeing me here with you he perfectly understands, Wilfried said reassuringly. He shouldn’t stick around anymore. Maybe he chose you because you were alone at first. But now he can see you have companionship.

The traumas of those trying nine nights resurged.

Didn’t you––sniff––didn’t you––you will have to take him Wilfried.

Why don’t you treat him like a dog. Let him be here all day as he has done over the past week and half. And when you come home you feed him.

Can you be serious for one moment?

Didn’t you notice how sort of happy he looked while we were eating?

Wilfried pushed away strands of her hair. Droplets survived in her eyes. He attracted her to him. He could not deny it to her: she had lived with a helpless sentiment under the eyes of a stranger, narrowly somehow, without seeing him and he was a child! The boy’s docility and quietness while Wilfried showered him, and then his nervousness when Annette entered the bathroom and collected his clothes. And while he was cloaked in a towel his skinny kneecaps and his mutism at the dinner table. Although attentive with active eyes as if the string of a puppet master linked him to them by the fact of his destiny. The satin of her gown feathered his hands. Wilfried whispered against Annette.

Do you suppose if we abandoned him in a park he would find his way back? Richmond would be ideal.

Annette escaped his arms and got out of bed.

You’re just not going to be serious, or are you? She fastened her dressing gown tighter. Your shortsightedness really astounds me.

To share an amusement ventilated the lungs and cleared a mental load. Laurelle judged Annette peculiar. Wilfried’s concept of a human dog, and his idea of abandoning him in a park, showed a communicative sense of humour. And we’ll hire a helicopter and scan his skills and his verve for survival while we’re at it.

In truth, the parcel from the sky, as Wilfried had summarised the occurrence to himself, in his mind was a homecoming gift, and humouring the nature of the gift was masking his feelings, was an initial step toward accepting the boy. He jerked the duvet and sat at the end of the bed.

Annette I’m sorry.

Behind one of the many doors of her wardrobe-encased wall, Annette continued ruffling through her clothes.

I was being an idiot.

Annette emerged from behind the wardrobe door messily carrying clothes in her hands.

I am serious and I want to tell you something serious Wilfried said, standing up and helping her with her bundle.

She accepted his peace offering.

What if we adopted the boy? he said in a fondling voice.

Annette wrenched the bundle of clothes out of his grip and stepped on past him.

Further lines described Annette’s distress at the suggestion of an adoption, her flutter at the washing machine in dealing with the clothes, and her limits in defending her stand to Wilfried. Annette enforced her opinion rather than engaged in a mutual deliberation over the issue. Laurelle exercised caution in judging this male-narrated female experience. The storyteller’s premise may have been misogynic: to blame the woman for his sentimental disappointment.

Keith Botan homepage bore the day’s date, sign of a rigorous writer, and his website housed extracts of a script, pages where the names Wilfried and Annette appeared in capital letters. He had adapted the novel into a film! Signage and annotations directed the navigator to his choices and progress stages, and, in swift and easy demonstrations, to his reasons for his picks. A listing of the cast and crew backed the last page. Some of these people had links to their own websites. As a fulsome director-fancier herself, Laurelle clicked on his web address. Honourable directors often had a handsome look in their eyes; and as if eternally bound to their creative soul, a subtly fresh energy plumped their skin. She would judge if he were an honourable director on his magnet credentials. She froze in mid-thought in front of the director’s picture. She knew this face. Something extremely familiar resided there. She looked closer. The screen tightened her ribcage, and in that stranglehold her heart beat not. The man on the shot, Harold Kitts––; she was nearing the shape of her own forehead, the bloom in her own corneas, and her own curved chin.

She retracted, swooshed back against the headboard of her bed. All around to behind her ears a shock atom resonated.

2.

From the sideboard in the livingroom, Laurelle flipped out a document wallet. Photocopies of photographs of her genitors together over the years. Father’s always been a photo. She selected a portrait of his and placed it on the screen of her laptop. She gasped at the unique resemblance. Time’s furrows and life’s misery separated the personal and the professional photographs, forty odd years perhaps, yet the charity of his lower lip and the sharpness of his eyes had survived. Identical features welded both portraits.

Harold Kitts was born in a modest family in Bourke, New South Wales, Australia. He began his career as a photographer, achieved a renown as a documentarian, then evolved dramatically into film directing. The Scaffolds of Love adaptation was his second feature after a decent debut, known in England as ‘The Road to Esmeralda’, the enthralling, comic journey of the lover in search of his dulcinea, according to the moviedatabase where nowhere was tallied a single reference to his private life, not even if he was based in Sydney or Melbourne or else. Harold Kitts film director Australia also located two on the African continent: an insect scientist and a botanist. In Australia survived an advertisement on the website of Queensland television for a documentary dated the previous year, and on a cinephile website the hunch that he lived in Brisbane. These information hardly surpassed the traces of a phantom. 

Laurelle dialled the telephone number of her sister––machine-answered. Days later, she received the returned call. At the news Irma sounded unimpressed.

- He’s alive then. Something must have happened, Irma said.

The detachment in her voice escaped neither sisters. But Laurelle did not fancy laughing on account of a man she had been told had died.

The truth, since its discovery, had clung onto her nose as if she had a Daddy piercing there. It blocked her view also in autopilot movements. For instance: that evening, she reheated canned fruits for dinner. In the morning, she washed her face with the flannel she uses for her bottom. She dazed through her librarian duties, and in the evening, she aimed her season ticket into the keyhole of her frontdoor, totally disconnected to her actions. Normally, Laurelle was too rarely preoccupied to even loose something. And there was the thought of her unreturned call, of Irma’s silence due to a possible embarrassment at the unutterable admission of madness.

Laurelle mitigated her anger. 

- There was a photo of him on the online database, she said.

- That he looks happy and healthy and guilt-free. And has nothing to blame himself for would not surprise me, her sister ejected sarcastically.

Laurelle wondered what this anger concealed; Irma sounded through vexed resentment. 

- Laurelle ... I was about to go to bed. I rung because I thought your message on my answerphone was an emergency. I don’t mean to be rude–––Irma sent out a ghastly yawn. Sorry. Haw. I had a long week. We travelled and only just returned. I’m still in my coat!

- I’m sorry Irma.

Inside her corridor, the biting cold of Scotland still ingrained Irma in her overalls and she had barely unshod.

- I’ll call you tomorrow, she said.

- Irma I’m a bit puzzled about something you said.

- When?

- Just now. You said he has nothing to blame himself for.

- Laurelle I––

- If you don’t mind Irma why be so sarcastic?

- And at this very minute you would like to lay an egg on me for it.

- No Irma. NAW. Yerk! what an image! If I were to lay an egg on you as you said it’d be in the morning because then things seem adverse and against me.

- I see. Shouldnt I take that personally? And anyhow. What is your point?

- Do take it personally it’s a special treatment I have for you.

- W-h-a-a-t? Oh Laurelle. You see––

- No I didnt mean anything bad Irma please.

Laurelle rolled her eyes and sighed.

- I was joking.

The deep silence placated a ditched gesture.

- Irma?

For the lack of a tone, Irma had obviously not hung up, had perhaps abandoned the telephone, a less brutal way of cutting short the conversation. Laurelle had sensed her sister’s hostility, but witless, tactless, she had upset her again. Their relation had wiped a nine-year blow from such impetuosity and misunderstandings, nine years in the sulks Irma the elder had determined never to let happen again.

- Shall we end this now Laurelle, before our current moods get the better of us?

Laurelle explained herself from her exact words without accusing her sister, said she meant she would have most likely laid an egg in the morning per her dejection to engage with whomever, as mornings were a challenge. All the same, Irma let not bygones be bygones.

- I see that you dont think your words were offensive. Very well. I shall as well think up a special treatment for you.

- You’re doing it again Irma.

- Doing what exactly? I am merely defending myself. You were caught stuck in the middle of your needs and your wants again as usual. And what did you do? Bulled yourself in like the Aries that you are. Without the least concern for even the mortal that I am.

An injury for a hurt. Laurelle deplored the retaliation; but it dignified her, it did not wane her confidence, to confront the hurt she had caused.

- I made a badly timed joke Irma. I admit it. But that’s all it was. A badly timed joke. You wanna know why it was badly timed? or why I made a joke? Because eternally with you I have been rerouted from bringing Father forth for a dialogue on him.

The call terminated, Irma Neville lasted on her crescent seat at the kitchen table. The penumbra of the room lessened her dreary sense of having handled an onion to a bonfire. Soon, she would see its petals flare, and undoubtedly, the prickliest would sting her, because Laurelle would see to its happening, going for what was withheld from her.

- I think you two talking again is the fact to concentrate on now, said her husband.

Irma fixated him, his unsociable, minimalist response a provocation.

Gilbert clarified.

- I do not wish to upset you, he said. But we pledged each other to pipe down this decision you took of choosing lies rather than. Rather than two-three simple truths. I am still happy to stand by that. She is going to find out the truth? Personally. I welcome it.

- Who is surprised? After all we all know you answered yes to someone who asked us if we had children. Because you had Laurelle in mind.

- An old story Irma. A Freudian slip you appeasingly granted me at the time. Remember?  

Irma sighed and rose from the bed.

- Do you realise that what she’ll find out may break her?

Irma filed out of her coat and hung it on a peg on the shut door.

- Break her? Gilbert said. I think the opposite could be true. Not more than a month ago you were calling her a plant. I think it was prescient