Almost 500 people entered Grazia’s First Chapter competition in association with the Women’s Prize For Fiction – and while coronavirus restrictions delayed the usual celebrations, our winner, Abigail Moss, was announced on October 19 in a virtual ceremony.
The judges were deputy editor Rosamund Dean, features and special projects editor Rhiannon Evans and author Diana Evans, who wrote the opening paragraph for the competition.
Diana will now mentor Abigail, who said, ‘My biggest ambition is to make a career out of writing fiction. I’m so excited to have such a talented and inspiring writer as Diana Evans as a mentor.’
Below, we publish her story, as well as those of our runners up Sun Hee Park and Laura Payne.
How Diana got the story started...
If you steal something from another time, they will never find you. That’s what he’d promised. You disappear. You never were or are not yet. You’re transient, like speed, or like the wind. So easily she had stepped into those magical machines with their white coils and sharp rims, believing in the next world, the next moon and the next theft. But one day she was caught, and everything she discovered thereafter destroyed everything she knew about time. It does not move or tick. It is one place, one moment. It is we who are moving. None of this is real.
Our winner, Abigail Moss, continues the story...
Move towards the edge slowly. Shuffle your feet in the dust. Stretch your arms like a tightrope walker. The desert is so flat you won’t see the canyon until you’re right on top of it. You know this. Flatness, flatness, flatness, flatness and then BAM! The ground isn’t there, your toes are inches from the void. The earth tumbles downward away from itself, like all that nothingness couldn’t sustain and fell inwards, collapsing like a dying star. Layers of red earth, millennia of mineral formations. It feels like staring across a vast lake. Throw a rock and watch as it sails in a slow arc over the side and down, plunging from view. Push a little tide of gravel over the precipice with your foot. Listen to it clattering down the craggy edge. Think of fairground coin pushers. Think of avalanches. Think of all the words you can for red.
It always starts this way, the tentative shuffle towards the edge. You stand and stare. Lateritious, brick red. Ferruginous, the colour of rust. Dare yourself to stare a little longer. Kermes, a red dye derived from beetles. Just a little longer. Haematic. You lean forward while pushing your weight back, see the spiny edges of a hardy desert shrub clinging to a rocky outcrop beneath you. Step away when the primal pull becomes too strong. When your fingertips get that vertigo tingle. When you start to think, imagine if I jumped. You never jump. Don’t want to jump. That’s not what this is.
Pull the brim of your hat low to shade your face. Roll up your sleeves. Drink some water. Lift your binoculars and stare across the canyon. There’s a figure on the other side. Wonder how the hell she got there. Squint and frown. She looks like she’s waving. She waves more dramatically, she jumps up and down. She has your hat, your slacks, her sleeves are rolled. She has your tattoo. Her hair is also curly, and it lifts in the breeze like yours. Your face is flushed and sweaty. She is unaffected by the heat. Rub your eyes because this can’t be real. She has your binoculars, but she doesn’t need them. She sees you clearly. She smiles and waves and waves and waves and waves and waves.
And in a moment, you know you will blink, and she will be gone. The dream always begins and ends the same way. You wake up sweating and remember that you got away. The learning of this is new every time, always the moment of forgetfulness, followed by the swell of relief so huge it burns your eyes.
Always another unfamiliar room. A hotel mattress that is too hard, too soft, or lumpy. A friend’s sofa, a friend’s guest bedroom. Sometimes you wake to the sonorous rumble of a moving train or a coach and that’s when you feel the safest, hurtling forward, increasing the distance.
His voice, his lies, come to you through the darkness sometimes. An imagined sound, of course, but for a moment, enough to make you sit up in bed, fumble for a lamp, stare around you with your heart pounding. This isn’t real. You repeat your mantra. This isn’t real. You left, you escaped. They can’t follow you here.
You started running but now it’s time to do more than just run. Even though the enormity of it is like standing at a precipice on tiptoe, daring yourself to look down.
The Guardian – Thursday 22 May 1969 MORE WOMEN COME FORWARD TO EXPOSE COMMUNE LEADER AVERY WILSON
Four more women have come forward to make official complaints to the London Metropolitan Police about Avery Wilson, founder of the communal living facility known as The Collective.
According to the women, who cannot be named for legal reasons, Wilson held them against their will within the compound, a former rope factory located in Limehouse, east London, for many months. Echoing previous statements, the women claim they were coerced into sexual activity with Wilson and other male members of the group. They also claim they were unwittingly given psychoactive drugs on a regular basis.
In a letter sent to this newspaper, one of the group’s co-founders Greta Belrose, denounced the women’s claims. ‘These sad young women are confused.’ Belrose wrote. ‘They came to us looking for friendship and family and that is what they found. Any claims of mistreatment, sexual or otherwise, are nothing more than delusion and lies.’ Miss Belrose declined further comment.
Other members of the group have spoken out in support of The Collective. Twenty-year old John Barnes described the commune as ‘a utopia, a beautiful place’. However, experts have expressed concerns over the group.
Dr Mari Chamborne, Professor of Sociology at UCL, said: ‘The Collective displays several characteristics of a destructive cult.
I commend the bravery of the women who have so far come forward, but remain gravely concerned for any other women, many of them young and vulnerable, who have been indoctrinated into this extremely dangerous group. I would like to appeal to them to reach out to friends and family and seek intervention immediately.’
Avery Wilson is thought to be travelling in North America, where he has family, accompanied by his wife Faith Avery and their adopted son, five-year-old Jet Avery. Mr Wilson has maintained silence regarding the claims against him. The case is ongoing.
Here's how Sun Hee Park continued Diana's story...
Or is that what she wanted to believe? No, she was sure. This was not a reality that was supposed to happen. You can take things but you cannot change events. That was Cardinal Rule One. And he’d told her that she was the ideal recruit because she did not have family ties. She willingly lapped it all up, even the downside of aging twice as fast every time she stepped into those machines. She had nothing to lose, and she was happy to be hurtling to her death.
But there was no mistaking it. He was a man in his mid to late 20s, but she knew it was Henry.
“Harry-boo!”
She called out her pet name for him before she could stop herself.
Her world spinned and she was transported back to the last day she saw him alive, at the funfair that had come to town. It was a glorious summer’s day, and the air was full of fresh popcorn and sugar. She saw the three of them – her dad holding his phone in one hand and Henry’s chubby 5 year-old hand in the other, and her 9 year-old self trying to break away from them and into the queue for the roller coaster.
“Please, Dad, you said I could if I got Harry his cotton candy!”
She hated leaving Henry but she just had to go on this ride. She would be spending the rest of the day with him anyway, at a friend’s birthday party. Henry was distracted by his pink sugar mountain, and for Henry was not clutching at her clothes. Timing could not be any better.
“Bella, I’m talking to your mother. Can you just wait until I finish?”
“But Dad, if I don’t go now, Harry will be done with his cotton candy and I won’t be able to go. Please Dad. The queue isn’t so long now. I’ll be back soon. Please.”
“OK. We’ll wait for you here,” Dad said, indicating a picnic table.
As she ran off, she could hear him pick up the conversation with her Mum.
“Celeste, as I said to you, I’ve had the children 3 times this week already. Your toy boy can wait. If I don’t get this contract out to the client today I might lose the project. I can’t lose this client.”
She felt grown up as she joined the back of the queue. She never got to do anything on her own anymore because she had to mind Henry. Not that she resented it. Quite the contrary. She enjoyed mothering him and having his adoring eyes on her. He followed her like a puppy. Even when he was a baby. Bella was the first to notice. Her mum had taken Henry out of the car, still strapped in his car seat, and placed him in the middle of the kitchen as she got the rest of the shopping out. Bella was hopping around in the kitchen, practicing her Taekwondo moves, turning to check up on Henry once in a while.
“Mum, do you see that? Harry’s eyes are following me!”
“Really? You were a bit older than that when you started doing it.”
Mum stopped to look at Henry, as Bella crossed the kitchen from one end to the other. They both laughed when Henry’s eyes indeed crossed back and forth, as though he was watching a tennis rally.
“Go get the camera, Bella. We have to capture this moment. But you know, it’s strange that his eyes follow you but not me!” said Mum, as she tested her theory out.
Bella had loved Henry from moment her parents brought him from the hospital, but this made her feel particularly close to her little brother.
“I’ll always have my eyes on you too, Harry-boo,” she had promised him.
But perhaps not without a break or two. This she had to do. Last year, she was not tall nor old enough to ride the roller coaster, and the funfair only came around once a year. She was tall for her age. Her classmates were not allowed on when they tried a couple of days ago. That was a nice thing about having a mum who used to be a model.
“Anyone going solo? There’s one seat left on this ride,” asked an attendant, looking at the queue.
“Me!” cried Bella, as she jumped to the front.
What luck! She could be back with her dad and Henry earlier than expected. She looked around as the roller coaster cranked slowly upwards. Her dad was still on the phone, but where was Henry? Her heart started beating faster, but she wasn’t sure if it was from the excitement of the roller coaster, or an increasing feeling of dread. The roller coaster started its descent and twisted along its course. Did she catch a fleeting glimpse of Harry with two older boys?
Bella ran to her father as soon as her belt was released. No one was at the picnic table. Then she heard her dad’s voice yelling frantically for Henry. She ran towards his voice. The next thing she remembered was being at home and her parents talking to the police. Was it a few days later that Henry’s body was found? She was not allowed to see him.
It was a quick decline from there. Her dad had thrown himself in front of a commuter train a year after Henry’s death, and her mum had died of complications from cirrhosis a few years after that.
“Harry-boo!”
Henry turned and looked at her. That wasn’t supposed to happen either. He was not supposed to see or hear her.
The machines whirred into gear and she could feel herself being pulled back to the Base. She had so many questions that needed answering. But the only one that mattered was: How could she go back there? But that was against Cardinal Rule Two: you cannot go to the same place twice.
Here's how Laura Payne continued Diana's story...
I tried to get her to stop, but she was hooked on it like a drug and I let her go one more time. It was the possibility of the truth; always another time to try, another place. ‘I’ll find proof,’ she said. ‘For her.’ It was always this time. She thought she was close and that was when they got her.
They let me see her, afterwards, when her mind had been blitzed from her and time swam by, meaningless. She stared at me through a haze of fingerprints smudged on the glass screen between us, her pupils shrinking in unblinking eyes, and I realised, she didn’t know me anymore. There was another there, who’d tried time like her. Their chains clattered along the corridor too. The place where they held them was a hospital once and the stench of piss and disinfectant cleaved to the air. I wonder who they were, the other one, if they’d been one of his too, whether there was someone there for them at the end.
None of this is real, she told me. It was the only time she sounded like herself. Rose. Her name rolled around my tongue but I couldn’t bring myself to speak it, not there. None of this is real. But I felt the solidness of that glass, the pain stiffening my hand as I held onto the chair. And here, now, the usual grey clouds clog the sky and the mountains wait in the distance as they always have. If I produce a record, if I write everything down, doesn’t that make this real?
They told me to say goodbye and so I did. She’d hate me for that, for going along with them. I have to find the proof now, but what will happen when I put my trust in those machines? When I step into that shimmering surface? She said it’s like falling off a cliff, the rush of air, the ringing in your ears, until your feet slam into the ground and you’re there, standing in a new world. Her face used to flush when she spoke of it, but that was before.
He came here this morning. The crows cawed as his car rattled over the cattle grid and I gathered the papers and photos and ran upstairs. He’s using the name Mason now. He thinks I’ll do as he bids, one sister replacing the other. A man like that is so used to getting his way he does not open his eyes.
‘She ignored the trigger.’ That was his only reference to Rose. He leant against a drawer in the kitchen and I thought of the black handled knife lying inside. He’d bided his time, for he knew they’d been watching. ‘It’s ready,’ he said. ‘You’ll go tonight.’ He handed me the slip of paper, green with blue ink, like all those hundreds he’d given her.
‘Memorise it,’ he said. And I have. The details are etched in my mind like the lines of a poem. The date first, then the time. The place is last. It’s always like that. He gave me the name, of course, but that’s never written down, just in case. He waited while I struck a match and threw the burning scrap into the fireplace. A tiny triangle of green still lies among the ashes.
‘And the trigger?’ I asked. Time moves differently there, but there’s always a trigger, Rose said, something that tells you it’s time to go, an object, a person, a place. He’ll give you a word, but you’ll only understand how it fits once you’re there.
He sucked on his cigarette then stubbed it in the sink. ‘Brigstock.’
When he left, I waited in the open crack of the front door as he walked back to his car. Halfway down the path he stopped, adjusted the collar on his coat, and when he turned I couldn’t see his mouth. His eyes were as dark as the dots on a dice. ‘Don’t be late Heidi.’
I drive for an hour, flicking the radio from station to station. Rose would always flit through the possibilities, wondering aloud if this trip would be the one. That last time, I should have noticed the difference.
When I arrive, no light escapes the house. Before, I always stayed in the car, judged time by the shifting darkness on the mountainside. I won’t be long, she always said, squeezing my arm as if she was popping to the shop. I’d watch her cross the cobbles, disappear down the steps at the side of the house. They’re steeper than I imagined. I knock twice against the door at the bottom. Heavy footsteps sound on the other side and I bite the inside of my cheek.
We know not to speak. He nods, beckons me in and the door clangs shut. A single lightbulb hangs from the ceiling of a narrow corridor. The man’s short, only up to my shoulder and he leads me to the door at the end as if he’s battling the wind, his body half bent. He fumbles with the key at first, but then there’s a click and he stands back. He doesn’t look up as I pass, doesn't follow and the lock turns behind me. My blood rushes through my head. The nine rectangular machines stand in a circle, like door frames waiting to be stepped through, just as she described. Coils and wires curl at their jagged metal edges, but it’s what lies on the floor between them that draws me on. The circular pool fills the space, the water shining as if light pours up from below. My fingers tremble as I tap the keypad, my poem, my memorised lines.
‘You have to go quick,’ she said. ‘Don’t hesitate.’
I slide my hand into my pocket, tighten my grip on the photo and close my eyes. I count down from three and step forward. None of this is real.