Essays

I am going to post my essays, for posterity's sake, so when I am old, I can look at them and laugh.

H.G. Wells’s narrator in FMM asks, ‘How can I describe the thing I saw?’

Explore how two of the module authors experiment with form and/or content in their writing

The rise of modernism at the start of the 20^th century led authors such as HG Wells and Virginia Woolf to experiment with form and content. Wells wrote ‘scientific romance’, the predecessor to modern science fiction as a form of pro-science, anti-colonial propaganda, and Virginia Woolf used stream-of-consciousness and free indirect speech, with the plot moving forward by using a series of flashbacks from different characters to give the reader a more true representation of time and space. Both authors used their work to look at new ideas in science, and both authors also used their work as a platform for political and sociological ideas.

After the turn of the century, Ezra Pound’s declaration was to ‘make it new’. ‘Modernism famously invents itself by imagining the new century as a rupture from the past (Hale, 2009)’. Both Wells and Woolf were trying to make something new with their work. They both famously had strong opinions on what the Modern Novel should be.

Woolf declared that Fielding and Austen’s ‘masterpieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity (1919)’ in her essays. She thought the modern novel ‘should attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves [the characters] even if...they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist.’ Both writers wanted to create something new, to carve their own ideas about what a novel should be on the new literary landscape after the turn of the century, and on the surface, it appears that they have similar ideas on where the novel should go. However, the distinction between the two is that while Wells, in the First Men in The Moon, deals with the ideas of the external, expounding his opinions on socialism, capitalism and his ideas about specialization, Woolf deals with the internal, a stream of consciousness and the psychological aspects of the mind and the mechanisation of time.

Wells did not claim to be a modernist; however, his essay The Contemporary Novel shifts the perspective from the 19^th century’s reader, the ‘weary giant’ to a new perspective. He declared that the 19^th century novel was pandering to the weary giant, a man who ‘doesn't want ideas, he doesn't want facts; above all, he doesn't want Problems’ (1911). He did not want art for art’s sake, claiming ’the novelist is going to be the most potent of artists’. He viewed the novel as a vehicle for social change. He ‘always wrote as a moralist, concerned with man’s place among the mystery of Nature, or the social implications of mastering them (Mackenzie, Mackenzie, 1973)’. Wells wanted to write about the whole of human experience, using his didactic literature as a way of setting examples to the reader.

Modern critics have drawn parallels between Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Well’s First Men in the Moon, as both writers use an ‘encounter with other rational species for the double purpose of satirizing the condition of our own species and attacking Western presumptions to the right of dominion over "idolatrous and barbarous People"’(Schwartz, 2003). Wells is playing with notions of specialisation, which he also looked at in Anticipations. This book was published in the same year as The First Men in the Moon, a treatise on what Wells thought the new world order should be. In it, he discusses a range of subject, starting with his ideas about travel, which is mirrored in Cavor’s sphere, and Bedford’s ideas about how Cavorite will revolutionise ‘shipping, locomotion, every conceivable form of human industry’. He talks of specialisation, which is seen in the Selenites hierarchal community structure, and also in the roles played by Bedford, the unfeeling capitalist, and Cavor, the scientist who is incapable of applying his knowledge to the society he lives in.

‘He admitted in a letter to Churchill, that in ‘‘The First Men in the Moon... I have been giving the specialise sort to the best of my abilities.’ This passage reveals that Wells intended the Selenites... to satirise specialisation. (McClean, 2009).’ Wells is examining theories about Social Darwinism in looking at specialisation. ‘Social Darwinism applies Darwin's theory of natural selection to the understanding of human society; it necessitates that individuals succeed or dominate because of their inherent superiority (Blake, 1998)’. When Cavor has told the Grand Lunar of humanity’s love of war, with ‘battle the most glorious experience of life’, he is soon stopped from sending any more messages. The cut off ‘I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know... ’ is taken to mean ‘about war’. Wells wrote First Men in the Moon as the Boer War was ending, and the colonisation of Africa no doubt influenced his writing when the two main characters are the first explorers of a dark new world, ‘the wildest and most desolate scenes.’ Bedford, after being captured, sets on his captors and attacks them. ‘My mailed hand seemed to go right through him.’ Wells is commenting here on the aggression on the British Empire. If we examine the First Men in the Moon, we can see Well’s unfavourable opinions on colonialism. In this era, colonialism was seen as a necessity, to’ improve the noble savage’. ‘The belief in the superiority of Europe, and the existence of the ‘lower races’ (Pennycook, 1998)’ was widespread. Wells is shifting the perspective on this notion. To the Selenites, humanity is the ‘lower race’. Bedford assumes that Cavor is dead at the end of the novel, once again driving home the point that humans are obsessed with death and war.

Many of Wells’ ideas are drawn from scientific theories from the turn of the century. Wells studied science under the tutelage of TS Huxley. His books are a break with the traditional explanation of magic used in the 19^th century novel. Instead, he uses his knowledge to explain science. Steve McClean (2009) points out that Wells called the First Men in the Moon ‘his best scientific romance... the writer has allowed himself no liberties with known facts ’. Wells was using his novel to popularise innovative technology from the turn of the century. When Cavor is talking to Bedford, he explains science in terms even a nonprofessional can understand, ‘Radiant energy, he made me understand, was anything like light or heat or those Rontgen rays there was so much talk about a year or so ago.’

The scene where Bedford and Cavor first land on the moon is a perfect example of Wells’ use of metaphor and description. It is poetic. He uses biblical allegory, comparing the plant growth to ‘the tree and plants [that] arose at the creation and covered the desolation of the new-made earth.’ Even in his descriptions, he uses scientific details, ‘Have you ever on a cold day taken a thermometer into your warm hand and watched the little thread of mercury creep up the tube? These moon plants grew like that.’

However, his characters are much less complex. His characterisation of Bedford and Cavor is satirical, and the characters are unflattering caricatures of the Scientist and the Capitalist. Cavor is depicted as an almost cartoonish character. Wells uses a typical view of the scientist to describe him. ‘He was a short, round-bodied, thin-legged little man, with a jerky quality in his motions; he had seen fit to clothe his extraordinary mind in a cricket cap, an overcoat, and cycling knickerbockers and stockings. Why he did so I do not know, for he never cycled and he never played cricket.’ Bedford is young, and has been foolish with his money in the past, ‘even when I had got out of everything, one cantankerous creditor saw fit to be malignant.’ We do not like Bedford, he admits that he is a liar and a thief within the first few pages, ‘a trustful baker came each day...I was a little sorry for [him].’ In creating such an unlikeable main character for the first part of the novel, Wells is setting us up for second part, where Bedford is transcribing the messages sent from the moon, we feel distrustful of what he is saying. ‘Looking back over my previously written account of these things, I must insist that I have been altogether juster to Cavor than he has been to me. I have extenuated little and suppressed nothing.’ Bedford is asking the reader to take his version as true but in doing so, he cast doubt in our minds. He goes on to say ‘I am quite willing to let the reader between us on what he has before him.’ This technique, almost an apostrophe, like when Bedford is telling the reader to ‘imagine it!’ when describing the moon’s flora after they land, throws us out of the story and makes us think about it from the outside perspective. Wells is telling us to read between the lines. It is when the novel changes from Bedford’s first story to his recounting Cavor’s radio messages we can see what Wells’ called the ‘splintering frame’ later in his life. The idea is that the novel is a frame through which we view the written world. It should not just be rigid or one frame, but many frames, cubism of literature. It was ‘designed (A) to frustrate expectations aroused by [literary] conventions, (B) to draw attention to the artificiality of and ideology behind these conventions, and (C) to point away from the ‘exhausted’ text as a self-contained finished artefact and towards the self-aware reader (Scheick, 1984)’.

Woolf was very much a modernist. She was inspired by James Joyce, talking about him in her essay Modern Fiction, impressed with his ‘attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves [him], even if to do so [he] must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist.’ Ulysses, Joyce’s masterpiece had a great effect on Woolf. It is one of the most highly regarded Modernist novels, and it’s publishing, in the same year as Eliot’s The Waste Land marks the beginning of what is known as the High Modernist period. Woolf is also considered one of the High Modernists. She called the modernist period ‘an age of fragments’ in her essay How it Strikes a Contemporary, and this can be seen in her writing. The novel is made up of collective moments where we see an event through the eyes of many people. When Clarissa is walking to buy flowers, we are inside her head, then the texts jumps into that of a man driving past who looks at her and we get a description of her, ‘a touch of the bird about her’. Woolf, like Wells, was also trying to write about the whole of human experience, but instead of doing it from an external perspective, she chose the internal.

Clarissa’s interior world is the reality we see in her character. She says, ‘this body she wore... with all its capacities seemed nothing – nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown.’ Inside her head, she is introspective and it is here we get a full understanding of her character. Her external world is shallow, full of parties, dinners, and mixing with high society and yet her interior world is rich in complex thoughts and emotions. Her relationship with Peter and the lesbian encounter with Sally Sexton show us that there is more to Mrs Dalloway than meets the external eye. Littleton (1995) states; ‘Woolf criticizes conceptions of character bound by the exterior forms of life: the whole complex (job, family, assets) that fixes every person firmly in the world of business and power relationships. Against this system, Woolf places a world of private significance whose meaning is wholly irreducible to facts of the external world ’. In seeing inside the characters head, we can have a more complete understanding of not just that character, but life itself. It is anti-essentialist in that Woolf is exploring the concepts in a society ruled by class, and showing us that people in post-war London were not as bound by the rigidity of the Victorian era, which the modernists were trying to break away from. Woolf draws her ideas about psychology from modern scientific thought on the subject. In Mrs Dalloway, she is using stream-of-consciousness, a method of writing incorporating William James’ ideas on the mind, first used as a consistent narrative method by Dorothy Richardson in Pointed Roofs in 1915 (Balakrishnan, 2006). This technique is effective at giving us the duality between the internal and external world. Peter accuses Clarissa of being shallow, and yet the reader can see how reflective she really is. This difference, this breakdown in communication with the interior and exterior world is reminiscent of Wells’ splintering frame, and Woolf takes the cubism of this idea even further in the crossing of all the major and minor characters thoughts. Woolf was trying to represent the strangeness of the stream of consciousness in its splintered and fractured train. Woolf uses events seen by many people as a way of jumping between characters thoughts.

Septimus, the soldier who is suffering from shell shock is an outlet for Woolf to discuss her views on a number of issues. Woolf famously suffered from mental illness, and suffered at the hands of the doctors who were treating her. She uses Septimus as a platform to air her views about the treatment of the mentally ill. When Doctor William Bradshaw visits Septimus, he is diagnosed after the briefest of examinations as being ‘in a funk’ and the cure is a long stint in bed, at one of Doctor Holmes’s rest homes, another name for an asylum. Bradshaw says he is not suffering from madness, merely ‘not having a sense of proportion’. This is despite the fact he is talking to his dead friend Evans, has threatened suicide and is hearing the birds speaking to him in Greek, something which Woolf wrote about as happening to her in her diaries is. Septimus’s treatment by the doctor, his refusal to see him shows us Woolf’s unfavourable opinions on the mental health system at the time, especially following the First World War, where many soldiers returned home with what we would now call post traumatic stress disorder. It is because of the doctor, ‘the repulsive brute, with the blood red nostrils’, that Septimus feels he has to escape. His suicide acts as the only way he can escape. ‘Septimus[...]believes that he has a mission to "change the world" and "renew society" With these eccentricities, Septimus[ ...] cannot survive in a social Darwinist world (Blake, 1998).’ However, Septimus’s viewpoint is similar to that of Woolf herself. The modernists wanted to do as Septimus wants, to ‘change the world, and ‘renew society.’ Perhaps in Septimus’s despair, we can see glimmerings of Woolf’s own.

Septimus also serves to show us Woolf’s opinion on war. In 1916 at the Battle of the Somme, England lost 60,000 young men. England may have won the war, but the cost was too great, and it was the end of the First World War that lead to the British Empire beginning to crumble. It may have been 1947 when the first country declared their independence from the empire, but the cracks in society had started long before. The characters that are pro-empire in Mrs Dalloway are old, and Aunt Helena’s glass eye serves as a way of showing us that the old ways are blind to the faults of colonialism. Politics directly appear in Mrs Dalloway in the character of Richard, her husband and a Member of Parliament. However, his apparent disillusionment with the system and his problems with the ‘detestable social system’ show Woolf’s dissatisfaction with it too. ‘Coming from a politician, this contempt towards the entire social body and its institutions seems to express the loss of a political idealism and a will to affect the whole of society (Garcia, 2010).’

Unlike Wells, who is direct and succinct in his writing and propaganda methods, Woolf uses subtle motifs and recurring images to move the story forward and to plant emotions in the readers head. The use of trees and flowers is symbolic in Mrs Dalloway, as a way of address the central issues themes. Cut flowers are used to symbolise death, and in post-war London, death would have been a major issue, with nearly a whole generation of men wiped out by the war. While Clarissa can go buy flowers for her party, Luiza can only buy ‘half dead roses’, and Septimus imagines ‘flowers[grow] through his chest’. This highlights both Septimus’s madness, and he and his wife’s position in society. ‘For Woolf, cut flowers are the trace of nature to the city, and a nostalgic connection to the past (Collett, 2009).’ While the events take place in one day, the novel portrays time as fractured, with many scenes of the past appearing in the characters thoughts. Time is another key theme in the book, ‘the leaden circles dissolve in the air’, and Woolf is commenting on how while the chimes of Big Ben many appear in everyone’s consciousness, the effect it has is different as we all occupy different realms of thought.

Wells’ fantastical dystopian novel is simple to read, and easy to critique. He did not want to distort his message with allusions and instead wanted to make the novel enjoyable to read but with a clear political message, whereas Woolf’s novel is a complex trench with over 100 minor and major characters, and difficult to read free indirect speech. Woolf disliked Wells’ method of writing, saying ‘In order to complete [Wells’ books] it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or […] to write a cheque (1950)’ and ‘[…] [the Edwardians] spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring’ (1984). However, the same can be said of Woolf’s work, with its looks at the everyday chores of going shopping, doctor’s visits, and having parties. Woolf uses much subtler didactic methods. Both writers wanted to write a kind of truth, and both writers succeed, albeit in very different ways. Without Wells taking ‘one small step for man’, creating a new kind of novel with his scientific romances, and showing his version of the truth, with ‘all life within the scope of the novel’, it would have been very difficult for Woolf to take her ‘one giant leap for mankind’, in creating her version of High Modernist art, encapsulating all manner of human thought and emotions.

Bibliography

Balakrishnan, G. (2006) Dorothy Richardson’s Contribution to English Fiction, The Indian Review of World Literature in English [Internet] (Vol.2.1) available from: worldlitonline.net/jan-06/word/Dorothy.pdf accessed 25/10/10

Blake, A. (1998) Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway.' (Novel by author Virginia Woolf).The Explicator [Internet] (56.n4)(pp209) available from http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/retrieve.do? Accessed 25/10/10

Collett, A. (2009) Sex and the City: Eliot and Woolf’s Vision of Post-WWI London; Virginia Woolf Miscellany [Internet] (Spring-Summer; 75) (10-13) accessed 25/10/10

Garcia, C. (2010)Decentring Discourse, Self-Centred Politics: Radicalism and the Self in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Ingleses y Norteamericanos [Internet](32 :1) (15-28) accessed 25/10/10

Hale, D. (2009) The Art of English Fiction in the Twentieth Century in:

Caserio, R. ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth Century English Novel Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Littleton, J. (1995) Mrs' Dalloway': portrait of the artist as a middle-aged woman - novel by Virginia Woolf. Twentieth Century Literature [Internet](Spring) available from file:///C:/Users/weasel%20jem/Documents/uni/%27Mrs%27%20Dallowayr accessed 25/10/10

Lusin, C. (2008)Red Flowers and a Shabby Coat: Russian Literature and the Presentation of 'Madness’ in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway Comparative Critical Studies [internet](5 ; 2-3) (p289-300)

Mackenzie, N., J., (1973) The Time Traveller The Life of HG Wells London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson

McClean, S. (2009) The Early Fiction of H G Wells New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan

Pennycook, A. (1998) English and the Discourses of Colonialism – London: Routledge

Scheick, W. (1984) The Splintering Frame: The Later Fiction of HG Wells – Canada: University of Victoria

Schwartz, S. (2003) Cosmic Anthropology: Race and reason in Out of the Silent Planet. Christianity and Literature [internet] (52.4) (p523) available from: http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/retrieve.do?content accessed: 25/10/10

Wells, H.G. (1901) The First Men in the Moon 4^th ed. London and Glasgow: Fontana Books

Wells, H.G. (1902) Anticipations London: Chapman and Hall

Wells, H.G. (1911) The Contemporary Novel [Internet] available from: http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/englishman-looks-at-the-world/11/ accessed 25/10/10

Woolf, V. (1996) Mrs Dalloway Great Britain: Wordsworth Classics

Woolf, V. (2008) Selected Essays 2^nd Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Find me (something to write about)

She woke up, disorientated by her dreams. Did that really happen, or did her stupid brain just make it up? She sifted through the details in her head before they faded away, as dreams always do. No. No it was a dream. Her boyfriend didn't wear glasses. Weren't they the glasses her dad used to wear? Ah yes. Abandonment issues. Awesome. Everyone should try them. Fear of being with someone and fear of being alone.
She stretched. He wasn't here, and in a way she was quite pleased. Nice to wake up in the morning sometimes without feeling obliged to be nice and make conversation before she'd had her first cigarette. She could smell her breath, sour from the long sleep. What time is it anyway? Oh, it's only 7 in the morning. More sleep? The uncomfortableness of the nights adventures had left her feeling weird, kind of scrumpled up inside. No. Better to get up and have a cup of tea. Maybe start the days writing task. It's only 750 a day, after all.
She padded to the kitchen. It was tidy for a change and she didn't even have to go in the dishwasher to retrieve a cup. What a lovely change, although she knew it was only because she was doing anything at all at the minute to avoid writing. It was just so hard sometimes. The blank page. The tabula rasa. It could be so daunting. What to write about? Fantasies about men on white horses come to take off their lady loves? Aliens and robots invade earth only for mankind to fight back and to live another day?
The possibilities were endless and that meant there was no choice. She put the kettle on, the cold water splashing out of the sink and hitting her bare stomach. Jesus. that's icy. That's one way to wake up, eh?
After she made her tea, she went and sat at the computer and turned it on. The bloody thing seemed to take longer and longer to get going, and she thought that she probably should have turned it on before making a brew. God. With banal thoughts like this, how was she ever going to get anything good written.
She sat back in her chair and waited for the windows start up tune to come out the speakers. It did, too loud and she jumped. Bloody thing. Why was is so loud? ah yes. She'd been watching a film last night and the dodgy copy had bad sound so she'd had to turn it right up.
Right. Quickly check facebook, reddit, twitter, emails...
Bugger. that's an hour of the day wasted again. She had been pleased to read in the news that the two boys accused of raping a little girl had not been imprisoned. What was the world coming to where a game of 'I'll show you mine and you show me yours' got you on the sex offenders register. She thought back to when it had happened to her. She had been 9, and her and her sister were playing with a boy from down the street. What was he called again? Wayne? Ben? Something, not that it matters. She had been horrified, as he got out his cock. Her sister had raised up her skirt and she'd bolted to tell her mum all about it. Seems daft now.
Maybe that was something to write. A story from the perspective of all three characters, her, her sister and the little boy. That could fill 750 words, surely? Nah, she wasn't in the mood right now for that kind of thing. Too early. Maybe try that tomorrow, or later in the day when she felt slightly more human. Her half-left cup of tea had gone cold, so she went back to the kitchen to make another one.
There now. She sat back down, sitting with one leg up on the chair and one dangling on the floor. Still no inspiration. What was the quote she'd read the other day? 'I love being a writer but what I can't stand is all the paperwork.' ha. It would be funny, if it wasn't so tragically true. How was she ever going to make it if she couldn't even rustle up a few words? Aha! What about just writing all this down? She began to type... 'She woke up, disorientated by her dreams. Did that really happen, or did her stupid brain just make it up..?'

A lady in Paris

She squirmed in her seat, trying to surreptitiously move her dress back up to where it was, without attracting any attention. That was the problem with the strapless ones, they always seemed to come down at the most ridiculous of moments, when reaching across the table for the water bottle, or when dancing. Her hair, which she thought dull and mousy, had escaped it's clip and was curling down her back as well.
She had been invited to dinner by Michael. He had seemed so nervous when he had asked and she thought it would have been rude to refuse, but now she was here, she was feeling a little out of place. He and his friends were talking and laughing too loudly for the crowded restaurant, after all the wine and brandy they had had, and the women were all joining in.
She wasn't used to it, all the razzmatazz of Paris after her quiet live in the village. Nemours had been too small, and she'd wanted to experience life, but now she was here, it was all so.... so very gauche, so very ooh la la and she felt so very out of place, a country bumpkin surrounded by elegant ladies and proper gents. What could she talk about? She could take someone on a country walk and point out and name all the plants and flowers, but in Paris, what could she talk about? The weather? The shops? It all seemed so trivial and when they all started talking politics, discussing whether the Germans were going to invade again, she felt so out of her depth.
She had lost her father and mother in the war. Her father had been sent to the front, he had fought at Verdun, and after the letter arrived telling them he'd been lost in action just before the war had been declared officially over, she'd watched her mother fade to nothing over the next few months. She'd been unable to do much apart from cry. Amelia had sometimes gone into her mother's room on a night and slipped into bed beside her, feeling her tremble. The weather had been very cold, and in a morning, she'd blamed it on that but Amelia knew it was more than just that. She had tried to get her to eat, but the meal always came back with just nibbles out of them. She had got a job in the local bar, and one day she'd come home from work to find her mother hanging from the beam in the bedroom. There was a letter and a medal on the table. Apparently, her father had been awarded it for bravery. It had been a final twist of the knife to her mother, and Amelia knew that she'd felt abandoned, even with the excuse of death, for his bravery.
Her uncle had taken her in, but he kept trying to come into her room late at night. His wife, and her aunt, had passed away from the flu after the war, and he had turned into a bitter, lonely old man.
When Michael had offered to take her to Paris, she'd jumped at the chance. Anything to get away from her uncle's prying eyes and monstrous hands. Michael had got her a job in a bar, and the work, while it was busier than she was used to, was not much more difficult than at home. This paid for her apartment, well, room really, and Michael had taken her out any night she wasn't working, to dances and meals and even soirees in big houses where Ameali had felt quite unwelcome with her dowdy homemade clothes and lack of airs and graces.
They were in a fancy restaurant now, with too much silverware and prices that she had gasped at. Everything smelt of elaborately roasted meats and expensive wine. Not to worry, Michael always paid for everything, but she knew that at some point there would be a return expected, for him helping her to escape. She was grateful, really, but she knew that she didn't love him and never would, and that would be what was expected of her.
'Are you alright, my dear?' . The lady sat next to Amelia had turned and looked at her. Amelia had obviously been staring off into the distance and now she blushed, feeling rather ignorant and rude.
'Why, yes, thank you mademoiselle. I just feel a bit out of place. You all look lovely, in your dresses and I just don't ever know what to do at these kind of gatherings'. Amelia blushed even more. The wine had made her talkative, and now she had embarrassed herself in front of someone who was probably important.
The woman smiled at her.
'I always felt like that when I first started coming to the affairs. Countrified and like I had nothing to say. Paris does take some getting used to after all.'
It was like the lady had read her mind.
'I'm Elizabeth. I've only lived in Paris for 2 years. I promise, you soon get settled in'. She put her hand on Amelia's arm, and squeezed gently.
'I'm Amelia.'
'Where are you staying?'
'Oh, I'm only 15 minutes walk from here.'
'Well, my dear, it would appear that the party is starting to break up. Would you care for someone to accompany you home? It can be awfully scary later on an evening, and an unaccompanied lady is not the thing, even in this day and age.'
Amelia looked over at Michael. His cheeks were flushed with the alcohol, and he was deep in conversation with the lady next to him.
'If... if you don't mind, that would be lovely.'
'Of course. Let's leave the men to their tomfoolery, and go have ourselves a little fun.'
They both rose from the table, and Elizabeth signalled to the waiter that they needed their coats. Elizabeth came around the table, and after putting her coat on, held out Amelia's. She put hers on, and Elizabeth took her arm. They set off, and just before they went through the door, Amelia looked back. Michael was watching her, an anguished look in his eye. She shrugged, almost imperceptively, and he looked down at his empty plate as she and Elizabeth set off into the night.

Wake up and smell the coffee

She woke up. Perhaps on any other day this would not have been worth mentioning, but today she was rather excited. It was her birthday. Then it hit her. Bugger. What had she done last night? There was something... just a feeling that somewhere, someone had a reason to hate her. She rolled over to go back to sleep, and bumped into something. Oh yes. that was it. Her best friend's boyfriend. He woke up, and turned over.

Morning.
Um... good morning.
Happy birthday.
Yeah... what the smeg happened last night?
He raised himself up onto his elbow.
Don't you remember?
She shook her head.
No. No, it's all a blur. I vaguely remember going to the last bar with everyone, but that's it.
He sat up, and rolled his head.
God. My head hurts. You got coffee?
Um, sure, it's in the kitchen.
Really? Well, I wouldn't have thought of checking there.
He hopped out of bed. He still had underwear on. He grabbed a jumper, and putting it on, stumbled out of the bedroom.
She lifted the duvet, and checked. No, she didn't have any clothes on. A bit of a mystery then. Did they... do it?
She got out of bed, and put on her dressing gown. She went to the bathroom to relieve her near-bursting bladder and to check how awful she looked in the mirror. Bleugh. She'd not taken her make up off, and looked like she had two black eyes. She peered closer, and managed to hit her head on the frame.
Ow! Fuck! That hurt!
You ok in there?
He'd come through to the hall, and tapped on the door.
Yeah, yeah, just drunk still, I reckon.
How do you like your coffee?
Strong, lots of milk, lots of sugar. I'll be out in a second.
She heard him go back through to the lounge and rubbing her head tried to figure out what the hell had happened. Nope. No joy. She gave up, and followed him through.
How's your head? I found painkillers in the cupboard above the microwave. You need any?
No, I'm feeling ok, I just can't remember last night.
Not that suprising after the amount of shots you had.
I don't mean to be rude, but did we..?
God. Was I that bad?
Really? We did? But what about Katie? Oh my god, she's going to kill me.
Sarah... what are you on about?
You know, Katie, your girlfriend? My best friend? She's going to kill me. I can't believe I'd do that to her. I can't believe you'd do that to her.
You seriously don't remember, do you?
Remember what?
Our plan?
What plan? I don't remember any plan.
Mark stood up, and taking her by the hand took her through to the kitchen. There, on the counter was Katie's head. The eyes had started to bloat. They looked like they were coming our. Her once blond hair was now streaked with red, and the smell was... actually not that unplesant. Sort of like pork, but a little bit more metallic.
Sarah screamed.
What the fuck is this?
It was the plan, babe. Do you remember yet?
Oh yes. The plan. Sarah had had her eye on Mark for a while. She knew he liked her too, and together, last night, they'd gotten drunk. He'd asked what she wanted for her birthday, and she'd said him. A few more shots of tequila and they'd hatched THE PLAN. As neither of them wanted to hurt Katie's feelings, they'd decided the best option was to just kill her. No fuss then, no extended feelings of guilt and remorse as Katie would later eye them across bars and cafes, huddling together with her friends to talk about them both and the inevitable fall out as people picked sides. No, best way, they had decided would be to kill her, and then Sarah could fall into Mark's arms, and everyone would just assume it was inevitable as they comforted each other to get over Katie's disappearance. Seemed like a winner last night.
We did it?
Fuck yeah we did it.
Well, I suppose if it's already done, there's no point in fretting about it. What's for breakfast?
Mark went over to the fridge, opened it, and held up a plate of what looked like bacon.
Katie and Egg sandwich?
Sarah smiled, and went over to Mark. Standing on her tiptoes, she gave him a kiss on the cheek.
That would be lovely, darling. Eggs over easy, please.