Extract From Strange Girls And Ordinary Women

[amazon_link id=”1472205804″ target=”_blank” ][/amazon_link]Settle down and enjoy the first chapter of Morgan McCarthy’s new book ‘Strange Girls And Ordinary Women’.

ALICE

Alice Rooke, the doctor’s wife, is preparing dinner for six. She is the only person in the kitchen full of fireless yellow light, flameless oven heat, though the mirror facing the window tricks her occasionally into glancing up in the belief that someone else is standing outside the window, looking in. But it is only ever her reflected self, following her usual routes across the large room. The Victorian tiles of the floor, a strict kaleidoscopic pattern of ochre, white, blue and red, have been perceptibly worn down into their most used paths over the years, and Alice likes to think of the women of previous centuries doing what she is doing; though the former pantry doorway is a ghost in the wall, the great old table’s place is taken by a marble-topped breakfast bar, and the Belfast sink at which she washes the invisible chemicals off her vegetables is an expensive reproduction.

Alice doesn’t know quite why it reassures her to call up an entirely imagined connection to the history of the house, but it does: the idea of standing not alone, but at the end of a queue, stretching right back into the beginning of things. It gives her a sense of sense; of the possibility that there is nothing so very catastrophic in having bought the wrong thing for dinner, with no idea of how to cook it.

Alice has never been an ambitious cook, so she isn’t sure why today she found herself abruptly sick of her usual variations on chicken breasts and purchased a whole salmon, which she has no idea what to do with. She hefts the weight of it in both hands, its cold slippery muscle, the solidity of it. The eye fixes on her with the flatness of pyrrhic victory. She repacks the eviscerated body with lemon slices, embalms it in salt and white wine, then wraps it in silver foil, neat as a dead pharaoh. The Egyptians, she remembers from a trip to the British Museum with Ben, preserved not only their kings but also various animals, their god-pets, ready for the afterlife. Though, in the end, it was not quite the afterlife they had intended: discovery, excavation, and a display case at the museum. A painted zoo behind glass: hawks, baboons, cats, fish.

Ben was startled by the display. He was eight then, and easily surprised by life. Even now he lacks the protective casing of his friends, their clumsy displays of intellectual superiority, their rowdy physical prowess. Alice has always worried about him. When he began walking home from school by himself, she used to look out for him approaching up the hill, trailing blue-blazered in a small group of boys, moving messily, uneconomically, along low garden walls and kerbs like animals pushing at the outer edges of their pens. She watched for the signs of betrayal in the faces of his companions. Though she still looks with concern at his slenderness – his skin undented, without the cuts and scabs of the others, but seeming conversely more damageable – she has relaxed more these days; let go of the need to locate herself in the sitting room at half past three, to watch him turn in at the drive.

You can buy [amazon_link id=”1472205804″ target=”_blank” ]Strange Girls and Ordinary Women from Amazon [/amazon_link] and is available to buy from good bookshops.