Futuredebt - 8 - Light for the hopeful sigh
I’m releasing a novel called Futuredebt across 2024, letting it go one chapter at a time. The first chapters are available for free, but you’ll need to join my Patreon to read later chapters.
Click here to go back and read from chapter one.
How long do you stay when you know it isn't going to last? The future has told Kerry the man she loves today will not be the one she marries in the future. Now she has to decide what she does with that knowledge. Meanwhile, at the other end of society, Fi finds herself struggling with a world that seems to be working against her, pushing her into the heart of a revolution plotting to bring the system crashing to its knees. Futuredebt is a story of free will, self-determination and how small acts of kindness can be a catalyst for change.
Light for the hopeful sigh
She will be shaking by the time she gets to the studio.
She will have opened the envelope the moment she got to the car. Inside will be a small stack of forms and a plain black notebook. Your notebook. She will ignore the paperwork and spread the pages of the notebook on her lap.
A part of her will hate you for what you have done, in the same way that the child hates the magician. She looks at your drawings with wonder, desperate to know how the trick is done. What she sees there on the page is drawn without the filter of self-consciousness. They are rough and unfinished but perfect in simple HB. Page after page of faces drawn with such intimacy that she can feel the shudder of their eyes as they slip into REM, the fog of their breath as it dampens the paper. She stares at the pages, hating them with every second of her MFA, every penny spent funding it. There is no sense of formality from image to image, no illusion of continuity. You have conjured a new style for each portrait, without consideration of proper structure or style, each one matched to its subject - rough and dark for the heavy soul, light and supple for the hopeful sigh. Such an ordinary notebook. Plain, office quality paper at 70g per square meter, so thin you could see the picture on the next page bleeding through like stained glass, and yet you made it something holy.
At the studio she clears her work surfaces of every scrap of paper, every frame of its canvas and every pin from her inspiration board. She is done with it all now. She folds face after face, creasing the images along the ridge of her nose or touching forehead to chin, and carries them to the waste bins.
Andrew’s cubicle is right next to them. He watches her from his workbench where he sits with a box of bent cutlery, fixing forks together with a rivet gun.
You OK, he asks.
I’m fine, she says.
Are you chucking all this?
I need space, she says, forcing the bin lid, crushing the pictures down underneath.
The bins aren’t being emptied until Friday, he says. And this is… quite a lot of stuff.
She looks down at the mess she has made. Thirty or forty frames. A dozen boxes of papers. The frame on top starts to slide and Andrew rushes over to help her steady the pile. She thanks him but leaves before the thing is properly set, letting him struggle with the slippage alone while she goes back to her cubicle.
Only the paints and the stock of clean canvas remain.
She takes out your notebook and lays it in the centre of the table.
She will have to speak to Dinah. She needs to find out who you were and what drove you to produce work like this - so raw and open. It will be an awkward conversation. Hi, I stole this book of pictures from you. Now tell me all about who drew them.
But right now all that will have to wait.
No. The book came to her for a reason. First the coin and now this. She is meant to do something with it. How else could she explain it? She has a sense that the universe has come tumbling into her lap, as though everything she has been waiting for is finally coming together.
It’s about time, she thinks.