Young Writers Society

Here is the prologue.



On a wet Monday morning, early with the new clinquant rays of the sun shining in the grey English sky, the seagulls, frightened off by the passers by - morning joggers and fishermen - flew up and about, calling with their infernal cries as they roamed around the shores.

The sounds of the English coast life filled the new day's air like another typical morning for any normal citizen of this coastal town. The fisher boats were lined by the harbour as their owners heaved their loads out, laboriously; the lorries were backing up, ready to be filled with goods to take off around the country, and people were leaving to the bigger cities for work, as they did each day.

A 1982 blood-red yacht, lined with white paint that appeared to have been well polished and varnished, approached the shore. The metal edges glistened in the sun as the boat bobbed between the rolling waves; the town the boat was drawing nearer to reflected like the tip of one's nose on the surface of a teaspoon in the yacht's reinforced stainless glass.

The sailor, or rider of the boat, stood behind this glass, and also behind the pair of glasses that filtered some of the early morning's sun rays that shone too brightly into his eyes as he manoeuvred the sea-engine. His hair, like fields of auburn hay deranged by some natural disaster - chaotic and disorganised - waved about on his head, following the movement of the wind, flapping against the sprinkles of water droplets from the sea below. His left hand remained in his pocket as he sailed and he only removed it to wipe off the residues of the damp ocean air, or to move that strand of hair that would just keep falling into his right eye instead of flowing obediently to the blow of the wind. He hadn't even changed gear in the last thirty minutes of his journey.

Coming back home from a funeral in the north of France, the man riding the yacht felt no true remorse - at least not the emotions he had expected or that he was expected to feel. He felt as though nothing had changed in his life, his being. He believed that even though he had just lost the woman who had given birth to him, the woman who had brought him up and supported him in almost everything he did, it made no difference. I guess it's life, was what he had said at the funeral speech.

He hadn't planned a long discourse about how great a woman she had been, or that she had always been a caring mother and loving wife. I mean, yeah, I'm devastated, (though he wasn't really, or probably not as much as he thought he should have been) but it's the way things are - that's the continuous cycle of life and we just keep pedalling until that bike can't move any further. I wish I could say more than just 'goodbye' but I believe that will have to do. Good bye Mum.

The man had left the ceremony right after the funeral mass and didn't even take the time to shake hands with some of the guests. He wanted them to believe that he was having an emotional breakdown, but in fact it had been to get away, to get back home; he hadn’t felt guilty for leaving his father behind either – his older brother and his family had moved in with him in their old summer residence in the north if France, for company since he no longer had his wife with him.

Gregory Swanson, the first son of an English dentist and a Welsh nurse, in the summer of 1976, married the third daughter of the French army officer, Daniel Deschamps. He had met the twenty-three year old lady in the south of London, where she and her family were spending two weeks of holidays. She had been taking a stroll on the outskirts of the park opposite Gregory’s street and she caught his eye as soon as he had shut the door of his house behind him, heading for a hippie-sort picnic in that same park.

It struck him to see such a beautiful creature, a new face – one had never seen before in that neighbourhood – with a completely different sense of fashion as the other London girls at the time. He noticed she was struggling to explain something to an elderly woman with all the gesticulations she was making and the woman shaking her head with confusion, then walking away.

Several years of secondary school education had helped him to learn a few words of French, which he guessed was the language she was more comfortable with, and even if he hadn’t completely understood what she was saying, he managed to at least pretend to hold a conversation when he was actually dazed by her beauty and lost in the pure radiance of her brown cystal-like eyes.

Elizabeth Deschamps never lost that beauty, even as she lay in her open coffin, receiving words of good bye from her relatives and friends. Though they were closed forever, Gregory could still see that radiance shining in her eyes.

Swanson and Deschamps had four children: Françoise – their only daughter, Marc, Justin and Michael – the youngest – who worked as a researcher in genetic engineering. As a graduation gift from his father, it just so happened that he inherited of a 1982 blood-red yach that he hadn't expected having to use for travelling to his mother's funeral; he removed his hand from his pocket, ready to change gear. He was not ready - or more like expecting - to live all the changes that were about to come to him.