Lizzie Hudson

Extract from Powercuts

In a green bedroom, Isla is writing a story that she cannot finish.

Sometimes, blackouts happen when she is writing. The lights in the street go out, leaving everything in darkness. The voices from the radio in the flat next door are cut off, as if a ghost has come in and swallowed them. The plug-in heater abruptly stops making its soft hum.

Recently, the blackouts have been happening more than ever. As a temporary solution, she has been bringing her notebook to sit by the downstairs window, where she has used a piece of string to tie a torch to the curtain rail. It hangs over her whilst she writes, the light swinging gently back and forth.

It is good to be able to still do writing but it is not as easy with a notebook, instead of the computer. She can’t go back to edit any of the bits from earlier, and she can’t write in the way she normally likes to, which is to start at a scene that ends up being at the end, then think about what happened before, or how they got there. The bit she was writing before the lights went out was a scene about how the figure skaters have a huge argument outside the rehearsal rink in Sarajevo and one of them cries in the snow, but she hadn’t really decided what the argument was about, only thought about the emotional impact and the bit where they resolve their differences and hug (kiss?) before the competition.

It isn’t just the blackouts that Isla is worried about. Since she uploaded Chapter Ten, she has not been getting as many views. Probably it is because a lot of her readers are in America, where, she has seen on the news, they are having some of the most frequent blackouts of all, more even than here. But Chapter Ten was a bit boring, she knows that. After she posted it, she put a note at the end saying that she had been having a really busy week (not really true) and issues with electricity again and that she wanted to still post anyway, which she does keep up every Thursday. She promised that next week’s chapter would be a very eventful one, and implied that exciting things would be happening to the figure skaters. She thanked all of the readers for continuing to leave comments, despite everything that was going on.

After she uploads, Isla gets a comment from a stranger.

She opens it to read as soon as she gets the notification. That morning, the connection is okay. Nobody is awake yet, not the baby, waking to be fed, or the dogs who live downstairs. The sun is coming through the window all bright pink, and the girl gets the feeling that this time has decided it is for her, that she is supposed to be here.

Isla turns on the laptop and rests it on her knees and she closes the door, in case there are any sounds from outside.

This is not the first comment that she has ever got; there is somebody who says their name is Raven who writes ‘great chapter hun, can’t wait to find out what happens next’, every week, but Isla does not respect her. There is Foxgirl, a friend she has on the website who always tells her that she is the best writer on the board, but Isla does not believe her.

Their username is Disillusioned. She has never seen them on the forum before.

Disillusioned’s comment is the best comment that she has ever received. The person has identified all of the things that she was trying to achieve – the complicated relationship, the sexless love arc, they say that she has managed to convey a really clear sense of what it must have been like to skate on ice.

They also say that they have access to some old videos of the ice dancers and they would like to share them with her if it would help her with her writing.

They ask if she can accept their request so that they can send her a personal message. She says yes.

Isla finds out that the person who sent the message is a woman. Disillusioned signs all of her messages ‘N’.

The first thing that happens is that N sends her a video of the figure skaters that she has never seen before. It is from the 1984 Winter Olympics, but it is not the most famous dance, the one where they wear purple, which she already has a video of safely stored on her USB stick.

This is a different dance, called the pasodoble. N explains in her message that it is a famous Spanish dance in which the man plays a bullfighter and the woman is his cape. When Isla watches the video a sixth time, she can really see this. Chris often holds Jayne to his side, she is gracefully whirled about, trails behind him in fluttering motions like a breeze is passing through her. At the end, he stands over her triumphant, and she is flung by him to the floor. The crowd rise.

Isla knows that the video is going to greatly change the periphery of her fanfiction. In the video she has seen before, it is very clear that the figure skaters are dancing a routine. But this one is different. It is angrier. There is more tension between the figure skaters and their bodies, but they are still a unit.

Isla asks N how it is possible that she got hold of the video. N explains that she has a special archive of lots of video and audio footage that she has stored. She does not tell her how, or where. She tells her that she is always very selective with who she shares the material with.  Isla feels a tiny proud lift; a lightbulb glowing warm inside of her.

The next night, N sends her a photograph. She is trying to put the baby to bed when it comes through on her phone, the whush noise of a new message. When she tries to open the photograph at first, there is only the grey box where it should be and a blue loading wheel turning around and around – a very bad connection. Nothing loads.

Late at night, when she is in bed, it comes through in full. It is shot by a window where it is dark outside, but in a room lit up by a bright, exposed bulb. You can see the thin wrist and the hand of the person taking the photograph. They are wearing a black watch. They are holding a pair of white ice skates.

N asks Isla to talk to her on the phone. It will be easier, she says, there are a lot of important things to say that writing can’t always convey.

Isla feels afraid to speak when they first talk. She has not talked to anybody on the phone for a long time. Before it is the time that N has said she is going to call, she charges her phone all the way to 100% and walks all the way to the end of the street.

N’s voice is hard and soft at the same time. She talks like she’s from the south, and Isla thinks she must be in one of the big cities.

N calls every other night for one week. Whenever they speak, Isla holds the phone close to her ear under the blanket, or goes outside for long walks. It depends whether her mum is home; she wouldn’t want to have to explain her new friend to her mum, wouldn’t want her to hear her. Sometimes N wants to stay on the phone for hours, and Isla is glad about this. She tries not to ever say anything that might remind N that she has to go, or that she has something else to do.

She imagines the place that N is writing from as literally underground – a cabin, a basement, the way that people used to imagine futures in films. Maybe N is writing with the archives all around her, books she has stored, photographs on the walls. She doesn’t feel like she is allowed to ask N that many questions about her life. That might be crude, she thinks, or too stupid and mundane to talk about.

But N asks Isla questions about herself, and she tells her things. After a week, N knows about her looking after the baby when her mum is away. She tells her about when they had to move to this house, and about what it was like when the schools closed down.

‘It’s good that you make sure you keep learning,’ N tells her. She talks to her like she is an adult.

Most people in the world, N says, lack vision. They don’t really know how to think critically about the people and things around them. They believe the things that they hear about in the news, they cook the food from their food boxes, which they collect from the supermarket. They get married. They do not try to tell stories. They do not want to experience radical empathy.

Isla listens. A lot of the time she wants to take notes when N is speaking, and does so quietly, so that she cannot hear the scratching of the pen.

‘Most people,’ N says, ‘don’t want to give things up to make changes. They think that the things they have, like their families and their jobs and their homes, make them permanent but they don’t. There is more to see. People like us understand that, I can tell you understand that.’

Isla agrees with her.

When she gets off the phone call, she notices a message from her friend Foxgirl. Foxgirl has asked her how she is, and why she hasn’t uploaded any of her story for the last two weeks. I know it’s not your connection, Foxgirl says, because you opened my message from the other day and saw it and didn’t reply. Are you okay?

Isla leaves the message on read. She turns off her phone and goes to sleep.

***

One night, N asks Isla, ‘Have you ever thought about being without a body?’

At first she thinks it is one of the things N says that she is not really supposed to respond to. A rhetorical question. She replies, ‘Mm’.

‘Have you? Ever? Once?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Most people haven’t. It’s a thing we are so used to, that we think we need, but I know you’re capable of imagining this,’ she says. ‘Try it for an entire day.’

Isla thinks about it when she is riding the train, the first time she has left the flat in several days, to get the food box after her mum is back from work. She is not even sure she has got the idea totally right. But the train is full of bodies; people shoving each other and holding on tight to the rails, coming out to work night shifts in the city. She is sweaty already. A man stands close to her and says sorry – it must be visible on her face that she cringes at the smell of his breath. Walking back up the stairs of the apartment building, the shopping is very heavy on her back.

Putting the baby into its cot, she thinks something that she doesn’t let herself remember much: how, a lot of the time, he makes her feel slightly sick.

Before it is time to go to sleep, rubbing on the creams into the itchy rashes in the crevices between her elbows and knees. And then later, flat on her back, watching her stomach fall up and down as she breathes, the way that it changes shape.

She watches the pasodoble, still open from yesterday on the computer, and holds the thought.

To be as light as a cape; to flutter softly to the ice as if caught by a real wind. Imagine it.