Elizabeth Ferretti
Elizabeth Ferretti’s first novel, Anglian Archipelago, is nearing completion. Set on the Suffolk coast three hundred years from now, the novel explores the effects of climate change on a vulnerable landscape. It is a story about the people who will be dealing with the consequences of the decisions we make today. The Escalator Award in 2007 took her happily away from a career in technical editing and writing non-fiction.
Extract from Anglian Archipelago
Cassi 1
Fly out east from here, fly out east with Crow, and after long long time Grandad say you get to Europe. Flip back and fly the other way, and there is grey mudflats, gold brown reedmarsh stretching out under your black wings, far as you can beady. Can you see it? The Drylands come after that, way off, and bam, you got to stop your Crow wings or you bash into them Drylander highrises.
I not ever been to them places where the people live. Highrise people been here a few times tho. They are strange. They’d not be good with the life we have. Grandad say they’d not survive five minutes. I bet he is right, bout most of them. They gone soft and gooey, like maggots, in their highrises. I see them looking at me with ‘yuck’ writ right over their faces.
‘She do better in the city,’ say distance auntie. ‘She need cleaning up.’ I know she do not mean I need a wash.
It is like they gone into themselves, like the lives they got make them go down to a nothing. I won't never go there, not even dead. They are all sick in their heads and how they live and after short time, that would be me getting like them. Make me turn into one of them Drylanders. That is me looking at them with ‘yuck’ writ right over my face. I am big as the sea, fierce as the sun, strong as the waves when the wind blows up. When I want.
It turned May now. A good time.
‘Cassi!’
That’s Mum.
‘Come through.’
I walk the passage to the hub. Mum been busy, there’s the big cookpot on the stove and it smell lovely.
‘You have to wait for that.’ Mum got a nice grin, I guv her a squeeze.
‘Tide turned. We better go quick,’ she say.
Moon tell us it is time to go see old Fishaer, see if she still with us. She is tho, cos if she was not I’d know. Mum pick up the big reed basket, got a pretty cloth on it. Soft and pinky.
‘What you put in it, Mum?’
‘Pie, poultice, punch.’ She is funny, I like her mucking with words. I get that from her, you will see that right off when you get here, when you turn up.
We climb out. Sun goggles on, floppy hat on. It is hot stuffy outside, like someone put a cloth in your mouth, filled your nose up. Home was colder and dark, a soggy blanket. I scuff the yard, make dust clouds, watch till they drop again. I love doing that, but Mum do her sighing.
Mum hand me the basket I made last summer, down off its outside hook. Not as good as hers but still it is in one piece. She say it were a pretty good go.
‘Pick up Samphire on way back and see if Horehound’s out.’ Two baskets. ‘Horehound good for coughs and the wet in your lungs, you mind that.’ Mum call the plants by their friendly names like they are people, she say it is her way of showing her care of them, cos they are alive like us.
I call out to Crow, guv a wave to Grandad. It is the start our trudge.
ENDS