Thursday, May 17, 2012

Introducing my first novel - HOLIDAY. How is this for an opening...



One
Manila

I need a holiday.
Incinerating, the moth caught in the exhaust plume glimpses the black jet dancing demonically through the heat haze of the cigarette sky. Even as the burnt flakes of the moth eviscerate into the jet stream, the cold perpetrator continues to press a hard body against the smoky air. Far, far below its belly, below feathery fragments of a falling Lepidoptera, through palls of poisoned Asian air, a wide wave of foam crushes over a sugary shore.
There he is, a young man, full of fear and uncertainty, but outwardly handsome, and strong limbed.  He is a long way from home, in this roaring dark dragon. More waters –  the sky around it transforming from stained tobacco yellow to the color purple. Running along the inside of the dragon’s purple painted spine – painted by the light of the sky – is an echelon of strange and foreign people, something like cyclists seen from above in a cycling race, except they have nothing of the organic nature of the peloton. The holidaymakers have placed themselves with machine like precision in columns and rows, like numbers on a spreadsheet. Most of these numbers are asleep. Some are reading, but in Hugh’s case, writing.  Trying to write.

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