“Getting Outta Here” [Novella]

This is a “prologue” and part opening of a novella I am currently writing. This is not a finished version, by any means, but an example of what this book should be like. It is uncharacteristic of me as it has no speech, but that will follow. I’m not happy with the speech part yet. All of these posts will be under the categories “Work” and “Ronsville”. (I am against prologues in any case.)

I cannot be sure exactly when this story took place, or even where. It is a strange occurrence. From recollecting the story I do see that there are certain news events that may indicate the year to which the preceding events belong. I know from the weather that it was high summer, maybe August. It is irrelevant to this story. One of conflict, division, isolation, racism and romance.

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I guarantee you have never heard of this place. You’ve never heard the name, you’ve never been there, heard it in the news, seen it in pictures. You can’t search for it on a map. I think it’s on the face of the Earth, but if you were there you wouldn’t know. It was living on a star far away. You can even see the Earth in the sky. At night you can see the motorway, the lights sliding along the horizon. That’s the closest thing to the rest of the world, and even that drifts by with out touching them. It’s definitely a different universe. And to the people that live there, it’s the Ronsville universe.

You may have passed Ronsville many times. Some people may pass it frequently if they use the motorway to get to work. Some of you may only ever go near it once in your life time, or not at all. Truth is you can never know. If you are on the motorway and you see a place in the distance, like a small town, somewhere a long way off where you can only just see it and you’re not sure what it is. You can’t always tell by looking, but it might just be Ronsville.

If you were to get on a train and ask for a ticket to nowhere, you might end up here, in the Ronsville Estate. Unmarked post ends up here. If you post an unmarked envelope it will reach the council’s post sortie. A different radio station is picked up every time you tune in; Radio Essex on a morning, GWR by lunchtime, Radio Glasgow in the evening, Classic FM through the night. Mrs Donelda Grey was certain she once heard Radio Hamburg. The news is a story, the credit crunch and the recession are the troubles of another country, government policies never reach here.