(Susan Gates is a twenty-five year old maid in a stately country home sitting on the steps outside on the porch when police officers are checking her room of evidence against the death of Hamish Jones.)
Well what am I meant to say, really... the idiot should have died anyway thank god, or I would have stuck the bloody knife in him myself if no one else would have done it!
Hamish wasn’t a nice bloke, he thought he ‘coulda’ get the better of women, he thought god created us; just to give him children, but hell no! He weren’t gonna get the better of me! I might be a English maid like the rest but, Hamish, no-no, Hamish was just, different to other men, I don’t really know what singled him out to the rest of the other blokes, but he properly just, I ‘dunno’, took advantage over women than the rest that ‘sorta thing’. He was drunk a lot, so he tried to touch your bottom and that sick ‘sorta’ thing... he didn’t really do it to me as I’m not that pretty, compared to Lucy Grange, with blue eyes and long blond hair, Me, I have big round glasses , lots of huge blotchy freckles, a horrible bobbed hair cut and a fat tummy, and I ‘gotta’ say that the cigarettes and the baileys won’t do much good, but I’m twenty-five and have police in my room searching my draws- For evidence! Ha, probably just ‘wanna’ good look around.
Well for one thing I know, that I had no intentions of killing the gerk than anyone else, and whoever did it I would kiss ‘dem’ a thousand times, but who wants to kiss me apart from a dead man!
(Looks round and snarls at the police sergeants who looked at her out of the window.)
This is a lovely little piece - which captures your scenario with real panache. I am fascinated by your character, whom I feel you really bring to life, and her involvement (or otherwise) in this murder is very intriguing.
ReplyDeleteI guess I just wish there had been a little more - but then that's just a sign of how good it is. :)
Hi Annonomus, this is nice characterisation. You give the reader quite a lot of back story. Just a few small comments: 1) I feel that putting the colloquialisms (dunno etc) in quotation marks, although it makes it obvious that they’re not misspellings, slightly detracts from the immediacy. I think readers would understand this is meant to be dialogue. 2) You might want to check out the punctuation – have a look in a guide to punctuation for when to use semi-colons and when to use commas. 3) Sometimes not giving the reader the whole back story is more intriguing. Check out a very short (about three page) short story by Ernest Hemingway, ‘Hills Like White Elephants’. In the story a couple discusses an abortion but neither of them actually explains what they’re talking about. That makes it more powerful in a way; the reader also gets an impression of more reality because, naturally, when we speak we don’t usually explain what we are talking about; more often we assume a shared back story with the person we are talking to. So sometimes, hinting at the back story but not spelling it all out can work well too.
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