An Excerpt From An Unfinished Novel.

Returning to the city of my birth was difficult.Coming back to the long abandoned theatre,all ready a monument of decay in my my youth,where teen evenings were drowned in jest, to the pubs where once I toasted dead sucesses, to the fields where in my absence tenements have sporuted and filled with people suffering out their own profound dramas.Returning to my childhood home was the hardest of tasks because there waited for me a box of crumpled cardboard that carried totems of my life to that point.That box was a testament to a paradise gone to dust.

The contents of the box were by no means spectacular-An album of dog-eared photographs in a forever paling grey, a yellowed pile of forgotten manuscripts, legal documents and years worth of correspondances ,creased piles of clothing and other flecks of Life's detritus- but the emotion of each and every item weighed heavy on my flimsy demeanour,forcing my countence to crack at the simplest thought. The album of photographs by far weighed the heaviest.

Beneath the gold-embossed title,beneath the thinnest layer of perspex laid an ultra-sound scan with the name 'Eloise' penned in a most familiar hand. The translucent hues of white and dark blue and grey that formed the outline of a child at 23 weeks filled the heart with a morose and definite dread.Eloise,the seed of my loins and no longer amongst the living.Beyond the cover, a photograph of a milky-skinned elvin-featured woman, a face that forced the deepest of woes and the fullest of admirations to course through my every cell.Clara,she was no longer with me but she was alive,breathing and existing a life-time without me.