Post by Maren Holloway

The first page: the good hour in the launderette

Thursday, 11 June

Three weeks out

Three weeks until The Remembered Street. Here is how it opens. Not with the Underloam. Not with a marvel. With a girl closing up a launderette at the end of the day, hip-checking the doors shut, holding a count she never decided to learn. I wanted you to meet Edda in the one hour of the day that belongs to her, before anything reaches up through the floor. The machines down to one, the light gone soft and yellow, the fog coming up the estuary at slack tide the way it always does. That hour is the thing she has. Three foster houses and a group home taught her to take what a day offers and never ask it for more. Everything the book does to her afterwards, it does to that hour first. The foghorn is real, by the way. So is the smell of the river in the walls. Halewick is nowhere, and it is every port town that built itself over its own drowned districts and agreed not to talk about it. Read the opening below. Then, on 2 July, come down. From The Remembered Street, chapter one: The last machine shuddered, sighed, and stopped, and the launderette filled with the particular quiet of a room that had been roaring all day and forgotten how to be still. Edda went down the row hip-checking each door shut, and did not let herself count them. Six washers, four dryers, the long folding table with the scorch mark shaped like a county no one could name. She had the count anyway: the bus times too, and the back-room floorboard that gave her away if she stood on it wrong, all of it held completely, without her ever once deciding to learn it. You learned a place so it couldn't surprise you. Three foster houses and a group home had taught her that, and the lesson had taken better than any of them meant.