Murder Room
5 total works
An unsettling sense of menace and violence link the eccentric lives of an obese yet still sensual senior citizen, a lonely eight-year-old boy, and an obsessive widow, living in adjoining houses in a seemingly placid English city.
On the brink of adolescence, the slightly confused Jennifer finds her world torn apart by recent revelations about her family's past, and she seeks to escape that past in her fantasies.
Nadia has been here before, at this seeping-away of hope. The other times curl behind her like the petals of a rose, all the memories, all her babies - false alarms, real pregnancies lasting only until her body rejected them. Meanwhile her boyfriend Simon is caving underground. In his dreams the dead places yield to him, the whiteness gives way the probing of his torch. Nadia knows he risks his life, a decadent death among the limestone, his bones withering in the rock. Her work is to create, to mould leather-hard clay into something beautiful. But she has not the heart for it today.
Jennifer is in solitary confinement. Through the world of memory and imagination she lives in, two stories emerge; her romantic relationship with a jazz musician and the link this has with her imprisonment, and the experiences she imagines her ancestor has whilst bound for Botany Bay.
In a remote, crumbling house in the Fens live four sisters - Agatha, Milly, and Ellen and Esther, identical twins so closely linked as to be almost one person. They have lived there all their lives, trapped still by the fear of their dead father, who governs his daughters' lives from beyond the grave. And then there is George, another inhabitant, imprisoned in the cellar. Bit by bit macabre events come to light; events that transformed an idyllic country childhood into a world of eccentric isolation.