The Misadventures of Isabel Instance: II
Isabel Instance and Aelfric Fouracre edge slowly through the perpetual Cambridge rush hour, traffic light to traffic light. Between each green Isabel floors the accelerator to keep up with the other vehicles on the road. The van’s splendid indifference to the throttle is the main reason she owns it. At an early stage of adult life Isabel reluctantly acknowledged two facts. The first: she loved speed. The second: she was an appalling driver. Buying the slowest possible vehicle was self-preservation.
As they approach Mill Road Ael stirs himself for the first time. “We can’t stop, I’m afraid.”
Isabel looks at him. She’s been driving them to her flat, three rooms in the roof of a terrace house out near Brookfields. This is their routine. Ael finds the case, using, so he claims, his network – a group of mysterious would-be spies communicating via cryptic classified ads in local papers. Isabel… Continue reading
The Misadventures of Isabel Instance: I
Isabel Instance sits in the driver’s seat of her badly parked van, watching passers-by on Trumpington Street. It’s warm, too warm for March: sticky and airless. A day of unexpected sweat and unprovoked aggression. The pavement is narrow and the people mostly fretful, refusing to give way graciously. Not that the tourists or the students notice. They bump along chattering carelessly to one another, leaving dons and pensioners like affronted statues in their wake. Isabel reflects ruefully that she feels more sympathy for the statues than for the youth flowing heedless around them. She really must be getting old.
Aelfric Fouracre is late as usual. She has waited for Aelfric far too often for any one lifetime – not that this is a concept he can ever really understand, given how little time means to him. Lifetime even less. She yawns, stretches. Alongside the van a sweaty man in a… Continue reading
Introducing Isabel Instance
Lovely subscribers, browsers-by, Google spiders and mindless spambots: hello. It has been a long time since I last blogged (an ugly word, like most ham-fisted neologisms; but then what can you expect given that it derives from the word log, which itself may have been created as an inarticulate grunt intended to convey the sense of something strangely massive).
For much of the time during which I have been not blogging, I have been having a sit, and for some of this time I have also been having a think. As a result of these thinkings I have made a decision, which is this: I am no longer going to fill this blog with random musings loosely connected to words. Not because I don’t like randomly musing on words. I am, after all, a man who has told a room full of incredulous adolescents that it is fun to… Continue reading
Will le Fleming is a novelist. His debut, Central Reservation, is published by Xelsion and available now. Read more...
On a grey Thursday morning Holly lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, and wished her sister would die. Five hours later her wish came true. Read more...
About this blog
The first post explains all - find it here.
