Welcome to Nicola's Weblog. Copyright Nicola Batty (c) 2010 - 2012. If you can see html code or can't see the sidebar links please use a different browser. I use Google Chrome now.
I am a writer of novels, plays and film scripts. I live in Manchester England with my partner Andy and our teenage son Jack. Andy and I started my Newsletter Raw Meat and began publishing with Rawprintz in 1999 to showcase my work. Some of you may be confused by my continual references to Ziggy, that’s my wheelchair! Both Andy and I are writers. I’ve recently lost my sight – hence the continual reference to my being confused!
Thanks for visiting.
“Take my hand. Look up into the night sky… it’s all open to you now, so take it. Take it.”
The warm wind breathes gently over the lashes of my eyes as I open them. The garden walls fall away as we stand side by side and stare into the night sky… the stars are dotted all over, and their canopy is completely unlimited. I grip onto your hand as if I’m falling, spinning round and round with the stars whizzing around me on either side. I can feel them whirring past me like a clockwork star, clockwork stars without the limited feel of mechanical motion.
It’s frightening, this total abandon of reality… of course it’s frightening, but it’s also exhilarating in the extreme. This night sky has completely opened up to engulf me, the hard edges of the stars glittering like many coloured gems falling away on either side, and me? I, meanwhile, have no dimension, no limits. Nothing to hold me in, to stop me to tell me no, you can’t do that, you can’t go there… it’s not allowed, there are limits after all. These sounds are dead and gone, there are no limits here… for I’ve gone past the barriers. I have gone inside my mind, and am travelling fast beyond limits.
As a child, I was drawn as if by an invisible thread down to the cellar which was a place of secrets. Cold stone walls with damp dripping down, dim light and silence, just a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling… cobwebs of course, and the smell of mushrooms musty with age and decay. My skinny arms struggled to lift the button cover I found high up on of the walls, for I knew with my child’s perception that the cover must hide a secret. I laid the cover down on the floor, and stared into the dark space behind it… what was inside the space? I had to find out - there was no two ways about it. Searching round the cellar I found a small ladder, which I used to climb up and enter into the Black Hole… I wasn’t frightened, just intrigued to know what secrets the space held.
There was no room to stand or even sit up - I was forced to wriggle on my belly into the darkness… there was a brick roof immediately above my head and as I stretched my fingers, I could feel more bricks separating the space into different areas. It was all very strange… especially because I couldn’t see a thing… only feel the bricks and the soft cobwebby substance which covered the bottom of this space along which I wriggled… my greatest fear was that my groping fingers would make contact with a dead rat or some other horrible corpse, perhaps even human. As I wriggled further and further away from the opening, deeper into the foundations of the house I became a little anxious that I would be unable to breathe in such an atmosphere of decay and secrets, for the cobwebby substance began to fill my lungs. This place, this dark space of secrets … I began to panic, though at the same time I just wanted to go on, to go further and stay down there forever, to stay far away from the old mundane life at school. I wanted to stay down there where there was always a secret to be found… I didn’t want to return. Yet at the same time I knew that I had to, I had to turn round if I wanted to stay alive and breathe.
So eventually I retraced my wriggling movements back to the dark opening back into the cellar. It was impossible to tell exactly how long I had been inside the foundations, for time had ceased to have any real meaning since I’d entered the Black Hole. As I climbed carefully down the ladder and stood there, brushing the cobwebby substance from my T-shirt and jeans I knew that the secret in the cellar would have to remain. With my skinny arms I lifted the wooden cover reluctantly and replaced it over the entrance to the foundations. I turned away, leaving the secret safely stored away from prying eyes.
