Chapter 3, part 1: Worst birthday ever
Our protagonist and her sister have been kidnapped. Their social worker is dead. The source of the mysterious noises remains unknown.
Time for a flashback!
It was not easy for Layane to remember the events that had happened before she had been abandoned at the care home, but a few disconnected memories swam through her mind.
Wait... is it a flashback?
The whole point of the timestamps is to ground whatever is happening, so why does the chapter open like this? Just get on with it!
I do love that Layane's parents abandoned their kids right outside the care home, like they'd done some research and figured it was the best place for them to grow up. I'm sure that made sense to me as a teenager.
She knew that the day after whatever had happened to their house had happened it had been her seventh birthday.
This is phrased in such a way that I can't tell if Layane's birthday is 20th or 21st September. I know this won't make a difference to the story, but why bother mentioning it?
I assume she means her birthday is the 20th, so she was abandoned on her seventh birthday.
The childishly excited seven-year-old Layane had not been able to sleep.
Again... we know Layane is a small child. The timestamps told us. And then the narration told us again. You do not need to hammer it in any more, the nail has already fallen through the other side of the fucking board.
Layane hears someone at the door, and her father answers it. She doesn't realise it's odd for someone to be coming round at midnight, because she's six, and carries on playing.
She hears two voices: her father's voice, and an unknown woman. She ignores them until the voices start to sound worried, and then she stops playing and leaves her room to check what's going on.
Her initial thought had been that perhaps this woman was bringing over a present for her, and she wanted to catch a glimpse.
This would have made a lot more sense as the motivation for Layane to follow the voices, rather than ignoring them until they sounded 'worried', but never mind.
Layane peers down through the bannisters, and sees a beautiful, blond-haired woman in a huge coat. Her hair is long, which I guess means characters are allowed to have hair that is both long AND blond in this version. The woman is tall, around a head taller than Layane's father, and Layane has no idea who she is.
The woman’s voice was light and she had a strong accent that Layane couldn’t place. She couldn’t hear a lot of what she was saying, or perhaps she simply could no longer remember it. The only words she could remember didn’t make anything any clearer to her, but rather confused her further, “She’s very angry.”
Yeah, sure, Layane can still remember a conversation she had over a month before this about a fucking box, but she can't remember what this woman was saying to her father the night her life was destroyed.
I know, I know, I said I was going to stop questioning that. But still... what is the point of framing the flashbacks with timestamps if they are written like this?
Moving on. I wonder who 'she' is. HMMMMM.
Layane tries to listen in, which suggests she simply couldn't hear the conversation, and the reference to her forgetting about it in the present was completely unnecessary. Then Clemant starts crying, and Layane runs back to her room and pretends to be asleep so her parents don't catch her staying up so late.
[Layane] kept an eye on the door as she heard her mother sleepily walk over to Clemant’s crib to pick her up. As the noises receded, Layane was tempted to return to her post and listen in to her father’s conversation. However, the shutting of the front door told her that the mysterious woman had left, and that the talk was over. She quickly returned to playing with her toys, when her father came into her room.
I know she's six (or maybe seven, depending on the time) but Layane explicitly didn't want her parents to catch her up past her bedtime. Why would she go back to playing right after the front door shut?
“Can’t sleep?” he said kindly. Layane noticed that he was holding a glass of water. “No,” she giggled. Simon smiled kindly. “Well, who could blame you? You have a very exciting day tomorrow!” He walked over to her bed and sat down next to her. “Have a drink, and try to get to sleep. The quicker you fall asleep, the shorter time it will be before tomorrow.”
Me, writing every single version of this: let's drug these kids so they fall asleep!
I'm not kidding.
“Goodnight, love,” Simon said. He kissed her forehead and started to walk out of the room. “Sweet dreams.” And then Layane must have fallen asleep, because that was the last thing she remembered before waking up in the morning on the cold, gravel ground in front of the care-home.
Goodnight, kiddo. Big day tomorrow! [Drugs Layane and abandons her in front of a care home.]
What a horrible fucking birthday. You know what would have made sense, sixteen-year-old El? Having the story open on Layane's birthday. She probably hates that day.
I'm unsure why this scene includes Layane's father, rather than her mother, who was established as more important to the plot from the beginning. If this scene was reframed around Layane overhearing a 'scary' conversation between her mother and a stranger right before her parents abandoned her, and her mother caught her listening in, I could have included the 'angels are watching over you' line here. Yeah, I'd have to rejig things a bit, but this scene appearing in this chapter (as opposed to earlier) doesn't add much to the story.
Never mind. I'm pretty sure Layane's father is in this scene for one of two reasons:
I realised he was irrelevant and wanted to correct this by including one (1) scene with him, just to prove to readers he exists
I wanted this scene to be interrupted by Clemant crying, and I couldn't imagine a baby's father going to check on them at night, rather than its mother
Sad.
Anyway, we switch to the present. It's four in the morning. Layane is in the boot of a car, scouring through her memories of the day before the abandonment to try to work out what's going on.
I don't hate that. It does make sense for Layane to think back to that day to try to explain her present situation, given the letter. What doesn't make sense is interrupting Layane's kidnap with a 700 word flashback, whose only purpose is to introduce a mysterious woman who 1) isn't the focus of most of the flashback and 2) could have been mentioned earlier.
The woman, of course, became part of the Netflix Unsolved episode that is Layane's life, after Layane gave her description to the police. Unfortunately (and predictably), no one ever found her.
Layane had always thought that [the woman] would be easy to find as she looked distinctive, but soon began to assume that she had imagined her. That was the theory the police had – that something traumatic had happened to Layane and the memory had been replaced with one of a kind-looking woman appearing at the door.
Yeah... the only distinctive thing about the woman was her height. I really should have spent more time on her, rather than Layane playing with her toys and using over 30 words to say, 'The next day was Layane's birthday and she was excited'. The way Layane described her didn't particularly make her sound 'kind', either.
I'm not sure why I didn't have Layane walk downstairs and interrupt the conversation, thinking that the woman was going to give her a present. It would have made a lot more sense than this.
[The police] thought that the one line of hers that she remembered – “She is angry” – had been a sign of this.
This leads directly on from the last paragraph and, gotta be honest, I don't know what I mean. What did the police think happened? What would this false memory of a stranger be covering up? What does Layane think it's covering up?
I don't think I could answer this question in 2010. I certainly can't now.
Anyway. Layane is quite sure the person who threw her in the boot was a man, because she heard his voice. She wonders if the woman is one of the other people Sue saw around the cars.
For the past decade, she had been working at the same assumption that the police had: that the memory of the woman had been false. Maybe even a dream. But now, when she had nothing else to go on, she used the memory to explain what might have happened. Someone, another woman, was angry with Simon. Possibly Nicola, too. They had killed them both, and abandoned Layane and Clemant outside the care-home. Why they didn’t kill the children too was a mystery, but the theory did explain why the house was full of water – the killer (or killers) wanted to destroy the evidence. What went unexplained was how they filled the house.
This is what the whole present day section of this chapter has been like so far. Layane has been kidnapped, is literally tied up in the boot of a car, has no idea where her sister is, but the chapter is just her calmly considering what happened ten years ago, in prose that reads like I'm being paid by the word.
(When I recently made a post on @gr8writingtips about shortening a 170,000 word draft to 100,000 words, a lot of people responded, "HOW?" If you, reader of this blog, were one of them, I guess now you know.)
I'm not sure where to start with the 'assumption'. This suggests that Layane's understanding of what happened to her parents went something like:
Layane, as a seven-year-old, remembers seeing a stranger talking to her dad the day her parents abandoned them. She's seven, so I assume all she knows is, "A woman came round, talked to my dad, then we were abandoned and our parents are gone."
The police look into this and can't find any evidence this woman exists, so someone (police, counsellor, social worker?) tells Layane that she must have imagined it to cover up 'something traumatic'.
Layane now thinks the woman does not exist. It's unclear what she thinks happened to her parents, but she is told something traumatic happened and seems to agree with this assessment.
For some reason, despite this, she still thinks her parents are alive.
Over the years Layane starts to hate her parents. She hardly views them as her parents, just two assholes who abandoned them.
But... she still thinks she imagined the woman at the door, maybe to cover up something traumatic. Her parents are totally fine, though!
The story opens. Layane gets a letter purporting to be from her mother. For some reason, Layane is convinced Nicola is overseas even though the letter does not state this, and the envelope wasn't addressed so someone would have had to stick it through the letterbox. Ignoring that - this is yet more proof that Layane's parents are fine. Assholes.
Now Layane been kidnapped, and even though there is exactly zero evidence the mysterious woman is involved, the kidnap is somehow proof that the woman was real this whole time AND Layane's parents are dead! Have been for years!
Even though before she received the letter, Layane had no proof they were alive, anyway.
Also, I guess Nicola isn't overseas anymore.
I don't fucking know.
The car had been moving without stopping for a long time, probably because the men don’t want to be caught by the police, she thought.
Thanks, I was wondering why they hadn't pulled over for a McDonalds yet.
The narration tells us that Layane is panicked, which is handy, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to tell. She starts to feel sick from the motion of the car, but somehow this ends up distracting from the 'panic' because it's mentioned once then forgotten, and has no impact on what Layane does for the rest of the scene. There's a large bag in the boot with her, and she could have started freaking out, first terrified that Clemant might be inside, and then, when she realises it's something hard, weapons that will be used against her if she can't get to them first with her useless, tied hands. Instead, the bag is simply described as 'uncomfortable'.
While I'm sure that's true, the tone this sets is definitely less, 'violent kidnap', more, 'travel-sick in a packed car on a roadtrip'.
Instead of investigating the bag, or trying to loosen her ties, or anything else, Layane stays quiet and waits for the kidnappers to speak, because she's hoping one of them will As You Know, Bob their whole plan so she knows what's going on.
In the earlier drafts, it probably would have happened. Here, it doesn't.
Is this growth?
Muffled voices came from the front of the car. Layane tried to listen in, but found that she couldn’t make out their words. They were mumbling, as if not wanting her to hear them. She managed to distinguish that there were both male and female voices coming from the front of the car, leaving her to wonder if one of them was the mystery woman.
WOMEN? In MY hivemind?
That's a bit mean of me. I don't know that they're a Hivemind yet, maybe we've reached the draft where they have distinct personalities!
(I'm not going to hold my breath.)
The chapter doesn't end here, but there's a page break, then a rapid scene change, and 3,000 more words before the next chapter. To save this from becoming very, very long, let's stop here.
