Remembering Not To Breathe
By Alex Morrall
()
About this ebook
Five stories by Alex Morrall and Man Booker Shortlisted Clare Morrall
Robert Anderson is the first of his brothers to make it past seventeen. How does that affect him? Does he expect to die soon too?
Bookish teenager, Ella is intimidated when she is asked out by an older boy, a man nearly, on a motorbike. As she starts to get to know him, their tentative friendship is under threat by the shadows of misogyny around her school and on the streets. How can she work out where the boundaries of a healthy relationship lie?
Follow these characters and others, exploring themes of regret, and isolation in this collaboration between Alex Morrall ('A hugely talented writer' - Mary Rowen) and Man Booker Shortlisted, Clare Morrall.
ACCLAIM FOR OTHER BOOKS BY THE MORRALLS:
'Breathtaking and moving, Helen and the Grandbees [Alex Morrall] is a novel that bravely explores themes of familial discord, race and love in modern Britain. It is a book that immediately gripped me, compelling me to keep turning the pages well into the night. Morrall writes with confidence, poise, and a sense of humour to match. At times heartbreaking and heartwarming, this is a novel readers won't soon forget. A riveting debut.' Awais Khan, author of In the Company of Strangers
Astonishing Splashes of Colour [Clare Morrall] is extremely well written and compulsively readable. At her very first attempt, Morrall has written a genuinely solid and satisfying work of fiction, skilfully plotted and fielding a cast of fully realised and individualised characters. More, please. ― The Sunday Times
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Book preview
Remembering Not To Breathe - Alex Morrall
Alex Morrall
Remembering Not To Breathe
Copyright © 2021 by Alex Morrall
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
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Contents
Helen & The Grandbees-READING BOOK SIGN UP
Snow
Chemistry
The Lights
Thin White Bread
A Winter’s Journey
Shouting Billy
Remembering Not To Breathe
Extract from Helen and the Grandbees
Circuit Boards
Looking for a book to get lost in
Author Bios
Acclaim for HELEN AND THE GRANDBEES
Also by Alex Morrall
Helen & The Grandbees-READING BOOK SIGN UP
Buy Alex Morrall’s Debut Novel Helen and the Grandbees
Uplifting
by the UK national press,
Breathtaking
by Awais Khan.
Read it here: https://books2read.com/u/bWGMZz
Twenty years ago, Helen is forced to give up her newborn baby, Lily. Now living alone in her small flat, there is a knock at the door and her bee, her Lily, is standing in front of her.
Reuniting means the world to them both, but Lily has questions. Lots of them. Questions that Helen is unwilling to answer. In turn, when it’s clear her grandbees are in danger, tangled up in her daughter’s damaging relationship, Helen must find the courage to step in, confronting the fears that haunt her the most.
Told in Helen’s quirky voice Helen and the Grandbees addresses matters of identity, race and mental illness.
READ THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS FOR FREE HERE and sign up for videos, readings and updates www.alexmorrall.com/free
Snow
by
Clare Morrall
My name is Robert Anderson and I am eighteen. I am sitting between the sky and the earth, contemplating the greatest miracle of my life. Unlike my two brothers, David and Michael, I have lived through my seventeenth year and stepped over the threshold into the unexpected beyond. I don’t know what to do with this future.
We lived in a small fishing village in south Devon, and spent most of our childhood watching for smugglers, searching for secret passages from our garden to the beach. We often trailed people through the village if we thought they looked suspicious - we were interested in spies.
My father went by train to Exeter every day, where he worked as a solicitor. My mother was very keen that we should be well educated. She made us sit round the wooden table in the kitchen and recite the three times tables, the fours, the fives. When I say the tables in my mind now, I can still feel the grain of the wood under my fingertips - smoothing along the grooves in time with our chanting. I was the youngest, but I could beat the others easily. I liked numbers, their patterns, the rhythms that they set up in my head.
David, my oldest brother, wasn’t interested in school or the work round the kitchen table, but he was still our leader because he had the best ideas. Let’s be pirates.
Let’s make a raft and take it down to the harbour.
We frequently found ourselves knee-deep in water, saluting David, the captain, while our contraption of paint tins and old planks sank slowly down into the mud below.
As we got older, David taught us everything we needed to know about girls, about which pubs you could get into if you were underage, about smoking - secretly under the railway bridge at the edge of the river. I felt sick, Michael actually vomited and David laughed.
David laughed at everything. He knew thousand of jokes: What do you do if you see a spaceman? Park, man, park. He told them with a seriousness that confused people at first. They would watch his face, waiting for a signal from him, not sure for a few seconds if he had finished. Then they realised how funny the joke was.
David laughed too much. He was the first to go.
On bad days, there’s a hammer inside my head, tapping into me, weakening me. I huddle into my coat of ever greater weight, keep my head down and observe others from behind a thick curtain. They never approach me because I am unapproachable. I know I am unapproachable because they never come near me. It’s a circle I can’t break.
* * *
You read about these things in the paper. A short headline: Teenager drowns on Devon coast.
Four or five lines of explanation. I often read these little comments now, because I know that there are people behind the words, families who will never be normal again. I think of the parents when they first hear the news, see how the mother understands first, how she grabs a younger brother and holds him tight, forcing him to change the words, making him admit it is all a joke. It isn’t a joke. It never is.
I imagine the father finally understanding the enormity of what the brothers are saying:
We must ring the coastguard.
Take us to the place where he fell in.
But the coastguard would be too late. I knew that.
We were playing on the rocks. The tide was high and banging violently into a kind of funnel between the rocks. We dared each other to go closer to the edge, along a row of rocks that we knew were there, concealed by the rushing white-churned water. David was always ahead of us, laughing at our fear.
Go on,
he shouted to Michael, who was cautious and easily frightened. You can go further than that.
Michael tried, but he couldn’t do it. He came back and clung to the edge, his dark curly hair wet and plastered to his head. I thought he might be crying, but couldn’t be sure. There was so much spray from the waves, and it was hard to