A frined of mine runs a brilliant writing group where she teaches others to improve their skills.

Another friend runs a great monthly group where people share what they’ve written, offering supportive comments. They are an exceptionally nice and talented group of writers. Quite often, I’m busy putting novels together so I’m pushed for time to write for the group, but it’s always good to try to create something different.

A third friend recently wrote a piece for the writing teacher based on a woman waiting in the doctor’s surgery for test results with her husband. She read it at the monthly group.It was written in the third person, filled with empathy, and we discussed whether first or third might have been better.

With that in mind, I set myself a ten minute exercise to write about someone in a similar environment, in the third person. Unedited, just a quick exercise in scribble, here it is.

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Therapy

‘I feel like a stranger in my own life.’

There. He’d said it. The words were out.

The woman with the lipstick mouth, sitting by the window, looked surprised and said, ‘Why is that?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I just feel…’

She leaned forward and smoothed her skirt, shifted in the office chair. He noticed that her heels were sharp like daggers. He wondered if she was uncomfortable.

She was waiting, her eyebrows arched like those French upside down arrows, circumflexes. She was expecting him to tell her something, so that she could demonstrate that she was a good listener. He noticed how her eyes flicked to the clock and away again. The appointment would last another forty minutes. He wriggled down in his seat and the plastic cushion beneath him creaked.

‘I just don’t feel like I used to… before,’ he said.

‘Before what?’ The woman’s tone held no emotion.

‘Before…’ he began.

He placed a worn hand over his eyes and at once, he saw himself running, a ten year old boy, through the scorched wheat stubble towards the place where the grass grew long and an old tree trunk lay like a sleeping dragon with its mouth open. He recalled the dip and stumble of his feet in the furrowed earth, old trainers curling where his toes peeped through. He remembered clutching a crinkled wrapper to his chest, containing two slices of Mother’s Pride as he reached the old gnarled trunk and hunkered down, nibbling the thin bread, tasting the tang of old cheese.

‘Let’s start again.’ The woman’s smile was meant to show that she was professional. Her glasses glinted as the sun streamed through the window. He watched dust twirl in the honeyed shaft of light. ‘When did you first notice you were feeling this way?’

‘This way…’ he repeated, and he heard a voice in his mind ask him, what way? He didn’t know. It was hard to articulate exactly how he felt. He tried to put a list of words his head. He was – numb? Confused? Tired? Like everything was too hard and it would just be easier to accept that nothing mattered, that the days were hollow and the nights were achingly lonely and that his mouth was always filled with bitter disappointment.

She glanced at the clock again, and he said, ‘I could leave it here….’

‘You have booked an hour,’ the woman reminded him. Her lanyard said her name was Abigail. She didn’t look like an Abigail. Abigails went home to children, cooked omelettes, laughed at jokes that weren’t funny. This Abigail had an indentation in between arrow brows. She was bored.

He took a breath as if he was about to say something, but no words came. His eyes flickered to the window. Outside, a crow landed on a wire; black wings shining like petrol on tarmac on a wet day. It opened its beak but there was no sound. He noticed how round the crow’s eye was, how unblinking. It stretched its wings, took to the air and the wind flung it away.

The woman tapped long red nails against the table. He imagined the drums of war rattling in the distance. He closed his eyes for a moment of peace and behind pulsing lids he heard a soft voice call his name. He hadn’t been called that name in so long.

He shook his head.

‘I don’t know,’ he said again.

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This probably won’t make it to the writing group. I’ve no intention of doing anything with it.

But it’s good to practise. To scribble.To try to create a character.