Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for The Naseby Horses, the debut novel by Dominic Brownlow. Despite having a copy of this amazing sounding book, time constraints have meant that unfortunately I haven't had the time to read it yet, so today I'm hoping to entice you to pick up a copy for yourself with an excerpt.
It’s another day and a night before they let me leave the
hospital. Uncle Pete picks me up in his black Rover, driving slowly over the
chain of mini roundabouts that gets us out of Spalding on to the straight
lonely roads of the Fens. There’s still been no word from Charlotte.
‘Hobby,’ he says, ducking his head to look at a small bird
of prey hovering by the side of the road. The hobby drops to the ground,
bouncing back into view with a field mouse locked in its talons, before
disappearing low across the fields. I press my head against the warm glass, my
mind weighed down with the hazy fug of medication, and watch the earth stream
by in an endless blur of yellow and green and gold.
Above stretch millions of square miles of unsullied blue
sky.
Years ago, in my grandfather’s living room, I read that the
mean radius of the earth is three thousand, nine hundred and fifty-nine miles.
I remember thinking how disappointingly small this was and how anxious I became
at the idea of billions of minuscule people and animals and cities being stuck
to this minute green and blue ball out in the middle of space. A few months
later I threw a marble out to sea on Brancaster beach, proclaiming to my family
that the marble in the sea was as proportionally irrelevant in terms of mass to
the unknown mass of the ocean as the earth was to space. They had laughed and
continued walking ahead, the wind tugging at their clothes as though trying to
pull them into the water.
The sea was choppy that day. I remember this vividly, but I
remember everything vividly. That’s the problem. It had swayed and dipped like
crude oil, its surface veined with seaweed where thin dirty crests appeared and
disappeared unevenly in the swell as though they weren’t quite sure which way
they should be heading. I remember, too, grains of sand skimming across the
hard plane of the beach, a sharp January wind that carried with it the decaying
scents of the sea and the marshes to the east. On the hazy spine of Scolt Head
avocets gather in their hundreds. To my left, like the iron finger of some
long-fallen robot, I can just make out the top of the wreck poking through the
water.
Back in the car, I stare directly at the sun. It’s high and
bright, and I’m thinking someone, God perhaps, is trying to burn a hole through
the universe with a magnifying glass when the scent of sulphur drifts eerily
through me. I’ve half been expecting it. After a seizure of that size, there
are often little aftershocks: partial seizures no one can see but me.
‘You OK?’ Uncle Pete asks.
I hold out my fingers and study them in the strange
fluorescent light. It feels like I’m in space.
Everything is both big and small
at the same time. Everything is beautiful yet frightening. There is something
quite beguiling about the aura, before it takes me, that is, something about
the intensity of the light, its still prismatic sharpness before it shatters
into millions of glittering particles. When I’m in the aura I get to see below
the surface of everything. I get to see the wires that hold the universe
together. Within it, I listen to the even hum of the Rover and I can’t help
thinking about that marble, only I’m not thinking about it floating freely in
the clear abyss of the ocean. I’m thinking about it covered in silt on the sea
bed.
Uncle Pete clears his throat, like he’s testing a
microphone. The resonant boom distorts in my head. He looks at me for a few
seconds, dark eyebrows pinching over a flat nose, but whatever it was he was
going to say, he doesn’t say it. Instead, he looks back to the road flowing
smoothly beneath us. He screws up his forehead as he thinks, concentrating on
his driving even though there are no other cars about. It’s just an empty
straight line pointing forward, its neat edges trying to join up somewhere in
the distance. I could even drive on a road like this.
I like Uncle Pete. He doesn’t talk to me like I’m an
exchange student. He doesn’t shadow me as everyone else seems to do. He and
Aunty Anne own a white-bricked cottage on the North Norfolk coast where
Charlotte and I spent part of our holidays when Mum and Dad were both working.
There’s a long sandy nature reserve there. For most of the year you can spot
curlews, godwits and lapwings, and in the winter, when the sky feels as cold as
the sea, there are geese, twite and redstarts.
‘She didn’t want to come here in the first place,’ I say in
a monotone voice that doesn’t really sound like my own.
‘No,’ he says. ‘But that’s no reason for her to put your mum
and dad through all this, is it?’ He’s trying to sound angry, but I know he
isn’t, and as though to compensate, he runs his right hand awkwardly through
his hair.
‘Do they still think that’s what happened?’ I say. ‘Do they
think she’s run away?’
Ahead, a tractor and trailer pull out of a farm track. Uncle
Pete tilts his head to the right as he indicates, overtakes, then gently
straightens the Rover, the sun catching on the windscreen in thin ripples of
white light. ‘We just can’t understand it,’ he says and he sucks in air and
turns away and stares out of his driver’s window.
I, too, look away, pinching the bridge of my nose against a
swell of nausea, and try to organise my thoughts, but it’s almost impossible.
My mind is like an aviary. It has been since I came round that night, the
smells of linoleum and disinfectant expanding relentlessly in the warm
synthetic air. Mum is sitting forward on a wooden chair designed for sitting
back on, that hurried look of hers accentuated in the artificial light.
‘We can’t find Charlotte,’ she says. ‘We can’t find her
anywhere.’
* * * *
I'm really looking forward to diving in to this book as several bloggers that I know well and have a similar taste with have already thoroughly enjoyed it. Hopefully I'll love it just as much as they did and watch out for my review which will hopefully be coming sooner rather than later.
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| Photo courtesy of Dominic Brownlow |
Dominic Brownlow lives near Peterborough with his two
children. He lived in London and worked in the music industry as a manager
before setting up his own independent label. He now enjoys life in the Fens and
has an office that looks out over water. The Naseby Horses is his first novel.
It was long listed for the Bath Novel Award 2016.
You can find out more about Dominic, his book and connect with him using the links below:
Be sure to follow the rest of the tour with these wonderful bloggers:
With kind thanks to Emma Welton at damppebblesblogtours for my stop on the tour and Louise Walters for my review copy.
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