Helen has everything: a job she loves, an intelligent caring partner and a house of her own. She also has a half-sister – the thoughtful angelic faced Lily – who threatens to upend her carefully curated life. When the two sisters meet at the deathbed of their father, Helen is forced to confront a truth that she has spent a lifetime burying. But, as she embarks on her journey, does Helen really know what that truth is?
With him for a sire and her for a dam/What should I be but just what I am.
(The Singing-Woman from the Wood’s Edge, Edna St Vincent Millay)
Prologue (1990)
A small girl sat huddled on the floor, just outside the bedroom door. Listening. Thumb in her mouth, her Beanie Bear fisted in front of her face. The bear flapped from time to time, side to side, so that the soft pink legs stroked the girl’s cheek. Suck, suck, suck, flap, suck, suck, flap. The legs went still. The girl could hear her grandmother talking.
‘Why?’ she was saying, ‘Why do you have to do this?’ Whining, like she was told not to.
The small girl peeped in, but the lump in the bed was still where it was the last time she looked. Just a lump in a duvet – the one with stripes – not moving, not saying anything, the head out of sight. Her grandmother sat facing the bed, staring at the lump in the soft bedside light. The girl liked the duvet with flowers. She hated the one with the stripes.
Suck, suck, suck.
‘Look at me.’ Her grandmother was watching the lump carefully like she thought it might do something and she didn’t want to miss it. But nothing happened. Her grandmother rubbed her face, sighed a big sigh and looked up at the ceiling. The girl looked up too, but there was nothing to see. Just the light that was always there. Just the brown patch that looked like a cloud dog. A bit like Jessie.
Suck, suck, suck.
She pulled her head back into the hall and hugged her legs. They were cold. Everything was cold, even Beanie Bear. She lay on her side and tucked up her knees and feet, keeping her head close to the doorway. She pulled at her skirt but it wouldn’t reach and she thought about fetching her rabbit slippers from her room. But it was dark on the landing, so she stayed where she was, waiting, listening, smoothing her cheek with Beanie Bear’s soft legs.
Downstairs, the front door opened, closed, a light switched on, sending up a faint glow. Her father’s feet trod along the hall and stopped at the bottom of the stairs. She could picture him in his outdoor coat, his briefcase in his hand, standing very still. Listening, just like she was listening. He might come up, he might say, ‘What are you doing in the dark, Pumpkin?’ or ‘Would you like me to fetch your rabbit slippers?’ But he didn’t. Instead, his shoes walked away. She heard the sound of the fridge door opening in the kitchen, the clank of a bottle.
Suck, suck, suck.
Inside the room, the chair squeaked as her grandmother shifted.
‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ she said using her firm voice, the one that said ‘basket’ to Jessie, or ‘let’s get you sorted’ when they were about to go out.
The girl crept forward on her side and looked. Her grandmother was standing up now, leaning over the bed. One hand reached out to the lump, and the girl watched the hand rubbing backwards and forwards. ‘You’re ill, darling,’ her grandmother said, ‘Very ill. You need to be in hospital.’
Then the lump moved.
Startled, the girl sat upright, clutching Beanie Bear, waiting. There was a slithering sound and she saw the dark head of her mother emerge from the stripes, her hair all messy and tangled. Her grandmother sat down on the bed and lifted the head onto her lap. She stroked the hair and the head began to cry. The girl sucked harder on her thumb.
‘It’s for the best, love. Going on like this is no good. I’m here to help you. I’m here.’
The girl watched while her grandmother stroked and stroked and after a long time, the crying stopped. The head lifted up, dark hair falling so the girl couldn’t see her mother’s face. But she knew there were tears because her grandmother wiped at them with a hand. ‘There now. It’ll be alright.’ Her mother sat up. Two thin arms reached out and the small girl wanted to reach out too, wanted to be the one that was held and hugged and rocked. She watched and waited and for a while the room and the landing were very quiet.
Then the head began to talk. ‘I’m scared, Mummy,’ it said, ‘I’m so so frightened.’ And the girl whispered, ‘I’m frightened too.’
‘I know, love, I know,’ said her Grandmother, ‘But I’m here. We’ll get through this.’ The small girl stopped sucking her thumb and waited for one of them to notice her, to say, ‘Come here, Pumpkin, and have a cuddle.’ But they just kept rocking from side to side: her Grandmother with her eyes closed and the tangled head of her mother.
The small girl looked at Beanie Bear and whispered, ‘Nobody’s going to fetch my rabbit slippers.’ And she stood up and walked along the hallway, a hand feeling along the wall.
In her room, she tugged her duvet onto the floor. She couldn’t really see it but she knew it was the pink one with the fairies that flew into the clouds. She slithered under the bed, pulling it with her, tucking Beanie Bear in to keep warm. She did a big Grandmother sigh and said, ‘I just have to do everything myself.’
Then the small girl put her thumb in her mouth, stroked her cheek with Beanie Bear’s legs and fell asleep.
To read Chapter One, Click here: What We Are Chapter 1
In a quiet rural village in Devon, an Iranian vicar is found stabbed to death. While DCI Erin Truman launches her investigation, a young psychology student, Nicky, is researching a dark web game called Imperium. When their two worlds collide, both realise they are facing a game master who is everywhere and nowhere, as elusive as a ghost, and, yet, this person must be found before any more of the game’s targets are murdered.
IMPERIUM – Prologue and Chapter 1
The copse was nothing like home, the ground sodden beneath Didar’s back. There was so much rain in this country. He shifted his head on the roots of the tree, peered down at his leg and tried to assess the blood loss. Perhaps it was not so bad. Overhead the trees rustled and blanketed the late evening light, turning the world tonal. He thought of the bright sun, the dusty heat, the vibrant sounds of Kabul and felt himself drifting, floating. It would be so pleasant to fall asleep and dream. Of home. Of Amina.
He opened his eyes with a start, the man’s face looming out of nowhere. ‘Hey! Paki!’ But there was no-one. Just some wild creature or a trick of the breeze.
‘Focus, Sar’e,’ he chided himself, and renewed his grip on the belt around his thigh. ‘Stay awake. Control the bleeding. He won’t be back.’
He’d encountered men like that before, in the streets of Crediton, as he’d walked from the hospital or waited for a bus. Keen to remind him that this was not his country; that he did not belong. As if he could forget. But not here, not in this quiet wood. And not with a face concealed by a mask.
‘Hey! Paki!’ Useless to tell him that he was from Afghanistan; that he had worked for the British Army; that he had no choice but to leave. The man had a knife and his own rationale.
To continue reading, click here: Imperium – Prologue and Chapter 1
PICTURE MY FATHER is my first novel about relationships, integrity and art. Inspired by Aristotle’s ideas of beauty and goodness, it asks the question: What is and isn’t acceptable in the pursuit of a good life. If you would like to know more about it, please get in touch at: joannaharperwrites @gmail.com
“Annie knew that what she was about to do would have consequences that she might not be able to control. She also knew that it was wrong at some fundamental level. She wanted him, not because she was lonely, unhappy or even particularly out of love with her husband, but because he was there, standing close, focussed, intense, radiant. He took hold of her hand and guided her paintbrush across the canvas and she let him, watching from some dislocated place, as the delicate sea that she’d fussed over all afternoon became a tumultuous mass of arcs and dashes. ‘Breathe’, he said and she breathed, inhaling his mix of soap and sea and savoured the almost forgotten sensation of being utterly, overwhelmingly alive.”
When her estranged father takes his own life, Jess, almost paralysed with resentment and guilt, uncovers a mysterious portrait hidden in his house and a complicated puzzle unfolds. As she pieces the puzzle together, trying to make sense of her father’s life and her own, she finds herself increasingly enmeshed in the lives of those women connected to him, with intense consequences for them all: Annie, Ellis and Alex. While tangling with issues of beauty, integrity and what it means to live a ‘good life’, the story twists and turns, finally escalating to its dramatic conclusion that changes the lives of all the women forever.