Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin Book 1 (Erica Martin Thriller) by Alice Clark-Platts
Authors: Alice Clark-Platts
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shares in their ancestral home for the readies needed to pay the utilities bills. It was a thirty-minute drive out of the city, and buses had been laid on to transport us party-goers to and from it. It will astonish you, no doubt, to hear that I was
actually attending
this auspicious event. Zack had taken pity on me and invited me along with his physics pals. Knowing that Emily would also be in attendance, I swallowed my dismay at the cost of a ticket and decided to throw caution to the winter wind.
On the night itself, the buses pulled up a distance away from the castle entrance, so we had to walk the last bit, up a path where flaming torches burned either side of the entrance doors set in the middle of its sandstone walls. A bagpiper stood at the entry, piercing the winter night with his wails.
The sky was heavy with snow, casting that frozen, faraway blueish light over everything, emphasizingthe dark outline of the castle against it. I couldn’t help myself, I was impressed. Zack had told me where to rent my dinner jacket. and I didn’t think I looked out of place. I resolved to make the most of the evening and, I promised myself, I would not spend the majority of it looking around the room for Emily.
I walked in with Zack and a mate of his named Jay. The physics group had all shortened their names in a hopeful expression of cool, hiding the true geekiness of the Zachariahs and Justins that they had actually been christened. If I’d have been part of their group, no doubt I would have called myself Dan. As it was, we entered the large hall where the ball was to be held to a particularly penetrating strain of the bagpipes. It was enough of an assault on the senses to ensure a number of people looked over in our direction as we came over the threshold.
I saw Emily straight away. We caught eyes, and she gave me a half-smile, before turning towards Nick and his ever-present acolyte, another hockey player called Shorty. She looked exquisite in a floor-length midnight-blue velvet dress.
She walks in beauty, like the night, of cloudless climes, and starry skies.
But I put Byron out of my mind and deliberately moved in the opposite direction and made my way to the makeshift bar by the floor-to-ceiling windows shrouded in deep red curtains.
The overhead lights were dim, yielding attention tothe garish disco lights dancing across the parquet floor. I ordered a bottle of lager and stationed myself by a selection of green baize tables proclaiming to be a casino and a bored-looking guy who appeared to be permitted to paste body-art tattoos on to giggling girls’ arms. The music was anachronistic, the stuff we had listened to as children; now, here we were, pretending to be so adult that we even knew how to feel nostalgia. We danced in a sort of mockery of ourselves, so cool that even as we were dancing we took the piss before anyone else could do it to us. The unspoken agreement was that no one would actually dance
seriously
or with any kind of
true passion
.
Passion doesn’t exist in places like Durham. It has been replaced by a knowingness, an all-seeing self-irony. I blame the American teen television series of the 1990s personally. Since them, we have become so emotionally articulate that the expression of any sentiment has actually become pointless; such is our ‘
me too
’ culture that the only way you can really draw attention to yourself is if you can successfully ridicule anything you are genuinely feeling. There’s a weird sagaciousness to this when you think about it: through ridicule you can control what you’re feeling and it won’t scare you. It means ultimately, though, that everything has become banal. We are being subsumed by our banality. I thought about this as I stood watching my peers, pogoing in a whirl of postmodernirony around the dance floor. I finished my lager and got another one.
There was a buffet table in another room, and I wandered through to have a look at it. I was quite hungry by this
actually attending
this auspicious event. Zack had taken pity on me and invited me along with his physics pals. Knowing that Emily would also be in attendance, I swallowed my dismay at the cost of a ticket and decided to throw caution to the winter wind.
On the night itself, the buses pulled up a distance away from the castle entrance, so we had to walk the last bit, up a path where flaming torches burned either side of the entrance doors set in the middle of its sandstone walls. A bagpiper stood at the entry, piercing the winter night with his wails.
The sky was heavy with snow, casting that frozen, faraway blueish light over everything, emphasizingthe dark outline of the castle against it. I couldn’t help myself, I was impressed. Zack had told me where to rent my dinner jacket. and I didn’t think I looked out of place. I resolved to make the most of the evening and, I promised myself, I would not spend the majority of it looking around the room for Emily.
I walked in with Zack and a mate of his named Jay. The physics group had all shortened their names in a hopeful expression of cool, hiding the true geekiness of the Zachariahs and Justins that they had actually been christened. If I’d have been part of their group, no doubt I would have called myself Dan. As it was, we entered the large hall where the ball was to be held to a particularly penetrating strain of the bagpipes. It was enough of an assault on the senses to ensure a number of people looked over in our direction as we came over the threshold.
I saw Emily straight away. We caught eyes, and she gave me a half-smile, before turning towards Nick and his ever-present acolyte, another hockey player called Shorty. She looked exquisite in a floor-length midnight-blue velvet dress.
She walks in beauty, like the night, of cloudless climes, and starry skies.
But I put Byron out of my mind and deliberately moved in the opposite direction and made my way to the makeshift bar by the floor-to-ceiling windows shrouded in deep red curtains.
The overhead lights were dim, yielding attention tothe garish disco lights dancing across the parquet floor. I ordered a bottle of lager and stationed myself by a selection of green baize tables proclaiming to be a casino and a bored-looking guy who appeared to be permitted to paste body-art tattoos on to giggling girls’ arms. The music was anachronistic, the stuff we had listened to as children; now, here we were, pretending to be so adult that we even knew how to feel nostalgia. We danced in a sort of mockery of ourselves, so cool that even as we were dancing we took the piss before anyone else could do it to us. The unspoken agreement was that no one would actually dance
seriously
or with any kind of
true passion
.
Passion doesn’t exist in places like Durham. It has been replaced by a knowingness, an all-seeing self-irony. I blame the American teen television series of the 1990s personally. Since them, we have become so emotionally articulate that the expression of any sentiment has actually become pointless; such is our ‘
me too
’ culture that the only way you can really draw attention to yourself is if you can successfully ridicule anything you are genuinely feeling. There’s a weird sagaciousness to this when you think about it: through ridicule you can control what you’re feeling and it won’t scare you. It means ultimately, though, that everything has become banal. We are being subsumed by our banality. I thought about this as I stood watching my peers, pogoing in a whirl of postmodernirony around the dance floor. I finished my lager and got another one.
There was a buffet table in another room, and I wandered through to have a look at it. I was quite hungry by this
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