Comfort from Strangers - Michelle Lovric

For someone who’s not paid to be there, I’ve spent a lot of time at St Thomas’ Hospital A & E this year. There’s a seat in the corridor outside Majors that – in my daydreams – will one day bear a small, discreet plaque:

IN SPRING 2010,
MICHELLE LOVRIC
WROTE A LARGE PART OF
The Mourning Emporium
WHILE WAITING TO BE SEEN HERE.

From that seat, you watch the meat wagons arriving full of bloodied drunks, pensioners disoriented after falls, people on bad drug trips. If you’ve read me, you’ll know I’m not squeamish. But at times even I’ve needed to turn away from what was being wheeled down that corridor outside Majors. I’ve also winced at the shrieked claims of inebriated girls about what they took or what they definitely didn’t do with whom. Some of them, sad to say, are young enough to read my children’s books. I’ve shrunk away from the huddles of defensive friends, hustling the fumes of their night’s drinking through the disinfected air. Almost worse is the occasional querulous posh person who turns up with a finger-tip lopped off in a gin-and-gardening incident. They bray their needs imperiously, oblivious to the exhaustion of the staff or the less socially entitled who might be ahead of them in the queue.

On each occasion (apart from the time my eye was swelled closed), my only shield against all this misery has been a manuscript. I’ve been able to tuck myself inside my story, close the trap-door, turn out the cruel hospital lights and light a private candle. I’ve been able to unhear the yelling and the moaning, unsee the blood, to fade far away and quite forget the ugliness and pain.

Instead, I’ve embarked on a floating orphanage in Venice and sailed her through ice floes to London, where I’ve encountered poor children who sleep in the coffins of a funeral parlour, lovingly tended by a Fagin-like English bulldog. I’ve staged verbal battles between wan London mermaids and their feisty Venetian counterparts. I’ve launched a murderous campaign by a pretender to the British throne. I’ve buried Queen Victoria. And nearly buried King Edward VII, somewhat prematurely.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that The Mourning Emporium, part-written in St Thomas’ A & E, also has a distinctly medicinal flavour. I’ve cured London of the dreadful Half-dead Disease (having first inflicted it on her). I’ve let my London mermaids become addicted to patent feminine nostrums such as ‘Charles Forde’s Bile Beans for Biliousness’ or ‘Dr Blaud’s Capsules’, which, according to the manufacturer, produced ‘pure, rich blood without any disagreeable effects and are recommended by the medical faculty as the best remedy for bloodlessness’.

It’s not just mermaids. I’ve given one major character haemophilia. One of the children has ‘phossy jaw’, from working in a match factory. Another has a wasting cough – that could surely profit from 'Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic', as illustrated. The rodents of London’s sewers are terrified of a patent verminicide called ‘Rough on Rats’. In fact, I can’t think of a single character who gets through The Mourning Emporium without feeling a little unwell at some point.

Might I have all written those medical pages anyway, seated in the full bloom of health at my desk at home? Perhaps. But I would taken longer, been easily distracted, and succumbed to the blandishments of the cat or the email.

At St Thomas’, however, I was driven into the manuscript, and it welcomed me with all the exclusive, excluding cosiness of a private club. A manuscript is a not just a sanctuary; it’s a portable padded cell with all mod cons.

I, for one, would never get in an ambulance without one.

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The Mourning Emporium, the sequel to The Undrowned Child, is published on October 28th.
Michelle Lovric’s website