Prince Rupert's Teardrop

Mary undresses and wades into the boating lake. She dives and opens her eyes. In the blur, she perceives the outline of a head – she reaches... A dead bird. But she will keep searching. Because Mary’s mother, Meghranoush – a ninety-four year-old survivor of the genocide of Armenians by the Turkish army early in the twentieth century – has vanished. Mary is already known to the police: a serial telephoner, a reporter of wrongdoing, a nuisance. Her doctor talks of mental illness. But what has happened is not just inside her head. A trail of glass birds mocks her. A silver thimble shines at the riverbed – a thimble that belonged to her mother. A glassblower burns a body in a furnace and uses the ash to colour a vase. Rumours circulate of a monster stalking the women of Plymouth. Has her mother simply left – trying to escape the ghosts of genocide in her mind – or has she been abducted? It is left to this most unreliable and unpredictable of daughters to try to find her, in this moving, lyrical, and very powerful work.

Praise for Prince Rupert's Teardrop:

‘Lisa Glass writes with dazzling linguistic exuberance and a fearless imagination.’ R.N. Morris

'A virtuoso stylist of the calibre of Rachel Cusk, Lisa Glass has created a powerful murder mystery, whose violent undercurrents flow from the bitter inheritance of the Armenian genocide.’ Stevie Davies

‘Prince Rupert’s Teardrop digs into the macabre inside apparently mundane lives, and dissects it with relish, energy and compassion.’ Emma Darwin

‘A powerful, moving read … a thought-provoking, sublimely-written first novel.’ Good Housekeeping

'It's a tough, stomach-churning, upsetting story, with razor-sharp characterisation and a cracking, if predictable, finish.' Catherine Taylor, The Guardian

See review at http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/book-reviews/lisa-glass-prince-ruperts-teardrop/

See review on dovegreyreader's blog http://dovegreyreader.typepad.com

About Lisa Glass

Lisa Glass studied English at Swansea University, until she eloped to Cyprus with her RAF boyfriend. She went back to Swansea for her MA in Creative Writing, which she passed with distinction. She has worked as a cleaner, a bookseller and a promotional model. She lives on the north Cornish coast where she takes inspiration from the dramatic scenery and drunken tourists. She has two cats, and a collie puppy.

See the author's website at www.lisaglass.co.uk

See Lisa's Top Ten books on The Book Depository website, at http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/WEBSITE/WWW/WEBPAGES/viewblogarticle.php?id=990

An Interview with Lisa Glass

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

Towards the end of my English BA, I signed up for a feminist module called ‘Gender and Monstrosity’ that influenced me greatly, and I began writing novels. Loads of them. I never got beyond the first five chapters, so I took a Creative Writing MA, which was brilliant fun. Shortly after finishing the course I signed with a literary agent.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Prince Rupert's Teardrop? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?

Otherness and separation. Outsiders. My mother’s family are Armenian immigrants, so I suppose ideas of foreignness and being a stranger were important. The Armenian genocide of 1915 makes an appearance in the novel. And glass-making – a strange, beautiful, violent art.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

I try to find out how my characters feel about themselves. What of the world do they notice most? Do they have an underlying sense that the world is a good place, or a bad place? Are people powerful or powerless? Is there order, or is it all random?

Then I’m looking for their language: are they hesitant, or fluent? How wide is their vocabulary? Do they often use words as weapons? I tend to keep these initial nebulous thoughts in my head, and at this stage spend lots of time looking vacant.

As soon as I start ‘hearing’ the characters, I force myself to write the first line and then I’m off.

How and when do you write?

I write whenever the house is quiet and the puppy asleep. I cannot write without a cup of tea to hand.

The last time I wrote longhand, I returned from a wine break to find the puppy running amok with the papers. Eating them, he was. So now I’m back on the PC, although that’s not foolproof either: I recently lost my third novel. Accidentally deleted whilst reformatting the hard drive. I’m trying to rewrite it, which is a grim process. The reminder ‘BACK-UP’ is perpetually inked on my hand.

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

I read sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, crime, literary fiction, poetry, historical fiction, Cosmopolitan, bird books. Whatever I can get my hands on. At the moment I’m reading The Gentle Axe by R. N. Morris, which is a return to nineteenth century Russia and Porfiry Petrovich, the detective from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A cracking read.

An extract from Prince Rupert's Teardrop

It is at the Crystillery that he encounters his very first victim. He is twenty-four years old, and three years have passed since he graduated magna cum laude from a venerable art college.

The woman who catches his eye is an assistant blower. Her image is burned into his memory. She is brand new and she stands, young and fresh, minding her own business, guarding the furnace.

He can remember it exactly, every detail, like a cine film playing in his mind, slowed down, the camera zooming in upon her face.

She is grindstoning her nose like a good little assistant and then she looks up and sees him hovering: the talented artist who has been fast-tracked to senior designer, a man that she is desperate to impress and yet someone whose personal repugnance alarms her. Someone who sets her woman’s intuition to red alert. A man unattractive and yet so enthusiastic; a gangly greyhound falling over its own feet. So paltry that she takes pity on him, and so when he offers her a tour of his lair after hours she accepts, enthusing at his craft and praying that one day she will be as proficient in the art of glassmaking as he.

She sweats as she stands in front of the furnace – but he’s used to it by now; he hardly feels the burn and is his usual pale self – but she reddens; cool beads of sweat run off her face, which she mops at furtively with a sheet torn from the newspaper pad, and she shuffles backwards out of the flow of heat.

She notices a small ginger mole on his cheek as he offers to demonstrate the construction of one of his more avant-garde pieces.

He instructs her to begin, indicating that he’ll guide her through the tricky parts, so she drops the gather of molten glass into a pool of water and they watch it solidify into a long teardrop. She picks up this fragment and hands it to him and he holds it up to the light to examine.

His grip must be too tight because she feels a change and instinctively she turns away. The drop explodes with a crack and when she looks back she sees that fragments of glass powder are embedded in his face, in his hands. His face begins to ooze blood from tiny pinpricks and his skewed countenance is pocked. He’s wounded, and her heart’s in her mouth; he’s her boss and she’s hurt him and that isn’t going to go down well on her appraisal.

The glass is ominous. Silent, fragile, yes: but potentially lethal. Their work, their pretentious art, can maim. Thank God, she thinks; thank God the teardrop was only small, for if they’d made a sizeable one it might have taken his eye out or his head off.

Prince Rupert’s Drop: a bubble, a ‘gather’ on the end of a long thin nose; molten glass dropped from a height into water. Strong glass – the head can take a blow with a hammer – but unbearable stress within this structure: a stress so immense that the tiniest scratch to the nose can cause detonation.

‘Sorry. I’m normally so careful,’ he says, coolly. ‘I don’t know what happened. I’ve never had one of mine explode before.’

‘It’s my fault, I’m so sorry.’ She wonders how long it will take to get promoted now she’s mutilated the boss.

‘It’s okay. My passion fingers are to blame.’

‘Passion fingers?’ she enquires, her eyebrows raised.

‘Everything I touch, I fuck,’ he quips smoothly, and it seems then that he focuses on the minutiae of her face: the small golden chairs on her cheek, the tiny blue thread vein on the bridge of her nose, the tiny open pores on her chin. He looks at her microscopically and yet he is not deterred, he’s engaged. Engaged in some kind of communication with her face which she feels she is not part of.

She laughs, but she’s mortified. Is this what she does to men, injure them? Is she that dangerous? No wonder they keep their distance, keep their heads down when they pass her. Like that snaky-headed Medusa: they should avoid her at all costs.

On that first night they go to bed. She drugs her doubt with vodka and there is a strange transformation: she begins to find him bewitching. Odylic force exudes from him, mesmerising her, momentarily alarming her, but ultimately inciting her. She is inconsequential in the shadow of his sexual aura, his feral magnetism and the thought of him unzipping her skirt, running his hands over her thighs is enough to make her blush. Her stomach contracts when he’s near, a deep visceral reaction to the smell of him.

She reclines on the bed beneath him and her eyes strip away his skin. She sees red muscle and blood vessels and white fat, and somewhere within this red and white soup, he is there.

She will offer herself on a platter, fall to her knees and kiss his feet; she will surrender; she will be his personal odalisque.

She’s disgusted at herself for this; her strident inner feminist wants to cut her throat for such apostasy. But she can’t help it; he fills her with a desire that overwrites everything else. It’s galling. It’s warming. She doesn’t usually go for complicated men, men with problems that need solving. But he seems different: there’s something hidden that is alluring, and it’s something she wants to find.

And so she falls headlong for the charisma of a killer. As she lies beside him this first night in post-coital torpor, her hands seek out his sleeping face; she touches his hot brow and she feels she’s done a good thing in giving herself to him: he is in need and she has provided. His immersion within his art world is avoidance: it’s born of pain. She senses this absolutely, and she wonders if she has it in her to heal him.

She watches him; flushed and hot, he throws the quilt aside and he lies naked, twisted, one arm protecting his head. She watches him dream, eyes flashing, teeth bared. In dreams this quiet, unobtrusive man fights; he stands his ground and kills, and she’s happy for him. She watches him for hours, noting the ultradian rhythms of REM sleep and night erections – even in nightmares his deep, flickering eyes are somehow beautiful, old in his young face.

He is bathed in candlelight and the milky luminescence of his skin is quite astounding – the radiance of that blemishless countenance in the soft smooth light is almost monstrous, almost inhuman, more like the carefully mixed oils of the renaissance super-realist painters than the face of a flesh and blood man.

The perfect skin hue that’s too perfect: so perfect it betrays its artificiality.

The more she watches, the more she can see the white aura rising from his skin, strong around his throat and around the perimeter of his still head. Growing, flailing out of him, a quarter of an inch, half an inch, a whole inch, coming from his skin, then more, until it almost seems that he’s aflame with white light.

Then, all of a sudden, it’s gone.