Time to grab a book and get tipsy!
Books & Booze is a new mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC that will post every Friday in October. The participating authors were challenged to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist.
Drowning "Thoughts of Maria" in Booze...
‘Thoughts of Maria’ is a multi-narrative novel, in
which each of the main characters relates their own experiences. Here are the characters (and their drinks):
Maria is a nineteen year old Filipina, who lives with
her family on a rubbish dump in Manila. They are desperately poor, but they are
proud, decent people and it is love, not poverty, which binds them together.
There is no money for luxuries such as alcohol, though this will change when
Maria meets (and subsequently agrees to marry) Gerry, a recently divorced Englishman
in his late forties:
We ate back at the hotel in the evening,
and I chose the food. I have not eaten so well for a very long time. We had
chicken and pork adobo, followed by hot rice cakes with butter and coconut, and
a bottle of Chilean wine. There were some silences between us, but it did not
seem to matter.
We are meeting
again tomorrow. Gerry says that if we are both happy with the arrangement, we
need no longer talk to other people. I think we are both happy with the
arrangement.
Gerry is a property surveyor who specialises in
old buildings. He is a traditional Englishman through and through, so it’s
definitely beer for him. In fact he is having a beer with his son Callum,
sitting out in the back yard one evening, when he tells him of his plans to
marry Maria:
I wanted to get to the point, but I needed
to explain myself properly. I was nursing my beer bottle in both hands now,
gazing at it. ‘I was walking into the newsagent’s a few months ago,’ I said. ‘I
saw this couple. They looked really content… She was a lot younger than him,
and she was oriental… I wondered if they’d met through an agency. I kept
thinking about it afterwards… And I’ve met a young lady myself… Her name’s
Maria.’
Callum, however, is more
into his drugs than his alcohol:
Coke’s my drug of choice. It might not last
long but while you’re on it’s like you’re superhuman, alive to every tingle of
every nerve ending in your body. I’ve seen some people get wired on it but for
me it’s always good. And, God, what it does for music. A banging tune is a
great thing anytime, but after a bit of Charlie we’re talking another
dimension. You feel the music in you, as physical as the heart pounding in your
chest, lifting you up, driving you on.
Yeah, there are
dangers if you overdo it. Too much and you’ll burn half your nose out, and
there’s always the risk of ending up with a batch that’s been cut with
something deadly, but at the end of the day that’s just a risk worth taking.
Because what’s the point of a long life if you’ve never truly lived, eh?
Honestly, what’s the point?
Rachel is Gerry’s ex-wife
(and Callum’s mother). Now trapped in a loveless relationship with Carl, she is
extremely unhappy, and is slipping rapidly into alcoholism. She drinks vodka,
and plenty of it:
Now I’m a proper drinker. I sit at the
breakfast bar, or at the kitchen table, and I drink vodka. And it doesn’t help
me. It helps Carl, in a way, after a while, because I get to the stage where I
no longer want to kill him. Because I realise that it’s all my fault. That I’m
a stupid bitch and I should have known. That I should have known from the
beginning, because I’ve never been special, and I never will be. I am ordinary,
just that, and anything else could only ever be an illusion. I should have
stayed with Gerry, in our ordinary life. I should have been grateful that he
wanted me. But I wasn’t, and now I can’t go back. Because Gerry has shaken me
off like dust.
I'm a British writer from a little town
called Melbourne, in Derbyshire, England. My poems and short stories appear
frequently in literary magazines and I have published two novels.
The main theme of my work is people’s
inability to communicate in a meaningful way with those whom they love, and
this idea forms the basis of my first novel, ‘The Entire Animal’, which was
published in 2006 by The Waywiser Press.
My second novel, ‘Thoughts of Maria’,
published in 2013 by Open Books, continues this theme, but also touches on
wider issues such as drugs, arranged marriages and sexual obsession.
I love to hear from my readers - visit my website at or tweet me @_GregoryHeath!
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