Change of Love - Excerpt from Chapter 1

When Joanna Meakin stood up to give the keynote presentation to the Gynexa sales conference, she was quite naked. She didn't dare look down to confirm it, but she knew. She was also acutely aware that her shoes - pale blue sandals with very high heels - were entirely inappropriate for such an important occasion.

Despite this, her audience sat calmly. There was no laughing, no muttering. In fact, attention was so sharply focused that Joanna wondered whether the high wooden lectern might be shielding her completely from the audience.

Her voice was a problem though. Rather than being raised by panic, it seemed to have dropped an octave. Unusually deep and slow, it dragged on her words like a faulty tape player. She heard it struggling on, driving home the familiar mantra of principal selling points. Perhaps all that presentation training was paying off at last. If they hadn't noticed her nakedness by now, she might still get away with it. That slight possibility spawned a moment of false confidence. She opened her mouth to deliver the final motivating challenge, the one supposed to sweep the audience to its feet on a wave of enthusiasm and applause. Instead, the clammy hand of fear gripped her intestines so cruelly that she had to clench her naked buttocks hard. How on earth was she ever going to get off that podium and back to her seat?

Three rows back, by the left-hand aisle, an empty chair lured her eye. Her favourite jacket hung around the back of it - distant, tantalising, granting the inanimate chair the protection that her vulnerable flesh so desperately needed. It was quite a long jacket; navy blue, executive-sharp but cut to flatter. Fastened and pulled firmly down, it would certainly cover her hips. A sheaf of notes, held low as she made her exit, would do the rest. Surely the audience would be too absorbed in generating thunderous applause to notice the rear view of the departing speaker. It must be worth a try.


Change of Love - Excerpt from Chapter 8

Sunday. Whatever happened to the special feel of Sunday, that particular stillness which once hung, almost palpable, in the air? Joanna lay alone in bed and ached for her childhood Sundays. She closed her eyes to look back, to a time when she used to wake in a different bedroom, small and square with sprays of lilac tumbling down the wallpaper, summer sun slanting through the curtains. That house had different sounds on Sundays, distinctively slow and leisured. The tinkle of a teaspoon, the rustle of newspapers, the steady clip-clip-clip of garden shears bringing shape and order to a recalcitrant hedge. There must have been dull Sundays, boring Sundays, Sundays when people bickered indoors as the rain poured down, but they had been erased, recorded over by gilded memories of certainty and peace.

Work on the crossword usually began before lunch. Crosswords were her father's passion and she grew to love them because he did. He introduced her early to children's puzzles, leading by degrees to the cryptic clues and tortuous anagrams of broadsheet prize crosswords. She would often sit on his knee, later on the arm of his chair, while they murmured half-formed answers to each other or recombined anagrams in the margins of newspapers. An ingenious compiler could keep them at it all day. Simple days, when life's most complex problems were those bounded by a three-inch square.

When she was very young, Sunday tea was taken prompt at five, cold meats or tinned salmon, salad ingredients served in separate bowls, innocent of dressing. A piece of homemade cake, a cup of tea and then off to church. They were always an evensong family, kneeling and sitting and singing together until the time came when Joanna, in her early teens, found other calls on her Sunday evenings. Her parents still went for some years, but then the habit must have gradually died out. By the time she came home from university they had become sporadic attenders, observing only the high days and holidays. Midnight service on Christmas Eve, Easter Sunday, harvest festival. Come, ye thankful people, come. Raise the song of harvest home. All those little boxes, covered in crepe paper, filled with eclectic compilations of polished apples, washed potatoes and tinned peas. One year her box contained carrots, fresh from her father's garden, their soft green fronds enviably exotic. Did people still do that stuff?


Change of Love - Excerpt from Chapter 15

Nothing redeems us, except what we are. We know that we exist in flesh. Yet we have been without flesh. And will be again. Flesh can only travel on the earth. It cannot journey to the light. Flesh is fear. Flesh knows no freedom. In renouncing the flesh, we embrace the everlasting. Feel the weight of your body. Feel the skin and bones and tissue being drawn into the earth. It is the dead weight of mortality. Time and gravity pull at your mortal flesh. Let it go. Feel the spirit break loose. It starts to rise, passing up through body, floating up, floating out. Beyond this room. Up into the air. Rising above the clouds, into the light. Simply be. You are renewed. This is your place. Here you will receive again the immortality you once understood.

The Thursday night supper with Hilary was becoming a bit of a ritual. Nick seemed to find other things to do. A client to drink with, perhaps, or work that would keep him late at the studio. Joanna hardly noticed. The important thing was being able to spend more time with Hilary, exploring ideas and sharing energy. They could talk for hours, quite unaware of anyone else.

"There was a point in tonight's meeting," said Joanna, "when I found myself thinking that if dying is like that, then there's nothing to be afraid of. It felt so peaceful. Peace beyond understanding. World without end. All that stuff."
Joanna searched for a better explanation but the words wouldn't come. That was happening a lot lately. The more intense the experience, the less adequately she could describe it afterwards, even to Hilary. Except, she didn't have to describe it to Hilary. Hilary usually knew.
"Perhaps there is no death," Joanna continued. "That's how I felt anyway. Just for a moment. Or maybe it was longer than that. I understood something. I can't exactly say what, because it's gone now, but for a tiny instant I understood that everything works out. It isn't that nothing matters, more that everything matters, but not in the way we think it does. Am I making any sense at all?" Hilary laid down her fork, looked up and smiled. "I'm so happy for you. I knew. I could see from your face, when you came down, that you'd reached something special."
She took Joanna's hand in her own, then kissed it. No-one looked. No-one noticed. Light from the single squat candle didn't reach much beyond their table. Joanna drew their hands towards her own lips.
"Thank you."
"What for?"
"Making it possible. Saving my life."