An Accidental Light - Softcover

Elizabeth Diamond lives in Devon, England. She has found her literary voice in mid-life, and is already working on her next novel. She received a British Arts Council grant to work on An Accidental Light.

There’s clock time where seconds mount up to minutes and minutes to hours. Where day changes to night and weeks build to months and months to a year, and the years play out on your face and in your thickening waist. The time most of us live in.
Then there’s the other sort. It has no limits. It reels you backwards without warning, spins you young again on a whim. It can be triggered by anything: a fragment of music, a scent on the air. Or a child moving in a blue school uniform in the rain. It claims you in dreams, on the borders of sleep, even in your waking moments when you think you’re safe.
A child moved out suddenly from the rear of a bus, ran in a blue smudge of uniform through the misted rain, moved out from that forward linear tick-tock time into the other, where she’s caught forever, like a broken leaf in a whirlpool current. I’ve seen her a thousand times. Running through the blue shadows in the rain. Stopped by a screech of brakes and my voice shouting. Stopped by the sudden boom of my heart.

Her name was Laura. I found that out later in the station. Bob Lees was on duty that night. He sat me down in the interview room, fetched me a coffee, and handed me a cigarette. I’d given up months ago but none of that mattered now–my old life wiped out now like a cloth wiping a smudge from glass.