It’s five thirty on a Monday and the sunlight is dappled on the falling leaves… as autumn makes them twirl and dance and skid gracefully to the floor. I’m in the park and the breeze stirs conspiratorially; trees whispering their secrets to each other.
It’s exactly the kind of place artist Cally Dune would have loved.
Cally is the main character in my new book, The Sound of Your Soul, and she paints fish. But in Callly’s world, there are no fish. The fish have been polluted by the plastic and they’ve all died out. It’s an England ravaged by flooding and climate change… but that’s not all. There’s a deep dark secret at the heart of government and it’s the reason all the people are supporting the new president, with his vacuous sentiments and his egocentric policies. Cally doesn’t like him. She doesn’t trust him… but people think she’s mad. They don’t believe her worried warnings… they don’t blame the president for the reason her husband hasn’t come back from the Government’s new Training Scheme… like she does.
She would have sat in the park, wondering and waiting… hoping her husband would return, as the light got low and the silent fish swam in.
The silent fish, the ones that only she sees.
She would have painted them, later, on her canvas, in big broad stokes, each one filled with longing, but no closer to the truth.
The Sound of Your Soul is out at the end of September, from Pegasus Publishers.
