The winner of our annual Grazia x WomensPrize competition is revealed
First Chapter competition, we’re excited to announce that Carmel Boyhan Irvine, from Plymouth, has scooped first place.’s deputy editor Emma Rowley and acting senior editor Maria Lally, along with Tayari Jones, acclaimed author and 2019 winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction with, who started the story – and will now mentor Carmel as part of her prize. Tayari said, ‘She pairs a poet’s attention to language with a novelist’s sense of urgency and plot. I can’t wait to read what she writes next.
It was a shock seeing my mother again. They call it taking stock, when the earth jars on its axis. My dreams drift in a stream of diaphanous thinking, high above my spinning world.
caught unawares. She must have been annoyed that she had looked less than perfect for our meeting. ‘First impressions, Teresa! You never get to make a second entrance!’ My mother looked directly at me. ‘Teresa,’ she said again, extending her arm in a parabolic sweep over my head, from the boundary fence to the water. ‘I never expected this.’
I mounted the steps and sat down. Their broad tread was a feature of these brownstone stoops, almost wide enough to hold an outdoor table. I patted the warm smoothness. ‘Come and sit by me,’ I said to my only mother, careful to maintain enough distance to satisfy an epidemiologist and proximity to reassure a social worker that we posed no danger to one other.
“You’re very sensitive. Were you always like this?” she asked, cocking her head to one side. “I can’t imagine you’d have been very popular with the others.”The girls and I used to sleep head to toe on Mother’s narrow bunk beds, our limbs and breaths and heartbeats entwined so tightly I couldn’t tell where I started or ended, back at the big house across the way from the Grand canal.
“Do you really not remember me?” I asked her. It seemed implausible. How could I have meant so little to someone who meant so much? I wanted to cry into her skirt. “Terri!” She scrambled to her feet, all tangled heels and flippy weave, “Darlin’!” beaming at me through brightly-painted lips, the remnants of a lemon Maoam chew stuck to her gums. I tried to look away but she was tottering down the steps, arms reaching towards me like tentacles. I didn’t want to be sucked back in.
It wasn’t only my rapidly diminishing savings that were gnawing away at the sober portions of each day, it was also that the days were just. So. Long. In my bag, I felt the cool weight of the chilled bottle of white I’d picked up at the Tesco Metro ‘round the corner to help the rest of the afternoon melt into evening and decided it’d be best saved until Mother had left. No doubt I was going to need it.
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