Kit: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff. Juno Dawson
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Kit
by Juno Dawson
Published by The Borough Press
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
In the compilation and introductory material © Kate Mosse 2018
Kit © Juno Dawson 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photographs © Sally Mundy/Trevillion Images, © Shutterstock.com petals
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the author’s imagination.
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Source ISBN: 9780008257439
Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008303204
Version: 2018-07-17
Contents
Copyright
Foreword by Kate Mosse
Kit
Note on the Author
A Note on Emily Brontë
About the Publisher
SO, WHAT MAKES Wuthering Heights – published the year before Emily Brontë’s own death – the powerful, enduring, exceptional novel it is? Is it a matter of character and sense of place? Depth of emotion or the beauty of her language? Epic and Gothic? Yes, but also because it is ambitious and uncompromising. Like many others, I have gone back to it in each decade of my life and found it subtly different each time. In my teens, I was swept away by the promise of a love story, though the anger and the violence and the pain were troubling to me. In my twenties, it was the history and the snapshot of social expectations that interested me. In my thirties, when I was starting to write fiction myself, I was gripped by the architecture of the novel – two narrators, two distinct periods of history and storytelling, the complicated switching of voice. In my forties, it was the colour and the texture, the Gothic spirit of place, the characterisation of Nature itself as sentient, violent, to be feared. Now, in my fifties, as well as all this, it is also the understanding of how utterly EB changed the rules of what was acceptable for a woman to write, and how we are all in her debt. This is monumental work, not domestic. This is about the nature of life, love, and the universe, not the details of how women and men live their lives. And Wuthering Heights is exceptional amongst the novels of the period for the absence of any explicit condemnation of Heathcliff’s conduct, or any suggestion that evil might bring its own punishment.
This collection is published to celebrate the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth in 1818. What each story has in common is that, despite their shared moment of inspiration, they are themselves, and their quality stands testament both to our contemporary writers’ skills, and the timelessness of Wuthering Heights. For, though mores and expectations and opportunities alter, wherever we live and whoever we are, the human heart does not change very much. We understand love and hate, jealousy and peace, grief and injustice, because we experience these things too – as writers, as readers, as our individual selves.
I DESERVE NO LESS, but before you judge me harshly, I need you to know I’m not that girl. I’m really not. I’m not the cartoon-silhouette girl on the chick-lit novel with the kitten heels and shopping bags. I don’t girlishly trip and stumble into whimsical new love affairs every time I leave the flat. I don’t wait by the phone. I don’t imagine what I would sound like with a different last name.
But he was different.
With him I became someone else. And so fast I shocked even myself.
The first meeting – mere weeks ago, although it feels like years – has taken on sweeping cinematography. They were refurbishing Pret A Manger, and I don’t care for the battery-acid aftertaste of Café Nero, so I went, with a certain smugness, into our local independent, Roaster. It’s all exposed copper pipes, Edison bulbs, and upturned tea chests as tables. I was raging at how a coffee shop could have possibly sold out of almond croissants before nine in the morning when first I laid eyes on him.
He emerged from behind the coffee machine, a vortex of steam hissing and swirling around him. Under his apron – thumpingly masculine with its coarse fabric and rusty fasteners – he wore a Breton shirt, rolled almost to the shoulder. Both forearms were a jotter pad of tiny tattoo doodles. Across his knuckles, from right to left, were the words CRUEL ABYSS. A tidal wave of raven-black hair, with flecks and stripes of silver, tumbled over his forehead and over his right eye. His beard was long, but not unkempt.
But it was the eyes. Isn’t it always? Framed by a flat, dissatisfied brow were the bluest blue eyes I’d ever seen. Not wishy-washy grey-blue. Blue, like the sky.
He slammed the metal milk jugs around as though he was mad at them. I suppose no one particularly delights in making coffee for strangers on a Monday morning.
‘Can I help you?’ the girl asked, and I suspect she was repeating herself.
‘Oh. Yes.’ She rolled her eyes. She must have caught me staring at her colleague. ‘A skinny latte and a porridge please.’
‘Plain, cinnamon, or jam?’
‘Cinnamon.’
He never once looked my way.
As soon as I got to the office, I exploded all over Nell. ‘Oh my God! Have you seen that guy who works at Roaster?’
She smiled and put down her granola pot. ‘Oh you must mean Dane.’
‘Dane?’
‘Great Dane. Irish? Blue eyes? Very … brooding?’
‘That’s him. Holy