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Blog of Carol Adlam, resident writer at Modern Languages in April 2020

20. Marie Celeste

I go into my kitchen, here in the Midlands. My empty coffee cup is on the table. I pick it up and frown at the rings it leaves behind. I put the cup in the sink, next to the stainless steel pot scrubber. Someone else…

19. Dum spiro, spero

But then I think of the people of St Andrews – the lecturer holding a tutorial from under the stairs;  the student in a hall of residence, talking to her mother on the other side of the world; the children in…

18. The Dying Day

And now the streets of St Andrews are quiet, stiller than they have ever been since St Regulus’s prayers died away. There’s no signalman, no sign of the dreaded Carol, no Cyrilla with her armadillo. There are no…

17. The Last Train from Cupar

The day was dying as the cabbie dropped me at Cupar train station and went to resume his place among the ranks of taxis that now wait there all day and all night long. I climbed the bridge that runs over the platform,…

16. The Troika of Destiny

The flat of the Writer-in-Residence is easy to spot these days, what with the troika that seems to be permanently parked on a double yellow line outside it. Three black horses stand guard, heads drooping, blowing hot…

13. Ich bin ein False Examiner

And so I ran down North Street, late for my exam board. As I ran, I heard a woman calling my name, and I turned. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’ve been sent to meet you. We’re just about to start the subject exam board, and…

10. Banquo at Northpoint

Meanwhile, the shade of a man is cupping his hands and peering into the windows of Northpoint café. It’s closed, of course, but it’s set up in there as if for a feast, or a banquet, with tablecloths patterned with…

9. Spooks

The story I’ve been planning is about a spy, of sorts: a woman who passes unnoticed because she’s an expert in sleight-of-hand and the diversionary illusion. She started life many years ago as Charlotta Ivanovna – the…

8. Ectoplasmic

The woman fiddles with the bunch of keys at her waist, picking out a long-necked key as she comes to the door. Next to her are several buckets containing algae, krill, and anchovies. The door’s just a verdigris patch…

6. The South Street Double

In the book I’m writing there’s a scene where one character touches the face of her former lover and asks, but is this your face? This would be a perfectly reasonable question to ask of her treacherous lover, although…

5. The Spirit of School 6

My father rings to tell me about his days as a student in the English department. There was a lecturer there, he says, who really taught him to study. My father is proud of this. But after a moment he hesitates. We had…

4. Uncanny in the Byre

There were two women sitting in the Byre Theatre cafe that day, and me. They didn’t see me, in one of the cafe’s dark corners, just another person sitting hunched over a laptop. A black and white cat wove its way…

3. The Leuchars Ghost Train

The young woman on my screen smiles and tells me to hold my passport up to the camera. A bit to the left, she says, so we can see your face, and yes, that’s all done now. She’s taking screenshots, and this is my HR…

2. West Sands Eidolon

My young self growing up in Australia regarded beaches as a waste of good reading time. I recoiled from their broiling heat, the sandstorms that whipped out of nowhere and that stung so much that the only solution was…

1. The Ghost Residency

One day, many years ago now, when I was a child, my mother stood up from her seat in a crowded cinema and cried out, “West Sands! Oh, West Sands!” The cinema was the Dendy Brighton, in Brighton Bay, Australia, and the…