little scratch

by Rebecca Watson

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A unique audiobook experience, written and performed by one of the most talented young authors to have emerged in recent British fiction.
NOMINATED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOT PRIZE
'Extraordinary' New Yorker
little scratch tells the story of a day in the life of an unnamed woman, living in a lower-case world of demarcated fridge shelves and office politics; clock-watching and WhatsApp notifications. In a voice that is fiercely wry, touchingly delicate and increasingly neurotic, the protagonist relays what it takes to get through the quotidian detail of that single trajectory - from morning to night - while processing recent sexual violence.
little scratch is about the coexistence of monotony with our waking, intelligent lives. It is a powerful evocation of how the external and internal aspects of our lives exist in a helix and what it means to live out the course of a single day consumed by trauma.
‘I found myself unable to stop listening' ***** Netgalley reviewer.
Rebecca Watson is Assistant Arts Editor at the Financial Times. Her work has been published in the Times Literary Supplement and Granta. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize.
‘A daringly experimental debut' The Guardian
‘[An] astonishing debut' Financial Times
‘An incredible debut… It'll be on every prize list' Stylist Magazine picks for 2021
‘Startlingly original' Vogue
'Wry, funny and heartbreaking' Sophie Mackintosh
'little scratch is a story that is urgent. It is a story that needs to be told' Meena Kandasamy
'Reads like the cinders settling in the air after an explosion... daring and completely readable' Colin Barrett
'little scratch is a little miracle... impossible to read it and not wish there were more books like it' Alan Trotter
'Confident and vital... little scratch is an absolute gift' Naoise Dolan

Release date: August 11, 2020

Publisher: Anchor

Print pages: 224

Sample

look at me now lost in linearity, where is the freedom in my head, to not have to only move side to side, stuck in straight lines every morning once I’ve arrived in this office, breaking myself in every morning, having to loosen the numbness punch by punch

but yes I can feel my head loosening, freeing, it’s always this way, numbness ebbs, visits, interrupts, but always pushed down eventually taking my head away, but always giving it back (or do I wrench it back? I am not sure but I am tired certainly, so I might have been wrenching), takes a while to unstick, colleague passing, who always makes tea for the assistant in the corner, who, I wonder, perhaps knows everything, it seems so, in her soft look, her incessant tea and the no questions, no questions, apart from tea, and sometimes

noting things that she likes, today   my shoes her, nice shoes!
patent t-bars that I rather like myself me, aw, thank you!
(obviously) they’re from Tesco
but don’t tell anyone

her, your secret’s safe with me

and she’s away, me still not even sure what she does, her name beginning with R, likely Rachel although that doesn’t sound right,

someone called her over once after she left my desk (she was probably pausing to offer me tea or compliment my dress), and I remember thinking I MUST REMEMBER HER NAME but all that’s left now is the R

I would conclude that she’s imagined, except I imagine that if I were to imagine people they’d make less small talk, do something more radical, incite Gregorian chant, my subconscious trying to find an escape route, a way to be sent out of this place for good (and a chant filling the newsroom might do the trick), I don’t think I’d imagine someone nice, I’d know I was imagining it straight away,

nah I don’t buy it,

I’d tell my imagined colleague,

just not a believable character I’m afraid, the critics would slate you
ignoring, admittedly, the fact that she does exist, her and the flecked auburn falling across her back, the white of her eyes even whiter than her skin

(her paleness not a weakness, not prone to illness, just pale),

I’m still in my argument (with myself inside my head) ignoring the fact that all of that exists, all of her exists, those eyes that hair those soft looks that seem to say I know I know I know, all exist and thus she is believable, is real even, but yes, after all, often those that are real are the ones that, when imagined up, don’t quite fit, don’t quite work

and she is gone now after all

shoes still on my feet

her gone

wondering the difference between a woman saying nice shoes

a woman I do not know very well at all no and a man

I do not know very well at all saying nice shoes
I guess
if a man says a certain sort of man that is, I can’t say for sure,
can’t tell you how to know, just that you’ll know when you know, that it’s that sort of man, yes,

when that sort of man says  nice shoes

he is not saying nice shoes
he is saying I am itemising you

he is saying, take yourself out of that head and put your eyes in my sockets

because hello I am itemising you

like yesterday

that man rapping the side of his stand

selling caramel nuts me sitting nearby propped on the side by the river ten minutes before I needed to go back to my desk reading and then him, suddenly, rapping the side, rap rap rap, me head down ignoring, him rapping the side, me looking up and beaming at me, nothing more, just wanting to grin, to show his presence when I was finally for a moment not present anywhere

what are those moments called? some would call them niceties I guess but I just hear the knock against the side of his stand with his fist (clenched), needing me to notice, to be interrupted, to give the attention I was so set on giving elsewhere

I know if I told this anecdote I’d stress the nuance, if I were to tell my him about it, as I often end up doing, telling that is (although not other things but this digression is not something I am going into), I’d embellish, I’d say !HE LOOKED ME UP AND DOWN!, or !he said PHWOAR LIKE A BIT OF THAT!, adding any detail to support my side so there is no chance he’d doubt, no chance he’d say, Well what’s wrong with a man wanting to smile at you on a sunny day? the answer is obviously a lot A LOT IS WRONG WITH THAT but I don’t have the words I can’t unpick