Content warning: mention of rape
What if something unspeakable happened to you at your office desk? What if you had to continue sitting there from nine to five, five days a week? In 2019, a study found that over half of UK women have been subjected to unwanted sexual behaviours at work. Around 80% of these women never reported it.
Rebecca Watson’s debut novel, little scratch, imagines spending a day inside the mind of one of these women. From the outside, the day seems unremarkable. The protagonist wakes up hungover and rushes to catch a crowded train into London for her dead-end job. She answers the phone and sends emails, then she meets her boyfriend for a poetry reading and pints. Nobody – not even her boyfriend – knows that her boss raped her at the desk where she sits each day. Other than the scabs on her legs where she compulsively scratches at her skin, she offers no external clue that something terrible happened.
Inside her head, however, is a different story. Watson fills each page of little scratch with jumbled fragments of text that capture every thought and sensation the protagonist experiences. Scattered irregularly across the paper, the experimental writing style looks more like poetry than prose. One moment, the protagonist is thinking about her mundane daily tasks – should she fill up her water bottle? Scroll one more time through Twitter? Then, her thoughts spiral. Her boss only physically appears once in the novel but his presence lurks inside her mind; the character’s brain feels as constrictive and dangerous as the office itself.
The pertinence of Watson’s experimental style to the subject matter is clearest when the protagonist finally physically encounters her boss. Her racing thoughts are represented concurrently on the page with their calculated guardedness: “him, did you get my email? / get your eyes off me you cunt stop looking at / me, which one?” Later, the protagonist chats with her boyfriend in a pub, putting on a show of normality while her thoughts scream at her to tell him about the rape. By filling each page with these mental interruptions, little scratch foregrounds the gut-wrenching disconnect between what is happening inside the protagonist’s head and in the world outside.
Although the internal experience of trauma is at the centre of the novel, the book also has vivid moments of joy and humour. Watson writes one page in the formation of a funnel, to represent the rush of commuters trying to push their way out of a train; the final agonisingly long minutes in the office are written in the shape of a clock face that the reader slowly circles their eyes around. One page is filled with the word ‘pedalling’ as the protagonist cycles away from work, finally free. Watson nods to Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925), which also follows the thoughts of a woman throughout a day in London. Almost a century later, Watson, like Woolf, finds beauty in these everyday, private observations of life.
Written before the pandemic but published during a lockdown, Watson’s mentions of crowded commutes and packed pubs make the novel now seem like a work of historical fiction. As she wrote in the Financial Times, her depiction of the pre-pandemic nine-to-five which once seemed universally timeless has now become “a time capsule.” If little scratch is a time capsule, it’s a perfect one. With her total commitment to immersing the reader in her protagonist’s brain, little scratch succeeds where many other novels fall short. For a brief time, it makes us truly see the world through the character’s eyes.
little scratch is published by Faber & Faber.
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