Finding a good opening

The following comes from Graham Joyce’s Smoking Poppy (the only book of his that has really captured me), and it is possibly the strongest opening few paragraphs I have ever read. I remember standing in a bookstore reading this passage and the last line literally had me staggering in the aisle, struck dumb and dark.

Oh that Charlie of mine, how I wanted her back.

When a baby is born the fontanel at the top of the head yawns open. You fill the hole with shimmering, molten, free-running love, where it sets and hardens over the hole with something like bone. But for the first few weeks of a baby’s life, you are intoxicated by the extraordinary scent of its head. The chemical fix. A gift from the garden of paradise. You want it all the time, and you get it when you cradle that baby in your arms.

After the first year this perfume thins out, but it never deserts the child entirely. So you keep hugging. Every time you pick up that infant you look for an opportunity to get her hair under your nostrils so you might get a hint, a hit, once more, of the perfume of heaven. It’s still there when she’s six years old. And even at eleven. And though between the ages of twelve and fifteen she pushes away your fatherly embrace, she still comes to you when she’s tired or hurt or unhappy. Then at seventeen it seems she’s more likely to come back to you, relaxed in your company again, not afraid to take a hug. And you’re still getting it. That scent. That charge. The love amalgam, fixed and hardening there from Day One. It’s still there.

And it’s there on the October afternoon, with the golden leaves spinning all around you, when you hug her and kiss her and wave her away to her life.

Yes, how I wanted her back. my Charlie. Just for two minutes. Just so I could hold her and sniff her hair to check that she was all right. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because she was rotting in a prison cell in some Far Eastern jail. And it made me want to howl like a dog.