Chris Parker, "Nameless Lake"

Chris Parker is a screenwriter who has written for shows ranging from EastEnders and Coronation Street to Bedlam, a Sky TV drama series he co-created for Red Production Company. He is also a prolific animation writer,  with credits including Peppa Pig and Shaun the Sheep. He was born in South Wales and lives in Cambridge.

About Nameless Lake, by Chris Parker

Nameless Lake is about the unspoken pressures of gender and desire, told through the shifting dynamics of a lifelong friendship. Emma and Madryn grow up with dreams of escaping their seaside hometown, sustained by an obsession with photography and secret acts of vandalism. But adulthood brings its own limitations, and Emma yearns for connection beyond the constraints of her family. Drawn deeper into Madryn’s private life, Emma feels new possibilities awakening within herself, but when Madryn faces a backlash from her controlling partner, Emma must finally break out of her role as passive observer.

You can read more about Nameless Lake on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Nameless Lake

When we carried out our next act, which was to break the arcade window, we were excited by the tiny slice of time we had given ourselves to carry it out – I had agreed to go with you to collect a textbook from a friend’s house, a round trip of no more than twenty minutes. I allowed myself only a few mouthfuls of the cider you carried in your bag so that I was affected less by the alcohol than the alien taste of orchard rot in my nose and throat. I was happy to stretch the swimming pool wristband across two of the seafront railing spikes because it meant the next job must be yours – to pull back the ball bearing you had found in your father’s toolbox until the royal-blue rubber turned pale and we had compressed thought and action into one sharp moment, not of decision, but of simply letting go, giving way to something inevitable so that the rubber band itself became the real culprit. 

Afterwards we threw ourselves down the concrete steps to the beach and scudded along the rocks until we were almost at the harbour, where the waves threatened to come and come without ever arriving, and I thought of a horse I had seen on the common when I was very small, a glorious and terrifying creature with a chestnut shine that appeared just at the moment when I happened to be thinking about horses, and I felt certain it had been made by the force of my own wishes