The blank nights

Text: an original contemporary personal-essay-style practice extract.

I expected the observatory log to be about the sky. Instead, its first pages reported a sticking door, a damp cupboard and the number of torch batteries remaining. Even the stars entered indirectly: “Cloud all night. No observation.” The sentence occurred so often that I began to hear it as a door being shut.

Halfway through the book, one entry interrupted the routine. Someone had written, “Clear enough to wake M.” The words had been crossed out, though not completely, and replaced with “Lens checked at 02:10.” I could have made a story from that correction. Perhaps M was another observer, waiting for a rare event; perhaps the initial belonged to somebody who had asked not to be disturbed. The log supplied no answer. On the next line, the writer had returned to batteries.

After that, I read the book less trustingly. Blank spaces no longer looked empty, but I resisted filling them. Three weeks were missing before the familiar handwriting resumed, smaller than before: “Cloud all night.” Near the end, a second hand recorded, “Keys returned.” There was no explanation of who had returned them, or why.

When I left the observatory, the clouds had cleared. I looked up, expecting the sky to feel newly significant, but it remained too large for the few marks in the book. What stayed with me was narrower: the crossed-out sentence, still visible beneath its replacement, and the care somebody had taken not to erase it altogether.

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to present the narrator’s changing response to the log and to interest and engage the reader.

In your answer, consider:

• language features and techniques
• structural techniques
• the effect on the reader.

Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.