Again, they laugh, soon silently. They sit, shaking and smiling, their mouths open wide. She crosses and then uncrosses her legs. Her skirt rides high. Her thighs shine under the café’s lights. She lifts it up, for a moment, showing her friend the pink underwear beneath. They snort, with laughter, together.
Ariane’s laugh, though, becomes mechanical. Its timing is slightly off. Her jaw is clenched and her eyes – they dart away from her friend’s face too often.
Where does a novel come from? A thousand impulses and compulsions over time. A novel – this one, at least – is an unassailable compendium of experiences that result in a pure fiction. Here is a loose telling of an event I witnessed; here is a character made up of the ghosts of people I knew; here is my distillation of a poem, pressed and kneaded into a conversation in a sweaty Spanish tavern. Nothing ever looks like the place from which it came; but that is why writing is addictive – you want to see what comes out.
Now you realise this is not the case. He melts before you, on the bus – this jigsaw of him – this memory, and you think you can hear the distant bleep of the heart monitor as he hangs on to life support like you used to for his phone call. It always came… you, sat on the bottom step, stretching the coil of the receiver across your palm, as you later pulled at the curls in his hair, both springing back as tightly-knitted, as lock-tangled as that first time.
As soon as I started writing I realised there would not be much untainted fun in this story. How did you end up living in a Ferrari? Of course, silly me, he had to have gone through a fair amount of losing to get there. The man had had a very different life not long before. The local hoodlums were his son’s age, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the mood darkened fast on his nights’ rounds.
Anthropomorphism is not to be encouraged in adult writing but it has a certain useful pedigree. It enables one to get closer to the animal kingdom and allows one to exhibit what one hopes are charitable attitudes towards it. Part of that response is to do with marvelling at form, function and behaviour, especially behaviour hitherto undiscovered. So my academic training as a biologist would have sent me to Bristol Zoo, specifically to the Primates, and more particularly to the gorillas. ‘Old Roffe’, however, is not an anthropomorphic story.
When I write a short story it can be born from anything. I might only have a first sentence or maybe an inkling about a scene, a character; but often I have no idea what the finished story will look like or how long it will be – it just evolves until it becomes what…
When that story was first published I knew that I wasn’t finished with these kids cast adrift after a low-key technological apocalypse. Their struggle to cope with a world bereft of mobile phones and games consoles mirrored the confusion I saw in my teenage siblings’ eyes when I talked about the pre-Internet era, or something as archaic as a manual typewriter. I wasn’t finished with exploring their world.
The singer’s chest was lifting like somebody was blowing him up. You looked at your Dad but his eyes were closed. Sometimes music closed his eyes and other times it made them watery. You went back to your drawing. The tenor’s voice was rising as if he was going to cry. You moved your hand across your page pushing your pencil down, then up again to a peak. The orchestra music got louder then broke into a shower of sounds, like when the Halloween bonfire on the green shatters the air with flying blue sparks. Your mother sat up and turned the volume down.
That’s what folk call me, among things; I don’t so much talk as hum. They used to call me flying man. They used to talk to me. Now it’s just books keeps me company. And magazines: paragliding ones is what I like best, still counts as books far as I’m concerned, but I’m not fussy.…
Above everything however, the walkway that lead to the hospital gates offered the chance to either plan or recompose. The difference in air, lightness and gait was tattooed onto every walker depending on the direction of their step. Evidence poured from them, ambitiously upbeat if they were walking in to visit friends and relatives yet silently screaming as they left, bereft of feeling and re-entering a world that no longer looked familiar.
His was a name which was neither specific nor personal. Brennan could have belonged to any male in Ireland, at any time. When Eileen married him and took his name, Brennan desperately wanted to feel flattered. He tried the angle that women were not doing this sort of thing any more. But Eileen just laughed,…
Jānis was hungry. Milk soup with dumplings would be nice. What to eat today? That depended on how much they discard in the case. Time of year, a few drunk foreigners can make a good day. Drunk British or Germans, or Finnish. All here for cheap good times. Part of a thing called Europe now, no more Soviet this and Soviet that. Now it is a new European Latvia, a new collectiveness; a new way of getting fucked! A tram, he hopped on, not knowing where it would go, but in Riga, most end up passing Milda. No need to pay, no money to pay. The tram was nearly full, but silent. A nasty silence, he knew he created.
The illustrations had that kind of Old World European quality, an illustrative style that I can only describe as melancholic and faded, even back then set in some unrecoverable past. Gnomes and woodland beings, doing whatever they do – I could read by then, but, of course, could not read the Dutch. I imagined they were discussing the giants, beings who stalked the weald and the low hills of the Kentish countryside if only I could see them. The books and the wooden cutlery fascinated me, gave me fretful dreams, thrills and anxieties as I walked the woods and marshes of my childhood.
We both got up from the couch and I followed him to a closet nearby. He reached inside a cardboard box and pulled out two black ski masks. He tossed one to me and I reluctantly caught it. He put his mask on and I began to mindlessly follow his lead, but I stopped halfway.