WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

“Hello,” says the new person whom Imposter Syndrome and I have just met. They run their eyes over me, decide I obviously qualify for a bus pass, and ask, “Are you still working, then?”

Imposter Syndrome takes a step back. Real life is nothing to do with her. “No, no I’m retired,” I say breezily. “Packed all that work nonsense in, ha ha, best decision I ever made, ha ha, lady of leisure now, ho ho.”

If the new person is a similar age to me they nod vigorously and say, “Well, quite, don’t know about leisure though, grandchildren keep you busy enough, ha ha.” 

Imposter Syndrome lets me take this one too. “Lucky enough not to have grandchildren yet, hee hee,” I say. 

The new person looks at me as if I have just revealed horns and a tail. “So what do you do with your time, then?” they ask icily.

“Um,” says Imposter Syndrome, reluctantly stepping up. “I, er, I write a bit, ha ha. You know. Creative Writing. Keeps me occupied…” She trails off.

“What sort of thing do you write?” the new person asks, with a vague flicker of interest.

“Oh…stuff…you know…a bit of the supernatural, a bit of science fiction, a bit of…well, all sorts really.”

The new person is well brought up and politely feigns interest. “Are you writing something at the moment?”

Imposter Syndrome shuffles our collective feet. “Well, yes, sort of…”

“What’s it about?”

“Um, it’s a sort of ghost story, only not, it’s about ghosts that aren’t ghosts…”

The new person gives us one last chance. “Have you published anything?”

Imposter Syndrome perks up. “Well, yes, actually, I’ve had stories in several anthologies and I’m a contributing editor to an international online writing community and I…”

“Anything I might have read?”

“Um…probably not, unless you’re a fan of small literary magazines and online writing communities.”

At this point the new person usually discovers they have an urgent appointment with either the bar or the toilet. 

Of course, if the new person is of a younger generation, the conversation doesn’t get beyond “I’m retired” because the younger person gives me the look that says, “It’s OK for your fucking generation, Boomer, mine will never get the chance to bloody retire,” and of course they’re right. Neither I nor Imposter Syndrome have an answer to that one.

It took me while, though, to realise the answer I always give to “What’s it about?” was entirely wrong. It should be, always, “I don’t know. I haven’t finished it yet.”

I was completely astounded when, after going to a critique group for a while, someone said of my contribution for that month, “Of course, your usual themes are there.”

“My what?”

Everyone else looked at me as if I were stupid. “Your usual themes. Your thing about the past seeping into the present, and the process of memory, and intergenerational buggins. It’s all there.”

“But it’s a story about a cat having a conversation with an alien mouse.”

They were very kind. “Dear, you could write a story about a brick having a conversation with a garden gate, and all that stuff would be in it. That’s your thing.”

“I’ve got a thing?”

Some writers start out with a thing, a theme, an Idea, and fit their stories around it. They know who they are, what they want to say, and pretty much how they want to say it. I envy them. They undoubtedly save a lot of time, and their Imposter Syndrome is probably smaller and less vocal than mine. I mean, how can I have a ‘theme’? I’m about giving people a bit of a jump scare, or making them laugh. A conversation, or an image of someone engaged in a particular activity, or a character name, or even a title for a story, come into my mind and demand I find out what’s going on. I don’t start off with a theme, or an Idea. I just like playing about with words.

I also struggle with endings, but I know I’m not alone there. It has, though, taken me far longer than it should to realise that if I’m struggling with an ending, it’s because I don’t really know what the story’s about. 

I’m not much of a one for tidy endings. I like a bit of ambivalence and ambiguity, but there’s a difference between ambiguity and leaving your reader asking, “What the fuck was that all about?”, and not as in, “Oooh, I wasn’t expecting that, I’m going to go back and read it again, because otherwise this will keep me awake all night”, more your “Well, that’s a few hours of my life I’ll never get back”.

There’s a story I’ve been working on for, oh, a number of years now. Literally, years. It started off with an image of a man standing in the middle of a road. I knew his name, and it was a very unusual name, and I knew he was in rural America. The story evolved and I realised it was related to a meeting I had with someone in my teens. I also realised it was important to me, and I thought it was about a significant World Event. I couldn’t get the ending right at all. 

I rewrote the bloody thing. I took it to a couple of critique groups. They all said the ending didn’t work, but no-one was able to put their finger on exactly what was wrong. I put it away. I got it out again. I put it away again. I asked myself what it was about, and told myself it’s bloody obvious what it’s about. I got impatient with both me and the story and put it away once more.

I recently got the damn thing out again and asked an American friend, someone I know through the wonderful online writing community ABC Tales, if he would read it and make sure the dialogue, terminology etc was appropriate to the US. Also, any hints on an ending. He was kind enough to say yes. I went through it once more, before I sent it, shouted at my shit ending, then sat down and asked myself, “Yeah, but what is it about?”, and realised I’d pretty much forgotten why I originally wrote it.  

I jotted down a few questions in a sort of a list.  (I am a bit wary of lists. I always associate them with a former partner who couldn’t get dressed without making a list, but at my age they’re a necessity. They really do give you some insight into the perennial question of why you’ve walked into this room.) I stepped back, literally, staring at the list lying on the table, and demanded, “What? Just what?”

Quarter of an hour later it gave up teasing and produced an answer. After which the ending wrote itself. 

There’s a thrill in finding out what our stories are actually about, but I also find it disconcerting. I’m seventy. I always assumed that by this point I’d have things reasonably worked out. I am this person, these things are important to me, these things can be left behind. But that’s the problem with this writing lark. It has a habit of asking, “But why this? And why now?”  

I’ve learned that sometimes I have to completely discard preconceived ideas of what the story’s about. ‘Kill your darlings’ doesn’t just apply to overripe phrases or meandering dialogue. It can mean the whole concept of the piece. Somewhere in there is the truth of what I’m writing. I’m just too wrapped up in red herrings to see it. Sometimes I may not even want to see it. Sometimes, it takes a while. 

I’m not sure, though, that the next new person Imposter Syndrome and I meet will be overimpressed when we tell them, “Haven’t got the foggiest idea what I’m writing about, come back in about six months and I’ll tell you. Or hey, buy my book of short stories, when it comes out! The answers to all your questions will be there!”

I think Imposter Syndrome and I need to have some brisk conversations about marketing strategies in social situations before we can quite manage that pitch, though.

Thanks for reading!

Jane

What I’m reading: 

Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander (Picador). One of the funniest, most insightful and moving novels I’ve read. Auslander is writing about a diaspora community struggling with identity and tradition in a changing world, but this diaspora community is like no other, and has very good reason to worry about the reaction of others.

Don’t Look Now and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier (Penguin). I first read Don’t Look Now decades ago, long before the film came out. It was in another collection then, where it wasn’t even the headline story. I suppose her style is old-fashioned now and yes, she lived in a very different world. But the power of these often strange and eerie stories remains. She was a consummate short story writer.

A STORY OF MAY

 I don’t just write about the supernatural or alien weird. Sometimes I write about plain, everyday oddities, and family dynamics always fascinate me. Also names. I can’t start a story unless I have the names of the main characters in place. Sometimes the name comes first, and it takes me ages to find a story to go with it. 

This piece came out of a writing prompt on the website ABCTales.com, of which I have been a member for many years. It was spring, and the prompt was simply to write something about May. The thing I love about writing prompts is that you never know quite where they’re going to lead…

A STORY OF MAY

I was born in October, and I always knew my name was chosen as a political statement. My Dad was a member of the International Marxist Group back then. They were big in the seventies. 

Well. Big in our household.   

Our surname was Day, so Dad wanted May, and Mum said she gave in because otherwise I might have been October Revolution. Anyway, she said, I was pink and beautiful, like a May Day.

By the time my sister was born two years later, Dad had fallen out with International Marxism, so she was called Holly (she was born on Christmas Eve). Eighteen months after that our brother was called Brian, for no reason whatsoever.

It was shit being called May Day. At school I got christened Walking Disaster, Plane Crash and, thanks to Larry Grayson, Gay Day. My sister had it worse as we got older, with nudge-nudge wink-wink boys going on about having a Holly Day, or going to work on a Holly Day, or calling her, more simplistically, Bank. Brian was no help. He just used to laugh with the rest of them, safe behind his normality.

When I was fifteen and she was thirteen, my sister and I decided to change our names. I chose Christina, and she chose Eloise. We initially went for Brooke as our new surname, after Rupert, but we were sensitive to all possibilities of corruption, and knew that Babbling would be too great a temptation for many. So we chose Carmichael, because it was the surname of the heroine in a book we both liked.

When we told Mum we were changing our names, she said she didn’t care about the surname, because that was just an accident of patriarchy, but the other names had been chosen specially for us, with love if not a lot of common sense, and she would be upset if we changed them. So we decided to keep the first names and just change the surname. May and Holly Carmichael sounded all right.

We told Dad we were dumping the accident of patriarchy, and he got very annoyed. He couldn’t say he was supporting the patriarchy, of course, because even though he wasn’t still an International Marxist he still had Leanings, and anyway Mum was within earshot, her wimmin’s earrings, clenched fist enclosed in the circle of the female symbol, dangling with intent. He told us we couldn’t change our names until we were eighteen. Then Mum stepped in and said, it’s a matter of self-identity, if they choose to identify as Carmichael rather than Day, that’s their free choice. And then Dad said, bollocks, this isn’t really about them is it, this is about you trying to indoctrinate them. And Mum said, don’t talk to me about indoctrination, I didn’t call her May Day. Dad said, I know, you should have married Dennis from the fucking International Socialists, he’s a bloody accountant now, didn’t he do well. And Mum said, right, and you should have married that American girl, Peggy Sue or whatever she was called, with the dad with the oilfields. Dad said, Rina Mae, actually, and her dad owned supermarkets, and she was working to bring down the system from within. And Mum said, yeah, I heard she got within lots of systems while she was over here, yours included. Then they both remembered we were there, and a scratchy blanket of silence descended from a great height.

They quite often had conversations like this, that sprang out of nowhere, went from nought to sixty in three seconds, and roared off down a road we couldn’t follow. I think they both kind of missed them after the divorce. Dad never has that kind of conversation with Shona, who says things like, I hear what you’re saying and we’re going to take time out for each of us to visualise what it’s like for the other. And Mitch just says to Mum, if you say so hun. 

Mum went to see the school about whether we could be called Carmichael instead of Day, but the head said it wouldn’t matter what we called ourselves, as far as the other kids were concerned we would always be Day. Mum told us maybe there were lessons to be learned about How to Cope With What You Can’t Change. When we pointed out she’d said we could change our names if we wanted to, she got snappy and said, there are people who put up with a lot worse, like Thalidomide victims or polio cases or gingers. 

Reluctantly, we accepted we were not going to be Carmichaels, although we did call each other Christina and Eloise for a while, until we got bored with having to remember. 

The Christmas after we didn’t change our names, Granny Day died on the 24th, thus ruining both Holly’s and Jesus’ birthdays. We barely knew her. She was Liverpool Irish Catholic, she’d had a couple of uncles who were Martyrs Of The Easter Rising, and she couldn’t stand our mother, who took her youngest son from his destiny in the priesthood and filled his head with atheist blasphemy so that he never baptised his children. We weren’t supposed to know that, of course, but the thing about Liverpool Irish relatives is that they’re Liverpool, and they’re Irish, so things get said. Our Uncle Dermot used to remind her, at our rare family gatherings, that Dad first joined the heathen socialists while he was still at school, long before he met Mum, but by the time Dermot had plucked up courage to do that the Guinness had been flowing for a while and Granny Day was singing The Bold Fenian Men and demanding money with menaces for our boys in the IRA.

Her funeral was full bells and whistles Catholic mass, following a procession with plumes and horses and an enormous construction of flowers that read MAM. Mum didn’t want to go, and she certainly didn’t want us there, and there’d been another nought to sixty conversation which we had no trouble hearing from upstairs. Dad said, she was my mother after all, the family will expect you to go. Mum said, she hated my guts, and I don’t think I could stomach listening to Dermot giving some sort of bloody eulogy after what she’s done to him all these years. (Uncle Dermot was Not The Marrying Kind, and Granny Day never forgave him for it, something else we weren’t supposed to know.) Dad said, I came to your mother’s funeral and she didn’t like me. Mum said, my mother didn’t ask a picture of the Virgin Mary for advice on how to deal with the harlot who ripped her child from the bosom of a God-fearing family. Dad said, she didn’t call you a harlot. After a moment Mum said, no, you’re right, it was a strumpet.

In the end Mum gave in and we all went. The entire tribe was there. As well as Uncle Dermot there was our Uncle Pat and our Aunties Sheila, Maureen and Rosemary, plus cousins, second cousins, cousins at various stages of remove, cousins by marriage, and an undefined posh contingent from Southport. When the plate came round for the collection in the name of our dear sister Lilian Veronica now departed, Mum hissed to Dad, don’t put anything in there, you know where it’ll go.  Dad hissed, it’s my mother’s collection, and anyway you support Troops Out. Mum hissed, I support Troops Out, not kneecapping. By now they were getting looks, and the father of the Southport clan shuffled his feet, put away his twenty-pound note and gave a fiver instead.

So Lilian Veronica Day was buried with more or less due reverence, and we adjourned to the wake at Riordan Road Community Hall.  Given the occasion Dad said Holly and I could have a Snowball to drink, with a maraschino cherry on a plastic spear. Brian complained because he wasn’t allowed a shandy. 

Mum was just freezing herself into disapproval at the first strains of The Bold Fenian Men when one of the myriad cousins slapped Dad on the back and said, sad day, sad day, she was one of the old school. Dad nodded and Mum set her lips very firmly together. The cousin said, I see she stuck with Lilian Veronica then, wouldn’t go back to her original name. Mum unset her lips and said, her original name, what do you mean? The cousin chuckled and said, Lilian was her second name, and Veronica was her confirmation name, she dropped her first name when she got married. Mum asked, what was her first name?  The cousin said, May, May McCartney as was, but she never fancied being May Day, well, who would?   

The cousin wandered off to the bar and Mum said, you named our daughter after your mother, you named our daughter after a woman who hated me. Dad said, I didn’t, that had nothing to do with it.  Mum said, you hypocrite, you bloody hypocrite, all that political bullshit, and you named her after a woman who once told me if I ever set foot in Ireland she would personally tell the IRA. Dad said, this isn’t the time. Mum said, oh, it’s time, it’s high time, high bloody time I came to my senses, Dermot wasn’t the only one the old cow did her work on. 

And I knew this time was different from all the other times, because there was no nought to sixty roar. Mum said, we’re leaving, and she walked away, with Holly and Brian and I trailing behind her, and Dad standing alone in the middle of the crowded hall, while the bodhran thrummed the heartbeat for The Bold Fenian Men.

AS YOU WISH

Sometimes people ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas from?” Sometimes the writer can give you a fairly coherent answer (coherent for a writer, anyway) and sometimes they just furrow their brows and say, “Um…it just kind of…arrived…” This story was one of those. It arrived complete. I have no idea where it came from. The writer Paul Marandina commented that  it’s “Thought provoking and somewhere in the wastelands between sci-fi and horror.” He did add, “It's a good place to be.” So I’ll take it as a compliment.

AS YOU WISH

MONDAY

“Please, Alex.” She holds the spoon, her hand trembling slightly.

He shakes his head, his eyes staring hard into hers.

“Just a little, Alex. Please.” The head shake again, more emphatic this time. But if he doesn’t eat now he’ll want to eat in an hour, or maybe less, and that will mean he’ll be late going for his sleep, and then the afternoon will seep into the evening, and the evening into the night, and there will be another day gone, another day when she went nowhere and saw no-one and simply disappeared into the gaping maw of his needs.

TUESDAY

She sits in the consulting room. The doctor gives her a friendly smile across the desk.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do, Miss Field. I did explain, right at the beginning, that the contract is binding for the life of your invalid. You signed the papers.”

“I didn’t know,” she says.

He says, “You were given all the information.”

“But I didn’t understand." She looks at her fingers, pressed against the sharp clasp of her handbag.

“I’m sorry,” says the doctor gently.

“Sometimes,” she says, looking up at him, “I think I’ll just make a wish.”

His eyes are full of compassion. “What would you wish for?”

She polishes the clasp with her fingertip. “A new world. A brand new start, for everyone.”

“Yes,” he says. “I think we’d all wish for that.”

She looks back up at him. “But I mustn’t, must I, Doctor? I’m not allowed to wish.”

He frowns. “Miss Field…”

She gets to her feet. “I will try not to,” she says. “I will try not to wish.”

 The memory of her despair remains with the doctor all that day. How terrible, he thinks, to have lost all hope, to feel that one could not even wish to make it better. Her parting words continue to disturb him, and he wakes that night flushed and trembling from a nightmare whose details have vanished but whose feeling still haunts him.

WEDNESDAY

They live in one of the small brick bungalows by the lake. The bungalows are all the same: main room, a kitchen, his bedroom and attached bathroom. Her bedroom and bathroom. And the Office, with the double locks and the alarm button.

On good days she wheels his chair to the window so he can look across the lake to the distant hills. She always chooses to sit with him, the small, neat box strapped to her wrist. That way she can pick up the first alteration in its gentle, rhythmic hum, and press the control button before his change properly starts. She prefers to anticipate and avert a crisis. The box is, after all, just a machine. She’s not sure she has that much trust in it, or in the restraints that pin him to his chair.

Today is not a good day. Today he is in his bedroom, under total restraint, and she is secured in the Office, trying hard not to wish.

That night the doctor is woken by the sound of his own shout. He stares around his darkened room, bewildered, and then suddenly his mind clears.

“Oh,” he whispers. “No. Surely not. Surely it can’t be that.”

He makes a phone call, but the recorded voice at the other end tells him it is out of hours and he will have to call again in the morning.

THURSDAY

Today is a better day and so today she will give him a shower. She says, “Shower day, Alex,” and wheels him to his bathroom. The hard eyes watch her as she manoeuvres the shower hoist into place, but he is quiet as the hoist lifts him from his chair and lowers him into the bath. She turns the shower on. The water is impregnated with cleansers, and the sponges in the hoist activate to clean him gently and thoroughly. He closes his eyes as the water cascades over him. She leaves the bathroom. There are few sensual experiences in his life now, and she cannot bear the animal hunger on his face at this one.

 In the judge’s office, the doctor wonders if he is about to make a fool of himself over a nightmare.

The judge looks at the papers on his desk. “So what’s the problem with Miss Field?”

The doctor says, “She doesn’t want to continue.”

“She was given all the information?” asks the judge.

The doctor nods. “Yes. Everything signed and logged. She’s got no legal case. But there are issues.”

“There are always issues,” the judge says, “and there is always a point when the family don’t want to continue. We can’t give in every time someone doesn’t want to continue.” He looks again at the papers. “She’s the aunt, I see.”

The doctor nods. “Both his parents died before the War.” He exhales. “At least they never had to see what happened to him.”

The judge purses his lips. “Non-parents tend to find it harder. I’ll put this case in for review, but I very much doubt the Board will do anything.”

“She told me,” says the doctor, hesitantly, “that sometimes she just wants to make a wish.”

“What?” says the judge, looking up.

The doctor's eyes are uncertain. “She said sometimes she thinks she’ll just make a wish and then she said, she wasn’t allowed to wish. And she’d try…not to…” his voice fades.

The judge roars, “God damn it, man, why didn’t you say?”

“I thought she might just be…I mean it’s natural to want things to be different, we all want that…” his face crumples. “I’ve never come across one of them before. There was nothing in her background checks. I mean, we’d know, wouldn’t we, if she was one of the War Affected. If she could wish…” his voice dies again.

The judge says coldly, “You have more faith in our record keeping than I do. We’d better get out to the lake.” Rising from his chair he adds, “I don’t suppose she said what she would wish for?”

The shower turns off automatically, and the dryer comes on. She waits until she hears it go off, then returns to the bathroom and says, “There, lovely and clean.” Back in the bedroom she dresses him in freshly laundered clothes. Some of the restraints have to be loosened while she manoeuvres and wriggles him into underwear, trousers and tunic, and she avoids looking at his face as she does it. She hates the thought that her touch might be another of those few sensual experiences.

She wheels him into the main room, says “Lunch now” and places his chair by the dining table. She goes into the kitchen to fetch his bowl, with the soft food already prepared, and then feels, insistent against her wrist, the suddenly sharpened pulse of the box.

The change will be well underway by the time she gets back into the main room, and she cannot bear the thought of that face.

She closes her eyes.

“I wish,” she says deliberately, under her breath. “I wish.”

The judge stands on the pebbled shore of the lake. “Shit”. He looks at the brick bungalows, shimmering in the air, fading in and out of sight. “Fucking shit.”

The doctor whispers, “Can we stop it?”

The judge says, “Only if we find her and kill her. Removing the source is the only way to stop a wish.”

The doctor whispers again. “How far will it spread?”

The judge shakes his head. “Depends on precisely what she wished for. Perhaps she just wanted her invalid to disappear.” He looks at the scattered empty spaces where bungalows once stood. “But I’d say she wanted considerably more than that.”

“It’s my fault,” the doctor says. “I should have done something sooner.”

“Yes,” says the judge. “But not only yours. Whoever did her background checks. Whoever didn’t pick up any of the signs. Whoever started the damn war, and the damn experiments, and the whole damn mess. Whoever stood by and let them do it.”

The doctor is silent.

The judge’s body shakes with a deep sigh. “The ones who can wish, those few with that power, they’re supposed to be contained too. Drugged out of their minds so they can’t think, never mind wish. And then one slips through the net.” His voice falters. “Ever since the war we’ve seen the invalids as the main problem because there’s so many of them, and what they can do, when they change, is so terrible. But the ones who can wish…” he shakes his head.

“She said she wanted a new world,” murmurs the doctor. He looks towards the hills, as their outlines dim and blur in the distance.

“Yes.” The judge glances towards the water.

Across the lake, the hills flicker out.