The Truth About (Some) Writers... #sorrynotsorry

 The bar staff were lively, messing around with a playlist of watered-down indie disco music from our teenage years – The Kooks, Razorlight, The Wombats. I started to feel pleasantly drunk and nostalgic. I imagined him when he was fourteen, in a sunny bedroom in the London suburbs, putting on ‘She Moves In Her Own Way’ for a pretty blonde girl with a snub-nose and rosebud lips. I giggled to myself: it was nice. I didn’t resent him. I liked that he came from a different world, a world I’d seen on E4 and Gurinder Chadha films but had never inhabited myself. I chided myself for my earlier cynicism, and as the beers went down I was really looking forward to sleeping with him.

Eventually, inevitably, we got to talking about our experiences as undergraduates.

‘Yeah, I mean, I was part of a couple of creative writing societies in my, sort of, second year and, you know, it was fine, but I just don’t find that environment particularly sort of, didactic in a helpful way?’ said Seb.

I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he seemed to be taking a pop out of Durham’s ‘LitSoc’, which was fine by me. I was nicely drunk by now: the happy, trusting kind of drunk that makes you feel like everything you have to say will resonate with the other person so completely they’ll think you’re reading their mind.

 ‘Oh fuck, god, creative writing classes,’ I agreed. ‘Here’s something I noticed when I was doing creative writing classes at uni, right: there are certain phrases that, when people use them in their prose, their readers automatically think it’s fucking great. So, not-very-good writers have stock ‘this-is-really-good-writing’ phrases that allow them to hoodwink the undiscerning masses into thinking they have talent. Oh, let me think of one, right… Right, so if they’re writing a sex scene, and it’s a blowjob, rather than write, ‘I sucked him off for a bit,’ they’ll write, ‘I trailed my tongue down the length of him,’ or, you know, ‘he pushed inside me’ becomes ‘he moved until his full length was inside me.’ People read this and think, holy shit that’s fucking brilliant. Or, rather than ‘she had her hair up in ponytail,’ they’ll write, ‘her hair was piled high on top of her head.’ God, I mean, I love writing, I want it to be part of my life, but don’t you think so many people who do it are such knobs.

I knew people at uni who were into writing, and that whole ‘arts-admin’ kind of scene – not very nice people, a lot of them… some of them got stuff published, some are about to, some never will, but they’re all bloody ‘friends’ with each other, Tweeting each other in support of each other’s fucking massive manuscripts that they claim to have read, supportively, in a day!? And I’m seeing this, thinking, am I missing something here? You’re writing your own novel - how the fucking fuck do you have time to read all your ‘friends’’ unpublished manuscripts? It screams of paranoia to me, it just seems really transparent: I read it just to check it wasn’t better than mine, and it wasn’t, so now I’m safe to do a patronising Tweet about it because it’ll never get published, unlike my novel, which is excellent.

Or, you know, like, writers who arrange erotic literature nights when it’s totally obvious that they’re completely fucking repressed, and you’re going, am I the only one who can see that this person is TOTALLY FUCKING REPRESSED?! Or when people say to you, you have to write out all the crap first before you get somewhere, let it all spew out of you, and only one tiny part of that spew will be any good, so you have to start again with just that bit. Edit, edit, edit. A lot of it will have to go, they say. Okay, but what if everything I write and want to keep is what everyone else would call the warm-up, and get rid of?

 And bios! My friend got some of her writing published in an anthology and they asked her to write a bio and she wrote, you know, went to uni at bla-bla and then did bla-bla and lives in bla-bla. So when the anthology came out we looked at the bio pages and they all had stuff like, ‘after surviving two years of Tindering in Newcastle, Jerome felt it was only right (and in the interests of public welfare, ho ho!) for him to share his experiences,’ and we’re like, fuck’s sake Jerome! You wrote that about yourself! You total prick! It’s this weird suspension of disbelief thing - are we all supposed to pretend that someone has written that about Jerome, like, has he got some sort of superfan who writes his bios for him at this very very fucking fledgling stage of his career—’

Seb, I realised, was staring at me blankly.

Figs and George Michael

The light in the hall was harsh. It showed up the blue veins in my hands, which unsettled me, so I switched it off and clip-clopped through to the gentle glow of my bedroom. I’d made my bed that morning with snowy white sheets. Virginal – too virginal, I’d felt – so I’d unravelled my pink chiffon shawl speckled with embroidered figs and thrown it over the bottom half of the duvet.

            ‘Oh yeah, the fig thing. Nice. See, the thing about D.H. Lawrence—’ I’d imagined Seb saying, before I silenced him. Or – maybe – if he’d been nice, if he’d been actually quite funny, if he’d been the one, he’d have held the scarf up to the light mid-snog and said in his best Alan Partridge,

            ‘Figs. Is that a… uhh… euphemism?’

I’d left all the lights off except the pebble lamp I kept on my nightstand, which omitted a soft rosy luminescence. Everything else – laptop cables, stray knickers, magazines, had been shoved under the bed; so certain had I been that I would be sharing my room that night, so keen was I to turn it into one giant, pulsating female appendage. (Yes, Alan. It was a euphemism. Yes.)

I caught a glimpse of myself in my mirror. There was a feral, banshee look about me; my eyes were dark, a livid red blossom was climbing from my cleavage up my neck. I walked closer to my reflection, put my hands on my breasts, held them tight. With my long pinkie nail I drew a dark red line across my throat, dragging harder at the last moment so that tiny beads of blood came to the surface of my skin. I slapped my throat once, twice, and looked down at the fine trail of blood on my palm. Not enough. It’s never enough.

I snaked my hand down under the fine material of my skirt, formed a fist with my fingers and pressed it hard against my clitoris. I could tell immediately from its bad-tempered response that I would not be blessed with an orgasm tonight. The novel mystery of someone else’s touch, perhaps, could have coaxed one out. But not my own. Not now. I clenched my teeth and let out a low, animal growl.

‘There are two of her,’ I remember my mum saying to a nurse. There was a frightened look in her eye. ‘She’s… she changes.’

If I really was a banshee, I remember thinking, I’d transform myself into a bat-girl and smash out of my bedroom window, shrouded in a cloud of undulating black smoke. Up, up I’d fly, over the Sainsbury’s Local and through the city night, leaving a trail of shadowy sexual mischief in my wake. George Michael would wake from his slumber and provide a luxuriously forbidding, glittering version of ‘Fastlove’ just for me: my personal soundtrack. He’d know that my bat-self would perceive in full the profound loneliness of that song – not the upbeat disco number others took it for, but dark, so very dark.

In the absence of security, I made my way into the night.

(‘How could you be lonely if you were George Michael?’ one of his fans had asked in a documentary. ‘You’d be with George Michael all the time.’)

Eventually the haze of smoke around me would clear. My wings would carry me back through my bedroom window and I would curl up in my virginal white sheets, spent and peaceful – human again, and as whole as I could possibly be.

I was just sane enough in that moment to accept that supernatural banshee antics were not a workable Plan A. My most desired activities thus eliminated, I knew I had to find a way back to functional, sensible me that did not involve two bottles of red wine and nicking an artery. 

Playing with dialogue for novel

‘How was Jo or whatever his name is.’

Bronwen draws on her cigarette and exhales slowly, eyes dark. When she speaks it’s in the resigned, dull monotone that spells imminent booze and recklessness.  

‘He was boring. Very, very fucking boring. He knew he was boring, so in the middle of the night he pretended to sleep-talk. So that he would seem less boring. This is a thing people do now – I’ve seen them doing it on Big Brother.’

She draws again on her cig, eyes foggy.

‘Only fairly recent Big Brothers, though. See, even in 2010, when people were cunts, they weren’t such cunts as they are now. Have you noticed that?’

I’m about to ask her how she knows when it’s fake, but I know exactly. You just do. Well, people like Bron and me do. This is our magic. It is also the thing that will probably kill us.  

Without taking her eyes off the telly, Bron slithers her hand out from beneath her nest of blankets and grapples about on the sideboard for her bottle of wine.

‘Was he nice, though?’

‘No.’

‘Oh. What are you watching?’ I try to keep my voice light and cheery in the hope that hers will miraculously follow suit.

‘Celebs Go Dating.’

‘Doesn’t that have sleep-talking cunts on it?’

‘No, s’good. Can you get me a thing of seafood from the fridge?’

‘What do you mean seafood?’

‘It's in the fridge.’

Uneasy, I shuffle in my slippers to the fridge. In it there are ten packets of Waitrose seafood antipasti, neatly piled on top of one another. There is also a carton of Alvalle Gazpacho and three bottles of James White organic carrot juice. And nothing else. 

‘Where’s the Waitrose?’

‘Dornoch.’

‘How did you get to Dornoch?’

‘I got the bus. That was my activity for today. Anyway, no he wasn’t nice. He kept trying to fuck me when he’d already come, and he also didn’t put his boxers back on between sessions, which I hate. So he was lounging about in my bed, flopping about like a cherub in one of those paintings, with his small, out-of-proportion arse. Then he tried to fuck me again with his flaccid Botticelli cock and I got fed up and asked him if he understood basic anatomy and he went all quiet and then he thought about it a bit more and was downright fucking raging and said to me, what the fuck were you thinking calling your son Marius—'

Marius comes thudding down the stairs, and for a second it’s as if the whole thing is a sitcom, except it isn’t, it’s our lives.

‘Mummy, were you talking about activities? Because our activity today was potato painting and Jeremy said—’

‘Which teacher did potato painting with you and called it potato painting’ says Browen, seething.

‘Miss Hynes.’

‘Is Miss Hynes the one who gave you the idea to call your grandpa Pap-Pap?’

‘Bron, don’t.’

Maris’s little tummy inflates and deflates as he breathes quickly, keeping up with the change of tack.

‘Yes, Miss Hynes said grandpa was Pap-Pap because it’s a song: WHEN YOU BOYS AND GIRLIES PLAY SNAP-SNAP, REMEMBER TO ASK YOUR OLD PAP-PAP. FOR OLD PAP-PAP WON’T BE HERE LONG, SO LET HIM PLAY AND SING ALONG.’

Bron stares at me, enraged.

‘What’s snap-snap?’

‘Bronwen, don’t.’

‘I told mum, the last thing I TOLD HER BEFORE SHE DIED… is that he’s not going to a primary school with five other ffffff-ing children in it—’

‘WHEN YOU BOYS AND GIRLIES PLAY RAM-BAM, REMEMBER TO ASK YOUR OLD GRAM-GRAM. FOR OLD GRAM-GRAM LIKES… ehhh… LIKES PLAYING TOO, AND SOON SHE WON’T BE HERE FOR YOU.’

Bron sinks back into her armchair and pulls the blankets tightly around her as Marius pulls his t-shirt up, swells his tummy out as far as it will go, and beams at me.

‘And guess what?’

I kneel, twisting my arms around his sticky neck.

'Miss Hynes made those songs up herself!'

Smörgåsbord

Ralph gazes at the vast array of food laid out on the kitchen table.

‘Hey, wow, it’s quite the… smörgåsbord!’

Stellan glances up at us, licking meatball sauce from his thumb.  

‘Hi. Yes. Yeah, it is.’

He’s stooping slightly, too tall for my kitchen. He’s wearing the navy linen shirt his mother sent him for his birthday.

‘So this is… from your country?’ offers Ralph. He hasn’t quite caught up with his breathing after the stairs.

‘We eat this kind of thing a lot in Sweden, yes. But it’s just, y’know, fish and meat. British fish and meat, in this case.’

When Stellan first opened that shirt it was practically rigid with starch. We laughed about it. He said this was typical of his mother; she had probably washed and treated it herself after buying it. I can see that it is soft now. It ripples slightly over his naval as he bends to roll a herring fillet.

‘So what do you guys call this… you know… type of… thing?’ asks Ralph, touching the tablecloth lightly. 

‘A smörgåsbord,’ says Stellan mildly, skewering the herring into position with a cocktail stick.

Juliet snorts unhelpfully from the couch.

'Did you keep the bones..?'

When Guy gets home I’m in the spare room, stamping on a potted cyclamen. His head appears at the top of the door. He surveys the carnage passively.

‘Caught fire during the incantation,’ I explain, breathless. ‘It’ll be alright.’

‘Hm. Good luck spell?’

‘Anti-nightmare charm.’

‘Right. Much longer?’

‘No. Just the photos.’

He nods, at once disparaging and acquiescent, closing the door behind him. His voice floats back to me through the hall.

‘Hocus pocus one, two three. There’s wine and duck breasts for our tea.’

I do my best with the remaining blackened petals and place the plant at my altar, tactfully placing a few tea lights so that the scene glows prettily. I prop up grandma’s spell book next to it, open at the cyclamen charm with its soft watercolour illustrations. I hoist up the camera around my neck and take five photos. I’ll later edit them to within an inch of their lives before sending them to ClaraRusso_675, a Sicilian client who saw my profile in Elle last month. She is having recurring dreams about a beautiful vampiric creature who chases her and sucks her blood. Later she will transfer £60 into my Paypal account (tenner extra where fire is involved), and close her eyes, hoping to dream tonight of softer things.

            I pad into the kitchen. Guy has his back to me, tending two pans of spitting duck. He turns round lazily as I sit at the table.

‘Jack Nicholson’s not going to appear at the front door in a fucking dressing gown, is he?’

He’s used this one before, but I give him a benign smile and a kiss as he puts my plate in front me. he’s done a beautiful job of the duck.

‘So, Viv is on about Woolf again,’ he says, pouring the wine. ‘Or should I say, Wolves.’

Viv is Guy’s PHD tutor. I’ve never met her, but Guy has played her radio contributions to me a few times. I remember being distracted from what she was actually saying by the slack, lazy quality of her voice. Something about the gentle click in her throat when she said her cs left me vaguely nauseous. I suppress the memory and look up from my duck.

‘As in Women Who Run With…? Or Virginia’s potential offspring.’

‘Well, both. Always both. But mainly Ginnie’s bastard cubs.’

Guy’s face swims palely in the candlelight. I take a glug of my wine, trying to remember the exact point this brand of smug, conspiratorial ‘young academic’ conversation became the norm for us.

‘She didn’t have any, though, did she. Not really,’ I offer.

Guy glances at my wine and smiles at me, which is what he does when he’s trying to make allowances for my contributions falling below par.

‘Well, the Americans’ take on it was that Leonard felt she was too weak, mentally and physically, to do the childbirth thing. Anorexia, didn’t sleep. Heard voices. But that’s really just a blind rhetoric.’

‘You said that the other night.’

Guy frowns at me. ‘What?’

‘Blind rhetoric. Something Jon Snow said on the news. You said that was a blind rhetoric too.’

Guy eyes my wine again, and changes tack.

‘We talked about you, today, too.’

‘Ah?’

He nods, crunching carelessly on a breadstick. He lets the crumbs fall over his duck, using its remaining length to punctuate his speech, like a conductor.

‘She’s very interested in your really rather fucking lucrative cyber-witch project. She thinks it’s revealing that you’re making so much money casting love spells during what is arguably the most liberated period women have ever lived through. Sort of, you, know, ‘in public I’m updating my Facebook with some anti-male rhetoric, but in private I’m working out a way to extract hair from my co-worker’s head and then pay sixty quid for an Insta-sorceress to make him love me by setting fire to potted geraniums and taking photos of it.’

‘Cyclamen.’

‘What?’

‘If you’re talking about the anti-nightmare charm, it uses a cyclamen plant. Not a geranium,’ I say mildly.

‘…other interesting moral questions, too,’ Guy is saying.

‘Oh?’

‘Like, does it make it better or worse that you don’t actually believe in magic. Worse, probably. Because you’re earning money off the oh-so-very-dated notion that women need men to be happy.’

‘Is every woman who’s ever married a man anti-feminist? Or fallen in love with a man? because that’s what it is, isn’t it? It’s saying your life is better with the other person in it. Am I anti-feminist? For being with you?’
Guy surveys me for a moment, chewing coolly. 

 ‘No, because I acknowledge that you are a full, whole person in your own right. We merely compliment one another’s existence, but we are whole in ourselves.’

He smiles at me sweetly. I think about how very far from a whole person I felt the last time we had sex. I finish my wine and watch as he polishes off the food that I paid for.

‘Did you keep the bones, by the way? I need them.’

A new project is afoot...

Follow Cathy's story at www.briarheights.co.uk

'Sister Ruth' extract

Ruth lolled on the hot concrete of the airport car park and glared malevolently at her father. She felt he deserved it. He was wearing pink shorts with ducks on them and negotiating loudly with the bemused Portuguese man in charge of the Europcar rentals.

‘Run smoothly, does she? Built for the heat?’

Ruth’s mother Susan’s voice was the next to reach her on the gentle Iberian breeze.

‘Ohforfuck’ssakePete. Christ.’

Ruth hoisted herself vertical. Her brother Luca, eight years old and seven her junior, was close by, pulling a stranger’s discarded bubble-gum from a crack in the ground. 

‘How much do you hate dad? Look at his shorts,’ said Ruth, shuffling up beside him.

Luca remained silent, committed to his sticky task with uncharacteristic solemnity. His loyalty, Ruth knew, was based almost entirely on a pleading bribe extended to him on the plane by their mother. Mention had been made of a certain inflatable pool-toy from the resort shop, pined after fruitlessly by Luca on holidays gone by. Rendered in the (somewhat impractical) shape of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, it was red, it was Luca’s heart’s desire and - for the first time - it was within his grasp. All he had to do was ‘behave himself’ from plane to villa.

Luca was not sure where exactly Susan would pin his current business with the bubble-gum on the ‘behaving himself’ spectrum, but as it was a quiet preoccupation and his father’s own antics had once again taken centre-stage, he thought he was probably alright so far. At any rate, he was not inclined to destroy his chances by allowing his sister to draw him into one of her conspiratorial parent-bashing sessions. Luca knew from experience that being discovered as a participant in Ruth's vicious tête-à-têtes did not, in general, result in any T-Rex-based rewards... unless you counted the admittedly reptilian transformation of his mother when she reached peak anger zone.

And yet... The resort shop was not known for its consistency of stock. This year round, they could just as easily be kitted out with benevolent, Herbivorous, green inflatables. Herbivores would not do. Green would not do. Susan was on shaky ground with the T-Rex bribe, and they all knew it. As such, Ruth persevered with her provocations.

‘Look how annoying dad is. Just look at him. Even if you couldn't hear him, he'd be annoying. Mum’s about to lose it, look.’

Luca, thinking resentfully of Diplodocuses - the gentle, boring fools - allowed himself a glance in the direction of his parents. Sure enough, Susan was at breaking point, shifting from foot to foot, beetroot-faced as Pete bellowed on about air conditioning to the now rather alarmed-looking car dealer.

‘Imagine you were mum and you had to kiss dad,’ whispered Ruth in Luca’s ear. Luca screamed. She clamped a hand over his sticky mouth. To her astonishment, the kerfuffle went unnoticed as their father opened, slammed and re-opened the driver door for the final time.

 ‘Okay kiddos! All in order. Thunderbirds are go.’

To be continued…