November 29th, 2009
This short story is by my writing pal, Heikki Hietala, lecturer in IT in Helsinki, Finland. Heikki also writes in English, stories full of a natural warmth and humanity. He chops firewood in his spare time.
It was a hot, humid, overcast August night, pretty dark even for Finland. Since it was 3am, not much was happening. I sat in the reception of the camping site I was working at for the summer, together with my co-supervisor, friend, and night shift specialist Jore. He was bouncing a golf ball against the floor and then the wall, and catching it. He counted out the throws. “Seven-forty-two… seven-forty-three… seven-forty-four…”
I was arranging the traveler identification forms that would be taken to the police in the morning, since the police had told us in no uncertain terms that they preferred them alphabetically by surname. The third slip in a stack of three copies only had a faint imprint of the information written by the travelers, and it took all the movable illumination we had in the reception to see the data. Three lamps on the desk made life hot for me.
“Eight-twenty-yy… eight-twenty-one…”
The defeatist mood of the night shift was worsened by the fact that the cashier girls had denied the supervisors access to their music cassette collection for the nights. This was because our smoothest operator had successfully courted the shapeliest of the cashiers, only to drop her at the sight of a new sport coupe model among the gardener girls. The battalion suffered from the action of a single soldier.
“Nine-forty-one… nine-forty-two… damn!” Jore said as the ball bounced off his knuckles and rolled under the sorry excuse of a fridge we had for keeping our food two degrees cooler than the ambient air. Rather than brave the ogres living under the fridge, he picked a new ball from our depleted minigolf stock.
The only cassette we had was better than nocturnal Finnish radio programming AD 1987. Still, playing the same plastic pop song every 60 minutes should be proscribed in the Geneva conventions. Jore scanned the pitiful set of channels in the sea of static, only to drop the chase in desperation. “There’s only talk available, on farming and such, and then there’s last week’s football analysis”, he said. He started bouncing his golfball.
I needed a bit of fresh air, and as it was on the hour, I went out and did the rounds of the site, checking that the saunas were locked, all boats were drawn up far enough on the beach, and the gates were locked. I loved walking the beat. The fullness of the summer was upon us but none of the melodrama of autumn had fallen yet. I knew every rock along the paths, every hole ripped into the perimeter fence by enterprising bottle collectors and all the nooks and crannies our site had for impromptu lovers and their quick snuggles.
All the locks were in place, and nothing out of the ordinary was to be found along the beat. As I wound my way back up to the reception, I saw a beat-up old Toyota Corolla parked at the far corner of the reception parking lot. It wasn’t there when I left. It was just within the tired yellow streetlight’s cone. There was one man in it, and he was watching me as I went into the reception.
“What’s with the Toyo there?” I asked.
Jore looked surprised. “What Toyota?”
“That one” I said and took him to the back room which was dark and only had a row of windows at the top of the wall. We stood on the sofa which had seen better days and peeked out.
Jore said, “Never seen that before.” He dropped down to sit on the sofa.
“Some supervisor you are too,” I said and went back to the front with Jore in tow. ”We got to check him out.”
I grabbed the gear, which meant a can of mace and a rubber truncheon, usually referred to as the youth guidance counselor, and then I glanced out of the window into the null-color neon lit front of the reception. A long shadow preceded the Toyota man as he sauntered up to our service windows. My first thought was one of relief, as he was skinny and small, but at that time, one always thinks of possible concealed weapons. Jore and I both slipped the mace cans under the desk for quick access, and opened our windows. After all, we were there to serve prospective campers.
The guy slithered up to Jore’s window and we got our first good look at him. He appeared very gaunt. A five o’clock shadow looked more like a five days’ shadow. His hair was worn in a greasy fountain directed up from the lobes and then down and back towards the neck, and a barber was sorely needed to make it look remotely human. He was in his early thirties, as far as I could tell.
Still, the oddest thing was his attire. He was dressed in a worn-out national costume, of which there are dozens of local subtypes, but I couldn’t tell where he was claiming to be from. National costumes in Finland are worn by three groups of people: the Romani minority, retired teachers when reciting the Kalevala or attending a country festival, and finally, folk dancers.
This guy looked definitely mainstream, not Romani, who take pride in the way they dress. He didn’t strike us as a dancer of any sort, and teaching was right out. Jore gave me the slanted look with the notched-up eyebrow. There was an awkward pause as both parties pondered which one should open the channel. He beat us to it with a “Hello” so muted we hardly heard it.
“Hello. What can we do for you?” Jore asked the guy. “If you’d like to come and camp for the night, we’re sorry, but the site is closed. We could let you in, if you pitch your tent right behind the reception and keep the silence”, he suggested.
The guy pivoted his head on the top of his skinny windpipe. I’d never seen a bigger Adam’s apple, and it lolled up and down as he prepared to speak. It looked like he was swallowing a yo-yo.
“I’m not here for camping.” He put his hands into his jacket pockets, deep enough to take in half the forearms.
“Well, in that case, you can stay in your car until the morning and we won’t charge you for the night. Some folks sleep on the parking lot, and we don’t mind. Just keep quiet, will you?” Jore must have thought the case was about to be closed.
The guy shot his line and caught us both by surprise. “I get impulses.”
“Come again?” I asked. For the first time he noted me. I didn’t like his eyes. The gaze didn’t come from the eyes, it started deeper than the usual retina level.
“I get im-pul-ses.”
Jore gave me a hand signal under the desk to grab the mace in case things turned sour. “What kind of impulses would that be, pal?”
“Criminal activity impulses.”
I looked at Jore and he looked at me. No one had told me of such impulses before.
“How so?” he asked.
“When there’s a crime being committed, I get impulses. They’re like electric shocks. If I’m close to the crime scene and the criminal activity, I get them real strong.The yo-yo resumed its oscillation and the guy went silent.
Under the desk, Jore motioned for me to dip in, so I did. “So, what do you do when you get these impulses?”
The guy moved towards me and took a stance halfway between our windows. “I used to call the cops. But that was too hard on me. The cops would always ask me to take them to the crime scene. But as I got close to it, the impulses got too hard to take.”
I felt sorry for the little guy. He was obviously the result of cuts in the mental health sector. Impulses… yeah right. “So what do you do these days? You don’t call the cops anymore?”
He looked straight into my eyes and said, “I have a deal with the chief of police of my home town.”
“Where’s home?” Jore asked.
“Forssa.” Jaysis, this guy was 250 kilometers from home.
“What’s the deal with your chief?”
“The chief of police told me to do this: whenever I get impulses, I don’t call them anymore to tell them there’s a crime. I just get in my car, and I drive in the opposite direction, and they’ll see me go. Then they know there’s a crime scene in the other direction and get there and take care of the trouble.”
I said, “Let me get this straight. You’ve just hopped in your car, like three or four hours ago, in the middle of the night, and drove up to Jyväskylä, just because you have these impulses in your head?”
The guy looked at me. I looked at him. This time, in the colorless light of the neon tubes, I saw into his eyes, and I saw it wasn’t my world there. It was his world. In his world, he was the telepathic crime buster, friend of the chief of police of Forssa, and I was the peon, working my way through college to reach a mediocre position in civil service, while his supernatural impulses helped solve crimes.
And in his world, he was not affected in the least by cuts in the mental health sector.
All of a sudden he put his thumbs to his head, using his palms as antennas. He rotated his head again. “Oh… I feel another impulse. And another one.” seemed to triangulate the origin of the impulses, and managed to find southwest from whence he had come. “Look guys, nice talking to you but I got to go on. I’m not far enough from the crime scene yet.” He turned and took off. Gone were the slinky toy movements, this was a man on a mission half running across the parking lot.
When he sped off northwards, we sat silent for a while. Then I said to Jore: “So… what do we write in the supervisor log?”
He looked at me and said, “I’ll think of something if you’ll do the remaining beat.”
I was only too happy to oblige. The site was calm, even the last night fever people had passed out in their tent or close to it anyway. At the boat beach I saw a pair of proud ducks with ten battery-operated hatchlings in tow, on their way to the reeds for a morning meal. I was delayed by a talkative retired policeman who often appeared very early at the site gate, eager for a chat, so by the time I got back to the reception, Jore had left.
In the evening I reported in for another night, not with Jore this time but another guy. It always was a busy time, that seven o’clock switch. Campers came and went, people hired minigolf gear and asked whether canoes are safe for beginners, and the cashier girls flirted with a busload of Dutch volleyball players.
At some point in the middle of the hustle I had a look at the supervisor log. Jore had written a Spartan entry:
“August 8-9th. Calm night. The police chief of Forssa is a GENIUS.”
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November 27th, 2009
I’ve been having a bit of a think about why I started writing, in case someone asks me. I can give them the long answer … which might involve a couple of bottles of wine, an open fire and some deep and moody background music. Or I can give them the short – I had a go, loved it and kept going. Somewhere in between there are some other interesting bits and pieces to pick over.
One of these is technology.
As a kid I used to play about with my mother’s old typewriter. Not writing anything serious - no precociousness here I’m afraid - but just to see what it did and how. The pressure required to push down one of those keys was enormous, requiring at least two sticky fingers and a tongue poking out. (It was old even when she bought it).
Then there was pen and paper. At university I wrote my essays in longhand and then would literally cut and sticky tape various paragraphs onto the wardrobe door. I’d have a long cascade of pages and snippets and scribbles and cut outs trailing down onto the carpet. I could read it in sequence, and cut and change as I felt necessary.
It was laborious, but few people had PC’s then. My first essay in General Philosophy was titled ‘Is it better to be Socrates Dissatisfied or a Pig Satisfied. Argue the case.’ Well, the answer was obvious, was it not? With my earnest undergraduate brow furrowed with concentration I feverishly rearranged my arguments until Socrates emerged triumphant. I’d think differently now, but that’s for another post.
Now I have more technology than I can poke a proverbial at – and doesn’t it make writing easy? It’s been my pet theory for years that access to this powerful writing tool has caused the explosion in creative writing. There are creative writing courses sprouting everywhere, but I never succumbed to their easy promise. After three degrees and a couple of stints in the tertiary sector I swore I would never undertake formal education again. Ever. I’ve chosen a different route and had to re invent the wheel numerous times, but it has suited me.
I do wonder however, that if I had to write a novel in longhand, would I do so? I don’t know the answer and I don’t have to test it. But I can say that having had the urge to write fiction; the ease in the physical doing of it has definitely contributed to my persistence. It’s not as romantic an answer as you’d get after the wine, but it is a small part of it.
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November 25th, 2009
I was thinking about changing from Vista to Windows 7. But I decided not to as changing everything in the middle of a major writing project could be a shattering experience. I don’t want to think about anything other than my characters, the setting, the plot and what is going on in my head. Some of you who are more computer literate may have raised your eyebrows at this point. Well, lower them. I work on a strictly need-to- know basis. I don’t know how my car works, and I don’t need to know, I only need to remember where I parked it. The same principle applies to telephones and gadgetry of all kinds. Either it does what it’s supposed to do, or it doesn’t. If it’s the latter I hand it over to someone who can fix it – for money or love.
I don’t want to be overwhelmed by my software. Simple is good. I use a laptop with Windows Vista and we have a good working relationship, so good I don’t have to think about it. I have a way of working that involves scribbling on scrap paper, arranging this paper around my desk, gradually building up layers - with bills and Post Its falling into this melange occasionally – but it works for me because I know how far I have to dig down to find the relevant scrap. I don’t want to change that.
I have read about writing software that allows one to add notes and comments, formats your chapters, keeps track of this and that and generally has you producing fiction at a streamlined peak of efficiency. I’m not against this sort of software, but I don’t think I’ll be investing in it. I’d consider it a waste of money because it’s not going to turn me into a better writer, nor is it going to help me keep track of everything, because apart from the paper carnage, (and the new fangled whiteboard I allowed myself), I keep it all in my head.
I did read somewhere, (as you do), that some older mathematicians considered younger mathematicians, those who have always used calculators, to lack a ‘number sense.’ The article used the example of adding a long list of numbers in your head or on a calculator – something is missing if a calculator is used. I found this an interesting observation, and as I am not a number person I have to take their word for it. I wonder if the same can be said for word processing or writing software. If you rely on it too much does it interfere with, or somehow dull one’s instincts, for what is happening in your manuscript?
My way of working involves reading and re reading what I’ve written until I can see it in my mind as a whole and I can sense what is lacking and where I need to build up or flatten out. I don’t know how others do it but I’d be very interested to know
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November 17th, 2009
It’s been a rejection kind of day for some friends of mine. A day where the why-am-I-doing-this-when-I-don’t-have-to succubus sits on your shoulder cooing softly. That’s true, noxious harpy, you say as you brush her onto the ground. But it’s also true that I am resilient, and stamp on this maggot of malevolence – silencing her – but only for the moment, because like some hideous science fiction creation, she will be back.
To persist in the face of constant rejection does take resilience, (or a delusional personality). It is part of the writer’s job specification – the resilience that is. It goes with the territory, as does verbal abuse if you operate phones in a call centre, or untimely death if you are a pirate in the South China Sea. But when does persistence tip over into delusion? When do you hang up your keyboard and acknowledge that you gave it your best and it just wasn’t your time?
To succeed at anything, a little encouragement is essential. A little reward that affirms you are on the right path. This is why writers pore over every rejection letter and analyse every word, as a seer examines chicken entrails, looking for a tiny scrap of encouragement. Look, you say triumphantly, they say there is no room on their lists at the moment. At the moment! Which must mean that one day they will have room and I should submit again! Or, the full stop is after ‘ridiculous’, which must mean that they like ‘ridiculous’ – just not at the moment.
These rejections are easier to take when one has good travelling companions. A camaraderie among writers, born of empathy, can ease the worst of pains. Your pals say the agent is a ‘c**t’ who has the sensibility of a shopping mall designer because anyone can see that your work is brilliant, original and grammatically perfect. Or everyone gets out the cheap plonk and shreds the whole modern publishing industry, accusing them of dumbing down the population at large at the behest of Big Capital who just want a bunch of mindless consumers to buy Dan Brown at the checkout for $9.99.
But one day that letter will come and you’ll know. I live on a large block of land. The subsoil has a depth of around one centimetre; it’s lashed by winds straight off the hot Australian interior and baked by an unforgiving sun. When I moved here I had the urge to grow vegetables, a strong urge powered by some primal force within. I had heritage seeds that I nursed along. I bucketed water to my vegetable garden during summer water restrictions when using hoses was banned. I composted everything that wasn’t nailed down. Bags and bags and bags of manure, sheep poo, mushroom compost, water saving crystals, chook poo and home made soups of all of the above were lavished on my vegetable garden. I built tomato trellises, bamboo tepee’s for runner beans and spread straw mulch around everything.
After ten years of failure I now buy all my vegetables from the shop. The idea of vegetable gardening produces spasms of nausea - and a harsh cackle occasionally when others wax lyrical about their vegetal triumphs. Every year, EVERY YEAR, birds and insects would take their cut from my garden. Weather extremes extorted another major cut. Plants failed to flower, or there was not enough water to plump up the vegetables, and then some sort of mildew would move in and do its thing and I’d be left with two zucchini and a handful of silver beet to show for a whole seasons work.
It was a crushing, soul destroying experience and I’m still astonished I persisted for so long. I had resilience, optimism and the knowledge gleaned from a thousand Gardening Australia’s. Now I just eat vegetables, I don’t want to know where they come from – because it hurts too much.
One day I may feel that way about writing. I hope not.
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November 13th, 2009
“She is finding escape from routine in the pages of a novel.’
To me, she looks like she’s put the book down and thought ‘bloody hell, why do I get to sit and read a book about other people doing all the exciting things?’ Finding escape from routine is just a genteel way of putting it. She could even be thinking ‘why doesn’t this sodding painter bugger off, or at least cast me in bronze atop a rearing stallion having done something meaning full like conquering somewhere?’
The quote is taken from the back of a calendar entitled ‘Women Reading’. I bought the calendar today at my local (independent) bookshop. I rummaged through the shelves of calendars looking for those with images I knew I could look at all year. I’ve had a Gaudi year, two years of Chagall, a Waterhouse year, a year of old archaeological photos of digs, and a year of medieval women. This year I just couldn’t pick the one I wanted, and I didn’t want to go hunting in other shops.
I came away with the aforementioned calendar decorated with twelve images of women reading, all collected from various American museums. As I paid for it I wondered why there wasn’t a calendar of men reading. Is it because it is seen to be too … un-manly? Would the equivalent be photos of men with power tools, or lying on the couch scratching their balls or watching the footy? In other words something active, not the seemingly passive pursuit of reading.
Those of us who read know that that it is far from a passive pursuit. And I know very few men who don’t read books. So I decided to go on an image scrounge and find the equivalent images - men in an interior (a feminine space) pictured reading a novel – not a scroll or a business paper or proclaiming a law or reading a map –but whiling away the hours reading for pleasure as women are always shown to be doing. Lazy bints.
I went into Google Image and typed in ‘men reading books’ and by the third line on the first page the search engine has given up and showed women reading. This called for advanced searching skills … I type in ‘Victorian paintings men reading books’ – but Google queried me with ‘did you mean women reading books?’ I know what I meant, and I meant men reading books, images of. How presumptuous!
I soldiered on, trying every combination I could think of, I scoured various galleries and art sites, and to keep it fair, I confined it to the first third of the twentieth century, the same era my calendar images are from. But images of men in those days were to do with action and acquisition – of land, property, dogs horses, family. I guess to be painted lolling about with a book could send the wrong message. It could say ‘I wish my life was as interesting as this book’.
I’ve no doubt lots of them did read novels, as they still do today and I would like to see more representations of men reading for leisure, and not the newspaper, their iPhone or Blackberry’s or a screen, or a fishing guide or a cook book, but a novel - for pleasure.
If anyone reading this has such an image they can send it to me and I’ll gather them up for a post.
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November 6th, 2009
This post today is from Alexander McNabb, writer, media and public relations person, blogger and commentator on Middle Eastern life, on food, on technology and on the convoluted moves and counter moves of Etisalat. He’s a writing pal, a funny guy and it has been my pleasure to work on his book Olives with him – a pleasure that only those devoted to the extermination of adverbs would understand.
I’ll Kill Her
I was walking with my extended Irish family along the Thames when I realised. I stopped and cried out, “Golly! I killed a bloke here!”
My 12 year old niece was sardonically (it’s in her job title) unimpressed but for once I was telling the truth. Actually, I was under-doing it. I had killed two people within a hundred yards of that very spot using the same murder weapon, a Russian spy and Mafioso called Ivan Litvanoff. Litvanoff, who tends to spend much of his time with his hand up his rather pneumatic secretary’s skirt, ran a knife across the neck of a ‘tail’ from British Intelligence and then, a while later, shot the head of a shadowy British intelligence agency as they sit together on a park bench. He used a silencer, for no better reason than tradition.
I had a lot of fun writing my first book, ‘Space’. It made me laugh tears and I killed loads of people in a number of highly inventive ways. My favourite was having a sex worker called Kylie shot, vomiting her last gasp in a stream of blood down her boyfriend’s shirt, dying with his name on her bubbling, carmine lips in front of the other woman he’s sleeping with. I invested a huge amount of effort in making her a funny, earthy character that the reader would strongly identify with before setting up her unpleasant death. That made me giggle and still does. Come to think of it, I killed a fat old pub dog, a Labrador, in ‘Space’ too. Better out than in, I suppose. If I wasn’t writing books, who knows what I’d be getting up to.
However, rather more seriously, I killed a girl I really like today. My second book isn’t funny, so there’s a little more emotional connection going on around here. Killing her was a conscious and painstaking decision that I’ve reached after years of thinking about her.
February Sea
She’s the very reason the book exists. I was listening to George Winston’s February Sea one night before going to sleep and it made me think of a girl dancing in the rain. That dance in a sudden downpour is the pivotal point of ‘Olives’, the dead centre of the book (not in the plot, but in the timeline). I woke up with a book in my head and dashed it down in four weeks. Four years later, I’ve been learning how to write books and so, unlike Space, Olives is (IMHO) a viable and publishable book. I want to say that Phillipa has played a significant role in that development process – she has been editing the book with me and I have learned a great deal from her. Pip is a surprisingly disciplined writer. I am a literary slob with a number of revolting personal habits (not least of which is my habit of killing people).
In all that time, with all that writing, editing, rewriting, replotting, changing, tightening up, cutting, slashing, tweaking and tuning, Aisha has been with me. She has always been the same person in my head, although she has only been taking shape in the book as I have been learning the difference between writing stuff and writing fiction. After all that, I have come to realise that killing her makes perfect sense and is the only course realistically open to me.
So today I decided to do it. To kill her. Not a word changes in the part of the book that describes her death. It was intended to be left somewhat unresolved, but her death is intertwined with TE Lawrence’s dedication of Seven Pillars, a ‘device’ that actually happened naturally and wasn’t ever intended as a ‘device’. The last line of that piece is:
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near and saw you waiting, when you smiled
And in sorrowful envy he outran me and took you apart into his quietness
Today I realised that this is how she is, in fact, going to end. Incredibly, it has made me terribly sad and I drove home listening to Secret Garden and thinking of a lonely girl crying as she walks through the rain on the eternal road to heaven.
Sleep Song
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Campground
for a good feed ...
