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Chapter Four: Uncle Tibri

November 7, 2009 by plegmund

4. Uncle Tibri

I have before me a battered copy of the biography written by V.I. Mischkoff: Marki Larvartin: Father of his country! If this account is to be believed, my father was an exemplary socialist virtually from the cradle: there are stories of how at school he intervened in a discussion of the First World War in order to explain the class basis of the struggle and discountenance the royalist nonsense being peddled by his teachers. At one time it seems, if Mischkoff is to be believed, he actually led a small insurrection of the younger pupils which succeeded in redistributing the contents of the Headmaster’s private pantry to needy families in the poorer districts of Sescastri, and then by the sheer moral force of his gaze shamed the authorities out of caning him.

But none of that bears any relation to reality, and in my opinion the true story is much more interesting. The Larvartin family were not, as Mischkoff would have it, manual workers; my grandfather was a moderately prosperous technician who had a responsible supervisory job in the Sestenburg brewery, the same place where my father was for a time a clerk. Both boys went to a decent school, but it was my father’s elder brother Tibri who really displayed promise, working hard while my father played football, winning prizes for his essays and ultimately a scholarship to university. It was Tibri, also, who first espoused radical views, though he favoured Kropotkin and Proudhon over Marx and Lenin: some of my father’s old comrades say they detect traces of Tibri’s anarchism in my father’s later thinking, but I don’t know about that: my father was always an eclectic reader and liked to maintain friendly relations with the leading lights of all strands of radical opinion. Really I think his views have always been entirely his own.

At any rate, to begin with it was Tibri who got himself involved with dangerous friends. I have never been able to find out whether my grandparents had leftist sympathies, but they must surely have been concerned that their talented son, who had seemed likely to become a successful lawyer or civil servant, was turning into a dissident pursued by the custodes. Although Tibri somehow managed to sit his final exams and emerge once again with dazzling results, he was forced into hiding immediately afterwards.

In those days, my mother told me, Marki Larvartin used to reproach his brother with having had his head turned by too much book-learning; he, on the contrary, had a steady job in the brewery and knew what real life was all about. I’ve never heard anyone say that my father was ever a Royalist or even a supporter of one of the bourgeois parties, but at this stage of his life he seems to have disdained politics, and was more concerned, first with his progress as a promising goal-keeper in the local amateur team, and second with the business of brewing: his highest ambition in those days was to set up in the beer business on his own account, and he spent a good deal of time mastering the details of the process, learning about malting and fermentation and no doubt stealing a look at the supposedly secret recipe for Sestenburger Doppelbock.

At the time of my story, the government of King Francis was making one of its panicky short-lived lurches towards liberalisation; the Dubitanian Assembly had been brought out of mothballs and a middle-class figure from one of the bourgeois parties had been appointed as Chancellor with a mandate to reform the tax system along progressive lines, abolishing the oppressive feudal levies which had been a source of so much unrest, and removing the anomalous exemptions which effectively subsidised the aristocratic class.

Unusually, the Royal Council, or perhaps it really was the King himself, had chosen a man of real ability. Chancellor Lodovi Manumin was a decent, patriotic man: intelligent, resourceful, and flexible, and although he had accepted a limited remit and constrained powers, he certainly had in mind the progressive establishment of bourgeois democracy in the guise of a constitutional monarchy along Dutch lines.

His tax reforms were introduced adroitly, without provoking the confrontation with the upper classes which had doomed all previous attempts. By offering attractive temporary concessions as a quid pro quo, he beguiled the aristocracy into accepting the withdrawal of three of the four most damaging exemptions. Taking advantage of a favourable stage in the economic cycle, he also progressively mitigated the impact of the land levies, doing just enough to calm the unrest which had been developing without imperilling the stability of the government’s finances.

Tibri and his friends watched all this with concern. They were used to being able to rely on the idiocy of their Royalist enemies, and they did not relish the arrival of a Chancellor gifted with foresight and charm. It seemed all too likely that if Manumin could buy himself enough time, he would succeed in taking Dubitania through a peaceful transition to stable bourgeois democracy. They decided, accordingly, that Manumin must be assassinated.

In later life, my father could not conceal his scorn for this reasoning. The anarchists had concluded that history was being determined by the actions of a single individual? Incredible. Did they not know that society had to pass through the bourgeois stage in order to move on from feudalism? If conditions required a Manumin, then Manumins would appear; if not, hundreds of Manumins would make no difference. They should have been taking everything he offered, supporting and hastening his programme in order to bring forward the inevitable economic crisis and the generation of pre-revolutionary conditions. Instead they thought the process of world historical development would be thwarted if one man died – and that they should therefore bring it about? My brilliant brother thought that? Thank God I never went to that University, but spent my time in proper empirical study of the material conditions of reality, he would conclude.

It may actually be the case that Tibri’s judgement was swayed by Manumin’s quiet modernisation of the Custodes Regin, which instead of a lazy cadre of corrupt and bribable aristocrats now became a blend of hard-working, ambitious, middle-class administrators and vicious gutter-fascist thugs, repellent but far more effective than their lordly predecessors. I believe it was Manumin’s reforms which gave Ursin his first promotions. At any rate the custodes began, as a result, to make life much harder for the anarchists. In the past, few of them had ever been arrested, and nothing worse than a few months in jail had followed: now, however, three of Tibri’s close associates were shot in the streets like dogs within the space of a couple of months.

At any rate, the plan the anarchists settled on was to strike while Manumin was presenting prizes at the annual Guild of St Luke art exhibition. Several of the anarchists had friends or relatives who were exhibiting paintings or sculpture, and it was relatively easy for them to obtain passes and smuggle equipment into the building during the Varnishing Day which preceded the opening.

They hired the upper room in the Grand Café nearby as their centre of operations, posing as a philately club. Three separate Infernal Machines were constructed, each sufficient to blow a large hole in the picture gallery: the first was to be installed in a strategic location and was timed to detonate when Manumin was making his speech: the second was to be placed further along the route in case the first one failed: it would catch Manumin as he paused for refreshments with selected guests; and the third would be carried by a volunteer, who if all else failed would throw himself on the Chancellor and blow both himself and his victim to pieces. All three were concealed in suitcases. The amateur chemist who had constructed them warned they were not as stable as he could have wished, and should not be subjected to violent movement before they were required to explode.

Unfortunately, the second Infernal Machine was installed in front of a large bronze figure of Andromeda. It was put there to make sure that the victim was not sheltered from the blast by Andromeda’s uncharacteristically beefy limbs, which she was holding out before her, presumably in fear of an approaching monster; but coming in early for a last check on the set-up, the sculptor resented the intrusion of the suitcase in front of his work and attempted to move the suitcase away, brusquely and imprudently heaving it into a corner.

Down the street in the upper room of the Café, the conspirators were startled by a thunderous bang which made the windows rattle. There was still half an hour before Manumin was due to appear. They looked at each other in consternation, and sent one of their number, a fellow called Tulli Forobdin, to check what had happened.

He returned fifteen minutes later to report that the second Infernal Machine had torn a huge hole in the gallery and destroyed several of the works of art, killing the unfortunate sculptor and one curator who had happened to be standing nearby. Andromeda had suffered only superficial damage. There was no trace of the anarchists’ suicide bomber; perhaps he had taken fright at the explosion and gone into hiding. However, Forobdin explained with pride, he personally had succeeded in retrieving the first Infernal Machine, still intact, and had brought it back with him. He held up the heavy suitcase to be admired.

The terrified anarchists dived under tables, shouting that he would kill them all; and swearing volubly Tibri told Forobdin to take his bomb back to the gallery. Manumin might still arrive there within the next few minutes.

Forobdin hurried away, but as soon as he had left a waiter appeared. There had been, he said, a most regrettable accident at the art gallery; an explosion of some kind. Chancellor Manumin and his guests had been diverted and wanted to go on with the prize ceremony they had been planning to hold, but needed an alternative location. They were waiting outside; would the loyal philatelists be willing to let them use the upper room in these special circumstances?

Smiling as best he could, Tibri agreed. As the distinguished party was filing into the upper room, he grabbed another accomplice and whispering fiercely in his ear told him to go and get Forobdin to bring the Infernal Machine back again. Too late: a moment later there was a second window-rattling explosion as another section of the gallery was destroyed, together with poor Forobdin and the three policemen who had just apprehended him.

Enraged now by the absurd sight of Chancellor Manumin himself approaching with outstretched hand and a grateful smile on his face, Tibri seized a carving knife from the table and fell on his target. Manumin, startled, defended himself with his ebony walking stick. He was attended on this ceremonial occasion, not by his usual efficient bodyguards but by Palace guardsmen in frogged uniforms and plumed shakoes. All of them were young aristocrats who were fit and expert at fencing; but they were taken by surprise and did not step forward to seize Tibri. Somehow the other anarchists were equally struck by irresolution and hung back passively; for several minutes both sides stood and watched the deadly struggle between the young anarchist and the middle-aged politician as if it were a prize fight. Tibri had the advantage of surprise, youth, and a deadly weapon; but the grey-haired Chancellor defended himself with agility and desperation. In the end the resolution of the situation was left to the Dowager Duchess Agrippinilla, a noted patron of the arts and former amateur tennis champion of Lexandrin province. Glancing in disgust at the useless men filling the room, she took up a brass table lamp and felled Tibri with a single vicious back-handed sweep to the head.

Poor Tibri regained consciousness as he was being bundled towards a police van outside; he could see the Chancellor and guests being ushered to safety. At that moment there was a third colossal bang, louder than ever, as the errant suicide bomber, returning the third suitcase to base, as he thought, was seized and thrown to the floor by the police in the upper room of the café . Pieces of glass and debris from the second storey of the building rained down everywhere, and in the ensuing confusion Tibri managed to escape and retreat to his parents’ house; unfortunately his head wound was serious, and too afraid to visit a hospital, he died a few days later.

This shambles nevertheless achieved its objective, inasmuch as the three explosions caused considerable alarm among the ruling class: pressure was brought to bear on the King and Manumin was removed from his post, to be replaced by a dim-witted General who prorogued the Assembly and brought in a new era of repression which would have been fully satisfactory to the anarchists if any had survived the explosion in the upper room of the Grand Café. One of the General’s first acts was to proscribe the pursuit of stamp-collecting, and imprison all of Dubitania’s leading philatelists, a setback from which the hobby, formerly in an admirably advanced condition in our country, has never really recovered.

This tragicomic incident, or perhaps simply his brother’s death, awakened my father’s interest in politics. He was shocked, and perhaps felt obscurely guilty. For the first time he entertained the idea that there might be a need to take Tibri’s principles seriously. He put back on the shelf his great tomes about wort and specific gravity, and began reading a different kind of work; first Tibri’s books, then more from the library. He was seduced by the beauty of Hegelian dialectic; he devoured The Communist Manifesto, and Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? Soon even the library was exhausted – its stock of political reading was meagre – and my father joined a Worker’s Reading Club, an organisation partly funded, as he was piqued to discover much later, by the Soviet Union.

Many of his fellow readers were already members of the small official Dubitanian Communist Party, and it was here that my father first fell in with Porfri Essedrin and Lucas Stilin. The two of them were already fast friends, although the contrast between the portly Essedrin and the stick-like Stilin had won them the nicknames ‘Latitude and Longitude’. Pavari, the wrinkled old Party Chairman, was not a slovenly man: his hair was always oiled and his pencil moustache neatly trimmed; but when my father began going round with Stilin and Essedrin in his incongruously smart clerk’s suit, the chairman remarked:

“So it seems we now have Latitude, Longitude – and Rectitude.”

I imagine my grandparents must have feared that their second son was going the way of the first, but for a long time Marki evaded the attention of the custodes, and remained outwardly an impeccably respectable brewery clerk. Within the Party, however, his stock rose rapidly; he was always an effective speaker, with a down-to-earth manner and a sense of humour that won him many allies and friends.

But it was not until the Dacsvillin rising that he really came to prominence, and at first he had many difficulties with his fellow Party members.

11,295 words

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Chapter Three: Lavordin Hospital

November 6, 2009 by plegmund

3. Lavordin Hospital

Reading some of those old stories I realised for the first time that my mother had perhaps embroidered and tidied them up a little. And in spite of my good resolutions, I realised that in places I was just as adulatory as my father’s official biography. So let me leap forward now many years to the happy days when my father was finally the President of a newly free country, but had not yet managed to introduce all of his reforms and regenerations and tell another story which illustrates in more sober terms the merits of his approach. This is the tale, much quoted, of Lavordin hospital.

Lavordin was a dark old building in the southern lakeside town of Oni-Litani. It had been a private sanatorium when the place enjoyed a brief spell of popularity as a spa, in the early part of the nineteenth century. Later, under Royal patronage, it had been converted into a charity public hospital but allowed to fall into disrepair; but when the modern hospital in the suburbs was hit by a bomb, it became the only place the local people could go for serious medical treatment. Overcrowded and lacking drugs and equipment it soon began to suffer severe problems. Finally an indiscreet surgeon who visited as part of an international research delegation issued a scathing statement to an Italian newspaper, describing the conditions as ‘Stone Age’ and contrasting the hospital’s performance with the grand speeches of Party officials.

My father was very upset by this, my mother said; not because of the bad light it shone on him and his regime, but because he had not been aware of how the patients at Lavordin were suffering. He immediately went and visited the hospital himself. The bureaucrats and doctors were in mortal fear, but my father seemed calm, asked questions, and criticised no-one.

“The problem, beloved leader,” ventured a doctor at last, “Is that this is not a real hospital. It was never a properly equipped hospital and now we’re simply improvising.”

“I understand, Doctor,” said my father, with a light in his eye, “But we must not focus our thoughts on what Lavordin is now, but on what it might become. That patient – “ he pointed to a grey-faced man in a bed across the way, “What would we do for him if we could?”

The doctor looked grave.

“That patient has a serious heart problem,” he replied, “There is little we can do. It needs some very advanced surgery, of a kind we have yet to perform in Twentyland. As it is, we do not even have a satisfactory operating theatre.”

“Where could we put such a theatre?” my father asked.

The doctor smiled, “Really, there is nowhere. We have no room as it is. We should have to build a completely new surgical wing.”

“Bring me a spade,” said my father, “and I’ll get the cement and the bricks.”

He called the staff together and made an impassioned speech. Here and there, especially among the younger nurses and doctors, he could see a gleam of hope returning.

“Tell me your problems.” he said.

This was no empty rhetoric. He asked what they needed, what they would do if they could, and wrote down a list on a blackboard.

“Comrades,” he said, “You talk of these things as though they were dreams, Christmas presents that St Nicholas might bring if we believe in him, which of course, being good materialists, we do not. No-one is coming to do these things for us. This is our hospital, it is in our hands entirely. But there is our hope, too; no one will help us, but no-one can stop us, either. No-one can stop us here. We can do whatever we will. We can make our hospital whatever we want. Listen to me. Believe me. I tell you these things on this board will happen. They will be done. They will be done here. Now. And what is more the point perhaps, by us.”

He spent most of a month at Lavordin, in the hospital and in the town: he made an appeal to the nation. People did, in fact, come to help; local people brought in some money and helped with the work; my father managed to transfer in some additional doctors. The building of the new surgical wing became a celebrated cause, and volunteers began to appear from all over the country. One day, to my father’s great amusement and gratification, the celebrated poet Georgi Versantin appeared, a pale, undernourished young aesthete with a beautiful silk scarf. Taking off his coat and casting it aside, Georgi shouted in a trembling voice:

“Comrades; the new slogan – Bring me a spade!”

“My God, comrades, if Georgi is going to dig our foundations, what will Carl Mustin have to do to save his face?” asked my father with a grin. Carl Mustin was the obese head of the Twentyland Miners Union.

A year later, my mother was sitting at a typewriter in the Palace when she overheard a French doctor speaking to the colleague who had come out to replace him on a long-term study of the Twentyland healthcare system.

“You must go out to Lavordin,” said the first doctor, “It’s an extraordinary place. I remember my first visit there: as I approached, by the line of poplars at the edge of the lake, I heard voices singing, like a rustic choir. Not at all sophisticated, not by any means great music, a simple folk song; half of them out of tune, some of them hoarse and old and cracked; but none the worse for that; perhaps more beautiful, more affecting. Human voices, very human; honest and full of the simple joy of singing. Coming through the trees on a sunny day by the lake, the effect was almost heavenly, like stumbling on some blessed Elysian field. It was the patients, of course. I asked whether the hospital organised this singing, but apparently it had begun quite spontaneously and was now an established feature of hospital life. I’ve never been anywhere that had such an atmosphere of serene confidence, such indomitable optimism. The way the younger doctors work there, such energy, such enthusiasm. All the time I was there, they were asking me questions about what we do in Paris, what techniques could I teach them, could I tell them about new research; anything they could learn from or copy. They were so quick to learn, so ready to try anything new that I could suggest, and so skilled at making it work. They begged me to stay, they insisted I come back as soon as I could.”

“And the things they do. It’s not a well-equipped place, you know, but you’ve heard how they put up a surgical theatre with their own hands, staff, local people, even some of the patients, working overtime; and they’re doing operations there I wouldn’t like to try back at home. Yet with tremendous results; it’s as if the optimism of the staff buoys the patients up, carries them on to recovery: when one of them gets better, there’s a feeling of shared triumph between staff and patients, as though they’d won a gold medal together, or something. I saw people who had left the hospital six months before, so excited by it that they still came back every day and helped in any way they could. I’ve never seen a hospital where I’d be happier to be a patient – but what a place to be a doctor!”

“You know,” he said wistfully, “Over the years you become cynical, and I’ve drifted into being more of an administrator than a practitioner. But those young doctors and nurses; being among them, I felt ashamed. I felt like a renegade. That place made me feel, more strongly than I had ever felt before, that it’s a high honour to be a doctor, one I had not valued enough; that there is nothing more wonderful than the practice of medicine; the gift of mending broken people. Those young doctors are so excited at what they’re doing, they can hardly bear to leave the hospital, and they hurry back as soon as they can. I was within an ace of throwing all these execrable papers away and promising to stay and help.”

“Lavordin?” said the other doctor, “I’ve heard some strange stories about that place. Huge death rate, people just being killed by the treatment. Something like that. Wasn’t that the ‘Stone Age’ hospital?”

“Yes, it was: but if you could see it now I really think you’d call it Golden Age.” said the first doctor, and then looked a little embarrassed at how his enthusiasm had carried him away.

Lavordin had that effect on others, however, notably on Sergi Scalapin, a respectable surgeon who had been a prominent member of one of the bourgeois parties, and had opted to retire from practice under my father’s regime. The stories which circulated about Lavordin became so extravagant – and it must be admitted that some of them were exaggerated – they annoyed him so much that he came to see for himself, determined to prove that it was all nonsense.

Once there, however, he fell under the spell of the place in much the same way as the French doctor; he took a job and went back into surgical practice. Not only that; in spite of his bourgeois sympathies, he was an innovative scientist and he soon collected around him a group of young doctors who began to create a radical new system of treatment which became known as the Lavordin Regime. One element in the Regime was a new approach to anaesthesia and palliative care based on techniques developed out of research into acupuncture. A visiting fraternal delegation from China had demonstrated acupuncture at Lavordin; Scalapin and his team took it up with enthusiasm, refining the method and replacing needles with a new technique of pulsed electrical charges. Not only was this a more effective way of dealing with pain; there were no side-effects or complications and recovery times were shortened by as much as 23%, according to Scalapin’s own report.

Of course, my father was often invited to visit the hospital, whenever they had a new ward to open, or were celebrating an anniversary. But for a long time he refused all these invitations.

“Why don’t you go?” asked my mother, eventually, “It seems as if you don’t like the place.”

“I don’t want them to give me credit for what the hospital has achieved,” said my father, “You know how it goes. They’ll make long speeches and say it is all owing to me. I don’t want that. I want them to realise it was all in their own hands, all the time. That is the whole point.”

“You have such a monstrous ego,” said my mother, sternly, “Who is going to say it is owing to you? Nobody remembers you ever went there, Nobody is going to give you the credit for anything. It’s just that as an internationally famous hospital, they think maybe it’s the President’s duty to come and cut some ribbons for them. But don’t trouble yourself.”

“Well, if you put it like that.” conceded my father wearily. So at last he accepted an invitation and went along to a grand gala dinner.

Unfortunately it proved exactly as he had said: every detail of his original visit was recounted, all the old stories were told again, and speaker after speaker rose to declare with emotion that all the hospital’s glittering achievements were the result of Marki Larvartin’s intervention. They had even found the hopeless heart patient, the grey-faced man about whom my father had asked; he had been the first to undergo open-heart surgery in the new theatre, had made a complete recovery, and was now back at work in the marble quarries. To my father’s dismay, he stood up in front of the dinner table and pulled open his shirt to show the great scar across his chest.

“Comrades,” said my father, responding at last to all the speeches which had been made, “Truly I am proud of what you have made of this hospital. All across the world the name of Lavordin is known; in our sister republics with pride, and in the capitalist countries with envy. But it is important that you understand how this has happened. It is because you took the hospital as your own. As a result, you were able to make of it whatever you chose. Remember that the hospital is entirely in your hands. And so, it seems, am I.”

This was typical of the way my father never shirked his obligations, although they soon became extremely onerous. On one occasion he arrived very late at our flat; the dinner my mother had prepared was long since spoilt.

“What on earth happened?” she demanded, “As if you weren’t away from us enough, now you’re late even when you’re here.”

My father explained that he had put in a long, gruelling day working through piles of administrative papers and proposals, and sitting through a three-hour meeting of the Council of the Twenty, the supreme Government body, always an arduous affair. He locked up his office and he and his shadow Lucas Stilin, cigarette always in the corner of his mouth, walked out to the waiting car. At that moment, an old woman seized his arm. The guard at the door stepped forward, but my father waved him away.

She had, it emerged, a long and complicated story of a problem concerning her son, and she was seeking my father’s personal intervention.

“Granny, I’m sorry, but I have had a long day, I am late already, and I cannot attend to this matter for you.” said my father, as patiently as he could, “Please speak to the Citizens’ Office tomorrow.”

“Is it not the President’s job to right injustices?” demanded the old woman, angrily.

“Yes, of course it is,” said my father,

“Are you going to right this injustice I have been telling you about?”

“Personally? Here and now? No,” admitted my father, becoming a little impatient with this rhetorical outburst.

“Then stop being President, personally, here and now, Marki Larvartin!” said the old woman.

So my father had gritted his teeth, gone wearily back into the building, heard her out, made some enquiries and after two hours succeeded in sending her away, if not satisfied, at least mollified.

“Stilin told me he would have had the guard kick her scrawny old arse into jail,” said my father, with weary amusement, “I told him that was obviously why he wasn’t President.”

I make that 8,753 words.

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Chapter Two: Ursin

November 3, 2009 by plegmund

OK, the pace has slackened a bit (it isn’t Sunday any more) – but here’s chapter 2.

2. Ursin
This morning I came across that little piece I wrote last year about my father bursting into school, and read it again with warm nostalgic pleasure. It wasn’t really the truth that I saw my father at home every day, though. Often he had to go away on journeys, sometimes for weeks at a time. Frequently he slept at the Palace on a camp bed, or in some provincial town where he was making a flying visit. For long stretches of my early life, I saw him only about once a week on average. When he was away, instead of his stories about Robespierre and Lenin, my mother would tell me stories about him: about his own turbulent early life and his role in the Revolution that turned poor backward Dubitania into the Twentyland of today.

I enjoyed reading my little memoir again and I have decided to record here my own version of these stories, or at least my favourites from among them – they might make a little book to give to my father on his birthday. I might even be able to offer some corrective to the silly hagiographic nonsense which has been peddled by some authors, and show that my father was never infallible or superhuman; that in fact his characteristic genius lay specifically in his gift for carrying the generous, egalitarian impulses which motivated his socialism through into its implementation. In this he was always a stark contrast with so many of our otherwise admirable leaders, who love the people but whose golden love seems somehow to be transmuted into the lead of oppressive bureaucracy when they put it into practice, if indeed it does not end up being freely scattered through the barrel of a gun.

Speaking of guns reminds me that his great enemy in those early days was Ursin, the head of the Royal secret police, the so-called Custodes Regin. In my imagination this man was Sheriff of Nottingham to my father’s sprightly Robin Hood. There were many revolutionaries who were hunted by the custodes, but Ursin had picked out my father as the most dangerous of them all.

“There are many Lenins in that man.” he said.

Ursin was a tall man with close-cropped hair and a hooked nose with a black moustache underneath it: he wore big boots and a leather jacket, but in spite of this menacing appearance he was far from being a mere thug and he directed his organisation with diabolical energy and sharp intelligence. He personally supervised the pursuit of my father during the period following the abortive Dacsvillin uprising, when the revolutionary movements were in disorder and many progressive cells were destroyed or exposed. Ursin carried a big black pistol with which he personally executed anyone his agents captured, in flagrant disregard for the law, which even in the Royalist times did not run to summary murder. He seemed to have some sixth sense which told him where his prey had gone to ground, and one after another the leaders and chief members of the different factions were gradually eliminated. But although he came close on many occasions, he could never get my father.

On one occasion, Ursin actually had my father and his old friend Porfri Essedrin trapped in a farmyard with a high wall. They had ventured out into the country to see an old man who claimed to have a cellar full of guns and ammunition; but when they arrived it was clear that the old fellow was senile and had nothing to offer them but rambling monologues about his days in the old Citizen Militia. This was especially annoying as they had twice got lost on the journey and it had already taken them the best part of a day just to get to the old man’s cottage. As they headed back to the road, they caught sight of a black Zastra car which was unmistakably one of those belonging to the custodes (no Robodins for them). Somehow Ursin’s bloodhound nose had put him on their trail yet again.

They turned round at once and set off across country in the opposite direction through a gloomy grove of pine trees, but soon got lost once again. When they emerged from the trees they spotted a farm, a group of low buildings in the distance, and they made their way to it in the hope of finding help. In the trees, however gloomy, they had been out of sight, but now they were dreadfully exposed as they crossed the fields, and must have been seen. Moreover, when they arrived at the farm they found no-one at home and the door securely locked. As they stood irresolutely in the farmyard, surrounded by a high wall, Porfri caught sight of a group of people hurrying across the fields towards them: Ursin at the head of a gang of thugs. Porfri was a huge, muscular man, a true proletarian, who had already protected his comrade in many tight spots. At once he picked up my father and flung him bodily over the top of the wall. From the other side, my father heard the shots that ended poor Porfri’s life. My mother would say when recounting this episode;

“But the good Porfri had saved not only his friend, but his country.”

My father was able to get away back to the nearby woods, where the custodes lost his trail: he arrived back in Sescastri hours later on foot, exhausted, covered in mud, and grief-stricken by the loss of his stalwart comrade.

Another dangerous episode from my father’s earlier life began when he was betrayed by an alienated Party member named Hugo Pertari, whose young wife Anna had named my father at random as her partner in adultery, simply in order to shield her actual lover. The angry cuckold blew my father’s cover to the authorities and the custodes surrounded the house where he was hiding. Hoping to discourage the police from a thorough search of the house, which might reveal clues to the hiding places of more comrades, and knowing that he was surrounded on all sides, my father gave himself up. They handcuffed him and imprisoned him in the Morgin House, the terrible Royal prison made from a 13th century castle, from which no-one had ever escaped. My father had a cold stone cell in the dungeons with only a few handfuls of straw on the floor. But there was an unexpected hiatus. As it happened, Ursin was out of the country at the time: knowing his personal interest in this particular prisoner, the custodes decided to contact him before proceeding. Ursin, as they had foreseen, sent back orders that my father was to be kept alive until he could return to shoot him himself.

At this point, even my father’s dauntless optimism had begun to fade, and he wrote the eloquent little piece which has since been published as Testament, setting out in visionary terms the political journey of his life to that point and what he hoped his legacy might be. But all was not lost.

Anna Pertari, whose husband had now fled the country in fear of the wrath of his fellow Party members, was stricken with guilt at the way she had indirectly sent an innocent man to his death. She managed to make friends with some of the staff at the Morgin House and began helping them on a casual basis, going with some of them right inside the gates on deliveries of fresh laundry. Finally she persuaded the old woman who did most of the work to take a day off and let her handle a delivery alone: amongst the bed linen she smuggled a set of women’s clothes into the prison, and my father escaped under the noses of the negligent guards, dressed as the old woman. The guards were too negligent ever to have noticed that while one woman went in, two had come out, and in fact they were never able to guess how my father had escaped.

“The unfortunate consequence,” my mother would say, “Was that the false story of adultery with Anna Pertari was now taken to be true, since why would the young woman risk her life to save your father otherwise?”

At any rate, this picturesque tale was the origin of the joking toast to the washerwoman which old Dubitanian Communists used to drink (and sometimes they still do). At gatherings where there were others present of differing or uncertain loyalty, they delighted in remarking on the quality of the tablecloth or someone’s shirt, and then proposing “The washerwoman!”*. In Dubitania it was not uncommon for a prolonged series of toasts to degenerate into a more or less frivolous drinking game, so any Royalists, fascists, or bourgeois revisionists present were not especially surprised at this apparently silly toast, and would not hesitate to drink my father’s health unknowingly.

On another occasion, my father actually lost part of his left earlobe. Sitting in the old Café Rosenstrauss reading the newspaper, my father saw a noisy group of custodes approaching with dogs. They were making such a fuss and calling out in such a stagey way that it seemed clear that they wanted to be seen, so suspecting an ambush, my father went discreetly upstairs, crawled out of the toilet window and descended across the roof of an outhouse. Peering down, he was amused to see none other than his old enemy Ursin standing patiently in hiding behind a corner of the building, waiting for my father to come out of the back door. it was a trap, but clumsily set. My father crept around until he was behind a wall set back from the café. He could have got clean away, but some imp tempted him and he could not resist raising his head and shouting;

“The duck has flown!”

He had, he admitted, severely underestimated Ursin’s presence of mind: the agent whipped round so quickly and fired so accurately that he blew off my father’s earlobe, and my father had to run away streaming a trail of blood everywhere. Only by running down to the river and leaping on to a passing coal barge did he escape with his life.

“The shot was perfect,” my father said, “It was only because my head jerked to one side that it missed my brain. I truly think that if the word ‘duck’ had not been in my mind at the time, I should have stood still and been shot. I must put this to the People’s Psychological Institute – an interesting point for them to research. In the end, I found out that Ursin wasn’t even after me that day; he was looking for Grigori Asbertin the syndicalist, who as a matter of fact was lurking in the cellar in a state of suicidal panic. So I should have kept my egotistical mouth shut and slipped quietly away. What makes it worse is that when Asbertin heard the shooting he thought he was doomed; he put a rope through a hook and hanged himself down there in the cellar, among all the barrels, poor fellow.”

My father’s own favourite story, however, was about the time he went as a fraternal delegate to a meeting of the Democratic Socialist Union of Dubitania, in a side room off the old Town Hall of Merovia, a medieval suburb of Sescastri. Before the meeting had reached item two on the agenda, which is to say after about three hours, there was a heavy knocking on the door, and the session was interrupted by a detachment of the ordinary criminal police, who had somehow heard a garbled report that a seditious and disorderly meeting was in progress. As it happened, the socialists were prepared for this: they had an enormous picture of King Francis on the wall, and a false agenda written up on a board, and they succeeded in persuading the police that they were in fact a branch of the Dubitanian Royalist League.

Things had reached this happy stage, with the police tendering genial apologies, and the supposed Royalists competing to see who could push obsequious deference closest to the limit of plausibility, when it occurred to my father that if the simple police had got to know about the meeting, it could hardly have failed to reach the ears of Ursin. So he drew the commanding officer of the police squad aside and confided in him. Having conferred amongst themselves, he explained, the Royalists, feared that the story the police had heard meant that their arch enemy Marki Larvartin and his gang of thugs were coming to attack them. They thought it was best to close the meeting and evacuate at once, and he would advise the police to leave, too. Naturally, the police declared that they were not going to run away, but would be only to pleased to encounter these ferocious insurgents, of whom they had all heard. My father praised their boldness. Larvartin, he said, was easily recognised by his close-cropped hair, his black moustache and the leather jacket he invariably wore.

So, the supposed Royalists deferred the rest of their meeting and made their way uneventfully to safety. But from the security of the roof of a neighbouring inn, my father then watched the entertaining spectacle of the Dubitanian police attempting to arrest Ursin, who had arrived less than twenty minutes after the socialists’ retreat. Ursin had only a few of his men with him, which left his side heavily outnumbered; and he was obviously taken by surprise at first, but he and his men were bigger and more capable fighters than the policemen, so all in all it was a well-matched contest.

The tale of Ursin has, as everyone knows, an instructive twist. Some years later, after the war, it was Ursin who found himself in the Morgin House, which was used for a time by the triumphant Red Army to hold prisoners of special importance. My father, of course, went to see him; Ursin refused to speak to him at first.

But my father was not easily thwarted.

“You have been after me for some time now, Juri Ursin,” he remarked, “You have killed many of my best friends and very nearly killed me. I think you personally have held back the revolution in Dubitania for many years. How would you deal with an enemy like that? I think we must find a suitable way for you to pay your debt.”

Ursin merely grunted. My father reached into his pocket and took out Ursin’s own big black pistol, which had been confiscated on his arrest.

“You know,” my father said, “I heard the story of you in the trench at Porti. You and six young soldiers were cut off there and besieged for fourteen days with scarcely any food. On the fifteenth day, one of the soldiers somehow caught a mouse: they butchered it with an opinelca,* boiled it up in a can and brought it loyally to you as their commander. But you said – is this true? You said: there are no officers in this trench, only brothers and Dubitanians. I will not eat until everyone eats, and I don’t mean to die until everyone dies either. Is this true?”

“Yes, it’s true, damn you. Any one of those boys was worth ten of you.”

“Maybe – though you’ve surely heard that I too fought the invaders of our country, and alongside Royalists, too. In a different way and another place, of course. I’m glad the story of the trench is true, anyway. I thought that was the true spirit of our country, that history had somehow made a hero of you after all.”

“Don’t mock what you don’t understand.”

“No mockery, Comrade. You had it dead right. No officers, only brothers. I don’t eat until everyone eats. That’s what Communism means to me, Ursin no more and no less. We must build our country on those principles. You were a true Communist in that trench, although you didn’t have the advantage of knowing it.”

“What?”

My father stood up for a moment and looked Ursin in the eye.

“I can’t make a country if all I have with me are my old comrades, Ursin. I want you too. I want you to be my Controller of Police. If you won’t do it, if people like you can’t recapture the patriotic spirit of that trench, then the land is doomed, and you might as well shoot me. One way or another the chase ends here. But think first. Think what we might make of this country if we work together.”

With that, he handed over the pistol.

Ursin held it for a while, staring at it as though he couldn’t understand what it was any more. Then he softly put it down on the table.

So you see, my mother would conclude when she related this tale, your father’s silly ideas about Louis XVI in a clockmaker’s shop – the man wasn’t fit to sweep the streets, let alone mend clocks – are not idle words. When it came to it, he was prepared to put his principles into action, even if it meant overlooking the murder of his best friend and many attempts on his own life. I must tell you honestly, Lucia, that I should not have done it; I should have had Ursin put away for the rest of his life. But your father saw something in him and was able to draw it out. Controller Ursin was reclaimed; he became a decent servant of the state, efficient and tenacious, but fair and even merciful at times. To this day he is among your father’s most valued administrators, she would insist.

But you know, I don’t suppose there were any bullets in that pistol.

* There is a pun of sorts here: in Dubitanian, ‘Lavratina’ = washerwoman
* The opinelca is a traditional Dubitanian shepherd’s knife, supposedly designed for fighting wolves.

Total to date: 6,353 words. Just a bit ahead of schedule.

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Chapter One: School

November 1, 2009 by plegmund

OK, folks, here is chapter one of Twentyland…

1. School

The other children would not believe that my father was also the Father of Our Country. His face, stern but gentle, square and manly with gently greying temples, smiled down from our classroom wall – from every classroom wall – and from the big framed picture in the hall, and from posters on every street. To my fellow-pupils our beloved leader President Marki Larvartin was a legendary figure, like someone from a story, and I’m not sure they believed in his real existence in quite the way they believed in their own fathers. The idea that I might be his daughter was to them an obvious lie, and not even an amusing one, but a silly, tedious one, an attempt on my part to add some status to my own mousy indeterminate dullness.

I had not meant to say anything about it. My mother had always warned me sternly against mentioning my father’s name: I wasn’t quite sure why. It hardly seemed something to be ashamed of. But she succeeded in impressing on me that it was effectively a secret, and that she would be angry if ever I betrayed it.

But then little Stephia started goading me, saying I was a bastard. I had rather liked Stephi before this, but this accusation was particularly galling because it was technically true, and therefore could not be rebutted. My mother, I knew, considered marriage an oppressive, bourgeois institution, more a defacement of an honest relationship than its natural fulfilment. She would no more have agreed to marry my father than to walk around in a set of chains. I always understood that my father tacitly agreed, at least in a more lukewarm manner. though he would never condemn marriage publicly and always lent his strong moral support to the institution of the family.

But then Stephi began to say I had no father, did not know who my father was.

“I have a father!” I shouted indignantly, “I have a father I see every day at home! And he’s more important than your father!”

“What’s his name, then?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“Why not? Because you don’t know it?”

“No, because it’s none of your business.”

“Ooh! Lucia’s father is secret! He’s better than mine, he’s better than yours, only he daren’t tell anyone his name.”

“My father,” I said furiously, unleashing what I took to be the equivalent of a nuclear strike, “is Marki Larvartin.”

The effect was far worse than I could have imagined. It was roughly as if I had said my father was Napoleon Bonaparte, or Charlie Chaplin. There was a stunned moment of silence, briefly gratifying, and they all broke out in sincere, uncontrollable laughter. Even those who had looked ready to defend me now instantly switched sides. I had gone too far, I had been too stupid, I had let them down and no longer deserved any sympathy. No, now I deserved all I got, they made it clear.

Over the next few weeks, some of them took to mocking me and even, in a desultory way, bullying me. I found myself penned into a corner of the playground by the leaking drainpipe which was covered in moss, the only place which was securely out of view of the teachers, where I was subjected to a lazy inquisition. If I hit you will the army come and get me then? Why doesn’t your father come and rescue you? One serious little girl got a more dangerous glint in her eye and told me that she feared this disrespectful appropriation of our Leader’s name showed false consciousness. I might be in need of re-education to prevent my becoming, in objective terms, a reactionary element. I might need to be sent to an ‘Explanation Camp’. She attempted to start the process by giving me a Chinese burn. I despised all my antagonists, but I viewed her and her supposed Camps (there were in real life Reading Camps and Number Camps where children who had failed to make good progress might go in the summer if their parents wished) with particular contempt. My father was not Chairman Mao, and the threat of compulsory re-education did not exist in our happy Republic; if anyone needed their perceptions amended, it was her. All the same I felt wounded to be placed in the role of the traitor, the heretic, when I knew I was the daughter of the absolute wellspring of orthodoxy.

In fairness, there was absolutely no reason for them to believe me. I went to an ordinary school, and because my parents were not married, I did not use my father’s surname: I was Lucia Fabrin, not Lucia Larvartin. We lived in an ordinary apartment in an ordinary part of the city, and my father would come home from the Agraci Palace in an ordinary green Robodin car, his only concessions to his elevated status being the uniformed soldier who drove it (it was one of my father’s quirks that he never learned to drive) and the pale secretary Stilin in the passenger seat, a black cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Lucas Stilin, who had been with my father since the early days, since my father first joined the Party, accompanied him everywhere, even up the door of our block before turning and getting back into the car. I never felt quite comfortable in Stilin’s presence. It wasn’t that his gaunt appearance was so terrifying – he really only looked like an elderly teacher or clerk of some kind, it was my imagination that made him seem so cadaverous – but somehow I felt there was a danger about him, like some poisonous creature which, without any malice on its part, would one day do me or my father some terrible harm. However, my father seemed to find him indispensable, and he certainly appeared to be dedicated.

My mother told me my father wanted me to have an ordinary working-class Twentyland education, not to have me treated as the privileged offspring of a politician. He would have been untrue to his principles if he had allowed me to use my unearned status to win the respect of my little peers. Once again it was made clear that she would be furious if she ever found out that I had even mentioned who my father was. But one day I could not help bursting out:

“If you are the President, Daddy, why don’t we live at the Palace?”

He looked up from his newspaper and raised his greying eyebrows at me. He threw my mother, standing at the sink, a sly look.

“What’s this? Our little girl wants to be a princess, it seems, Marica.”

“But you work at the Palace. You go there every day, even Sundays. Wouldn’t it be easier if we lived there?”

He sighed. My mother was giving me black looks which threatened a bad time later on. But my father was not angry. In fact I never remember him being angry with me. He put aside his paper and held out his arms; I skipped across to the battered old armchair he always settled into (like some old bear easing itself wearily into a pile of leaves for its winter sleep); worn thin in places, leaking stuffing at one side, and with one broken spring, but still his favourite; he wouldn’t hear of replacing it. I sat on his knee. Resting my head on his chest (I wasn’t too old to do that yet) I caught a faint but definite whiff of pipe tobacco. He was supposed to have given up a year ago; if my mother caught him there’d be a bad time for him too.

He began by reminding me of the bedtime stories he had always told me; stories about the French Revolution, the Russian revolution. He had always told me, he said gently, that our Revolution was to be better than those, fine as they were. When the leaders of past revolutions had got into the King’s palace, they found it suited them very well. They began to live in the King’s house and wear kingly clothes. in the end they became kings, as Napoleon had done. There was an English writer, he told me, a terrible reactionary, but one who had written a good, clever story about this, a story about the revolution of the farm animals; I should read it when I was older…

My mother rolled her eyes up disrespectfully. My father often tried her patience; she had a far sharper sense of propriety than he did. She did not think there was anything a good Marxist-Larvartist could learn from English literature, not even from Charles Dickens’ harrowing documentary works on the cruelty and contradictions of capitalism, about the only English books she was prepared to countenance at all.

My father reminded me how the French had cut off the heads of their King and Queen. But you cannot dispel the institution of monarchy merely by executing the individual who happens to occupy the position of monarch, he said: like bad magic it lingers in the air until it can inhabit a new human form. Louis was not a bad man in himself, perhaps; it was not his wickedness that made him a king, but the impartial processes of historical dialectic. Perhaps he did not even like being king; instead he wished he had been a clock-maker. How would it have been, now, if the revolutionaries had not killed him and his silly wife, but given him a little shop, and her a flock of real sheep? How would it have been, if instead of spilling the blood of all those aristocrats, many of them decent individuals at heart, people who could have worked for France, they had simply been told that they should all be ordinary people now, or at least, that they should be ordinary until they did something remarkable, something good for their fellow citizens that made everyone open their eyes. Wouldn’t that have been better? Mightn’t some of those guillotined people have turned out to be worth having? Wouldn’t the French Republic have lived and grown? Mightn’t it have become the example which other countries strove to emulate, a land that lived out the true meaning of its own creed as a place of loving fraternity just as much as one of freedom and equality, a nation of comfort, sympathy and kindliness instead of the birthplace of a ravaging Imperial army?

When the Chinese captured the last of their Emperors, my father said, they didn’t cut off his head; no, even though he had most atrociously betrayed them by collaborating with the Japanese occupation, even though he was responsible for the cruel deaths of many innocent Chinese citizens. Instead they made him a gardener, and allowed him to live a decent useful life, free from the institutions which had oppressed him as well as the workers. He turned out to be a simple fellow, no more than a tool in the hands of ruthless politicians in his earlier life, but a decent and honest gardener at the end. Now that was the way a Communist regime should behave: that was exemplary; that was Marxist-Larvartism, though of course the poor Chinese didn’t have the advantage of understanding the illustrious theory they were exemplifying.

“And so, Lucia,” he concluded, “that is why we must be ordinary people if we are to keep faith with our special Twentyland Revolution. You know, it suits me anyway: ordinary life is congenial to me. I’m sure you prefer it too, don’t you? Think of having to wear stiff clothes all day and never get them dirty; think of always having to eat properly with a knife and fork while lots of horrid servants in wigs stared at you. You would not like to sleep in that Palace, in a huge bed with horrid musty curtains around you, wide dark spaces full of ghosts, the sound of strange people creeping down the corridors all night; no, no.”

“But then why do you work there every day?”

“I wish I didn’t, to tell you the truth. You know I have to entertain foreign leaders, Lucia, and my advisors tell me that such people are impressed and rendered more amenable if they come to a palace to see me. And when I present awards to our workers and scientists, they feel honoured all the more if the presentation is in a palace. Perhaps they should not feel like that, perhaps one day they won’t, but at the moment, I’m afraid they do. Anyway, I should not like to demolish the place; it is a fine building in its way, a valuable reminder of our history, too, and it is better that we put it to ordinary use. Do you know that we only use a small part of it for my offices? We made the rest of it into a lunatic asylum.”

My mother frowned.

“It is not a lunatic asylum; it is a mental hospital.” she reproved him.

“I’m sorry. But you know, Marica, there is some excuse for me. They call themselves the lunatics. You know that they belong to St Matthew’s Refuge for Lunatics – that is the official name. But there is also St Matthew’s Hospital of Genito-Urinary Medicine, and when people asked which one they were from the patients always used to say very quickly that they were the lunatics. They got used to it. In any case, it is a good use for a palace, don’t you think? You know that when they first moved in, they were very pleased with their new accommodation. When I came out of my office one evening, there was a lunatic – excuse me, a female mental patient I should say – standing by. She saluted me and thanked me for moving them all into the Agraci Palace, and then, as I was getting into the car she shouted at the top of her voice; ‘Don’t worry, Marki Larvartin, the people may think you’re a scoundrel, but the lunatics will always support you!’”

He paused, and then raised one finger thoughtfully.

“But you know what? I think your criticism is a good one in a way, after all, Lucia. She is right, isn’t she, Marica? You think, Lucia, that I should not be ashamed to bring these foreigners, and these deserving workers, to an ordinary home, and you are right; your approach is impeccable. Tomorrow you shall live in a palace, because this flat will become the Palace – will you be ready, Marica? I look forward to seeing the reactions. I think the face of the British ambassador, Sir John Beauchamp-Tollemache, will be particularly worth seeing. I shall offer him this chair as a mark of my special regard for the English aristocracy.”

My mother was not amused. She told me my father must not show me any special favour, since that would betray his principles, and that I should not ask it.

“I’m afraid your mother is right, Lucia, said my father, if we begin to bend the rules for ourselves, we shall be setting off on a bad road.”

I moaned in frustration, and he looked at me in surprise.

“Is there something else behind all this? Tell me your problems.”

I hesitated – this was going to make my mother even angrier – and then I told him about the other children and how they wouldn’t believe me. He listened carefully – it was one of the things he was good at: no-one else paid attention to my views, but he seemed to think they were as important as my mother’s, or the Controller of Police’s, or anyone’s. People trusted him for the simple reason that he listened to them properly, and he seemed for his part to find people unendingly interesting, not always a quality a politician can afford, I should have thought.

When I had finished my mother intervened.

“This is your own fault, Lucia,” she declared icily, “If you had done as you were told, there would be no problem. I will speak to your teacher about this, but you must say no more about your father. Understood? In time this will blow over.”

Over the next week at school I found this hard to believe, but I was a dutiful girl and I did my best. When I was teased, I clamped my lips shut and would not say who my father was – or anything at all.

Then, after ten days or so, in the middle of a lesson, when we were settling down to a spelling test, the classroom door flew open and my father, entirely unannounced, strode in, looking older, greyer and fatter than in the picture on the wall, but far nicer and instantly recognisable. I felt as if I were soaring out of the top of my own head on a surge of joy and excitement. He looked around the classroom, came over to my desk, and seized me in a great bear-hug, all in an astonished silence; put me down again, strode over to the teacher’s desk and whispered inaudibly in her ear. I don’t know what he said to her – I supposed he was trying to put her at her ease; she certainly looked as if she needed it, poor woman. Then he went back to the door where his driver was standing grinning beside the ghost-like figure of Stilin the secretary, waved at the children and disappeared.

The teacher was completely flummoxed by this. She sat in silence for a while, staring straight ahead with her eyes wide open. Then suddenly, as if she had woken up, she began to applaud frantically. The children joined in gradually; for about a minute we all clapped vigorously, and then faltered and stopped again, feeling slightly ridiculous.

My life at school was different after that; not better in every respect, since some of my former friends now shunned me while a few of the worse kind of people began to toady and follow me around; but no-one doubted my word any more.

My mother was furious when she found out what had happened.

“After all those lectures about being an ordinary man, you do this!” she exclaimed, “So she must be the President’s daughter for the rest of her life after all! Her life must revolve around yours! For the sake of a cheap gesture you sacrifice your daughter’s privacy and freedom forever! You understand what you’ve done? Now no-one will look at her without thinking of you. Damn you. You should be ashamed of yourself. So much for Marxist-Larvartism!”

My father took it all with patience, as he always did.

“I’m a simple man, Marica,” he replied, “I don’t understand ideology. I never went to college like you. But if this Marxist-Larvartism of yours says that a man can’t hug his daughter, then frankly, I say to hell with it.”

“What did you say to the teacher?” I asked.

“I apologised for disrupting her lesson. I said I was so delighted by your marks recently that I felt I must come at once and congratulate her on your achievements… Er… I said the visit was informal, strictly informal, just a parent dropping in. I asked her not to tell the head teacher that I had come, or she would be sure to get out the committee and ask me to make a speech, and then I would be late and Stilin would begin fidgeting and we should all be in terrible trouble. And I asked her to remove the picture. My picture, I mean, the one on the wall. In Twentyland, we don’t have the cult of personality, I said: if I should come back another time with the Minister of Education, I should be embarrassed that my picture was on the wall. Not that I’m not flattered, I said, please don’t think I don’t appreciate the warm sentiment, but you know another thing about that picture is that I don’t like the way the eyes follow you around the room.”

“You couldn’t have said all that. You didn’t have time.”

“No, I suppose not.” he answered slyly. “Perhaps I just said ‘Excuse me, Miss’.”

I threw my arms around the President and gave him the biggest hug I could manage.

3,391 words. Woo hoo!

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Oh no, not again…

October 12, 2009 by plegmund

I’m not ready. Last year at this stage I had a full outline with notes about what was going to happen in each chapter; this year, all I have is the general idea. Last year it felt exciting, this year it has a definite tinge of getting out of bed at 6.00 on a cold, wet morning.

Still, what the heck.

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ABNA

April 5, 2009 by plegmund

I put ‘Nanowrimo Winner’ in for the ‘Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award’, not because I thought it would win but because it was all I’d got.

I didn’t really expect any reaction beyond a possible sales pitch for Amazon’s self-publishing service, but I’ve just had a couple of pieces of feedback from ‘ABNA Expert Reviewers’. A bit good cop, bad cop, really.

First Reviewer
I enjoyed reading this “novel.” I gave it 4 stars for originality, but not 5 because it really doesn’t really seem like a novel. It seems more like a humorous treatise about writing a 50,000 word novel for the ABNA contest or of the author’s chances of winning, perhaps. It certainly seems to be a tongue-in-cheek effort to sort of poke fun at the contest.

Actually, it’s rather difficult to decide what is going on: Is this a story about how the author’s is trying to impress his live-in girl friend to commit to their moderately casual relationship, and is she and the first-person narrator real or fictional?

When the author relates to a childhood friend at “the Royal Oak,” a pub I think, a summary of a detective novel stored in a box in the bottom of a cardboard box in a cupboard somewhere in his residence that he wrote at about age 17, its zany plot sounds pretty good.

The author uses words quite well, frequently playfully, but with good vocabulary and clear prose. The tumbling flow of ideas is rich in content and entertaining. His brief descriptions of characters in his tale make them come to life rather effortlessly. Actually, I think a lot of us who write would like to write like this author has written at least once, just escape the bounds of sensible restraint and go supernova with wit.

I want to add-I think it is important to add-that this author has potential, and I wish he would of “had a go” at writing the detective novel he enticingly described, instead of a “novel” about writing a novel for an actual contest. Would any publisher be interested in this “spoof”? Well, maybe.

Second Reviewer
Though I really wanted to like this excerpt based on the premise, I simply wasn’t able to in the end. What I thought would be a tongue-in-cheek look at the novel writing process turned into a pedantic novel about a pedantic novel-writer. It was not at all amusing and certainly did not inspire a desire to continue reading.

The narrator of this novel is not at all a sympathetic character, and his snide approach to novel-writing seemed a touch bitter for a writing competition. When read aloud, the dialogue is clunky and does not flow naturally. If I read this excerpt in a bookstore, I would not purchase the full novel.

I’m afraid the net effect on me is one of mild encouragement…

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Victory!

November 28, 2008 by plegmund

Nanowrimo winner badge
The official Nanowrimo counter puts the word count at 53,782, a bit more than I thought based on WordPress totals (but I’m not arguing).

Back with further comment in due course. I’ve done a handy pdf version of the whole thing, to make it easier to read (in the unlikely event that anyone should want to).

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Chapter Twenty-Four: The End

November 28, 2008 by plegmund

[Final Total Word Count: 53,547]

The end is nigh, gentle reader. It’s nearly over. It seems hard to believe, but less than 500 words now stand between us and the summit: Nanowrimo!

It’s been tough along the way, I acknowledge. The rest of my life has taken a number of knocks while I’ve been closeted with the laptop. But I’ve grown, gentle reader, I’ve learned to value my own qualities, and I’ve learnt that I must take charge of my own life. A new life and a better, more mature Faletcher lie ahead.

And you know, I’m actually quite pleased with Wenham, too. It’s going to need a lot of revision, obviously, and probably some expansion. Not to mention some editing. It pains me to think of cutting it back down to about 30,000 words, but it’s going to have to be done before I start adding again. So there’s a long way to go, but let me be quite honest and open; I really don’t see why, at the end of it, there shouldn’t be a half-decent, perhaps even a viable book come out of it. Don’t worry, I’m not back on the Booker prize tack, and I realise it may just be the euphoria of completion that’s speaking here, but at the end of the day, when all’s said and done, taking everything into account… why the hell not?

I rang Julie earlier on and told her that within about an hour, all being well, the thing would be done, and asked her to come over and celebrate. So now, gentle reader, the last little insertion into the text…

…is done. No, I’m not going to give you a sample of it this time. It’s a kind of inverted Hardy passage where I go on soppily about how in spite of the dullness of the landscape round about Wenham, there’s a property in the soil that brings good out of bad, and how the three years of blight fertilise the land for the seven years of plenty that follow. Alright, it might be a bit out of key with some of the other stuff, but I’m determined to put a bit of optimistic uplift in, and not merely because I’ve developed this superstitious fear about the story having some kind of ghastly influence over me. I’m free of it now, anyway.

Right on cue, Julie rang the doorbell – I told her she should use her key – and came in.

“So it’s really finished?” she asked.

“Yes, that’s it. Well, I have to upload the stuff and get it counted officially, but the writing is done.”

“Congratulations!” she said, and kissed me on the cheek. “I’m really impressed with your determination.”

“Have a seat,” I said, “I’ll open the champagne.”

“Wait a minute,” she said solemnly, “Come and sit down. We need a talk first.”

Clearly I had to sign up to a few basic protocols before anything as frivolous as champagne intervened.

“I didn’t want to go through this while you were still doing your writing thing,” she said, “It didn’t seem fair. But now we have to get on the level.”

She took a deep breath.

“First, I slept with Geoff.”

“Geoff? What? Geoff? Geoff Browne? You slept with Geoff?”

“Yes, Geoff. Oh come on, don’t look like that. Is Geoff so awful? He’s supposed to be your friend.”

“Yes, he is, isn’t he? I don’t…Is this… is this sort of in revenge for the Mouse?”

“No – it happened before that.”

“Before? But why didn’t you say… Oh, is this why you didn’t give me much of a hard time? But you were definitely post-Maureen, right?”

“Look, the details don’t matter. If you must know, it was only about three times.”

“About three times… My God, you’re Mercedes, aren’t you? Mercedes, the reliable, comfortable ride…”

“There is no Mercedes, John,” she responded irritably, “That was just some bizarre idea of Geoff’s, supposed to help keep you from noticing anything, or something.. I told him I didn’t like it.”

“You went to the Miramar and had breakfast with him, though, didn’t you?”

“What has breakfast got to do with it?” she exclaimed.

“OK, OK. I don’t care about the breakfasts. I’d rather you admitted to the breakfasts and denied the sex, to be perfectly honest.”

“Look, I’m sorry.”

“Jesus,” I said, “And the reason he wanted me to carry on with Nanowrimo was so I wouldn’t be spending any time with you…”

“No, you’re being totally paranoid.” she said.

“My God,” I said, unable to help myself, “You told me there were heaving bosoms. I just didn’t realise it was yours we were talking about.”

That did not go down very well, gentle reader. So at last I shut up.

“The second thing is,” she said grimly, “you and I are splitting up. Look, I’m not, you know, in a relationship with Geoff. I probably won’t see him any more. That’s not what it was about. The thing with Geoff, well… it was partly, I don’t know how to explain it, just a way of persuading myself that my life needed moving on – can you understand that?”

Yes, I understand that alright. It’s the new double standard. If I play away, it’s a contemptible betrayal and shows my piggish male nature; if you play away, it’s a deeply felt emotional exploration of personal potential, something in fact, which I could learn valuable life lessons from if only I could rise above myself sufficiently to contemplate it with the required reverence. That’s it, isn’t it?

“Yes,” I said, “I think I sort of do. So I’m what you’re moving on from, is that right?”

“I really thought we might salvage it,” she said. “Until the other day. It was that rose in the bottle that did it, made me realise it was basically no good.”

“The rose? But that was meant to be apologetic, a tender gesture, a friendly joke. I meant it to be nice.”

“I’m sorry, but it looked sarcastic to me, and it still does. I can’t help forgetting the bottle, for God’s sake. But you couldn’t lay off the smartarse stuff, could you? You couldn’t just leave it.”

There were tears in my eyes, but I had to think clearly. I knew a lot might depend on what I said. Obviously the situation was not retrievable here and now. Things had to play themselves out, this was not a conversation which could be turned away from its planned destination. If I protested, if I got angry, above all if I said anything else that could possibly, in any way at all, be construed as smartarse stuff, I would just destroy the last remaining long-term chances. Instead, a little late in the day, I had to do my best not to slam any more doors, and leave the way back as open as I could.

“I’ll only say this once,” I said, in a slightly strange voice, I noticed, “But I mean it more than I’ve ever meant anything. This is a mistake. I love you.”

I think it had some impact, possibly left some trace. We sat in silence for a minute.

“Alright, well I’m going now,” she said at last, “We can speak again later if you want to, but you must accept that I’m not going to, you know, have a row about it, or a detailed post mortem, or a shouting match. And of course, there’ll be some things to sort out, stuff to move. See you.”

“Goodbye.” I said.

So here we are, gentle reader. At the end, it’s just you and me after all. We can have a glass of champagne – Geoff’s Cristal in fact, though he never actually paid for it. Or perhaps it’s best to leave the bottle standing there in the middle of the table forever. Like Miss Havisham’s cake. The weird thing is that as I sit here the thought that comes to mind is: Lady Jane Pimsey must be laughing her head off at this one.

Still we made it, didn’t we? The summit of Nanowrimo. Shake hands, gentle reader – maybe a little farewell hug? Thank you. It’s cold up here, and a trifle lonely, but you can see a lot of things you couldn’t see from down there. Was it worth it all? I lost a month of my life; what I would have called my best friend; the chance of promotion; my job, a substantial chunk of my sanity; and finally my girlfriend.

But Nanowrimo came through. It delivered as promised. Because look what I have got. Fifty thousand words of unpublishable crap.

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Chapter Twenty-Three: A Problem

November 28, 2008 by plegmund

[Total Word Count: 52,106 !]

“I gave him that spreadsheet.”

“You what?”

“I gave him that spreadsheet. Only he asked for it again, and you never got me another copy, so I had to find my copy and give him it.” said Katie, resentfully.

“Did you delete the sheet with the story on?”

“No. I can’t start mucking about with documents – I just used it the way you sent it to me.”

“Actually I didn’t send it to you. You took it out of my sent mail.”

“Well, whatever. He’s got it now, anyway.”

I moaned and clutched my head, and she turned away.

“Katie, wait. Has he actually read it?”

“I don’t know. It’s in his reading folder.”

“Could you go back and delete the second sheet? Could you? You know it’ll only annoy him. I’m not just asking to save my own skin. Alright, mainly to save my own skin. But not just.”

“No, if he thought I was editing stuff he’d asked for, he wouldn’t like it. He gets really upset if he thinks people are trying to manipulate him. It’s your own fault – you promised you’d get me the original version, didn’t you?”

“If I get you another copy of the proper one now, immediately, could you swap them – I mean before he reads them?”

“I don’t know whether I can. He might have read it already. Well, I might be able to, I suppose. But you’ll have to be really quick. He’s going to start looking at his stuff any time now.”

As soon as she had gone I started frantically searching. I usually accumulate dozens of copies of any given document, as I get re-copied into different circulations. I ransacked my own emails and files, but I just didn’t have it. Not a sniff. With insane, self-destructive tidiness I’d even cleaned out my sent mail, gentle reader. I checked the circulation of the original, which was still on a forwarded email in the depths of my inbox. Only about six people had it, one of whom was John Sopert himself (no point in asking Katie to retrieve it though); one was Kevin, still away, and one was me. One of the others was from a research organisation who would probably try to charge me for an additional copy, and one was in hospital with a broken leg. The other, my last best hope, was Bill. My old friend the headless troll. Clearly it was my day today.

I hurried up one floor to the land of the faded blue cubicles – I lived in the sea of green. By great good fortune Bill was in place, staring myopically at a turgid-looking document on his screen as if hoping it would speak to him.

“Bill,” I said, without ceremony, “Have you still got that spreadsheet on the Multistode spend? You know the one.”

“Hmm? Hello young man. What do you want?” He looked up unsmilingly and raised one condescending eyebrow.

“You remember the spreadsheet with advertising spend we discussed the other week? Have you still got it? Could you send me a copy?”

“The Multistode? I thought that was finished with. OK. I’ve probably still got it somewhere. Not sure where. I’ll have a look when I’ve finished this and send it on if you like. What do you want it for, anyway? Didn’t you keep it yourself?”

“No, that’s the problem. The thing is, Bill,” I gripped the edge of his cubicle. “I gave John Sopert a messed-up copy and now I need to get the correct one before he sees it, or he’ll have my proverbials for garters, you know? I sort of need it now. I’d be very grateful. Please, if you would.”

“Oh.” he said, looking me up and down. “I see. Got ourselves in bother again, have we? Honestly John, and I’m not being in any way personal here, but honestly you want to get a grip of this sort of thing, mate. One of these days…” He paused for a moment’s reflection. He enjoyed making me wait, but finally some last shred of decency came out; or perhaps he decided that in the long run giving me the thing would piss on my chips in some deeper and more effective way than withholding it. Or perhaps he thought John Sopert would in some way blame him if he didn’t provide a copy. In any case, he sat forward with a sigh. “Let’s have a look then… Oh yes. Here it is. There. Sent. Happy bunnies again?”

“Thanks Bill.” I said, fervently.

“Good luck.” he said, and then, with all the scorn his tiny twisted body could hold: “Mr Minimus…”

I ran back to my own desk, checked the spreadsheet. I wouldn’t by any means have put it past Bill to have somehow sabotaged it, but he hadn’t, and it hadn’t somehow acquired a copy of the extra sheet through evil magic. It was OK. I emailed it off to Katie. Then I ran back along the corridor to the little anteroom she occupied.

“Have you got it?” I asked, “Can you replace the other one?”

“No,” she said, “It’s no good. Too late. And you got me in trouble, didn’t you?”

“I what?”

“See, after I spoke to you I thought perhaps I was being a bit mean. So I thought I’d help you out. I deleted the second sheet. But then he comes out and he says that’s not the one he wanted. He says he wanted the one with the fictional material. It turns out he did read it the first time even though he had the plumbing problem. He says it takes more than water through the drawing room ceiling to stop him reading his papers. So there was actually no point in bothering about it anyway. It was too late in any case. But now he thinks I’m trying to pull some sort of fast one, or that I don’t know what I’m doing. All through trying to help you out.”

I had a vision of Mrs Sopert frantically moving buckets and attempting to shore up the house while her husband sat gravely immersed in his business circulars, lifting his eyes only to suggest fondly but firmly that all the noise wasn’t helping his concentration very much darling?

“Thanks for trying.” I said, hopelessly.

I set off back to my cubicle, feeling numb. I was doomed, doomed. There was no getting around it. I didn’t know in what form the storm would break over my head, or when, but clearly it was only a matter of time now. In fact, I hadn’t long to wait at all: before I had quite reached the illusory security of my cubicle, a heavy hand descended on my shoulder. I very nearly squealed in fear, I was so tense.

“John? Come with me a moment, would you?” It was Sopert himself, and his tone dispelled any idea that he was going to congratulate me on a brilliant bit of writing, or ask where he could sign up for Nanowrimo. I trailed behind him the long and weary way back to his office.

“Right, John: I’m guessing you know that this is about the spreadsheet you sent me inadvertently, ending with, er, internet fictional material,” he said once he’d settled himself. “Now you may be wondering why I didn’t speak to you sooner. The fact is, I’ve been talking to our HR people. If their advice to me had been slightly different, John, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, and you’d be clearing your desk. Understand? And don’t think that scenario has altogether gone, John, because in my mind it hasn’t. It’s still very much a possibility.”

“However, the HR people tell me that since the material in question is not explicitly pornographic, does not appear to breach commercial confidentiality, and is not offensive hate speech or unacceptable in other ways, it is technically not in breach of our Acceptable Use policy, and is not therefore a disciplinary matter in those respects. They suggested instead that the waste of company time and resources implied by this – material – is instead a management issue.”

“You see,” I began.

“No, you wait a minute,” he interrupted, “You listen to me. What makes this very much worse in my eyes, John, is that this misdemeanour is internet-related. The text here includes a web-site address, and I am forced to conclude that it was your intention that this, er, material of yours was to be uploaded to a chat room. I’d like to know exactly what – ahuh! – you thought you were doing.”

I breathed in and out. It was time to put aside all dignity and decency and grovel.

“I’d like to make a clean breast of this, John,” I began, “To begin with, I must confess I’ve been going through a difficult time with my girlfriend.”

“Ahuh?”

“One of the problems is that, well, she’s a very creative person, whereas I’m sort of totally focussed on work and my career you know? I had to sort of show that I had a creative side too. So I’m afraid I started writing this, er, short story. She sort of insisted. It was her idea, really. I mean totally.”

“But it took me an awfully long time, and I hated it really. I had promised I’d finish it, so I had to, but I really just wanted to be done with it. Well, the other day, when I was reviewing the spreadsheet, in my lunchtime of course, I just thought, I can’t concentrate properly for worrying about this wretched story. Julie’s not going to be happy unless I finish it. So I thought, why don’t I take ten minutes, get the whole thing out of my system and be done with it? Then I can really get into the analysis of these figures. I realise now it was stupid, and I really regret it, but I’ve learned from the experience. I was sort of under pressure, you see. It really won’t happen again.”

“And what about the, the chat-room?”

“Oh, that address isn’t a chat-room. It’s a site about publishing stories. I wanted to show it to Julie, my girlfriend, to er, to show how hopeless, how pointless and stupid it all was. I’m just sorry that in a vulnerable moment., I let myself be led astray in the first place.”

“Ahuh. Well, I’m glad at least that you’ve chosen to be honest. I think I understand the position. You can’t afford this kind of thing, John, I hope you realise that. I’m surprised that you’d let yourself be led astray like this. I’m very disappointed. But I think I understand, at least. Now I’ve spoken to a couple of people about you – it’s a shame Kevin isn’t here but I know his views – and a pretty consistent view emerges. You’re a talented young man, but there’s a problem of attitude. One of your senior colleagues said to me that you were very clever, but he didn’t quite know whether you had taken on board the positive culture we like to foster at Behemoth: the ethos of Total Improvement. I need to make a decision here. We’re a civilised organisation. People values are very much part of our vision. So I’m not going to sack you. But my expectation is that you will want to look for other opportunities over the next few months. Let me make myself clear. You need to be working for someone else by 1 April. I’m not going to spell it out any more than that – just don’t be here, alright? If you are – well, let’s not explore that. Now you can go. And it’s none of my business, but if I were you, well – I’d get myself a new girlfriend, to be quite honest.”

I stood up and turned to go.

“Oh: since you were looking at the Multistode spend, what do you make of it?” he asked.

This was bizarre. As if we were straight back to normal. A wild hope that this was just a test, that I hadn’t been irrevocably fired, sprang up in my mind, matched at once by a desire to tell the conceited old fool where to put his Multistode. No, no: play it cool. Cool. I couldn’t remember anything about the figures. For the moment I couldn’t even remember who Multistode were.

“There are several aspects, really…” I began, limply.

“Ahuh?”

“But in the end if you were to sum it up as a headline it would be, er” – fingers tightly crossed – “Slide Of Distribution; Outturn Falling Fast.”

“Muh?” he raised an eyebrow, “Slide of distribution?”

“Basically A Slide To A Reduced Distribution.”

“Well,” he said impatiently, “You’re right about that, anyway. As far as it goes. Thank you.”

So much for that, gentle reader. As I collapsed back into my cubicle, I was actually trembling. My reserves of nervous energy were at a low ebb, and as the last trickle was diverted to essential life support functions my self-esteem shields flickered and went out. The warm duvet of ego-protecting delusion which we all normally carry round with us fell away from me and I had a rare and painful moment of self-knowledge. I was contemptible, without dignity or decency. Servile attempts to lie and divert the blame to others while trying to convince myself there was something ironically witty about it, that was me. Attempts to blame Julie, who had displayed such patience, who had given me opportunities to be a better person, all spurned in favour of febrile showing off.

Those acronyms – acrostics? – initialisms? -were a pretty crap thing to have done. Childish rudeness, cringingly concealed, and, the characteristic Faletcher icing on the cake, a footling attempt to make myself feel clever. Sopert could sack me, but he couldn’t humiliate me: no, I did that to myself. I had two choices there. I could have frankly told him to piss off, or I could have risen above it and behaved with calm indifference. But I couldn’t do the former for fear of being thrown out before I had a new job, and I couldn’t do the latter, full stop. That’s the kind of thing you have to be a man to do, my son, and I failed; I failed in myself, of my own doing. I can’t do that man stuff, gentle reader. You’re just going to have to call me Peter Pan. Ah. Did you notice the self-esteem coming back on line?

There were some other things to worry about now, of course. It might actually be a good thing to leave Behemoth; it doesn’t look good to hang around too long in one job. But I’d need luck. Any prospective employer would get suspicious at any sign of haste. They might pick up some problematic vibe. For that matter, Behemoth might give me a rubbish reference. I don’t think it would be the Sopert way to give me a really bad one, but a bit of studied restraint, or one allusion to how I hadn’t quite achieved perfect harmony with the local corporate culture and I’d be doomed. Any mention of internet activity would be equally damning. I should, in fact delete this blog altogether now.

OK, gentle reader, I’m still here. I’m not giving up. This is the lesson of Nanowrimo, I’m discovering: as in novelising, so in real life: it takes effort, but you can write your own story. I mean to do so. This is my blog, and whether or not I am to be the hero of it, I’m damn well going to be the author. As I took control of Wenham, so I shall take control of my own life. Well done, me.

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Chapter Twenty-two: Difficult conversations

November 28, 2008 by plegmund

[Total Word Count: 49,479]

“Good morning!” said Julie, “Sleep alright?”

I gradually resumed consciousness and pieced together the essential memories I needed for a coherent answer,

“Yeah, not too bad, considering,” I answered, levering myself up off the couch.

“There’s coffee if you want it. I’m off in about ten minutes. OK?” she glanced sideways “What’s that?” she asked, staring at the table.

The wine bottle still stood there, gentle reader, but in it was a single red rose.

“It’s just a rose.” I said, “Well, I say ‘just’, but I had to ransack about twelve gardens last night to find it. Your neighbours are probably going to think the Yeti’s moved into the neighbourhood.”

She clicked her tongue, shook her head, and left.

I felt pretty good that day, in spite of a relative lack of sleep. I was back in control. But there was an unwelcome task ahead of me, and as the evening approached my spirits began to droop again.

It was only as I picked up the phone that I realised there was another difficulty. I still had no idea what Mouse’s actual name was. But I wanted to speak to her. I didn’t want just to avoid answering the phone for the next month. Never mind, with any luck, she’d answer the phone herself.

“Hello?” said a voice, uninformatively. I wasn’t even completely sure it wasn’t her, but I didn’t think so.

“Hi!” I said. What now? “Er, this is John…”

“Hello! Did you want to speak to Phillipa?”

Phillipa! Aha! My strategy was succeeding.

“Yes please.”

“She’s not here any more, I’m afraid.”

“Not there?”

“No, she moved out.”

“She moved out? Surely not? When was this?”

“Oh, last February, She went back to Shropshire. Haven’t got a phone number, but I think we’ve got an address if that’s any use.”

“No, no thanks, that’s…OK.”

“Sorry. Bye!”

So much for that. I replaced the phone in confusion. What the hell was I supposed to do now?

Luckily Mouse took matters into her own hands and rang me about ten minutes later.

“Was that you speaking to Anna just now?” she asked, “Why did you ask for Phillipa?”

“I didn’t, I didn’t. Don’t forget… I still don’t actually know your name.”

“It’s Cecilia.”

“Thanks. Hello, Cecilia.”

“Hello. How are you?”

“I was wondering… Could we meet in the pub again, tonight?”

“Oh, I should think so! Same one, about seven?”

“Yes, that’s great.” I said, wondering immediately why I thought so.

After that conversation, I sat in front of the laptop for forty minutes, but it was no good. I actually began to revise the last section I’d written, which is a bad sign. You don’t revise. Don’t revise. Don’t.

As I approached the pub, I felt really sick, and it was worse when I saw Mouse sitting there, happy, waving at me. I liked her. She was nice. I wanted to be friendly. I didn’t want to upset her. Or was it vanity to think she’d be upset?

I got drinks and sat down.

“I just… I wanted to say…” I began.

She understood instantly, without a coherent sentence being spoken. She went stiff: I could see whole structures of assumptions and hopes turn instantly to choking dust inside her. A look came over her face, a look of fury, a look I hadn’t seen since I had suggested her story was like one of Catherine Cookson’s.

“You don’t want to see me.” she said, coldly.

“I feel like a total bastard…”

“You are a total bastard.”

“Uh, yeah. Well. I’m sorry. You’re great, but you know, I’m sort of in a relationship.”

“Oh yes. Like it says on your stupid blog. Good luck to you. You do realise she’s just about to dump you?”

“Oh, look… Don’t let’s do this. Don’t…”

“I felt sorry for you, but it’ll serve you right. Oh, what’s the point?” she stood up.

“Mouse,” I said, “Don’t…”

“Cecilia!” she hissed, and left. I sat back and sipped sadly at my pint. I didn’t really know how I could have handled things any better. Apart from not sleeping with her in the first place, obviously.

And then she was back again, angrier than ever.

“And you know what?” she said, “You know what? Your story is crap. It’s crap. It’s full of clichés, the characters are corny and flat, the plot doesn’t make sense; there are no clues… it’s full of irrelevant digressions, all the characters sound like you – you pompous git – it’s all dialogue with no description, the motives don’t ring true, the chronology is contradictory, and the names of characters change half-way through…the names are all stupid as well… your MC is a boring male fantasy…”

The spirit of Nanowrimo rose strongly in me.

“Yes,” I said, conclusively, “All of that is true. But none of it matters, because you know what? It is fifty thousand words long.”

“To think I said I liked it!” she hissed, “To think I actually listened to your ideas!”

“Look,” I said, “Let’s not do it like this. I understand why you’re angry, but let’s not make a meal of it. I tell you what. Just hit me, OK? Get it over with.” I held out my cheek as if for a slap, but much to my surprise she punched me, and gentle reader, she got some surprising force behind it for such a slightly-built person.

“Ow, shit!” I said, involuntarily. It hurt like hell, really, far worse than I’d bargained for. But I think it did relieve her feelings for a moment. She sort of pursed her lips in a job-well-done sort of way.

Everyone in the pub was looking at us now, and the landlord was putting down the glass he had been polishing as if he might just come over.

“Sorry,” she said, insincerely, “But you deserved it.” She stalked out quickly.

“Sorry!” I said to the bar at large, “Sorry! You know… sorry!”

You know, gentle reader, I’m a reasonable sort of bloke. I’m ready to accept the karmic harvest of my personal turpitude. But really, you know? I take up a friendly offer, I politely decline anything more: in this day and age, gentle reader, is that grounds for outrage? Just asking.

Anyway, I stayed where I was for a while, under the landlord’s beady eye, just finishing my drink, giving Cecilia plenty of time, if she were so inclined, to pop back and point out that my poetic imagery was rubbish, or my use of metaphor and simile was weak.

It was fairly clear to me that I wouldn’t be served another drink in this establishment this evening, and that in fact I had probably overstayed my welcome already. I had the strong impression that the landlord thought it was better to let me leave quietly than throw me out, but that if it came to it, he was by no means averse in principle to the latter alternative. But I rather felt the need of one more drink. I went outside and phoned Geoff on the off-chance. He was slow to answer.

“Fancy a pint?” I asked, when he did, “I’ve had a difficult session here.”

“Difficult session?” he answered angrily, “Oh, you’re having difficult sessions, are you?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh nothing. Sorry. I can’t come out. Er… she’s here.”

For a moment my confused brain conjured an image of Cecilia giving Geoff a thorough briefing on my failure to exploit to the full the resources offered by litotes and zeugma.

“Who, Mercedes?” Even in my depressed state, my interest in Geoff’s obliging girlfriend was soon reawakened.

Geoff grunted irritably.

“She’s been here for two hours already. She wants me to listen. She says she wants advice, but I’m not allowed to say a word. Between you and me, I think the only way through, the only way my ears can cope, is for me to get totally rat-arsed again, the way I was the first time.”

“The first time?”

“The first time she unloaded all her damn issues about… oh you know. Oh fuck, look John, I really can’t talk like this, with her upstairs. It’s just mad. I’m sorry. Really. I’ve got to go. Sorry, mate. Really. Bye.”

O, the mutability of human fate, gentle reader. One minute a man is enjoying an uncomplicated regime of sex and cooked breakfasts, the next his happiness is dashed and he finds himself being required to spend his evenings listening sympathetically to a range of female relationship problems. I mean, isn’t God supposed to be a man? I couldn’t help feeling though, that in a limited way Geoff was getting what he deserved for falsely representing himself as a good listener, a reckless step which is all too easily taken in the early stages of a relationship.

I walked home contemplatively and plonked myself in front of the laptop. I really need to press on here – there’s a definite possibility that I can finish ahead of schedule, before the actual last day of the month – and wouldn’t that be great? But in spite of myself, I can’t help thinking about what Mouse said.

Are the names of my characters stupid? OK, Fidgett is a fairly whimsical name for the Earl’s family. But what Mouse, OK Cecilia, probably doesn’t realise is that I stole the name from Osbert Lancaster. It’s the name of the aristocratic family in Drayneflete. Surely no-one – no-one who’s read James Knox’s book, at any rate – is going to tell me they think Osbert Lancaster is stupid?

OK, the clues are a bit deficient. They don’t really amount to a knock-down case. Mind you, Agatha Christie’s clues weren’t all that good. She was a devil for the late revelation which solves the case and which the reader hadn’t been given a hint about. So I understand. To be honest, I’ve never actually read any Agatha Christie.

Wenham makes sense to you, doesn’t it, gentle reader? Oh, I forgot. You haven’t actually read it. Only the bits I’ve quoted. You know there’s lots of other stuff in it, all good stuff? And you’ve read enough to know it makes sense, haven’t you?

“What you have to remember, you see,“ said Lady Jane as they sped towards London, “Is that we’re not in a detective story. In those things, it always happens that the case produced by the detective is enough to secure a conviction; or the guilty parties confess, faced with the overwhelming evidence, or they kill themselves. So everything is wrapped up neatly; they never end up knowing who it is but unable to get a guilty verdict.”

“In real life, it’s not like that. Poirot would never have secured a single conviction in the real world. People don’t confess, and they don’t obligingly kill themselves just because you happen to have correctly accused them. It’s not as easy as that.”

Charlie digested this for a few moments.

“Still, though” he said, slowly, “ the Wenham murders. It so happened that they actually did kill each other off, leaving no-one to be tried. So that is a real world case where things were wrapped up neatly, isn’t it?”

“Charlie,” said Lady Jane, “Come on now. It may be neatly wrapped up, but do you really think they killed each other?”

The car lurched just perceptibly sideways as Charlie absorbed this.

“You mean they didn’t? But that was what you said – you convinced everyone that that was what happened. And then if they didn’t, you mean there is a single murderer after all? Is it…?”

“It was a complex case, granted. If this is a story we’re living in,” said Lady Jane, darkly, “there’s been more than one person who thought they were the author. More than one who thought they could dictate the course of events. But they miscalculated. You know, Charlie, I’m not a big believer in traditional resolutions, and I don’t always see a need for the actual killer to be brought to book…”

Oh no, look, this is somehow drifting away again. The story’s over, complete. We’re not looking for another twist. We’re just bulking out the word count. Is that OK with you, Lady Jane? You know, gentle reader, I was a bit worried when Charlie started getting into my dreams, but at least it wasn’t her. Maybe it serves me right for imagining a character who is more clear-sighted and intelligent than I am. I’ve got Sherlock Holmes syndrome – you know how Holmes was basically sharper and more resourceful than Conan Doyle his creator, and hence wouldn’t allow himself to be killed off, even when Doyle, in desperation, threw him over the Reichenbach falls. That’s not happening here, Lady Jane – sorry. I know she’s trying to mess me up. She doesn’t like the happy ending – that sort of thing is not to her taste. Tough luck.

No: I am master here, and I decree that there will be no more negative reflections. It’s still partly a superstitious thing I admit – I half-believe that what I’m writing is influencing my real life somehow. If things are bad in Wenham, they turn bad with me, and vice versa. I know that’s a bit mad. Put it down to a month of continual creative and emotional stress, gentle reader. But that’s only half of it. The other half is a new kind of ethical commitment. An author has a kind of responsibility to his characters, don’t you think? Or am I just losing it?

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