Nanowrimo Winner

[Total word count 12,080]

So last night there was a small difference of opinion when Julie discovered that as well as having been atrociously late for the election thing, I wasn’t planning to go and see the fireworks.

“But you told everyone you were coming,” she protested, “I’m sick of having to apologise on your behalf, and this is only the fifth of the month. Come on, You can leave early if you have to.”

“No, I won’t be able to do any writing if I come back after half a Bonfire Night party. Really, trust me, I know this about myself. I could come along later?”

“Oh no. Not that again. Alright, stay here. But I’m telling people you had to go to the emergency clinic with your unmentionable disease, OK?”

So I sat there alone in my own little place with the opportunity to do a bit of catching up. Where are we? I need to be at about 10,000 words by the end of November 5th,: but at the moment I’ve got 7,000. The minimum I ought to do today is 2,000: that effectively just stops the shortfall getting any worse. Ideally, I’d like to do the whole 3,000 needed to get back on track. So the range is two to three thousand.

3,000 is not realistic, though, is it? The original plan envisaged me having days off, or at least retaining them as a margin for error. I think I have to concede now that I’ll need to use that time. If I use weekend days to the full I can make up the deficit then.

Let’s say two thousand, then. Following the principle of doing the bits I fancy doing first, instead of following chronological order, I’m going to do Lady Emma’s long monologue to Charlie about the death of her parents.

I’ll just check my email.

Do you find that spam goes in phases? Once upon a time I got nothing but emails that promised to tell me where I could meet real women. Then for a year they offered me fake watches. Then there was a confused period where ‘non-accredited degrees’ and stock market tips slugged it out with the perennial Nigerians. Now I get virtually nothing but penile enlargement. Are these world wide trends, or are they targeting me specifically?

Anyway, time’s a-wastin’. Just a quick glance at a couple of sites.

OK. I’m not sure how that happened, but I spent 40 minutes playing Desktop Tower Defence. I don’t know why – I never get anywhere with that thing. I thought it was going to be a breakthrough when I realised that you could open and close parts of the maze and send the attackers all sloshing back through it – I think they call it juggling – but it didn’t help that much. Here we go, anyway.

“Always murder cases, ma’am?”

“Yes. I’m not really all that interested in other crimes. I’ve got a bit of a thing about murder, Charlie: always have had since Mummy and Daddy were killed when I was seven. I found them, you see.”

“I… I’m sorry.”

The mouse ball is claggy again. I don’t know how this happens. My mouse balls always get claggy really quickly. I need a paper clip to open the retaining ring – back in a tick.

Well, I don’t seem to own a paperclip of any kind. I’ll just have to try a biro…

There we are, then. Wasn’t actually as claggy as it seemed. Just get a glass of water and I’ll be right back with you…

I don’t know how far to go with this storyline. You see, the way I conceive it, Wenham would be the first of a long series of stories featuring Lady Jane. Bit by bit, we should learn about her psychological issues, until in the very last novel, she would investigate the long-ago murder of her own parents. I hardly have to tell you, faithful reader, that although she has wiped it from her memory in a dissociative personality crisis, she actually killed them herself.

The way things are going, I’m liable to put all of this into Wenham in a desperate effort to bump up the count, but that really isn’t going to work very well.

When you sit here, you can see the edge of the skirting board under the radiator. It’s absolutely covered in a layer of what looks like greasy dust. Excuse me a moment.

Yes, yes, I know what displacement activity is. In fact it isn’t quite what you think: it’s when an animal is subject to two competing stresses and responds with a pattern of behaviour completely inappropriate to either of them: no, actually what I’m doing is just evasion.

The little girl plays happily on the golden beach by herself. A gentle breeze ruffles the fronds of the trees from time to time, but otherwise the sound of the sea is all she can hear when she stands still and listens. She becomes absorbed in the construction of a large sandcastle: not high, but filled with tiny roofless rooms. As she works, she recites the imaginary conversation of the occupants in squeaky voices under her breath. After a while, she notices she is hungry: it must be time for lunch by now? She dusts most of the sand off her hands and walks up the beach. She skips along the boarded walk back to the large hut, where the door stands ajar.

“Mummy?” she asks, looking inside.

Her mother’s eyes rest on the little girl’s feet. The eyes are held at an odd, strained angle: perhaps because of the position of her mother’s head, sideways on a high shelf at the back. Most of her body is behind the door.

No, no.

… perhaps because of the position of her mother’s head, lying on the ground with her body twisted awkwardly as though trying in vain to avoid the pool of blood which has poured from the long gash in her throat.

I’m not very good at this sort of stuff. Oh, you’d noticed?

The phone rings, and before I can remember that I deliberately left it set to answer, I have picked up.

“Hello, John Faletcher?” I say. There is a long pause with confused noises.

“Can I speak to… John Faletcher, please?” asks a voice, female, Indian.

“My dear, you already have,” I reply in my best Colonel’s voice for some reason.

“Sorry?”

“This is John Faletcher.”

She now goes into a rapid monologue, emphasising words randomly, or so it seems.
“Mr Faletcher. I represent Livingstone Facilities, a leading company in the field of modern driveway and hard standing replacement. We are carrying out a survey in your area, at no obligation to you, and I wondered whether you would have time to help us, at no obligation to you, by answering a few questions.”

“Fire away.”

“Sorry? I wondered whether you would have time to help us, at no obligation to you, by answering a few questions, Mr Faletcher.”

“Yes. Alright.”

“Oh, thank you very much, Mr Faletcher, now first of all can I ask whether you are the Home Owner?”

“I am the Home Owner,” I declare, in my slow, deep, Master Villain number 2 voice.

“Sorry?”

“I am the Home Owner,”

“Sorry?”

“I am the Home Owner.” with a touch of menace now, “Do you doubt me?”

“Sorry? Can I ask you whether you are the Home Owner, Mr Faletcher, please?”

“My dear, you already have,”

“Are you the Home Owner, Mr Faletcher?

“I am the Home Owner.”

A short pause, with noises in the background.

“I’m sorry, Mr Faletcher, I think we’ve got a bad line. I’ll ring you back.”

I wait, but she does not ring again.

I have three more attempts at Lady Jane’s childhood trauma, in between making a cup of coffee, checking yesterday’s post, counting all the words all over again and – yes – cleaning the windows.

“I am the Home Owner.” I murmur self-righteously as I polish. Then I switch the telly on, and it is there that I wake, about 4 in the morning, in front of BBC Learning Zone: the World of Hard Sums.

“You were snoring when I came in.” Julie remarked rather tautly this morning, “Did you actually write anything?”.

“Yes, yes, I’m getting on fine. Well, actually not that fine. I’m having a few small problems: not a crisis yet, but you know, basically I’m running out of plot. I can write the words, but the story’s going to peter out at about 15,000 words. I need more complications, more stuff to happen.”

“Could I read it?”

“Well… Yes, I suppose so. You probably won’t like it. It’s a detective story.”

“You told me that. Lady Sarah Pimsey.”

“Lady Jane.”

“Alright, well if you can put it on my memory stick before you leave, I might be able to have a look at it at lunchtime.”

“OK. There are actually several different sections, so I’ll give you the overall summary as well. I’m not writing the different bits of the story in sequence, you see: it’s easier this way.”

“Is it? Don’t you get continuity problems when you stitch the bits back together again?”

“It’s a risk, but I think it’ll be OK. Oh, one other thing – don’t show it to anyone else, OK?”

To be honest, gentle reader, I wasn’t sure that letting Julie read it was a good idea. She’s not much of a reader, generally, and it tends to be non-fiction, biographies, that kind of thing. I’m not an avid detective story fan myself (why am I writing one, then?), but compared with her I’m Dame Ngaio Marsh. Only still alive, obviously.

So I must admit I fretted a bit as I made my way into Cincinnatus House, where I work. I haven’t as yet attempted to work on Wenham in my lunch hour, and to do so would be dangerous, but no doubt it will come, as will sitting up all night panicking. I know what fate has in store, gentle reader: I am not deluded.

Cincinnatus House, a horrid modern block, was built by Behemoth, my employer in its sixties heyday. Behemoth is in the food business, loosely speaking: back in the thirties it was a pioneer of the process by which food was turned into a fully industrial product. In those days, the techniques of divorcing the different qualities of the foodstuff – flavour, colour, mouth-feel, texture, keeping qualities, cost – achieving them in totally different ways and then artfully co-ordinating, injecting or compounding the results to achieve the ideal synthesis, were only sketchily understood and flavouring technology as we know it today barely existed. As a result Behemoth did not really do well until the war, when advantageous contracts with the government allowed it to grow somewhat, and years of rationing destroyed the national cuisine and palate. By 1945, Behemoth was ready with bigger factories and more advanced food enhancement, and the punters were ready to eat anything. Latterly, the shine has gone off things a bit as people have tended to trade up to premium products: although making a great success of certain products, like Thai Caesar Sauce and Provencal Taco Salsa, Behemoth has struggled to shed its deep conviction that all it needs to do is turn the elusive ‘premium’ ingredient into a liquid that can be sprayed onto its comestibles, and all will be well again.

Be that as it may, it is in this grey, provisional-looking building that I spend my day attempting to bring order to Kevin’s planned presentation of our Q2 sales data, and asking myself whether I should have kept Wenham strictly to myself. By the time I slink out of the front door, once again muffing the decision over whether to say goodnight to the security guard, the Q2 figures are pretty much as they were, and I’m pretty sure it was a mistake to let Julie see it.

But I misjudged her, gentle reader.

“It actually looks pretty good.” she says, sitting on my sofa with a reporter’s notebook in her hand, for when it comes to business (and it seems this is business in her eyes) she is nothing if not systematic. Would that she could apply the same orderly habits to her soft furnishings. “Apart from typos and things. It makes sense, it’s readable, the plot more or less hangs together. Your clues need work. In fact, you need some clues.”

“The real trouble is, there’s not enough of it.” I explain, “I’ve tried long evocative passages about the scenery, but even I get too bored to carry on.”

“Are there any ideas on that website?”

“Not really. Not that I can see. It’s more people asking things like whether men sit down when they wee, and how British people talk. I already know the answers to both of those.”

“Hmm. Well, the main action is really the family members killing each other off. Why don’t you just add another sibling?”

I can’t believe it. It’s so simple. There could be ten children. Twenty. Never mind murder, it could be a very slow form of genocide.

“If it were me, I should make it another sister,” Julie continued, “I would make her the one, who though led astray, shows occasional signs of decency. There could be a bit of chemistry between her and Charlie, which Lady Jane would get sulky about.”

“Lady Jane’s relationship with Charlie is purely platonic,” I protested, “She is celibate, or possibly lesbian if you insist. In book five, in conditions of great stress and danger, having just narrowly escaped with her life from a burning building, she may lay her head briefly on Charlie’s comforting shoulder. That’s all.”

“Book five?”

“Yes. Of course I don’t mean to write the full series, but detective stories come in sequences, so you sort of have to imagine them as fitting into a longer, multi-novel context.. It’s like, you know, Trent’s Last Case, which was actually meant to be the only book about Trent: it still had to suggest that there was a series, in fact making it seem like the culmination was a cunning marketing trick.”

“Well, it’s up to you,” she said, and smiled.

“But the idea of extending the family is marvellous. I’m really grateful. I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit of a pain the last couple of days, but I tell you what: when I get to the half-way mark, we’ll have a big celebration, OK?”

“You’re on.”