The Lion in Winter

In Chinon in the Loire Valley, amongst the stones and mist and turrets and walls as deep as your arm is long, the family gathered. They came across the seas and down the mountains, through the grassed valleys and out of thickly laden forests. They came, not because they wanted to traverse their empire, but because they had been summoned.

The old King sat in his castle with his hated Queen and he called his children, both through biology and through kinship, to his side. Even though they all loathed each other with equal venom they meekly did as they were bid and arrived at the castle gates not in preparation for a summer war, but in readiness for a winter peace.

The House of Plantagent was full once again that twelfth century December.

Henry the Second had kicked and snarled his way to claim the inheritance of his mother. He bullied his way to the kingdom of England, the Dukedom of Normandy, the Counties of Blois and Maine and Anjou when that still wasn’t enough he married into the Counties of Aquitaine and Gascony. The Plantagent empire, the first English empire, in 1183 stretched leisurely all the way down from Hadrian’s wall to the English channel, leapt the sea in a single bound, grappled with most of Northern France and then snaked its lazy way down to the foothills of the Pyrenees and the summer sunshine of the Mediterranean.

For Eleanor of Aquitaine, his older wife, this was on second queenship, having already divorced the King of France after rumours of infidelity and incest abroad on the second crusade. Henry didn’t care about her age or her history. After all it wasn’t as though he loved anything about her other than the titles she carried and the land, wealth and soldiers they brought with them. It had been a strategic marriage, for Eleanor didn’t care about Henry save for the armies he commanded and the slight it struck Louis when not only did she remarry but also squashed his allegations of her infertile nature by bearing four hulking sons.

The boys: Henry the younger, Richard who would late be accused of being lion-hearted, Geoffrey the schemer and poor little John. All were the image of their father, all turned against he who had sired them not only in stroppy teenage portcullis slamming but on the battlefield. All of them were too easily manipulated by their mother. All of them were the same, yet all of them despised the other, were jealous of the others privileges, almost as greatly as they couldn’t stand their parents. Even Henry, the eldest and the heir to the sole actual crown, the boy whom old King Henry envisaged starting a mighty dynasty which through crafty marriage and brutal swordplay could one day rule the entire known world.

At least, that was, until he inconveniently died too young.

So they gathered alongside the strapling new King of France, the young Philip Augustus who was only hanging around either because he was infatuated with the beast of a man that was Richard (and maybe they did share a touch too much under a starry sky one spring night, or maybe they didn’t) or just to annoy his own father. Still, the old King played by Peter O’Toole, the Queen by Katharine Hepburn and the kids – Richard by Anthony Hopkins, Philip by Timothy Dalton, Geoffrey and John by nobodies. Because this might be history, it might be true, but it’s also the Lion in Winter. It’s a good film. I’d lend it to you, but I suspect I might be the only person still using a VCR.

The TV was down too low to hear what he’s saying, but there he was once again – good ol’Gordie Brown, the sunshine of my days, for once without his sidekick Beagle Balls. He stood behind a lectern, his jowls flapped and in front of his hands that no doubt so sweatily gripped the fake wood, a placard read: ‘A future fair for all.’

And again he managed to disappoint me (or perhaps blame should be directed at Dougie Alexander, who’s supposedly campaign managing this seemingly protracted suicide note and of whom I had expected better after listened to him speak under the dome of St Paul’s last Autumn). It’s such an empty meaningless phrase. Or grammatically incorrect, at the very least. Shouldn’t it say ‘A future (comma, hyphen, colon, some sort of fucking punctuation) fair for all’? That might actually give it some sense beyond conjuring jaded images of cranky merry-go-rounds with crackly accordion music which never end until someone puts a bullet in our brains.

Still, at least it’s better than butter-wouldn’t-melt-Davie’s campaign slogan of ‘ ‘. Or possibly, ‘hey, what-ho, at least I’m not Gordon! Who’s for a pimms on my yacht? White properly educated chaps only, of course - the sort of people who cry to the papers about possibly having to stand up and smell the same air as the hopeless on the same train to Darlington.’ It’s not very catchy, is it?

Then there’s the other one. You know: Cleggy? The one wearing the flat cap and the dark raincoat and stumbling incoherently around Yorkshire? The one who doesn’t say much at all in case it’s a dead-heat in May and he and his cohort are suddenly thrust into a position of responsibility for the first time in almost a century.

And so, the morning after Gordie’s crime against English slogan launch, the Observer, the Observer of all places – one of the ones that supposed to be on his side – voiced accusations of bullying at number Ten. By Monday morning a charity mysteriously endorsed by Davie and his polo club chums broke ranks and confidence and confirmed that it has had ‘numerous’ emails and calls (‘well, two actually’) from staff in Downing Street about being bullied. Shamelessly, the charity’s Chief Executive refused to concede that her move was political, claiming that she acted solely out of concern for the bullied in question. Those who are now, presumably, completely exposed for a fully fledged round of fires of hell being released, of Chinese burns and of having their homework flushed down the toilet, by the grouchy dour monster that lives pretty darn close to the peak of our government.

‘And where are you in all this?’ asked the cute blonde in the bar with the view the of city yawing, exposing its electric silver teeth as it fleed across the horizon. ‘When do I get to see the real you step out from behind the front?’

I paused. Hmm, perceptive, I thought. But, sssh, whisper it, I’m actually swamped at real work pretending I have a clue what’s going on, hoping to just muddle my way out the far side as per usual. So, a lot of this is taking place in my head. Or if not in my head, then in the space between my fingers and the keyboard.

I find bullying such an emotive word, such a tricky subject to handle. In one sense I am on the side of the bullied, for when I was child I frequently came home from school bruised and bloodied both inside and out. I suffered seemingly endless taunts with nothing being left sacred. Mocked and relentlessly ridiculed for my weight, my stance, my size, my posture, my mass, my intelligence, my bulk, my lack of height, my density, my disinterest in sports, my inappropriate bulges, my interest, my utter fatness.

‘…I’m mean you,’ my friend said back in the summer, within the context of the conversation, as she lit a cigarette ‘you don’t have to worry about these things, being naturally so thin.’

‘Hah,’ I replied choking on my umpteenth glass of wine.

‘In that case,’ she leant forward and exhaled slowly, ‘you hide it very well.’

Okay, I’ve kept off the weight I shed through the heartbreak diet ™ and even piled on a bit of muscle, but that’s not the point: I’m still overly conscious of my size, not least from being reminded of it on a daily basis as a child.

But then, you know, kids are kids and what’s the harm in a little joking, a little laughing at your absurdities. It toughens you up, doesn’t it? It steels you for adulthood. I’m not exactly known for holding back a quip, cruel or otherwise, if I think it’ll get a laugh. Many times have I had to backtrack, apologising, because it sounded funnier in my head.

But the fights were the difference – and these too were my fault. Me and my increasingly short temper. Frustrated that at the time a witty comeback was beyond me, I’d lash out with my fists and feet. But I was a round kid; neither strong not tall and once that first punch had been thrown, then violence became fair game. A game I routinely lost.

We’ve got to take responsibility for our own mistakes.

Of course, being bullied as an adult in the workplace is very different. No-one throws your bag into the tall steel bins, or down in the gutter running out the sports hall toilets. No-one kicks you in the ribs rather than the face so as the marks won’t show in class.

I've heard people throw the word bully out almost as a default defense mechanism, as though it will get them off the hook for consistently getting it wrong. Being pressurised to meet a deadline or complete an element to a project you don't particualry fancy doing is not being the same as being continually tormented - being bullied is not the same as being given a bollocking for cocking something up.

I could well be proved wrong. This is a political game and Ali, Petey and all the others are avoiding mentioning any real detail about what’s been going on behind that famous black door, but given the amount of disasters and fuck-ups that have plagued Gordie’s premiership I think the guy’s probably allowed to expect better, to ask that mistakes don’t happen again and again and again and when they do, well, perhaps the hairdryer treatment is too tempting. Those on the receiving end could do well to look at themselves, pull their boots back on and get back to work.

Within Chinon’s impervious walls, the fractured family came together for Christmas and there they bullied one another. They taunted and twisted and throttled the next youngest down. Henry bullied Richard, Richard bullied Geoffrey (with a side interest in tormenting Philip), Geoffrey bullied John who in turn, being the very youngest, had no-one of his own to bully (aside from the servants, obviously). So bereft was John that he screwed himself into so many tight circles until he accidentally ended up on the throne, after Richard got an arrow in shoulder trying to storm a French castle and bully Philip some more. Once King, John had a crack at bullying everyone, especially dead Geoffrey’s young son Arthur who also ended up in a grave, but the robber barons who made up the nobility were too much of bullies themselves and so the whole mess came to a conclusion in the field near Runnymeade and the signing of a document: Magna Carta, the foundation of our law formed to make everyone play nice.

‘Life,’ said Suggs being interviewed for Madness’ The Business boxed set and asked whether he agreed Chas Smash had unexpectedly assumed leadership of the popular eighties ska combo group, ‘is made up of bullies. Barson was a bully and Carl’s a bully. And I’m a bully.’

Rufus

The morning smelt of sweat. Perspiration clung to the mist and filled my nostrils. The daybreak reeked of saltly musk and of horses. The doe could smell it too. Before me, before I was more than simply unconsciously aware of the approach, she paused, looked north and then ran, brambles flicked away in her wake.

They came across the horizon at a canter with wild yelps that echoed through the forest. Cries of aggression and buoyant macho adrenalin vocalised to rebound off the clustered trees. The lead horse slipped in the wet and churned mud in a grey-brown arch along its flank so that its rider cursed it all the way to black pit as one of his rivals whisked on past.

And then, they were gone; nothing but the gently settling earth and the throbbing vibration of hooves striking dirt vibrating through the earth, through time. I sat on my fallen tree trunk in silence and took a sip of coffee poured from a silver thermos. The New Forest was alive yet dead simultaneously; trapped in-between worlds.

He appeared as though from behind history. A flame haired man atop a chestnut stallion. He was slightly hunched forward, his purple cloak was wrapped tight around his shoulders. He urged his mount to trot forwards, his eyes scanning from side to side, but looking for what I couldn’t tell – the doe? His comrades? No, not his comrades. It was clear they weren’t his equals, but his minions. He paused in front of me and seemed poised to say something, to speak in a tongue I wouldn’t recognise.

That was the when the crossbow bolt hit him in the centre of his chest.

‘An end to Punch and Judy politics,’ David Cameron announced as he stepped up to the lectern for the opposition in the House of Commons in December 2005 – before going onto remind Blair ‘you were the future once.’

I never watched a Punch and Judy show as a child. Puppets tended to scare me, especially those representing humans. I even found the old men who sat up in the box seats for the muppet show somewhat disturbing. But, from what I understand, it’s a dark tale not only of incessant slapping and that’s-the-way-to-it-ing, but of lying and of murder. After Baby, after Judy, after the Policeman and the Crocodile and the strings of sausages Punch just can’t help himself. He has to go on and on like a force of nature.

Towards the end Mr Punch fools the Judge into placing his own neck in the noose and thereby hanging himself.

The rider looked down at the shaft jutting out of his torso and let out a surprised groan. He slid almost wearily, as though resigned the thankful inevitability of it all, to the ground. There he lay, his horse patiently waiting for orders, whilst a growing pool of crimson soaked through his purple finery at the root of the wooden bolt.

I lowered my head and closed my eyes out of respect.

And when I opened my eyes again there was, of course, nothing there. It was nothing but a ghost of nine hundred years prior.

William the second; middle son of William the bastard otherwise known as the Conqueror – the Norman Duke who sailed across the Channel to smoother the land. William, also known as Rufus for his fiery red beard; who reigned for barely ten years and managed to fall out with everyone. William who was slain in the private hunting grounds of the New Forest, Dorset, killed by a solitary crossbow bolt in circumstances that have never been fully explained. An accident or murder, no-one seems too sure. Rufus was childless, arrogant, variously accused of homosexuality and being warlock, renowned for a ferocious temper, happy to make war with his own kin, yet strangely affectionate for finery. Who killed him, we can never know because nobody hung around to find out. In 1099 England the rule of law died with the King and so everyone in the hunting party pelted back to their newly acquired lands and castles and serfs desperate to beat both word of mouth and the grubby hands of their neighbours. After all, he was dead; just another corpse. In those days, no-one cared whodunit as long as they didn’t try to do them too.

Another Rufus had been a more frequent companion recently - high-camp sub-operatic warbling playing in the background of my subconscious.

‘If anyone wants me,’ I cheerfully called out, sauntering across the office floor, ‘I’ll be in the basement making snuff films.’ It got one laugh and even then only after I’d repeated it.

‘Mmmm, making movies of myself,’ I minced as I rode the lift down, deep down underneath the surface of London. And there as I messed around with green screens and video cameras and pretended I understood what we were doing I watched the careful reading of the autocue and the image projected in the directors’ monitor and it all seemed more real than life itself. It was, in that moment, as though the ultimate representation of ourselves was being stolen from the waking world and digitalised, to be flung across a thousand computer screens. Were we losing ourselves?

‘I’ve got so much to tell you, babes,’ said the girl with the dyed red hair who had inexplicably reappeared.

She tucked her chair closer across the crowded bar and whispered into my ear a tale of filth until someone broke the moment by saying: ‘I can’t hear what she’s saying, but I doubt it’s desired effect is a face so horrified.’

Far from ending Punch and Judy politics, Cameron seems to have pushed it on to another layer of perverse macabre.

He’s making the early slavos of the election battle about individuals and the trust we are prepared to place in them; our faith that they are real people rather than anything they might actually do in the future.

Cameron calls Brown shameless over the expenses scandal as the whip is withdrawn from the three Labour members of parliament facing prosecution, conveniently forgetting that the fourth is a Conservative. He then moved onto calling electoral reform proposals ‘cynical attempts to save his own [Brown’s] skin’ and attacks a non-existent death duty. You know what? Just fuck off, Dave.

What’s the alternative to actual policies? The two of them (and they are almost as bad as each other) going on chat shows to be interviewed by sycophantic slimeballs as they try to our mourn each other for the death of their children. Both are enormously tragic events, but don’t – don’t either of – politicise it. So, don’t talk about it. Because you’re politicians so everything you say becomes political.

In the end Mr Punch even manages to fight off the devil himself, refusing to be dragged down in hell and preferring to wander this world, homeless, doomed to recount his bloody tale again and again until his immortal soul has paid its price.

The crowded commuter train was steamy from the rain. Outside, it was unseasonably icy and the torrential downpour thumped off the roof of the carriage, but inside the heater fired wafts of smelly hot air across our faces and water roses up from sodden jackets into the air. The couple pressed up close to me could not help but display their adoration for each other and over minutes gentle nuzzling of noses and little kisses to the dents of chins became fully fledged tongues slipping between teeth replete with squelchy saliva smacking sounds. It ruined my enjoyment of In Cold Blood. I felt like a passive voyeur in a three-some. The whole porno experience was amplified by the ipod of the short bald middle aged man pressed into the small of my back. From out of his ears comes the eighties power electric keyboard chords of Van Halen’s: Der-der-der-der-der-de-dah-‘Jump, you mighta well jump.’

Back in 1099, whilst all the barons fled for home, one man – Rufus’ younger brother Henry – rode for the Winchester and the treasury. Money talked as much then as it does now.

William Rufus was buried almost grudgingly by a suspicious clergy in Winchester Cathedral. When, a few years later, the tower collapsed it was said to be the presence of his blacked heart degrading the holy foundations of the church.

I stood up in the afternoon sun broken by the thick forest canopy and flicked the remnants of the coffee, bitter like burnt bark, onto the floor. As I turned I saw a figure and for a moment wondered if it was the culprit, but it was only a dog walker. A sensibly wax jacket and flat capped man with wisps of grey escaping ears and hyperactive collie collared to a lead. On I tramped out of the woods and across a boggy ridge, my boots squelching through pools of green slop. In my wake I was followed by the muddled memories not of despatched kings, but of idle afternoons, total disorientation amongst the trees, of insects and fish and of the bristle of autumn heather against sun saturated skin.

Later, I drove back up out of the country and towards the city. The motorway slipped away behind me in a haze of fuzzy electric lights and high up above a colossus silver skinned moon hung in the sky like a painted backdrop. The earth felt unnaturally close to the weirdly neon moon as though its craggy craters were carved in high definition. I drove towards the city, back towards answers and that was when it struck me for the first time. Perhaps the city wasn’t the place to find what I was looking for. Perhaps, I needed to look in the country, into our murky past to find the simmering tomorrow. Pop music blared out the speakers and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was driving to the moon itself, leaving that world behind for the blissful void of space.

Augustine

J.D Salinger was dead and, as Holden Cauldfield himself might have muttered: ‘So what? He was just another old phoney in a world stuffed full of fakes telling us what to think about life.’

It was a one of those January afternoons where the open sky yawns clear and free. It looked as though it might break away from the sea as they raced in parallel across the horizon. I wondered what might exist in-between.

I walked along the Kent coastal path in the shadow of the ruined Roman fort, its skeleton exposed like torture victims’ tears, and thrust my gloved hands deep into my coat pockets. Out in the waters the white pillars of the wind farm, with their turbines’ slowly twisting arms, sent semaphore messages of ecological disaster, that stretched up to the still fleeing sky and all around me the echoes of snowfall disappeared back from whence they had come.



This was where Augustine came to tame the so-called English - the Angles, the Saxons, the Danes and the mixed up mess of leftover empire. The allegedly uncivilised bastard hybrids of a thousand blood soaked battles, the bedevilled offspring of rape that arrived on the cusp of a wave screeching obscenities. Or if not here, then some other corner of Kent, the mythical garden of England. Some say the Isle of Thanet, some say Ramsgate. The coast from Margate, which snivels its way through Herne Bay and onto the Rochester estuary, is haunted by history, particularly memories of invasion, but has such resonance lingering as that of the arrival of Augustine. He who brought orders from blessed Rome and the sanctification of divine word to spread amongst the peoples of this land.

Legend tells that in the sixth century he landed out of a bedraggled small fishing boat that had barely survived the splurge across the channel, and stumbled, barefoot through the salty waters and across the shingled sands, crashing to his knees and praising his unrecognised lord for delivering unto him a nation of heathens to better.

Actually, that’s not a legend. I made it up. I have no idea what the true story of his landing is. Same as I cannot really pass judgement on the apparent ease with which the King Ethelbert fell for the story of redemption and eternal paradise. It is a legend because history is written by the winners and Augustine and his church, with its holy soldiers scattered throughout the land to enforce moral servitude, won.

Maybe. Maybe not.

I raised my camera and picked off a snaggle of hikers along the far dyke, drenched in the semi-lit red death sun rays falling across the oyster farm. Silhouettes, representations of people. Like Plato’s shadows in the cave. They may have been real people. They may not have been. My imagination might have automatically interpreted them as flesh and blood, filling in the gaps of the framework that the representation suggested.



Perhaps it was just me, but as January limped its way out of the snow drowned suffocation of winter it felt as though something was ending. Or it maybe beginning. It probably was just my imagination (running away with me); seeing things that aren’t there.

Earlier, back when the snow still blanketed the streets and it was warmer out than in as long as I stayed mobile, I walked along the Old Kent Road and felt his leery smug gaze fall upon me. David Cameron’s photoshopped eyes slimed out of the billboard into the city.

“We can’t go on like this,” even his type intoned evangelical hypocrisy, “I’ll cut the deficit not the NHS.”

‘That’s not a policy,’ I grumbled to myself, ‘that’s just an empty promise.’

His great big tight lipped privileged smile was condescending to the whole street, inflated to the size of an upper deck of the number thirty-six. I wanted to clamber up the billboard and rip him into meaningless shreds.

Someone in Hackney went further. “Fuck off back to Eton,” they scrawled in cartoon blood red.



In Hereford a full abusive makeover transformed the Tory leader into a sideburned end of the pavilion Elvis impersonator who’s seen better days. “We can’t go on like this,” he wailed whilst the backing tape slipped, “with suspicious minds.”



The night bus inched its way through Peckham trying to plough through an inexplicable two in the morning traffic jam. I rested my temple against the cold damp glass of the upstairs windows, letting the rumble of the diesel engine throb across by brain. The rhythm burst the red wine bubbles that raced through my thoughts. I dreamed of words, words printed on paper and pushed into hands. And for some reason about shaving all the hair from my body; of being reborn free from sin.

My head was riddled with frivolous thoughts and memories of histories once learnt. But whilst all that was going on inside me, outside in the real world stages were being set.

Gordon Brown stepped out of the St James’ mansion that is Lancaster House; he walked out of nineteen century red silk luxury and into the unrelenting flashbulb glare of twenty-ten media. In his back there were still the stab wounds, the fresh knife cuts overlaying the budding scar tissue. He talked of offering something to the Afghan people other than bullets from the white hot, dust clogged end of an SA-80.

He was careful to avoid phrases such as ‘save’ and ‘peace’ preferring to focus his dour delivery on things he is more comfortable articulating. Monetary issues. Finance. Cash. He concentrated and his body barely moved for fear his wounds might reopen.



The NATO leaders are trying to wash their hands clean as they promise to use the rainy day pots of emergency money to establish a trust fund for Afghanistan. They made a pledge to Taliban fighters; offering to make them wealthy if they will renounce arms. They suggested a binding deal with people whose ideology is, in part, the removal of western capitalist decadence from their homelands. They will attempt to bribe idealists to renounce their cause. And they think this will work.

You cannot solve every problem by throwing money at it. Money, you do not necessarily have. Money, that if you do have it may be of more use elsewhere – such as topping up the fund to rebuild the vibro-shattered infrastructure of Haiti. Sometimes, you have to find principles. Sometimes, you have to have morals.

Meanwhile, a matter of hundreds of metres away the Tony Blair circus rolled into the Queen Elizabeth conference centre and erected its marquee. Journalists reported the shake in Blair’s hand as he fumbled with a water bottle, the only sign of apprehension before the performance began. The immortal star of persuasion politics rose like a phoenix back for one last encore. The smile, the hand movements, the intonations were all nauseatingly familiar, like Oasis’ brief and unexpected revival from beyond the grave a couple of years ago – some things are best left in the time they originate from. He deflected questions, he rephrased arguments, he ignored reality with greatest of ease, like a trapeze artist swinging through the air knowing that the safety net won’t be needed for he never falls.



And at the end, when he was asked if he had regrets, when he was given the opportunity to appear human he declined. The heckles dribbled through, but the shock that someone could be so arrogant was like a thunderclap. Gordon’s back may have been bloodied, his face might have been scarred and bruised, but Tony’s hands were soaked red with gore and the demon eyes flashed out of the past to burn passing good souls.

Was Elthebert a good soul for allowing the patchwork of Christian population suppression to descend across his land? Did he mean well? Did he believe he was doing the right thing? Did history judge him or have we all forgotten who he was?

Indeed, we have no clear picture of the man. There is no photograph, no permanent record of perhaps a distinctively striking, tall, muscular man with fine drapes across his leather cross hatched armour, a noble poise as his horse galloped across the Kent flatlands, marsh mists and horse sweat forming clouds around him. We don’t even know if Augustine convinced him of the power of the Lord or if the King grudgingly converted to keep the marital bedroom a harmonious place, for his wife Bertha was a Frank and therefore already one of the converted. Possibly, he insisted on meeting Augustine and his cohorts under an open sky for that would protect him from sorcery.

Or maybe the monk bunged him thirty pieces of silver and walked straight on past.

I slid off my rock on the sea’s rim and trudged through the loose shingle back to the car. The locks opened with a snicker and the engine fired with an oomph. As I drove back to the city, back the future, I headed into the dipping sun. I raised my hand to shield my eyes and the whole world was blistered with gold.



J.D Salinger is dead. Does that mean we all have to wise up? Grow up? Does that mean I can no longer act like a teenager?

The bus jerked forwards and seemingly travelled backwards simultaneously. I wondered if I was going to make it home before I needed to leave for work. On the other side of the aisle were two young men, sitting apart and yet together. Each had their own double seat. The one in front was turned around and draped over the plastic upright, whilst the one behind leaned in close to hang off every word. Their conversation was lowered, but the snippets I caught were those of an introductory conversation, the sort you make when you’ve just met and are desperate to impress. It was a conversation of hopes and aspirations, of dreams and desires. It wasn’t idle small talk, but statements of intent. The one man ran his fingers across the back of the other’s hand. Romance was blossoming.

Whilst in front of me it was dying. The woman with the bright orange hair was purposefully looking out of the window at the night whilst he turned inwards, almost demanding with his body that she pay attention to his earnestness, his hand cupped empty air for emphasis. Their voices were not so hushed; they drifted in and out of earshot as decorum and privacy were rudely shoved aside by indignation and anger. The argument could have been any relationship burning out. It was about money, or the squandering of it, it was about suspected and refuted infidelity, about jealousy, about effort of lack thereof with each others’ friends. Her voice began to crack with tears. His gestures became increasingly desperate.

The bus stopped yet again. A blonde girl whose smile seemed larger than her face flounced up the stairs.

‘Hi,’ she sat down next to me. ‘Can I make friends with you?’

It took a moment for my brain to stop prying into everyone else’s business and reply: ‘Um, okay.’

‘Cool. I need to talk to some else I’ll fall asleep and it’s always super to make a new friend.’

In my head Billy Bragg sang “I don’t want to change the world, I’m not looking for a new England, I’m just looking for another girl,” but I wasn’t sure I believed him.

Decade: Unfinished Sketches of Recollection

I lay submerged in scolding hot water, relishing the prickles that turned my skin pink, and dunked my head under the water, forcing my knees to jut out like dual hairy periscopes. I held myself down in the depths of my parents’ bath for a moment, letting a tightness gather in my lungs before bursting free with a grasp for air. Water sloshed over the side and darkened the carpet. A temporary stain of bleakness, but it would dry, become untarnished once again.

Growing up, we didn’t have a shower. We only had that bath. My bedsit is my first home since university to not have a bath. I don’t remember the last time I soaked my sins away. I miss it. I miss lazing as the water goes still and cool around my stomach, between my legs, on a Sunday morning, my mind languishing towards conclusions. Calm and relaxed, I used to do my best thinking in the bath; now everything seems frantic and rushed.

Times change. I know this; I can understand it, even though I struggle to believe that yet another decade has, surprisingly, ended. It seems but a moment, it seems like an entire generation. A paradox, I know, like feeling anchored to the past, but still adrift, aimlessly attacking the future.

I closed my eyes. I was tired. It had been a tough, intense few weeks, months, I forget how long. Since late March when I began my book and have since had scant moments free from work. Since last September when I suddenly found myself single, homeless and unemployed. Since I boarded a train bound for Marylebone on a June Sunday’s afternoon, with my rucksack on my back, bound for the big city. Since the beginning. Since the end. I let myself sink back down again, not under this time, my chin broke the surface and I thought back to ten years ago.

*

We were in a flat I can no longer place. Somewhere near Waterloo. Somewhere between the Tate Modern and the National Theatre. It is only hindsight, an understanding of London’s physicality, that allows me to suggest this, for Millennium Eve is now but a blur. Outside the flat, the city breathes heavily, as thousands battle their way through streets warmed by the intensity of body mass. A little girl, over-excited to be up so late, sat on my knee. She may have been wearing a pink party frock. I felt uncomfortably burdened by responsibility.

My then girlfriend squatted in front of us and said to the young blonde girl, ‘won’t he make a great Dad?’ and I thought ‘will I?’ At that moment, I could think of nothing more terrifying.

The girl remained a recurring feature in my life, on the outskirts of the everyday, for the next nine years. She woke me up when we briefly stayed with her and her mother by excitedly bringing in toast smothered with jam and cups of blackcurrant for our breakfast. We watched her in school plays. She barricaded herself in our bathroom on more than one occasion. And then, when everything changed, she stopped being there. The last I saw of her was on the other side of the road early one frozen November morning as I waited outside the garage to collect my repaired car. There was a vicious wind down the road and I lurked in the doorway, a hood pulled over my head. She didn’t see me. She paused; looked both ways and crossed the road. She may have been lighting a cigarette; she was too far away for me to be certain. I was tempted to call out, but for some reason couldn’t find my voice.

At the end of the decade I sat on the festive floor with my cousin’s baby daughter. I covered my face with my hands and then whipped them apart, pulling a variety of joyously silly faces each time. Silent. No words. Just expression, but she gurgled and beamed and chortled all the while. I catch my Mum watching me with a particular look on her face.

‘Yeah, I know,’ I thought.

Because things change. In-between, I have met children of numerous friends, I even got to be an Uncle for a couple of years, and every time it felt a little more comfortable, a little more right. A little less like the conversation that might have gone something along the lines of:

‘I think we should have a baby.’

‘Really? I mean, not yet, surely? We’re only twenty-three (twenty-four, twenty-five).’

*
‘How’s the boy?’ I ask Rhys as we skid across ice plastered rocks.

‘He’s really sound. Five and a half now.’

‘Five and a half?’ Where does the life drain away to? I remember, like it was last week, driving down to south Wales to meet the new born, having a barbecue, fooling around with the football, playing flash goalie. I remember Rhys’ stag-week in Newquay so clearly, but I can’t recall what I ate for breakfast or where I went last night.

*

Nine years ago I had lied on my cv. Well, exaggerated would be more accurate. The claim to be fully computer literate from someone who hadn’t seen the point in paying attention during IT lessons at school, struggled to use word, had never sent an email and didn’t know what google was, might have been stretching the truth.

I was explaining all this to a colleague as we strode out along Shaftsbury Avenue on our way to some god-awful west-end bar for pre-Christmas drinks. ‘But, hold on,’ she replied, ‘you’re really good with computers. You’ve been using photoshop and editing videos and running websites and all sorts.’

‘Ah,’ I said with a wink, ‘it’s all an elaborate bluff.’ And it was partially true.

*

Until 2004 I regularly made mixtapes to listen to in the car. Compilations around a theme or just a collection of stuff I was enjoying at the time. I’d spend hours searching for the right connections between tracks to convey the mood, drifting between hip-hop, trance, punk, Americana, acoustic singer-songwriter, indie-rock, all layered across each other. Those tapes finally convinced my then girlfriend of the merit of musicians she’d previously derided: Bob Dyaln, Rufus Wainwright, Johnny Cash, Jeff Buckley. And there were others like Ryan Adams or the Ramones or the Pogues she never would learn to appreciate.

Now, with ninety minute cv tapes dead, I compose soundtracks to imaginary films only ever to be heard in my head.

And besides, my car now has a CD player.

*

‘I can’t stand you youngsters with your mobile phones going off in the pub all the time,’ said the pointlessly irate stranger as I served him a pint of West Midlands’ ale. ‘You all need to constantly be in contact with each other.’

‘I don’t actually own one,’ I replied, snatching the ten pound note out of his hand, and, for once, it was true rather than just convenient. I neither owned a mobile nor had any desire to know much about them. In fact, when I’d found a dropped phone down the side of the pub toilets I hadn’t even known how to answer it or switch it off and so just left it under the counter as it shrilly and incessantly chirruped away to itself.

I continued to refuse to own a mobile phone until the end of 2002. I thought them intrusive and nothing but a tool for bad planning and streaming novelty irritating ring tones and archaic arcade games. I only caved in when my work insisted.

‘What I want to know,’ said Rhys squatting down in the snow, ‘is who’s dropped their iphone?’

My hand instinctively flew to my pocket, not because I suspected it was mine, but to doubly check that my phone was still zipped away for now it coordinates my life. Contacts, calendar, reminders of things that need to be done, it keeps me in roughly the right place at the right time. It’s still intrusive, though, but a portal through which the world can be managed.

*

When I started work we were discouraged from using email too much and to never send contracts electronically because there was concern over how legally binding they might be. Instead we faxed. Each team of six sales reps have a shared fax machine. Where I currently work there are two fax machines for the whole organisation and I have to keep explaining to the youngsters what their point is.

‘I switched it off,’ someone said proudly, ‘to save paper.’

How quickly we learn, how quickly we forget.

*

‘Look,’ a middle-aged man said to his wife at a wedding a couple of years ago as my then-girlfriend snapped pictures of the cake with her single lens reflex, ‘look at that funny old camera.’

In ten years I have been to eleven weddings. Before the start of this decade I had been to only one, for a while they came thick and fast.

‘It’s your age,’ the guy I used to work for commented as I scheduled time off to make a particularly frantic celebratory schedule fit.
• Friday morning, drive to Cheshire
• Friday afternoon, wedding one.
• Saturday drive back to London
• deposit my then girlfriend in college to finish installing an exhibition
• Sunday fly to Italy
• Monday watch my cousin get married
• Tuesday fly back to London
• Wednesday and Thursday back to work
• Friday morning drive Birmingham for yet another wedding.

In ten years I appear to have fallen in love with possibly two or three people and now sometimes can’t help but wonder if it was ever returned.

*

In the second half of 2000 and the start of 2001 I smelt deeply of smouldering ash; smoke exhaled in the pub where I worked clung to my clothes, nestled in my hair, snuck under my skin. It penetrated my existence.

The white paper stick with the bronze tip bent under pressure. Spent smoke curled around his fingers. ‘Can’t wait for the smoking ban,’ he said. ‘I only smoke when I’m drinking and I’m only tempted when I’m drunk and people around me are puffing away.’

Over the summer of 2008 I found myself back behind a bar and this time, when I unpeeled my t-shirt in the small hours of the morning, it smelt of beer and sweat but never of burnt toast. In some way I missed that rank stench. There was something genuine, something unfabricated and honest about it.

February 2009 and we clustered around an inefficient outside heater, my duffel coat tugged tight around me. His hands shivered as a match uselessly broke against the box. Our beers threatened to unseasonably freeze over. He gave me a look over the end of the unlit tip that said something like ‘I know, I know.’

And in June 2009, for some inexplicable reason, I found myself sharing a cigarette she’d cadged off an old fella at the bar.

I know, I know.

*

Ten years ago we thought the most significant challenges to the planet were deforestisation and water shortage. Climate change, global warming, didn’t even make the top ten. It wasn’t sexy, it wasn’t prevalent, it wasn’t media friendly. Then, despite losing our bite for protests (the 2009 anti-capitalism marches were feeble compared to 2001) things got a little crazy as Politicians fell over themselves to be the greenest, to be the one most in touch with the environment, until the shambles of Copenhagen, a conference that was doomed to failure before it had even started with clusters of aligned countries warily stalking each other, probing for electoral weaknesses.

But it’s probably all too late anyway, isn’t it? We can snipe and grumble about how America needs to set an example and stop being so selfish, but if you’ve been there, if you’ve been to the south, you’ll know that actually people do need a car to get around; it’s a big country with lots of empty space and no system of public transport outside the big cities.

And we’re all just as bad. I wrote this on a computer. You’re reading it on a computer. Both of those actions required non-environmentally friendly electricity to work. We own mobile phones, we have the central heating on during the winter, our households are built around entertainment systems, we drive, we fly across the world for holidays and business and then threaten to begrudge others the right to do the same. The stereotype of guardian-reading, eco-pontificating liberal horde lambasting supermarkets and high street brands, permanently plugged into the internet and flying out to exotic locales is alive and well. ‘Hello, there.’

Whilst I haven’t flown for over two years it has been more out of financial necessity than eco-consciousness. The next time I travel abroad, I’ll think more carefully about how to get there than I would have done in 2001, but let’s say, for sake of argument, I want to visit my friend in Singapore. I’ve never been to the Far East before, but I’m sure I could concoct an elaborate train network system to get there and it would be significantly more enjoyable than the hateful queue process that is flying. However, by the time I arrive I probably should have turned around and headed back the day before.

So we confine ourselves to paying others to possibly plant some trees on our behalf and recycling, to sorting out our rubbish into different coloured bins to be collected by the council only if we obey a strict and complex rule codex where one slight error, such as putting the wheelie bin on the left rather than the right hand side of the drive, sees you taking your recycling to the tip in your gas guzzling four by four. And anyway isn’t it all, a little bit like pissing in the wind? The world’s ending, the planet’s dying and the best we can come up with is to tidy up a little more efficiently.

This is the thing: We’ve had our inexpensive fun and whilst we may just about let it be prised from our bleeding fingertips we’re also going to prevent anyone else having it. Which is the right thing to do, but we shouldn’t be so fucking pious about it. Have a bit of humility, for God’s sake. It’s our fault that the damage has already been done.

*

This is starting to feel like a lament, which wasn’t the original idea. The past decade has been flushed with moments of beauty and humour and satisfaction and that sensation of warm bubbles rising up your spinal cord – from James Brown believing he’d danced the English summer rains falling on Hyde Park away to Paris dusted with snow and ice, from the elation in liberation when I decided to do my Masters, to the satisfying bone crunching weariness at the end of the longest journey – but sometimes I feel like we might be the generation who missed a trick. In a time of prosperity and technological wonderment, when opportunity was at the core of society, what did so many of us do? Worry about getting on the fucking housing ladder, splurge our salaries on booze and holidays and cars and DVDs and ipods and endless, endless dregs of landfill. What have we done with our life that gives us the right to tell everyone else how to live theirs?

*

Despite the relative stability we still managed to go to war twice; once in the white heat of fear and unplanned reaction to horrific deaths and once amid a mess of power politic play and personal agendas. The repercussions of both still endure. The second world war lasted six years. The not-the-first war in Afghanistan has so far lasted eight. Whilst the two conflicts compare in neither scale nor casualties, this time, we have failed. This time, we have been in the wrong. In a decade where public grief has been encouraged for the deaths of ultimately insignificant urchins like Jade Goody where has our sorrow been for the women, children and all innocents in far off lands we kill through compliancy and the bodies of our soldiers flown back home in the grey caverns of military aircraft, the only semblance of remorse the silent cortège through the small town of Wooten Basset.

Sure, we remember occasionally. We sign petitions, join facebook groups and sometimes we may even march through the cities, but then we’ll shrug our shoulders when nothing instantly happens and go home to comfortably fill our bellies.

What’s happened to our bite?

*

The town of Redcar offers a useful metaphor for the end of the decade. I went there several times as a sales rep, trying to persuade Corus to do business with me. The furnace filled the town with heat; it dominated lives like a fiery pit from below, fear of dropping into eternal damnation making people strive hard. There was little else that I could see there, but whilst those fires burnt, those fires that somehow seemed older than the furnace itself, there was life. Now it sits cold and as dead as the world it supported soon will be. The roads are silent, an air of despondency floats through. You can almost taste the surrender to the inevitable.

*

But in amongst the chink of festive glasses, the calls of family and friends rarely seen, the embraces and the drinks to a brighter tomorrow, as the timely glistening white snow settled all across the lands for the first time in my memory, I still believe that miracles can happen. On Christmas Eve I walked back from the pub where I was born, half singing under my breath the fairy tale of new york and the cold pinched at my cheeks and burnt my ears but the glow inside was for tomorrow.
Because, for every end there is almost certainly a beginning and for every failure there are lessons learnt and a new line of those who can strive to do better. Like the fat icicles around blades of grass making the Welsh hillside resemble fields of crystals from a dream, there is something else underneath. There is life, deep down. We learn, we adapt; things (we) change for the better.

Endings

‘I’m a bit worried that it all goes a bit sentimental towards the end,’ mused Amy at some point back in the summer when we were, as per usual, discussing books.

‘Would that be such a bad thing?’ I asked and, strangely enough, I can’t remember her answer.

Here’s how a completely different story doesn’t end:

My ex and I meet for a drink somewhere neutral. We chat and it’s easy because it always was. We have a couple of beers and we laugh like we used to. We laugh so hard that we forget all the spiteful words, all the closed doors and all the mistaken dreams. And after the bar closes we walk together to the bus stop and continue random scattergun chatter of times passed and badgers and the people we lost along the way. For a moment it’s like a million things never happened and when I lean closer she doesn’t resist.

That isn’t what happens. Why would it? That particular ending is consigned to the bin of unworkable ideas. The world turned a while ago. That was then and this is now.

Nor is there a moment of falling headlong in love beneath the streaming downpours of rain with someone else, neither someone unknown or someone who’s always been there in the background. There is no firework backdropped kiss. There is no last minute rush to save the world. There is no triumphant book deal. There is no booker prize nomination. There are no tears mixing with saliva and the dust of tomorrow. There is no blood spilled in the dank alley behind the snooker club. There is no moral to this story. It doesn’t end with an explosion, with a slumped body crying, with a birth or a death or even with a paltry bang. There is no grand finale. There is no happy ending.

Not yet.

Because none of those things can happen. They are, after all, just imaginary stories.

“Writers get to choose their own endings,” wrote Rose Tremain. It’s a nicely apt idea, but since she was writing a fictional account of Leo Tolstoy’s death perhaps it is flawed from the outset. Still, self-mythologising vain bastards we are – we probably wish we could.

‘I hate those books where at the end everything is tidied up neatly,’ said Justin. ‘Real life just doesn’t work like that. Things don’t conveniently resolve themselves all at the same time.’

‘Yes,’ said Alison tapping the papers on the table between us, ‘but this isn’t actually real life, is it? We’re just making it all up as we go along.’
Saturday evening and I was unsteadily walking down the steps of the newly ostentatious Brockley station still wearing the clothes I’d woken up in all the way over in Sudbury Town and things just don’t feel right. Swirling storm clouds mustered in the spitefully grey sky. The winds unfurled all around making the air thick with the flicker of browned leaves, dirty chicken boxes, coke cans, cigarette butts and granules of grit that stung my cheek.

‘Huh,’ I muttered for I’d been writing this blog in my head on the train. ‘Bloody well does feel a bit apocalyptic and all.’

For the writer this is the dilemma: We spend months (years sometimes) with our characters and we probably know everything about them from how they’re born to the day they die. We start to live their lives for them. They inhabit us and vice-versa. But if death’s visitation isn’t necessarily the conclusion of the story how do we know when to end other than we’ve gone past the ninety-thousand words mark? Does it just stumble to a sudden finish, an unexpected blank page, or does it draw to a conclusion? Drama or realism?

There are stories that end with the future direction of the characters being signposted but never explored. “There’s a brand new life beginning on the other side of this door, all I have to do is open it.” That type of thing. Or maybe we flash forward to the narrator reflecting on their life and summing up what happened next. Suddenly, hindsight tells us what fate befell everyone. Is this sentimentality or just audience consideration?

Justin aside, many readers, I suspect, in the main like a neat ending. It gives a sense of conclusion, a feeling that the time invested in reading the novel has been worthwhile. And if it is sentimental, as I asked before: ‘Would that be such a bad thing?’

Maybe. Maybe it would. Maybe it’s more important for the author to satisfied with the answer to the starting question: What if?

The three of us strode across the open concrete forum surrounded by sun shimmering glass, confused international students getting to grips with the city and fake pots of plastic plants.

‘That’s what they’ll put on your tombstone, dude,’ laughed the man to my left. ‘David Marston: Immune to alcohol.’

‘Until his liver gave up,’ chimed the woman on my right.

‘Yeah all right,’ I grumped. ‘Everyone’s a fucking comedian.’ That would be one way to end, but it won’t happen. Here’s a secret: It’s just a myth. A story. I made it up. I invent things. There is fiction everywhere.

Or maybe I didn’t.

‘So are you over her?’ people seem to keep asking me, but this particular occasion was back in July.

‘What does that even mean? Am I supposed to discard twelve years of my life?’

‘I guess not,’ she said. ‘Let me put it another way: Do you want to get back together with her?’

‘You know what?’ I said after a moment and for the first time. ‘I don’t think I do.’

‘How are you finding being single?’ a different girl asked me in a pub in Putney one Sunday evening just as it was beginning to turn cold. That was what she asked as she twizzled her hair around her finger, but I think she really wanted to ask the other question.

‘I’ve found out a lot about myself.’ I smiled. ‘And it’s given me a lot of time to write.’

I am nearing the end of my book; getting close to the end of my story. I finished the narrative arc back in August. I’ve redrafted and restructured. I’ve been back through it and forced the words to work harder. It’s nearly there. It isn’t finished, but it’s within breathing distance.

And I am afraid.

I will be sending it out to people, to people whose opinions matter, and I am scared. Not of rejection. (Well, okay, just a little bit of that – what if all this has been utterly futile? What if I cannot really write?) No, the real spine biting fear is over what I will do once it’s gone.

I have been intensely writing this book in every spare moment since late March. When it is finished I will be bereft. A void will open up inside me and threaten to swallow my world. I am almost tempted to deliberately never finish it, to keep picking at little holes here and there, changing the words back to three drafts previous and then cutting them out again. Round and round, again and again.

What will I do with myself?

‘So, babes,’ I imagine the girl with dyed red hair who may or may not exist saying, ‘does that mean you’ll be around more?’ I know I have invented her words in my head but I still roll my eyes.

I am almost at the end of my tale, an end which is, in fact, also the beginning. We come back to the start. I stand in the bathroom one evening after possibly or possibly not one drink too many and look at myself in the toothpaste splattered shaving mirror. Back in the flat the black text on the white screen waits impatiently. It is dark in my fictional place. The rain is torrential. I know there will be epilogues to come after this, moments with the other main characters where I will tread the line of sentimentality closely. But for the moment this is the man’s end. There is a gun. The gun is loaded with a single bullet and held in a shivering hand.

Do I?

Can I?

My fingers hover nervously above the keyboard.

And then I begin to write.

Of course I do. It’s only words. Isn’t it?

But then there’s another end I have to tell and I’ve no idea what this one is. It’s the conclusion to an imaginary story. Heh, an imaginary story? Aren’t they all?

I’ve written dozens of endings and perhaps one of these is the way it finishes. Is it, the two men who run at the cliff edge hand in hand unsure when their feet leave the ground if they’ll fly or fall? Is it, the solitary figure slumped on the bench in the torrential rain as his lover walks away for the umpteenth time? Is it, waking up in bed next to someone and realising that you will love them forever and a day? Or the same and not knowing who she is and loathing yourself for it? Is it, driving until there is no road in your mind left? Is it, a Mexican stand-off in a busy airport and a mobile phone ringing the truth through, but no-one dares answer it? Is it discovering she was never who you thought she was, that she was never quite real? Is it staring into the eyes of a scraggily coyote and seeing the ghosts of your fathers? Is it lying back in the freezing waters and letting them inside you, letting that blissful release overlaps your mind? Is it with a wink, a witty quip and a turn away into the setting sun?

Or does it just stop?

Villains

I flung the bathroom door open sharply and stepped into the bedroom. I kept my pistol raised, even though the source of the terrible scritching was nowhere to be seen. But then, I hadn’t been playing the international jet set spy for very long and from who knows where a stiff blow struck me on the back of the neck and the world went first stark white and then tar black.

After what felt like an instant, but could have been a lifetime, my eyes damply opened. I looked around as much as I was able. I appeared to be trussed up to some sort of rack device, my hands bound tightly above my head. My field of vision was severely restricted, but I could just about make out a man’s body. He was sat prissily in a stiff backed chair, wearing a light brown suit and his hands rhythmically groomed a white, long-haired cat.

‘Ah, Mister Marston,’ a voice that sounded hauntingly familiar said, ‘welcome to my liar.’

All of which, is of course, completely invented. I have, however, recently been tied… No-no-no. Let’s not go there.

Villains. Adversaries. Nemesis.

The Baddies.

If there is an innate requirement for a fictional hero, as discussed last week, then do we naturally have the same need for its mirror image?

Going back to all those old films I watched as a child, back to when the bad guys were mainly hordes of unnamed characters, extras got in dressed up and told to fall over at the right time. They were the Germans or the Japanese. They were hordes of unspecified Asians strangely working for a white eastern European. They were Red Indians (or, I should really say, Native Americans) or they were the unidentifiable members of the posse – except the ugly one who spat chewed tobacco every ten minutes.

Yet there was always someone who was the lead villain; the one so dastardly that even his henchmen flinched away from his rage. The German Major who’s glasses steamed up with excitement whilst he gunned down refugees. The unpredictably raging cowboy with the low slung bullet belt and the glint of glass in his eye. The genius corporate magnate with the burning urge to suppress boredom by developing a super yacht and hijacking oil tankers to ransom back to the world just to make money to fuel the hog roast because it might raise a giggle.

If the hero was a cipher, a disguised melee of ideas, then the villain was little more than dots on the screen. He didn’t even get time to have conflicts about his motivation, to give any sort of insight into his troubled childhood that led him down this path of destruction.

‘I think you would say absolutely anything to make sure you got your own way,’ the curly blonde said through clenched teeth in the corridor of a club underneath central London. ‘Did you think it could just go on forever? That this would be enough? Getting drunk together and occasionally snogging? Is that all you want?’

I couldn’t think what to say; words literally failed me, but the voice in the back of my head: ‘It’d been working okay for me.’

As I got older the psychos, the deeply detached lunatics, came out to play more often. They would be allowed more screen time; their own voices in the books. They were malicious and broken and sometimes on our side, but they had motivation. They were characters. When I drifted through puberty dark thoughts of rebellion and subversion were much more attractive. It was a blessing to revel in their complexness.

But that’s the fictional rhythm of good versus evil. At the very start the hero will appear to be on top of it, to have a plan. Then it’ll all go more and more wrong until there doesn’t appear to be a way out. It’ll reach the point where the villain is so supremely confident in the inevitability of his cunning trap that he will, only for a moment, take his eye off the game.

Isn’t that how it works? Isn’t it always the way and then at the last moment, the hero will succeed? In the end? The villain helps us reach the end, helps us get to the point.

It’s often been said that all writing is driven by conflict. It helps enormously to get the audience on side if the hero has something, if not actually someone, to strive against. Their story must be a struggle.

I used to know someone who disputed this vehemently usually citing Jane Austen as an example, but there are huge amounts of sexual tension in Austen’s writing. There are parties to be endured and men to find. This is conflict. Just not conflict in the guns and explosions mode.

There are, I am sure, books (or possibly even films) without conflict. And I am sure that these books have something to justify their publication. Sumptuous prose, for example. Gorgeously constructed sentences which may appeal to the extremely literary minded (and I can think of at least one person who never remembers plots, as in what happens in a novel, but has total recall on literary trickery), but for the vast majority they will be an indecipherable, time wasting snoozefest.

So, it helps to have conflict and the easiest way to this is to create an identifiable bad guy; the enemy, someone the crowd can throw rotten tomatoes.
The opposition can be a love rival, it can be an insane murderer stalking the streets, it can be an institution, a company or even the government, or it can be a mysterious international terrorist organisation. It could be the weather. It could be vague unidentified apocalyptic fall out. It can be used to create fear, hatred, anxiety, unfulfilled lust, desperation, pity, anguish or relief, but whatever it does, it must thrust the narrative and therefore characters forwards.

It should also have resolution.

I lay back on the obviously dyed redhead’s bed and looked at the coving on the ceiling wondering exactly what I was doing there and how was I going to get out.

She looked across at me. She had a cute smile if nothing else.

Then, for some reason, she asked: ‘What’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told?’
Again, I couldn’t think what to say. The question took my by surprise. The voice in my head, ever helpful, suggested: “Same as everyone else: I love you, too.” But I couldn’t make my tongue form the words.

In the probably-a-novel I’m trying to finish, my central male character has plenty of potential adversaries. There’s his ex-wife, the police as a whole, one policewoman in particular, the mysterious American teenager stirring up trouble at right-wing rallies, the cracks in the relationship with his best friend, his manager at work, or even his manager’s manager. Then there’s the shadowy figure of the Boss, the man in charge of everything who lurks on the edges of everyday life roaring above London in a Chinook helicopter. It might even be the city itself.

Or it could be something a lot simpler, something significantly closer and easier to define.

After all, in real life, does anyone have an out-and-out enemy?

Whilst my ex was breaking us up, she said something. At the time just another verbal stab to the eyes, but it went something like: ‘You can’t keep blaming others for everything that’s gone wrong in your life.’

Which was slightly odd. I wouldn’t have said I did and anyway, up until that point, not much had gone wrong. However, she had a vitally truthful point: The ultimate adversary always comes from within.

The eerie voice kept on talking to the rhythm of the hairs being plucked from the cat. It was something about death-rays hooked into weather satellites manoeuvring into position over the world’s capitals. I wasn’t really listening. I was busy using my special cuff links that handily doubled as lock picks.

The chains gave a satisfying ping and I rolled over the rack just before the buzz saw ripped open my genitals.

‘Looks like you’ll need to take a rain check on those plans,’ I quipped (and then worried about whether that had actually worked, whether there could have been something actually funny to have said), but when I finally saw his face it froze my blood.

No wonder the voice was familiar. It’s owner was me.

Heroes.

The air was thick with dust and the sun sneered down on the broken desert, as my horse idly shook its aching neck to swat the flies away. My body rolled to the slow rocking rhythm of the nag’s steps as we approached the half-burnt out town. The buildings were a mixture of white plastered stone, flaking at the rims and stained a little red in the wrong places and cheap, wooden slats thrown up overnight.

The streets were devoid of life. Behind the doors of the buildings lurked only the fear of death. Shadows of loneliness burnt along the main street, at the end of which the church’s solitary brass bell tinged out twelve times.

I tethered my horse outside the saloon and walked across the boards, the chinkle from my spurs announced my arrival before even the creak of the swing doors. The motley crew of late-morning drinkers turned to look at me, but whether they liked or disliked what they saw was masked by the blood tints to the whites of their eyes.

I sat at the bar and tilted my black and dirty stetson back.

‘Whisky,’ I growled.

The barman obliged. ‘New in town?’ he asked.

I shrugged a little to let my waistcoat fall open enough for the pocket of my shirt to be visible. The checked pocket of my shirt and the silver star of a sheriff.

All of which is completely invented, of course. I am not in a small town in the middle of Arizona. I don’t really do horses. I am not a sheriff. I have, instead, been sitting at my desk with my chair turned around, typing one handed as the other gripped the neck of the sea like a pair of reins. I have gotten up, walked to the kitchen table and poured myself a scotch. I am wearing a cowboy hat.

And I am thinking about heroes.

I was bought up on good versus evil. On wild west and world war two films. On Sean Connery and Roger Moore and John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen in the Great Escape clearing the barbed wires on a stolen motorcycle. I read comics which had a moral black and white, Spiderman and Superman and Charley’s War and Johnny Red and Lofty’s One Man Luftwaffe.

These were heroes in that they were the central characters, the lead role and they were also the goodies. And the goodies would always win out in the end against the baddies.

That was how the world fitted together.

Then I got a little bit older, a little more aware and I realised that actually things don’t work like that. I began to notice that James Bond might have had issues with women and maybe Dirty Harry wasn’t strictly following the rule book. That Batman was ultimately more interesting than Superman because he wouldn’t always do the absolute right thing. He was, to an extent, selfish.

The older we get, the more cynical we become, the more flawed our heroes are.

As a writer I often find myself in a love-hate relationship with my own heroes, as in my own creations. They are, as the focal point of the story, the conveyance of the point, of a world-view or of one of my opinions; or they are a conduit for a badly expressed emotion. From that point of view I love them. But then I must also hate them, for I have a tendency to put them through all sorts of horrific events.

In my abandoned novel I took Dan/Gene, a previously relatively happy albeit slightly dull person, and give him insomnia and soul-wrenching nightmares in the brief hours he did sleep, put an ocean between him and his girlfriend who may or may not have been pregnant and then promptly had her disappear. I killed his grandfather. Time and again his friends lined up to stab in the back (or occasionally in the front). He no longer believed anything anyone told him as his world fell apart. I consciously broke him into fragments.

I do it again and again. In short stories I’ve maliciously destroyed relationships, I’ve turned people into alcoholics, lunatics, manic-depressives, failures in every facet of life. I build them up and then pull them apart and I do this in the name of entertainment.

What have they ever done to me?

Of course in a world beyond action movies and fantasy adventures there is not necessarily a need for a hero, in the classical uber-human mould. In a work that is realistic, where John Wayne isn’t just expected to portray a variation of John Wayne, when it is supposed to be a literal representation of real life rather than a adrenalin and idolised version of the world then real people are not fictional heroes.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with this.

Sure, I have no interest in reading, writing, watching Bruce Willis leap off exploding buildings; I am interested in real life I don’t need a hero, necessarily, who will land the plane full of maimed zebras in the centre of New Delhi, despite being blinded by ex-KGB assassins, but I do think we need a lynchpin. There is an argument that the hero is a representation of self – a manifestation of the reader, the watcher of the entertainment. We are not completely satisfied with being on the outside. We need a way in. We want to become a part of the storuy (and this is why the heroes are often son unfeasibly glamorous because then we feel good about ourselves – it’s just clever marketing) and that is one of the hero’s functions.
They are required to have entry points, they are a way for us to experience and understand the fictional worlds being displayed. The danger is that by trying to make them appeal to a broad as spectrum as possible they become little more than ciphers, a collation of symbols and ideas without substance. Making a hero well, means holding he/she together. Making them whole.

This still doesn’t mean they have to be likable though.

Indeed, I think the heroes of my current piece of work are anything but likable. I can barely stand their self-absorbed, hypocritical, whinging uselessness. They are, however (I hope), understandable. Readers, I think, will find them believable; and maybe somewhere under all the ugliness they might recognise a glimmer of themselves.

At some point I began to think of myself as the hero in my own life. I began to think of my life in terms of narrative arcs and dramatic twists and turns. I began to write myself in my head.

(This started long before this blog – although David Marston Writes is the ultimate expression of self-portrayed fictional-esque heroism. Especially in its current format, where I, essentially, regurgitate fragments of my life mildly dramatised for brevity, effect and convenience and drop these adventures into the public domain and my friends email.)

For years now I’ve had an internal narrative that suggested it was me against the world. Be it driving up the M1 at four thirty in the morning on some pointless round trip to pretend to be interested in pre-fabricated walls, or forcing my eyes to stay open through the booze fug on the half-one bus back from the arse end of nowhere, or standing on the top of a blizzard flooded mountain in outdoor kit well past its final adventure, to forcing myself to write for twelve-fourteens hours on a Saturday powered on by endless black coffees. It’s all self-delusional. I talk to myself in mirrors. I expect good luck. I demand neat resolutions as though someone was actually plotting this out. I tend to think that someone is me, but it also presupposes that I’m a hero in my own drama and not a supporting character in someone else’s.

Why do I think like this? Because I am painfully vain. Because I am obsessed by narrative. Because secretly I hope for a happy ending to everything. Because I optimistically believe that no matter how bad things have got, when I am standing at the end of the pier in the storming rain, with wicked waves crashing all around, my clothes torn, my skins bruised and bloodied, at the penultimate point when there seems no way back, then all it will take is a smile, a quip and a final desperate roll of the dice.

Because the hero always wins.

Or, at the very least, survives.

Doesn’t he?

But something is missing. Something doesn’t quite fit.

I stood in the black marble tiled bathroom of my Geneva hotel room and buttoned the perfect silver cufflinks into place. A quick flourish and I’d arranged my bow tie. The cut of the dinner jacket made me appear more than human; it made me make-believe.

I checked the time on my gold rolex. Three minutes before I needed to go downstairs to the blackjack table. The watch may or may not have contained a razor garrotte wire, or a small semtex package, or a pin pointed laser lockpick. It may have just been a watch.

I sipped champagne from a crystal flute. Everything around me was the finest imaginable. I was at the luxurious end of the life’s scale, for once, but something was wrong. I felt pointless.

A noise in the bedroom like teeth being sharpened on aluminium made me turn. I didn’t flinch. I was not shocked or concerned. I was just aware of the noise and that it had no place in the bedroom.

I reached inside my jacket and took out the walther ppk. The snub nosed pistol felt cold and brutal in my hand. I paused, the weapon raised, my hand on the doorknob and I realised that I was alive again. I had purpose.

A hero needs an adversary.