Paingyric - Short Story

Like a suicide bomber, regard this video to be my last will and testament, only unlike him I do not proclaim myself martyr and will not be ushering anyone else into death with me. I have spent a lifetime wreaking both effects on those unfortunates in my orbit in any case. I have taken to the camera lens since I can no longer cradle an actual pen between fingers, contorted by freshly minted muscle memory of clenched teeth and cramped hands. Cruel perhaps that this reflex strikes at such strategic loci for the production of words, when both are the furthest peripheries removed from the actual epicentre of the pathology. My pathology, the rest of my corpus in revolt against me. And perish the thought of my digits ever dancing across a keyboard ever again. But my mouth still functions. Little surprise to those colleagues and peers in the industry that it would be the last constituent of me to seize up and relinquish the fight. Alas however, the pen is not mightier than the sword, judging by the rotisserie blade that has impaled my liver and convolutes it above my internal infernal fires, sending off a shower of metastasised sparks to all other parts of my benighted body. Particularly having a liking for and coming to rest on my brain. Because it’s relatively spongy up there I suppose. Soft landings for terminal take-off. 

Even though my name bears considerable commodity value, there will be no pecuniary charge to access this video, as it shall be made readily available on the free file sharing sites. My offspring have been well provided for already by my career, though it cannot compensate for the other incommodious dearths that came about in its wake. Was one contingent upon the other? I already know their answer, so that my response matters not, for it carries no weight. This may be my testament, but only they can testify to the fallout of its contents. See who turns up to my funeral I imagine. A veritable dead reckoning.

Every so often you’ll have to excuse me as I pull on my metal straw of liquid morphine. Here in my sippy-cup, forged from metal as betokens the status of a seething adult. I have to adjudge the optimal time to imbibe, as close to the Richter Scale peak of crescendoing spasm as to be able to maximally alleviate it, without leaving it too late from evacuation so that the pain quake obliterates all other competing consciousness. In such a way the opiate serves as an inkwell, dipping the pen in to prevent the flow of words becoming sundered and surrendered. A sharpening of the senses emerging only with the assistance of anaesthesia.

So, to the meat of the matter, albeit marinaded in morphine. Reading is a hybrid art form. That I say this might surprise you since the author’s sole tool, his only palette, is that of language, which makes it perhaps the purest of art forms, unmediated by its materiality; no coloured pigment on canvas; no 50-piece orchestra, conductor and opera singers; or no electrified amplifiers for the screech of guitars. No, it’s hybrid because it requires both senses of sight and hearing, without privileging one over the other. We read the words with our eyes, but ‘hear’ them sounded inside our heads and that way we hear the voice of the absent author. Alive or dead. Or somewhere in between, soon to pass from one state to the other. It’s a different mechanism from listening to an interlocutor who is stood there in front of you. So why have I taken to this filmic medium that most definitely privileges the optic sense over the aural? Because in one respect there is very little visual variegation to keep your eye entertained, so you would ordinarily have to focus solely on the words. No mis en scene, no carefully constructed image within the frame. Yet what ocular paucity on offer, is, I rather feel, vital. You see before you a middle-aged man in decline. Though unless you are a part of my serrated inner circle, you would not see me incrementally enough to be able to discern any such decline. I was fortunate enough to be an artist in the pre-social media age. My putative audience had and have no idea what I really look like beyond the fly leaf photo with all its high production values. A fiction for a fiction. So it is not this image of a crumbling man that you should or could fix on. It is this flask. Because the flask is the central image. Even though it has no magical powers. It is no elixir restoring me to life. Nor does it hold back the press of barbarian hordes of tumescent incoherence from the Palatine redoubt of my upper stories. At best it allows me to reach the end of my sentences.

But why it is so important for this image to be front and central, is because it represents something that no amount of skilfully composed words can ever achieve; it stands for death. It represents and embodies pain in a way I could never harness simply through language. Morphine, the tincture of dreams, the realm of Morpheus after whom it is named, when actually it serves as the very antithesis of dreams; death as the eternal dreamless sleep. Palliative care while the pall-bearers are merely suiting up. No matter how intricate and resonant I articulate, death resists my metaphors. Here I am, throwing liquid analgesic down my gullet to try and allow me some fleeting joined-up seconds to contemplate what it is I’m grappling with. Yet it is really too late in the day to really come to grips with the intractable. Interesting word ‘palliative’, it bears a sense of extenuating or mitigating pleas in law, or apologies of which I have none. And yet its Latin root is the word for a large mantle or cloak, that you’re concealing or shrouding something. Which brings us back to the pall cloth over a coffin. As if we could tuck death out of sight. Like an unsightly coffee stain under a doily. Or look here, a morphine smear on the table’s glass top. See, the flask is to be in plain sight at all times during this broadcast. The flask is the motif of this talk; motif of course as in motive… Oh the pain siren is a howling… Motile, as in both one’s fructifying semen and the free movement of metastasising cancer cells, which is most assuredly unfructifying. 

Sometimes I wonder if these twinges are the prod of some sort of internal critic or censor, outraged at myself. Even though I have never once felt any compunction to retract what I have written. I stand by everything I say, or in this present case, sit doubled over in agonised throes… There, that’s better, sucking succour. A blessed modicum of damnable relief. Until even Morpheus’ soothing powers are dulled through what is laughingly called ‘tolerance’. At that point you can only beseech morphine not to relieve you, but to release you. For you will probably self-medicate yourself to death before the cancer culls you. Ironic that the root of the word ‘release’ is to loosen or relax, which is what you count on the drug to do for you in these last knockings, yet the apposite word ‘relief’ has a connotation of getting you back on your feet, of raising you up from being prostrate. Neither are related to the word resurrect which has an etymological root of resurgence. More’s the pity. The surging going on is in one direction only and it’s to my absolute detriment. There, that hits the spot. You know, the most galling thing about this self-medication, is that as an inveterate smoker of cigarettes, which as you can see, I still do because, hell what’s to lose, but the action of lifting the flask to my lips and puffing on the straw, is akin to vaping. I suppose I could have opted for an audio only rogation, but who listens to the wireless these days anyway? The word wireless now standing instead for networks of frenzied, swarming airwaves that have superannuated the original wireless with its singular stentorian voice. But no, I rejected the Godcast, because the flask has to be up front and central. A flask will and testament if you will. And you will, unless the disarticulations of Alzheimer’s gets you first. 

I had always thought I was offering our species profundities in my writing. But this pewter flask tells me I fell oh so far short of that. Not that my work wasn’t more insightful than the drivel the vast amount of other writers produce… Excuse me… That coughing jag would have been produced irrespective of my current blight. The carcinogenic splutterings of most other writers stops up one’s breath, through the audacity of their musings being so feeble. Some of them even choose to pontificate on the contents of this flask, yet couldn't see what was staring them in the face. Reflected in the adulterated silver sheen. Alloyed with lead, the supposed barrier against radiation but proffering a differing poison of its own. Same duplicity as morphine, on both counts… Even abutted hard up against it, yet still these so-called writers (with apologies to the ‘so-called Islamic State’) couldn’t see what was clearly right under their noses. Or in it in the case of some, trying to shortcut the creative process, to get to the lesser seen parts of their selves, when in truth they weren’t worth accessing in the first place and even if they were, just put in the requisite bloody work! You can't mainline genius! Instead they all plumped for the fanciful altered reality vistas offered by Morpheus, rather than the ineffable singularity of death.

But who am I to cavil and carp, when in the greater scheme of things, I now question the merit of my own endeavours and even that of all possible writing? In the manner of the Classical Greek philosophers and the Christian theologians who squatted on their shoulders, I was pursuing the wrong lines of inquiry. It is not a question of what constitutes a ‘good’ life, or an ethical one. It is just the question of life itself we should be interrogating. As framed by our flagrant mortality. I’d employ the word ‘blatant’ rather than the hyperbole 'flagrant', only its root is to prate and babble, when we never speak of death at all, so the word does not befit. Yet ‘flagrant’ isn’t quite right either, with its sense of flaming and fulgurant, iterative of an enlightenment that is anything but. Words fail and break down in quietus’ vestibule. You have no power to lobby once in Death’s lobby. At this late stage I am afeared that writing and language itself just isn’t up to the task. Sculptors of stigmatic saints and martyrs have got to better grips with pain and agony and their corollary of surcease. Whether theist or humanist in their outlook, many rendered the wound of humanity right on the nose. Because it is non-lingual. An expression of pure emotion which always eludes language that has to take the roundabout route of metaphor. Pain etched into skin is far more pertinent than printed words etched into the grain of paper. Let alone on a monitor screen which possesses no grain at all. The pain wreaked across my features says more about life than my entire wrote oeuvre. Wrought for nought… 

How we are obsessed with origins. Ting. With original sin. Ting. With formative Oedipal relations. Ting. With identity and founding myths. Ting. When everything should in fact proceed from eschatology. Ting ting. Flask your father, oh you can’t, he’s dead. While we're about Herr Freud, if we are to invoke his Oedipal theory, why not also his oral, anal and phallo-genital stages as well? We writers should play with ludic language with orality, with anality as well as genital gay abandon. In our linguistic sandbox, we should throw words around like our own shit. James Joyce did, not that I'm comparing myself to the master. We ought to bite and gnaw and lacerate text with our teeth, I mean words emerge from our mouths right? But we don't, we meekly succumb to the superego of grammar for arranging our words into syntactically governed, linear sentences, instead of bloodied smears and seminal gobbets. In doing so we mute language’s energies. But cancer won’t stand for that, for it is a mutiny against any and every muted energy. So I also am not immune from such criticism, as I too yielded before the publishing proprieties suggested by my various careworn editors over the years. Consider the beginnings and ends of novels. Every reader is thrown in the deep end at the opening of a novel. They have to find their way into the world and the language of the book, enter into the voice of their character guide. Consequently authors devote a lot of attention to the beginning, to hook the reader in. But the ending of books? How many endings have ever truly satisfied you the reader? They just seem poor apologies for concluding the book there, like it ran out of steam, or offered a lumpen twist to try and give the novel some last minute perspectival weight. The attention given is the wrong way round. The beginning will always remain inchoate as the reader comes to it blind. But the ending...? The ending must be utterly defined, even if it leads to inchoateness beyond the final full-stop, for after all, death ushers in the inchoate. 

Oh, the flask is empty. Out of juice. Out of words. Out of time. I'll just unclip my throat mic here and set the flask upon the table next to it.

Dear Teen Me

A few years ago I was invited by the fabulous "Dear Teen Me" website to pen a letter from my contemporary self, addressing the teenage me. Sadly the website no longer functions, but I'm reproducing that letter I Wrote for the site.

Dear Marc from author Marc Nash

Seeing as like the primitive tribesman you have a dislike of having your soul captured by a camera, tracking this shot down from your Gap year back in 1982 was something of a coup. Fortunately even though you have no pictures of your youth, your mother clung on to the few photographic morsels you granted her. This is you sat at the top of a cathedral either in Paris or Italy in the days you used to travel. And yes you are wearing a music T-Shirt, that of Joy Division a band who were to play a very important part in your life, not least because one of your first plays was about them and the fact that their lead singer committed suicide. But here at age eighteen, the sun is shining, you’re underneath the sky on top of the world where anything is possible ... and you’re wearing summery black!

*

1977 aged thirteen and the year of family parties sitting in marquees in back gardens talking about punk rock. Well Marc, you never did master the paltry four strings of a bass guitar and fulfill your dream of being in a band, but you did make it into the arts. You didn’t write any lyrics, but you did still compose words in the form of stage plays and novels. Even though you have still never read a classic novel other than the handful you studied at school. At the age of fourteen, it was a recommendation from one of your cool older cousins to listen to The Cure’s song “Killing An Arab” and then read Albert Camus’ novel “The Outsider” that kindled your love of modern novels, while still burning the fires for music from which you have never looked back.

Teenage years were when you finally turned your head away from the childish world centred around the home and started to think about the wider world. You discovered politics through a concern with the nuclear arms race and mutually assured destruction. That fusion of the political and the fear of death has never left you and permeates all your writing as you now approach the age of 50. Cleaning the blood up off the floor of a parent after a serious suicide attempt in your last year of teenagehood probably saw to that. Though a terrifying and brutal initiation into other people’s misery, it has set you up for not shying away from tackling dark subjects in your writing and probing the extremes of human behaviour. When you wrote about suicide bombers in “Not In My Name”, you could balance the ‘bomber’ aspect with the ‘suicide’ part like few others possibly could.

There were wars a plenty around the world while you were a teenager. On your doorstep there were the charmingly euphemistically named “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. There was the ongoing conflict in the Middle East which was of grave concern to your family, but which you couldn’t engage with as you held an opposite point of view from them. In your Gap year Britain sailed an army halfway around the world to bafflingly fight over some barely inhabited islands against the Argentinians. That was when you realised you had a love-hate relationship with your own country, another theme you would go on to write about extensively, particularly in your debut novel “A,B&E”. Interestingly you chose to write that from the point of view of exile from Britain, even though after extensive Gap year travel as a teenager, you resolutely decided to stay in London and set your face against further travel. These days you don’t have holidays, you only write in your time off. You travel extensively in your imagination.

Yet it was a another conflict about which little was reported because journalists couldn’t gain access to the closed country, which really caught your attention, perhaps because you could not confront these other wars which were supposed to prompt your allegiances more directly. And that was the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the subsequent horrors of the Killing Fields and the disastrous famine. That warzone resonated more than any other with you, but you could never find the words to express such a scale of depravity and horror. It would take you 30 years until you were finally able to write a story about it. Before then you had written on Northern Ireland and the Middle East, intricate, complex works making no judgements of the various parties involved. But your story on Cambodia pulled no punches in delivering its searing condemnation of the cult of death.

And where did this passion for writing and particular the novel develop from? Well you got into Britain’s supposed best university to further you hunger for knowledge, But your were appalled by the closed and prejudiced minds of many of your fellow students. You were also disillusioned with your History course as you felt the teachers were not really interested in teaching, only in pursuing their own research. You were on the point of walking out, when a new student theatre stage space was opened and you decided to try your hand at writing stage plays. Even then with no experience, instinctively and temperamentally you opted for some radical staging and the whole play was performed behind a wire mesh fence separating the cast from the audience. And because you had difficulty casting it, you decided to back up your words by stepping in and performing yourself. You even learned to smoke for the part and scaled the fence to confront the audience at the play’s ending. From that short 20 minute piece, you then went up to the Edinburgh fringe Festival with two new plays, which in retrospect was complete madness, but you had no fear. You were hooked by creative writing back and you also completed your degree, as playwriting kept you in college.

You knew an office job wasn’t for you, so playwriting seemed like a good way to avoid that, which of course it wasn’t as there was no money to be made. After four years you secured a job in an independent record store to pay the bills, but the number work there left the word side of your brain free to continue writing in the evenings. You kept pushing the boundaries in what you did, moving away from dialogue and more towards movement and dance. The dancers looked at you like you were mad, what need did they have of the written and spoken word? It was only cut short when your beloved twin boys arrived and you became the main carer for them. No more hanging out networking in theatre bars for you, with bottle feeds and dirty diapers to see to at the double.

So you turned to writing novels through the night, interrupted only by feeds and changes. The books you liked to read weren’t really out there in the market, so you set out to write them. Stories that pushed the narrative form into new places, books of ideas and a rigorous pursuit and examination of language. And once self-published, you started giving live readings, the closest to the dream of performing live in a band. And you put on a show live. You inhabited the characters, you dialogued with the audience through the way you staged your readings. 

So it wasn’t quite how you imagined it might turn out, but looking back a lot of the seeds were in place in the teen you. Here’s to our salute of the old age us, pen in arthritic hand still writing and challenging the status quo.

Love and respect

marc x

9-Line Nonpareil - Flash Fiction

I author infect you. I stain you with my word markers. I impregnate you with my seminal ink. You download my minuscular packets of lexical data. Even if you scale no further than the opening chapter, my verbal DNA has ineffably entered your bloodstream. Your eyes burn in the back of their sockets. Your breathing stops up and when you swallow for air, it burns the lining of your throat such is the caustic corrosive nature of my verbiage. For you can’t unread me. Words are viral. The symptoms are similar even if you regard the words as invigoratingly communicable, as non-pathogenic. Either way, partially digested or complete, your system extracts the aliment, my propellant, while the lexical orts refuse your expurgation and bulwark and barricade themselves rendering you discomfitedly costive. Your mental immunosuppression system may attempt to quash my word sepsis from reproducing within your host, but they hitch a ride with your vulgate leukocytes. Catch as catachrestic can. Sink their claws into the antigen receptivity, forestall your production of antibodies through a circumlocution here, a turn of phrase there, to elude the wandering phagocyte censors. Suppressing your suppressors. The macrophages who would seek to inject me with their deleterious toxins, when it is in fact my printing press that squeezes and devours them. My words knock off your words. They duel and grapple and attach themselves dual. Whence my muscular molecular vernacular makes use of your cellular apparatus. A reverse transcription to multiply your vocabulary and shape it inevitably mine. I rewrite you. I seep into your very marrow, to be spewed out a thousandfold greater in volume. I bleed you dry, drain you of lymphocytes and replace them through my own hematopoiesis. I transcribe your blood. I author you.  

Guest Post - Vivienne Tuffnell

"Kissing Moths Not Frogs"

I'm delighted to be hosting friend and wonderful writer Vivienne Tuffnell on the occasion of her latest book, a collection of short stories called "The Moth's Kiss", several of which I had the privilege of reading as they were being written.

Viv and I share the imperative to interrogate life and our surroundings, to really dig deeper under surface appearances, although we take different stylistic approaches in our writing. But while I content myself with sitting at home and processing everything as thought experiments, Viv has a huge wealth of knowledge and experience in many different fields which she brings to her writing and being. Deeply spiritual, she has a wonderful blog about all things to do with the human psyche, both the things that damage it and the things that help heal such assaults.

Viv never veers away from dealing with deep, deep emotions and she doesn't sugarcoat the darker things in life whenever she happens to be discussing them in her writing. I can't recommend her writing enough.

Over to Viv-

Folklore fascinates me, and it's younger sibling, the urban myth comes a close second. Once you start looking at them both, you realise there is a hoard of inspiration for writing but also they're something that thread through much of modern consciousness. When it comes to superstitions, most people claim to be above it all, but there are things that seem to undermine that.

The tear-drinking moth is one of those things.

I thought it was a myth and I casually asked my brother to confirm this. His area of expertise is lepidoptera, and I grew up with bugs of all sorts so I'm deeply grateful that he stuck largely to butterflies and moths as his primary interest. He's had a room full of tarantulas since I left home, and would like to breed scorpions too. When I mentioned the moth that drinks tears he surprised me. It exists, and he sent me links to some photos of it. It looks harmless enough until you realise that this moth does not merely wait patiently for tears to spill from sleeping eyes, but rather it provokes them. It uses its sharp proboscis to poke the eye and make it water, causing serious irritation and spreads various disgusting diseases. Creepier still is the evolution of a moth that drinks not tears but blood: http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2008/10/081027-vampire-moth-evolution-halloween-missions.html

I'd be lying if I said I set out to write a story about the tear-drinking moth. I didn't. I'd got to a part in a novel I was writing where I needed to step back and look at the narrative from the outside. The novel in question is the third in a series, the first of which is The Bet, and I was trying to create a penetrating sense of menace, of that creeping sense of being watched. So I stepped outside and in a number of pieces, I became the observer, watching and waiting and plotting. Most of it is liable to sit on my hard-drive, unseen but the short story I named The Moth's Kiss for its reference to the tear-drinking moth was obviously capable of standing alone as a story in its own right.

I enjoy writing short stories; it's a very different discipline to that of writing a novel. As a result I write a few in bursts and often do nothing more with them. I've published one collection of shorts, with a theme of ancient deities interacting with the modern world, and I wondered if among the many stories stuffed onto my computer I had sufficient to produce another collection with a theme.

That's when I had the idea of The Moth's Kiss as first tale in a sequence of stories with related themes. Initially I thought of it as scary stories, but on reflection I realised that each of the selected tales dips into some well-embedded folklore and urban legends. A Devil's Pet visits the abiding belief that cats are uncanny and evil. Black Hole is entwined with some quite new beliefs, made widespread by such books as The Secret, that we can draw to ourselves what we need or deserve by merely focusing our thoughts on our goals with sufficient confidence; I took this so-called Law of Attraction and had a little fun with it. Both Green Willow and Bitter Withy  incorporate both ancient folklore of the willow tree being the champion of the discarded lover and other more recent legends, such as the oracle of iPods on shuffle.

Each of the ten stories links to some abiding belief whether ancient or modern or a combination of the two. I have heard that Einstein is said to have recommended that for intelligent children you should read them fairy-tales and for more intelligent children, read them MORE fairy-tales. I'm not convinced about the intelligence bit but fairy-tales, folklore, urban legends all emerge from various strata of the collective unconscious and point not just to our primal needs but also our collective primal fears. This is why we can be transported back millennia by a good story well told; it takes us back to a time when that prickling feeling of being watched was worth heeding for it may have meant that Smilodon or other ambush predator was lurking in the long grass licking its lips. Such a tale reminds us of our fragility even in our technological bubble and there's really nothing like being shocked by a brush with death (even fictional) to make us feel vibrantly alive again.   

The Moth's Kiss is available from Amazon UK:  USA: 

I blog at: http://zenandtheartoftightropewalking.wordpress.com/

I tweet as @guineapig66

Friday Flash - Flash Video Bonanza!

For this week's Friday Flash, I've uploaded a home-recorded version of a flash reading I did in public, talking about the art of flash writing and reading 11 of my stories and talking about where they came from.

Hope you enjoy!

Guest Post - a Kickstarter Project Appeal

Today on my blog I'm delighted to host a guest post from Linda Parkinson-Hardman. Linda is a writer, blogger, reviewer and all round good egg who I've been lucky enough to meet recently through social media. She's also the founder of the Hysterectomy Association. I've invited her to post a guest blog here as she has an exciting and important project she is looking to get off the ground via the crowd sourcing not-for-profit online funding tool Kickstarter. Over to Linda!

It is true what they say, it is often the smallest things that can make the biggest difference, especially when it comes to our lives.

Estimates suggest that 1 in 5 women will have a hysterectomy at some point; in the UK around 60,000 are performed every year and in the US the number is closer to 600,000. It is said that a hysterectomy cuts to the heart of what being a woman is all about; and I know this is true because the small stories I hear tell me this.

Simple stories from women who have undergone the trauma of hysterectomy can make a huge difference to others having one later. Such stories help them to feel less unsure about their decisions, less stupid about the questions they ask and less alone than they do even with family and friends.

But not all women have access to these stories and so The Hysterectomy Association is planning to pull as many together as possible into a new book called ‘In My Own Words: Women’s Experiences of Hysterectomy’. But we can’t do it without your help. We need to get this project funded.

Please will you pledge to the project today; a small amount of even £1 takes us closer to our goal of £2,500. These amounts soon mount up when lots of people pledge and I’d rather reach 500 people who have each pledged just £1, than 40 people pledging £5. Of course, if you can pledge more it will always be very welcome.

Please pledge today at http://kck.st/11sd6JW to help us get this book out to the women that need it. We need to get pledges to the whole amount by the 9th March otherwise we get nothing.

This is a project that is close to my heart, over the years I’ve spoken with, emailed and comforted tens of thousands of women and each one has a story to tell, and each story deserves to be heard. Click here if you’d like to see some of the stories women have shared on our website, just to see how powerful they can be http://www.hysterectomy-association.org.uk/index.php/latest-news/hazels-story/ 

Here is the video for this Kickstarter appeal

                           

Linda Parkinson-Hardman is an author, social media strategist and a social entrepreneur. She works with clients to help them make better use of the Internet to build their personal and business brands. Her social enterprise, The Hysterectomy Association currently works with around 200,000 women every month. You can find her online on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and if you have a question you only have to ask.

The Moral Responsibility Of The Author Part 2

This book is an important and troubling one. A middle class researcher for a political thinktank befriends a South London gang and her book is an excellent insight into what remains a very alien mindset among such youngsters, utterly cut off from the rest of the society they prey upon. It's a really important record to be in the public domain, no matter how troubling its insights are, since it gives a wider readership the opportunity to see and understand where such alien values arise from and to follow the strange logic applied by such youngsters. I for one am glad this book exists and salute the achievement of the author in producing it.

However, the book is also deeply troubling in other ways to do with the author's own role in the narrative, that is the very real life of the boys she reports on. Quantum physicists state that the mere act of observation distorts the results that are being observed. And to my mind the same could be said to apply in this 'sociological' study. With worrying effects.

The author befriends a gang and with varying levels of interaction with individual gang members, comes to actively intervene in their lives, particularly in the case of one of the gang called Tuggy Tug. She wants to 'save' them and ultimately Tugguy Tug in particular from the bleak prospect of jail, death, addiction or sectioning under the mental health act. A highly noble aim, but as flawed as the Victorian Missionary's intent to save the 'noble savage' by converting them to Christianity. The book traces her coming to an understanding of both the barriers to these boys escaping their fates, but only by making mistakes that cost the boys along the journey. She comes to an understanding of not only how the boy's poor literacy levels works against them, but also how the system of bureaucracy is set up to thwart their likes at the bottom of the social heap. But only after dragging Tuggy Tug through the process of signing on to a Job Centre and raising his hopes unrealistically in doing so. Part of that process uncovers that he has a huge debt against his name of housing benefit he failed to back up with paperwork. An added stress brought upon him, where previously because he was entirely outside of the benefits system, had no way of catching up to him.

But even these well-meaning errors are nothing compared to more alarming elements. There is a minimal amount in the book about the author actually questioning herself as to her motives in all this. Maybe it is axiomatic that trying to help one's fellow man needs no justification, no matter how misguided. And yet I'm curious why she zeroed in so much on Tuggy Tug to the point where she is virtually mothering him (her actual son remarks on her having photos of Tuggy on her phone, but none of him, her own flesh and blood). Maybe it's because he responded the most positively to her actions of all the gang members. She remarks on his small size, maybe she is responding to a seeming physical (and emotional) vulnerability in him, but again there is no self-reflection on these matters. Perhaps she feels that as an objective researcher, she cannot allow her feelings to be openly displayed within the pages of the book. But that only leads her further into murky waters of responsibility. I find it significant that the end of the book has her recounting the tenor of some unseen (by her) documentary film footage of an interview with the now jailed Tuggy Tug. In it he extols her loyalty and efforts on his behalf as the only reliable adult in his life. To me that reads like a character witness in her defence, against unwritten accusations of failure, of meddling, of ignorance, of bull in a china shop. That it's the author indirectly averring that failure or not, it was all with the best intentions and appreciated by her study object. It's self-hagiography which blares out against the complete lack of personal reflection throughout the rest of the book.

Another way her personal stance would have been instructive, concerns the criminality displayed by the gang in her presence.  Drug taking, setting up drug deals, reports of theft and violence all take place in her presence, particularly in her car. Now while I have no issue with her allowing these things to take place on her watch because she realises it is part of the hand to mouth existence of these boys, I'm curious that she doesn't analyse her own journey of acceptance, of moving from the staunch law abider to a willing bystander, if not an actual facilitator of criminal activity. Now she is an influencer of government and policy by dint of her job. So again she may have felt that she could not openly comment on this illegality given her official position of responsibility. But what could be more illuminating in how she, a member of the establishment, was actually so influenced by what she observed on the streets as to reach a position of scarcely batting an eyelid whenever flagrant law breaking occurred in her presence?

She buys the boys food, takes them out to restaurants and museums. Gives them money. She is trying to materially affect their lives in helping them to elevate themselves into work and a 'normal' life. But they gang unerringly and depressingly shuffle along into their prescribed fates. One in prison, one in a mental institute, one addicted, one dead (their male mentor and admittedly not from gang violence) and one who has made it into designer clothes, but who had family money and influence behind him in the first instance. As much as this book is really important in being available to read, the process in which it was produced was ultimately exploitative and consuming of its cast of real life characters. There was hope throughout its pages but ultimately and for all the author's interventions, none escaped their fate. So part of me feels also that this book shouldn't be out and making money. That as an influencer with access to the corridors of power, her private observations should maybe have been kept for those policy documents as anonymous case studies. I don't know, I'm really torn on this one. But I do feel the author currently is getting an easy ride, since I'm unaware of others picking her up on her moral responsibilities and the consequences of her actions that take place within the pages of the book.

There's a world of difference between a fiction author withdrawing a book because of a turn of real life events, and a non-fiction author intervening in the subject matter of her book, to possibly detrimental effect.

What do you think?

*

You can read my post on The Moral Responsibility Of the Author Part 1 here, in regard to Stpehen King withdrawing his novel "Rage"

Closed Book - Friday Flash

Prior to birth, my parents' friends speculated on my likely sex with their homespun portents. How low my mother carried me. How high beyond the navel the black line running up her stomach extended. The significance of which breast was larger than the other. They even suspended a gold ring on a thread and dangled it over her bump. There were drinks won on the back of some of these calls. My parents could have simply asked the ultrasound technician to reveal my sex, but they preferred to bate their own breath. Even as I was struggling towards taking my own.

And in that same overwrought anticipation, they bought a Baby Book to record my development. They could have just read Piaget instead. And on their deaths, it passed to me along with all the other sentimental bric-a-brac that cluttered up first my family home and then the retirement place they both inhabited until the end of their days. God preserve me from such a vitiating march headlong into death.

I'm holding it now, this baby book. I've never opened it before. Still can't see the point of it. Wonder if it was something my parents went back to gaze upon and delve inside, in their quest to extract my essence? That which they dejectedly referred to as the 'closed book' of me. It's hard to judge how well-thumbed the book is. Its venerable age alone has left it careworn. God knows what the state of the organic contents will be like. The forensic clippings attesting to me, but never being brought before any jury.

The leaf of the inside cover, my mother's florid script in an unfurled scroll borne by cartoon cherubs. My name, date of birth, weight, eye colour, the usual biometrics of the passport entry into life. Smudges that presumably were my neonate fingerprints, though could have conceivably been unfortunate bugs trapped by the wax paper and executed with the snapping closed of the covers. My ultrasound scan picture. Too undercooked to determine organs of sex, thus preserving their fussy ignorance. Seeing how I was hatched from a conspiracy of self-delusion, was it surprising that I became their lifelong rebus?

The coming home photo. Wrapped in a shawl that probably was never used again. Red eyed me on the red eye express family car no doubt driving at 3mph all the way home from hospital. The colours have faded on the snap, save for the demonic eyes of course. Behind my Zimmer frame I reckon I can hit 2mph.

And to the guts of the book inside. A lock of my hair preserved under selloptape. Patently a more durable adhesive than the glue for my toupee. The baby tress is blond. The hue before they quickly darkened to the mouse brown tone I inherited from my mousy father. But even that seems light years away from the dirty snow grey of the few remaining follicles that crazypave my sideburns. And sprout from my knuckles, my nostrils, my ears and every flaming orifice. So what do these blond hairs commemorate, other than a fleeting period of another me from a time before consciousness? So a non-me really.

A small swollen, sweated envelope holding a slither of nail cuticles. Desiccated like some voodoo magic. And it's worked too, to judge by how hard and thick my nails are now. The clippers can't cut them and that's before the arthritis contorted my fingers so that I couldn't even grip them. They're twisted and curled over like talons. Biting into the circulation there so I no longer have any feeling in my digits.

First age of crawling, which I have reverted every time I try and rise from my bed. Age of teething, well now my gums have shrunk and persecute me all over again. Reduces me to eating rusks and baby solids, oh the indignity. First slept through the night, well that one didn't take for very long. Burning the candle at both ends might have shaved seconds off my life span, but it did screw up my body clock for good. Drank from a cup for the first time. Ha, I was precocious on that particular skill. Of course hailing from a family of lushes I would have been. First smile, just left blank! And look here, my first word. A babbling single syllable. An unremarkable lexeme. Modelled for me by my mother's deferential idiom no doubt. These first words of countless ones. Words adorning books. Words splattered across theatre stages by actors. That cheap and nasty Polaroid of me emerging into the light, when thirty-five years later I was being photographed by three-thousand pound a session photographers for my inner sleeve picture. And all from the humble beginnings of the first word "ta-ta". Goodbye and good riddance.

Yet now I have no more words. All my books are written. There is nothing left to say. Me and Roth both. Just as well with these numb fingers unable to palpate the keys. I have turned the closing page and embraced the final dust sheet on my oeuvre, the same as on the spare chairs in redundant rooms in my house. And yet I see there are blank pages aplenty at the end of this Baby Book. Guess my parents fell out of love with the task of chronicling my development. Or maybe just fell out of love with me. Why shouldn't indifference be mutual?

And then it struck me. The ending of this book. The ending of endings. This book which is supposedly all about the burgeoning of life, needs also to mark the pathway to death and cessation. Of course I'll reach a state eventually when I won't be able to record the final part of the journey. And there is no one around to do it on my behalf, since I forbade all biographies, while the writer's life is irredeemably solitary. But why shouldn't people speculate, wager and the few successful ones celebrate with drink once again? Bookending my entry and exit from this world. What with the internet and everything, I can offer this to anyone and everyone. My final book, one I omitted to recognise I still had left in me. I can't collect any winnings on this one either.

Book on my Death:

Heart failure 2-1

Cancer 5-2

Pneumonia 100-30

Kidney/Liver 5-1

Thrombosis 7-1

Lower-respiratory/infections 8-1

Alzheimers/dementias  10-1

Bile/Gallstones 12-1