My First Story

To Be With The King is my first ever story, written a whole decade ago. I'm putting it up on my blog now because I know I never will enter it into competitions. Being my first, I am very fond of this story, so much so that I don't care what anyone else thinks of it! Although your comments are welcome, of course.

The inspiration for this story is a gorgeous folk song, Galway to Graceland, by Richard Thompson. Despite originally receiving permission from his music production company to publish, I have left off the lyrics to the song that complete the story and recommend you find a copy of the song instead...

To Be With The King

She dressed in the dark and whispered Amen. The bedroom is moonlight grey but Sally is pretty and pink like a young girl again. She crouches at the foot of the bed, her knees pop and crack under the strain. She slides out her suitcase. Until yesterday, all it had contained for twenty years since her honeymoon were a pair of woodlice shells and a single sock zipped into the lining compartment. There had been no time to wonder what had happened to its partner.

She glances up at Seamus. He lies uncovered and naked despite the night’s chill; turning the quiet night air into noise through his cavernous nose while the vast dome of his belly rises and falls in time. She knows where those twenty years have gone: Seamus swallowed them whole, one by one, gorging himself on them without ever being satisfied. No, she thinks, she won’t miss him and she says under her breath ‘not one little bit’.

The truth was that Sally was in love with another man and everyone knew it. It was Love the night she first caught sight of him at the local picture house; he was larger than life. Larger than her life. She felt like the only woman on earth when he looked at her and he soon became all she could talk about. From the hairdresser’s to the butcher’s Sally would swoon over her lover’s latest movements. Father O’Reilly had sat patiently as Sally had giggled her way through her daily confessions of impure thoughts. His eyebrows, on his otherwise immobile face, often dived down the centre of his nose in disapproval but they had once shot up so far they almost slid over his bald head.

In the beginning, her friends had joked about Sally’s obsession on street corners and over the fences on washing day;

‘Guess what our Sally did today?’

‘What now?’

‘She only wrote to him, told him she’s in love with him and her life would be unbearable without him.’

‘She never did! Mother of God! Whatever next? How did she get his address?’

‘She told me she wouldn’t need one, the postman is bound to know where he lives. She’s a funny one.’

Everyone agreed.

Lately, Sally had begun to think of her house as an ungrateful old relative who creaked and groaned constantly, despite the care she had showed it over the years. Sally knew it would try to interfere with her escape tonight by waking Seamus with its snapping joints and whining hinges. She had practiced night after night, waking the snoring heap at various stages en route but avoided suspicion by blaming a weak bladder. No more practice runs, this is her last chance.

In her stocking feet Sally tiptoes across the bedroom floor on the safe places like she did as a child to avoid the bad luck hiding in the pavement cracks. The wailing door to the landing only squeaks meekly, sedated by a treatment of fat from the Sunday roast. Sally shuts it behind her. On the landing she ties a length of rope to the suitcase handle and lowers it over the banister into the dark hallway below. She stands at the top of the staircase, every stair is prepared to scream out to Seamus but now, taking a deep breath, Sally tucks her skirt into her knickers and straddles the hand rail before inching slowly passed the mute stairs towards freedom.

It was not long before Sally’s friends had ceased to see the funny side and were embarrassed when, for her 40^th birthday, she had ‘Elvis I love You’ tattooed upon her breast which, without shame, she showed everyone. Poor Seamus was a laughing stock. Everyone agreed he would have to put his foot down, he would have to show her who was King and so he did. He stopped her house keeping money which she had been spending on records and magazines. On one night the neighbours would talk about for weeks, Seamus threw the TV out of the window when he had returned from the pub to find THAT MAN gyrating his hips in his very own front room. To add insult to injury the ancient television set had created a triple image - Elvis in the flesh and two ghostly companions; it had to go, everyone agreed. What’s more, every time Sally hummed Blue Suede Shoes in absentminded reverie Seamus would reach for his brown carpet slipper.

Very soon Elvis was a dirty word in Galway and Sally was totally cut off from news of her sweetheart. No one mentioned him for fear of undoing all Seamus’ good work in curing his wife’s affliction, even Father O’Reilly offered him wholehearted support and stood Sally at the front of church on one cold morning and preached for three Catholic hours about worshipping false idols. It was for her own good, everyone agreed, despite their pins and needles. The good Father also stopped paying Sally for cleaning the church so that through penance she would also cleanse her own poor soul. Galway severed every link between Sally and her lover but Elvis found a way and every night he came into her dreams singing Are You Lonesome Tonight? and then loving her so tender that she cried out in her sleep.

At the backdoor, Sally slips on her shoes and in to the night, down the network of alleyways that lead to St Catherine’s church. The clock face glows in the moonlight and reads a quarter to two as Sally lets herself into the vestibule. Sally is nervous: she tucks a stray auburn curl under her headscarf, adjusts her horn-rimmed spectacles and approaches the Madonna in pigeon steps like a disobedient school girl. She kneels at Her feet and looks up. She knows Our Lady intimately, she has dusted every nook and cranny for 15 years but notices now that she had forgotten her nostrils on her last visit and the legs of a spider are poking out like unsightly nasal hair. Sally draws out her hanky and wipes the Madonna’s nose, she thinks it is the least she can do, after all she is the only friend she has left. Is she mistaken? Did Our Lady wink? Sally blinks, adjusts her glasses again then looks up for the last time at the stain glass tableaux of the devoted followers gazing adoringly up at The King of Kings with a child in his arms.

One day The King was dead. Sallys the world over wailed, tore at their hair in grief, set up shrines and began to flock to Graceland but our Sally had no way of knowing. Seamus wore the smug smile of a victorious lover, the corners of his mouth pushed upward by the news that filled it. But instead of spitting it out he savoured it, rolling it around his mouth like a bully with a stolen sweet. His tongue tingled with the delicious anticipation of revelation but it was not long before he could take it no more, after all Seamus had needs, everyone agreed. Sally had been saving herself for Elvis for so long and now her true love was food for worms, Seamus saw his chance. Spurred on by a night in the pub with his friends, he staggered home with a tingling in his loins, practising the Presley hip thrusts they told him were guaranteed to turn his wife’s knees to jelly. It couldn’t fail; he was so confident in fact he had made a bet with sceptic Billy O’Connor on his success. He found Sally sitting at the kitchen table, spelling out Elvis with the peas on his plate of cold dinner which scattered all over the table as he pushed it aside. He opened his shirt and thrust a hip in her face. Nothing. Not a bloody flicker and certainly no flush of lust. He belched to clear his throat then slurred tunelessly in her ear…We can’t go on together with suspicious minds…and something ignited in Sally’s eyes, she whispered;

‘We’re caught in a trap, I can’t walk out because I…’

Seamus looked behind him because Sally seemed to be seeing straight through him to someone else.

‘Bloody hell fire woman, what are you whittering about?’

‘Why can’t you see what you’re doing to me?’

‘Eh?’

‘You can’t see these tears are real, I’m crying, we can’t go on together with suspicious minds.’

Sally was singing now and the penny dropped.

‘Bloody hell fire woman’ he growled as he reached into his pocket for his secret weapon, he held out the tabloid clipping heralding: THE KING IS DEAD. Her singing stopped and his grin spread to reveal his remaining teeth that were sunk into his gums at angles like miniature, neglected headstones. He stooped to look her full in the face, breathing death on to it. Having dealt his blow and seen that the spark had been extinguished, he dragged his stunned prey up the stairs. First thing the next morning, Seamus hammered on Billy O’Connor’s door to collect his winnings.

Sally kisses the Madonna then finds her way through the gloom to the vestry where Father O’Reilly keeps the coffers which are swollen by the new roof appeal. Sally lifts the velvet bag of coins and notes and bites her lip. Doubt washes over her but as she decides to replace the bag a voice whispers to her in a familiar soft Southern drawl;‘Darl-in, it’s yours. Uh huh. It’s back payment, your penance is over.’ He is right, it is just enough to cover her unpaid wages. Sally lifts the bag again and it feels lighter now.

Seamus opened one eye. Something wasn’t right. Breaking the crusty seal on his other eye with a fat finger he saw very clearly that something was wrong. Where was she? He called once and waited. Nothing. With every step he took and door he opened, the house found its voice and it cried ‘She’s gone, she’s gone’. In anguish he looked out of the windows front and back and replies ‘gone where? gone where?’.

From a distance St Catherine’s clock face watched. Before her hands had turned a full circle, news of Sally’s disappearance had been passed over the walls and around the tavern tables of Galway, each storyteller adding a new twist to the tale. Within weeks it had passed from speculation to folklore and, on the rare occasions Seamus was not in the pub, some even sang…

(To find out what they sang, download Richard Thompson's 'Galway to Graceland' on i-tunes).

Two new discoveries...

1. It's great to see publishers showing the love for the short story and my new favourite is Harper Perennial whose site, www.fiftytwostories.com, delivers one short a week, free.

2. You know something's in trouble when it's deemed worthy of its own charity. The short story, by some people's reckoning, is endangered but thankfully through www.one-story.com - a nonprofit 501 (3)(c) - you can have a short story posted to you by snail mail every three weeks. Great for junkies like me who need a constant supply and don't much like reading shorts online.

The best thing about both these publishers, is they take submissions from just about anybody...

Subscribe to both these sites folks (see links) and get your regular diet of shorts started.

A Tense Moment

As a writer, one of the creative choices I've found hardest to make is which tense to use.

I'm trying to finish a story I began sometime ago that has been sitting around for too long. The Perfect Lodger began as a first person past but following the first overhaul, this changed to third person past. Now I'm trying to decide if it would, in fact, be better told using third person present...

If anyone's reading this, I'd be grateful if you could read the following openers and tell me which works best. Is one more engaging than the other? Or, do you think the story might be better off as first person?! VOTE NOW - it's over to you.

Option A:

“The seaside,” Lola said. “I want to go to the seaside.”

Having mistaken Saturday for a school day, Lola was dressed too early and she sat at the kitchen table, scowling into her pastel-coloured cereal with a ferocity that could have boiled the milk. Her ears, which poked through her lank black hair, were bright red.

Her mother squealed, clapped her hands together and sang, “We’re off to the seaside!” over and over. Kerry, her thick hair tied back in a bunch of curly brown twigs still frayed with sleep, was still in her pink-hearted pyjamas and fluffy grey slippers, like two chinchillas squashed by the soles of her feet.

On the other side of the kitchen Carla was sawing through a fat log of fresh bread. She had been fooled into her suit by Lola who had knocked on her door at 8am needing help putting her school uniform on the right side out. Carla had been wardrobe mistress since Monday when, in the aftermath of a cataclysmic fall-out, Kerry lay buried beneath her duvet while Lola sheltered under an occasional table. It had been left to Carla to coax the child out, dry her eyes, get her dressed, pack her lunch and walk her to school.

Unable to endure the punishment any longer, a day out of Lola’s choosing was Kerry’s latest peace offering. The month before, it had been a pair of rabbits. They were never allowed in the garden but given the run of the hallway, showing their boredom by stripping off the first half-foot of wallpaper, nibbling the skirting boards and scattering little brown balls across the lino. Carla had kept a dustpan by her door and a stoic silence, but ranted about the situation to her colleagues who agreed with her: Lola was one spoiled brat.

Option B:

“The seaside,” Lola says. “I want to go to the seaside.”

Having mistaken Saturday for a school day, Lola is dressed too early and sits at the kitchen table, scowling into her pastel-coloured cereal with a ferocity that could boil the milk. Her ears, which poke through her lank black hair, are bright red.

Her mother, sitting opposite, is delighted and begins to sing, “We’re off to the seaside!” over and over. Kerry’s thick hair is tied back into a bunch of curly brown twigs and she’s still in her pink-hearted pyjamas and fluffy grey slippers, like two chinchillas squashed by the soles of her feet.

On the other side of the kitchen Carla saws through a fat log of fresh bread. She is also dressed, fooled into her suit by Lola who had needed her help putting on her school uniform on the right side out. Carla had been wardrobe mistress since Monday when, in the aftermath of a cataclysmic fall-out, Kerry lay buried beneath her duvet while Lola sheltered under an occasional table. It was left to Carla to coax the child out, dry her eyes, get her dressed, pack her lunch and walk her to school.

Unable to endure the punishment any longer, a day out of Lola’s choosing is Kerry’s latest peace offering. The month before, it had been a pair of rabbits. They aren’t allowed in the garden but are given the run of the hallway and show their boredom by stripping off the first half-foot of wallpaper, nibbling the skirting boards and scattering little brown balls across the lino. Carla keeps a dustpan by her door and a stoic silence, but often rants about the situation to her colleagues who agree with her: Lola is one spoiled brat.

Truth is funnier than fiction

The following hilarious excerpt from a genuine debate in the UK's House of Lords shows why fiction is so damn difficult. No writer could make up either this dialogue or these names...

The Chairman of Committees (Lord Brabazon of Tara): My Lords, the administration is fully aware of the problem with mice in the Palace of Westminster and is taking all appropriate measures to minimise their numbers. We retain the services of an independent pest control consultant and a full-time pest controller. The current focus is on poisoning and trapping, blocking of mouse access points, and more frequent cleaning of bars and restaurants to remove food debris. This programme was intensified over the February Recess and fewer sightings of mice have been reported since.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff: I thank the noble Lord for his reply. How many calls have there been to the mouse helpline? Has the accuracy of that information been checked, given that the staff report seeing mice on a daily basis at the moment in the eating areas? Has consideration been given to having hypoallergenic cats on the estate, given the history? Miss Wilson, when she was a resident superintendent in this Palace, had a cat that apparently caught up to 60 mice a night. The corpses were then swept up in the morning. Finally, does the noble Lord recognise the fire hazard that mice pose, because they eat through insulating cables? It would be a tragedy for this beautiful Palace to burn down for lack of a cat.

The Chairman: My Lords, there are a number of questions there. I cannot give an answer to the number of calls made to the mouse helpline-if that is its title. I suspect that it would not be a good use of resources to count them up. But I am well aware of the problem of mice, as I said in my Answer. It is something that we take seriously.

As for getting a cat, I answered a Question from the noble Lord, Lord Elton, last week on this matter. I was not aware that such a thing as a hypoallergenic cat existed-I do not know whether our cat at home is one of those. There are a number of reasons why it is not a good idea to have cats. First, they would ingest mouse poison when eating poisoned mice, which would not be very nice for them, and there would be nothing to keep them where they are needed or stop them walking around the House on desks in offices or on tables in restaurants and bars-and maybe even in the Chamber itself. Therefore, we have ruled out at this stage the possibility of acquiring a cat, or cats.

Lord Bradshaw: I have spoken continually to the staff in the eating places in the House and I acknowledge that there has been some diminution in the number of mice around. But could I press the noble Lord, because further action needs to be taken? I know that this is an old building, but mice are still here and we are talking about places where food is served. I have no magic solution, but perhaps the consultant who is being employed might have some answers.

The Chairman: My Lords, I am well aware that there are still mice around. I saw one in the Bishops' Bar only yesterday evening. I do not know whether it was the same one that I saw the day before or a different one; it is always difficult to tell the difference between the various mice that one sees. We believe that the problem is getting better. Cleaning is one of the measures we are taking, as I outlined in my original Answer. As I speak here this afternoon, the Bishops' Bar and the Guest Room are being hoovered, so we can get rid of the food scraps from lunch. If you were a mouse, you would rather eat the crumbs of a smoked salmon sandwich than the bait. Therefore, we want to remove the crumbs as quickly as possible.

Lord Pilkington of Oxenford: Why should I and noble Lords trust the Executive to deal with mice when they cannot deal with the economy?

The Chairman: My Lords, I do not actually deal with the economy. I am glad to say that that would be above my pay grade, whereas trying to deal with the mice is probably just about right for me.

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I was in total ignorance that there was anything of the nature of a mouse helpline until this Question Time. Can the Chairman of Committees tell us what helplines there are for Members of the House on other issues that we do not know about?

The Chairman: I rather hope that we do not have too many other ones. I was not going to advertise the existence of the mouse helpline, although it was advertised some time ago. Indeed, I invited Members of the House to telephone when they saw mice. The trouble is that when the person at the other end of the helpline goes to check this out, very often the mouse has gone elsewhere...

I Don't Believe It!

Thank God for BBC Radio: without access to it on the internet, I might go mad here in the US where news media is so excruciating. This weekend I listened to a great Radio 4 documentary feature on Les Bouquinistes - the 100's of second hand booksellers that line the Seine. The reporter told a story of an American woman visiting Paris who perused the books and was delighted to find a book she remembered as a childhood favourite, long since out of print. Full of nostalgia and keen to buy it, she opened the front cover to find the price and found her very own name in her very own handwriting.

I immediately considered writing this as a short story but then began to worry that, as fiction, it would be considered too contrived, too coincidental to be believable and the power of the story will be destroyed. I could only get away with writing about the American and the Bouquinistes if I added 'Based on a True Story' - a subtitle used to prepare us for the unbelievable. Tolerance for the unbelievable seems so much greater in non-fiction.

I find this somewhat depressing. All non-fiction formats - from newscasts to fashion adverts to autobiographies lie to us: they are fiction masquerading as fact. One fifth of the US population believes Obama is a Muslim because the conservative media has inferred it over and over until fiction festered into fact. No doubt, Glenn Beck's inevitable memoir will convince us all he isn't, in fact, the devil incarnate.

A close friend once refused to read any fiction because 'there are too many facts in the world' and too little time to waste on frivolity. Happily, he's seen the error of his ignorance and is now a passionate writer of fantasy fiction with an appreciation for literature. Although he would never admit it, he would probably agree with me that fiction, especially in this day and age, is becoming the bastion of 'truth'. Fiction is open about its fabrication and lies without hypocrisy and as a result the truths within (by which I mean universal truths about the human condition) can be told.

Short & Sweet

"Congratulations! You've won first prize in the Twisted Tails Short Story Competition (Spring) . One hundred euros will be sent shortly to your PayPal account..."

Never have two sentences given me more joy.

Now I can call myself a writer!

Close Encounters

I've read a lot of books about writing over the years. Some are essential technical reading, like Strunk & White's The Elements of Style but others are a bit hit and miss. However, I can heartily recommend the book I've just finished: Reading Like a Writer by the aptly named Francine Prose.

The book is all about close reading and looking at the choices writers make regarding words, sentence structure, paragraphing, character details etc. It's great to read a book for writers that doesn't throw out rules but looks at what works and, quite often, what works goes against the received wisdom you'll find in a lot of writers' self-help books.

I learned a lot from Prose, more in fact than I learned about close reading while doing my English Literature degree. As far as I recollect, we didn't do much close reading on the course - having to get through 6 books a week prevented that. Instead, we were encouraged to look past the words to the socio-economic meaning, as if the beautiful rows of flowers were not as important as and the soil and the gardener. Authors created 'discourses' not 'narratives', apparently.

This concept was not one I'd been used to prior to University. I remember sitting wide-eyed throughout a lecture in which The Wizard of Oz was deconstructed by our gay lecturer in a way that would've finished off my straight-laced grandma who can take or leave all films except this one. A lot of people - my fella included - would say such interpretation is ridiculous but what I learned from my degree is that interpretation is not about what the reader/viewer takes out, it's about what they put in. And thus, post-depression, The Wizard of Oz can also be read as an allegory about economics. That said, I wish there'd been more close reading at University. But now I am trying to become a writer, I will be taking close reading more seriously and I am currently studying (rather than reading) The Poisonwood Bible and thanks to Prose's book, it's a doubly useful experience.

With an hour to kill a few weeks ago, I wandered over to the SF Library curious to see if any self-help books existed specifically for the short story writer. I typed "How to Write Short Stories" into their computerised catalogue and there it was - a book written by Ring W. Lardner in 1925 with that very title - so I ventured up to the antiquities section to view it.

It wasn't quite the instruction manual the title had implied: it was a collection of Ring's shorts with an introduction. But the introduction delighted me because it was hard to tell if he was being serious or sarcastic in his advice. Because of the age of the book, his stern face in his photo and my largely unfounded assumption that sarcasm is more common in modern comedy, I assumed his advice was given in all seriousness. That was my University training talking. However, if this assumption is correct, the following passage is absolutely hilarious:

"The first thing I generally always do is try and get hold of a catchy title, like for instance, 'Basil Hargrave's Vermifuge', or 'Fun at the Incinerating Plant.' Then I set down to a desk or flat table of any kind and lay out 3 or 4 sheets of paper with as many different colored pencils and look at them cock-eyed for a few moments before making a selection.

How to begin - or, as we professionals would say, "how to commence"- is the next question. It must be admitted that the method of approach ("L'approachement") differs even among first class fictionists. For example, Blasco Ibanez usually starts his stories with a Spanish word, Jack Dempsey with an "I" and Charley Peterson with a couple of simple declarative sentences about his leading character, such as "Hazel Gooftree had just gone mah jong. She felt faint."

Personally it has been my observation that the reading public prefers short dialogue to any other kind of writing and I always aim to open my tale with two or three lines of conversation between characters - or, as I shall call them, my puppets - who are to play important roles. I have often found that something one of these characters says, words I have perhaps unconsciously put into his or her mouth, directs my plot into channels deeper than I had planned and changes, for the better, the entire sense of my story."

On close reading, however, we can see sarky-pants Ring is, in all likelihood, having a laugh - although whether that's with us or at us is still not entirely clear. While remaining humourous, close reading makes the piece far less amusing than our original interpretation. So there. Perhaps close reading isn't such a good idea after all...