Now that I've completed the first draft of my transatlantic novel Scars & Stripes, I've been sunning some of the content under the fierce rays of scrutiny from two writers' groups I belong to. (Step forward and take a bow, in no particular order: Warren, Martin, Chris, Elizabeth, Susie and Kath.)
As S&S started life as a semi-autobiographical novel, the first person POV made perfect sense. But it does have its limitations and there's a certain cognitive dissonance that occurs when I start meandering into fiction told from my perspective. Far better than, as Warren has tried to persuade me from the very beginning, to switch to third person and start again at page one.
Despite my uninformed protests, I tried it with a few pages and it was immediately apparent that writing in third person not only opens up the narrative (to include observations and useful information that a first person narrator couldn't possibly know), it also acts as a buffer zone between me and the source experiences so that the characters can start to tell their own story.
Anyhow, without further ado, here's a sample from the revised 'work in progress' Chapter 1:
Scars & Stripes
by
Derek Thompson
“Thanks for having me over.”
Chapter 1 – The First Time
Thursdays had always been Alex’s favourite day of the week, until that one.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” Polly whispered breathlessly. “And you’re not going to like it.” Her eyes veered away then sharply back again, as if checking his mental progress.
He suddenly had a very bad feeling about this; the fights and angry silences, her mysterious disappearances – they all pointed to one thing. His mind raced back, picking out clues, like the end of a murder mystery – wisdom in hindsight. Polly, suddenly smoking again; Polly, listening to new music; Polly, changing.
She cleared her throat, bringing him back to the present. “There’s someone else.” Time froze, burning the moment into his mind - the stillness in the room, his breath catching in his throat and the way the sun shone through her Indian cotton dress, silhouetting her legs. He thought he’d never seen her looking so lovely - it was his personal Princess Diana moment.
Once Polly’s big secret was out in the open, neither of them spoke. He stood there in tears as she blurred before him like a rainy view, while she looked on in mute embarrassment. He’d always promised himself that if this moment ever came, he’d handle it with dignity and honour. But now that the dreaded moment was here, a voice in his head was whispering ‘Sod that for a game of soldiers’. He nodded to himself, fair enough. He was twenty, with the emotional maturity of a troubled eight year-old, and his secure little world had just been shattered.
When Polly spoke again, he wished she hadn’t bothered. “It’s Jimmy – it’s been going on for a month now. I thought it was time we were honest about it.”
He huffed; what a cliché. So Jimmy was the villain of the piece - the ‘just a good friend’ that he’d had to swallow his suspicions about, because he was ‘obviously insecure’. Too bloody right he was.
All Alex’s high ideals went out of the window. Even by his own estimations, he was a complete arsehole about everything, pleading his case in predictable fashion: swearing, shouting, threats and recriminations - all the greats. Polly bore it all stoically; afterwards he would even say she’d been generous about it. She could afford to be though, he'd always add – she’d got what she wanted.
“So, erm,” she chewed her lip, “I’m gonna take off for a few days to let the dust settle. Mum says you can come back over the weekend to pick your stuff up.”
“Where will you be?” he sniffed, blinking slowly to try and take it all in.
“Folkestone. My brother’s letting me and Jimmy use his place for the weekend.”
He took the knockout blow without comment and she led him out of the ring. Next thing he knew, he was at the front door and Polly was whispering ‘sorry’ as if he’d just failed an interview. The door closed behind him and he stood for a moment, watching the traffic. Then he heard her Polly’s mother through the glass. “About time – I thought he was never going to leave.” She may as well have popped the champagne.
He didn’t sleep well that Friday night, tortured by the thought – well, the reality – of Polly and Jimmy together in Folkestone. On Saturday, he went shopping for goodbye presents because it seemed the right thing to do. And if they happened to tug at her heart strings and made her come running back, begging for forgiveness, so much the better. Sunday morning, he went back over and collected his things, which her mother had thoughtfully crammed into two Tesco’s bags. She let him go up to Polly’s room and he left two parting gifts on her pillow: The Egyptian Book of the Dead - an early Christmas present, and Madonna’s single, Crazy for You. He also accidentally left the receipts in the bag, which was understandable as he had a lot on his mind. It was the autumn of 1985 and, as far as Alex was concerned, his life was over.
All break-ups are difficult, but Alex and Polly’s had a further complication. Call it fate, karma or chance, they had both ended up working in the same Civil Service building. They hadn’t met there (an Animal Rights march, actually), but it was a quirk of fate that when he applied – at her encouragement - that’s where he was assigned. Fate could be a cruel bastard.
What once seemed like a blessing was now a curse. In that first week after the split, he’d catch glimpses of her in the foyer sometimes, wearing a pained expression whenever she saw him; the kind that people reserve for a beloved pet in its dotage. After a seven day cooling off period, she decided that they ought to be above petty emotions and support one another through this period of transition.
Consequently, they now attempted civilised lunches together at a vegetarian café in St Paul’s, where invariably he paid and she tried to avoid his attempts to hold hands as friends while they sat waiting for service. Polly spoke in clipped sentences, as if she were in a black and white film. Not the sci-fi films he had started collecting on video, but the sort of thing that started off in a railway station and ended up with him falling sleep before the finish. There they would sit, awaiting their vegetarian cuisine; he trying desperately not to play twenty questions about the past while Polly, swinging between concern for him because, she assured him, she still cared about him, and wanting to sing from the rooftops about how great life was with Jimmy. It was an impossible situation, for Alex; he longed to see Polly, but every time he did, he felt as if he were making payments on a car that he was never going to drive again.
Over lunch, pen and paper, they divided up our friends like possessions – it wasn’t difficult. Those people he’d known before they met, he kept. Everyone else – met mainly through her anyway - belonged to Polly, with limited access rights.
He listened and tried to pay attention as she gave him a copy of their agreement to respect one another, but he couldn't help feeling as if he were being squeezed out of his own life. Or at least, the life Polly knew about.
Six months before the split, he and Polly had met Paul’s new girlfriend (Paul was one of his originals) - an American exchange student named Stacey. She’d dated Paul for a few months, until he’d inevitably cheated on her; then she went back home to rebuild her life. The day after Polly set off to Folkestone, Alex had rung Stacey in Wisconsin to wallow in the bad news.
She'd been fatalistically philosophical. “It had to happen – how else could you grow? What a drag. It’s a shame we can’t meet up.”
“Yeah,” he sniped, “I’ll just get the bus.”
“You could always fly – they have planes these days…”
Alex wasn’t big on embracing the moment, but it was a lifeline so he grabbed at it. He’d never been anywhere before, unless you counted the family trip to Malta where he’d learned to swim in the hotel pool, aged 19. All he knew about the USA was what he had gleaned from TV and films, and time spent talking with Stacey. As far as he could see, it was full of bold, fascinating and talkative people. Which could be just what he needed.
He felt a tremendous sense of power in holding the secret back from Polly during their friendly lunches, for the whole three weeks that he managed to keep his mouth shut. It wasn't how he'd planned it, but he grew tired hearing about Jimmy’s car, Jimmy’s sensitive side and how he was just so good for Polly.
“I can’t meet for lunch next Friday,” Alex tossed into the conversation, with all the subtlety of a lump hammer;“I’ve got an interview at the American Embassy.”
Naturally, Polly took the bait. “You never said you’d applied for a new job,” her voice dipped a little.
“No, I’m getting my visa,” he said, reeling it out, yard by yard, and loving it.
“Oh?” she lowered her hummus sandwich.
“I need to get it taken care of this week,” he paused then added, like a child bragging about a favourite toy, “because I’m going to America soon.”
Polly paused mid-bite and seemed to look at him differently. In his mind, he’d become exotic, decisive; perhaps a little more like the person he’d been when they first met.
His sense of superiority didn’t last long once he’d acquired his visa. He had more pressing things to deal with, such as arranging a mutually agreeable travel date with Stacey. Agreeable to her and affordable for him, since the main thing he’d learned about relationships was that they were expensive. December it was, then – almost three months away. Meantime, he was still in Polly’s gravitational pull – bumping into her at friends’, the wholefood shop or the alternative bookshop. Or as Polly liked to put it: the three boundaries of his world.
He saw Jimmy for the first time at the wholefood shop, when he’d run out of puy lentils. And they’d both instinctively shared a silent nodding acknowledgement – the dual recognition that they each wished the other under a bus and that the only thing they had in common was sleeping with the same woman. And not necessarily on different days.
Friends tried to be patient and supportive. Alex would listen as they encouraged him to see new people. Then he’d tilt his head against their words and spend the rest of the evening showering gloom and despondency on everyone around him. It wasn’t long before he took to spending more time on his own, wandering around Central London at the weekends like a spectre. He'd start at Hyde Park and gradually gravitate towards Covent Garden, where boutiques and design shops rubbed shoulders with new age emporia and veggie restaurants. He quickly grew to love it there.
The new age shop where he’d bought Polly’s Book of the Dead was a particular favourite. And they had psychics and other readers there so what better place to figure out what to do with his life? The manager, a kindly looking man with a bushy beard and glasses – looking like a cross between a Maharishi and an accountant – peered down a list. “I can do you a tarot in half an hour or a palm reading after four.”
Alex checked the clock on the wall – the one festooned with angels. It was about one-thirty. He opted for the tarot reading, left his name and payment upfront, and went for a walk.
“Don’t be late back,” the manager called after him, “the cards don’t like to be kept waiting.”
Alex left the shop with a smile on his face, convinced he was doing something decisive about his situation, beyond spending a tenner. When he returned, he was shown through to the back of the shop.
“Number three,” the manager murmured, pointing down some steps.
As Alex walked past numbers one and two, he could hear a low muttering as the psychics and seers plied their trade. He wasn’t a sceptic; far from it – he had a set of my own cards at home, for all the good they had done him. But then everyone aiming for enlightenment knew it was hard to read one’s own destiny. Polly and he had gone through a mystical phase, just after the political phase and just before the alternative psychology phase. With each successive change he had kept the philosophies and the books.
He knocked on the door marked three and watched as the cheaply taped number flapped against the wood. The door eased in a little and he went inside. A woman was sat at a table, facing him. She had one hand clenched around a can of coca cola and the other rested by a spread of cards, as if she expected one or the other to make a break for it. A cigarette burned lazily on the edge of a saucer, four spent companions beside it like a family grave.
He glanced at the cigarette and coughed involuntarily. She took the hint and stubbed it out. That, or she really was psychic. She smiled, proffered her hand and said, “Hi, I’m Maggie – take a seat.”
He sat opposite and she scraped the cards together before passing them over. He knew the drill and shuffled them quietly, trying to focus on ‘the matter at hand’ without making eye contact or asking questions about her accent. Irish? Canadian? American? Something exotic.
She laid the cards out, face down in rapid succession, pausing to finish the last of her cola. Once ten cards were in place on the baize, she started top left and turned over the Two of Cups. She smiled and looked straight at him. “So, your relationship has just ended.”
Alex let out a stilted sigh and shifted a little in his seat, like a criminal caught in the act. That was how he came to meet Maggie, although he could never have foreseen how important that meeting would become. It was less of a psychic reading after those first few words, and more of a meeting of minds. They were like old friends, working through the reading together, swapping favourite authors and laughing about the incongruities of life. Towards the end, she wrote something on a piece of paper and said, “I teach at Old Street – you should come along.”
He waggled his head noncommittally, picked up the note and shook her hand. She’d already lit up another cigarette before he’d got out of the room.
Outside, the sun was still shining, but a breeze had picked up. He wandered back to Covent Garden underground with a sense of contentment. He couldn’t put his finger on it exactly; nothing had really happened in the last half an hour, but he felt as though he had just managed to scratch an itch.
He didn’t make up his mind about Maggie’s classes until Monday night and on the Tuesday, he arrived at the address on the note, an impressive red-bricked building that looked like a Victorian school. There was a wholefood shop next door, which was miraculously still open after 6pm, accessible through the main building.
Apple juice carton in hand, he climbed the stairs to the second floor and peered in through the glass-fronted door. Maggie turned immediately and waved him in. He was early, but that was fine as it gave her a chance to acquaint him with the syllabus.
Over the next few weeks Alex learned about meditation and the symbolism of dreams, he practiced moving imagined spheres of energy between his palms and he started to look at people differently. Everyone in the class seemed to fit into a pigeonhole. There were the bright ones and the needy ones (he was the crossover kid), the devout Christian who nonetheless wanted to see what else was on offer, the intellectual one with his own ideas that he always happy to share and the stray ones looking for a date. Each contributed in their way and each was desperate to get their own needs met, including him.
He stayed behind after the class to help tidy the furniture away; it wasn’t as if he had anywhere pressing to go. “Do you need, er, a lift?” he gripped his car keys like an amulet, even though they weren't doing amulets for another 6 weeks.
“That’d be great,” Maggie said, blowing out the white candle on the table. Something he’d learned from Stacey was that Americans tended to see the world in bright colours. Things were awesome, great, fantastic or crap and bullshit – no middle ground.
He soon realised why it would be great, as they crossed the Thames into the labyrinth of South London. Psychic she might be, but Maggie had no sense of direction at all. As they meandered back and forth through Deptford, he mentioned his upcoming trip to the US and she offered some sagely advice: “The Mid-West, in December? Pack a sweater because winter there is a bitch.”
By the time he navigated my way safely back to North London, where he also managed to get lost on his own, it was close to eleven-thirty. He was tired, but happy; there was a certain joy about being around strangers, an opportunity for reinvention or simply holding back. As he got home, murmuring apologies for waking anyone up, the phone was ringing.
“Where have you been?” Polly pouted down the phone. “This is the fourth time I’ve rung you.”
He didn’t say much beyond ‘hello’, having learned from the whole Stacey / visa affair that telling Polly what he was up to felt like giving away little pieces of himself – and he was still trying to collect a new set.
“So,” she sniffed, as the silence extended, “where were you?”
“Just out.” He stared at the wallpaper and wondered whether tonight’s exercise on closing down the aura could be used to good effect.
“We went round to Nathan and Kate’s and they said they hadn’t seen you for ages…”
There was more silence from his end of the phone. He wondered if they’d gone there on purpose, just to check up on him.
She lasted a count of seven. “Anyway, I just felt like a chat and I wanted to make sure you were okay and everything,” her voice began to crack.
What he should have said was, “I’m fine,” and politely put the phone down. He knew that, of course. But no, what he actually said ran along the lines of, “I think Nathan and Kate were getting tired of me talking about how my girlfriend left me a few weeks ago, for some friend of hers.”
Then Polly started crying and he felt like an idiot, again. And before he knew it, he’d opened the floodgates with those fatal words ‘so how are you then?’ and learned more about her relationship with Jimmy than could ever have been good for him.
END OF PART 1!
It's that time of the year when many writers see one of their seasonal offerings thrust out into the world. I'm talking of course about today, June 30th, being the halfway point in the calendar year.
