For the Sake of Appearances (With apologies to P.G. Wodehouse) - a short story by Maureen Bowden

It was barely dawn on Saturday morning, certainly no later than eight, when some blighter, bashing on the old doorknocker, jerked me out of the dreamless. The chums and kindred spirits are frightfully well aware that nothing gives this girl the pip more than events breaking loose at an ungodly hour. After sleeping off an evening stewed to the gills, the former glory needs to be restored in a leisurely fashion, by a lightly boiled egg with toast soldiers and full strength coffee, followed by a splashing of brandy, stiffish, with not too much soda.

I draped the chassis in a designer dressing gown fresh from Harvey Nics, and toddled to the door. On the doorstep, I encountered, seeped to the gunnels in serious purpose, Aunt Camilla.

“What-ho, Auntie,” I said, with a sense of impending doom.

She shimmered into the living room. “Get dressed, Bunty, it’s time for some straight talking.” I sludged off for a shower to cleanse the outer girl, dried the frame and donned the upholstery. She pounced when I buzzed back. “Have you eaten?”

           

“No, I’ve been sleeping. These early morning frolics are too rich for me.”

           

She reeled me out for a bite of breakfast, which restored the inner girl somewhat. The ancient relative’s a rum old bird but she doesn’t stint on the nosh.

           

“The thing is, Bunty,” she said, “it’s time you were married.”

           

I drooped like a bally lily. “I say, Auntie, I’m not ready for the yoke and whip just yet.”

           

She pursed her lips. “Your choice of entertainment is your business,” she said, “but you must acquire a semblance of respectability for the sake of appearances.” The scales fell from the old peepholes and I skidded to the nub and gist of the rummy business. It was her own respectability she was having a fit about. She’d been a game old girl in her day, before marrying above her station, and now black sheep Bunty was letting the family side down.  

           

“Well, I’d be happy to oblige in the normal course of events,” I said, “but it would be dashed inconvenient right now. I have this spiffing bloke, not short of funds, makes no objection to my drinking him under the table and he’s a hummer in the hay.”

           

“Not a problem,” she said. “The specimen I have in mind is Lord Belmarsh, widower in his dotage, about to blow his last Tally-ho any minute.” She topped up our coffee. “Unleash the Soames-Hogg charm. Once you’ve tied the knot convince him he needs a new gamekeeper and you can install your chappie. Run round and round the mulberry bush making daisy chains while the old boy snoozes.” She sipped the Brazilian nectar. “When you’re Lady Belmarsh you can be as wanton as you like. You’ll be regarded as a colourful aristocrat, which is perfectly socially acceptable. An unwed drunken trollop is not.”

“Dash it all. That’s a bit thick,” I said. “Pot calling kettle: what?”

“Don’t be precious, Bunty. Come to dinner on Sunday. I’ll invite the poor fish and you can see if you click.”

She set me adrift to bounce off home, contemplating the prospect of matrimony. The holy state is absolutely a girl’s crossroads, if you know what I mean. Fun and freedom scuttle off down the primrose path and she’s left to trudge along the dirt track, rattling like a bally one-girl-chain-gang. Unfortunately, without my monthly allowance from Aunt Camilla to keep me in bolly and other essentials, my goose might as well trundle to the oven. I had to keep that queen of her sex sweet.

Rather than sneaking off to the river to end it all, I hopped into the Dagger and Duck for Mein Host’s cyanide special, only to find myself confronted by that pearl of manhood, Tristram Concannon, the current love of my life. I offloaded a report of the pickle I was in. No bloke of spirit could take such tidings unperturbed and the dear chump expressed his intentions of descending on Belmarsh Hall with brass hooks on his knuckles and a stocking full of sand, in order to render the unfortunate Lord even more incapable than he already was.

“She’d only line up another specimen,” I said, “so unless you’re prepared to immobilise every octogenarian aristo in Old Blighty I have to acquiesce. If she were to cut off supplies what would I do, work for a living?”

“Pretty scaly, old girl,” he said.

We cracked open a few bottles and as time trotted on, the prospect began to appear less unappealing. By the time we were ejected onto the pavement in a state of euphoria, Tristram frisked and whooped, and was all for bashing off to call the Rev and setting the date for the duke and me, tra-la-la.

However, as Sunday’s assignation loomed into view my ambivalence about the impending conjugals gashed me to the vitals. Lying back and thinking of England had never been on my agenda. On Saturday evening, therefore, a last dalliance with drunken debauchery appeared to be the order of the hour. In the company of Tristram and a flock of kindred spirits I set to it with a vengeance. Before long, being somewhat under the surface, and completely sozzled, we devised a grand master plan.

I should pip off a member of the constabulary, with a view to being deposited in a Hurry-up wagon and transported to wherever the city’s finest incarcerate society’s dregs; thereby scuppering the auntie’s scheme. The first difficulty to be overcome was locating a member of said constabulary. After an intensive search we happened upon two such personages, scoffing a chicken masala takeaway, in a gaily-chequered blue and yellow vehicle, in Asda’s car park. Tristram and co hauled me onto the bonnet, where I proceeded to do the Hokey-Cokey. Knees bend, chest out, ra-ra-ra.

The rest of the evening remains a mystery to me. I can only assume that I was abducted by aliens and subsequently beamed down by a Klingon into the cell in which I awoke, in a dishevelled frame of mind, next morning. I retained a vague impression of having had a ripping good Saturday night, for which I was now paying the price. Breakfast was uneatable but my complaints fell on deaf ears.

Sometime later I was admitted back into civilisation. Tristram, with great presence of mind, had informed Aunt Camilla of my predicament and she had used her elevated social position to secure my release. I was presented to her in the Chief Inspector’s office. If I had been expecting a warm welcome from the old flesh and blood I would have been disappointed. She was sizzling. I got it in the neck, despite attempting to explain that her matrimonial ambitions had led to the present state of affairs by sending me running for cover.

She would have none of it. “You are a cowardly custard and a disgrace to a proud family,” she said, through gritted teeth, like the true descendant of Charles 11, which, on the haystacks side of the merry monarch’s blanket, she, apparently, is. She inferred that the Soames-Hoggs had been mentioned in despatches at Agincourt: we band of brothers and all that, but I had my doubts. The upshot was, we were escorted out of the private exit of the establishment and I was sent packing with instructions that I must be spruced up and tickety-boo in time for dinner with his Lordship.

I was feeling pretty sorry for myself when I trickled into the auntie’s Dun Roamin’ at the appointed hour. I perked up considerably, however, when confronted with a robust sort of cove, whom she introduced as his lordship, George, Duke of Belmarsh.

“This is my niece, Bunty Soames-Hogg,” she said: all simpering smiles competing with reserved hauteur.

“By Jove,” he said, “Millie told me you were a jolly sort of gel, but I mean to say, I wasn’t prepared for a spiffing Bobby dazzler. What?” He grasped my hand and pummelled with a well-practised action.

“Delighted to meet you, your lordship,” I said.

“Call me Georgie. Now, shall we get down to business?” 

The auntie had scooted off, leaving us to it, so we helped ourselves to her liquid fortifications, and a hunky-dory time was had by both. Georgie was an all round good egg. He set out his stall with some panache.

“The thing is, Bunty, m’dear, I don’t need a wife. I have Mrs Pentonville, housekeeper extraordinaire, and constant companion, if you get my drift.” He gave me a wink and a hefty-ish dig in the ribs. “I understand there’s a Mr P. somewhere on the far horizon, but there’s not a murmur out of the blighter, so the jolly old situation’s well in hand. In the eyes of society, however, a lord must have his lady, and Mrs P. doesn’t quite fit the bill: blood not blue enough.”

 “Right-ho,” I said. “Does this mean I can haul my bloke, Tristram, along and install him as gamekeeper?”

“Go to it, old gel. Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, what?”

I raised my glass, “Hey nonny-nonny!”

We drank a toast or six, with charitable feelings to all human kind, and my sweet Georgie Porgie came up with a mutually satisfying suggestion. “Just to keep the whole thing ship-shape and Bristol fashion, do you think that we might, just once I mean, honour the marriage bed with a good biffing, entirely for the sake of appearances, of course?”

Maureen Bowden is an ex-patriate Liverpudlian living with her musician husband on the island of Anglesey, off the coast of North Wales, where they try in vain to evade the onslaught of their children and grandchildren. She writes for fun and she has had several poems and short stories published. She loves Rock ‘n’ Roll, Shakespeare and cats.

Loss By Nigel Jarrett

Manley wishes that he could live up to the adjectival sound of his name, if only to make an impression on women like Lydia, the new marketing assistant in Cultural Services (Overseas).  He thinks of the word ‘impression’ in the same physical sense as the extrapolation of his surname into a version of the palpably muscular, but not in any sexual way at first.  No - he is thinking more of the indentation made by his thumb on the back of her hand when they were first introduced.

But all that has changed. The quarry has turned and is making overtures.  Naturally, he gives in.

‘Hi!’ she  says a few days later, in that over-your-shoulder, PR sort of way. ‘Is this all yours?’

He looks around at the three empty desks and beyond them to the open door of his office, though he imagines her saying the words with her hand thrust inside his flies as she pins him against the wall.

‘Sort of’, he says. ’I’m the fixture but the others come and go.’

This is not the way even he usually deals with such encounters, but he often sits at his desk imagining the transformation of workplace vulgarity and haste into decorum and nonchalance.

His department has no need of marketing - quite the opposite. Sending a group of Leicestershire Morris Dancers to a folk festival in Ankara requires Lydia’s svelte assurance, her way of imposing charm on everything in her path.  Around her head as she moves is sprayed a cloud of words that illustrates her department’s overt status, its ‘pro-activity’.  Her English is none too secure (in the newsletter he has seen her commas doing duty as full-stops and her non-descriptive clauses thrashing around for completion) but in her ignorance of solecism he has found an unacknowledged weakness that excites him, though he has tried to banish the thought because it will end in her submission, always ambiguous in women of pert confidence, he believes; instead, he dreams of pointing out the inaccuracies and discovering that her acquiescence melts into admiration.  He thinks this not bad for a conservative dresser who has just read in a magazine that kipper ties are coming back.

‘I like your pullover’, she says one morning, giving the garment a little tug and letting go.  ‘Cashmere.  I love cashmere.’

It is exactly what Squires  said on being briefed for his last job, down Rawalpindi way.  Squires - the AWOL dickhead.

He would love to tell Lydia more but he cannot until he knows she is real, and even then he’ll probably make something up because you can never be sure. Bad English as a front - that’d be new.  In his game, everyone is guilty till proved innocent; it’s like being permanently dispossessed, trying to rein everyone and everything in to make a quorum.  He cannot convince even his mother of his worth, but soon, if her forgetfulness increases, he might be able to confess all without her understanding or remembering a thing.  Just two days ago he had a phone call from his newsagent. ‘She’s in the shop here in her dressing-gown and slippers and she don’t know why - it’s pissing down,’ he said, as though it were permissible and non-aggrieving for elderly women intimately dressed to cross his threshold in fine weather. He imagines he is talking to someone in a brown storeman’s coat   But that wasn’t what the caller had meant, and he wonders if this tendency he has of interpreting plain-speaking as eccentricity comes from the same bubbling genes that are playfully drawing down the shutters in a bankrupt sector of his mother’s brain. He went to collect her. She was sitting at a table in a backroom, with a cup of steaming Nescafé.  In three weeks, he has to take her for a test.  A vision recurs of his leading her by the hand to a destination that has slipped his mind.

Someone he cannot get out of his head is Squires.  Not his real name, of course. Assignment codeword Beaver (the department is into aquatic mammals at that moment). POE on the road between San Bernardo and Racagua. But no DOC yet.  Because Squires has vanished and his PTBE, one Eduardo Miguel Villacorta, is at that moment meeting a representative of the World Bank following the swift penetration of an escort, one Angelo D, and a hearty lunch.  Squires is normally so reliable: in Africa, he relieved two with a single bullet while they were in flagrante delicto, like one of those mad war heroes beloved of the Daily Telegraph’s obit column (‘Old  Harrovian Who Deflected Sniper’s Bullets With His Sabre To Wipe Out German Gun Emplacement’). Squires is outstanding in at least two senses. If only Cultural Services (Overseas) might combine with Manley’s section, Squires could be circuitously brought home disguised  as a Somerset troubadour, with Lydia’s innocent connivance.  At least, he thinks her connivance is innocent.  Squires, of course, though he still has to be monitored, has been on loan to the Americans. Like the whole fucking Service.

Someone must be praising Manley’s way with words, because Lydia approaches his room one day for advice on a Press release she is concocting. He is encouraged to fraternise by people his colleagues and Lydia never dream exist.

‘It just doesn’t look right,’ she says, adopting a stance of what seems like real frustration, her right foot cocked on its very high heel.

‘It’s a plural possessive,’ he says.  ‘They never do.  Try this.’

He reaches for her pencil and writes in an alternative.  ‘D’you know, I don’t think you are worried about this at all but simply want to bask for a few seconds in my  Solar Zone,’ he says, his head still down.

He wonders if it sounds bold; he doesn’t feel bold saying it.

Lydia’s impressively apparent vacancy even stretches to pretending not to be insulted.  ‘Sounds exciting!’ she says.

‘In fact it was once remarked at a boozy after-work gathering that the distaff consensus reckoned I was the office’s most fanciable male.’

‘Really! The what census?’

It is possible that Lydia sees a different Manley from the one that stares back at him in the shaving-mirror each morning, a case, so he thinks, of the flaws being in the detail - such frequent and thorough inspections have proved it to be so - and the generality or the unacknowledged, clearly virtues, arising only through the interest of another.

‘If you asked me what I was doing after work, I’d have to say nothing,’ she tells him on another occasion.

 ‘What are you doing after work?’

 ‘Nothing.’

*

                                                          

The road from San Bernardo to Racagua is somehow more interesting on traditional maps - the crisp, crackly sort that appear to have been ironed into their handy compactness - than in satellite pictures, to which Manley has only irregular access.  The camera never lies but it expresses no natural flair in the telling.  The decoding of paper maps, however much they sometimes lack detail on the ground (Extent of Available Information), allows the imagination to flutter. The department’s love of old technology is a species of the arcane, always an aid to secrecy, and through his magnifying-glass  Manley can see how the contours gather around that U-shaped bend in the road, rucking it into the steep hillside;  he can almost hear Squires panting as he climbs, with his hunter’s gear, a few steps behind the guide, who stops, turns and grins his white toothsome grin at the other’s halting progress every few yards. An hour away but already turning the heads of goatherds, the two black Mercedes saloons are heading into the mountains, the regime’s paradoxically conspicuous way of avoiding trouble.  Villacorta  is in the second car, its pennant flying.  Such garish colours, such ostentation.  Also, Villacorta always sits in the nearside rear seat, often nodding off with his head pressed against the window.  How can Squires have missed, if he actually squeezed the trigger at all?

But apart from waiting for the results of the investigation he has set in train, there is little he can do for the moment.  It is that time, necessarily brief, when he becomes the most important link in the operation.  In its line of warning buttons, his is the only one that is red and flashing.  Not that everyone else higher up are tapping pen on notepad while waiting impatiently on his intelligence.  For an even briefer period, he alone will be privy to the Squires blunder, if blunder it is. He has never met Squires - thank God - which is why the multilingual thug has become for him an imagined figure in a landscape both exotic and picturesque; or rather, in the present circumstances, a figure which has momentarily decamped from the landscape for good or ill.  It may be that Squires, having grown suspicious or been compromised, has left the scene or aborted the exercise just in time and is now in hiding.

He sees Lydia approaching the stock cupboard, the combat-green steel structure that supplies the needs of people who are each sworn to the secrecy of their sly departmental functions. He his more than ever convinced that her responsibility for barrier-breaking thespians  and her cack-handed way with words might be a front, her way of bending down for the slabs of copy-paper and flashing her glorious toosh at him a means of consolidating a persona of ingratiating  artlessness.  The three team-members who have returned to their stations are too engrossed to notice her.

‘Lydia’ he calls. ‘Come’.

She clacks towards his door, her swishing bolero-jacket reminding him of a bullfighter, in her case the supreme example of a misnomer. Apparently.

‘Later,’ she whispers, and walks away, waving without looking back.

His two hours are extended by thirty minutes, but it is not Florida relay that comes through; it is the hospital.  His mother has turned up for her test two weeks early and cannot identify herself without pulling at the chain around her neck so tightly it is in danger of being torn off.  She has no shoes on. It is a fair distance but she’s walked it.  He listens to a disembodied lecture: ‘The brain is a funny thing, a sort of roof.  While some tiles slip off, never to be replaced, others cling on so fast that not even a hurricane could shift them.’

He’s heard it before but feels obliged, like a child, and says, ‘Thank you.’ Then he phones some relatives, a friend or two.

The trouble with a botched assignment is that procedures became delinquent.  Villacorta is known to suppress details of attempts on his life, so there will be nothing on the wires. Nothing about Squires on the wires.  Perhaps Squires has gone over to the other side.  He grins. Aunty Vera, his mother’s sister, is a spiritualist and familiar with that territory. Or perhaps he’s renewed acquaintance with Angelo D, to whom he has been pillow-talking. Whatever.

He will have to go to the hospital.  They will have to keep her in over night.

*

Lydia insists on his wearing his pullover as she squats on the bed, waiting. She looks different with her hair down. In fact, her thumping physicality has routed her waywardness with words and rendered it unimportant.  Only in the office, her flesh marshalled and packaged, does her verbal floundering beguile or, in his case, amuse, irritate and intrigue. He wishes love transcended all, but the fact that the very statement sounds like a vacuous pop lyric almost guarantees that it never will. If Lydia has depths, they may be conceivably murky.

Afterwards, as he studies the ceiling, he can feel her scrutinizing him. She wriggles, as a prelude to saying something.

‘What’s going to happen?’ she asks

‘Don’t know. Nothing good in the long run.’

‘Can they do anything? To retrieve the position, I mean.’

‘Not really. In fact, it’s a bloody mess and it’ll get worse.’

Before nodding off he lifts his knees, making the high sierras rise from the duvet.  Her walking fingers begin  exploring, clambering ever upwards to the heights, where she stops, smiles at him and lets her hand flop back, as though she has lots of time.  She notes that his eyes are glazed with unspilled tears.

Nigel Jarrett is a freelance writer and music critic, having worked as a reporter and sub-editor on a daily newspaper. He is a winner of the Rhys Davies Award for short fiction. His début story collection, Funderland, was published by Parthian in 2011 to enthusiastic reviews in the Guardian and the Independent on Sunday, among others, and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize.

Lynne Barrett-Lee On Writing

‘Yes,’ or so the narrative goes. ‘Yes, yes, oh, yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES, YESSSSSSS!’

I'm not the first, obviously, to quote the actress Meg Ryan, and I’ve a hunch that neither will I be the last.  And it may well be that, in doing so, I'm sliding slightly towards cliché, but I'm prepared to risk it, as I can think of no better way to put what I'm trying to say, which is ‘just say yes’.

Ah. Perhaps those three words would do just as well. After all, as writers, the big thing that’s always drummed into us is to avoid using lots of words when fewer will do.

And here’s more; ‘it’s a long game’, a ‘precarious business’, and that old chestnut – that ‘2% of writers, in total, earn more than the other 98% combined’.

I made those figures up, actually, but they are certainly in the ballpark. Writing is an incredibly tricky way for a person to make a living because for every J K Rowling or Terry Pratchett or Dan Brown there are thousands – tens of thousands, perhaps – scratching one, because there just aren’t that many livings to be made.

Which begs the question – why does anyone make it a career choice? With odds like that, you’d have to be some kind of lunatic, wouldn’t you? Well, yes. That’s exactly what you are.

What we all are. As I always point out whenever I find myself  in a room of budding novelists (hungry for instruction, words of wisdom and hopefully the names of a couple of agents) writers write because they are afflicted by what many liken to a disease. The majority of us write because we can’t NOT write. Which is what makes it so astounding, when you stop and really think about it, that, on any given day, there are writers - writers desperate to make writing their day job - spending hours and hours failing to do just that.

Sound familiar? I imagine it might do because one of the chief gripes I deal with when teaching my novel writing classes is the writerly affliction that dare not speak its name, but which attracts acres and acres of analysis and discussion,  and generally goes something like this…                                     

Nasty. Nothing more dispiriting than an empty page, is there? Damn that  wicked muse and it’s capriciousness. But let’s give the resultant lack of progress an acronym instead, shall we?  Let’s simply refer to it as WB, and having done that, let’s afford it the respect it deserves i.e. none whatsoever. Nada.

Because the truth is that, in most instances (a few diehards will disagree with me, and that’s their right) WB is a luxury you really can’t afford if you are serious about trying to write for a living.

Those italics are key. If you don’t aspire to becoming a career writer, then it’s fine. You can stare into the middle distance, gently bleating, all you like. Your output or lack of is entirely your affair. But if you want to earn proper folding money (or its post-modern digital equivalent) you need to get publishable words down on paper, and get them published - and do it day in and day out.

It’s a bit like the relationship that exists between calories and weight, which is a simple one. You take them in, you use them up, you do the maths and, hey presto, that relationship is proven, time and again. But that doesn’t stop the juggernaut that is new-diet-craze, does it? There must be some other way, people think, scouring the media. Some easier way. Some better way, some nicer way than that.

It’s the same with writing. There is no route out of being unpublished than the (some might say) boring one (I don’t, for sure) of sitting down and writing. And writing some more.

But I can’t! I hear you cry. Some days, it’s just not happening! I’ve been afflicted by a virulent case of WB!  And I feel your pain, I do, because that happens to me too. But that’s where the ‘yes’ bit comes in.

It might sound trite, but the reason I earn a fine living writing is that  when I’ve been short on inspiration, I have written other things. I’ve never turned down a writing gig, ever.

I started small. Yes, I had a lofty plan to Be A Published Novelist. That’s a given. But since I had no more idea about how to write a novel than I did about, say, spacecraft ergonomics, I thought I would chance my arm writing short stories while I practiced. I wrote several, I got a few published, I amassed wealth (where wealth is defined as a lot of free copies of the small press magazines I had subscribed to in the first place in order to see what sort of short stories I might sell.) Then I focused. I did sums. I realized (somewhat fretfully) that in order to survive, I needed more in the way of food than sustainably sourced paper, however culturally enriching the words printed on it might be.

I diversified. I wrote a piece about being a student teacher for the TES. I wrote an article about pregnancy hormones for You and Your Baby. I wrote a readers letter and sold it to BEST magazine (for a whopping £50) about getting confused in a toilet in Debenhams. I embraced the WOMAG  market (that’s the woman’s magazine market for the uninitiated), realizing that if I researched well, studied the craft (and, boy, is there a lot of craft to it) I could write fiction ‘in the style of’, varying to suit each magazine, and, if I toiled, could get published in all of them.

And so it continued, and still goes on a whole two decades later, with perhaps the biggest leap of faith (having by now nailed that ‘novel writing’ thing) was to say yes, when approached by a stranger and asked if I’d help them write their life story, while my agent yelled ‘noooo!’.

In fact, thinking about it, saying yes has been key to every positive development in my writing career. Yes to those writing gigs (you never know where they might lead), to those invitations to speak in backofbeyondsville (you never know who you might meet) to those to teach (you never know what might come of it  - in my case, a book) to the idea that, actually, it’s a myth, the whole ‘career’ thing. For almost everyone, being a writer isn’t a career. Not in the sense that it’s something plannable or controllable. You are flotsam and jetson, willo-the-wisp, at the mercy of the breeze, a slave to fortune. Almost everything that happens to you, outside of the actual writing, is down to destiny and circumstance – and those pesky right-time-right-place dynamics. Understand that, embrace it, be joyful, and be industrious.

You are already special. Course you are - you’re a writer. So just say yes, and give fate a helping hand.

www.lynnebarrett-lee.com

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NOVEL; Plan it. Write it. Sell it. By Lynne Barrett-Lee:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Novel-Plan-Write-ebook/dp/B00ELJGKDW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377864492&sr=8-1&keywords=novel+lynne+barrett-lee

Published by: Thistle Publishing

Price: £3.99

Date: Out now

You Can Never Go Home

Procrastinating with Perry Iles

Thomas Wolfe said you can never go home. Stephen King said that home is the place where, when you get there, they have to let you in. They’re both right. As the Chinese say, you can never cross the same river twice, and the home you get back to at teatime isn’t the same place you left after breakfast. Everyone’s that bit older, but unless you’re really unlucky they’ll let you in because they’ll still remember who you are. Except for the goldfish.

Me, I remember sunsets. My father had a new upstairs bathroom built, and when they were building it I used to climb the scaffolding and sit up there watching the light fade from the day. The summer was over, autumn mists spiraled up from the river a few hundred yards away. Beyond that, trains went by on the main London line. Duxford Aerodrome, now part of the Imperial War Museum, was a functioning airfield a couple of miles beyond the railway. I’d hear propellers and jets and on the days they’d have drills the air-raid warning sirens would wind out over the flat fields. Life in the atomic age. On school evenings when my parents thought I was doing my homework I’d sit out on the scaffolding planks, smelling autumn earth and looking through the apple trees, complex black silhouettes against the impossibly garish sky.

In the winter the house I lived in — five hundred years old, low-ceilinged and creaky — was damp and cold. My father paid £1900 for it in 1949. There was no damp course, no central heating, no fitted kitchen, no fridge, telephone or washing machine. There was a shed outside for wood and coal and in the sitting room there was an open fire. My father roasted chestnuts on the hearth at Christmas and pretended Father Christmas had dropped them down the chimney. I was four or five; he’d call up the chimney and pretend to catch the chestnuts, tossing them from hand to hand, too hot to hold. Winters used to bite more harshly after the festive season, in the dark days of January when the winds blew in from the East Anglian fens. Those winds had come from Russia, a presence on the map painted pink on the school globe. A place of endless cold, endless cruelty and landscapes even flatter and less interesting than my own.

There was a bay window in our living room, the wood softened by damp and rot, the gaps in the glass letting the wind in and on nights when the easterlies raged gales of gritty snow against the windows the curtains billowed in the draughts and smoke from the fire blew back down the chimney into the sitting room. When it was bedtime I’d put my pyjamas on and throw myself between sheets that were so cold they felt wet. I’d go foetal until I got warm, then stretch my limbs out slowly until the warmth spread through the bed. In the mornings the frost drew intricate fractals on my windows, patterns I would scratch my name into as my breath steamed in the morning air.

It really was as cold as a bastard.

My mother chopped wood after breakfast, her own breath pluming around her in winter sunshine and her fingers blue with cold, the washing frozen rigid on the washing like. On Mondays she dragged an old boiler out and threw all the clothes in, adding New Super Rinso and boiling the clothes until they smelled clean. The bath was downstairs, and my mother threw the soapy clothes in and filled it with tepid water, stirred them to get the soap out then fed them one by one through an old mangle. Everything was steam, her face was red and so was mine in the school holidays when I’d help her. We kept meat and milk in the cellar. In the winter the milk sat outside the back door when we got up, frozen, the expanding ice forcing the lids from the bottles and hurling up solid creamy tubes of frozen milk with the silver lids perched on top.

In the winter of 1963 everything went crazy. The pipes froze for weeks, the snow fell and kept on falling. The tiny black and white television in the corner of our living room showed a newsreel of the sea freezing off the Suffolk coast. My father responded by buying two fan heaters and putting one in the dining room and one at the top of the stairs. He’d turn them on only when the room was in use or just before we went to bed to take the edge off the cold. The bathroom was downstairs, in an annex off the kitchen. In the winter it was a swift run from the hot bath through the cold house and upstairs to bed. In the summer there was a world of other fears. That downstairs bathroom was home to the biggest spiders I ever saw. Black and spindly against the white ceramic of the bath, or in the skylight above the toilet, casting shadows. The scurrying little eight-legged bastards ran from under the bath when the taps were turned on and my mother picked them up in yellow dusters and threw them into the garden. I would shriek and run like a girl, and my father would step on them so they looked like scrunched up cotton. I am still afraid of tomato stalks.

But my abiding memory was of the apple trees; the biggest and the best one right outside the new bathroom window. In September the whole tree hummed with wasps and I’d shuffle out along the branches to pick the best apples that were always the highest. My mother called up to me to be careful and stood below me with her apron in her hands catching the apples I threw to her. We never got them all. The branches were too high. We’d wait for them to fall, all waspy and half rotten, and my mother cut the good bits out and made pies and crumbles and charlottes. In the early autumn we’d get into my father’s Ford Consul and go blackberrying in the hedgerows of Essex. I’d take a book, or a sketchpad, or I’d just sit in the car waiting to be old enough to drive it. My mother took over my playroom, strained blackberries from the clothes horse through muslin into tin bowls.

Blackberry jelly, blackberry and apple jam, fruit from the trees in the back garden, not just apples but pears and plums as well. Vegetables from my father’s allotment. This was England. No outside influences apart from the American TV shows – The Lone Ranger, Champion the Wonder Horse, Stingray, Supercar and later the Man from UNCLE and Thunderbirds. A nation in splendid isolation still, the cold war raging, the planes going over, high in the sky, propeller driven, small specks of sky-borne silver-grey carrying unimaginable destruction. This was home. You could measure how bad the storms were by knowing comparative puddle-size, how deep the snow was by how far up the wall it lay. Home, the place I had the measure of, the place I knew like the back of my hand. The local river that never flooded as bad as it had that autumn in 1961. The railway, the smell of steam engines lingering on the wind. And all this was mine. I was an only child, except I wasn’t. My father had been married before, long ago before the war, and had two children who were nearly twenty years older than me. They had children of their own, and by the time I was ten I had five step-nieces, all of whom would visit and fill the house with girly shrieks, those high-pitched teakettle screams, noise and laughter. I was a teenager by then, all hair and broodiness, playing guitar and listening to early noise. The girls sat on my father’s lap in the evening, talked through Top of the Pops except when their favourites were on, when they screamed those teakettle screams again and again. I tried to be aloof and deep and interesting, but I was fifteen so I came across as surly, unpleasant and anti-social. Those nieces grew up and had children, and then their children grew up and had children, that’s how long ago it was. Burgers were still called rissoles, Barbara Windsor made parts of my body behave in ways I couldn’t control (not personally of course, but boys could dream…), Cilla Black didn’t look quite so much like a demented chipmunk and Kurt Cobain hadn’t been born yet.

I moved out in the spring of 1973. I went back to visit, because my parents were still alive back then and they had to let me in because it was home. The fruit trees in the garden were still providing, the flower beds and the rockeries where my mother grew herbs were still there. The corrugated iron fence was getting rustier, the Bramley cooking apples on the tree next to it so heavy they would cut themselves in half as they fell off. In the last few springs before he died, my father still oiled his old push-mower and cut the lawns in strips each way so they looked neat and presentable, like a cricket pitch. My mother tended the rockeries and the flower beds, my father planted his vegetables, made trellises for the beans, strung netting to keep the birds off his raspberries.

When he died in the spring of 1980, my mother hung on in the house for a year or two in the company of an ageing poodle called Soot the Dog. Not just Soot. Always Soot the Dog. I don’t know why, perhaps it was because of his pedigree that we always had to give him his full title. When the dog died my mother sold the house and moved back to Hampshire where she was born. She moved in with her sister and they traveled the world well into their eighties. She died in 2004 and my daughter sang the theme song to Clifford the Big Red Dog all the way through her funeral service. I think she’d have liked that.

So, why am I waffling on about all this, indulgently banging on about some idyllic, white, privileged middle-class existence that occurred in an England that never really existed in the way we remember? It’s because of technology, that’s why. When I was a kid we had to watch liver sliding down a wall or whatever you did to make your own entertainment, we had to use libraries and read books and stuff because there were only two channels on the television and one of them had adverts in so my father refused to watch it. But now, technology has the power not only to entertain, but to find just about anything, including homes in South Cambridgeshire, so I looked on Zoopla one day and there it was.

My old home.

Well, I certainly can’t go back there, that’s for sure, not unless I had half a million quid. And even then I wouldn’t want anyone to let me in that I couldn’t punch really really hard. I presume UPVC double glazing has a purpose or a reason, but it’s certainly not an aesthetic one. And those little windows with the odd purpose-built bubble in the glass looked really nasty. And they’d bashed a hole through to my playroom and the dining room was part of a “spacious kitchen-diner” now with an MFI veneer-and-MDF kitchen and striplights. Someone had bought a conservatory from Conservatories R Us and had shoved it into the back garden off the kitchen where the woodshed used to be, where my old splay-legged bath had provided homes for the spiders that could not possibly exist in that wall-to-wall pink carpet under merciless light blinding in through yellowed plastic windows. The house was centuries old; the conservatory was something horrid from the 1990s. In the sitting room the beautifully proportioned little rectangular side window had been replaced by a sort of oval porthole with a twee little nylon curtain on a twee little plastic curtain pole, and the mirror above the fireplace, where my father would trim his moustache with my mother’s nail scissors had been replaced by a hideously crenellated monstrosity that appeared to have come from one of those shops that sell things cheap because nobody likes them any more. There was a beige leather three piece suite, and I found myself hoping that whoever bought it had been ripped off at DFS during those few micro-seconds when they weren’t having a half price sale. Upstairs my mother’s oak wardrobe had been replaced by a glass-fronted fitted sliding-door thing all along one wall, and I imagined getting out of bed in a room like that and being faced with my own full-frontal early morning nakedness every day. It’d be like sharing a room with a fat orangutan. I’m sure there are beautiful things in this world but I am not one of them, and I’d sooner keep mirrors to a minimum for everyone’s sake. I checked for mirrors on the ceiling but thankfully there weren’t any. It was my parents’ room, for fuck’s sake.

There were thirty or so pictures on the website, all revealing the old place in varying degree of tastelessness. It was in bad need of an interior designer, or at least somebody gay enough to realize what horrors had taken place here. And then I found the garden and began to weep. There was not a tree left. Not one. The raised lawn my father had built was gone, the rockeries and the flowerbeds gone, the path my father had laid with old bricks and East Anglian flints and bits of broken stone was gone. I’d helped him mix the cement for the low wall each side of the path. Don’t get the lime in your eyes, boy, be careful when you mix the sand in, get it even. I remember him kneeling back with a trowel in his hand and dust in his hair, checking his handiwork, setting a stone here, a flint there, some dull red bricks, weathered and chipped. I remembered the soil, delivered by a lorry in a heap in the road, and helping get it round to the back garden in wheelbarrows to make a rockery and raised flowerbeds. Geraniums in cloches and daffodils in the spring. Afternoon shade from the trees on hot summer Sundays. Apples in the autumn and sunsets from the scaffolding.

Gone.

Replaced by an easy-to-tend lawn, some grey flagstones and big plastic flowerpots and white plastic garden furniture. A shed and something called a “garden studio”. A Barbecue set on the flagstones. Actually, let’s face it, it was described as a ‘BBQ’ in the details. Bill Bryson once said that anyone who spelled barbecue ‘BBQ’ is not yet ready for unsupervised employment, but I think he said that in the days before estate agents had websites.  At the end of the garden was a new wood-effect tin and plastic garage and another tin “utility store.” Well that was it. A utility store. What the fuck was that? It’s a shed, just another shed. It had been named a utility store by the sort of person who would call a spade a hand-held horticultural earth-inverting implement. Outside the utility store was a new garden fork and a rake. Just in case you didn’t have the imagination to work out for yourself what to put in your utility store. And that was it. Imagination: a road you can’t help taking to a place you’ll never see, and my home had been turned from an idyllic memory from my imagination into a Daily Mail reader’s paradise. You could sit in the garden moaning about immigrants in between random bouts of wife-swapping. You could nod your head in shared wisdom at everything Iain Duncan Smith said as he dismantled the welfare state. You could maybe retire there and put your Nissan Urethra or your Skoda Fellatio in the garage and polish your caravan at the weekend while your wife went to Waitrose, and your wife would have a mouth like a cat’s arse and a mindset to match and you could have roast beef on Sundays and one day you’d die but you wouldn’t really notice because it’d be a day much like any other.

People noticed when my father died. He’d planted daffodils in the grass verge of the public road across from our front garden. On the day the hearse came for him they had just bloomed and were waving in the April sunshine. I stood in his bedroom looking out over the low wall to the field, the elm trees bordering the main road at the top of the village. His old room smelled of pipe tobacco and polished wood, and I looked out beyond the main road to the undulating Essex hills beyond. That horizon had framed my childhood, had given me something to strive for in the end, something to get beyond. But now the sky was blue and the clouds that scudded through it held nothing, not even the promise of rain. 

Compass, a short story by Catherine Ford

We hear her as the moon, blind as an ancient cat, clambers past ranked chimneys – and, at first, we think it might be someone’s idea of a joke. We think, it must just be drunk people taking the piss. Jamaica Street is that sort of street. A place of passage from one dense cluster of pubs to another; a route people take in order to be seen being careless. Yet as Sister Baba draws near and her voice grows louder, we recognise something in it that we haven’t heard for a long time – something protective, almost motherly, something like conviction.

If you are able to get out of bed early enough, before the whistling work-booted men arrive and wake you up, before they hurt your eyes with their orange outfits and the practised way they drag their outdoor brooms behind them, you can count one hundred crumpled cider bottles if you like. You can kick your way through cigarette cartons and takeaway trays pretending they are fallen leaves; look on as a golden-eyed gull descends upon a corpse-cold chip, anticipating a severed finger. Sit awhile on Turbo Island, between patches of grass – the first you’ve seen for ages – and watch the dregs float home, just before the cheap bacon sandwich place opens and everything begins to begin again.

Having lived here for some time, we are acquainted with the noises drunk people make, accustomed to the strip of pavement outside our flat reeling with loose proclamations and staggered footsteps. But Sister Baba sounds different. She sounds purposeful – like she means to bring about change.

Before the Sister arrived, we argued. You told me that I must find another job or sort out somewhere else to live. It had been my choice to resign and now it was my responsibility to get enough money together to pay my half of the rent. Besides, I had to eat. What was I planning to eat? You worried your hands through your hair and asked me whether I was even trying. Of course there were jobs out there for people like me. I had been leaning on you for too long and it was beginning to ache.

“I’m not keeping you,” you sighed, “you’re twenty five. You have to support yourself.”

I said: “Money, money, money – all you care about is fucking money,” because you were being truthful and I hadn’t anything else to throw at you.

It was so hot we rowed with the windows open. I thought, if my old boss walks past now, he’ll be smirking, nodding his head, his wallet so fat and heavy that he’ll have to keep hitching up his trousers.  

We took ourselves away from each another, to either ends of the flat – the farthest apart we could be without one of us actually leaving. I could hear you beating your hands against the bedroom wall but I didn’t go in to stop you. I didn’t care. I googled “how to live with no money” and clicked on the first result. It was an article entitled “No cash? No problem”. The first line read, “Almost all shops accept credit and debit cards.”

I do not touch the computer keyboard for the amount of time it takes for the screen to turn black – I can see my own face, as well the moon’s, reflected in it. The moon smiles a Down’s syndrome smile as Sister Baba’s voice keens gently through the open window. Initially, I cannot make out any individual words but the quavering quality of it brings me to the ledge. I lean out and, when I turn my head, I see that you are leaning out too. We stare at one another, complicit, confused.

When we first moved to Jamaica Street, we spent every evening side by side at the sitting room window.

Delivery vans made the floor boards and the glass inside the window frames tremble. You convinced me that this, coupled with feeling hungry almost all of the time, meant that we had artistic integrity.

So that they wouldn’t trail across the night storage heater and scorch, we tied knots in our inherited curtains and let the street reveal itself to us hour by hour, day after day. It was early spring. Rain flickered on the horizon, turning the crackers gathered on the steps outside the Compass Centre to nuns, their hooded heads bowed as if in prayer. We got to know their voices when they shouted up to one another or asked a passer-by for a lighter, then a cigarette. We listened to them laughing and fighting and pleading to be let in to the hostel late at night. Whenever one of their dogs spilt a litter of puppies beside a mattress or beneath a laurel bush, they’d offer us one. I always wanted to say yes, to make a proper home half-way between Horfield and the Highbury Road, but you insisted we couldn’t afford it, told them we’d get kicked out of the flat if the landlord discovered we’d a dog living with us.

Despite dragging a tartan shopping trolley behind her, Sister Baba is weighted with blue carriers.

Most of her braids are hidden under an enormous brightly-coloured head wrap, which she wears at an angle, orange, black and gold, Nigerian style, but a handful trail down her back reminding me of shoelaces which have come untied. Her loose plaits whip her wide shoulders as she walks her sumptuous, heavy-hipped walk. She swings her cumbersome body over the cracks in the pavement, singing.

“In the name of Jesus I release you from the demon of addiction. In the name of Jesus I release you from the demon of debt.”

Upstairs’ baby starts wailing. Above me, a window clatters open and a pint of water is tossed out of it, whispers past my shoulder and makes a star of itself on the ground.

“I have been sent by the holy spirit to cleanse this street of demons,” Sister Baba yells, pointing at the window from which the missile was launched, “I am here Lord. I am here and I can feel the demons quaking in terror. I can feel them relenting, loosening their grip on these people – these enslaved people. Free these people, Lord. Show these lost people the way. Show them that you have not forsaken them.”

You are smiling.

“Hallelujah!” I shout down to her.

“Amen sister.” Her eyes are dark and ready and righteous. Her crinkled carrier bags make a reverent shushing sound whenever the wind blows.

“She’s mentally ill,” trills a passing cyclist and someone, somewhere, starts to laugh a shot gun laugh.

The Sister begins to quake. Half a dozen more braids tumble out from underneath her headscarf and graze her cheeks. Gracelessly, she falls to her knees, rolls over and lies on her back on the rough ground beside the parking meter, where I know the crackers send their mutts to piss. She begins to recite the Lord’s Prayer – a prayer that we used to say at school. Despite myself, I almost join in, if only to prove that I can still remember all the words.

“Is she speaking in tongues?” A young guy with a can of Tennent’s protruding from his pocket is hollering up at you. You are bent almost all the way over; leaning so far out of the bedroom window that I think you might slip. Maybe I want you to.

“There’s no talking to these people,” you shout back at him and he gives you a thumbs up.

“God monsters, eh? Will you shut it – we don’t need saving.”

The air is so warm that you can smell the bins’ diaperish sweetness from the first floor, couldn’t sleep with so much as a sheet thrown over you last night. A couple of days after I quit my job, we went to stay with your mum in Stroud – “the world’s first bee guardian town” a host of road signs declared. When we returned to the flat, we uncovered handfuls of maggots, which had been existing in a perfect circle underneath a rubbish bag we’d forgotten to dispose of before we left. At first, we’d thought they were seeds.

We moved the bin bag and the maggots began to spread out, like moon coloured sunrays. Not knowing how to kill them and, after a while, feeling guilty about trying so hard, we swept them into a dustpan and threw them out of the window.

“Maggots are a bad omen,” I’d said, half meaning it.

A number of them must have survived because over the next few days the flat filled up with flies. Not the fast, green, darting kind but sluggish cluster flies, which didn’t so much as move a foot when you set about squatting them. Their crisp bodies fell soundlessly on to the carpet. You looked closely at the grey smears left on the wallpaper, brushing away tiny wing fragments with the tip of your finger.

Sister Baba hauls herself up from the ground and gathers her carriers and her trolley around her. There are faces at the windows opposite. The crackers are calling down to her:

“Sister – I’m just putting a shirt on but I’m coming to talk to you.”

“Hiya Sister. You’ve got such a lovely voice.”

“You’re an angel Sister – have you got sandwiches?

“Have you heard from Benny?”

She is beaming and nodding and beckoning them down.

“Of course. I’ve got loads of sandwiches and homemade soup. Why else would I be here?” She’s pointing at her tartan trolley, riffling through the bags piled up around her feet and pulling out wraps and flapjacks and packets of crisps.

“I’m on the phone. Would you save me a pastrami and mustard?”

She’s looking at me.

“Are you hungry?” She asks. “I’ve got about forty of these Pret A Manger sarnies. You’re welcome to take a couple.”

But before I can say yes, I’m starving, I’d like one, I’ve had a horrible day, you’ve shaken your head and told her we don’t need anything, that we’ve plenty of food.

Later that night, there’s a thunderstorm so loud and close that it wakes me up. I left the sitting room window open and water is streaming in, surging into the heater, soaking the back of the sofa black. Another row when you notice, I think. But, since I haven’t work in the morning, I don’t heave the window shut and go back to bed. I sit with my feet hanging over the ledge, rain bouncing off my cheeks, forcing myself to keep my eyes open. I watch daggers of lighting slice through the sky. I stare at the lights still on in the Compass Centre and realise some of those lights never get switched off.

The next day, Sister Baba appears again, much earlier this time. I bump in to her as I am walking to the shop at the end of the road, a ten pound note you said must last me all week burning a hole in my pocket. She is accompanied by a weird-looking group of people who seem to be echoing every remark she makes. A pair of pallid skinny women wearing head wraps a bit like hers but smaller are carrying the sandwiches.

“Hello,” I say.

“God go with you,” she responds without much conviction.

“I don’t believe in God,” I tell her but she just shrugs. A drear puddle of water recoils from her plimsoll.

I buy a scratch card. Not one of the cheapy ones – a five pounder with six individual foil panels. The first five plays produce nothing but on my sixth go, I reveal a hundred pound win.

In the end, I buy shoes – Russell & Bromley, half off. Shoes that I promise you I will wear to job interviews, just as soon as I get some. Shoes that rub my feet to ribbons. Shoes as unlike the Sister’s as I can find.

Catherine Ford is a freelance writer currently living in Bristol. A recent English graduate from the University of Bristol, Catherine is the author of “Damaged Goods”, which was shortlisted for the Telegraph Short Story Prize in 2013, and “Indelible Memories”, an essay concerning Holocaust tattoos, published in volume one of Paper Publication.   

A Wave Theory of Writing by Sarah Bower

Or, how to write without killing the cat.

What is home? A small, humble word within which is contained a whole universe of meanings. Home is a place – a room, a street doorway, an island, a lover’s arms. Home is a state of mind, the interior place we retreat to in our dreams, when listening to a favourite piece of music or watching a movie we love, or reading Wuthering Heights for the nineteenth time. Home, for the writer, may be somewhere between the lines she writes. Ultimately, however, home is this planet we live on and every version of it is defined by the laws of the universe through which our small world spins.

The other day I received an email, at the end of which my correspondent apologised that what he had written was ‘trite’. The emails in his head, he said, had been more ‘fluent and persuasive’. I knew exactly what he meant. It happens to me all the time. I might be driving, or out walking my dogs, or lying wakeful in bed in the middle of the night, and words, phrases, whole passages of fiction come to me which are the last thing in elegance, economy and emotional power. By the time I come to write them down, however, the magic has been lost. Once committed to the page, the words look every bit as inadequate as words are to express what we have stored inside our hearts and minds.

I wonder why this is? Do the words change, somehow, in the process of being extracted from our brains and set down on the page? Are they like ancient cave paintings whose brightness and beauty are lost the moment they are exposed to the air? Is there something alchemical in the writing process that turns gold into base metal rather than the other way around? Perhaps this is why so many writers spend their time in a perpetual state of self-doubt and frustration, wondering what happened to the fluent and persuasive sequences of words that glittered in their imaginations before they were committed to the page and their edges dulled?

Doubtless there are many answers to this. They were never as good as we thought they were in the first place. They were perfectly beautiful, but we had forgotten how they would have to be strung together with the unavoidably pedestrian – the articles, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions without which even the most gorgeous list of words makes no sense. They simply refused to submit themselves to punctuation. They desired to be dreamed, not written down, to fly rather than be chained to the page.

Then, once you have pummelled these unruly and unpredictable words into a form you believe is, if not an exact replication of your original inspiration, at least comprehensible, along comes the reader. Every writer knows how hard it is to successfully manipulate readers. All writers who have given public readings have experienced that mixture of thrill and vague discomfort that accompanies a reader’s discovery of something in their work they didn’t know was there. The lifeblood of reading groups flows through controversy and disagreement. Every reader brings a unique set of expectations to her reading, evolved from her life experience, her prejudices, her intellectual and emotional bent. Every reader has therefore read a different book and every reader, unless the writer has failed completely and elicited only indifference, will fight his corner as if his life depended on it. So rarely do readers agree about books that, when they do, the experience may assume the fairytale magic of love at first sight. (I remember seeing, years ago, the advice given to boys who wanted to attract clever girls, to carry a Penguin Classic just sticking casually out of a pocket or backpack, though I can’t remember ever falling for it…) Conversely, disagreements about books can cause profound rifts, between writers and readers as well as readers and readers.

The fact that there are so many possible reasons why the transition from brain to page can fail, so many possible versions and approximations of our original concept, and so many more of these once readers get involved could have something to do with those ‘laws of the universe’ I mentioned earlier.

In the arcane world of quantum physics, we learn that, at any given moment, everything is possible. Imagine you have a particle in a box, an electron, say. Before you open the box, this electron exists as a wave theory, which is an array of itself in all the places it might possibly be in the box, in all its possible states at once. This is called superposition, and is a bit like the effect of a superimposed photo of a moving object (a writer, say, pacing her study) in which the film is exposed every couple of seconds. What you end up with is a blur. However, at the point at which you open the box to observe your electron, the wave theory appears to collapse into a single state, fixed in time and space. Your blur resolves itself into a singular object.

          

It occurs to me that this mysterious quantum process is not unlike what happens to the flurry of words in the writer’s head at the point at which she sets them down on the page. They seem to become fixed, immutable, and in the process they lose some of the magic with which they were invested when they existed only as an array of themselves in a whole range of possible forms and combinations racing along her synapses. Once written, the words are weighed down with the responsibility of the moment – the moment the physicist opens the box or the writer, in an image I have borrowed here from Martin Amis, is propelled out of the armchair where he dreams to the desk where he performs the mechanical and limiting task of committing his dreams to paper or screen.

            

I am heading, surely, towards a bleak conclusion here. If writing works like quantum theory, there comes an inevitable point at which the words can no longer be changed. They are, for better or worse, fixed by the restraint of the physical laws of this universe, this home of ours, in which they were written. By the very process of committing words to the page, the writer makes herself redundant.

            

But wait a minute… Let’s hear three cheers for Hugh Everett who, in 1957, devised a mathematical formula to support the theory that, when observed, the quantum system doesn’t collapse but branches. Schrodinger’s cat (which was in the box, of course, long before my little electron) is neither dead nor alive when you open the box but both dead and alive, as two different cats in two parallel worlds. Surely this helps the writer out of his predicament. His words are not condemned to eternal inadequacy but remain, after all, alive with possibility, in every version in which they ever existed in his mind and in every new interpretation put upon them by their readers, by the audiobook, the film version, the videogame, the interactive e-book…and the listeners, viewers, gamers and so on and so on, ‘unto the last syllable of recorded time’ (which was quite quantum of Shakespeare, if you think about it…)

Sarah Bower has been thinking about the parallel lives of stories quite a lot recently since spending a morning at Broadcasting House listening to the recording for Radio Four of her own short story Moon and Henry (originally broadcast on the 8^th September 2013 but still available on iPlayer) She, her producer and the actor, Poppy Miller, who read the story, together turned three versions into a fourth…and no cats died in the process.