Week One.
In the run up to the General Genre Election Roma Tearne will be on her own campaign trail taking the Election Bookshop along with her in a bid to find out what people are really thinking. As resident artist and writer of many years in many strange places, too numerous to list here, she is as interested in The Big Question as anyone else…er…that is to say, hardly at all.
‘It is clear, isn’t it,’ says Roma, a (small) feisty woman who constantly rebrands herself, ‘that the book itself will come out on top?’]]>
Week One.
In the run up to the General Genre Election Roma Tearne will be on her own campaign trail taking the Election Bookshop along with her in a bid to find out what people are really thinking. As resident artist and writer of many years in many strange places, too numerous to list here, she is as interested in The Big Question as anyone else…er…that is to say, hardly at all.
‘It is clear, isn’t it,’ says Roma, a (small) feisty woman who constantly rebrands herself, ‘that the book itself will come out on top?’
The Election Bookshop is less certain. After all e-books, the Amazonian Kindle and other gadgetry are rapidly gaining ground. If sales figures are anything to go by, that is.
‘Sales?’ scoffs Roma. ‘Pheff! I’m not interested in numbers. I’m an artist, don’t you know. And anyway, to have and to hold, Major. That’s where the book triumphs every time. It’s an object, innit!’
To be honest I’ve no idea what she’s talking about. There isn’t a Major in sight.
‘I was referring to a comedy programme from the eighties, stupid. Not the war!’ she tells me, confusing me further.
That’s the trouble with these fiction-makers. One never really knows where one is with them…but to get back to the Election. I thought I’d ask her a few pertinent questions.
‘Who do you think will win, then?’
‘It’s hard to say. There are so many genres, aren’t there. Crimes, thrilling thrillers, dramas….’
‘Greek tragedy?’ I venture and she frowns.
‘I don’t think we’re letting any of that into the list, are we? Just a minute……tragedy in translation….hmm. I don’t think so. We have less than five per cent of translated fiction in this country……hang on while I check with my agent.’
‘Why’s that?’ I ask quickly taking advantage of her hesitation.
‘Why d’you think, Freddy? Why on earth do we want stuff from the foreigners? When we have all we want, here; home-grown, comfortable, understandable. Why pay for translation rights?’
‘My name’s not Freddy,’ I mumble.
She glares at me.
‘Huh? What is it, then? Come on speak up.’
‘It’s Zool,’ I say.
‘Okay cool. Will you give out some ballot papers for me?’
‘Well I… well…could I see them first?’
‘Certainly not. It’s secret, until the big day. This is just the warm up, you know!’
I didn’t, of course.
Roma’s latest book, The Swimmer, is out on 3rd May. She will be writer in residence at Blackwell Bookshop, Oxford, for one week beginning on April 26th 2010. Let’s hope the shop recovers…..
More about Roma:
- #tvbookclub: Wrecking your chances
- Reading Group Questions
- Q and A: recapturing the past
- A short film about Brixton Beach
- Roma Tearne on writing Brixton Beach
“The bookshop wanted me to create a space” says Roma, “somewhere on the shop floor, not far from the coffee shop. A sort of writing space, somewhere an author might be found, while she was Being the writer-in-residence. Possibly where she might be writing her next novel. The bookshop have never had a residency before. But I didn’t want that sort of boring set-up. Given the News coverage these days I’ve decided to go along with the trend of offering an abundance of choice when there is very little. So on the 26th of April for one week I’m having a polling station, instead. Customers can vote for their favourite read, on proper ballot papers, in a proper ballot box. Interestingly all the local politicians are mad keen to have their picture taken with me at this event. (I wonder why?) They also want to know whom I’ll be voting for……”
Roma’s latest book, The Swimmer, is out on 3rd May. She will be writer in residence at Blackwell Bookshop, Oxford for one week beginning on April 26th 2010. Let’s hope the shop recovers…..
More about Roma:
]]>‘What are you cooking?’ asked my daughter, adding, before I could reply, ‘can we have a roast?’
‘Mmm, tasty,’ said the middle one. ‘I fancy a roast.’
‘Apple crumble, yum,’ said the eldest, always the last to comment.
We were talking, all of us, on video Skype. It was a ritualistic clan gathering session. One that happens now and then as and when the occasion demands. And the occasion clearly demanded it now. My husband wasn’t joining in. He was busy sorting out an aerial for the new telly.
I was beginning to wish I had kept my mouth shut. The trouble had begun the day I heard the extraordinarily good news about the Amanda Ross Book Club.
‘You’ll be appearing on the show,’ my editor said. ‘And don’t worry,’ she added, smiling. ‘it will be pre-recorded. Excited?’
Obviously she had no idea of what was going on in my head. One side of my brain was thinking furiously. Hair.
‘What’s wrong with her hair?’ asked the other side of my brain.
‘What’s wrong with it? You idiot! Don’t you know it frizzes in the rain? What if she has to be filmed outside?’
‘Hmm, well…couldn’t she have an umbrella?’
‘And what on earth shall I wear?’ I wailed. ‘I’ve put on weight!’
‘Stop drinking, then,’ said my daughter disapprovingly.
She was still listening in on Skype.
‘The way you talk you’d think I’m an alcoholic,’ I protested. ‘Two drinks a week, isn’t much.’
There was a silence at the other end. I saw she had gone off line. Probably she was straightening her own hair.
My editor took me to lunch.
‘Take it easy,’ she said, eyeing me over the fish course. ‘You’re worrying unnecessarily; try to enjoy it. You’ll be fine.’
‘No she won’t,’ said the left side of my brain. ‘She’s obsessing.’
‘You’ve heard of a bad hair day,’ said the other side. ‘Well this is a bad hair month.’
I nodded but thankfully my editor wasn’t listening in.
Finally the great day dawned. Dawned was the right word.
‘You’re up early,’ said the left side of my brain.
I looked at my watch. It was 4 am. Beside me, my husband was snoring peacefully.
‘Ha-ha, scared?’ asked the left side.
‘Shut-up!’
‘What did you say?’ asked my husband sleepily. ‘Has the cat come in, again?’
Outside the rain-drenched sky fulfilled my worst expectations. It was definitely a bad hair day.
‘Relax,’ said the producer, sounding like the dentist, smiling reassuringly.
I did not feel reassured. My publicist was nodding, too, holding my hand, metaphorically speaking.
‘You look dreadful,’ said the left side, disapprovingly.
‘Whatever you do, don’t smile!’
‘I agree,’ said the left side. ‘She always looks weird when she does.’
‘Great!’ I said. ‘Now can you chaps go somewhere else, please?’
‘Ready?’ asked the producer.
He was staring at me, puzzled.
‘Even he thinks you look a bit strange,’ said the left side, nastily.
‘Open wide,’ said the right side, peering into my mouth and screeching with laughter.
I thought of my editor. Focus on the story, she had said.
‘Okay,’ I said out loud taking a deep breath.
And somewhere in the distance I heard the faint sound of the tape, running.
‘You were fine,’ said the producer, afterwards. ‘Let’s get you coffee,’ he added in a kindly way.
‘I looked like a drowned rat,’ I told him. ‘When we walked in the park.’
‘She did,’ agreed the left side.
‘You did not,’ said the publicist hotly.
‘Liar,’ said the right side. ‘I’ve never seen anyone look as bad as she did!’
‘Yes, yes, I agree,’ said the left.
The publicist was looking confused.
‘Sorry?’ she said, bending to catch my words. ‘What did you say?’
The producer smiled encouragingly.
‘She won’t be able to eat for days,’ said the right side with some satisfaction.
‘Or sleep,’ agreed the left.
He sounded as though it was all a huge joke, my appearing on television.
‘The proof of the pudding is in the watching,’ said my daughter, when I told her.
‘Pudding?’ asked her sibling. ‘Crumble I hope? Don’t worry, we’ll all be there.’
‘I’ll have the aerial fixed,’ promised my husband.
‘Bye,’ they all waved on the screen, cheerfully. ‘See you on the twenty-eighth, then!’
‘Bye,’ said the left side.
‘Ta-ra,’ added the right side, waving for me. ‘Ci vediamo presto!’
Roma Tearne will be appearing on the More4 T.V. book club on Sunday 28th February talking about her book Brixton Beach. She is grateful for such a stroke of good luck but it is also her fevered hope that no one will notice her hair. Or her nervous tic…or her smile…or even the fact that she was having her teeth filled at the same time…
Read more:
]]>I have a vague recollection of my first sketchbook. I think it consisted of a collection of blank paper torn from my mother’s diary. I remember the pages came from the back of the book, so the month must have been December. The torn edges curled slightly, there were small, discoloured holes where the stitching had been, and the paper itself was thin and transparent. I wrote my name on each page as large as I could. Ownership began here. I was about four years old and got a severe telling off, but it was worth it. Later I heard my mother tell a visitor that I loved to rip paper. I was, she stated, a nightmare. My love affair with torn paper continues to this day although it was some time before I understood that destruction is part of creativity. During the years when I used to paint full time I kept dozens of sketchbooks. I had made friends with another, more established artist who had the most wonderful books filled with effortless drawings and strong, confident watercolours. At first I tried to copy her but somehow text always strayed onto my pages, giving them a feel that was, thankfully, entirely my own.
In those days I didn’t travel abroad much and my best sketchbooks were the ones I made on my annual trip to Cornwall. Day after day I would sit on the beach drawing my children as they played. Small children do not stay in one place for long and I learnt to draw quickly, in situ, using whatever came to hand: thin pencils, graphite sticks, pen and black ink. In the margins of the pages I wrote short, acerbic stories about the people with whom I shared the beach. I would fill other pages with found objects, scraps of metal, exquisite slivers of driftwood bleached by the sea, all perfect as collage material. My books were beginning to be objects in themselves; a warehouse of memory distilled from each summer.
Back at home in the dark winter days they were a poignant reminder of my desire to capture the passage of time. Years passed in this way. Then to my dismay the local shop discontinued the darkgreen sketchbooks I used. But I had begun to write anyway, I was busy with other things and had no time to draw. The sketchbooks were consigned to the loft where they remain to this day. I wrote furiously and took to keeping notes for my novels in larger, more impersonal exercise books, or, as more often was the case, on the computer.
One day, soon after my first novel was accepted for publication, I was given a small notebook with a black cover. The paper inside reminded me of the diary I had once destroyed. However, the cover disturbed me. It was too clean, too ordered, too smooth for someone as chaotic as me. So I did the only thing possible. I ripped it off. Instantly I could breathe again. Then I made my own cover. A collage of faded sepia photos, found on foraging expeditions to flea markets: sad faces from unknown pasts.
I was not painting. The novels were taking up every waking moment of my life. My studio had shrunk to a table on the landing, my oils were drying out. And although I missed the mess and smell of paint, the way the hand and eye worked together creating narrative through colour and line, I could not see the use of a sketchbook. I no longer sat dreaming on a Cornish beach. Now my husband and I travelled to Italy, accompanied by whichever reluctant adolescent happened to be around. I took my new, unused notebook with me.
Sitting in a café, hesitantly I began to draw. Almost instantly a story started to take shape. Word and image jostled for attention. Keeping my handwriting as small as possible, I wrote a character piece called ‘The Woman Who Loved Concrete’. Then I drew the woman. Even now, whenever I pick up that particular notebook, I am transported back to the sunlight on the oleander plants and the smell of strong black coffee that filtered through the shutters of the Italian piazza. The switch is instantaneous and needs no further explanation.
Since that first one I have become obsessed all over again by the keeping of notebooks, with their collage of found images, their drawings and the stories that later creep into my novels. They are my precious resources. For in them exists the relationship between work (my novels and paintings) and my personal life. Nowhere else but in these small objects, with their stolen papers and pasted memories, is the connection stronger.
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Two years ago, while researching new work, I visited my old home in London. I had not been back there since my parents died but I wanted to write about a woman who searches for her lost past.
The house in which we had lived since leaving Sri Lanka is in Brixton. Always a little shabby it now seemed woefully rundown. In the boarded-up back garden a jasmine creeper my father once nurtured was still thrusting itself up, and a hydrangea bush, planted by him stood forlornly, its flower heads merely a frost-blackened memorial to happier times. The house looked closed and dark, its windows covered in grime, for life had fled and was replaced by neglect. I peered in at the room where my mother had died. There was nothing in it, not a bed, not a carpet, nothing. Unable to bear the sight, I fled, pursued by memories.
Back at home I began thinking of all the houses I had lived in as a child. They were places existing only in my mind and they formed a map of nowhere. Images from a lost time began to come back to me, superimposing themselves on the landscape of my current life. I remembered a sepia photograph of Mt Lavinia beach that used to hang in the sitting room. It was a view that had been part of my mental map for longer than I could remember. There used to be giant cacti growing on the sand dunes. Now, staring out at my own well-cared-for garden, and the cacti I grew in large pots, I understood the ways in which loss is carried into exile and the manner in which landscape can be altered by the longings of the immigrant who lives in it. How often does one see, on entering a foreign house in some corner of Britain, a place where two worlds meet and a sense of place overlaps?
I began to write the book that would eventually be called Brixton Beach. In its pages my female character shifts the memories from her childhood, inch by painful inch, until at last they bloom again in her new, alien, home.
Opening dramatically with the horrors of the 2005 London bombings, Brixton Beach is the profoundly moving story of a country on the brink of civil war and a child’s struggle to come to terms with loss. It is published in paperback by Harper Press in January.
]]>All these things happen in one second and last forever.
Perhaps it was when the crow knocked a plate off the table that I had first noticed the crack. Yes, that was it; in the year when I was three. In order to fix the date it is important to remember the images clearly. The line across the plate was so faint as to be hardly noticeable. Except we all saw it.
‘It will only get worse,’ the servant said, picking it up. ‘This plate has been weakened.’
That was what she said. Weakened. I ran my finger across the hairline. I remember the hand that rested on the painted butterflies on that plate; a hand smaller than the butterflies themselves. How old would I have been? Two? Three? There is no one to ask, not now.
‘Eat up the murunga,’ my mother told me, ladling the hot rice onto the pale green curry.
The crack was by now a fixture on the plate and in my mind. The light it seemed was ever green. Saturated with movement. Piercing, like gold. The weakened plate was packed along with all the others, lovingly, into a rosewood trunk. My father had been to the market to buy a bunch of Asian watercress which he then chopped up and mixed with a little coconut and chilli. It was his invention on an old theme. We ate off Wedgwood plates because my mother said we must have standards.
‘When all around you there is chaos, that’s the time to keep your standards.’
‘Your mother is a mad woman,’ my father said, but still, he too ate his last meal on one of these fragile plates.
I traced my finger across his face. My finger, I noticed, had become larger, his face slightly smaller. He was leaving the island in a few days time and seeing him sitting with his back to the light I registered how very handsome he was.
‘This meal is the best you’ve cooked,’ he told my mother. ‘Must be because of the plates we’re eating them on!’ he added, winking at me. ‘Better bring them with you, then!’
We were following him to England. I would not have borne it otherwise. My father was the centre of the universe. Dappled sunlight shone on china bowls, cups and saucers, blue and white and paper-thin. This was my world, along with the sea breeze and the sun-warmed veranda steps. The crow glinted evilly at us from the mango tree. He was watching the china. Waiting for his chance. When he opened his mouth to squawk, I saw all the way back into his beak. In the silence that followed, the servant threw away some empty coconut shells. They clattered hollowly, like skulls.
After my father left, when there was time on our hands for such things, we packed the china. It was a way of keeping busy and in any case no one wanted to buy it. So that it was just as easy to take it on this epic journey.
‘What do we want your china for, child?’ the neighbours asked. ‘Lanka House is making its own bone china.’
But my mother, I sensed, preferred the delicate blues and faded pinks of a bygone era. My mother was, even then, politically incorrect and what might be called, nationally lapsed. Beauty, she subsequently told me, when I hit adolescence, had no barriers.
So they were packed in soft straw that smelt of rulang. The crack in my favourite plate was still there but the plate itself appeared strong; my memories, not yet fixed as memories. And then, in a moment, unremarkable and languid, we left the tropics. Taking with us the sound of coconuts being scraped and voices rising and finally, somewhere along the shore, the sweet sad words of our National Anthem. That was that. And now those receptacles of memory are broken.
In London I had an appointment to meet my editor. It was an icy February day, flat and very grey, with nothing to recommend it. I sat waiting in the restaurant, my mind a dull, blank void. All around, through cracks in my consciousness I noticed a patchwork of starched white tablecloths moving in and out of focus. Old black-and-white photographs lined the walls. Above me were deep yellow stained-glass widows. Like crocuses. Winter struggled, as indeed I did. The air was filled with unfinished thoughts, insubstantial and obscure with no words to access them. And then, as I sat there, half in a dream, I caught a glimpse of my editor hurrying towards me through a reflection of glass and mirror and pale blue hyacinths. Bringing in a rush of outdoor air, smiling.
‘Here it is!’ she cried, handing me a copy of my finished book, Bone China. I had written in the dedication: In memory of my parents.
Forty years before, when we first arrived in England, we continued to eat off those china plates and drink out of delicate porcelain teacups. They reminded us of the people we had left behind. It made us closer to them; their lips were where ours were now, their hands merged into ours. But these were utensils from another world; a slower, languid life of bicycle bells and the sudden thud of a coconut in the grove outside. And then when the four o’clock flowers turned their magenta faces from the light, as the sun tilted in the sky, there was the sound of the sea. Endlessly turning; clearer always in the evening air.
‘Tea time,’ my mother would say.
‘Go and wash your hands.’ On the train coming in to London, an acquaintance, hearing how the china had broken, told me, ‘You must go and buy yourself some pretty old blue and white plates with the insurance money!’
I did not have the heart to tell her that bought china, however pretty, would not conjure up the bright magenta voice that called, ‘Tea time.’
I saw the way in which we must have travelled, hopefully, never knowing how things might turn out, or even that our past might be unrecoverable. We had crossed seven thousand miles, chased by monsoons, shedding the heat so carelessly, never understanding that these small tokens carried with us were insubstantial as air. For time itself had been the enemy, washing the years, bleaching our memories, fragmenting them until the china became simply a symbol of all we had lost. No more. The china, too, was no more.
We sat talking over lunch, my editor and I, about books. My book, the books we both loved, the writers we admired. The waiter poured water into huge goblets. Through the meniscus, I saw her soft wool coat. Light streamed in as in a Dutch painting. Water sparking in a clear glass on a winter’s day. It had taken a lifetime for my novel to surface. The connection between what lay broken in my kitchen and the book now in my hand was clear as the glass. The fugitive recesses of the everyday, hidden memories of a searing heat, a vanished life laid bare; through fiction. I had wanted to preserve the house in which I lived, the plates we had eaten off, the cups we once had drunk from, the touch of hands no longer alive. And I had failed. Memory could neither be contained nor made accessible by itself. The last cup of hill-country tea my mother poured out for my father, the blue-black glint of the crow’s eye, a ripe, plump mango as it fell with a green and fragrant thud, the mood of my polka-dot dress; all these things moved within me. China carried twice around the world, first with my great-grandfather on a sailing ship to Galle, and then with us back to England. The memories had collected like rainwater in a porcelain bowl, filling up the cracks, inaccessible and silent. We had not seen how mute they were. We had not noticed how much was held in these objects. We had seen them as heirlooms, beautiful things to be passed seamlessly down through the generations. Like exhibits in a museum, we had treasured them and then abandoned them to stand uselessly on a shelf.
‘Keep going,’ my editor said, as we stirred our coffee and the waiter, almost redundant now, poured out the last drops of water.
The scents of spring mixed with the coffee. Only in fiction was it possible to capture the fragmentary nature of memory.
‘It’s why I love it,’ she said, softly. ‘Good fiction mediates and shares, fixing what would otherwise be lost.’
Sitting in the restaurant, on an unremarkable February afternoon, watching the people come and go, I saw how it was that art could, by some strange, sweet, indefinable metamorphosis, quite literally preserve life. 
“Well done,” texted the family. “Another triumph!”
I blinked. I had travelled across continents, crossing war zones, mountains and seas; places of horror and romance; Kabul, Samakand, Denpasar. I had watched as one half of the world sank into night and the other woke up, and I had passed over the Indian Ocean for the second time in my life. (The last time had been on it and going in the other direction.) Flying below the equator into Australia I had gazed at the dark enveloping desert. Then as we skimmed over Broken Hill, a single light blinked insistently up at me from the ground, a solitary reminder of humanity. All this I had done in the space of a day.
And now this early morning Adelaide sun, unexpectedly translucent, like honey. Small birds flitted through the ghost gum trees and five fat magpies with unusual markings stalked the undergrowth as the taxi put me down. Twelve thousand miles brought to a close in an astonishing moment. I stared out at the lake and parklands, my writer’s retreat for the next two days. It was hard to believe I had completed last summer’s plans. As I stood absorbing the sunlight, into the silence there came an outpouring of birdsong, magical and fluted. In that moment, the stress of leaving and arriving melted away. England seemed further away than the moon.
On a table in the communal dining room I discovered a pile of books by the writers appearing at the festival. Mine were included. An inspirational move on the part of the organizers who wanted us to relax and by reading them, get to know each other. Slowly through the mist of jet-induced tiredness, a pattern emerged that matched names with faces. I had come here knowing no one. But now, faces hitherto seen only on dust covers began appearing across the breakfast table. Amusingly, however, few bore any resemblance to the publicity images on the books. So much so that I wondered when on earth these photographs had been taken. Twenty years ago, thirty? Walking back to my room I came across a broken bird’s egg.
“Looks as though it was attacked,” a voice suggested, close in my ear.
I looked up. The man staring at the ground beside me was an author known across the entire English reading world.
“Amazing!” the family agreed, when I rang to tell them. “Aren’t you glad you went? Look what an interesting time you’re having.”
I agreed absent-mindedly.
“We’re going to see the koalas,” I mumbled.
“I got a B for my History mocks,” the teenager said. She sounded far away and disconnected.
On the bus, a holiday air prevailed. Snatches of conversation ebbed and flowed. We were passing through a long, straggling town filled with bright, flat-roofed buildings. There was a funeral parlor called RIP, a shop boasting of Ray’s Outdoor Equipment, an aquarium and a supermarket. The road curved, dropping down into a duel carriageway as we sped through wide sweeps of scrubland. The bush with its drooping desert oaks, its majestic eucalyptus, and spiky spinifex was all around. A sign flashed pass. Beyond Land For Sale it stated, somewhat enigmatically.
“Where are the kangaroos?”
“No smoking on the coach please!”
Conversations hummed. The movement of the bus was sending me to sleep. Dangerously, I closed my eyes. I glimpsed the Murray River. A bridge had been built over it much against the wishes of the Aboriginal women. The area, our guide told us, was a sacred site, symbolizing the ‘women’s business’. I stared at the extraordinary Australian light. Kangaroos were stretched bark-brown in the sun. All around the air was fragrant with the smell of the sea; turquoise and motionless with nothing beyond except Antarctica. At lunch we made our friendships easily over glasses of cold Australian wine and fresh Orange Ruffi fish. And naturally, as in every playground, there just had to be a scapegoat. On the coach back ours fell asleep.
“Looks as though he’s taken a powerful muscle relaxant!” giggled my companion.
The scapegoat slept with a huge smile on his face and his legs open in a come-hitherish sort of way. Someone took a photograph amidst ribald laughter. The organizers watched balefully, presumably knowing what a group of drunken writers could be like. But it was only high spirits. Then back to base for a siesta with a novel from the author’s pile. Strangest of all was the act of reading words by someone with whom I had just lunched.
The days of the retreat sped by and all too soon it was time to depart for the hotel in Adelaide. The festival was about to commence. The heat rose by several notches, the pavements were beginning to melt. At the Hilton some of the party were without rooms. I tried to connect my computer to the internet and failed. We felt cut off from the rest of the world. Struggling a little with these small irritations we walked across town to look at the festival tents being set up. I began to feel unnerving twinges of stage fright at the thought of the audience.
Then, subtly, all of us began to change. Call it nerves or insecurity, it amounted to the same thing. We began to drink too much, smoke too much, gossip a lot, and scream with laughter. Feeling more and more dislocated I rang home hoping that the familiar voices would reassure me but home was strangely removed from this new reality. Distance had defamilarized my family, giving their voices an annoying echo that unsynchronized our conversation.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“We’ve put you on speaker phone. Everyone’s here. How’s it going?”
Although they sounded their usual boisterous selves it was hard to imagine the evening in Oxford. The heat was bearing down on me.
“I’ve been looking at the Pacific,” I said, lamely.
“Are you still tired?” my husband asked.
“Mum, we’re all going out to dinner later.”
There was a disconnected pause as I struggled to explain the experiences that had bombarded me in the last few days.
“How was your math’s exam?” was all I could say.
“I’ve dyed my hair.” (Such was my sense of disorientation that I let that pass only to sit bolt upright in horror in the middle of the night.)
That evening, when the room situation was sorted out, a group of us tentatively left our air conditioned castle in search of a restaurant; a subdued group of disparate people who had mislaid their authorial voice while gaining another, more anxious one. Australia was out there somewhere in the darkness. Had I flown across the world crossing ancient civilizations to arrive in 1950’s England, I asked myself? Yet bemused though I was, I suspected there was more to it than I understood.
We ordered wine from this New World. Cold, white, delicious. The Brazilian writer smiled breezily. I love everyone, his smile seemed to say. My wife, my baby son, my computer. All of you. We sighed collectively, a jet-lagged, weary sigh. The air was hot as from an open oven. I felt the sky spin. Tomorrow the festival would begin.
“You’re so tiny,” the tall writer in the straw hat said, faintly. “How can you be so tiny?”
There were no cicadas here, no breeze. I had loved the retreat with its ghost gum trees rustling in the cooler breeze.
“I seldom keep up with the writers I meet on my travels,” the Brazilian was saying, lighting another cigarette.
Scented smoke, from a different city.
“What time is your meet-the-writer session?”
“Mine’s not until Thursday, unfortunately.
“I won’t come to Australia again,” the Irishman said with finality. “It’s too bloody far, really.”
“Such hard work.”
We nodded. The wind blew hotly against our faces.
“I’m longing to get back to my book.”
“All encounters with the writer are events after the facts,” said the oldest and most established amongst us, gently. “And almost inevitably they are a letdown!”
We were silent. Exhausted I scanned the night sky. This was the Southern hemisphere for God’s sake! Why wasn’t I more excited? The bar was belting out music of the most fearful kind as the waitress brought the bill.
“Here you go!” she said with confusing cheerfulness.
“Can we pay by card?”
“No worries,” she replied, guilelessly.
“Perhaps,” said the writer with the straw hat, a shade wistfully, “perhaps she really doesn’t have any.”
In my hotel room I stared at the pulsating neon lights and the empty tennis court below. A building of sand-blasted cleanliness stood unlit and empty. Beyond Land For Sale, I thought. But where was Australia? Where was its heart? I had come all this way; I did not want to leave until I found it.
Bemused, unable to understand the slippages of difference, I could only pay attention to trivia of the most banal sort. Names like Newcastle and Paddington and Kings Cross buzzed around my head. Subtle differences are harder to grasp at the best of times. Now all I could do was worry over my meet-the author session. So no, Australia did not reveal itself to me. Not then. Relentless blue skies and flat David Hockney buildings, the sheer scale of the place, everything, was too much; I struggled in a suffocating blanket of heat- riddled tiredness.
Perhaps, I thought having finished the dreaded talk, I should not have come. Perhaps this place was too vast, too puzzling for me to understand? But then as I began the book signing, people began to talk to me. From all across Australia stories began creeping tentatively out. Of loss and migration and always, they mentioned distance. Of families, separated not by war or need, but by intermarriage or a desire to live in Europe. The feelings of separation were the same. Feelings are feelings.
In Sydney there was an electrifying storm. The sails of the Opera House merged into the sea. Fruit bats dive-bombed across the city. There followed, a dozen radio interviews and later, the desert. The red heart of Australia, looking like a series of Hockney drawings. A child must have invented Australia, painstakingly blocking in its colours. Very soon I would be on the long flight away from this translucent sun.
“You’ll have a shock,” they warned me at home. “It’s freezing!”
In this way, touching briefly down in a night-bejeweled Bangkok, I returned wearily home. To the rain. Leaving the sunshine behind.
All was as before. The cat threaded himself between my legs, purring. The teenager reverted to childhood at the sight of me. All was as I’d left it. Only I, with my strange waking hours and crippling tiredness was different. Memories disturbed my sleep. Life would go on in Australia, I realized with unexpected sadness, the sun would rise and set over the great planes of the red desert, changing from flame red to soft-crayon, purple in Ayers Rock. Small birds would utter their liquid sounds, fruit bats would fly in their thousands at dusk, but I would not see any of it.
At that, a curious transformation appeared to take place within me. For memory, that impossible inner measure of the mind, began working its magic. Here in rain-washed Oxford, the sunset on the yellow Cotswold stone reminded me of another place. The impenetrable distances, the monumental emptiness I had witnessed, began to invade my thoughts. Silently they expanded. More saturated and vivid than I had believed possible. The eye’s lens having refracted the images, pasted down the experiences and began replaying them. Clearly it appeared to me, unforgettably; Australia, recollected in tranquility.
]]>“Shit!” I said.
You must understand; I have a phobia of flying.
“Language!” the sixteen-year-old said, disapprovingly.
A plane droned overhead in the bluest of skies. It was August. A difficult moment for someone who could hardly manage the short trip to Genova let alone the thought of twenty-four hours in the air.
“Oh dear,” my husband said, keeping a perfectly straight face. “That’s a bit unfortunate!”
The sixteen-year-old guffawed, but the dilemma was all too real. As a writer I have become accustomed to routine. I have learned to shut myself up in a room for hours at a time, to turn inward and to build an alternative world with words. And all the while nurturing a secret hope that one day what I had written would be of some small interest to others. I was always pontificating on the fact that people the world over shared similar concerns and experiences. Here suddenly was the proof such people existed. A moment of triumph. You would think so, wouldn’t you?
The rest of the summer was spent with the question, ‘can I, shall I?’ suspended over our collective heads. It followed us to Rome and then further south to the insane heat of Naples. It hung around in the air over dinners in waterfront cafes, in pizzerias, popping out unexpectedly like a cork from a bottle of local wine. Whenever the family advised me to say no, perversely, I always decided to say yes. But equally if they decided to be encouraging, telling me that of course I could get on that plane, I was certain I could not. What was I to do? A collective groan began to rise like sea-heat every time the subject was brought up.
“You’re turning into a non-flying bore,” one of the older ones, who should have known better, said.
“What d’you mean, turning?” asked the adolescent.
I checked my e-mails obsessively and then ignored them all. Please could you let me know as soon as possible? my editor wrote.
Foolishly I tried discussing the problem with the teenager.
“It would mean not being around on your seventeenth birthday,” I said, tentatively.
“Why do you treat me like a bloody baby all the time?” was the predictable reply.
“She’s right,” said one of the older ones. “You do.”
“Don’t listen to them,” my husband said, encouragingly. “Do what you want. But ring your editor and tell her, soon.”
It was too hot to move. I went into the street to make my phone call trying to imagine people in Australia reading the books I had worked on so lovingly in Oxford. On cue, a plane etched a white line across the sky.
The family were sprawling exactly where I had had left them, under an umbrella, eating ice cream. They yawned languidly at the sight of me.
“Well? Lets guess, shall we?”
“I’m the only one in my class with such a weird mother,” declared the youngest.
“Be quiet,” my husband told them. “What did your editor say? I’m sure she was very understanding.”
I nodded. “Very,” I told him, delighting in the unusual silence brought on by my words. “Especially when I said I would go in spite of my fear of flying!”.
Summer’s brave words turned to autumn. At Christmas all my presents had the stamp and flavour of Australia on them. I finished reading Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines and began David Malouf’s latest book of short stories. I was nearing the end of the fourth draft of my next book. This new novel is saturated with images of the sea in the way the others are not. I had not been further than Europe for forty years and I knew that at some point during the long journey I would fly close by Sri Lanka. What would that feel like? Maybe I would catch a glimpse of the Indian Ocean?
A journalist from Perth rang to interview me. We talked about both my books, out already in Australia. It was nine o’ clock in the evening. Oxford was dark and cold, making it impossible to imagine red earth or searing blue skies. The unknown journalist quoted back to me a sentence I had written. She spoke of one character in particular that she told me she loved. Astonished, I began to see how far the books had travelled. They were not simply mine any longer; others cared about the people in them. It was staggering. We talked and talked.
“Is she going to be on the phone all night?” remarked the adolescent, caustically.
Beside my side of the bed the small pile of books was growing. Naturally, they were all about Australia. On a visit to a second-hand bookshop I had picked up a copy of a book called Eucalyptus by Murray Bail and an out of print Sydney by Jan Morris. I had chosen my notebook for the trip. It had taken some time to do this; stationery being of great importance to us writers. Every time I start a new project I have a numbered, black, A5 notebook. The Australian notebook however would need to double both as a note and sketchbook, I declared. And then there were the pens for both drawing and writing. The family watched me doubtfully.
“There’s nothing to eat in this house any more,” observed the teenager.
With still a month to go I was too busy packing to answer.
January drew to a close. I finished the last chapter of my new novel and wandered aimlessly about, too exhausted to start on anything new, yet unable to give up the characters I had lived with for almost two years. The sixteen-year-old continued to watch me, closely.
“Do you think you’ve got OCD?” she asked.
Twinges of flying-fears flitted across my dreams, like bats. The itinerary for the trip arrived and I wrote notes on what I was going to talk about. There were some literary giants appearing at the festival. Who on earth would be interested in what I had to say? Then with only three weeks to go I posted lists of instructions all over the house, finished reading Malouf and started on Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Planes continued to scribble vapourishly across the sky reminding me there was one other thing left to do.
“I enjoyed your book,” the doctor said, smiling, handing me the prescription. “Have half a tablet when you take off and you’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”
Some hope.
But in the end it was the adolescent, (now in the best of moods since hearing her other parent was joining me for a few days holiday at the end of the trip) who put her finger on it.
“Stop going on about the flight, mum,” she told me this morning, adding with the razor-sharp though random insight of her age, “Didn’t E.M. Forster say, ‘Only connect’? Isn’t that what you writers want?”
Indeed it was.
]]>There is a horrible secret in the scheme of things that everyone forgets to tell you while you wait hopefully for the judges to notice your particular brand of brilliance. It is a secret so well kept, so dire that, like the woes of parenthood, no one dares speak of it. In the light of this I feel it my duty to divulge certain things, if only for the sake of other writers. This is how it was for me.
From the moment I was told about the prize, I found that I was taking part in an initiation ceremony, chiefly in my head. There was this question, you see, that I kept hearing. Actually, I confess it sounded more like a howl of despair. The conversation went along these lines;
‘What if I don’t win?’
‘Well of course you won’t win,’ the left side of my brain said. ‘Why on earth should you? You’re neither good enough/well-connected/lucky/young/modish.’
‘Stop, stop, screamed another part, probably the right side of my brain, sobbing. ‘What can she do? ‘
‘Do? Why nothing,’ said the left side, nastily. ‘That’s life, don’t you know?’
By now several days had passed. Until the moment I heard about the prize I had been writing the third draft on my next book. I had been working since September, rising early, writing until midday, walking along the tow-path after lunch, then working again in the afternoon, pairing down and polishing sentences as though they were precious stones.
I was now only three chapters from completion. But from that morning, hearing of the short list, I could not settle. I switched on my computer and within seconds various e-mails popped up, congratulating me. Next I had a radio and television interview. Bent double with appalling desire I made my way to the local studio and talked my way through a lengthy conversation of precisely one minute 40 seconds. Back home, I answered phone calls with gritted teeth and a fake smile. My family eyed me speculatively, rather in the manner of property developers who didn’t care too much for the proposed plans.
‘Why don’t you chill out?’ asked the left side of my brain, kindly if condescendingly, I thought.
It sounded like one of the teenagers who inhabited our house.
‘This is the end of the road for you. Personally I’ve no idea what they were thinking of, short-listing your book! Get on with what you’re supposed to do. Write your next one.’
But that was the problem, you see. I couldn’t.
‘Why not?’ demanded the left. ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re a writer, aren’t you? So, write.’
That was easier said than done. Something had gone out of my latest manuscript. All the polish that was appearing on those lovely sentences, the rise and fall of the rhythm, was eluding me.
Leaving my desk I went into town and headed for the bookshops. It was a cold wintry day, dank and bitter, with a sharp wind from the North. Not a patch of blue sky, no sun. I wore my shades. This is a small town, you understand.
‘Idiot!’ said my left brain.
‘You never know,’ snapped the right side. ‘Someone might recognise her.’
The left side of my brain made a snorting noise, but no one heard. People in the shop were busy queuing up for a book-signing session. A famous author was in town.
‘Careful,’ said my left side. ‘You’re going a bit green. Woops, only joking!’
I made for the shelves. There was only one copy of my book on it. That was the good news. The bad news was – it was the same copy that was there last time I looked. I signed it.
‘Boo-hoo!’ laughed the left.
‘Oh shut-up,’ I said crossly.
‘Pardon?’ asked a startled woman, nearby. ‘Are you talking to me?’
I mumbled an apology and moved away.
‘You’re going nuts!’ jeered the left side. ‘Best go home back to Chapter Nine. It’s where you belong.’
‘The worst thing about all this short-listing,’ said the right side, conversationally, ‘is that while she’s been fantasizing, she’s lost all narrative drive, all momentum…’
‘I agree,’ said the left. ‘And now she’s in danger of losing her marbles too. So you know what you should do?’
‘Yes, yes, get back to the plot, start concentrating on the craft of writing, remember I’m doing this for me and not for fame or money or recognition.’
‘Good girl,’ approved my left side. ‘At last you’re making sense.’
‘She’s lying,’ said the right in a very small voice, sounding like a child. ‘She is doing it for all those things, money, fame…..’
‘No she’s not! At least, if she is, then not only is she a fool but the stuff she writes will be rubbish, too.’
It all seemed a little hard to take.
‘Now you listen to me,’ the left side said, bossily. ‘Stop skulking around in this bookshop and go home. Take your dark glasses off and get back to Chapter Nine. In case I haven’t told you, it’s terrific. So get to work, but before you do I want you to write a speech.’
‘Huh?’
‘Yes, a speech. You’re not going to win, not this time anyway, so you must have your “been-rejected speech” ready, right?’
I was speechless.
‘Remember Virginia Woolf?’
‘Didn’t she kill herself?’
‘Well yes, that is a bit cautionary, I suppose, but I was thinking more of something she once wrote in her diary. “Success is distant and illusory, failure one’s loyal companion, one’s stimulus for imagining that the next book will be better, for otherwise, why write?” You see how Virginia Woolf speaks for us all? So now write.’
‘To whom it may concern’, I wrote:
I am of course disappointed by the outcome of this prize. When I first heard I had been short-listed I was keen to win. But I have had a voice going on in my head for several days now, and slowly I have begun to realise that winning is not what this is all about. Winning is the very least of it.
‘Go on,’ said the left side, encouragingly.
What being short-listed has made me realise is that at last I can take myself seriously. I may never make any money, I may never…
‘Less of the whine,’ said the left, sotto voce.
What I have understood through a process of painful negotiation with myself is that I am a writer.
‘See how great it feels to say that,’ said the left side.
I am a writer who is happiest only when I am working on my next book, grappling with my characters, breathing life into them. What I want, more than anything in the world, is to be able to continue to write. Indeed, I now see, existence itself is impossible were I not able to do so. And all this jealousy, all this desperation to win is actually a distraction, a hollow thing by comparison to that impulse.
‘Do you really, really, mean it?’ asked the left. ‘You’re not just saying it for effect?’
I nodded. The right side of my brain nodded too, all three of us were nodding together for the first time in days. It was a great relief. Something, some danger had passed. The green-eyed giant that had been sitting on my head, squashing my characters, yawned and loped off. The air seemed clearer. I could smell the open sea even though we were miles away from it. Perhaps it was the ocean of my memory.
I opened up my laptop and put my head-phones on. J.S. Bach, tranquil and precise flowed into my head. The Partitas. Chapter Nine, I wrote. And I didn’t even see the left side of my brain smile with radiant contentment.
]]>Page turners are not new. My favourite, a riveting tale of female oppression and forbidden love, was written in 1860. Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel and is a sweeping, passionate drama. I first read the book as a teenager and loved it.
Then this year, I picked it up again. The story remains as I remembered it, powerful and compelling. The cast of characters, including the lovely dark-eyed Maggie Tulliver, head-strong and clever, her insensitive brother Tom, and her foolish but loving father, returned to me like long-lost friends, still vivid after all these years. And then of course there’s Stephen Guest, the flawed hero who pushes the narrative to its tragic conclusion. But I won’t spoil the story. Read it and see for yourself. There are vistas of Constable countryside, beautifully described in language that is full of light and movement.
Just pause for moment on the opening paragraph and you’ll see what I mean. It’s the difference between drinking cheap plonk, and a vintage wine.
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