anna’s adventures in norbiton

Next morning she truanted on Dr Alpert, changed trains at London Victoria and made her way down through the postal codes until, the other side of Balham, she thought she recognised the way the streets curled and dovetailed across the swell of a hill. “Orchid Nails”, read the signs outside the station: “Minty Pearls Dental Clinic”. Anna descended from the train and wandered thoughtfully along staring into the windows of empty houses. She had no plan. She favoured quiet residential avenues and a particular kind of four-bedroom mock-Tudor, with laurels and a slip of driveway to one side of its front garden. The shabbier a place looked, the more likely it was to hold her attention. By mid afternoon she thought she might be in Sydenham Hill. She had covered miles under the enamel light, trespassed on the hard standings of a dozen middle class homes. She was exhausted. Her ankles hurt. She was lost. It wasn’t the first time she had done this.

Sydenham Hill turned out, in point of fact, to be Norbiton, a place named after the suburb in an Edwardian novel. Anna sat down with a cup of tea in the station cafe and emptied her bag on to the table. It was full of the usual silt–ends of make-up, a single glove, an address book bloated with the names of people she never saw anymore, her phone with its flat battery. There were receipts folded into very small squares, foriegn coins and coins no longer in circulation. There was an old outboard computer drive: this, she took up.

It was perhaps two inches by three, with curved, organic-looking edges, its smooth dull surface interrupted at one end by a line of firewire ports–one of those objects which, new and exciting in its day, now looked as dated as a cigarette case. Michael had left it with her, along with some instructions, putting his warm hand over Anna’s–they were in a railway cafe just like this one–and urging her:

“You will remember, won’t you ?”

All she could remember now was being afraid. When you’re afraid of everything, especially each other, you have to walk away; consign each other to the world.

Anna had arrived in Norbiton between trains. She drank a second cup of tea and stared out with vague good will at the empty platform, where everything had a thick fresh coat of paint. After about twenty minutes an old man was helped into the cafe by some railway staff. He had outlived himself. His bald brown head seemed too big for his neck; his underlip, the colour of uncooked liver, drooped in exhausted surprise at finding himself still there. They sat him at Anna’s table, where he banged her feet and legs about with his stick, shoved the contents of her bag carelessly across the table towards her, and, as soon as he was settled, began eating salmon sandwiches directly from a paper bag. His hands were ropy with veins, the skin over them shiny and slack. He ate greedily but at the same time with a curious lack of interest, as if his body remembered food but he didn’t. As he ate he whispered to himself. After some minutes he put the bag down, leaned across the table and tapped Anna’s hand sharply.

“Ow,” said Anna.

“Nothing is real,” he said.

“I’m sorry ?”

“Nothing is real. Do you understand ? There are only contexts. And what do they context ?” He gave Anna an intent look; breathed heavily a few times through his mouth. “More contexts, of course!” Anna, who had no idea how to respond, stared angrily out of the window. After a moment he said, as if he hadn’t already spoken to her, “I have to get on the next train. I wonder if you would be kind enough to help me ?”

“I wouldn’t, no,” Anna said, collecting up her things.

It was almost dark when she arrived home. Marnie had left irritable messages on the answerphone. “Pick up, Anna. I’m really very cross with you. It’s not the first time you’ve let the doctor down like this.” Anna made herself an omelette and ate it in the kitchen standing up, while she rehearsed what she would say to Marnie. The last of the daylight was fading out of the sky. James the cat jumped up on to the kitchen top and begged. Absent-minded with guilt, Anna gave him more of the omelette than she had intended to.

–Empty Space, 2012

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The new novel is finished subject to tinkering (also to waking up at three in the morning, looking at part of it & thinking: what on earth did you think you were trying to do there?). I can’t say what kind of novel it is because I don’t feel I know yet. Maybe I’ll never know, but I can say that it’s set now, it’s odd, and it’s not a space opera, so that gives you some idea of what it isn’t. After that, things take on, as they should do, a slight, puzzling shimmeriness.

No title as yet. Publication details as and when I have them. And maybe the odd little excerpt to tease & confuse.

I started a version of this novel in 2008, looking to pick up where I had left off in the mid-to-late 90s with Signs of Life and Travel Arrangements. I wanted to take advantage of the things I’d learnt from the kind of short stories I began writing around then. That process was interrupted and modified by Empty Space; then the post-2012 version itself was interrupted by a house move and a heart attack, with an accompanying sense that I’d better get fit, go climbing again and generally take charge of myself from then on if I wanted to keep pushing and not give in and become old; and also by the recognition that this novel didn’t represent a direction I was going to be encouraged to take (& that therefore it was exactly the right thing to do). So I’m glad to have got to this point and be able to move along one way or the other.

In the last five or six years I’ve received such support, from so many new, exciting and unexpected directions, that I’ve had more sense of the fun of being a writer–not to mention the worth of it–than at any time since the early 1970s.

Next year I’ll transfer my attention to the other new novel I’ve been working on the sly: but also enjoy the luxury of finishing two short stories that have been slowly ungluing themselves from the edges of what I laughingly call my “mind”; and two really exciting collaborative projects nothing to do with on-the-page fiction. I also hope to do more readings, because I enjoy that kind of ephemerality of presentation, that way of entertaining people. Readings are a good way of finding out who you are and what you write, and extending that; and they offer audiences a new way in, too. I’ll be back to reviewing in the new year, for the Guardian & the TLS, and I’m hoping to collect a “personal anthology” of favourite short stories for Jonathan Gibbs’s excellent series here.

Sadly, The Course of the Heart, Signs of Life and Things That Never Happen remain out of print. Perhaps something can be done about that in 2019; I intend to be rather more energetic, and rather more vocal about the problem in certain quarters. Whether anything can be done or not, there’ll be a “selected” short stories to include material from The Machine in Shaft Ten onwards, introduced, I hope, by someone young, lively and cleverer than me, and aimed at an audience I didn’t until recently know that I had.

My slogan for 2019 will be: We go through the doors that open.

a trajectory of relapse

THE GOOD DETECTIVE

Primrose Hill, that hour when things get hold of you, five o’ clock on a dull Saturday afternoon. Single fathers are leading their little girls up and down the wet pathways and you can see the Regents Park birdhouse draped like fruit netting across the nearer trees. A systems manager walks away from his first wife. All she was doing was making a phonecall, answering a text. She looks up and he’s gone. He’s taken the children with him.

Where is she supposed to start looking for him? The world’s full of harassed men his age, with two daughters and a suitcase. The trains and buses are full of them.

Eventually someone puts her on to me. She’s upset. It’s new to her, but frankly I’m used to it. People do this all the time. They’re trying to get away from themselves. They’re trying to reinvent, and why not? London’s kind to the confident. Otherwise, what is there? Get on the tube in the morning and people stare straight into your face from less than one foot distance. That’s no way to live. So they go missing, and I find them. I find kiddies and criminals, and people who would do crimes if they knew how. I find the people who paint themselves on to your walls, play their favourite music over and over again then leave you nothing but a picture in the night.

I never look for the ordinary ones. They’re too easy to find. They’ve cashed in on the housing differential, abandoned Islington. They’re off to the Cotswolds: no mortgage, walk the children to school, grow your own vegetables. They’ve disqualified themselves.

Listen to this, though–

A man lives in Putney, Barnes, East Sheen, one of those places along the river. He’s an actor, an investment banker, a publisher’s editor–it doesn’t matter. Or he sells something, say mobile phones. Say he sells mobile phones. One day he gets tired of that. He decides to write a travel book about the area he lives in. This area is two miles on a side, roughly square, no hard boundaries. That is, it’s bounded on its north and west by the curve of the Thames: but he can cross that if he wants, and enjoy the other bank–willows, a couple of muddy playing fields and an old bandstand. A little road with allotments on one side which in the spring looks like a lane in the country. Over there it doesn’t look like London at all.

This man buys several notebooks of the brand the famous Bruce Chatwin used to use for his writing. He buys some gel pens of different colours. He buys a Nikon 775 digital camera. Then he sets off into the streets which surround his house, intending to record everything he sees.

Winter. Late afternoon. Christmas is close. It’s on his heels. The streets are dark and at the same time comfortable, narrowed by cars and a sense of warmth, a sense of drawing-together which seems to come from the houses on either side. The women have fetched their kids from playschool and finished parking their SUVs. In one street of little workingmen’s cottages they close the curtains; in the next there are gleams of light from every window. Every street has its own culture. Here it’s more BMWs than Audis; there, they’ll keep a pedigree dog but a pedigree cat is extravagant. Wood floors, a child sitting on a sofa with its knees up, watching something you can’t see. She stares out, startled by the flash of the Nikon. The traveller smiles, waves, moves on. Is that the river at the end of the street? Is that a Toyota? He’s already lost.

To begin with, he brings all this back. From the Nikon he downloads smoky still images of Barnes bridge, taken a few hundred yards downriver on an afternoon that makes it look like industrial archeology in Manchester or Bremen. His notes say: “Every rivet stands out.”

*

When I claim some people are too easy to find, what do I mean?

Poll tax gave rise to a generation which lived in other people’s houses. They formed strong personal ties yet remained evasive, incurious about one another. As a result, never fully sited, they suffered mild depressions and moved on. I”m not looking for them.

A train ride with someone you met yesterday. The smell of diesel fuel in carriage air. You look sideways at her face, you’re not even sure you like her. The plain fact is she looks more grown up than you. Her house is cold and needs work. She has a kid. She says things like, “I’ve always got by on my wits.” That’s exciting but eventually you interpret it as a judgement. Later you see that’s how she lives her life, as a judgement, as an ideological act. It’s too forceful. It’s too blunt. Worse, it doesn’t work. She’s just as compromised and vulnerable as you. Later still the pathos of that hits you, but by then she’s long gone and you are too.

I’m not looking for her.

Afternoon, Old Compton Street. Rain makes it like an older version of itself. I’m doing the bars with a photograph. “Can I just show you this? This is a sixteen year old boy who’s gone missing. You haven’t seen him round here have you? No? Can I just leave this with you?” Meanwhile in some other street–Ghost Town, Croydon, UK–the boy’s parents have consulted a clairvoyant. She has a vision of him washed up in the waiting room at St Thomas’ Hospital, Waterloo. Easy enough to check. I find he called there using a false name, but “became frightened” and left without treatment. Treatment for what? They can’t say. That’s a bit more interesting to me, especially the clairvoyant, but it’s still not quite what I mean.

Facts are the easiest things to come by. From age fourteen upwards, girls run away more often than boys. Yet twice as many adult men go missing as adult women. Men aged twenty four to thirty are likelier to disappear than any other group. More people go missing from the South East than any other region in the UK. What did they leave? Well, they left home. Why did they go? They can’t tell you. People run away. They relocate, they go missing, as we’ve said. That’s a geographical statement as much as a social one. It’s what makes them easy to find.

The challenge is in the ones who go missing in their own lives. There’s less to know about those people. They live inside us. They have very simple ideas. We rarely hear their voices before it’s too late.

*

What does he want, this man from Barnes, whatever his name is? His intention is still unclear. Is he a traveller or only a tourist? Worse, is he a psychogeographer? To start with, he brings it all back. He comes home, seven every evening, just as if he’s been to work. He’s diligent. He keys his notes into the Sony; he downloads his pictures. It’s an act of capture. For now, at least, his is the narrative of a man who begins to write a book about the immediate area he lives in–a radius of a few ordinary London streets–with every oriel window and garden ornament, every spalled brick wall, described as a feature. Then one day, from a narrow corner in “Little Chelsea”, East Sheen, he hears the following dialogue:

“Now she’s begun to claim it’s boring here.”

“Well of course, it is.”

He stands up close, but he can’t see in. He imagines a room smelling of death, with two old people talking their dreary talk beneath the crosses, pietas, and old photographs on the walls.

“What’s her name?”

“I only know her as Myra.”

A long pause, and then:

“We wanted that war. All of us wanted that war. World War Three was the great imaginative act of its day.”

“Children are better in pairs.”

After that there’s only a sound like someone doing the washing up. A cough. Later, at home, he realises he hasn’t written any of it down. The next morning he takes the Nikon but forgets the notebook. Soon he’s leaving them both behind. He feels relieved. A little guilty. He feels naked. Two years later his wife finds out he doesn’t work in communications any more. That’s when she calls me.

*

I listen to the family’s ideas. It helps them. I appear receptive but that’s a pretence. All I need is the facts. Who’s missing. When it happened, or when the relatives first noticed it had happened. I don’t want their theories. They come to my office and sit uncomfortably looking at the desk and the dusty filing cabinet and wishing they had gone somewhere else.

Whatever I say they always ask themselves:

“Why did he do this?”

I could tell them. From age forty he had the feeling of being spread very thin on the world, like a specialised coating. If people weren’t careful with him, he felt, if he wasn’t careful with himself, he’d crack or peel or flake away. Then one day he was trying to understand the instructions for some household appliance, and where it said, “How to set up the timer,” he read instead: “How to let things slip.” In the end, even the correct reading began to seem odd to him.

“Timer?” he thought.

That would have been the way it was.

For the sake of the family I ask all the usual questions. Did he seem to be getting thinner? Did he have–some evenings and in dim light–a kind of transparency, an abraded look which you could detect one minute but not the next? For the sake of the family I look through the stuff he left behind: it’s a collection of professional qualifications, Barbour jackets and Australian stable boots. It’s a shelf of music CDs, English light classical. I find his laptop. I find the travel notes and picture files, stored under Personal, and it’s all much as you’d expect–that naive, eviscerating attempt they always make to express their inner life as a record of the outer. I find the garage he sold the Audi to: it was a TT, very nice condition. I get positive responses at the White Hart, the Bull, and the Sun–he was seen in all three, last Boat Race day. But what did those locations mean to him?

Nothing, compared to the wall he puts his back against now, as, quaking with Thames fever, he rests after the long slog up through the woods from the railway, past Marc Bolan’s memorial and on to the Roehampton Gate. He’s emaciated, stripped down. He’s so far ahead of me! What began as observation became an adventure then a trajectory of relapse, a going-native. The long slow slide into the heartland of his imagination.

Eventually I’m on some windy hill, Richmond Park, early morning. I know he was here before me, quivering like an animal that’s got the scent of distance in its nose, turning his head slowly so he can discover everything with those new eyes of his. But that was two years ago, and even if he was here yesterday I won’t catch him. He’s got his second or third wind by now. He’s used to it. In his mind he’s pushing an old bicycle loaded with his things, first towards Wimbledon then down the long heartbreaking sweep of the A3 to the sea. It’s his space now.

I call the wife.

I say, “He’s in your house but he’s not here anymore.”

I say: “You knew that already.”

I advise her: “If you find the husk, leave it where it is. They’re often in the garden somewhere; or the attic.”

Some of them you track down. Others you don’t, and often that’s the best thing. Because what are you going to do? Corner them in the loading bay behind a supermarket in Dalston? Chase them down a muddy path in Stoke Newington cemetery, calling out in a language they can’t remember? Back them up against themselves until there’s nowhere left to run and whatever dissatisfaction drove them inwards, whatever fire they’re full of, bursts out of the neck and sleeves of their crap old raincoat and they go up in front of you like a bundle of dry sticks? I’ve seen that happen, believe me it’s not worth it.

*

Another afternoon, another bar. I’m always on the lookout for the boy who called in at St Thomas’ Hospital then, unable to control his anxieties, left before he could be treated.

“You can’t keep them away,” the barman says. “They’re so bloody anxious to start their lives.” He treats the photo to his oblique, dismissing glance. “They think of this as life,” it makes him say. He laughs. “You should be here in the evenings.” Whatever he’s seeing is so ordinary it’s beyond his power to describe. “Life!” he repeats.

“You run the place,” I remind him.

“Too true,” he admits, turning back to the spirit optic.

A missing person inside your own life.

OK, I’m not sure what I mean by that. But the good detective shares some of those qualities of absence. Qualities of self-disenfranchisement, for instance. He’s a torn place in the web which would otherwise detain him–home, family, profession, culture. I went missing from my own life years ago, but you don’t need me to tell you that.

And what if, in the end, I’m wrong? What if Missing of Barnes only ran away, the way the majority of them do?

Well then I’ll know.

One day I’ll stand in an upper room in Harringay, looking out. The rain will be falling almost invisibly on the shiny black branches of the trees, dripping off again in big soft quick drops. At the bottom of the garden next door I’ll see a man working in a shed. It’ll be him.

I see him like this. He’s wearing a blue plaid shirt and safety glasses. His dog sniffs round his feet. Every so often he stops what he’s doing and comes to the door of the shed and looks out into his garden, or across it towards his house. The dog stands by his leg, its head just touching his knee. It’s an old dog with a grey muzzle. After a moment they go back into the shed. He moves the wood from one place to another inside. He puts it up on the workbench. He takes it off again. Everything happens very quietly and comfortingly under the yellow light above the bench, and the afternoon slowly gets dark around him. A growing pile of offcuts appears by the shed door and, absorbing the rain, turns from white to sandy brown.

The Good Detective is copyright M John Harrison 2004, & was originally published in Interzone.

every haunt

Every shop on a stock brick corner seen from a bus in south London. You think: I’ve been here, haven’t I? At some time in the past, you think, you’ve been there. Well maybe you have, maybe you haven’t, because all those stock brick corners look the same. Every train running across the grain of shallow wooded valleys, trailing its brand new landscape through the old cuttings. Grass like astroturf, stiff model trees in a fringe where the view opens on to a motorway but you never seem to see a house. The land drops away on the left. That narrow ride cuts off at an angle through the woods; at night the distances are always hung with lights. Every quarry, every cliff. Every forestry track in deep Snowdonia exhaling mist, every junction between the seafront and a steep little lapboard terrace in every seaside town: every green lane anywhere in the rain. Maybe you’ve been there, maybe you haven’t.

Maybe you were here. Maybe you weren’t.

march 2013

Hanwell Bridge to Wharncliffe Viaduct: suburban gardens, each with its decking, its wooden viewing bench, its toy mooring stage. At some point not long ago the river, suffering some sort of flux, the fluid equivalent of a seizure or convulsion, has swept down from the north, exfoliating its banks to grey mud, carrying away the garden-centre fences, the clumps of bamboo and exotic grasses, leaving instead a detritus of broken branches, blanched and ancient looking, tangled together with plastic carrier bags, broken toys and bits of garden architecture from the houses upstream. It has washed away a pebble path here, a nice if flimsy little gazebo there. Suburbia, which previously ran all the way down to the petrol coloured water, now ends ten feet further inland, ceding itself to a mud flat. We follow the river through Brent Lodge zoo and maze, past Hanwell Cricket Club with its views of St Andrews Tower, Ealing, to the point where it crosses Brent Valley Golf Course. There, I write by accident,“Gold Course”; and, extending that immediately to “Gold Coast”, arrive at the concept “Hanwell Gold Coast”. Hanwell Gold Coast, shabbier than some. Everywhere it slows, the stream is pasted with the usual milky brown curd; every large obstacle has a stationary stern eddy filled with beer cans and plastic bottles; and a smaller one at the bow.

fleamarket ontologies

Found material is a private experience. If I use it I try not to draw narrative conclusions from it. It’s not there to provide “story”. The reader doesn’t need my idea of what happened; I don’t need the reader’s. It would be a crude intrusion into someone else’s fantasies. But there’s more. We both know how interpretations spin away from found material, but we also recognise that choosing one of them breaks “history” out of its quantum state and turns it into a lurching caricature, a bad guess, a sentimentalised drawing of an event in someone else’s life. Found material might be “evidence” –might even be a direct, indexical sign of a thing that happened–but the thing that happened, the life that contained it, can’t be reassembled, or back-engineered into existence. It’s only what it is now: if you try to glue the fragments together with the sentiments “evoked” in you, all you will have is a golem. All you’ve done is bully the mud into a shape that satisfies your needs. But avoid interpretation as determinedly as you can, and you have a metaphor for the way we encounter not just the past but the present. Lives as the most tentative assemblages; interactions in your own life as partially interpretable fragments, fading images, achieving the condition of conversations overheard on the tops of buses, postcards from the past even as they happen.

You Should Come With Me Now

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Disconnected memories. Uncertainty of events and entities in their relations with reality. The author positioned like Maxwell’s demon, feeling able to claim that this is the inside & that is the outside (the conscious & unconscious, the forgotten & remembered, the admissible & the inadmissible). Calculatedly inefficient filters will be placed at points of transition represented as boundaries and edgelands. The hiatus or glitch, the dropped catch or stitch between the living & the written.

Originally blogged as “who’s dead & who’s alive”, 2016

start point

When I was an obsessive climber, Shropshire was just a corridor you went down to get to Wales. You turned right or left at Birmingham, depending whether you’d come north or south. The effect of blinkering yourself in that way is that you accidentally save up unexplored territories. By 2005, whole areas of the country were overwhelming me with the sudden, pure clarity you feel in childhood and adolescence–nostalgia for landscapes you’ve yet to investigate, places you’ve yet to know. Shropshire, the South Downs, the Rhinogs: the world seemed new again, but now it was set up perfectly for an old head. I was certain I could make something out of this feeling, but publishing–which would rather you didn’t find things new again, for fear you might wander off on the wrong track–got in the way and since then writing has been a process of struggling back to a lost start point, through a substance a bit like glue.

gifco is here

Those who have failed to regulate the self. Those whose behaviours enact a medicating fiction. Those who flew to the Canary Islands on a cheap ticket in December 1991 & left the remains of their personality in the apartment hotel. Those who ran from everything in a zig-zag pattern, so fast they never found the transitional object. The unsoothed. The dysmorphic. The unconditional. Those who were naive enough to take what they needed & thus never got what they wanted & whose dreams are now severe. Those who were amazed by their own hand. The confused. The pliable. Those who look at the sea & immediately suffer a grief unconstrained but inarticulable. Gifco is coming. Gifco you are always with us. Gifco we are here!

Photo: the other Nick Royle.

Originally published here in 2012 as “those who know gifco”

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A wasp pushed itself into the room from behind the wooden blanket chest, as suddenly as if it had made itself from nothing. I looked behind the chest and found a ventilator daubed with layers of paint. Had the wasp blundered down the old chimney? It flew straight up into one of the skylights and sat on a bent nail, grooming its antennae. I tried to hit it with the local freesheet but I couldn’t reach that high; and anyway I couldn’t believe in it as a wasp. Long ago my writing filled up with characters who suspect that they don’t understand the world: not because the world is impossible to understand but because they have reached either the limits of their intelligence or the emotional boundaries that describe what their intelligence can be allowed to understand.