Good morning.
I often get annoyed when people at my writers' groups feel the need to 'explain' their stories before they read them out. It always sounds like an apology and makes the audience think they're going to hate it. If you're that worried, people WRITE BETTER TO BEGIN WITH!
So I will get straight on with 'Through a Lens...', pausing only to tell you that it came from a Writers in the Rafters commission - imagine you're being followed round all day by a film crew. What does it feel like...?
I liked one of the characters so much I kept him; he's inspired two novels to date and I'm thinking about a third...
Through a Lens, Darkly
‘Rafe, I should never have
agreed to do this…’
‘Probably not,’ Rafe said. ‘But it’s good for your career, Chiquita.’
That’s not my name,
incidentally; Rafe travels a lot with his job, and likes to collect foreign
endearments to try out on me. ‘Chiquita’
I didn’t mind. But one day he came home
from France and called me a little cabbage. I nearly thumped him one.
‘Are you sure you’ll be all
right?’ I asked.
Rafe reached out to neaten
the collar of my second-best blouse.
‘I’ll be fine; it’s just a
day, after all…’ His engaging, lopsided smile turned into a grimace as he
looked over my shoulder through the window.
‘Ah… I think they’re early!’
He grabbed his coat, and
left through the back door just as the knock came at the front door.
The driveway was suddenly cluttered
with vehicles, none of which were ours.
A short woman in ridiculous shoes and an overlarge winter coat was
tripping up the path, but the girl on my doorstep was much more normally
dressed.
‘Hi, I’m Meg, production
assistant for ‘Scribbler’s Cribs’, you’re expecting us?’
‘Um…’ Ignoring a sudden urge to introduce myself as
‘Chiquita’, I shook her hand. ‘Jennifer
Swift, nice to meet you, Meg.’
The other woman arrived and we
stared at each other. Meg showed she had
the best manners by introducing us.
‘Ms Swift, this is Helena
Hancar, the show’s host.’
Helena nodded to me, and
pushed past into the house. Several hunky
men with cameras and sound equipment wiped their feet sheepishly and trundled
in after her.
Meg gave an apologetic
shrug.
‘If you don’t mind, I’d like
to get Tom started on some mood shots in your garden?’
Tom, another chunky hunk,
wearing a fleece and a knitted panda hat waved at me from the middle of what I
optimistically called a lawn.
‘That’s fine. Just keep away from the back garden shed,
okay? My husband’s on nights this week and he’s trying to sleep…’
‘In the shed?’
‘Rafe can sleep anywhere; he
just doesn’t want a camera barging into his bedroom while he’s doing it. Anyway, come along in. Kettle’s not long boiled.’
Helena had made herself at
home in the sitting room, sprawling elegantly in Rafe’s winged armchair while
she talked to camera. She ignored my
friendly glower and kept on with her speech.
‘…to the home of Jennifer
Swift, author of the successful ‘Attached to an Angel’ series of light-hearted
romantic novels about an unlikely relationship between a human woman and an
angel. With seven books already
published, Ms Swift still lives in her modest three-bedroomed semi on the
outskirts of Leeds…’ She fell silent and
then nodded at Camera One. ‘Okay,
that’ll do to start with.’
Meg appeared at my side.
‘Just ignore us – I know,
it’s difficult, isn’t it? – Joe and Helena will look around while Pete watches
your daily routine. We’ll prompt you
with questions; when you answer, make the question part of your reply. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ I agreed dubiously. Having never felt the urge to watch
‘Scribbler’s Cribs’, I didn’t know the show’s format, but I imagined that
watching me snarl at my laptop might begin to pall after a bit.
‘Shall we practice?’ Meg
suggested. ‘Your husband’s on nights;
what exactly is it he does?’
We’d talked about this;
Rafe’s job’s quite unusual; finding the right way to describe it had been
tricky.
‘My husband Rafe works in
pan-global logistics,’ I said, sitting down on the sofa and firing up my laptop.
‘He’s often away, but never for too long.
Writing helps fill the time.’
‘What are you doing now?’
‘Now it’s time to start
work. I usually check emails, and then get stuck in to whatever I’m working
on.’
I began by firing off an
angry email to my agent (‘Why did I let you talk me into doing this stupid
show? I’ve better things to do, Rafe’s sleeping in the shed and IT’S ALL YOUR
FAULT!’) before loading up my latest project.
I fell into the plot with
the same sort of relief you feel when you put your slippers on after a long,
hard day at work… the dialogue flowed easily as my two protagonists flirted and
advanced the storyline. I introduced
colour and texture in the descriptions, inserted hints and red herrings and
then, about two thousand words later, someone cleared their throat; Helena was
standing in the doorway, looking mildly cross.
‘Is this really what you do
all day?’ she demanded.
‘I spend most of my time
writing,’ I said, and, mindful to include the question in my reply, added, ‘it’s
what I do all day. It’s much more
exciting to do than to watch, I’m afraid.’
Meg sidled into the room.
‘Well,
Helena’s done her pretties of the house and we’ve got lots of footage of your
creativity in action… How about a brief
interview now?’
Pete and Joe and Tom
(looking a bit peaky, I thought, after the freezing cold of the garden) prowled
around us while I tried to engage in the interview.
‘What gave you the idea for
‘Attached to an Angel’?’ Helena asked.
‘Well, there’s a lot of interest
in angels lately,’ I began. ‘I’m particularly intrigued by how everyday people
are reinterpreting the angel for themselves.
Also, in recent years, film, TV and books have been reinventing the supernatural
stereotype - so I thought I’d redefine the angelic paradigm.’
‘Yes? And what was your starting point?’
I blathered on about angels
in world religions, how - even within the sacred texts – their purpose and function
changed, how that was still continuing.
‘Nowadays, people talk about
their ‘guardian angel’, but originally angels were messengers, or conduits, if
you like, for divine intervention…’
‘For all you say you’re
breaking with tradition, your angel still has wings…?’
‘Not traditional ones,
though - my interpretation has the wings folding up very tightly before sliding
into pockets on either side of the spine to keep them out of sight of mortals –
admittedly in contravention of regular physics, but if ever there was a
metaphysical creature, it’s an angel. And if you examine the source documents,
nowhere in the Bible does it say angels have wings; that’s a later theological
conceit. But I wanted to write about
plumage. There was a lot of research.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, my six-foot tall angel
is said to have a wingspan of around fifteen feet; that’s a lot of feathers... once I’d done the
initial research and extrapolated for the extra size – I had to find comparative
species to study, obviously, and…’
‘Obviously…’
I stopped short; just as I’d
begun to warm to my theme and really enjoy the discussion, Helena’s eyes had
glazed over and her tone had become scathing.
‘Let’s break, now?’ Meg
suggested. ‘Jennifer - perhaps after
lunch you could explain further?’
I decided on something more
photogenic than that – I rummaged around until I had a bag of good-quality
bread crusts (wholemeal, seeded, home-baked) and led an expedition to the local
reservoir, the cameras following like three electronic stalkers.
I began hurling bread over
the iron railings; we were on a wide concrete bridge across the eastern end of
the reservoir; beneath our feet the overflow swished through, vanishing into
the culvert that fed Farnley Beck. Today
we could see mallard and coot, black-headed gulls and Canada geese and a nice
little cluster of tufted duck with some over-wintering pochard bobbing about
near the willow-tree island; on a tree stump sticking up from the water, a
cormorant held its wings out on either side to dry.
And then there were the
swans.
The dominant breeding pair drifted
across with pretend nonchalance and rapidly began to clear up the bread. One of the geese took exception to the cob’s
proximity and stood up on his tail feathers in the water, flapping his big
wings and providing a great example of wing structure; primaries, secondaries,
coverts overlapping and bonding, the pinions spread like extended fingers. Cob wasn’t impressed, and sailed around in
front of us to prove it.
‘You can learn a lot about
how wings and feathers work from watching the local wildfowl,’ I said, mostly
to camera. ‘I’ve been following this
family of swans all year. They had six
cygnets in the spring; little fluffy grey bundles that the pen carried round on
her back. Sadly, they lost two in the
early floods, but the rest survived and until a few weeks ago, were still part
of the family group…’ I felt the smile in my voice; I loved my reservoir and
liked to pretend that the birds recognised me, singling me out over the local
Chavs who came along every Sunday to drop cheap white bread through the
railings.
Across the reservoir, the
young swans launched themselves hopefully towards us.
‘Look! Here they come… you
can see how there’s still a lot of grey in the plumage…’
One of the youngsters, ahead
of the rest, came up for bread. He got a
bit too near to the pen, and the cob reacted, fluffing up his feathers and
holding the great wings apart from his body, slinking his neck into an ‘s’ and
getting protectively between his teenage cygnet and his mate. The cygnet, still too young to recognise the
pen as anything other than Mum, came on after the bread which was just a neck’s
length out of reach.
This was too much for the
cob, and he arced himself up and launched himself at his teenage son. His feet slapped loudly on the water and he
propelled himself forward, the huge smack and thump of displaced air thunderous
as his wings drove him on, his neck outstretched as he reached towards the
startled, fleeing youngster, chasing him half way across the reservoir until he
was satisfied he’d driven off the intruder, and he gave himself a shake and
sailed back towards his pen.
‘I hope you got that?’ Meg
asked. Joe and Tom nodded.
‘A dramatic display of the
strength of these normally graceful creatures,’ Helena said with authority to
the camera. ‘Swans are so powerful they can break a man’s arm with their wings.’
I wasn’t having that level
of ignorance, not on my episode…
‘Well, theoretically they
could,’ I said firmly. ‘Maybe. But it’s
never been documented. And anyway, why?
Why would they? Unless it’s protecting a
nest or a mate; swans don’t attack without provocation…’
‘I’m freezing,’ Helena
interrupted. ‘Let’s get back and wind this up.’
I pulled a face at her back
as she set off and immediately wished I hadn’t; Pete was grinning from behind
his camera.
I let us back into the
house, relieved that it would be over soon, and then froze as I heard Rafe’s
voice from the kitchen.
‘Got rid of them early, did
you, Chiquita? I’ve just made coffee…’
‘Oh, so we’ll get to meet
your husband after all,’ Meg said happily.
‘Can we film him, do you think?’
‘I’m not sure that would be
a good idea…’
I got to the kitchen first,
but only just. There was Rafe, fresh
from the shower and (mercifully) with a towel around his waist. Droplets of water speckled his chest,
glistened on the ice white plumage of his wings.
From behind me I heard a
squeak from Meg, and Helena’s startled profanity, felt the shock in the air as
the camera crew followed us into the kitchen and hastily began filming.
‘Please, don’t swear,
whoever you are.’ Rafe said evenly.
I tried to speak but all I
could do was point at his glorious primaries.
‘What? Oh, Chiquita!’ Rafe protested. ‘You know I hate putting the plumes away
damp..!’ He tipped his head at us with a
grin. ‘Can’t do a thing with them after…’
He shrugged his shoulders
and stretched out his deltoids, causing his wings to raise up, gave them a
little shake to shed as much water as he could, splattering us with droplets,
and then, cantilevering like a dozen mad umbrellas, his wings folded, and
folded, and kept folding until he stretched his arms backwards and the wings
slid into place beneath the twin sheaths on either side of his spine.
Once tidy, he nodded to Tom.
‘Hello again… Tom, isn’t it?’
‘Again?’ I queried, turning
to glare.
‘Sorry,’ Tom mumbled. ‘I know you said not to, but I thought, if I
was quiet…’
I sighed; I should have
known that telling a camera man to keep away from the shed was akin to telling
a group of teenager investigators to keep out of the haunted castle...
Oddly enough, Helena and the
film crew lost interest in me after that.
They took over the living room – and Rafe - while I settled myself at
the kitchen table, opened the laptop and plunged into my story again. It was much later when Meg, her eyes shining,
came to find me.
‘Thank you so much for
agreeing to film with us!’ she said.
‘This is going to be the best episode ever!’
Once everyone had gone, Rafe
joined me, made me a cup of tea.
‘Don’t look so worried,
Chiquita,’ he said, and I wondered briefly if he was going anywhere new soon;
the name was starting to lose its mystique.
‘It’ll be fine.’
‘But… your boss...? I mean…’
He settled into the chair
opposite me.
‘All I did was answer a few
questions; how we met, was I the inspiration behind the books. Nothing too personal, of course.’
‘But… the kitchen… Tom… you…wings…’
He grinned that lopsided
grin at me again. ‘You know, for a writer, you do seem to struggle
sometimes! Yes; Tom peeked through the
shed window; it being a bit chilly today, I’ll admit, I was using the wings as
a duvet… I woke up, saw him, knew we were rumbled, thought it better to play
along, that’s all. As for the Big Man,
well, he does like us to be honest where possible… if the truth seems
unbelievable, is that my problem?’
‘Rafe! They still saw them…’
‘Of course they did!’ He
shrugged. ‘They’re living, human
creatures, looking at me with their living, created eyes. But when they run the film back, they’ll see
nothing. Well, they’ll see a chap in a
towel… the camera lens is artificial, not created, so it won’t have seen the
wings; there’s nothing incriminating on film.
Now,’ he went on, getting up and rolling his shoulders forwards to open
his wing casings and ease his plumage out.
‘Any chance of a bit of a preen before I leave for work?’
