09 Long Shorts & Odd Socks…
The stories in this page appear in (roughly) chronological order. All are unpublished, largely because few of them were ever submitted anywhere for consideration. This is their first appearance. Please scroll down for links to the downloadable/printable documents – brief-ish introductions supply relevant background. Standard copyright stuff applies.
The earliest of these stories must’ve been written around 1994, ’95. From a personal point of view they are valuable documents, reflecting preoccupations, concerns which now feel distant. At the time, I was trying to write radio plays, screenplays, television series etc i.e. the big-money shots. These stories were mine, and private, not for consumption by others – only a few of them were shown to close friends.
Now? I can see how flawed they are, and have applied some cosmetic treatment (i.e. formatting, typos, the dreaded apostrophes etc) but the broad story-lines, characters, PoV originally used have remained unchanged. The ideas are/were I feel, good, but the execution, the treatment, is often awry – some may glean helpful hints from comparing these earlier efforts against recent work.
The single biggest advance in my work is, I feel, narrative consistency e.g. the voice of Francine (Suzy) in Bulletproof Suzy is believable, steady, and true to her character, which is, in turn, developed, bolstered by the consistency of the unusual, off-kilter cadence she uses in ‘telling’ her story.
Suzy was written in 1998 – these stories are precursors, all written between ’94 and 2002, and were already gathering spider-shells when Suzy was finally published in 2006.
For example, the wine-waiter ‘Kenny’ in ‘The Banquet’ uses an all-knowing, sarcastic, wordy voice at the outset. It’s a voice which is vaguely Hunter S. Thomson, slightly less vicious, but it’s Ian Brotherhood using ‘Kenny’ to set the scene, fill-in details about the characters he’s about to serve – in doing so, I sacrificed the integrity of ‘Kenny’ for the sake of some smart-arse put-downs referring to characters I loathe (and will be more or less identifiable to those in Scotland who have seen the behaviour of some ‘great & good’ at close-quarters).
‘Kenny’ may also have despised the people he had to serve, but he would not, and could not, in the circumstances, have composed such withering assessments. He had no reason to do so – he didn’t have an ‘audience’. I was using him as a dummy, putting words into his head-mouth. As the story develops: ‘Kenny’ becomes more real; he starts to own, demand his voice; I recede, with my all-knowingness; ‘Kenny’ shakes off the apostrophes, asserts his Kenny-ness – that’s when it becomes believable.
As it stands, The Banquet is a failure. It’s neither satire nor short-story, but it’s a useful example of how important PoV is, and why it’s crucial to nail that voice – i.e. understand it, inhabit it and apply it honestly, consistently – before telling the story.
There’s a phrase I heard when I was small, at family get-togethers, when I was with my younger sisters and brother, listening to uncles, aunts, grandparents. If a particular anecdote was raised and two or more of the adults present tried to take command of its telling, confusion would result and the story (of interest to all) would be mangled. Such chaos was not allowed to last – someone assertive would select whoever they thought was best telling the story, or most entitled to tell it, and declare ‘One singer, one song!’ The cry would be taken up by others, the favoured teller given silent space – the story could then unfold, order restored.
Orwell, in ‘Why I Write’ (Penguin, 1946) stated that ‘…one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a window pane.’ He was a man given to occasionally outrageous generalisations (e.g. earlier in the same paragraph, ‘All writers are vain, selfish and lazy…’) but, for me, he hit the bulls-eye with that one. I can see now, looking over these pieces, evidence of that process. It wasn’t done consciously – at no time did I look at a piece and think ‘this is me talking – not the character.’ It was a slow and gradual process of hit-and-miss, of groping towards a method, an approach which produced credible work – that discrimination was only possible after the work had been done, left alone, then reviewed, sometimes after many years.
Flawed as they are, I can’t put these stories in the bin. All of the other work I produced in those same years i.e. the radio-plays, screenplays, television series etc, have been jettisoned – they were formulaic, cliche-ridden, cynical efforts to enter industries whose requirements I cannot meet.
We all like to feel that we live interesting lives, but the best (true!) stories are rarely autobiographical – fiction writers would have no function otherwise. (Or is that just an Orwellesque generalisation?!)
In any event, the story-teller should give due respect to the character whose tale is being told -
‘One singer! One song!’
The Banquet
Spring 1997: bookies refuse to offer odds on a Labour victory in the May General Election; Blair’s a shoo-in; the New Labour machine is rampant, well-oiled, hauling in the dosh.
So it was. Seriously.
A crucial element in the party’s fundraising was the circuit of plush dinners, held all across Britain. Guests at these events were not just paying for a nice five-courser – they were buying the opportunity to get close to the man who was about to become Prime Minister, finally ridding the country of the Tories (who’d already bolted out of the front door, bare-faced, with most of the family silver. Blair’s boys went on to remove the fireplaces, ornate staircase, and cut the portraits out of the frames, but theirs was a strictly night-time balaclava job).
A place at one of the (extremely crowded) tables at these events was the hottest ticket in town for anyone even tangentially involved with business, local government, quangos etc. Many of the people who paid (or billed the public purse) for their night with the New-Labour Kids on the Block were the same who’d fed their faces at similar events heralding the arrival of Thatcher’s Wild Bunch, some seventeen years previously.
Almost fifteen years after The Banquet, it’s difficult to evoke the optimism, excitement of that period, but it was short-lived, and for many – especially those working in the service industries – there was no ‘honeymoon’ period at all. e.g. when New Labour introduced the much-heralded Minimum Wage, many hotel and catering workers were sacked every 16-weeks – their employers were thus content (and had already been reassured) that no holiday entitlement and/or payment of sickness/maternity benefits need be honoured. After all, there were plenty of willing waiters, bar-staff and cleaners waiting in the sidelines, and it didn’t matter where they came from, or what ‘minimum wage’ existed on paper – what mattered was that they be casual, short-term, and disposable.
‘The Banquet’ centres on the experience of a fictional wine-waiter called Kenny. He’s working on the night that Blair’s big fundraising dinner happens in a Glasgow hotel. Such a dinner really did happen, but this is set in a ‘fictional’ hotel, the characters are all ‘fictional’. What happens in this story did not, so far as I’m aware, actually happen. But it could’ve, and may have happened elsewhere during New Labour’s big drive to corral the ‘smart’ money.
Big hotels and the ‘fundraising’ dinners they host, are pretty much the same when viewed from the inside, from underneath, from the point of view of the people who make all-that-they-entail appear to be ‘normal’ i.e. the catering and front-of-house staff.
‘Kenny’ worked in that hotel, that night. Not me. I worked in real hotels, on other nights, and I remember the names, the layouts, the scams, the way ‘we’ were treated by (some, not all) bosses and customers. But memories of my own experience during the Blair years overlap with the experience of ‘Kenny’. This is an uncomfortable quilt of memories & imaginings, assembled in 2002, a full six years after the event – the account now seems oddly archaic, like something Orwell may have experienced when in Paris.
Perhaps it really did happen…more or less. And perhaps Blair (no more than a bit-player in this story) really was ‘Prime Minister’…more or less.
Anyway, it’s just a piece of ‘fiction’.
Isn’t it?
Kin right…
