I started writing a children’s novel six year’s ago in between leaving UEA as a mature student with a first in Philosophy and getting a job in Oxford as a copywriter with my cousin’s web design agency, EIT, now WebActiv. The idea was my father’s, why don’t you write a book, he said, when he asked me what I wanted to do with my degree – he never could work out why philosophy and was at a loss that I didn’t want to carry it on, why waste three years? Worse, I still didn’t know what else I wanted to do after all that time lost thinking. So I kind of said writing, and he kind of said, what kind, and I kind of shrugged, and that’s when sighing but with an impish grin he said kid’s books sell well these days, look at Harry Potter…..which kind of makes me think now just how many people actually have written children’s books since Harry Potter and were they inspired a) by the books or b) by how much money they made the author? Anyway, I did write a children’s book, or an idea for one, three chapters about two kids who have just lost their father and who discover one morning a strange balloon on their ceiling of their room, a balloon that they can’t pop, even though they try and try and try, and which they eventually tie to an old travel suitcase sitting in each side to keep it balanced and fly away to distant lands where they have loads and loads of adventures trying to find their father’s soul and bring him home. Except the soul of their father was, you guessed it, actually right there all along, trapped inside the balloon…..Mmmm. Didn’t really go anywhere, and Oxford was too much fun anyway, Blackwells every lunch, reading more Celine and Klossowski and Bataille...not Potter. But even though I dipped into it, often after each Christmas when my father would ask, how’s the next Harry Potter coming along, to which I would nod and say, real well, great, fine, nearly there… finally I got to the part about the bad guy in the book and something changed. Oh dear. I could really think up a good bad guy! I mean he was real scary. Far too scary for a kid’s book. Or rather she was, being that it was a crazy old woman, who in the case of The Balloon Suitcase, as I was then calling it, had black spikes coming out of her stigmated (spelling?) hands and feet like a spider and chased the kids upside down on the ceiling trying to pop the balloon and steal their father’s soul…put it this way, like everyone else, the kids were dead by Chapter 5, so I had to think again, or at least postpone it till I could think of someone less scary and keep them alive past half way. Which is when I had the idea for this new book, Until Nothing Stands Between Us.
I know. Sounds sloppy, but it’s far from it. Ok it is a bit sloppy, there is some love action there, albeit in the context of a good vs evil style thriller. And there is still a scary old woman, and a couple of kids, same age, with a still recently dead dad… Not because I wanted my father dead or because he was dead, but because of something which happened in my childhood, when I was the same age as the kids in both books, and which both kids in both books go through.
My sister and I came home from school one day to find our house dark. We were met by our father, who normally worked late, and ushered into the kitchen, where there were several people we didn’t know drinking lots of tea and whispering, and smiling in odd ways. Our grandfather had passed. He had been digging over our rockery outside that afternoon felt suddenly tired had a heart attack and died when we were at school and our mum – it was her father – couldn’t even see us, too upset, locked in the lounge with tissues and hugs. So we were given something to eat and told to go to our rooms. I can’t recall the rest, except people kept coming and going to the house, doors closed very very slowly not to wake us, even though we were wide awake wondering why we couldn’t comfort her like everyone else. Well, we were awake for as long as we could be. I woke up. I didn’t know when I had drifted off, but I was restless. No kiss goodnight and all that, and the hall light still on, door ajar, landing light on. Then just before I called over the landing to my sister’s room to see if she was still awake, if she had had a kiss goodnight, her door being always open too so if we got scared in the night we could run unhindered into our parent’s room, there was a footstep on the stair. One heavy step, creak, then a long wait before another. And then another. As a kid you know these sounds. They are everything. You know who’s coming, the mood they are in, whether because of the mood they are in you want to stop misbehaving and let them pass or want to call out to them to come and see you whether you are misbehaving or not. But these steps I didn’t know, this person I didn’t know. Maybe it was one of those tea drinking strangers still in the house, one of them going to the toilet past my door. So I peeped one eye to catch them. But when they reached the magic number, the magic number of steps up the stairs that I knew meant the next one would be the landing, that they would be right there in the light, they kept coming, the foot steps I mean, more steps, the heavy feet louder and louder, as though the stairs extended right up into the roof and out into the night, but noone was there, no person, no shadow, nothing….So naturally I did what all kids do, I screamed, for my sister at first, who it turned out had heard it too and was equally freaked, and then both of us for mum, MUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMY!!!!!!!!!!!
And then the lounge door opened, soft feet on the stairs replacing now the still terrifying echo of the other, mother’s feet, counted perfectly, then her face in my room as my sister flashed by jumping into my bed beside me. What’s wrong? Of course, there was noone there. We were told to shhhh, that we had had bad dreams, that she was sorry for not being able to see us when we had first come home from school but it was alright now. And suddenly remembering everything again and seeing how upset she was we didn’t make any more of it, not then, just a hug and a kiss and back to sleep. But of course, we did talk about it later, how impossible it was, impossible for my sister and I to both have dreamt it. Not at the same time, right? Dreaming is just for one. And if we didn’t both dream it, who was on the stairs…..?
Ok, let me say this now. Now I am an atheist. I studied philosophy, remember, caught a hefty dose of old walrus beard horse hugging Nietzsche. I like Wittgenstein’s notion that the soul is the shape of the body, and that, where we cannot speak, well, shhh, it’s all just a bad dream. But if it wasn’t a bad dream, if it wasn’t a real person, was it a ghost? Who or what was it coming up those stairs in so laboured and heavy a fashion only to disappear unseen through the ceiling?
I didn’t think about it again until I started writing my new book and included the whole episode as the children’s father coming as a ghost to the children to say goodbye, only to hear them scream in terror at his footsteps on the stair and carry on his ascent to heaven rather than scare them further. And thinking about it all again I decided to ask my mother about it. I asked first if it was ok to use, this being a painful memory from the worst day of her life. First she said she actually never remembered it like we had, didn’t realise that we had both heard it. All she knew was that we called out for her. Which surprised me, until I realised that she was probably not in a fit state that night to think about anything straight. So I told her that yes, we had both heard it, which meant it can’t have been a shared dream. And she looked at me in the exact same way that she had that night, utterly weary. So I asked, quickly and rather matter of factly, if she minded that I use it in a book. And instead of saying yes or no, she told me when he died, my grandfather, her father, he was complaining about feeling tired, asked to go and lie down that afternoon, that he had come in, too exhausted even to take his work boots off, and instead of lying down on the settee as they had thought he would, he had sneaked upstairs to lie in one of our beds, leaving a trail of mud from his boots up the stairs, which was not like him of course, being above all a clean and tidy man, leaving a trail of mud to my sister’s room a little further down the hall, where he passed. I didn’t know this. My sister didn’t know this too. Just as my mum hadn’t known we had both heard something that night, the same thing, we didn’t know that he had come up those stairs in his boots, fighting the pain he was feeling, before finally succumbing on my sister’s very own bed, the same one she slept in that night…..
Anyway, this is all now, in one form or another, in the book, the new one, which I will write about here. But if you have any ideas about what really happened that night, let me know. Or if something like this happened to you or someone you know, I’d like to hear it.
