My brother-in-law worries about me, always has. He’s a nice man, a good man, but when he looks at me something happens to his eyes. They don’t glass over or suddenly develop a look of cataracts that are getting out of hand. It’s more that they’re suddenly alert, interested, determined to unravel an enigma of some sort. You see, to some, I’m like one of those strays you round up for Christmas as some sort of penance for all the guilt you’ve been piling on all year. Like a January exercise routine to burn off the excess calories of the festive season, collecting strays seem like a good idea until the big day arrives. Before you all panic, I will say that I’m not one of those strays who places my false teeth on the table before tucking into a slice of the festive bird. I’m not one of those who brings my own special protein drink to the dinner table, avoiding all offerings the host lays before me. I’m not even one of those who spend more time outside, in the cold, cigarette in hand, than at the dining table. Fact is, I’m not even a proper stray; it’s just that I appear to many to be a perfect specimen. This, even though I’ve been the festive organizer of my mother’s Christmas for the last five years and have had no complaints, or salmonella outbreaks, in all that time. In other words, I’ve never been adopted for the day by any family, never had to be. But that look, that, I wonder look, I’ve seen that plenty of times. And it’s not reassuring to see it on the face of your brother-in-law.
While always sceptical about the stability of my mental health foundations, I think, as a kind man, he accepted me as being normal enough. But, after reading my first novel, Toxic Love, he found me more interesting than hitherto fore, a man who might require further investigation. I’m not saying we sat down for a formal interview, it was more a chat about the creative impulse.
This is not something easily explained at the best of times, and I’m not saying that any negative consequences were flagged, but somehow it felt that any wrong answer might result in me never seeing my grand nephew again. A mere precautionary move on my brother-in-law’s part, you understand, on account of his reading a book I’d written which hinted at a darker side to me than can be imagined by a passing encounter. Well, that’s how it felt to me, as we both casually sipped coffee and shot the literary breeze. Not that I shot anything, shooting something in not in my comfort zone; blood lust is not part of my makeup.
As one engineer talking to another about the finer points of writing, it was obvious that it was not Aristotelien story structure which intrigued Ingo, but more where the story came from in the first place. Oddly, many of the themes of the first book played out in a French court last year, where a husband was found guilty of drugging his wife and filming the unlawful sex he then indulged in. To me, this sort of behaviour was predictable based on what was already happening on mainstream messaging apps. Having said that, all stories depend on seeing something mundane and asking, what if? As a kid growing up, I was intrigued by World War Two movies. Sure, the wooden hurl became a sub-machinegun later in the afternoon, but the game we played became more nuanced than cowboys and Indians had ever been. Somehow, seeing neighbour betray neighbour, seeing children rounded up and put on trains because their parents prayed at a different church to other people, made any game you played darker, far less innocent than anything that came before. Sometimes, curled up with a book I would put it down and brood about how a Nazi regime would have affected me. Running a checklist of neighbours, I calculated the stances they might have taken and recognised in them, a potential policeman, camp commandant, and man who would love nothing better than to run an extermination chamber. I also saw a potential embryonic resistance movement. But, looking at my family, I saw nothing only tragedy. My grandparents were safe, uncles and cousins too, my mother and elder sister might have escaped. But I had one hand, a death sentence, my younger sister would have joined me. As for my father, he had offended too many clerics and politicians to escape retribution.
By now you will realize that I have always been fascinated by the dark side. That my mind always made-up stories to help me navigate the world I lived in. While it might seem a daft waste of energy to think like this, it leads to a creativity in everything you do. By not accepting cliché answers, it is easy to reach past the obvious. It may even trigger empathy to imagine yourself in the shoes of the victim occasionally. However, it is perhaps the fact that I stepped into the head of a psychopath which caused my brother in law’s worries. This is easy to understand, but the fact that you can imagine what someone is thinking, does not mean that you agree with them. For instance, most people can probably imagine what Donald Trump might do next. That does not mean we will ever condone it.
And now, Death Watch, my second novel is out. This, if anything, is an even more disturbing novel than my first. Psychopaths abound, maternal instincts fray at the edges, stepbrothers prove horrible, and the mental health industry takes a battering. Nova is once more in deep trouble, and so might I be if Ingo gets around to reading it. What are the chances of me ever making it onto his stray’s list after he wades through the carnage that appears to be Nova’s life? And there is a future grand-nephew I might never get to see! Oh Lordy, how can I keep a lid on this book, so he doesn’t know about it and still get it into people’s hands.
