EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

Satan’s Schoolgirls – Chapter Two

The charabanc was a rattling old Humber in worn brown, which smelt of petrol, tobacco and wet moss. The driver was a thin twist of dark leather. He chewed constantly on the ends of the ragged walrus moustache that took up most of the lower half of his face. He inhabited a worn driver’s uniform that had room in it for at least one lodger, if they could bear the insanitary conditions.

“Yer for the school,” he said, his voice as wet and frayed as his facial hair. It was not a question. Why else would we be here? It was cold, pitch black, utterly isolated. I could feel the shapes of the mountains around us pressing in, looming just beyond the reach of the station’s inadequate electrical lights.

Father nodded, and the driver slung my baggage into the back of the bus with a strength that belied his size. Maybe there was someone else in that comedy uniform after all to help him do the heavy lifting. Certainly, he took half the time to do the job that my father had made such a meal of at Inverness.

Finally, we were squared away. My father swung himself into the shotgun seat in the cab, and sat waiting. The driver considered me thoughtfully for a moment, then swung open the driver’s side door and held out a hand to me.

“Yer carriage awaits, mamselle,” he said. I took his hand. It was warm, as dry and hard as old hide. With a courtly bow, he spun me up and into the cab, moving swiftly up beside me and nudging me along the bench. I was comfortably wedged in between the two men.

“Perfect,” the driver burred. “It’s nae the smoothest road up to the school. Cannae be havin’ the young lady bouncing around like an untethered lamb, now.” He grinned at my father. Well, there was an upward shift in the general attitude of the moustache. My father looked back, impassively.

“Let’s get on, then,” he said. “The sooner this is over with the better.”

The driver matched his gaze for a moment, then nodded and turned his attention to the engine. “Aye,” he said, just quietly enough for me to hear. “They usually put it like that.” Then he started the charabanc. The engine fired with a harsh, coughing throb. He smoothly guided it down the single-track road, and soon the lights of the station were swallowed in the darkness.

As the driver had warned, the road was more of a cattle track than a working highway, and we were soon jouncing about like fairground rides, the unoiled springs of the suspension squeaking out a traveling song. However, the wiry Scotsman knew the road well, and smoothly guided the creaking old bus around the worst of the obstacles. Wedged in tightly between the two solid, warm men on either side of me, I was soon lulled into a drowse.

The dull illumination of the Humber’s lights shone barely ten yards in front of us. There was no moon, yet the night was luminous, the stars blazing in the clear dark air. The mountains around us cut that riotous show in half. You saw them only in the way they blocked the sky.

In my dozing state, I had no idea how long it took to get from the station to Cape Wrath. It seemed like moments before the driver nudged me gently in the side.

“Wake up, lassie,” he breathed. “We’re here.”

I looked up. We had stopped before a massive set of wrought iron gates, easily twenty feet tall. The lights from the charabanc splashed over them, sending shadowy grids across the high stone walls on either side. These loomed away into the black, seemingly endless. Rough-finished, impenetrable. Their tops were frosted with jagged shapes that glinted in the feeble headlight glow.

Glass, I realised with a shock. Shards of broken glass. This was like no school entrance I had ever seen. It was as forbidding as a prison.

“Aye,” the driver said. “They always look like that, once they see the gates.” The look on his face was one I had not seen in a very long time. Something like sympathy. Something like pity.

He hopped out of the cab, and swiftly pulled the gates open. They came apart with an unlubricated scream. I would hear something very like that a lot in the coming months. Then we were away, down a narrow avenue lined with gnarled, bare elms, the headlights flaring nightmarish shadows through their empty branches. Talons. Demon masks. Wounds made in light.

“It’s not as bad as it looks, lassie,” the driver said.

And we turned a corner, and I saw the school for the first time.

It was a clawed hand, rearing into the night sky, yearning to scrape the stars out of the velvet black. It was a fortress, an impenetrable obstacle against an unending flood of heathen hordes. It was a prison, a zoo, a madhouse, the castle of an evil wizard, the lair of the witch, the house of the beast.

I reared back in my seat in horror. There was a roaring in my ears, a boom of cannonade, a bellow from the throat of a dragon. I was ten. The furthest I had ever been before was to Oxford on a day trip, and the dreaming spires had overwhelmed me then. Now, suddenly, I was on the north-western apex of Scotland, the air was full of salt and nightmares, and I was being confronted with Gormenghast.

Reader, I fainted. I popped a fuse, blew a breaker and fell into blissful unconsciousness.

“Isnae so bad,” the driver told my father. “Normally they throw up too.”

Satan’s Schoolgirls – Chapter One

PART ONE
NOVEMBER

Chapter One

The journey from Berkshire up to the school took twelve hours, and my father and I spent most of that time in silence. As the train clattered through a landscape that became more colourless and desolate as we headed north, I tried to make sense of the emotions he would sometimes allow to flit across his stony visage. I was used to see him angry and sad, but crammed in the confines of the smoky, humid second-class carriage where we’d formed a tiny base camp made up from my trunks and valises, he allowed his defences to slip enough to show me something new.
Fear. Every time he looked at me now, he looked afraid.

I knew better than to ask where this had come from. As we stepped onto the train at Maidenhead, he had fixed me with the look I had come to recognise as the precursor to the laying down of a new law.

“There will be no conversation on this train,” he said. “There will be no idle chit-chat, no musing on the state of the country, no speculation on the marital status or love lives of those idiotic movie stars you seem to find so fascinating. I expect to hear nothing from you until I put you into the care of the staff at St. Anne’s, and at that point the only words I wish to hear from you will be “Goodbye, Father.” Do I make myself adequately clear?”

I nodded mutely. Arguments were utterly pointless when father spoke to me like that, although Lord knows I’d tried enough times. It was like running into a brick wall and, if I got him angry enough, would raise the same kind of bruises.

So, twelve hours in a train with a man who had forbidden me to speak, who had not provided me with a book, a magazine, or any kind of entertainment apart from the view from the besmeared window. After I tired of watching my father, I settled myself into a cramped corner and watched the sky cycle steadily from blue to a deep, bloody red. I was not a dreamer, and was incapable of the kind of pointless babble that had been put under embargo. It showed how little he knew of me. I contented myself with the sky, and the cheese sandwich he wordlessly handed to me at lunchtime from the brown paper bag that was his only luggage. They were scant comfort for a girl of ten who was about to be abandoned by her family, 500 miles from home.

We changed trains at Inverness in rapidly failing twilight. My father, cursing under his breath at the lack of porters, somehow managed to manhandle my baggage onto the much smaller local service that would take us through to the coast. As light relief, he enjoyed a hissed altercation with a gentleman in a tight tweed suit who tried manoeuvering himself into our carriage, in the thin gap remaining between my steamer trunk and me. It was a pointless argument really. As my father made it clear using words I’d never heard from him before, we were the only three passengers on the train.

Once we disembarked at Pitlotchery, the darkness was absolute. The gentleman in the tweed suit watched us as we waited on the platform for the charabanc to take us on the final leg of the journey. He mouthed a single word at my father, a word that twisted his face into an angry mask. His face was livid in the light flooding out of the train compartment as it pulled away. Father shook his head as the train shouldered its way into the blackness at the end of the platform.

“The thing about idiots,” he said, “is that you’ll never have to worry about looking for them. They’ll always find you.” It was the first thing he’d said to me since we’d crossed the border into Scotland.

Satan’s Schoolgirls – Prologue

Beginning today, I am serialising my first novel, written in a fume of creative smog in the winter of 2006, and spring of 2007. The reasons for this are numerous, but break down into a couple of major components.

Firstly, obviously, I want to get it out there, so people can have a look and hopefully respond to it. At the end of the serialisation, I’ll be offering signed copies of the book via Lulu, featuring original cover artwork by yours truly, and a couple of extra surprises.

Second of all, I want to play around with the pacing a little, and there are still some rough edges to rub a stone over. Doing this editorial work in public might seem suicidal, but it’s the best way I can think of to actually get the work done, instead of sitting around moping about how the book’s not finished. So, for those lucky few of you that have already seen a draft of this – there will be changes.

So, here we are then. I’ll tag every episode with something meaningful, so if you do a search on “Satan’s Schoolgirls” you should be able to find everything fairly easily.

Welcome.

SATAN’S SCHOOLGIRLS

A cheap horror movie by Rob Wickings

“Bad natures never lack an instructor.”

Publilius Syrus, Sententiae

For Clare. My education.

PROLOGUE – FIFTEEN YEARS LATER

I have led a life filled with regret, replete with sorrow. Any moments of joy have been soured and flattened by that understanding. There can be no respite from it.Yet somehow, I have come to accept this state of affairs. Somehow, I have come to find a kind of grace in the sadness.

Until now. The painfully delicate, exquisitely balanced life support machine I have built is gone, blasted away in an instant, leaving me alone again, unprotected. I sit quietly, strangling a cold cup of coffee in a knotted grip, and watch the evening news.

A reporter, trussed in scarf and thick coat, buffeted in the violent wind scything across the gorse land (I feel it now, the way it bites through wool and jersey, always with enough moisture in it to soak you through, to wear you down, to pull you under) braces herself against the cold, and tells the story of the derelict building in the background.

Even now it’s hard to look at it. Although St. Anne’s is a skeleton, there are still shapes in the stones that sketch themselves against the rubble. With a start I see that the dormitory I spent the worst months of my life in still stands, intact against all reason, against all wishes. The camera moves on, showing the chapel, the assembly hall, the kitchen block, no more than a single crumbling wall and a hint of foundation now.

Around the building, the cranes are gathering, insectoid, prehistoric. They tilt their tiny heads and gnaw at the brickwork, drooling rubble. Smaller scavengers, trucks in canary yellow, scoot in to carry away choice scraps. Before my eyes, it seems, St. Anne’s is disappearing into the mists from where it came when I first saw it.

The girl in the big coat whitters on, her carefully constructed hairdo gone to chaos in the approaching storm. I will her silently not to make a connection in this, not to use the coincidence for a glib one-liner.

Don’t say the name, I beg her. Don’t tell the story. Above all, don’t show the sign.

My wishes are pointless little things, lost in the noise of the wind. She is there because of the story, because of the things that happened there, the lives that were lost. Without them, this would be the simple demolition of an old building grown dangerous in its old age, put down before it could cause any more harm. There would be no news report, no pretty girl, no camera.

As if that would ever end it. The damage that place did to me, and to the other women who I have no doubt are watching the same programme as I, with the same haunted look, will never end. The girls who survived the fire, the storm. The girls who promised themselves they would never talk about the turning cross, the Dark law.

Or Epiphany Davies. And Cathaerin Halberd. And Sister Serenity.

And Mother Mercy. If nothing else, they do not let the name of the Scourge of St. Anne’s out into the world. Silence, at least, they can manage. They can protect themselves with that.

And, I, on my sofa in my quiet suburban home, watching the girl reporter, her hair going down for the third time as she motions the camera to pan once more around the charnel house of my memories, I realise that unlike my classmates, silence can no longer help me. Our old school has held it’s secrets for long enough. The time has come, as dust claims the school, to tell the tale of how it was lost. The part that I played in its destruction.

The Ugly Truth About The Ugly Truth

It’s been an unsettling few weeks for me. 2008 has become The Year Of Change in a lot of ways, and many of the people I’m closest to have changed careers or moved on in some way. I’m not immune to that process. I’ve been at risk of redundancy for the last couple of months. That’s fortunately no longer a problem, but my workplace and responsibilities have changed, and pretty rapidly. I can’t really discuss what I’ll be doing over the next 18 months or so. Let’s just say it’s a decent sized project for a very prestigious client, and it’s extremely flattering that my name was the first one discussed to spearhead it.

Nonetheless, the situation has got me thinking. With the changes at work, and being without a computer for a fat chunk of June, I’m reappraising my online and creative life. In short, I need to get some shit done, and the blog needs to reflect that. I was reading a post Warren Ellis put up recently regarding the way blogs need to be more than simple linkdumps if they’re to be of worth. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, although I try to avoid the obvious stuff and give a link a little context. The rapid spread of a meme online is of course a part of why the internet is so important. But as Warren says, there are plenty of places to find an instant web hit of funnitude. I’ve got an RSS reader full of that stuff, and The Ugly Truth does not need to be that place.

So, here’s what I’m thinking. I claim to be a writer of fiction, and TUT needs to be a place where I can showcase that. It’s entirely likely that I will completely retask the blog into a proper website over the next couple of months, featuring new and archive writing. In the meantime, I will attempt to throw up some flash fiction (under 1000 words) and, for your delight and delectation I will also begin serialising my first novel SATAN’S SCHOOLGIRLS. At the end of that run, I should be in a position to offer a paperback copy with original cover artwork at a knockdown price. My toedip into the waters of the new self-publishing business model.

All this starting on Monday, presuming that I’m done watching season 4 of The Wire of course…

Nirvana

That’s me sorted. then…:

This is a pretty brand new cafe located at 3030 Bristol St., Costa Mesa. The parking log signs in back says the cafe’s name is ‘Chaya & Total Relax’ but this pix is of the sign out front.

Lots of tables, tons of magazines and manga comic books, smoothies, coffees, boba milk tea, and unique selection of Japanese cuisine. Free wifi. Internet terminals available. 2 fancy electronic massage chairs were available for free use with a button-filled console almost as complicated as the starship Enterprise. Membership for something I didn’t recognize b/c I don’t read Japanese.

They don’t have a business card yet, and don’t have a takeout menu. Hours from 11:30am to 1:00am (or later).

At a loss without a laptop.

The Blackbook chose the ideal time to blow up on me. In a week when Barack Obama finally made the Democratic nominations, Bo Diddley died and its still only Wednesday, I’m reduced to blogging on the phone and blagging time on Clare’s Book. Which is tricky at the best of times, and almost impossible when she’s in the throes of organising a massive international get-together for fifty of her closest friends. I am both GAAAH and AAARGH. Keep an eye on the Twitter feed, and stay tuned for further developments.

(let’s not embarrass ourselves by suggesting I use the work PCs, eh? I do have standards…)

The Ugly Truth About Drinking On The Tube

Is anyone surprised that a Facebook-inspired party/jaunt/misguided freedom of expression demo turned into a drunken brawl that closed five tube stations on Saturday night?

Nah. Me neither. There is little worse than a drunk on the Tube. Best case scenario – boozy wibbling. Worst case scenario – vom. I, dear reader, have been guilty of both, and I apologise unreservedly to anyone that has had to witness my excesses over the years.

Yes, OK, there is a valid point to be made that the only way to make make the Circle Line bearable is being several pints in the bag. Yes, OK, there is an element of nanny statism about the pronouncement, and it’s rushed implimentation was almost guaranteed to bring on the pitiful scenes we saw over the weekend.

But let’s be honest. Didn’t you think that every single person that partook in that ride was a bit of a wanker? “Oh, boohoo, I can no longer drink on the Uxbridge branch of the District Line.” So flippin’ what? It’s not like there aren’t enough pubs/bars/restaurants/parks/gardens/street corners in town where you can quite legally wrap your face around a cold one. Why would anyone want to drink on the tube? What possible attraction can there be to swilling an alcopop on the Northern Line?

Let us not also forget that Facebook parties tend to be arsehole magnets, and boy did this one ever bring the twunts out of their twuntholes. Take a look at this gallery of gits, and bask warmly in the fact that the instigator of the whole thing is that most hated of lowlives – a city banker. Snuggle down cosily in the reports that he is now fearing for his job. Nuzzle enthusiastically in the fact that he started the whole thing as an anti-Boris protest, and has ended up vindicating the blond buffoons’ argument.

Oh, look, I know this makes me sound like an old fart of the highest ordure, but come on.
To my mind, anyone that drinks on the tube is a bit of a saddo and a loser, and I’m frankly surprised that there wasn’t legislation already in place.

If the best you can do for a Saturday night out is get drunk on the Circle Line, then frankly your social life is a bit lacking, don’t you think?

Not ‘armless at all.

One of the major nightmares of the war on terror is the flood of soldiers coming home without limbs after IED attacks. The field of exoprostethics is going to extraordinary lengths to address that problem, and at the same time snag some of that sweet, sweet military green.

OK, that sounds a bit snarky. I’m trying to disguise my astonishment at the leaps and bounds being made in the development of artificial limbs under a sheen of cynicism. Really, I’m astonished, and amazed. Check out this video interview with Deka Research’s Dean Kamen, demonstrating his bionic arm. In a nicely geeky twist, he’s called it the Luke.

There are some wonderfully poignant moments in the film too, as you see film of vets who have been unable to feed themselves for years doing just that. One throwaway comment did it for me, when Dean tells the story of a wife of one of the vets seeing her husband using a spoon for the first time in thirteen years –

“…either that arm’s coming back with us, or you’re keeping Chuck.”

Of course, all this innovation can go too far, as Warren Ellis observes.

Links For A Lazy Bank Holiday

God almighty, it’s filthy weather out there. Any thoughts I had about doing some gardening have been washed away in the face of the battering the world’s getting outside my window. Time to settle back with the Blackbook and indulge in a little light reading.

Reason Magazine has a fascinating interview up with Ed Burns, one of the prime movers on The Wire, probably the best TV show evar. He skewers the War On Drugs with alacrity, anger and a twist of humour. Which is pretty much what The Wire did over it’s five seasons.

Further to the announcement earlier in the week of the death of Will Elder, The Comics Journal has reprinted a massive interview they did with the man himself back in 2003. There’s insightful and intelligent discussion on the precariousness of the comics business in the 50s and 60s, and Will’s warmth and humour shine brightly all the way through. Lots of reprints of his artwork too, including some old friends like Mickey Rodent and Shermlock Shomes that I hadn’t seen in years. If you’re a fan of comics at all, I really can’t recommend this highly enough.

And finally, Futurismic have done a good’un with their weekly list of free fiction. Andre Norton, Joe R. Lansdale, and lots lots more. That should keep you going for a while.

Now, stop bothering me. Can’t you see I’m trying to read here?

The Ugly Truth About Eurovision

As the smoke settles for another year, the arguments begin again. I’m not going to describe Eurovision as a guilty pleasure, because there’s nothing to feel guilty about. Eurovision is the best and worst of Europe all crammed into one gloopy, over-sugared, glorious mess of an evening. All the factionism, petty political point-scoring, all the eccentricity, all the glamour, all the weirdness. All there, all singing, all dancing, all for you, you lucky punter.

And once again, the bitching from the UK camp about how badly our country has done over the past few years have re-emerged. Terry Wogan has threatened to stop doing it, citing exactly the kind of openly partisan voting that’s made the competition much more fun over the past few years. Which is of course, hardly a big surprise as it’s been going on for as long as the competition’s been running. Mewing “no fair” at this point in proceedings is disingenuous, to say the least.

Despite all the griping about the Russian victory, (I was rooting for the crazed rock opera of Azerbaijan’s entry) let’s not forget that the song is a heartfelt if slightly dull ballad about believing in yourself and following your dreams – in effect, it’s a song about Eurovision. Factioneering aside, it was always in with a good chance.

Let’s be frank. We’ve hardly been sending our best and brightest out to the contest lately, have we? While France, for example, have a song produced by Daft Punk, Germany have sent their equivalent of Girls Aloud, and most of the ex-Russian protectorates have voted in their biggest selling and most popular artists, what have we got? An X-Factor reject with a duff piece of disco-lite. In fact, we’ve been sending out reality show rejects to die on their feet for the last five years or so. The last time we won was in 1997, when proper band Katrina and the Waves won with a proper Eurovision song, Shine A Light. I’m still of the opinion that the great lost opportunity for the UK was the failure three years ago to sign Morrissey up for the cause. That would have been something.

Did we deserve to come last? Well, our attitude to the contest doesn’t help. With the element of complacency and the irritating smugness that comes with our pretense that actually, we’re a bit too cool for this nonsense, being the place where all the good music comes from and all, yes, we did rather deserve the drubbing we got. Why not throw a proper, credible band into the contest next year? I say, Radiohead for Eurovision. If we lose then, we may as well pull out of the contest altogether.

(decidedly odd photo credit: werewegian on the BBC Eurovision Flickr group. And that’s by no means the strangest photo on there.)