When you write what you never write...
How does Gregory Peck look? Smug? Quietly contented? Bemused? I’m sure one of those might have applied to me this morning - I just don’t know which one…
I have always claimed that I never write ‘genre fiction’. It is, I believe, a claim supported by the evidence of my portfolio. And yet there are the occasional outliers: a sci-fi short story “The Big Red Button” (in An Irregular Piece of Sky); and this year a dystopian novella, The Red Tie. I will argue, of course, that even though their landscape is futuristic, the stories are still about people, their relationships with each other, and their relationship to their own histories. That’s my ‘bag’ after all.
This morning I was awoken by an embryonic opening sentence. One which saw me at my computer around seven, then again a couple of hours later (a brief edit)… And here is the output. It may be nothing - or the start of something. Who can say?
Were it possible to do so, it would take you just over two days driving at a constant sixty to reach Vastion; three thousand miles across inhospitable terrain, even if that landscape offers some variety: undulating, and punctuated by the residue of forests and lakes. Even the scars of the old glacier near the top of Mount Flax would be visible from the road — were you able to take your eyes from its dangerous bends, potholes and craters for long enough to glance upwards through the windscreen.
Better to be a passenger then?
Those had been the days. The days when it had been possible to trust someone else to do the driving. Or when ‘trust’ was a concept you could hang on to.
The terrain is inhospitable not due to its geological features but because in it you would be entirely alone, unlikely to see another soul once you had left the outskirts and relative security of Kranmer. And the journey is impossible because even if you managed to locate a vehicle, where would you get the fuel to power it? Of course there are, secreted away in private garages here and there, some relics from the disappointing and ultimately fruitless experiments with solar-powered cars. One of those might do the job. In theory. But then it would take you far longer than three days given they were all so fabulously slow — and because the sun’s appearances are now all too rare. Two weeks rather than two days in such a conveyance? If you were lucky. And if you managed to stow sufficient provisions for the journey.
Vastion might just as well not be there, better remembered as the stuff of legend.
Yet it is there. We have been convinced of that. Cut-off from the rest of the country — from the rest of the world, for all we know — it is still intact. One of few places probably. Occasionally there are bulletins, newsflashes — though use of the word ‘flash’ is thought by many to be entirely inappropriate these days when used in relation to speed. Explosions, yes; speed, no. Some suggest that the notion of ‘news’ is also flawed; that there is nothing at all coming from Vastion; that we are being fed lies from some government department, ostensibly to keep our spirits up. The more sceptical among us — I would say ‘radical’, but that word has other connotations now — believe Vastion isn’t there at all, one of the first casualties.
A number of us have occasionally gathered — the remnants of what once might have been called ‘a friendship group’ — and tried to piece together the last few years’ sequence of events. It is a harder job than you might imagine, as if history has been unravelling all the while it continues to accumulate, unable to stop and take a pause, to reorientate itself, get its bearings. Which in a way is what we have been trying to do, our little group. Or our ‘cell’, as some might like to call it.
United by our attachment to those we know in Vastion, we have been sending our own messages, trying various means to breach the intervening three thousand miles. Not that there are many ways to do so. When there are rumours of some government mission making the crossing — usually in one of the few remaining serviceable aircraft, or via some military vehicle or other — we write letters, submit them to collection points where they and innumerable others are gathered up with the promise of onward transfer. We have been doing so for the last three years, and without any response. The naysayers tell us that’s because the government burns all the letters as soon as they have them, or because the transport never leaves Kranmer, or because there is no-one at the other end to receive them. Depending on our collective mood, we have chosen, at one point or another, to believe all of these possibilities — and, when more upbeat, none of them.
The one certainty is that three years is a long time, a period over which one or two things happen: either you forget or your longing increases. Those who choose to forget gradually slip away from our group, our cell, sacrificing the identity associated with belonging to something collective, focused, to become absorbed in the anonymous morass that is Kranmer. It is a diseased city, leprous, marking time — like an old man rocking slowly in his chair, talking to himself, knowing the end is coming. We’re told there is no longer any threat. Or that the only threat is what we now have, the new normal. We are told that if we work, try hard, pull together, our lives will improve. Apparently more and more fields are coming back into productive use, the volume of food being harvested is increasing, trade with our neighbours (in the opposite direction to Vastion) is beginning to gain momentum even if discussions over where the new borders should be drawn have yet to conclude. After all this time. Occasionally we are given something to celebrate. And the sceptics? Well, you can guess what the sceptics think. It’s a position we’ve all occupied.
As is one section of wall facing due east in the direction of Vastion. It is a wall a few hundred yards beyond which the landscape quickly blurs and becomes indistinct, yet where we — the few who have chosen not to forget — occasionally stand and look out and try to remember.
And if we have been meeting there more regularly in the recent weeks it is not because our longing has grown stronger, nor our memories more desperate, but because we are steeling ourselves for what is about it happen.
We are going to make the journey to Vastion.
As I say, this may be nothing. Whatever it is, it needs work. And whatever the outcome, the effort will not be a wasted one. No writing is ever wasted.
Of course this is something, Ian, even though too early to know what kind....! But I suggest getting some skin in the game SOON - ie. who do we care about here? Who'll draw us in by being human: having something important to lose... ? You're already suggesting some stakes - so open those out emotionally and get your gloves off! You know all about this, of course! Zanna