Inheritance

I can’t say that I ever got on with Terrence Oblong. I found him too argumentative, objectionable, too intense. Even though we share the same genes we have little in common.

I’ve always assumed that he had little interest in me, our lives are very different and I never had any contact with him beyond the occasional insult traded on ABCtales.

So it was a great surprise when I took a call from Terrence’s solicitor informing me that he had died and had left his entire estate to me.

It turns out he left very little money, enough for me to pay for the extension at the back of the house that Mrs Oblong has always wanted, but barely enough left over for a holiday.

He also left me his entire collection of writing. I’ve always thought that Terrence was a productive writer, if not a particularly good one, with over 200 stories to his name, a novel and a novella. I was shocked to discover that this made up a tiny proportion of his unpublished work. His house was crammed with piles and piles of handwritten stories awaiting write-up on the computer. The majority of them were unfinished, ideas that had the embryo of a story within them but which had never been fully fertilised and brought to life. There were hundreds of first chapters of novels ranging from historical fiction about a group of 18th century labourers to an autobiographical story about his childhood. He had even started work on my biography, though had gotten no further than my first word.

I decided to pay homage to Terrence by completing some of his stories for him. This is my first attempt, the opening lines are Terrence’s not my own, so I make no apology for their being badly written and incomprehensible.

xxx

“I received a text from a number I didn’t recognise. “Meet me in the Cricketers now,” it said. I tried phoning the number to ask who it was and what they wanted, but got no reply.

I could have just left it, but the Cricketers is just round the corner from my house and it seemed no sort of effort to stroll round and see if there was anyone there I recognised.

As I walked in the bar the barman called over to me, handed me a full pint of my favourite brew and a piece of paper. “A man left this for you,” he said, “bought us both a drink and left you this.”

The note wasn’t sealed so I opened it in front of Dave, who would doubtless have read it already.

‘Ring this number’, it said, and written below it was another mobile number. I checked my phone and it wasn’t a number I recognised.

“Mysterious,” I said to Dave, “you sure it wasn’t a beautiful young woman trying to arrange an illicit liaison.”

He laughed loudly at this suggestion. “Well if that’s your taste in romantic liaison so be it, but he was a bit hairy for my taste.”

xxx

By this point in the story I was struggling. With my own stories I am used to waiting for the idea to gestate, so by the time I get round to writing it I have a clear idea of who the characters are, where the story is going and usually how it will end. But Terrence clearly didn’t write this way, he started scribbling ideas down as soon as they entered his head and the result was a half-formed story drifting into god knows where.

Despite my best efforts the story was lacking any clear direction. Even my own character was a bit of a generic nothing at this stage. I decided to take a break from writing and got down the Crickets for lunch. They do a mean Sunday roast and frankly Mrs Oblong isn’t the greatest cook in the world.

When I arrived in the pub, however, Dave called me over and handed me a pint and a piece of paper. “A man left this for you,” he said, “bought us both a drink and left you this.”

The note wasn’t sealed so I opened it in front of Dave, who would doubtless have read it already.

‘Ring this number’, it said, and written below it was another mobile number. I checked my phone and it wasn’t a number I recognised.

By this time I was beginning to understand what was happening. You see I was initially created by Terrence as a character in one of his stories (the other Terrence Oblong: http://www.abctales.com/story/terrence-oblong/other-terrence-oblong). Clearly in some sense I still am merely a fictional creation of his. What this meant was that any Terrence Oblong story could affect my life, if he wrote that I went to the Cricketers and found that someone had bought me a pint and left me a mysterious note then that would happen to me in real life.

Except that Terrence was now dead and I had inherited his stories. Which mean that I could write my own life. I was my own author, my own God. Terrence’s departing gift was, in effect, to have given me total mastery of my destiny.

I went straight to the computer and wrote more of Terrence’s stories. The ideas he had come up with were so loose and vague that it was easy for me to introduce myself as a character in all of them.

Now a writer like Terrence would just have written himself into a millionaire, a random lottery win or just a sudden realisation that after a life of poverty he is actually the 10th richest man in England. I’m above this sort of cheap trick, I understand that the rules of literature and the rules of physics. I did, however, make subtle changes to myself as I wrote the stories. I slightly upgraded my degree to a First and climbed the career ladder slightly quicker than I had in actuality.

I also made myself fitter and slimmer. To be frank I was worried by Terrence Oblong’s heart attack, we share the same genes after all. I took up running, in one story I even completed a marathon and in another I swam the entire length of the Big Pond (distance unspecified). I lost three stone with all the exercise and had to buy an entire new set of close. Luckily, in the story Chance Happenings, I won £2,500 in clothes vouchers, which allowed me to refurnish my wardrobe.

A new job led to me founding my own company. In Going Solo I set up Oblong Enterprises and in Our American Friends I corner the American market.

Within just 33 stories I had become a self-made millionaire.

I also found that I was able to change other people. Not any other person, my attempts to turn Nick Clegg into a decent human being failed abysmally, but those people I was close to, those I knew, I could affect the lives of.

Of course, I wouldn’t change Mrs Oblong, not one iota, she’s perfect in ever way, but in some of the stories she did change some of her habits. In Driving Lessons she finally learnt to drive and in Back Seat Driver she became the main driver, which left me able to have a drink or two on a night out. Mrs Oblong also became a better cook. In Gourmet Lessons she won a cookery course with a top chef and as a result I no longer needed to pop down the Cricketers every time I felt peckish. Her breasts got bigger too, so much so that Specialist Services describes her attempts to find a company that sold bras in her size.

I discovered that I could also change the lives of people I hadn’t met, but who had corresponded with me online. People like OldPesky, who had made a few comments on my work on abctales, most of them negative I should add. I found that by writing about OldPesky in one of Terrence’s stories I could change him as well. I showed no mercy. I made him Scottish and, just for a laugh, made him support a Scottish football team. OldPesky had been a popular contributor to abctales, but I made him write some ill-judged comments that saw him banished to obscurity.

Of course, I refuse to abuse this power I have. I won’t destroy the lives of just anyone for no reason. I write this piece merely for information and entertainment, in no way should it be seen as a threat. It’s not as if I’m saying to the abctales editors ‘give me a cherry now or I’ll destroy your lives’.

Anyway, this is the first of Terrence’s stories I have adapted, what do you think of it?