Don't forget the songs

"Don't forget the songs that made you cry"

By the time I was nine, I already knew three of the most painful facts
that I would ever learn. I was never going to be good enough to be a
professional footballer. I was never going to be devilishly handsome. I
thought I might have been basically, you know, ALRIGHT, up until I was
twelve and I couldn't read enough letters on an eye-chart.Then I got
stuck with windows that rested on the bridge of my nose. And I knew
enough about space-travel to realise I was never actually going to get
the opportunity.

I was too young for all that, wasn't I?

All that was left was writing. It was too long ago now to work out if
that was always the fourth option and just all I was left with, or what
I had always wanted anyway.

I remember being nine and producing comics for everyone I was friendly
with, boys I went to school with and younger boys I built dens with and
played Robin Hood with at the weekends. The comics were called "Pirate
Weekly" and I really did produce one every week, for almost two years.
A lot of the stories were inspired by television - so there was a Dr
Who strip, a Monkey strip and a Professionals strip; but there was
other stuff of my own devising, space and cowboys and pirates.

I drew each issue myself, although I could never draw. Bodie and Doyle
were just trousers with shoes from the waist down and their faces were
simply round and with the right sort of hair. I didn't do the comic for
the art. The other thing was, that I had no access to a photocopier in
those days, so I used to draw twelve, thirteen copies by hand, each as
identical as I could get them. My dad had bought me a proper stapler,
so that I could fasten them. I loved anything like that.

My favourite times as a child were when my dad had bought a new shirt
and he would give me the package to unwrap, going through the ceremony
of removing the plastic strip that sits beneath the top button, the
card at the back of the neck, each of the pins secreted in the shirt.
Best of all, of course, the A4 sized piece of cardboard at the back,
shiny white on one side and stone gray on the other. I always got to
keep the cardboard and would make things out of it, card games,
identity badges for gangs, board games - drawing little pieces to
represent space cruisers and scout ships.

After "Pirate Weekly" finally folded (was there a farewell issue, or
did I just stop making them one day?) there were all the other stories.
For a long time, I was convinced that I could crack the Roger
Hargreaves market - those stories were really short and once you got a
theme going, they almost wrote themselves. I did invent the Munch Bunch
concept before the official ones, but who listens to a ten year
old?

I also wrote a series about a dog called Rab. We had a neighbour who
always seemed kind and his name was Rab. I can't even remember what he
looked like now. I could still draw the dog, at a push.

There was also a long period of fascination with Enid Blyton (prompting
my book, Five go to Crumbling Castle) and later, Agatha Christie.

One day, I was on a bus with my mum, going into town. I got very
animated and asked if we could get off at a stop that was too early,
because I had seen a shop with the word "Bookmaker" outside. I really
thought that I could take in my Rab the dog books and they would make
them for me. An odd thought that pops into my mind at this moment is
that our bus terminus was "Scorer Street" and then they built a big bus
station at the Co-op, more central to town. I have never been to Scorer
Street since, nor have I ever heard anyone mention it since. It used to
be such an important place and now it seems sort of mythical. Dull
mythical, but still.

Do you ever feel like you've let your younger self down? I'm happy now.
I've got a gorgeous house and good friends and a wife who I'm utterly
crackers about. I laugh at least four times a day. But it's a different
sort of happy to what I would have wanted when I was nine. Shouldn't
there be plastic action figures available of me by now? Shouldn't
people be pointing at me nervously in the street and asking for my
autograph? Shouldn't I have a proper theme song?

* * *

October asked Deane to wait. They had come up from the city that lay
under the city of London, having done an extensive tour of all the
important stations. There was so much for Deane to think about, but he
was too hungry to contemplate the nature of good and evil any
more.

"Let's get a burger or something, " he said to October, "My shout.
Apparently I've got loads of money now. I inherited some from a man I
hardly knew. "

While Deane was eating his fries, October seemed distracted, looking at
something that was out of Deane's field of vision.

"Whassup? " asked Deane, craning his head around.

"That man over there, " said October, "He isn't real. He doesn't belong
here. "

He just looked like a slightly rough man, with long choppy hair, to
Deane, nothing at all out of the ordinary, but he knew somehow that
October was telling the truth. When he looked more closely, he could
see that the man wasn't in fact wearing slightly crumpled modern
clothes, but instead a sort of jerkin and leather breastplate, and that
he was also carrying a sword that seemed to pulse and flame in his
grasp.

October approached him, "Do you have a story?"

The man looked at him strangely, "It has been a while since anyone
asked me that. I am Avarawn, but most know me as The Forager. I am
leading an army, to try to seize back the town of Palahill, captured by
the goblin army long ago. I have had many adventures, but all of my
companions have been lost. I find myself here, in a world that seems
strange and wrong to me. I don't know how long I have been here, but it
seems like forever. "

"What's the score here? " asked Deane, eyeing The Forager up and down.
He noticed a very elaborate scar on the warriors face, one that could
not have concievably been inflicted by any weapon, but that looked
amazingly cool.

"This is a Paper Boy, " said October, "A very interesting phenomenon.
Watch this. "

October took out a small box from his pocket, opened the lid and blew
some sort of dust towards The Forager. As Deane watched, the skin on
The Forager's face seemed to become white, with thin blue lines racing
across it. He looked closer and every inch of the warriors face seemed
covered in small, scruffy handwriting, seemingly written in pencil. The
same was true of his neck, hands and forearms, which was all of the
skin that Deane could see, or would wish to. Deane could also see that
the man had no thickness to him at all. He had appeared as solid as
either of them, but in fact he was no thicker than a human hair.

"Er, October? Is this not going to be freaking the ordinary people
out?"

"They see what they expect to see and nothing more, " said
October.

Deane took a look around and nobody was paying them even slight
attention.

"This unfortunate is an unfinished story, " said October, "A character
created, but never resolved. Usually nothing happens to them, but once
in a while, they fall out of their own fictional world and into ours.
And they try to end the story themselves. This one, I think is the
result of someone reading Lord of the Rings at an impressionable age.
"

* * *

Guilty as charged. I did indeed write the story of the Goblin War, with
literally hundreds of characters. There were many disparate groups,
each with their own agenda and each forging and breaking alliances with
the others. The Forager was the lead character.

Oddly, I did write the whole book (or, more crucially what I managed to
write of it) entirely in pencil, writing in spiral bound notebooks,
writing until a pink saucer-shaped blister appeared on my right index
finger. I did write at least six notebooks, but then I'd got bored of
the thing. It was supposed to be four thousand pages long, with
characters that would die and be replaced midway through the book. It
all seemed a bit much, once summer came around.

It was shockingly bad anyway, very derivative. My view now as an adult
is that Tolkein really closed the book on that sort of fiction. There's
no real point anyone else trying. First attempt at a real epic of
fantasy, the guy nailed it.

What's particularly awful is that I don't remember anything much else
about it, not even the title. I know that the first hundred pages were
largely about the internal politics of the goblins, there were some
goblins who were sort of heroic. I don't remember any of their names,
or what the plot was doing when I stopped writing it. I don't know
where The Forager is supposed to be.

My grand Fantasy epic and I can only remember the name of one
character.

* * *

October took pity on The Forager and bought him a double-whopper, some
fries and a large coke, which made him gasp at the coldness of it. He
took off the plastic lid and peered in wonder at the ice-cubes, poking
them with his straw and grinning.

"This food is odd, but good, " he said. Deane was relieved that he had
sheathed the flaming sword, but a little appalled that The Forager ate
the burger by tearing at it with his hands, the way Henry the Eighth is
portrayed as eating.

"What do we do with him? " Deane asked October.

"That is a good question, " answered October, "The Committee would say
that it is not our affair. Either the character will find his author or
he will not. It is no business of ours. For myself, I tend to help the
Paper Boys when I find them. "

"But what will happen if he finds his author? Come to think of it, what
will happen if he doesn't? "

"If he finds him, the author must end the tale and all of the
unfinished characters will be at peace. Or the characters will kill the
author. If he doesn't find the author, that becomes a little more
complex. Every author puts a little of himself into every character.
Even when the character appears to be nothing like the author, there is
some portion of the author which goes into the character. And, if the
story is unfinished, that portion remains the property of the
character. If too many stories are left unfinished for too long, the
author becomes less real than his creations. "

"And that's generally a bad thing, " observed Deane, trying hard not to
watch The Forager cram handfuls of burger into his mouth.

"Generally, " said October quietly.

Within an hour, the three men had found themselves outside a school
playground, led there by October's clocks. Avarawn was still rather too
quick to unsheath his sword at the slightest sound of traffic, but he
had at least stopped looking in wonderment at Deane's bleached hair and
asking if he had any elfish blood.

Outside the playground, a dishevelled man leaned up against the
railings, chain-smoking. He had sand-coloured hair and was wearing a
trenchcoat. Deane was able to spot that there was something about him
that was not quite three-dimensional. When he looked closer, he could
see that the surface of the man's skin rippled and ran with even faint
blue lines. Also, the writing seemed set out in a much more rigid way,
with short words to the left and then long sentences to the
right.

"Another Paper Boy? "

"Yes, " said October, "I'm trying to find all the ones that belong
together. "

Deane looked from this newcomer to Avarawn and back again. One seemed
modern and gritty, the other from a time and world that had never
existed.

"Alright? " asked the newcomer, "You haven't seen my partner have you?
Dull bloke, full of good intentions, name of Hare ?"

* * *

Ah yes, Hare and Tortoise. My detective pairing. Written in anger and
despair at the screening of a programme called "Hunter" - a cop show
pairing good-cop Deedee McCall with ex-mobster turned cop, Rick
Hunter.

I hadn't watched the first episode, because I was sure it would be
dreadful. But there was nothing else on, so I picked up an
orange-covered school exercise book and began to write a play - my own
cop series.

They want good-cop bad-cop, I could give them that. Good-cop was Hare,
a real American as apple-pie type, noble, decent, kind. The bad cop was
Tortoise, a cop so bad that he actually sold drugs to children during
the lulls in his investigation, hence the hanging around a
schoolyard.

I was also watching a lot of Marx Brothers films at the time, so the
play was full of what I felt was sharp banter. I can only remember one
snippet now, all these years later.

HARE : Have you rifled through those drawers?

TORTOISE : I've rifled through them twice, there are no rifles in
there.

Yeah. No wonder I never finished it.

The anger burned out and by the next week I was watching the show and
it turned out to be brilliant, in a cheesy sort of way. Rick Hunter was
ice-cold and menacing and his catchphrase was 'it works for me' and
DeeDee McCall was small, dark haired and busty and became a major
league crush. Thinking of her now summons up her image.

* * *

The four men came out of Boots, Tortoise all sardonic and flicking ash
at passers-by, Avarawn still braced for battle and the wind whipping
his hair. Deane was just puzzled as to why October had bought a jar of
moisturiser.

"Special recipe, " October explained, "I bought heavily into the
company several years ago, to get them to make this just how I wanted.
Saves me making it up myself. It's just pure luck that it also happens
to soften your skin. "

"So what exactly do you do with it?" asked Deane.

"Applied in the right way and with the correct incantation, Oil of Ulay
protects from cold steel. Wearing this, no blade can harm me. And I'm
almost out, so I thought we might as well pick up a jar on our
travels."

"Olay, " muttered Deane, "They call it Olay now."

Who was the gorgeous man who watched them from nearby? Tall,
dark-haired with elegant clothes and a manner of pure natural grace. He
was so handsome he didn't seem to have an actual face at all, it looked
different every time you saw it. There was nothing definite about it,
he was just handsome. That was the absolute essence of him.

He moved like a dancer, knew karate and fine wines and was an expert at
everything he did. Oh yes, and he wore a signet ring on the little
finger of his left hand.

* * *

Oh now that's hardly fair. I did finish at least one story with Tony
Swann in it. He was a sort of secret agent cum knight of fortune. A
maverick (of course). He was a shadowy figure, known principally as The
Cygnet.

The story I finished was about a gang of crooks who were using
cross-channel swimmers to smuggle diamonds, presumbably tucked into
their Speedos. Is it lucrative to smuggle diamonds from France to
England? Who knows? I had no way of doing research, I was twelve.

I was also reading way too much Leslie Charteris. I had decided to get
a lead character and then write a huge series of books about him.
Problem was, he didn't really have any sort of character at all.

When you're young you don't realise that what makes Bond interesting is
the flaws, the defects. All you see is how fantastic he is at
everything. Watch them again, see Bond spout acres of knowledge about a
certain brand of sherry or Faberge eggs and there should be a little
part of you that goes, 'dull bastard'.

Just like every sales-rep wants to be Bond, there's a little bit of
Bond that is just a tedious man, a Swiss Tony who knows that the secret
with women is fine wines, Belgian chocolates.

* * *

"Come in, " I said.

The five of them did so. There was part of me that recognised most of
them. I knew who they were and why they had come for me. Tony Swann was
now wearing a white tuxedo, but his shoes kept flickering in and out of
existence. I never was very good at deciding on shoes. What sort of
shoes is someone suave supposed to wear with a white tuxedo?

"Good evening, " said the elderly gentleman, who was exceedingly
polite and gave the impression of wanting to appear very
insignificant.

The young man with blonde hair immediately crossed over to my stereo
and began looking at the racks of CD's, too many for the racks now,
most are heaped up in dissolute piles.

"These men are people that you have lost, " said October, at length,
after Tortoise had tried to unplug my video and steal it, "Stories that
you haven't finished, people you loved who you have nearly forgotten.
"

How did I feel, faced with my creations?

Mostly guilty. A little ashamed too, if I'm honest. I created these
characters and never made the effort of finishing them, completing
their worlds and setting them free. I left them to drift around on
their own devices, and with what ?

A handful of mannerisms, perhaps some clothes, an attitude of some sort
and nothing more. They have all remained fixed in the aspect that I
created them, because I didn't give them the freedom to be anything
else, anything more. I didn't have the skill to make them really alive.
Maybe I never will.

Eventually I asked October, who seemed to know about these things, "How
do I put things right?"

Avarawn drew his sword and pressed it to my throat, but I was more
worried about a paper cut than about dying.

"You have to finish them. Write their stories, complete them. "

How can I do that? I can't even remember where I got up to. I can't
remember anything of the Goblin War, or what crime Hare and Tortoise
were supposedly investigating - Hare was so bland he didn't even have
the strength to exist as a Paper Boy. I can't remember what 'The
Mystery of the Blood Candle' was, maybe all I ever had was the title,
and the words to go underneath the title 'The Second Tony Swann
adventure'.

"Weird, " said Deane, looking up from the CD's, "I'm six years younger
than this bloke and he's clearly not cool, but we like loads of the
same music. "

Yes and I always used to leave music playing when I left the house as
well Deane, I thought, but I didn't tell him that.

In the end, all I can do is write the story as simply as I can. They
wait for me to do it and all I do is write a story in which my lost
characters come to me for finality. I am sure that when I write that
Avarawn, Tortoise and Tony Swann vanished into the ether with a faint
smile on their lips, that is what they will do.

Even this, the story that was supposed to make things right has been a
damp squib. I wanted to put some emotion into it, maybe make it a
vindication of the awful mistakes every writer has to make while they
stumble in the dark, but on re-reading it just seems horribly false, as
if it's supposed to be clever rather than genuine. Part of me worries
that I'm just spoiling things for people who like their stories to be
stories. If you are one, then I'm sorry and in the words of all jilting
lovers, it's not you, it's me.

'Don't forget the songs that made you cry, and the songs that saved
your life. Oh you're older now and you're a clever swine, but they were
the only ones that ever stood by you.'