Sticky Fingers. Pt.4. Narration.

Arthur left the hotel and took the tube to Heathrow. It was easier than he expected. So here he sits now at 30,000 feet, strapped into an aluminium tube powered by Rolls Royce engines with 400 other people. There isn’t a lot to do. Sleep of course but that’s not easy. So he’s obliged to fall back on internal monologue. And eternal questions. Who am I? What am I doing here? That kind of thing.

At the moment he’s part of what writers call a bridge. Something to get the reader from London to Bangkok. Thai Airways should get most of the credit but of course a lot of things happen during the interim. Minor incidents involving check-in desks, baggage, customs, food-trays and fellow passenger’s elbows mostly along with various unrelated thoughts and sensations of no interest to anyone.

Who is he? It’s a legitimate question and one that will have to be dealt with sooner or later. He’s the central character in ‘Reincarnation’ which is the last part of ‘Sticky Fingers’. Actually it isn’t because ‘Sticky Fingers’ is just a sub-section of ‘Brighton Line’ which goes on forever. But ‘Reincarnation’ has a nice sort of finality about it, or continuance for the karmically inclined, in as much as it involves the circle of life and death and if you’ve read this far presumably you’re interested in knowing more. Arthur’s personality will be established as we go along. With any luck a novel will gradually emerge. The finished version will probably include a lot of flashbacks. There might even be some sort of storyline.

Who am I? I’m the bloody narrator that’s who. Headley’s the name. Dick. Disgraced Arsenal striker. Made a few quid on property thanks to Margaret Thatcher. Bought a yacht and moved to the Caribbean. Lived like a king until I got wiped out in the crash of 2008. I’m in the process of turning the yacht into a B&B. Reasonable rates for ABCtales readers. In the meantime I’m doing a spot of freelance narrating. I do short stories, novels, anything you want. Voices and tones to order. Even dabble in a bit of poetry. And I’m a big Beckett fan too so watch it. I can keep this post-modern stuff going ad infinitum. You may never get a proper story. No, I don’t see it as evasion or procrastination. It amuses me. Go and make a cup of tea if you want.

What’s this novel about then you ask? Assuming it ever gets written. Well I’ll tell you what it’s not about.

It’s not about funny awkward girls who fall in love with every fella in the office. Nor will there be any cute little dragons called Zork who want to be like all the other little dragons but can’t breathe fire. There will be no breakthroughs in cruise missile technology and no startling revelations about the Illuminati, no psychopathic serial killers in rural Texas complete with mandatory vivid torture sequence, no oversize sharks and no bullet-proof transformer-type robotic creations crashing through foliage under the weight of extraneous features, no Hobbits and there will definitely not be any Dark Princes hunting Krarkons from Griffon-back in the Forest of Dred. Nor is it the heart-warming story of two Afghan lesbians overcoming all odds and finding fulfillment in Essex. It has nothing to do with a runaway Haitian slave who joins the US Cavalry only to change sides at the battle of Little Big Horn or the adventures of a 16-year-old concubine at the court of Genghiz Khan. Notes and false starts to those and other abandoned projects do exist somewhere but they all, let’s be honest, turned out to be beyond the would-be author’s literary skill level. They didn’t excite me much either. Sorry about the rant but I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.

But you don’t want to hear about my problems. Let’s get back to Arthur. His plane is just starting the descent into Bangkok. Under control he hopes. This being an Asian flight the passengers have their hand luggage out before the wheels come down. Arthur emerges and takes a deep breath of damp concrete and rotting carpet. He walks to immigration where a grumpy uniformed Thai girl behind a desk flips through his passport, scowling at all the Thai entry stamps. Crash goes her new addition. He scans the arrivals hall. There is no sign of his mother’s ghost. He begins to make mental preparations for the blast of heat he knows is waiting outside.