Writers in education is a relatively small community, so it’s really good to put yourself out there and make yourself, and what you do, known.  With this in mind, I’ve been pitching to conferences like the Oceans of Short Stories in Liverpool last May as well as to the usual short story journals.  The Liverpool conference went really well, so I pitched for another one and just received notification that my paper has been accepted.

I’ll be giving a a presentation examining transgressive literature and the values of taboo subjects in taught creative writing courses.  Referenced will be the first wholly transgressive prose module at the University of Gloucestershire, undertaken last year.  The paper will explore the difficulties in approaching and creatively experiencing the forbidden and the unspoken as well as the rewards of such conscious risk-taking.  Ultimately, the presentation will highlight that this genre is ideal for creating original and memorable prose in new and developing writers.  Included in the presentation will be a short extract of my own prose (’that’ story, God help me) evidencing the content of the paper, and an opportunity for Q&A at the end.

More details for registration and the like will come in January.  The conference is the ‘Great Writing, International Creative Writing Conference’ at Bangor University in Wales.

This is a much bigger conference than the last, and with that in mind I’m very grateful that a version of this paper is what I’ll be writing for my Teaching Creative Writing module on my Masters.

Hohum, such exciting developments.  They delight me.

In other news - university has piled up, the need for money has me at my survival jobs far too often, but life is generally doing good.  Just, busier than I’d perhaps like for the purposes of updating this place.  Good though.

 I recently passed 40K with Gabe, which has broken the back of the ‘novel’ challenge.  I thought I’d pop up part of one of the chapters I’m working on at the moment.  Takes place somewhere in the middle and can stand alone alright, I reckon.

Diversions

The problem with being a writer is that you do the majority of your work sitting in self-imposed solitary confinement, so when you do want to temporarily rejoin the outside world, it’s desirable that your social circle is one that you can plunder for ideas.  This means having a very diverse collection of people, many of whom you wouldn’t readily admit to seeing when the words are only dribbling onto the page.  Alcohol is part and parcel of seeing them.  

So, being a writer means you’re either sitting drinking with social castoffs trying to find something to write about or sitting alone trying to write.  Compound this with being unable to write and sitting alone in a small flat waiting for your lover to hopefully come back and it’s just going to lead to disaster.  Daytime television consists entirely of property, cooking and antique shows, punctuated with the news, which doesn’t seem to change much.  After 48 hours I feel like I’ve read the entirety of the Internet that’s worth reading and can no longer bear the sight of a monitor.  It’s time to go out and distract myself so I’m in a fit state to receive Tilley, if and when she comes back.

I go to where single parents and the unimaginative go to kill an hour for free.  Pets 4 U is two stories and smells like sawdust.  Just inside the door is a stand with various animal treats and toys on it under the banner ‘pets like presents too’.  Above the blown up photo of a Dalmatian puppy is a slot to put in a picture for the current holiday season.  Right now it’s empty.  I wonder if they’re going to start milking the Jewish holidays any time soon.

Inside their lidless glass cube the guinea pigs make alien squeaks and hoots at me as they scuttle backwards into a mass of hay.  Two escaped budgies fly over my head and perch on a hanging strip-light.  One employee is peering under the shelves with a net by the chipmunk cage.  I spot Rik at the cashier counter and maneuver around screaming children towards him.

“Hey Rik.  Going on your lunch break anytime?”

He grins and looks like he should have toothpaste in his mouth as a stand-in for a cigarette.  “Hey Gabe.  Yeah, me and Mike are off in about ten minutes.”  There’s no ‘about’ approximation about it.  People on minimum wage know exactly when their breaks are and will be gone for every second of it.  “Wanna grab a burger with us?”

“Sounds good,” I reply, trying not to sound grateful.  I’ve known Rik for two years and Mike for a few months.  It’s one of those casual acquaintances where you drift in and out of each other’s lives, have a few laughs but don’t get serious.  It’s a friendship with all the perks and none of them as well, in a way.  “Burger King?”

Rik’s acne scarred forehead creases, deforming the craters.  “Not McDonalds?”

“Went off them a few years ago.”

“But they’re using 100% chicken breast in their nuggets now.  It’s good eating,” he enthuses, far too keenly.  Suspiciously brain-washed, one might say.

“What were they using before?”

That throws him, and Rik glances quickly to the left before giving up on an answer with a shrug.

I point for razor-wire emphasis.  “And just think: they’re not raving about what’s in their milkshakes yet, are they?”

Another jaded shrug.  “Alright, Burger King then.  A burger’s a burger, wherever you grill it.”

*

The chips are stiff and over-salted but with the Teflon tables and harsh lighting, the chain really isn’t different from McDonalds.  The Golden Arches have this place down on their barbeque dip, though, and I’m quite particular to their squidgey chips that can be folded three times for ultimate dip immersion.

Rik and Mike have burgers with cheese and bacon slapped on beneath the wilted lettuce.  I have a large chocolate milkshake, as much to stand by my point of rejecting the food as actually wanting it.

Mike slams a hand on the table and grins through a mouthful of grey mush and beige grease.  Sexy.  “I’ve got a great one for you, Gabe.  Right up your street.  I’m going to give you your next book, you sick bastard.”

Long sip of chewy milkshake and I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth so my brain doesn’t think it’s freezing.  “Go on then.”

Sitting back decidedly pleased with his attentive audience, Mike plays out his story with vague hand gestures and animated eyebrows.  “So, last few months, right, we’ve had this guy in buying loads of rabbits and guinea pigs.  Like, three a week.”

Rik swallows loudly but doesn’t clear quite everything.  Flecks of white pulp cling to his teeth.  “Thought he was doing a breeding program or stocking a petting zoo or summut.”

“After thirty animals, though,” Mike continues, drumming a finger to his temple, “we get a bit weirded and suspicious, and call the police.”

Rik nods.  “They followed him home since he kept coming in at the same time to buy the things.”

A maniacal grin from Mike.  “Turns out he was fucking them and, like, ripping them up and splitting their insides so he had to keep buying new ones.  Sick bastard, huh?”

I slide my milkshake away and wish that I could go a few days without someone telling me shit like this.  “That’s a lovely story.”

Rik jabs Mike in the arm.  “It’s like that guy they found in a building after that earthquake.  Stone dead with a chicken on his dick.  Hell of a way for the wife to find out.”

Mike glares at him like he’s said something stupid.  As if stupidity could be the only thing wrong with that sentence.  “How could he have a chicken on his dick?  Surely his dick was in the chicken.”

Rik squints and speaks around a mouthful of food that all looks the same.  “Well, they’d both gone, like, stiff from being dead and I reckon that once the Earth started moving he stopped holding it and it stuck there on his own.  Clamped up around his bell end in its death throes.  Hell, it might even have been dead before the building came down.  Chickens pass eggs, yeah, but those are short and nothing deep like a cock. Unless he had a little stumpy one.  I don’t know.  That bit wasn’t there in what I read.”

Mike jumps in before I can.  “How do you even know this whole story isn’t bullshit?  Where in the world did this tale of cross species erotica even happen?  ‘Cause you could get a rough idea of dick size from that. Standard sized American condoms are made smaller than for the British.”

Rik shrugs awkwardly, embarrassed.  “I don’t know.  You know I’m shit for remembering details like that.”

Mike’s nostrils flare dubiously.  “Uh huh.”

I roll my cold cardboard cup between my palms.  “It could just be another urban story myth, like the girl who wanted to grow up to be a tractor.  Or Jesus.”

Rik’s mouth turns sour and he turns to stare through his reflection in the glass wall.   Mike flicks his eyebrows at me and keeps eating.

In his defense, I did come here seeking a distraction.  How can anyone think about their love life when all these images are being smeared across their brain?

-*-

It’s genuinely unsettling how much of what I write is based in truth…

In 1981, a seemingly innocuous book called The White Hotel emerged into the literary market.  It created a bit of a stir, and quite rightly.  Within a restrained and beautifully constructed narrative, a young woman recounts a tale of eroticism and violence to her psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud.  It is the most original book trying to make some sense of the Holocaust, a period that is all too easy to bury within sweeping statements of horror.

I first encountered this book in the Transgressive Prose module in my third year at uni.  I remember the lecturer sitting on the table at the head of the room, cross legged and furrow-browed as he held one of the photocopies he’d made for all of us of the final section of the book.  We had twelve pages and managed six before he said that he couldn’t read anymore aloud, much to our relief.  To my mind, this is the strongest indicator of the book’s power, as this was a module where every week we read and discussed stories of murder, rape, torture, paedophelia and grotesque persecution.  That this book, preceeding many of our births, could still weild this kind of emotional clout in the present day alongside Palahniuk’s Snuff and Easton Ellis’s American Psycho is stunning.

Quite simply, I believe that this text should be taught as a testament to the power of words.  Humble, simple words that we throw around every day, but have the power to make you weep in the hands of a master storyteller.

So, it was my enourmous pleasure when bluechrome put me in touch with D M Thomas for an interview.  Rather than taking the usual route that has been taken by many reviewers, I decided to try approaching him as a a writer.

One of the strongest and most enduring qualities of ‘The White Hotel’ is its structure, beginning in close proximity to a damaged woman’s thoughts and drawing back to end with traditional 3rd person prose.  Did you have this structure in mind when you began writing, or did it evolve as the book progressed?

The book started as the poem, ‘Don Giovanni’, as a separate entity, though I knew it wasn’t finished.  Then, the synchonicities with what happened at ‘Babi Yar‘ made me realise, one day months later, that this was a novel, beginning with poetry and ending with bleak prose.  So I needed other styles to bridge those.  Since I’d long wanted to write a novella in the form of a Freudian case study, that became the obvious middle section.  To be bridged in turn by a lush erotic prose narrative and the narrative of my heroine’s life between Freud and Babi Yar.   So the general form was in my head from the first day.  In the course of writing, I realised I needed a prologue of letters and a final section, Lisa’s ’spiritual fantasy’.

What fueled your desire to tell the story of ‘The White Hotel’’s troublesome and, ultimately, futile attempts to be adapted into a film?

The bizarre twists and turns, such as a war once ruining the project –NATO’s war against Serbia– and the bizarre characters involved.  Also the idea of weaving my life into this narrative.

Having written ‘Bleak Hotel’ and re-examining what could be described as a difficult period in your life, do you find yourself perceiving ‘The White Hotel’ in a different way now?

No, not really.  My novel is still separate from all the movie flummery.  I haven’t actually re-read it for 20 years or more, apart from browsing it to look for passages to read to an audience.

Across your extensive writing career in prose, poetry and translation, have you found that the way you write has evolved over time (in terms of time of day, place, mood, ambiance, ‘props’, etc)?

The two big changes were from writing part-time, when I was a teacher/lecturer to writing full-time;  and from poetry to mostly fiction, which came more or less simultaneously.  Poetry always in long-hand first;  fiction straight into type.  Cigarettes always to hand, apart from a two year period when I had given up.  I used to be a writaholic, but I take it easier now.

Many authors feel that all their earlier writing has an influence on their work, and that they couldn’t have written ‘C’ without writing ‘A’ and ‘B’ first.  What writing turning points across your books do you feel have influenced you most, be they research, a new style, new topic, etc?

I think my bursts of translating Akhmatova and Pushkin taught me a lot;  and the life of Akhmatova ushered in my first published novel, ‘The Flute-Player’.  The way the great Russians don’t clearly separate verse and prose, e.g. ‘Dr Zhivago’ and Pushkin calling ‘Eugene Onegin’ a ‘novel in verse’, gave me the courage to try to do the same –mix up the forms.

For what reasons did you use Kuznetsov’s text, ‘Babi Yar‘, when writing about the Holocaust? 

I didn’t actually use Kuznetsov’s text.  In his novel ‘Bibi Yar’ he quotes an eye-witness account, by the sole survivor, Dina Pronicheva.  It was her account, which echoed so strangely my ‘Don Giovanni’ poem –the falling, earth, water, fire, etc.– which made me realise my poem was the beginning of a novel.

The novel has often been discussed in relationship to pornography - what are your thoughts on these readings?

The real pornography was what the Nazis did to their victims.  Lisa’s erotic thoughts are natural and true to her character, as I saw it.

During a module studying Transgressive Literature, we examined a passage from The White Hotel as a study of taboo - in this case, the intimacy developed with the characters and the unflinching descriptionts of events.  There was such a powerful response to this that we ceased the reading of it sooner than expected and spent a long time discussing our unease and the effectiveness of the piece.  What were your intentions for the reader when writing The White Hotel, in so much as a writer can have intentions for their audience?

My reaction was surprise!  I didn’t expect it to have such an emotional effect.  I was told by one reader that she vomited on reading ‘Don Giovanni’, and by two other women that they masturbated to it.  I’m surprised by both reactions –though I prefer the second!

Many new writers whom aren’t published and aren’t in the public eye commonly feel unqualified to label themselves as ‘writers’.  When did you feel you could identify yourself by your craft, rather than simply saying ‘I write’?

I honestly don’t remember.  But I called myself a poet long before I called myself a writer.

Finally, where do you think you’ll go from here?  You say you’re taking it easy in writing now, but are there still projects that you want to get out of your system in the near future?

Yes, but I feel too uncertain about them –or rather it– to want to spell it out.   In case it doesn’t work…

D M Thomas’s new book, Bleak Hotel: The Hollywood Saga of the White Hotel is out now.  Watch this space for a follow-up review and interview.

 
With my utmost thanks to Anthony and Don for this opportunity.  I thoroughly enjoyed myself

Writing is easy, as a beginning anyway.  You sit your arse down and get on with it.  Over time, you get a bit better at it.  Time passes and the movement of ideas from your head comes through your fingers in a pen or on a keyboard more smoothly.  Finally, you get good and are enjoying what’s coming out, maybe even surprising yourself.

Publication isn’t the ‘pass’ mark of writing, and it’s unfortunate that that’s how a lot of people see it.  A lot of crap gets published and a lot of good books spend years in slush piles before they reach a publishing house reader.  There are many other outcomes of writing aside from publishing that are valid and worthwhile, including just the process of writing itself.  Someone who plays football on a Saturday shouldn’t give up kicking a ball when it becomes apparent that they’ll never play in the Premiership.

Getting something you that you’ve written published is a wonderful bonus to finishing a piece, and if you’ve got something polished and ready to go, then try your hand.  You never know how things might end up.

I’ve lifted from a post on bluechrome’s blue blog here, as it is invaluable advice to writers pitching for their first publication:

‘One of the biggest ways in which people submitting their work to bluechrome (and publishers and agents generally, I’m sure we’re not most people’s first port of call) let themselves down is by being a bit sloppy on the self editing and presentation fronts.

God knows anybody that reads this blog will know that me, me grammar and punctuation aren’t exactly bosum buddies like, but I think a lot of writers can at times forget exactly what it is that they are doing when they submit their work ‘for possible publication’, getting caught up in the dreamland of…

write it-get an agent who loves you-submit it-get signed-get published-sell the film rights for millions,

…cycle they read in the ‘How To Be A Writer In 28 Days For Fantasists’ books.

They forget that they aren’t really saying

‘Please publish my book’,

as far as the publisher is concerned, instead they are saying

‘Please invest thousands of pounds, a year of your life, a few hundred trees and what remains of your hair in the faint hope that you will make a better return on the investment than you would in an Icelandic bank’.

Which is a different perspective, when you come to think about it.

And why I get the feeling that writers don’t really consider the question they are asking, is because an amazingly small number of them seem to consider the fact that they are trying to sell their book to a publisher or agent, whether there are advances involved or not, and in these days of mass-media, they are also in the business of selling themselves, with the publisher being the first of many they have to convince that they and their book is worth the price.

OK, there are a thousand books out there (I’m sure) that will tell you what you should do when you ‘Chapter 77: Approach A Publisher’ - what letters you should write, how to tell whether they are a vanity press by the degree of enthusiasm in their response, what rights you should retain and everything else. And I’m sure that most writers at least read one of them (actually I’m not so sure) but I think sometimes writers just need to take a step back and look at the whole ‘package’ and make sure that the letters, the submission, the person they are writing to and the choice of publisher give the person receiving them the least reason possible to instantly reject them. And sometimes they could do with a bit of help.

And that is the key.

Writers, publishers get lots of submissions, and we all sit down with piles of paper and these days emails, with the best of intentions.

We sit there convinced that there is gold and are keen to find it.

We pick up the first one, carefully remove 300 strips of sellotape from the re-used envelope (amused that what used to be seen as tightness is now the sign of the eco-warrior, despite the formentioned trees the contents are asking you to butcher), check it isn’t ticking, if satisfied carefully remove the contents.

It sits there staring at us and we stare back, trying to make out the poorly photocopied letter with ‘Anvil’ crossed out and ‘Bllodaxe’ scribbled in green crayon over the top of it.

‘Dear Bllodaxe’,

but we persevere. It smells a bit musty, and maybe of cats.
But it might be a sign of eccentric genius, so we read the letter -

‘Dear Bllodaxe,

ere is te book I want you to publis. It tells about my time as a sub-Post Master in Derbysire and all the funny tings tat appened. My wife as typed it up, but we aven’t got an aitc key on te keyboard after one of te grandcildren ripped it off over Cristmas. Little sod e is, but very good wit te pooter, as e calls it. Anyways, it would be nice to ave the book by Cristmas as my broter is over from Canada and e would like a copy to take back wit im on te plane.

cheers
Alf’

Slightly concerned at this point, looking at the typed 500 pages of single-spaced double-sided A4 in front of you, smelling of cats, but we persevere and reach for the first few pages.

‘My Life as a Sub-Postmaster in Derbysire 1947-1996 (retired)’

Lots of funny tings appened wile I was a sub post master in Derbysire, between 1947 and 1995 wen I retired. I remember te first day i started and te post adn’t been delivered on time. It were quite a kerfuffle I can tell you. It only turns out tat….’

You sigh, look at the pile of misordered pages one more time and then spend half an hour trying to slide it back into the envelope.

Maybe not this time, and anyway we’re a poetry publisher who does ‘cutting edge literary fiction’, you remind yourself whilst cursing the decision to get your name put in the Writer’s Handbook, perhaps the next one will be better.

Still keen you reach for the next, and then the next and then the next three dozen.

You start to spot the flaws earlier - the crayon, the incorrect publisher name, the fact that it isn’t anything like you normally publish, and slowly your checklist changes from reasons you would want to publish the book

a. Well Written
b. Great idea or story
c. It might sell a few copies

to reasons why you don’t even need to read the manuscript, things that the writer has done or not done that make it easy for you to reject it:

a. 300 pieces of sellotape
b. Poorly presented
c. Letters that are ill thought out or poorly punctuated
d. A manuscript that is full of typos and bad syntax and grammar on the first page
e. The author spelling their name three different ways.

Anything, that gives you an excuse not to put yourself through any more torture.

Anything that makes it look as though the author doesn’t care.

So why should you?

I mean, why should you have to?

You are a publisher, you can just ring some agents and get them to send something suitable through, they know the score and always present everything so nice.

They don’t send crap like this.

They don’t waste your time.

And I think that is where Caroline and her people at BubbleCow can make a real difference. They have the knowledge, they have been there and done it and most of all they are professional.

So if you are a writer who thinks they are ready to submit their work, consider it.

If you were going to apply for a job or sell your car or do anything else where you were asking somebody to believe in you and part with their money, wouldn’t you be daft not to put the effort in?

Wouldn’t it be nice to get some cheap, quick advice that will make you stand out from the rest?

Even if it improves your submission by a few percent, it can be the difference between being published and not.

When it comes down to it, quite often publishers will have two or three manuscripts they think they can sell and have to choose between them. They can’t publish everything that they think is ‘good’ (commercially viable), so the littlest things can make a difference.

So isn’t it better to give yourself an edge if it is available?

And if you don’t, wouldn’t you be gutted if the other authors you are up against in the submission pile had?’

I think that’s about the best advice a writer hoping to see their words printed and bound can get.

A while ago I submitted a paper on what it’s like to be taught transgressive literature as a creative writing student to an external creative writing resource pool  I got it back from peer review today, and it turns out that academics can be incredibly cutting when they want to be and it’s totally anonymous.  I got warned that they didn’t pull their punches, but this guy seemed out to destroy me.  ‘Fuck off’ doesn’t really strike me as constructive criticism anyway, but hey ho.  We live and learn.  In a few months I’ll have the stones to read it all through properly and start redrafting it.  Then, I’ll send it again.  If and when it gets accepted, it’ll be a damn huge accomplishment that I’ll know I’ve earned.

It’s just been a couple of really bad weeks, and though I was anticipating a rejection, this was an awful lot worse than I was expecting, which has sort of been the icing on the cake. My card got cloned and my money spent in Dubai, so I’ve had no access to my account for over a week, which has been awkward.  More information has come out about just how badly my cousin bullid my brother when they were working together (who takes the piss out of an autistic guy in front of his workmates, really?).  Worst, though, was the box that I’d been containing my grandfather’s illness in cracked apart somewhere.

I’ve had it comfortably boxed for the last year that the Alzheimer’s was making him a bit forgetful and repetitve.  He shaved eight or nine times a morning and didn’t know who we all were sometimes.  It was shitty but I could deal with it.  Recently though, he’s begun doing things that are just undeniably ‘mad’, and this is only the beginning.  It’s going to get worse, and there’s nothing any of the family can do about it aside from support eachother.

Hurt like this is ultimately good for the soul, though.  Everyone creative who was any good got their hearts broken at least once.  When you’re happy, you tend to take everything with an aura off frivolity.  When you’re somber, you see things in a sharp, cool light.

Hey ho, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and part of writing is getting hefty criticism.  So, nevermind.

Why bats - who echolocate moving objects - are killed by turbines has remained a mystery until now. The research council thought the high-frequency noise from the turbines’ gears and blades could be disrupting the bats’ echolocation systems.

In fact, a new study shows that the moving blades cause a drop in pressure that makes the delicate lungs of bats suddenly expand, bursting the tissue’s blood vessels. This is known as a barotrauma, and is well-known to scuba divers.

Article here.

Due to my inability to operate the strings and levers of technology with more aptitude than a heroin junky elephant, I shall supply the link to the video.

Here mostly because of the awesome title and WTF value.

Scientists are receiving death threats over phone and email, as well as pleas for reassurance that their children will be safe when the 17 mile gizmo is turned on next Wednesday.

My very favourite quote comes from Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, and should serve as reassurance to us all that a chunk of Europe isn’t going to be sucked out of existence: “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.”

Original here.

The elephant, captured in 2005 in southwest Chine by illegal traders, was fed heroin-laced bananas to control him for months.  After three days in rehab, he is now ‘clean’ and to be moved to a wildlife park in Kunming.

What a nice, strange story.

Original here.

An extract from Gabe, which has been coming along very well.

Sins

I’ve heard that it’s the same at every concentration camp: no birds fly over, there aren’t any insects and you can’t hear any traffic noise.  Dachau is the same as I remember it, cold and barren in every sense of the word.  The visitors tred softly.  Near the entrance is a bronze monument to the thousands that died here made of vaguely human shapes the same as those the prisoners were reduced to, taken down to the wicks.

“I can’t believe how quiet it is,” Tilley murmurs, taking my hand.  “Even the kids have shut up.”

We glance back to the bus alongside the cars parked a way away, the young teens hanging back to the bumper and watching the camp mutely.  They have clipboards under their arms and their coats flap in the wind.

I think everyone should see a concentration camp sometime in their life, but there’s got to be some sort of minimum age.  History books make the years and the figures dry and distant, so the kids aren’t prepared at all for when they get here and see the solid bricks and dirt paths of it.  The shower rooms.  The ovens.  This isn’t like any other school outing they’ll go on.  There’s nowhere for them to sit and eat their sandwiches, and they can’t smile in the photos with their friends.  It’s an oddness that most of the camp photos  taken by visitors are all without a subject, as if the image is just a record of the place and not an indication that they were actually there.

We walk, the ground crunching like rock salt and the loudest sound after our breathing and the wind pulling through gaps in the buildings.  Closer to the shower block we pause, standing still to take in the innocuous exterior.  I desperately want a cigarette but I don’t dare light one.  Just can’t smoke in the camp and I’d be at a loss for what to do with the dog end all day.

Tilley steps into my side, her coat rustling against mine.  “When were you last here?  This is the one you went to before, right?”

“Yeah, couple years after my folks died.  I came up after doing Munich.”

She nods.  “I remember you going to Munich.  Surprised you didn’t say anything about this.”

I shrug, twist my boot in the ground to raise a bow wave of tiny stones and dust that sits static about the sole when I stop.  “Not the sort of thing you just bring up and talk about over tea.  Besides, it wasn’t really relevant to what I was doing at the time.  Just a curious detour that ended up feeling more important than what I was writing at the time, which is why I don’t have a book on Neo Nazis out.”

“Can’t look at the Nazis without the holocaust,” she replies, reflecting my sentiments exactly.

A few seconds pass and when I speak again I walk us both forward, around the shower building to where we can see some of the countryside through the fence.  “It’s a weird thing though, when you talk about it with people now.  It’s like ‘no, we’ve talked about the holocaust.  We’ve done that.  What are your thoughts about the Middle East?’, but it’s not really like that.  That whole period has been studied and preached about so much that it’s become sacred in itself, and it’s like we’re not supposed to talk about it.  But we have to, because it’s about people.  It was a mixed pot of blacks, gays, the disabled and intellectuals that got trooped through here alongside the Jews, and it was people who carried it all out.  Everyone should see places like this so they can get a feel for what people can do, can really actually do, at their worst.  People will torture, maim and kill if you just give them an excuse.”

We stand for long minutes with nothing but the wind, me studying the buildings and Tilley studying the chest of her coat. 

She gets hold of my gaze.  “Gabe, I know that you research some pretty messed up stuff for a living.  Evil, terrible things sometimes, and I know it’s because it needs to be brought out into the public light.  But, don’t you ever feel that…  When you’re spending months getting the primary source material about whatever, do you ever start to see their point?  Start agreeing with it?”

I feel a pressure in my temples as I frown.  “You mean like brainwashing?”

Her orange hair flicks in tapers as she shakes her head, and I can almost hear the warning bleeps of her backtracking.  “No, I mean getting saturated by their way of thinking.”

“No.”  The answer seemed to come faster than she was expecting.  I step away a little and face her, needing her attention wholly because she needs to understand this.  If she can’t understand this, then she doesn’t understand me as well as I either of us had thought.  “With any research you do into so called ‘dark’ subject matter, you start finding symbols coming out: plugs at the end of steel wires that conduct the heat of the thing straight into you without getting bypassed by unbiased reasoning and cold logic.  With the holocaust it was this one photo.”

I can see it in my hands even though I haven’t looked at it in years, and I want Tilley to see it now with me as much as I don’t ever want her to.

“It’s this gaunt woman, easily getting onto eighty, with arms as wide as my wrists all the way up and she’s hunched and laboring, and behind her there’s this little girl.  Around seven or eight years old, filthy, and she’s wearing these huge workmen Wellington boots, and that photo just brings it all together for me.  How did we let the fuckers get away with this shit for so long?  We knew what Auschwitz was and where it was.  We could have flown over and bombed it, and harsh as it sounds, the people inside would have been worth it.”

I jab a hand out to the crumbling building, dimly aware to keep my voice down.

“The guy who blew up the shower blocks is one of my biggest fucking heroes.  To put it in short, Hitler was a cunt, the Nazis were cunts, and the notion of distilling the populous down to the strongest was a piss poor excuse.”

Tilley watches me and sucks her bottom lip.  Finally it comes out grey with the faint white lines of tooth imprints.  “Is that why you didn’t write the book in the end?  Because it all boiled down to, pretty much, those two sentences for you?”

Christ, I want that fag.  My hand feels coarse and frozen as I press the heel across my jaw.  I start us walking again, away from the showers and keeping to the perimeter fence.  “It was far too close to my folks going,” I reply eventually.  “When I looked at pictures of the bodies being piled high, I’d see them.  I’d see my dad’s boots in the piles of shoes.”

The ground crunches for eight more paces, then, “I’m sorry.”

I give her a sideway glance.  “Nothing to be sorry about.  Just, your parents dying is the big kicker.”  I snort and try not to grin.  “Hell, no bugger ever sat me down when I was a lad and told me that these people that I depended on and needed like we need our shadows to be here would just die on me one day, and no mention of the possibility of them both going at the same time.  They teach you bollocks about Oxbow lakes and erosion in school.  There should have been a class where you got told: ‘one day they’re going to die and leave you, and it’s a bitch but it’s not as bad as you think it’ll be, and life will go on.  Before you realise that, though, you’ll spend a long time wanting to die.’  No one warns anyone about that.”

Tilley nods, not looking at me.  “Up until a few years ago, I used to hope that I’d die before them.  Just dodge the whole ordeal.  It’s selfish, but, just felt easier.”

We stop again and I watch her, suddenly feeling that maybe I understand her a bit better than I thought.  Same goes for her, I think.

She squints and shoves her hands into her pockets.  “You wanna get out of here for a bit?  Take a few hours off and come back?”

“Yeah.  I’m getting hungry and I don’t reckon they’ll have built a café here just yet.”

A single raised brow, thoughtful.  “Or a gift shop.”

“What would they sell?”

“Honestly, I shudder to think.”

An 85-year-old woman boldly went for her gun and busted a would-be burglar inside her home, then forced him to call police while she kept him in her sights, police said.

I like to think she looked a little something like this:

Original.