Me Three

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3.10.05

The Size of My Hat

By Steve Finbow

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There may have been ducks on the wall, I can't really remember. There was definitely embossed wallpaper. I remember stones: stones in the shape of things; a stone the shape of a swan, a stone the shape of a slipper, and a large stone that sat in the centre of the hearth and was the shape of, well, as far as I could tell, a stone. There were antimacassars on the backs of the napped chairs and mismatched sofa. There was a wicker stool. Brass ashtrays, coal buckets, and tongs made from the remnants of mortar shells and other ordnance. I was 10 years old. A sickly child. A loner. My brother had no interest in me and I had no interest in him. I took solace in my illness and was addicted to the attention of my grandparents. On that day, my brother had constructed a go-cart out of crates, planks of wood, rope, and old pram wheels he had scavenged from the neighbours and from the wasteland behind the house – The Big Pit we called it. It was his day and I wasn’t the centre of attention.

Art by Nicholas Allanach

My asthma reared its head, my lungs constricted, and my cough sounded through the house. My grandmother made a concoction of hot water, camphor, and cloves, and I sat with a towel over my head breathing in the potion. How do you feel? My grandmother asked. OK, I said. It was time to wrest the day from my brother. Nan, I said, the doctor said I might have TV. She looked at me. She didn't smile, she didn't frown. He said what, dear? He said I might have TV. Last week when I went to see him. Do you mean TB? I bit my bottom lip. Did I? I wasn't sure. I had watched a programme about tuberculosis, didn't know what it was and couldn't pronounce it; all I saw were people coughing their lungs up. I had to keep going. No, TV. The doctor said it's much worse than TB. My grandmother walked away. A lie. And I’d been caught. It was the first time. There would be others – I was Jewish. I was descended from Bonnie Prince Charlie. I had a snake for a pet. My grandmother returned with one of her cups of sweet tea. Here you are, dear. Drink this. It'll make you feel better. The teacup was Royal Doulton, the pattern Old Country Roses; and years later, in her senility, my grandmother would spend half an hour trying to scrape from her dessert bowl the red and yellow flowers believing them to be fruit.

“Fiction is a lie covering up a deep truth,” Mario Vargas Llosa.

“When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.” Isaac Bashevis Singer.

“He who cannot lie does not know what the truth is.” Friedrich Nietzsche.

Telling porkies* and senility – seems like my life will be stretched between the two and measured thus. Last year, the fiction writers who were most adept at turning their lies into truths were American – Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Stephen Elliot’s Happy Baby, anything by George Saunders; but this year American writers seem to be slow off the mark. In 2005, British writers are finally tackling the big subjects – Saturday by Ian McEwan and Wreckage by Niall Griffiths. I have always been a McEwan fan but became increasingly frustrated by his reluctance to tackle issues. He does fear well. He does sex well. In Between the Sheets and First Love Last Rites are two of the best collections of short stories I have read. Black Dogs and the Comfort of Strangers are detailed analyses of strangeness and dread. I am not a big fan of The Child in Time, and I do not understand how Amsterdam won the Booker Prize. Enduring Love I saw as the apogee of McEwan’s earlier writing, and thought Atonement a mature departure, but Saturday is immense. Its major theme, similar to Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog, is the expansile nature of terror and violence from the personal to the global. Apart from one jarring scene, in which the main character, a neurosurgeon, has a conversation with his daughter about Iraq, which I think forced and false, the novel is perfect.

Niall Griffiths’ Wreckage is a sequel to his equally brilliant Stump – more of which next time. The novel follows two Scousers (Liverpudlians) on their journey back from Wales and their (mis)adventures with a rucksack of stolen money. The novel’s dialogue, written in idiomatic Scouse, is a dialect form both harsh and musical. The novel also explores the concentricity of terror and man’s incapacity to escape the inheritance of violence. The wreckage of the title is both human wreckage – junkies, alcoholics, thieves, murderers, and the wreckage seen on our TV screens – 9/11, Iraq.

I am 11 years old and on holiday. I’m from London, all local kids are wankers. Two boys leer at me from across the street. They are older. I flip them the finger, thinking that my cool cosmopolitan ways will instil fear. I am wrong. They dodge traffic as they run toward me. I take off. I don’t know this area, so it’s by chance that I dart down an alley and find myself ten feet from a cliff’s edge. I look behind and see them turn the corner. Rickety steps lead down to the beach and I take them two at a time. I lose my footing ten steps from the bottom and fall, scuffing my knees, grazing my cheek. I hear the boys laugh. They do not follow. To get back to town, I clamber across slippery rocks, wade through pools thick with seaweed. My face is swollen, my knees are sore, and my trousers torn. I reach home. Whatever happened to you, my mother asks. I look at her. Two big boys beat me up, Mum. Come here she says, and enfolds me in her mum smell – towels, warm milk, tobacco tang. I want to go home, I say and start to cry. Later that year she buys me a bike.

I have argued that America is becoming insular, self-regarding, and this is demonstrative in the plethora of memoirs spewing from your shores – Augusten Burroughs (whose Dry I’ll write more on next time); Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City; Steven Sorrentino’s Luncheonette: A Memoir, to name but a few. This is denial, this is navel-gazing – there’s another world out there, folks. To quote EL Doctorow, “The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.” It is as if a million diseased and disoriented whales have washed up on beaches from Deer Isle, Maine to Coronado, California. They smell of the age-old sea, they smell of necrosis, and you’re ignoring them, pretending they’re not there, hoping they’ll go away, disappear, while you turn your backs and stare down your microscopes at the autobiographical animalcules gathered there. I hope Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Marc Bojanowski’s The Dog Fighter provide respite from the narcissistic catoblepas that is American memoir.

* porkies = pork pies = lies.

Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.

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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.