Monday 28 May 2018

Episode One - the man with enormous feet


I was once very good at telling lies before I stopped and realised it was a type of emotional cancer.

Even today, I think I live a duplicitous life, playing roles, being good at one thing and trying to be good at another. Can I really call myself a writer or am just pretending? Some of the dead voices start echoing back: ‘you’re wasting your time… you’re never be a writer!'

As you can hear, low aspiration in my past was a virtue.

On the road down to the river is a sign that says: No Entry. That’s the sort of road I like to go down. There are always two horses on the other side of the water and some long carriageway shuffling cars along. If you sit on a bench you can meet a man with enormous feet and he can tell you:

‘See the world, don’t waste your time being in one place. I have been everywhere and seen everything.’

That was good advice back then and so I’ve started travelling.  

But it is hard this journey. I had to decide on a destination and found a story from my family which meant I might end up at Fiction Point. I am not sure if it is real or imagined. It seems real enough on a map, the middle of nowhere across the vast tracts of land in North America, population 438.

Migration and invitation, some of them headed out for a better life; stoke the fires, produce a brood, farm the land. Until things went wrong. No one said anything when they came back.

I think reality caught up with the lies because you can’t rid yourself of the past. Starting out with nothing, frontier life, less rules and law than there had ever been.

The dirt gets in the teeth, the sand drifts north then south, the sun is hot, and the cold is worse; the pots are fired, the land is broke, the money stretched until the money runs out. Old habits die hard in the harsh life and brawls in bars mean somebody is bound to get hurt. Perhaps it was their own fault, but murder, manslaughter all adds to one thing: it’s time to get out.

I don’t think this is what the man with enormous feet meant when he said you should travel the world. Above, they had made a mistake; they had only made it to one destination. But I think I am going to go there. I have imagined that I will look in the register of births and deaths and see something which intrigues me because I am a writer. I will be invited to stay at someone’s house, be fed and watered and sleep the night. In the morning I will notice something strange. I don’t know what it is. There is a young girl on a swing, and she is swinging like crazy, back and forth, back and forth, swinging in the chill of the morning.

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