Kissing Frogs

That ‘The Playhouse‘ has made it as far as publication – finally – is a story in itself. Not one I shall be around to tell, but it has all the components of a good book. It has multi-faceted and flawed characters, a strong plot and a lot of conflict. It starts with a compelling hook and has plenty of obstacles for the ‘heroine’ to overcome – and there are a lot of those. Its journey from one book to a completely different one was aided, in no small part, by a character who entered stage left – the longstanding theatre tradition for evil or conflict. Based on historic, cultural, and psychological associations – stage left is considered the “cold” or “sinister” side – and, goodness, he brought some conflict with him. His appearance, like everything that followed was bizarre in the extreme. Although, when asked, I say that it was a memory that appeared while sitting on a beach, that is a bit of fiction. I was in the South West of France and I was sitting on a beach but I was writing a chapter of the original book. I had been struggling with a scene where the ‘heroine’ was dressing to meet someone and was trying to decide how to make her appearance sexy, alluring. All the writing felt unconvincing and full of noun piles. Quite suddenly, a voice appeared my head saying,

‘Come on, you can do better than that, tart her up a bit.’

The voice was so clear and the image of the person saying it so vivid, it was difficult not to feel he was standing behind me. What it was that prompted that, why then, why there is an insoluble puzzle. But, it happened and a lot of things happened as a result.

Having not thought of this unexpected arrival in my plotline for years, there was a mixture of bewilderment and then curiosity. I had no idea as to where he was or anything about his life since we last met. For the time being, I thought it might be interesting to try and weave him in to the plot of the current novel as a sort of Jiminy Cricket character, but whilst it worked on some levels, it was unsatisfactory on others, not the least because he seemed to want to be centre stage, something that was a characteristic of his that I did remember.

Unfortunately, for him, for me, I’m not sure, he appeared at a time when I was sat up on a ledge looking down at some very dark events in my life. After years of investigations and enquiries, meetings with the hospital board, the decision had come back from the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman that, in spite of’some failings’, the death of my mother was not due to negligence. We had fought for years to get the way in which she was treated and died recognised as a catastrophic litany of failure on behalf of the hospital, but we were overruled and given the ‘lessons will be learned’ speech. I, who had been closest to it all, was diagnosed with PTSD and suffered frequent, heart-breaking flashbacks of the unqualified nurses trying to get a canula in and her shrieking with pain, and fear. Though drugs were offered to me and taken to numb reality, self-medication with wine and vodka worked best. Unfortunately, this often resulted in bizarre and difficult bouts of behaviour which were tough for all those involved.

The holiday in France and being away from a life full of other worries and demands was supposed to be a way of breaking the pattern. Curiously, it created something else which did much more damage than an odd memory should have.

Once home, the curiosity about my now very present stage left intruder had deepened and, in the way these things so often happen, he suddenly started appearing in conversations with people from our shared past and a dozen other ‘hey, look, it’s me, remember’ ways. It was relentless. No choice but to try and make contact. Oh, what a bad, bad decision that was. My memories of him, once they surfaced, were very clear and very specific. I presupposed, completely wrongly, his would be the same or similar. Getting a response was a slow business. I got a holding reply to my initial message, but it was months before we actually had any sort of actual communication and that was a peculiar online conversation. I thought then, and think now, that he was pissed and that I only had 50% of his attention. My plan to hark back to the old days did not go in the way I expected. After some disconnected ramblings, I decided to give up and close the conversation. ‘Let’s stay in touch,’ he said. And there, there is where it all went profoundly and horribly wrong. Staying in touch clearly had completely different meanings for the two of us.

At that point, the original book was floundering badly. I had got a publisher lined up and it was really a case of pulling it in to some sort of shape. But, it didn’t want to be pulled in to the story it started out as. It had been derailed, upended and wouldn’t be massaged back to its original plot and the characters had all gone walkabout. In the meantime, I was stuck with Banquo’s ghost trailing around in the background. It quickly became apparent that ‘staying in touch’ was not what was on offer and it became even clearer that my thoughts about exchanging phone numbers, Zoom chats, catching up, were all figments of my overactive imagination. Our ghost, wanted to remain exactly that, invisible, unsubstantial and in a liminal space that I could not access. The more obvious this became, the more frantic I became to make ‘something’ happen, to make him flesh.

The high ledge I had been balancing on was becoming narrower and narrower and high winds were blowing that were full of more loss, friends dying, and then a car crash writing my beloved car off. There was less and less to hang on to except the bottles and I began gripping them more and more tightly in an attempt to blot out all the broken, fractured pieces of my life as they blasted round me. My behaviour became erratic and I got careless about sending messages when me and the bottle had spent a long day together. Sending the email was probably a mistake and my therapist says I should acknowledge that the recipient might have felt uncomfortable and I should apologise. Fuck that. His reply, the ‘hounding and stalking’ email, was a shove in the back, a pair of hands on my shoulders pushing me forward. I dropped off the edge and fell in to a morass of loss, misery and a vortex of hurt. The book was ditched entirely and it was years before I could even begin to think about touching it. The new book was something quite different and although the trigger for it was born out of extremes of misery, it is a stronger, more powerful and the little voice in my head in France, now takes up an entire imaginary world where he alone is king which is almost certainly not what he would want, but it’s what he got. Actions have consequences after all.