I could admit the truth. And with another man, one I knew better or longer, I would. But Len is a little too openly eager for company to be dealt any favours just yet.
"You should use him as material.” I flatten a bill on to the bar sufficient to cover both our drinks. "I thought you liked horror stories."
"Definitely. But there’s a difference between imagining bad things and doing bad things."
"I hope you’re right. Or some of us would be in real trouble,” I say, and give Len a comradely pat on the shoulder as I go. The big kid smiles. And damn if I don’t feel a smile of my own doing its thing too.
Angela’s Story
Transcribed from Tape Recording No. 1
There once was a girl who was haunted by a ghost. A terrible man who does terrible things who would visit her in her dreams. The girl had never had a friend, but she knew enough to know this wasn’t what he was. No matter how much she prayed or how good she was or how she tried to believe it was true when others would tell her there was no such thing as ghosts, the terrible man would come and prove that all the wishing and prayers in the world could never wish or pray him away. This was why the girl had to keep her ghost to herself.
The only connection, the only intimacy she would allow herself with him was to give him a name.
The Sandman.
Everyone has parents. Knowing this is like knowing that, one day, all of us will die. Two things common to every person in the world.
But there were times when the girl thought she was the singular exception to this supposedly inescapable rule. Times she felt certain she was the only person who’d ever lived who had neither a mother nor a father. She simply appeared in the middle of her own story, just as the terrible man who does terrible things walked into the middle of her dreams. The girl is real, but only in the way that a character in a story is real. If she were a character in a story, it would explain how she had no parents, as characters aren’t born but just are, brought into being on the whim of their authors.
What troubled the girl almost as much as being haunted by the terrible man who does terrible things was that she had no idea who her author might be. If she knew that, she’d at least know who to blame.
Even characters have a past, though they may not have lived it as the living do. The girl, for instance, was an orphan. People never spoke of where she came from, and the girl never asked, and in this way it was never known. She was a mystery to others as much as to herself. She was a problem that needed solving.
There were books the girl had read where orphans such as herself lived in homes with other orphans. And although these homes were often places of longing and cruelty, the girl wished she could live in one, so that she was not the only one like herself. Instead, she was sent to live in foster homes, which are not like the orphanages in books, but just regular homes with people who are paid to look after someone like the girl. When she was ten, she moved four times. When she was eleven, twice more. When she was twelve, she moved once a month for a year. And all along the Sandman followed her. Showing her the things he would do if he were real, and continued to do in her dreams.
And then, when she was thirteen, she was sent to live in an old farmhouse in the dark forests to the north, further north than most farms were ever meant to be. Her foster parents there were the oldest she’d had yet. Edra was the wife’s name, and Jacob the husband’s. They had no children of their own, only their hardscrabble farm, which yielded just enough to feed them through the long winters. Perhaps it was their childlessness that made them so happy when the girl came to them. She was still a mystery, still a problem. But Edra and Jacob loved her before they had any reason to, loved her more than if they’d had a child of their own. It was the suffering the girl had seen that prompted their love, for they were farmers of land that fought them over everything they took from it. Edra and Jacob knew suffering, and had some idea of what it could do to a girl, alone.
For a time, the girl was as happy—or as close to happy—as she’d ever been. There was comfort in the kindness her elderly foster parents showed her. She had a home in which she might live for years instead of weeks. There was a school in the town down the road she took the bus to every day, and where there were books for her to read, and fellow students she dreamed of one day making friends of. It was, for a time, what she’d imagined normal might be like.
Her contentment had been so great and without precedent that she’d almost forgotten about the terrible man who does terrible things. It had been a while since her night thoughts had been interrupted by his appearance. So it is with the most awful kind of surprise when she comes home from school one afternoon in late autumn to overhear Edra and Jacob talking about a little girl who’d disappeared from town.
Thirteen years old. The same age as her. Playing outside in the yard one minute, gone the next. The police and volunteer search parties had looked everywhere for her, but for three days the missing girl remained missing. The authorities were forced to presume foul play. They had no suspect in mind. Their only lead was that some in town had lately noticed a stranger walking the cracked sidewalks at night. A tall, sloped-shouldered man, a figure who kept to the shadows. "A man with no face,” was how one witness put it. Another said it seemed the man was searching for something, though this was an impression and nothing more. Aside from this, no details were known of him.
But they were known to the girl. For she knew who the dark figure was even though she wasn’t there to see him. She knew who had taken a girl in town the same age as her. The Sandman. Except now he’d escaped the constraints of her dream world and entered the real, where he could do all the terrible things he desired to do.
The girl was certain of all this, along with something else. She knew what the Sandman searched for as he walked in the night shadows.
He searched for her.
Write What You Know.
This is one of the primary Writers’ Rules, though an unnecessary one, as the initial inclination of most is toward autobiography anyway. The imagination comes later, if it comes at all, after all the pages of the family photo album have been turned, love affairs autopsied, coming-of-age revelations and domestic tragedies rehashed on the page. Usually, people find their own lives sufficiently fascinating to never have to confront the problem of making things up. The Kensington Circle is no exception. Evelyn’s campus sexcapade, Petra’s marital breakdown, Ivan’s sewer-rat metamorphosis. I’m jealous of them. It would make writing so much easier if I never tired of seeing the same face in the mirror.
But what if you don’t particularly find the life you know all that interesting? Real, yes. And marked by its share of loss, redeemed by the love of a son with eyes the colour of his mother’s. It’s just that I don’t see my life as satisfactory material to present as fiction. I find it challenge enough just muddling along as who I am, never mind casting myself as hero.
This is the reasoning I call on when, as now, I try to squeeze out a paragraph to be read at the next circle meeting, and nothing comes. I’m taking lunch at my desk, gnawing on a cafeteria hamand-cheese, randomly pecking at the keys of my computer. Tim Earheart, who finds my literary aspirations perplexing (“Why do you think anybody would pay to read the shit you’re pulling out of your ass?” is how he put it to me, unanswerably, when I told him of my attendance at a fictionwriting circle), comes by to read over my shoulder.
“I’m no judge,” he says, “but I’m not sure you’re going anywhere with this.”
He’s right. Over the next hour and a half, only a few sentences remain on the screen.
Here’s