28th Best in the World or 'David Tries Writing for an Anthology'

       The real short story is - I didn't get published in an anthology. This is how I tried, and the story, for those who want to read it.

Roehampton University have just started Fincham Press to match themselves with the big guns over at Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, along with all the other big universities out there who publish their own work. Every year (for 2 years now) they've run and will be running a competition for the students of Creative Writing, English and Children's Literature to be published in an anthology of short stories. So - published, no agent, my name in a book - sold.

I entered the competition with my short story 'If I Were a Blackbird'. I'm very pleased to announce that while I didn't make the 21 winners who will be published, I've just been emailed and told that I made the longlist of 28 out of 171 entries. So basically I was somewhere among the seven runners up. Now published I'm not, but that's pretty damn good in my opinion.

As the speaker, Dr Bernadine Evaristo said at the Fincham Press launch event I attended with the missus, failure is part of an author's life. 

I'm not taking this as a failure. If I was the 28th best author in the world (whoever decides that), I'd be the happiest person on earth (well...apart from numbers 1 through 27...). Still, a group of judges read my work and said it was good enough to be published. So I'm taking this as a success - I'm getting warmer.

So for those of you who are interested, here's my short story, and a congratulations to the 21 entries who were published and everyone else in the competition who was brave enough to enter. Roll on next year…

If I Were a Blackbird

‘If I were a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing.’

The song drowns out my other thoughts, my granddad’s voice still fresh. I’d give all my pencils and paints just to have him here. But I can’t, so I sing his songs to myself. One of infinite fragments of Patrick Busby I wish I’d recorded on my phone, just to listen to when I need him. A fourteen-year-old boy who still needs his granddad, I bet I’m the only one.

‘Am I weird-looking, Eve?’ I ask across the picnic blanket. ‘Be honest.’

Eve Quinn stares back at me, a half chewed ball of melon puffing her cheek like a hamster.

‘When you ask questions like that, yeah,’ she states, taking a big swallow.

I begin to reply but my head jerks to the side with a wet slap.

‘You get radio on those things, Busby?’ The shout comes from across wet field by the pond that divides the boy’s and girl’s schools. I came to St George’s to escape people like this.

I wipe the side of my face with the handkerchief Eve hands me, and catch her looking down at her sandwich.

‘Ignore them,’ she mumbles.  She never acknowledges them, but she doesn’t stand up for me either. I watch them move towards the woods at the east end of the pond, laughing. I gaze over at the sunflower field in the west: a yellow line in the distance tracing the outline of my favourite place to draw.

‘I don’t know why they ever thought a lake would stop boys and girls slipping through the hedges to meet up,’ Eve says, changing the subject like always. ‘There’s all sorts of ways across.’

I nod, taking another sandwich.

‘I mean there’s the boats?’

I imagine I’m a pirate, sailing away. I know they’re meant for rowing practice, and I’d never voice my fantasies to anyone, not Eve, definitely not Dad. Mum had listened, before she died too.

 ‘Why don’t you tell someone?’ Eve’s looking at me and I can tell I’ve been staring into nothing. ‘And stop that!’ she snaps, batting my hand from the eyebrow where I’ve begun to pluck the brown hairs from the end. I’ve tried everything; plastering my fingers, wearing gloves, but still I pull.

Her blue-streaked, black hair stands up at funny angles, her nose too long and pointed. Why isn’t she picked on for that?

She reaches across the blanket for another jam sandwich. That’s why I like her. Not many girls still pack a chequered blanket when they go for picnics, or go for picnics full stop in November.

‘Because it’s hard over here.’ I always say the same thing. Those five easy words that make my life seem more difficult than everyone else’s.

‘But that’s the point, Callum,’ she pleads, pushing the plate of bready triangles closer to my toes. ‘Do you think it’s not hard for us? Everyone has struggles. We all find ourselves targets sometimes. You either learn to dodge or throw something back. We come here because it’s different, because there’s something particular in the romance of the two opposing manors lost in the woods.’

She looks so suddenly embarrassed. My bald brow crinkles and my usually affectionless hand goes out to comfort her. Touching her purple-tighted knee I panic and consider pulling away, but decide to leave it there and she lets me.

 ‘You don’t talk like real people.’ Before I can stop myself, I add: ‘You’d be interesting to draw.’ My cheeks flare and I’m quick to avert my eyes.

‘We are weird, Busby,’ she says, laughing. My hand slips onto the blanket. ‘And the truth is I came here because my mum and dad did. They met over the lake just like us. They’d go crazy if they knew we were meeting like this though.’

I think of my parents, just for a second, the mother who died long ago, the father who forgets my birthday: the reason why I miss my granddad so much, sitting at home with his stacks of Irish records and dusty old draught board. My rock after Mum died, singing me Irish songs about blackbirds when I needed comfort; now a constant reminder that my excuse for a father is all I have left.

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘You’re a boy, and boys are dangerous and are only interested in getting me pregnant.’

‘I don’t really think I’d ever do that,’ I reassure, laughing and scratching my earlobe. My hand unconsciously creeps along my brow and tugs on the sparse hairs.

‘Stop it!’ Eve bats my hand away again. ‘You do it for everything!’

‘I can’t help it,’ I snap. I fall silent, guilty. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t say sorry,’ she says. ‘I just don’t want to be the one who makes you do that.’

‘I always do it,’ I say. ‘When I’m nervous, happy or when I’m drawing or reading, I find my hand pulling and I know I can’t stop. It’s become comfortable and I hate it.’

She has such a pitying expression on her face I want to pull again.

‘Except…’ I say, hesitant.

‘Except what?’ she pushes.

‘When I read about art,’ I admit. ‘Or when I sit in the sunflower field and get caught up in the life and death in a living thing.’ I always bring my sketchbook in my bag, even when I’m not going to art. I aim to join great men, unappreciated in their times.  ‘That’s when my hands stop twitching. If I could take a tent and set up camp there, away from the school, away from Dad, then I would. I came here because he’s fed up of me. I thought I could escape, but all I’ve found is a trap; a lie.’

Eve is smiling and I don’t know why.

‘You don’t talk like real people either,’ she says. ‘Come on then.’ She jumps up, taking the hamper and the blanket from underneath me. ‘We’re going to the sunflower field; you can draw a masterpiece and I can draw stick-men.’

*

I love art on Thursday mornings. I always get the seat by the window and take to my work with fresh vigour with the beautiful expanse of Norfolk spread before me. Maybe Eve is right, maybe it is beautiful here.

I smile. I filled about six pages in my sketchbook sitting with her in the sunflower field, concealed by the tall stalks. She didn’t draw but danced around instead, leaping from stones and fiddled with yellow petals.

But it’s the separation from her, locked in my dorm room at night where my hand starts to twitch. The silent, ever present urge to fix the stabbing pain in my brow.

I wish my window opened more than two inches. If it did, I’d want to creep along the ledge that runs around this old country house like a spider. Maybe I’d sneak into their rooms and bite them as they sleep.

But even as a spider I know I’d be gutless.

I think of Mrs Turner’s last words that day:

‘All great artists have their troubles. Sometimes great art is born in response to great pain and terrible sadness.’

And those three terrible boys just sit at the back, sticking two fingers in their mouths.

But Mrs Turner’s words speak to me. My world is a picture, and if I stop and appreciate it every now and again, the struggles beauty is born under isn’t wasted.

I swing my canvas bag onto my shoulder. But I turn into a wall. A cigarette-breathed wall named James Spade.

‘Why you smiling Sput-dick?’ he spits. I assume that penis puns on satellites are the height of sophisticated, ear-related humour.

I wish I could articulate the thoughts in my head, the long list of scathing retorts I’ve been building for months.

‘I don’t know,’ I murmur instead.

‘I thought Turner said you had to experience pain to do good stuff.’ He smirks. ‘I thought I’d help her little artist.’

I realise his friends are behind him, like hyenas to his prowling predator.

James seizes a clump of my t-shirt and pushes me back onto the desk. I try to scream but he clamps a reeking hand over my mouth. I kick but I’m weak and he’s well trained in torture.

‘You want to be like that guy who cut off his ear?’ he sneers.  ‘It’d be an improvement.’ One of the others passes him the scissors.

I’m sweating, and crying, and struggling but it’s pointless. I can’t move under the bigger boy’s weight. Maybe I deserve this.

He’s still laughing as he places the blunt blades to my ear. I hear the slide of metal on metal and it’s so intimately close I think I’m going to throw up.

I’m shouting ‘please’ and ‘no’ but his hand is a gag. My tears are rivers down the sides of my face and the table is paper for him to draw in my blood.

He clamps the blades down, laughing. The pain is immeasurable, intense, spreading out from the point with overpowering force. The cold of metal and the air on my exposed, bloody flesh is painful and horrific and disgusting and I do throw up this time.

He’s repulsed; blood and vomit all over him as he draws back and I scream, scream, scream. My voice fills the room, the school and the moor and I wish I would die.

*

It’s been two weeks. James got kicked out of school. Of course he did. I’m due to give evidence at his court hearing.

I have no eyebrows left to speak of. The helplessness of it all keeps me in my hospital bed for a week, and now in the solitude of my dorm bed a week later. Dad doesn’t want to know. ‘Should have fought back,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I teach you nothing?’

I can’t sleep because my ear still hurts so much. Mrs Chudleigh in the sick room said: ‘You just have to sleep on your right side’. As if I can control how I sleep. I end up sprawled out most nights and sometimes on the floor.

This means I’m awake, like usual when the rapping comes at the misty window above my bed; a square of starry night covered by leaden criss-cross panes.

I jump up and throw open the moth-eaten old curtains.

She looks like a pixie in the moonlight, like Tinkerbell coming to take me back to Neverland after I decided growing up wasn’t worth it. Her blue hair is tied back and she’s wearing a Ramones t-shirt.

Clearly she’s taken to desperate measures to reach me. She braces herself, seizes the frame of the window and pulls. The supposedly ‘suicide-proof’ locks break easily with her touch.

‘How did you do that?’ I ask, shocked.

‘Grow a pair, Busby!’ she challenges. ‘You’ve got to put your back into it.’

Instead of climbing in, she stays perched there, looking at me.

‘Come on,’ she commands. ‘This place is so much cooler at night.’

I pick at the hem of my pyjama top.

‘Callum Busby,’ she states. ‘You’ve ignored me for two weeks and I’m willing to forgive you. Now have you ever wondered why I bothered staying friends with you?’

I stare back, scared of the answer.

‘It’s because you impress me.’ She smiles. ‘You take sticks of graphite and tubes of paint and you create the most beautiful things. You’re picked on because you’re amazing. And you know what? I like you because I can relate to you. You think it’s not bullying when every bloody person in this school, bullies or not, sees right through me because I’m different, because I have weird hair.’ She pauses, like the words are a struggle. ‘Because I’m not beautiful. I like you because you are the only one here who actually sees me as a person. Now let me try and do the same.’

I move towards the windowsill.

‘Really, Busby?’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘You think you can scale the walls in your jammies? Get dressed!’

I redden and turn my back so she can’t see anything. When I turn back round, fully dressed, she seems curious, even smiling a little.

We edge along the building and I tremble. I didn’t think I was afraid of heights, but tiptoeing along a ledge, five stories above the hard, November ground is either wildly brave or mindlessly stupid.

‘You alright, Callum?’ Eve asks, as if she is walking through a field with miles of space either side of her.

‘Fine,’ I snap.

‘Is it the fun you’re afraid of?’

‘There’s fun and there’s having a death-wish,’ I hiss.

‘What was that?’

‘Nothing,’ I mumble.

‘Better. Now it’s not much further and it’s worth it.’

We walk past window after window, with arches far too fancy for boy’s dorms. Sometimes we pause and dart across, one at a time, because the curtains are open.

There’s a window ajar and Eve ducks inside. I follow cautiously, grateful to move away from the scary Ledge of Doom.

I hear a scratch and hiss and Eve’s face bursts into orange by the flame of a match. Her eyes are shadowed as if she’s about to start telling a ghost story.

There’s a door beside a narrow staircase, apparently winding up into nothing.

I look to the door, then to Eve, no-brows raised.

‘It’s locked, Sherlock,’ she says. ‘Come on, it’s amazing.’

She grabs my hand and pulls, her fingers sliding down my palm. I shiver.

I follow her up the stairs and pray my palms don’t start to sweat.

It’s narrow and I think I’m going to get stuck as we weave our way higher. Eve slips through easily with her small, boyish frame.

I collapse through the hole and flump to the floor. I straighten up, cough and gasp all at once.

We’re in an attic, but it’s unlike any attic I’ve ever seen. The ceilings are vaulted, with beams as thick as a car and heights too dizzying and dark to make out. All along the sides are windows; arched like the dorms, though these are glassless and skinny. I imagine I’m an archer, firing my bow against the horde of oncoming foes.

In the middle of the room there’s a little camp stove and two sleeping bags.

‘We’re making s’mores,’ Eve states, as though that’s a normal thing to do at 2 o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday. ‘And you’re going to tell me which of those pricks did that to your ear.’

I’m silent.

 ‘Stop it.’ She grabs my arm.

I look down and there they are, the eyebrow hairs between my thumb and forefinger; staring up at me with accusing looks on their follicles.

‘I heard what happened, Callum, everyone across the pond is talking about it. So there’s no point lying to me. Sit and talk. I’ll cook.’

‘They cornered me,’ I begin, my voice cracking a little.

I think it’s better to just start. My hand aches from the effort. I want to pull. I want to deface my features because they made me feel insignificant.

The smell of marshmallows and chocolate fills the cavernous space. Eve cooks and listens.

‘There were three of them, like always. I started to cry.’

Eve doesn’t well up for me. She only keeps eye contact, not sad or happy. Neutral: a blank canvas ready for my expression.

‘You know what they usually do; hit me where I can’t show people, dunk my head in the toilet, draw penises on my paintings. But this time it was different. I don’t know why, it just is sometimes I guess. Maybe it was because I cried. Maybe I looked weak. Maybe it looked like I deserved it.’

My hand is up again and Eve doesn’t move, just looks and I see her. I lower it.

The s’more is on the plate now, gooey and chocolaty. She crosses the space between us and holds my hand.

 ‘God it hurt so much Eve. I felt the steel beneath my skin and I wanted to move it but I couldn’t. I thought I was going to die in the one room I feel like a person. And there was so much blood. That’s why James ran away. That’s how they caught him and expelled him in the end. But you know what? I’m glad I stayed here.’

Eve smiled and came and hugged me, squeezed me on the dusty floor.

‘You know what I want you to do?’ she says. ‘I want you to paint and trap that day forever in the paper. Then you take it to the art room and hang it on the wall to show it doesn’t scare you any more. Because, to be quite honest, Busby, I think you’d look better with eyebrows.’

I nod slowly, face buried in her neck. I always love the curve of her collarbone.

‘I’m sorry I ignored your problems,’ I whisper. ‘I see you, I see you all the time.’

She snuggles her face into my hair; her warm breath prickling the nerves that never thought they’d be touched.

I know that in Eve I’ve found the person who grabs my hand in the middle of the night and takes me on an adventure when I’m supposed to have grown out of them. She smiles when I’m stupid and doesn’t mind when I’m naked.

In the end, I need Eve because I love her and she loves me in one way or another.

In the end, she makes me feel at home.

*

            The sun rises bright and true the very next morning, and I wake with a determination I’m unaccustomed to. Eve looks completely at peace where she lies in her sleeping bag and I leave her there. I don’t even know if I’ll tell her it was me when she sees what I’ve done. She’ll know.

I cross the open space and travel back down the staircase, the cool warmth of the morning sun giving me the strength I need to travel forward.

Late last night, lying awake in my sleeping bag, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Eve has shown me that sometimes a leap of faith is needed. You need to do things for yourself if you’re ever going to pull yourself from a rut. Eve deals with her loneliness through exploring this old place, and now she has me. She’ll always have me.

I have to make a statement. And now, in the early hours of the morning when everything seems like a good idea, I move with purpose.

In a few minutes I’m along the ledge outside, travelling back to my room and grabbing my bag. It has everything I need.

Creeping through the school at this hour makes me feel powerful, like the old house is mine along with everything in it.

I exit the building and the wall of ice-cold air hits me and fails to knock me down. I don’t shiver as I round the building, the dew on the long grass wetting the hems of my trousers.

Setting my bag down on the grass I survey my canvas. The image I’ve had in my mind for so long, the painting screaming to escape me finally has an exit.

I unzip the rucksack and tip everything to the ground.

I work with a feverish grace that only finds me when I have a brush in my hand.

My arms move as though possessed, creating great sweeps and swathes of colour. I work for an hour at least, deeply in my artist’s trance.

The wet of cold acrylic sprays my face with every brushstroke. A rainbow of colour washes over my hand, making me a mix of every painting I’ve ever created. The colour finds my bed hair, sticking out at odd angles, now coloured with the black of feathers and blue of clear sky and shimmering white of softest clouds.

Eventually I step back, happy with my work. I’m out of breath, quite proud of my own daring.

It’s graffiti of the highest order.

I stand, my brush in one hand. Soaked by the grass, sweat, paint and the morning.

On the wall is my blackbird. Swooping through the air with cold wind in its feathers. Eve told me to hang a painting in the art room for everyone to see. I did one better.

I’ll do as she does and look at the eternal black smudge on my hand, and the paint under my fingernails as badges of honour. I relax, knowing that I’ve found someone who sees the world in colour, not just black and white. I turn it outwards and feel the spread of warmth and thrill in my chest.

The blackbird on the wall is my moment of daring, my guide and my inspiration.

I am free.

I am the blackbird. I whistle and sing.

Maybe I Will, Maybe I Won't or 'David Tries Being Employed.'

It has always bothered me that in this society, we are confined to one dream and one career path. Nowadays, you have to select your vocation from primary school age and follow it through adolescence into adulthood. For me, this has always been just about as possible as swimming on Jupiter and living to tell the tale. I cannot remember all the jobs I have wanted to do in my life, because that would take far too much time, probably bore you, and ultimately give me a headache; none of which I have a particular desire to do.

I have recently achieved a 3 month position as an intern with the Wimbledon BookFest. This is a job that I now hope will lead me into a career into publishing. At the same time, I hope it will improve my personal writing. The arrival at 'publicity assistant' was never my intended career path. Who sticks with their intended career path for 20 years? Lucky so-and-sos, that's who. 

The Wimbledon BookFest is currently run from the mezzanine of one of their sponsors: Marcus Beale architects. When I walked in for my interview, past a small ocean of iMacs, clean white desks, maquette models of buildings and towns, watercolour paintings and those cool slanty desks architects use, I was reminded of a career dream I had in year 8. I remember year 8 because I recall asking my year 8 RE teacher, a brilliant gent called Mr Linnane (spelled correctly, he hopes): how long you have to go to school/university for to become an architect? The reply: 7 years.

Now, at the time this was an insurmountable amount of time for me to spend at university. This is rich, considering that only a few months ago I had my heart set on doing a Ph. D in English Literature; a profession I now realise I do not have the money or time to take on. I'll be honest, parts of English criticism annoy me. Another blog for another day, but I believe that 3 more years of that was not the right path for me. Nevertheless, quite by accident I was more than prepared to do my 7 years of university. 

        So I could have been an architect I hear you say. However, I gave up on that dream for another reason. I love art. I always loved it at school, I still love drawing and painting and anything of the sort, but at AS Level I did Art with 3 essay subjects and almost drowned under the workload. Needless to say I gave up Art, and with it that dream.

Then there's the other problem. I don't like to be told what to do. Watchers of Lost may imagine John Locke screaming: 'don't tell me what I can't do!', but I assure you, my story is quite a bit less dramatic. 

So I have always written. I have always dreamed of being published, making a lot of money and being rescued from the rat race. Hence my also spending amounts of money I never had on the lottery throughout the 7 years subsequent to my turning 16. 

A fear of work maybe? I'd agree with you, but I currently study on a Master's course in Children's Literature, write a book, work as a receptionist in a library and also work at Wimbledon every Thursday and at author events, so that's not it. It's not a fear of work, it's a fear of being stuck. Stuck in a place I don't want to be. 

It took me a while, but I soon realised at some point in the last two years that I needed a good job, a realistic job that will give me money and time to do what I liked to do most with my life. Read books, write books, watch films, watch plays, paint paintings, bake cakes and spend days in London in assorted Caffe Neros with the missus. With all of these things, things that I'll never lose or give up, no matter what my job is, I'll never feel stuck. But with that thought in mind lay the question: what am I good at doing?

I arrived at this point after deciding to become a teacher because everyone else was (returning to this idea recently as it appeared I couldn't do anything else). I don't want to be a teacher. The teaching profession is one I respect hugely, yet I know it's not for me. It's like knowing I'm not gay. I have zero problem with homosexuality. I believe, wholeheartedly, and pray the day will come soon when freedom has reached a certain level where the world is not narrow-minded enough to disapprove of things like this. I would do anything to fight for this cause. However, in my heart, I know that isn't me.  I respect teachers, but I could never work in such a pressurised, authoritative environment, controlled by the controlling forces *cough* Gove *cough* who make the job damn near impossible. 

I was once going to apply for graduate schemes, only to find that they may send me to the far ends of the earth. I love holidays, but I'm not a traveller. I never will be. I am one of the folk of our not so green and pleasant land who is quite happy to stay here, and finds an odd sort of beauty in the oily sheen of a rainsoaked M23. 

I arrived at publicity assistant because of luck. Because I found an MA at a lovely London university with a temping office, and was lucky enough to have gathered adequate experience to lead me to Wimbledon. I love meeting authors and thinking about book festivals, and talking to people in the business I have craved since I was 6 years old. Being in the business is good no matter what your entry point, and this is a wonderful dream for me. In the meantime, I very much enjoy my job as a receptionist. To paraphrase Transformers (stay with me), I want the job after this job, but you still have to do the first job first. There's no point in whining about that simple fact of life. 

I will never be an architect. I will never be an artist. I will never be a photographer. I will never work in a zoo, learning about fantastic creatures and making friends with elephants. I'll never be a high flying film journalist as I was lucky enough to experience for 11 months last year. Maybe I will experience these things in small ways throughout my life, but my life has told me that writing is my calling. Maybe I'll teach creative writing at a university one day? Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll be published? Maybe I won't. The fact of the matter is I write and continue to write. That's enough for me.