Mothers Day

I spotted a billboard outside a restaurant: "Mothers Day Special! Champagne and Flowers Included! Book Now!"

Excellent, I thought. I'll take the old dear, put a smile on her face. Budget for a few gins and tonics. Prepare to grin tolerantly while she flirts with the waiter.

And then I remembered: Oh...no, I can't. She's dead.

Much as I dislike the relentless commercialisation of Mothers Day and Fathers Day and What-Can-We-Dream-Up-Next-To-Shift-Some-More-Product-Day - filial love as consumerism - it's a benign enough phenomenon, in truth. Mums like it, and there isn't much wrong with that. If florists and restaurateurs and Lindt make a few bob out of it, well, no harm done.

Part of me resented the whole "Book Now, Buy Now!" circus while she was alive, while a larger part of me resents that, today, this Mothers Day, I can't take part in it. I can't join in. I'll see the sprawling, squabbling family groups through the window of Wetherspoons from the outside. I'll still buy the flowers, but I'll just have to throw them in the river and remember my mum as they go swirling through the arches of the stone bridge among the spring's first ducklings.

So if you have a mother to treat today, do it. Don't think about it, just do it. While you still can.

RIP Dee Wyatt, 1930-2003.

Walls

Walls of solidified sound…

the bricks memories of a lifetime’s noise stacked too high to see over; striated blocks of songs and voices, of lorries on wet night roads, cries and pleas and ignored entreaties; brown waves rolling shingle; crackling cellophane, cities – traffic, telephones and typewriters – the wind in gutters and the jets whistling over the river, descending; music and hubbub; ringing and rain; engines; sweet words never truly believed; radio voices, chanting crowds, Hollywood gunfire and squealing tyres; unceasing chatter, instructions, threats, jokes, laughter, complaint, the endless goodbyes; the scratch of a pen and the cry of gulls

sound...sound…

Walls of solidified sound enfold a garden of spikes, dry and dusty, Spanish; the exercise yard of a prison; a crouching space bounded by fossilised noise.

This must be written down, he had thought on the edge of sleep, slipping into the velvet; this demands a table in midnight lamplight, a table with an ashtray. I am being told something. It would be disrespectful not to write it down. It is the soul of the Word made solid in bricks of sound, each one a whispering block of time, a lost place. There was never stillness, never a pause – there was only sound, sound chased, sound to fill the silence of lonely fear.

Mute books in rows on blue shelves. The face of a mask. Hush, says the mask, mouth closed, eyes empty holes showing the blank wall behind. Behind me and before me is silence: cultivate silence, enter silence, embrace silence. Let the whispered words swarm up through a soup of silence. Hear the silent night.

I feel her. The Lady speaks, and her voice is silence. She looks to me without eyes.

Presumed Killed it is.

As a wise man once said to me: "Never go into your own head without a grown-up." Publisher Tim Roux at Night Publishing prefers Presumed Killed, so Presumed Killed it is, here.

It's been a crazy few weeks, with the agent racing around doing agent stuff - in New York, no less, at one point (though I'm not kidding myself the trip was made solely on my behalf) - and my mood swinging from delusional to depressed. I'm just a scribbler: when I write 'The End' it's job done, as far as I'm concerned, but of course in the real world it's job just started.

So let's get it started, then.

Cover by Bradley Wind

Marching to the Somme

For weeks the khaki tide had been flowing into this strangely English corner of France in trains and trucks and rattling open-topped buses, marching in their thousands along roads and tracks while rooks cawed in the poplars and the iron-rimmed wheels of limbers rumbled on the pave... from Presumed Killed

Here we go

Manuscript finally, obsessively edited and ready to go to the publisher. I was going to email it today and then realised it was the 13th. Perhaps not. And I'm still not 100 per cent convinced about the title - 'Vain Shadow' (see sample here). Any ideas or suggestions most welcome.

Many thanks to Bradley Wind http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwind3/ for the cover.