by James Ellis
‘That’s sad. I always wanted to draw cartoons, I can remember that much. I would like to live my life in a three-frame cartoon strip. Bang, bang, bang. Clean and simple. God should have been a cartoonist. Perhaps He is. If I were God I’d give everyone bolts to hold their heads on.’
He paused. She was watching him.
‘I don’t think I am God, just in case you’re wondering.’
‘I wasn’t.’ She laughed again. ‘Now I really must get back to work.’
She walked away and he lay back on the pillows, closed his eyes and after a while, he really did fall asleep and dream.
5
Tom dreamed he was a student again and Karen was wearing shorts and a vest-top and sitting beside him in his car. Tom’s car was an old heap that had ripped seats and dodgy brakes and a pre-ignition problem that made it cough and lurch long after the engine had been switched off. The doors didn’t shut properly and they were tied together with rope, which they had to sit on in order to keep it taut.
They drove through country lanes and empty roads to the coast, smoking cigarettes and sharing cans of cider. They sang along to songs on the car radio with voices so wildly out of tune that it made them laugh until they couldn’t sing anymore.
The windows were open and the breeze was warm and the air smelled of summer and in the dream Tom told her seriously that he was going to be a cartoonist, and that he had an idea for a character, a fox. Karen laughed, a happy, musical laugh, and kissed his face.
They were in a café by a pebble beach. They sat close together at a table on plastic chairs and shouted to make themselves heard over each other’s voices and played up to the frowns and stares of other people who were eating quietly.
They were on a beach and sat on the pebbles and Tom kissed her. The salty smell of her skin and the wetness of her lips made his skin tingle so that every touch was like an electric charge. She held the back of his head and pulled him down onto the stones, and he took his weight on his arms so as not to crush her. She had a tiny blemish on her cheek; a mark so small it was hardly visible.
It was night and they were in his room and in the shadows she stood by the window and took off her clothes – a silent silhouette swaying from side to side. She got into bed next to him and pulled the bedclothes up to her chin and lay for a moment, lit by moonlight, with her eyes closed. When she opened them again her face was calm and serene and she looked up at him from behind the bars of her lacquered eyelashes. She was perfectly still, silent, unblinking, scarcely breathing, and then she laughed and reached out to him.
‘Hello, Tom.’
Tom opened his eyes and saw, looking down on him like pale ghosts gathered around a deathbed, Karen, Holly and Dan. He looked at them while his mind cleared out the dream of long ago.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I was going to call but you’re here. How are you all?’ He struggled up the bed until he was in a more upright position and could see them more clearly. ‘Oh God, what a time.’ He gestured around the bay. ‘Look at me. I’m in hospital. Did you find me all right? Is it visiting time?’ He looked at Karen. ‘I was just dreaming about you. Really.’
The Karen beside his bed was older than the Karen in his dream. She stood tall and aloof and remote, and looked slim buttoned up and belted in her overcoat. Her face was made-up and her hair was tied back in a businesslike fashion. She still looked calm and serene, though impassive, with high cheek bones and cool eyes. She had a smoker’s stance: one arm folded, elbow in hand, hand on chin. She looked down on Tom as if she were considering him as an interesting specimen on display in a bed.
Beside her was Holly, a heavy 15-year-old, looking beefier than she might with her hands in her pockets and her hips pushed forwards. Her wide-set eyes had a puffy look as if she’d been crying, although she hadn’t. Holly never cried. You could bruise her but you would never break her. Half-girl and half-woman, she was raw and incomplete; scruffy in her sloppy, sawn-off jeans and over-sized T-shirt.
And on the other side of the bed was Dan, two years younger than Holly and built like his mother: slim and cat-like; his face partly hidden by an overhanging thatch of hair as impenetrable as a hedgehog’s stare. A cocky, geeky boy, full of himself and the assurance of his age, confident that he would live forever, eat pizza and be cool like all his box-set heroes.
Karen leaned in and kissed Tom on the cheek.
‘How are you feeling?’ she said.
‘Like I’ve fallen off a roof.’
‘You have fallen off a roof, Dad,’ said Dan.
It was suddenly very important to Tom that they were there. He hadn’t realised how alone he’d been feeling. Shock, or something like it, rolled over him and took his breath away. He had fallen 60 feet; flown through the air and hit the ground – even if a wet flower-bed and a pile of bananas had got in his way. Sometimes too much luck can be as scary as too little. He wiped his eyes.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Holly. ‘Don’t cry.’
‘I’m not. How have you been? Did the police come? How did you know I was here?’
‘The police came this morning,’ said Karen. ‘We wondered where you were.’
‘This morning?’
‘We weren’t there yesterday.’
‘They came to the house,’ said Holly. ‘I thought they were going to tell us you were dead.’
‘But there was only one of them,’ said Dan. ‘So I knew you were all right. They always send two people if someone’s dead.’
‘They should say that straight away,’ said Holly. ‘The first thing a policeman should say when he goes to someone’s house is “Don’t worry, he or she is not dead”, or whatever.’
‘But it wasn’t a policeman, it was a policewoman,’ said Dan. ‘She asked Mum if it would be all right if she came in. Mum said, “What’s it about?” And the police lady said it was about you. And Mum said, “What about you?” And the police person said you’d fallen off a roof.’
Tom looked at Karen. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said, come in.’
‘She sat in the living room,’ said Dan. ‘She was really sweaty. Holly kept looking at her.’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘Did she say what happened to me? Why I fell off?’
‘No.’
‘What were you doing up there?’ said Holly. ‘Why did you fall off?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tom said. ‘I can’t remember anything about yesterday. Did you see me yesterday? Did you come here?’
‘We’ve come today.’
‘It was a great way for a cartoonist to fall,’ said Dan. ‘Were you running in the air until you realised? Did you leave a cloud of dust and a crater?’
‘Who knows? I might have.’
‘A bit unlikely, though,’ said Karen. ‘Don’t you think? Falling off a roof onto a crate of bananas.’
‘It’s not Dad’s fault they were there.’
‘Do you think we’ll have to pay for the bananas? They’ll be all covered in blood.’
‘Dan.’
‘What do you mean, unlikely?’ said Tom.
‘Well, I mean,’ said Karen, ‘normally somebody falling that far would die. Wouldn’t they?’
‘Splat,’ said Dan.
Tom looked at them but their voices were diminishing, fading out. He looked beyond his family at the nurses’ station where Maggie and her cohort were gathered, laughing and talking. He could hear Maggie’s musical laugh. He tried to hold onto the sound but he felt as if he were retreating from the colourful, three-dimensional world around him into some dark place, telescoping back into nothingness, into a chalked outline, into an airless room without a door.
Tom, what ’ s the matter? Come on, sit up. Sit up, Tom, and look at me. Look at me.
‘Tom, what’s the matter?’
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Give me your hand. Let me hold your hand.’
Karen gave him her hand and he held it tightly and looked up at her.
What do you see when you ’
re up there? What do you see when you ’ re up there and you look down? The Pelican looked down. It saw Karen holding Tom ’ s hand. It saw children shouting and chanting and pushing and pointing in a playground. It saw a big man fall hard against a table and an old woman fall slowly t o the ground. And it saw a great well of darkness. And far below, deep within the well, it heard the distant howl of a dog.
The Pelican stretched out its wings and veered from left to right, sweeping and swooping like a child pretending to fly, feeling eac h individual feather lift and flutter – caked though they were with sticky fat and grease and multiple wriggling larvae. Its eyes were closed and the wind streamed along its beak and over its head and away to places that the Pelican would never visit or ev er know existed.
Against the empty blue sky the Pelican was a splotch of oil paint; a grey-brown-yellow-white splotch that suddenly didn ’ t seem to move at all. Against the infinite blue sky nothing would seem to move. Even the Pelican, free to fly wherever it wished, would, against an infinite blue sky, remain in the middle of the frame, caught in its moment of flight. Only if you looked beyond the frame would you see its imperceptible movement. Only if you looked beyond the frame would you feel the wind an d smell the day and hear the beat of the Pelican ’ s wings.
6
http://www.tashfanz.com/tash%2911interview.htm
A Belgian television interview with Tom Hannah from January 2012.
On 1 January 2012, Tom Hannah was interviewed by Germaine Kiecke for a New Year’s Day edition of her late night arts television show Kiecke in Conversation. The following is an extract from that interview.
Germaine Kiecke (to camera): Thomas Arthur Stevenson Hannah – Tash to his public; Tom to his friends – is one of just a handful of British cartoonists whose work is regularly syndicated around the world. His cartoon strips have spun off into books, clothing, homeware, games and cosplay conventions, and are discussed daily across dozens of internet fora, blogs and tweets. Among his peers, he is known as the cartoonists’ cartoonist, and for almost 15 years he has been delighting us all with his weekly cartoon strip, Scraps, about a smart urban fox who wages war against waste and an always-angry restaurant owner, along with his friends Plenty the Cat, Billy the Hedgehog and the Pelican. Tom, welcome and thank you for coming in. And a happy new year to you.
Tom Hannah: Thank you – and a happy new year to you, too.
Germaine: Let me jump straight in – is Scraps you?
Tom (laughing): He has many traits I admire but I haven’t got a tail.
Germaine: You share the same eco-ethics. Are the direct methods of Scraps and his colleagues something you aspire to in real life? I’m thinking, for example, of the so-called Freegan Movement.
Tom: Bin-dipping? I’m too squeamish for that but I admire those that do. It makes a lot of sense to me.
Germaine: Can I take you back to the beginning? You wrote once that cartoonists find their vocation early in life. Was that true for you?
Tom: In terms of a vocation, I think so, yes. I can’t imagine doing anything else and if I did, I’d probably still draw whenever I could.
Germaine: You were born to be a cartoonist?
Tom: Well, I didn’t come out of the womb rubbing my hands and saying, ‘Right, give me a pencil.’ But I do think I was hard-wired with all the necessary attributes – and the desire. I just needed to be shown the form.
Germaine: Like a potter being shown clay?
Tom: More like a potter being shown a pot. When I was young, pre-school, I used to look at comics and drive my mother crazy asking what they were saying. So she taught me to read to get some peace. Just the basics, you know, ‘Look look, see Spot. See Spot jump.’ That sort of thing.
Germaine: So it was the words as much as the pictures?
Tom: Well, yes, I mean there are words in comics, and nowadays I like reading prose and poetry, and I love the way a well-told tale creates images in your mind, your own personal cinema. I like that very much. I think there’s a lot of crossover between the mechanics of literature and the mechanics of a cartoon strip. But with comics I just got the whole thing immediately, it was my medium: speech bubbles, movement lines, looking out of the frame and talking to the reader. It all seemed so right to me.
Germaine: I’m interested in that appeal to you, the appeal that you’re describing. Was it cartoon drawings specifically?
Tom: Very specifically cartoon drawing. Not illustrations or sketches or pen and ink or anything like that. Cartoons. And comics were my entry point. Characters with blobby noses and crazy hair and knobbly elbows and talking pets, and all the visual, cartoon grammar that goes with it. You know, the physics of a cartoon. But a good cartoon strip is more than that. There’s comedy, absolutely, but there’s more. Or there can be more.
Germaine: I’d like to come back to the ‘more’ later on, and also to the grammar. But for the moment, there you are: a pre-school Tom Hannah and already you know what you want to do in life?
Tom: Not quite, but pretty soon after. I went to school and I hated it. On day one I wanted to go home; and on day one-thousand-and-one I still wanted to go home. That’s how it’s always been for me. I don’t like having to be somewhere. I’m a home-bird. Fortunately, a kindly teacher took pity on me and dumped me in the school library.
Germaine: This is your first day at school?
Tom: Maybe not the first day, but probably the first week. I was miserable. Always crying. Anyway, I remember being in a library, a little primary school library – low tables, orange chairs, the smell of crayons, posters all over the walls, that sort of thing – and there, on a book-stand with all the elephant stories and big bear adventures, was a Tintin book. Hard-cover; dog-eared and in French.
Germaine: Ah, Remi. A man consumed by his creation.
Tom: Perhaps. But at five I wasn’t thinking about that. I remember picking the book up and looking at it and feeling like I’d met an old friend. Even the feel of it was good. The whole tactile experience of holding a hardback book filled with tightly drawn, colourful cartoons struck a huge chord. I wanted to own it because it seemed so much more permanent than a paper comic. Coming across that book made a big difference. A massive difference. It helped me get through… everything really. I knew then, completely, that I wanted to be part of that creative world. I wanted to be on the pen-side of the page. I couldn’t understand a word of it but I was hooked.
Germaine: You mentioned your mother. How important were your parents and your upbringing to your creative development?
Tom: Crucial. My dad was an architect, so there were always plenty of drawing materials in the house, and my mother was a barrister. They were both very left-wing so there were a lot of opinions bouncing about, although Dad was relaxed and easy-going. Mum was much more forthright and competitive. But they were busy so I spent a lot of time on my own reading and watching television. That was also important. I don’t believe that television, game-playing or anything like that is a waste of time. It’s the opposite. You learn and your mind expands. I read every book in the house and I watched everything on television. Endlessly.
Germaine: Some games and some television can be very…
Tom: Violent?
Germaine: Sexist.
Tom: That’s a fair point. There’s good and bad.
Germaine: Is it that simple for you?
Tom: Life is complex; messy. I know that. But there’s a term chefs use in the kitchen: ‘work clean’. I like that approach. So yes, it’s that simple for me.
Germaine: You have a sister.
Tom: Yes. She’s ten years older than me so it was a bit like being an only child with three parents.
Germaine: Were you spoiled?
Tom: Horribly.
Germaine: Paint me a picture of this young Tom Hannah. Or rather, draw me a cartoon.
Tom: Okay, well, we’re looking at a large, lumpy and shy child; something of a loner. We lived in south London in a big, ramshackle house in the corner of a cul-de-
sac. It was tucked away and set back and looked like something the Munsters should live in. You remember the Munsters?
Germaine: I wanted to be Yvonne de Carlo.
Tom: There used to be a local newsagent and inside there was this incredible smell of comics and sweets. There was something about the paper or the ink that they used.
Germaine: I feel the same way about a library I used to visit. The smell of well-thumbed pages on a wet afternoon is very evocative. Those big hardback books in heavy plastic covers.
Tom: That’s right. I used to visit our local library every week. The whole experience was a ritual. Kicking along the streets on my way there, not in any rush, the big stone steps, the heavy door, the quiet, and all these over-laden shelves of endless choice and the thump-click of the librarian’s stamp – eight books in and eight books out. It’s a tyre garage now.
Germaine: You used the term ‘loner’. Were you also lonely?
Tom: I don’t think so. Maybe solitary is a better word. I’ve always been good at compartmentalising. So if there is something I don’t like, I just stash it away somewhere and don’t think about it. That’s the great thing about imagination. It’s huge and you can lose things there – if you want to. And you can go there whenever you want. I didn’t choose to be solitary, I just was, and it didn’t bother me. Now I like it. I prefer it.
Germaine: Were you picked on at school? Solitary children are often made the outsiders.
Tom: It’s hard for me to say. I think there was some bullying. I remember a beefy girl and her brother were less than friendly, and I was big when I was young so there was always going to be some name-calling, but I think it just washed over me. I was very happy. In those days I used to play out a lot. There was an old root ball that had been dug up, about ten feet across, and I made it my secret fortress until somebody set fire to it. The beefy girl, actually. I can still see her doing it. Imagination played a big part in all of my games. I suppose it does for all children. It’s a shame so many people forget how to play. Anyway, to a degree physical things were just props for what was going on inside my mind. They still are.