by Peter Wild
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Fiction Inspired by The Smiths
Edited by Peter Wild
For Weez
Contents
Is It Really So Strange? – An Introduction
Ask – Gina Ochsner
This Charming Man – Mike Gayle
Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now – Kate Pullinger
Bigmouth Strikes Again – Nic Kelman
Shoplifters of the World Unite – James Flint
Girl Afraid – Rhonda Carrier
Back to the Old House – Graham Rae
Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before – Willy Vlautin
I Won’t Share You – David Gaffney
Oscillate Wildly – Alison MacLeod
Sweet and Tender Hooligan – Charlie Williams
You’ve Got Everything Now – Catherine O’Flynn
I Want the One I Can’t Have – Matt Beaumont
Nowhere Fast – Jeremy Sheldon
There Is a Light that Never Goes Out – Helen Walsh
Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours – Peter Wild
Jeane – James Hopkin
The Boy with the Thorn in His Side – John Williams
Some Girls are Bigger than Others – Jenn Ashworth
Paint a Vulgar Picture – Scarlett Thomas
Cemetry Gates – Mil Millington
Death of a Disco Dancer – Nick Stone
The Queen Is Dead – Jeff Noon
Stretch Out and Wait – Chris Killen
Contributors
Acknowledgements
About the Editor
Other Books by Peter Wild
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Is It Really So Strange?
An Introduction
OK, yes. I admit it. Part of what drew me, and undoubtedly countless others, to The Smiths was the fact that they seemed to get it. They seemed to get how difficult and unfair and just downright unpleasant and nasty it was growing up (in Manchester or anywhere) in the 19-haties. They seemed to get it because they seemed to be living it alongside us; or maybe they had lived it alongside us but now they’d escalated into the realm of gods. Later, much later, when the decade was on the change, The Stone Roses told us they wanted to be adored–The Smiths never had to demand that fealty. They knew they had it. They could see it in the glassy-eyed, occasionally tearstained mugs of the faithful. Man but these kids love us, Johnny Marr might have said once a long time ago.
What was it they had? What was it that made them so special and so singular? Was it the fact that–no matter how far they encroached into the world of Top of the Pops–they always felt like a secret? Was it the fact that no matter how many people ‘got into them’, they always felt like yours and yours alone (because–ah!–Morrissey was singing to you, yes, you, just you, dear heart). It’s impossible, really, to count all of the ways in which The Smiths stood out from the crowd. But here goes anyway: if you’d had your heart broken, if you thought you loved someone and she wouldn’t give you the time of day, if you had a thing with someone and it didn’t work out, if you bumbled, felt crap, thought that the person staring back at you out of the mirror more closely resembled a gargoyle than the person you thought you were–you know–inside…if you were a teenager, basically, the argot of The Smiths was the articulation of your every inadequacy. But if they were just a band for teenagers, they would’ve dated as quickly as the New Kids. Surely? So what else? Well, The Smiths weren’t literature–although Morrissey’s literate sensibility helped elevate the songs to a wholly different level, that much is true–they were a band. And bands live and die on their tunes. It was the beef and the muscle supplied by Morrissey’s gang, Marr, Rourke, Joyce (with Gannon loitering in the shadows wielding a bicycle chain, maybe), that gave Morrissey the confidence to be who he was on stage and in between the lines of every song.
The Smiths weren’t literature, but they were steeped in literature. Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, Shelagh Delaney, James Joyce, Alan Sillitoe, Charlotte Brontë, Alan Bennett, Rita Mae Brown, Truman Capote, George Eliot, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Marcel Proust, Hubert Selby Jr, Edith Sitwell, Elizabeth Smart…all these and dozens of others have been mentioned by Morrissey over the years. Reader, the man is a reader!
That’s all well and good, you might say. But what about Paint a Vulgar Picture: Fiction inspired by The Smiths? That doesn’t explain the whole idea of fiction inspired by a band, does it? What does that even mean? Fiction inspired by whomever…Well, what it means is this: some writers are inspired by a snatch of conversation overheard on a bus (that was certainly true of, say, Joe Orton); others find an image appears in their mind, some hard, frozen picture that itches and urges and requires articulation (I remember reading an interview with Michael Ondaatje years and years ago where he said that The English Patient started out as the image of a woman hanging washing on a washing line–the novel unspooled from there); still others frame their inspirations about what if’s and what was’s and what will never be’s. Inspiration strikes in many forms. It can be a tree. It can be a photograph. It can be ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. The writers in this collection have been inspired, in some way, and to a greater or lesser extent, by the music of The Smiths. Some of them have taken the song title and run with it. Others have been inspired by something conjured up by the lyrics. Still others have found the music or even the very mystique of The Smiths the thing that lights the blue touchpaper of their imaginations.
What fiction inspired by a band doesn’t mean: fiction about a band. These stories are not stories about The Smiths. This is not–to use a seemingly popular pejorative–fan fiction. Although a great many of the writers in this book would, I think, say they are big, big fans of The Smiths. What fiction inspired by a band means–and apologies if I’m spelling it out in letters fourteen metres high with the paint still wet–is fiction for which music is the starting point. No more, no less. Which isn’t to say that The Smiths are not explicitly referenced: John Williams’s ‘The Boy with the Thorn in His Side’ is a sort of memoir about a Smiths fan John knew back in the day; Chris Killen’s ‘Stretch Out and Wait’ revolves around an imagined visit to Morrissey’s grave. The presence of The Smiths can be more keenly seen, though, in the many implicit ways writers have chosen to interpret the source material. In her preamble, for instance, Rhonda Carrier says, ‘I tried to evoke…an overall Smithsian mood (fatalistic miserablism meets intense yearning).’ For James Flint, it’s a ‘mixture of resignation and optimism’. For some, The Smiths were always funny–dark and strange, yes, but always amusing. For others, The Smiths were dangerous, political, taboo-busting. Charlie Williams says The Smiths hit him like ‘a call to arms’.
All of the writers in the book would, I’m sure, agree that The Smiths were important–and not just because they have become, as that once great institution NME had it a few years ago, ‘the most influential band ever’. In fact, certainly for the fans who were there (man), at the time, the importance of The Smiths is prefigured by the wilderness in which they appeared: the mainstream was trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of bad hair, bad clothes and bad music. Liking The Smiths was, at times, tantamount to sticking a piece of paper on your own back that read: please beat me. Especially if you also (ahem) looked a little bit like Morrissey. Or tried to look a little bit like Morrissey. Back then, The Smiths were as divisive as it got. You either loved them, with every trembling fibre of your weak and puny body, or you hated them and all they stood for (‘being fey’, ‘reading books’, all that noncey stuff). It’s funny, these days, looking around the average Morrissey gig–all the bruisers you get, all the lads, ’avin’ it large down the ol’ Morrissey gig. Who’s getting beaten these days? Certainly not the Morrissey fans. Tha
t particular cloud of disaffection seems to have shifted in Emo’s direction…Poor Emo.
But we were talking about The Smiths. The most important and emotionally urgent band of my adolescence–a band whose songs stand endless listens, a band that haven’t dated, whose best work stands alongside the best work of anyone, who were important and (at the time) neglected and (for a bit) punished just for being a little bit different. Lord love ’em. A band, furthermore, who celebrated books and reading–what was it Morrissey sang? ‘There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more’–in a way that no band has before or, to my mind, since. When you think about it, it’s amazing that it’s taken this long for a book of fiction inspired by that most literary of bands to arrive. Is it really so strange? We don’t think so…
Peter Wild
Manchester
Ask
Gina Ochsner
I’m fascinated by the endless possibilities each of our lives represent. Each day is a door full of yeses or noes. Each choice leads to another corridor opening to another series of doors, a labyrinth of more yeses, more noes. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if my father had not asked my mother out on that first date. What would have happened if my husband had not overcome his shyness to ask a girlfriend for my telephone number? What would have happened if I had not overcome my preternatural shyness and not said yes?
One day a girl, utterly unremarkable in every way, sees a boy she recognises from her high school. He’s standing in the frozen food aisle at the neighbourhood grocery store. The long muscles in his arms, that little down of fuzz over his lip, and the smell of grass and sweat on his skin indicate that he’s going turn into a man any day, a phenomenon he has anxiously awaited–though he doesn’t quite know why. The girl loops a plastic shopping basket over an arm and walks toward the boy, who is contemplating a series of frozen burritos. She touches the point of his elbow and says, ‘You don’t know me, but you should because you are 100% perfect for me.’
The boy blinks and his face colours slightly. No one has ever told this boy that he was anything but imperfect and the unexpected compliment sounds so foreign in his ears that he stands there as if frozen. He watches the girl round the end of the aisle. He can tell from the way she slouches toward the Entemann’s pound cake, and from the day-glo green sweater exhaling the smell of mothballs and unravelling at the cuffs, that she is absolutely ordinary, and for some reason, he likes this about her.
The boy continues to shop at that supermarket, loitering in the frozen food aisle, hoping for another chance encounter. As luck or fate would have it, or more likely because the girl knows the boy is the one for her, she too makes a point of shopping in the frozen food aisle. Before long, they have an established pattern of rendezvous in the freezer section of the store. Sometimes their timing is off, but each of them knows that the other has been there because inside the sliding glass doors of the cut corn, French cut beans, snap green and petite peas, traced in the hoar frost on each of the glass panes, is the figure 100%.
Soon, the boy and girl are in love, each of them sure that the other is 100% right for them. For a time everything is as it should be when you have found the 100% perfect person: the sun warms the street under your feet, and the ordinary cacophony of morning birds cartwheels in tune, the air turns more tolerant and it seems that nothing can go wrong, and if something does, with a wink it is easily dismissed.
But the boy, having slowly become a man, is still youngish in his ways. So too with the girl, who is now by all appearances a woman. They graduate from high school and, after a whole summer of freezer food love, they become restless, wondering whether there aren’t more perfect loves out there waiting for them. After an exchange of forwarding addresses, they part, each of them 100% convinced that should their expectations in others fail, they will certainly find one another again someday. The man travels. Vagabonds. In no time he meets beautiful and interesting women from all over the world. He dates many of them, falls in love with several, and almost marries one. And while he doesn’t regret falling in love, none of these women seem 100% perfectly right for him. He suspects that these women know, too, that he isn’t the one for them, either. And when he says goodbye to these women, or they to him, he is sad, but not broken hearted. For some reason, he even feels grateful to have loved and been let out of it so easily. As he flies in airplanes, rides on slow boats down winding rivers, climbs mountains of dizzying heights, he begins to wonder whether the idea of 100% perfect isn’t little more than an imperfect myth. He begins to wonder whether the perfect girl for him isn’t little more than an assortment of all the perfect parts of all the imperfect girls he’s met. And then he remembers a girl from his old neighbourhood grocery store. He can recall her only in fragments: her slouching walk, her love of Klondike bars and the smell of her mothball-riddled sweater, the feel of her hands in his, the way her eyes disappeared entirely when she smiled. And in place of her name, he thinks: 100%.
The girl, too, has had her adventures. Her heart bent, bruised, and twice broken. She tells herself these are the risks of modern romance and that love would be simpler if reduced to numbers. She buys many copies of Euclid’s Geometry, which are no help at all. After another serious heartbreak, she becomes the kind of girl who harbours grudges against those who have hurt her, never considering the harm she herself might have done. Days collide with months. She stores her tears in an old pot she keeps under the stove. Eventually the sharp desire for love encourages a reckless but forgiving myopia. She buys a new pair of glasses and in time the hatch-mark scars of her heart diminish. She calls it healing, and marries the man who doesn’t say no.
And then one day she shops in her old neighbourhood, at that very same grocery store she used to visit all those years ago when she was a girl in love. While checking the nutritional value of frozen snow peas she is arrested by the sight of a man. Her hands flutter to the handles of the freezer doors, and her fingers–remembering something from a lifetime ago–trace a figure. The girl squints fiercely at the man. There is something very familiar about him and she scrolls through her mental list of previous lovers: 37%, 50%, 2%–and she’s being generous with that figure–and the one she married, 87%, but none of those men match the one standing there at the end of the aisle, carrying a stack of frozen pizzas in his arms. She squints even harder behind her new glasses, but still, she can’t recall things with the same clarity she used to have; she doesn’t have the same faculties of her youth and her memories are like trampled mud, each new day full of new prints that reshape the old. But where her memory fails, her muscles remember. Her hand jogs the point of his elbow. The pizzas drop and the man falters, stumbles into an open freezer bin of turkeys.
The man blinks, feels his heart quicken. Here’s the crazy thing: when he stands and brushes himself off he sees a figure of a number carefully drawn in the condensation of each of the sliding freezer doors: 100%–a number he knows should mean something to him, would solve every puzzle if only he knew what it meant. For now, all he can do is stare at the woman before him. There’s that awkward pause, the heavy silence under which entire islands of forgotten languages might shoulder to the surface, but don’t.
And then the glimmer passes; the spell is broken. They share a quick laugh. The woman apologises profusely and the man assures her that he likes turkeys and that no harm has been done. As he speaks, the woman relegates the man to her long-established categories: a nice-looking, polite fellow whom she will remember later as possessing an earnestness that suggests a grave belief in second chances. They part then–he more determined to find his 100% perfect girl, she more desperate to make her husband a little more perfect.
And so it goes. And so it goes, the story spilling past clumsy borders. The end becomes another beginning. It’s a long walk home. A tug on the woman’s sweater leads through foggy recollection, fuzzy intentions. Though she’s married–happily so–she’s finding it hard to brush away notions of previous lives she might have had with p
revious loves. She is wearied by her dimmed desires and this package of frozen snow peas, which feels for all the world to her like a heavy bag of stones. Having eaten the warm bread of doughy fairy tales, the moral fibre of which she counted on to buoy her through the hard years, she’s finding it difficult to keep her feet planted deep in the ordinary soil of her days. But somehow she knows it’s unfair to hold her husband to that standard: 100%.
She arrives home and sees her husband bent over an ancient typewriter, the keys and strikers of which he is realigning for her because he knows his wife loves that beat-up old thing. He is doing it, she realises with a series of blinks behind her glasses, because he loves her. With a final blink she forgets about the man she sent sprawling in the grocery store. She thinks instead about this beautiful perfect gesture made for her for the purest of reasons. In that pot where she had stored her tears, she heats the remaining peas. The salt makes for flavour and she is glad something good at last has come of her foolish sorrow, glad to serve it up and give it away. But even in this she has her faults. As she sets the table for their supper she can’t help herself:
‘You’re not perfect,’ she says, but not unkindly. ‘Not 100%.’
‘I know,’ he says.
She peers at the pot and wags her head slowly. ‘I’m not 100% either.’ She’s burned a few of the peas, but they both know that’s not what she’s talking about.