And – perhaps unsurprisingly – voice work has never been part of a national curriculum, freely available to all. Public speakers, lawyers, captains of industry and politicians may be coached in persuasion, some school kids may be driven to abandon their accents, but the exploration of voice could do so much more for so many more. Depending on their training and career paths, actors will always have to at least maintain their voices, and by now it will be obvious that I feel writers should, too, but expressive citizens, informed and informative consumers, an articulate electorate – what would happen if our voices unleashed that? What if, on the page and in the air, we found muscular, living freedom, freely expressed?
In my most recent session I worked through the usual process and reached the point of my ascending and then descending through the scale. This time we were exercising an aspect of the Female Voice. I exhausted all the low sounds I could make, sank into simply exhaling. As Ros continued to play lower and lower notes, I breathed out more and more deeply each time until I heard it again – the truth of my departing breath. But this time I didn’t feel this was like dying.
No, I was producing these huge sighs, almost racking: jaws open, letting a purpose rise from the heels and punch out.
This time it felt like fury.
It felt like love and being broken and healing oddly, or perhaps not healing at all, staying raw and as alive as I had ever been and proving it, racing it out.
Afterwards, I sat and Ros left the usual space for me to talk about what seemed to be happening.
What seems to be happening?
I am alive.
And I am writing this in a time when there’s a great deal that’s being broken and taken away, a great pressure towards silence, the closing of unsuitable mouths. But there are so many mouths, so many new and fast and clever ways for them to speak, and there is so much passion to spur on their inventions. All over the world, we may be able to read the start of a story where people with nothing to lose start writing and speaking and screaming so unstoppably that they become different people and make a different world.
This could be a story where we decide to be the opposite of killing ourselves, where we do not kill others.
I hope so.
I hope we can learn to listen, as well as sing.
I know this is a voice. My voice. And yours also. Together we are here and now, alive in this – loud as we like and everything possible – alive in this.
To remove this would be the most severe and crippling form of censorship – to unwrite the books before they are written, to silence the mind and to steal the words that could say, ‘I love you’, ‘I’m dying’, ‘This has to stop.’
But here I am.
Here you are.
Here we are.
And as long as we have this, any story can be changed, invented, repeated until it can make itself true. We can remember that we are ourselves and that being ourselves requires freedom, imagination, dignity, the chance to speak.
Here I am.
Here you are.
Here we are.
Words
A One-Person Show
IN THE BEGINNING was . . . a small person, inclined to mumble.
In the beginning was . . . the lips the teeth the tip of the tongue and the thought of the shape of the taste of an idea.
In the beginning was . . .
It’s the 23rd January 2008, and I am London. You know London – colourful cockney characters, the West End dazzle, entirely reliable bankers with little hats . . .
It’s the 23rd January 2008 and it’s 4 a.m. London is shut. In the whole of Chinatown there’s just me and this lady who’s sitting in a doorway smoking crack, and because I believe you can only survive London by pretending you’re in a novel – by Dickens – I greet her as if she is a perky urchin.
‘Good morning, crack-whore.’
‘Morning, lady.’
And that is the most sensible conversation I have had in hours – because last night I won a book prize and for ever after journalists have been asking me, ‘How do you feel?’
Journalists are very emotional people – they always want to know: ‘How do you feel?’
‘Tell me, when your entire family was sucked into that combine harvester and their remaining bloody fragments were eaten by particularly ugly dogs – How did you feel?’
Me, I don’t know what I feel, and meanwhile I am being distracted by the other question they keep asking, which is: ‘What’re you going to do with the money, Al?’
And I have this incredible urge to say, ‘Spend it on Pringles and sex.’
Which isn’t true, but I have a story going round and round at the back of my head repeating and repeating, so eventually I will believe it’s true. And say it, possibly on live television.
And meanwhile why don’t I feel anything? I just won a prize. If I can’t be happy for myself, I can be happy for my words – they just won a prize . . . Does this mean it’s like a bad marriage now, and we lie there side by side in the dark after making paragraphs and maybe I’m embarrassed, because at that vital moment I shouted out the name of another book . . .
Has it come to this?
So – okay – I’ll try to remember when it all started: me and the words. What was, for instance, my first word?
And I know that. My first word was no. Sign of a Calvinist childhood. ‘No.’ People kept saying it to me – No – Oh, but I was saying it back.
‘No. I say no to your no. I am a small but incredibly determined person and when I am grown up I may even say yes – probably to weird stuff that I’ll regret later – but I’m gonna say it, anyway. I am going to be a positive Scot.
‘Yeah . . . On second thoughts, my second word won’t be yes . . . I think it’ll be UP.
It was, that was my first word – up. Anyone I saw who was taller than me – which was everyone – I would go to them and say, ‘UP.’
‘No.’
‘Up.’
‘No.’
‘U-uuu-UP!’
I was a frustrated child. And, of course, because of going to be a novelist – I was troubled. You have no idea how difficult it is being a four-year-old girl who wants to dress only in black. There is no Mothercare Goth Range. I checked. To be more interesting, I tried affecting a limp. So people would look at me and say, ‘Aw, she does really well for a little girl with a limp.’
‘Yes. Yes, I do. I’m incredibly brave.’
I considered running away. But I wouldn’t have got far, what with my appalling limp. So I was trapped in Dundee. Born there. That’s sort of like being born in the late 1750s, but without the fun of cholera and public executions. Dundee. The City of The Dandy – they made it there – and The Beano and Just Seventeen . . . And The People’s Friend. How best might I summarise the typical People’s Friend letter . . . ?
‘Dear People’s Friend, I have been knitting a husband since 1953. I now lack only one ball of flesh-tone Sirdar 4-ply wool to complete his finishing touches. Perhaps your readers can assist. Yours sincerely, Impatient of Brechin.’
Not just Dundee, but Dundee in the 1970s – that’s power cuts, Cybermen on telly who could flatten the city centre with futuristic weapons, district councillors who did flatten it using, well, who can say, but quite possibly friends and family working in the construction and related industries – I mean, are you in any way surprised that I started inventing alternative realities? I really did eventually dream of running away to Old London Town, where I would become a perky urchin and scamper up and down alleyways. You need very few qualifications for scampering. And then I would take real teeth from poor people to make false teeth for rich people. Because I knew about the past – I was going to live there and so I’d done research. I knew that in the past people made medical appliances out of just anything – George Washington: wooden teeth. Tycho Brahe – sixteenth-century astronomer, I was a precocious child – he had a metal nose. They just loved making things out of metal: metal arms, metal knees, metal
elbows.
‘How are you liking your metal feet, then?’
‘I don’t like them. They are heavy and metally and clanky.’
‘What about your metal nose, then? We’ve put a clapper inside, so every time you shake your head it rings like a bell. Two for one!’
‘So I cannot even shake my head in sad disgust without sounding like a cat toy . . .’
I knew your average Olde English conversation would have run thus.
‘Ho, Sirrah – why liest thou in the street on thy back?’
‘Well, my toffee leg melted and then my glass walking stick snapped. I am afraid that I must lie here for ever unless I receive assistance.’
‘Alas, good sir, I cannot offer you assistance because of my entire spinal column having been replaced with these strips of gingham.’
Yes, it’s nonsense. But where would you be without nonsense? In Dundee.
The imaginary past was one of my happy places. And like all of my other happy places – Gallifrey, Middle Earth, the Land of Green Ginger – it was in here, in my head.
And in here it just got happier and fuller, because my mother taught me to read before I went to school – which was a good thing – until I got to school and worked out that no one else could yet. And so I pretended that I couldn’t, and I really couldn’t add up and so that made me tense. And when I’m tense I tend to hunch . . . and I’d already got the limp and the whole black look that was working really well for me and . . . basically I went through the whole of my primary education looking like a very tiny Richard the Third.
Now is the playtime of my discontent . . .
My parents, of course, wanted me to be normal. But they were distracted by one of their words – divorce. They got one – which was a good thing, because they didn’t like each other, but this meant my mum and me ended up living for a while in a residential caravan in Arbroath. That’s basically a big wooden shed with a potentially fatal gas fire. And if you’ve never stood in a big, damp shed, inhaling just a tiny bit too much carbon monoxide, and stared out through the sleet at an illuminated sign that reads ‘Pleasure Land’ – then you have a less than full understanding of the cruelty of words.
Not that I understood words then, either. But I did know that I liked them. I remember watching Three Sisters on telly. Three Sisters, you’ll remember, a play by Chekhov in which three sisters spend a lot of their time staring into the middle distance and saying
‘To Moscow, To Moscow . . .’
And part of you does think, ‘You dozy mares, just go to the railway station and tell the man – “To Moscow, To Moscow – day return, please, and we have a family railcard, because of being sisters.”’
But part of you does understand – to . . . Wanting to go to anywhere else, to be anybody else, to do anything other than what you’re doing. To. You do understand.
And I got my to. I went to university. Where I was a Theatre Studies and Drama student – not English – because I’d already worked out that I was going to be safer saying other people’s words, rather than writing my own. Because remember, when you’re still a little kid and you have a great story in your head, you’re bursting with it – there’s a man and he’s in a wardrobe and drinking tea and there are snakes – from outer space . . . and the only thing that could make your story better would be if you could somehow put it into someone else’s head, cos then it would be bigger, and so you look and you look and you find someone and you tell them your story. And your story makes them happy and that makes you happy, and so everyone is happy. And then you get a little bit older and you’ve got another story and the man’s drinking Tizer with a biscuit and there are more snakes and a lizard that can read your mind . . . and so you look and you look and you find someone and you’re going to tell them and then they say . . .
‘No. Don’t tell lies. Don’t make things up, you’re too old for that.’
And a little bit of you falls off, turns to dust and blows away.
But then you go to school and – I worked this out really quickly – when you go to school, if you write the story down, teachers have to read it. They get paid for that stuff – so you write the story about the man and the biscuits, and the Tizer and the snake, and you hand it in and you wait . . . For minutes, hours, days . . .
And then you get it back . . . and it’s all covered in red, as if it’s bleeding. And yes, I need you to tell me if my story’s no good, so I can make it better, but if you don’t tell me the right way, then I’m going to be too young to say – Hey. I needed that.
So I was a Theatre Studies and Drama student, thank you very much, and – as such – I got used to doing incredibly stupid things for no good reason at all. But then one day a visiting tutor came to tute us and got each of us – eighteen, I think, always an oversubscribed course, Theatre Studies and Drama has so many applications in the real world – she got all eighteen of us and she gave each one of us one word from the same sentence from a novel – by Dickens. And we stood in a line and – one by one – we each said our words and it sounded dreadful. It was like a little dog coughing – like eighteen different people saying eighteen different words, from eighteen different books from eighteen different non-parallel universes.
And then she said, ‘Whatever word you had – that is now your word. And for the next three hours you’re going to be working with your word.’
My word was the.
Oh, and we worked with our words. We whispered them, we said them to each other, we lay on the floor and whispered them, we yelled them, we had to make a gesture for our word . . .
I was not happy.
But then after the three hours she got us all together again and lined us up and – one by one – we said our words and it sounded beautiful. It was as if the sentence said itself. It was musical and manifest and I thought: I want that.
I have no idea what that is – clearly – it had taken me three hours to come to the edge of the beginning or the start of understanding the definite article. I know nothing about nothing. But I do know – I want that. That is the beauty of the thing itself, its proper name. I didn’t know words gave you that.
And, at about the same time, somebody told me if you’re a classical actor and you play large roles, classical parts, Shakespeare – you tend to become a different shape. Because Shakespeare, he’s a little bit fussy about when he lets you breathe – so you end up with a torso that is a kind of variation on a theme of opera singer.
Let me recap: this is a man you’ll never meet – a dead man – and he can make you a different shape. All of those words in all of those minds, all of those mouths. I want that.
But I’d worked out that if I really went for the acting thing, the best I could expect would be to occasionally stumble onstage and say . . .
‘Your horse awaits without, my Lord. Thank you.’
Which wasn’t going to make me happy. Or anyone else. So I went home. To Dundee. And unemployable. Not that I didn’t try. Word of advice – no matter how desperate you are, no matter how low you fall, never become a children’s puppeteer. It’s a terrible job. Trapped in a hot canvas box while unattended children cut the canvas and try to stab you in the feet, and meanwhile you’re unable to defend yourself because of your hands being inserted inside endearing woodland creatures. You can’t punch a toddler with your hand up a squirrel, they just don’t feel it.
So we’d come home – Mr Fluffy and Mr Squirrelly and me – and we wouldn’t ask each other, ‘How was your day?’ And I couldn’t go and sit in bohemian cafés, sipping coffee, flirting with the waiters, trying to knit absinthe. Because of being in Dundee. No, I would sit in bed to keep warm and read books about people who sat in bed to keep warm and wrote books about people who sat in bed to keep warm and wrote books.
And I started thinking and then I started writing.
Now. Who wears shoes in bed? No one. Who, outside of bad pornography, wears socks in bed? No one. So I was barefoot. And if you start writing barefoot, you’re g
oing to get used to writing barefoot and then you’ll feel comfortable writing barefoot and then you’ll be superstitious about writing barefoot and pretty soon you’ll feel you can’t do anything you care about that has to do with words without being barefoot.
Imagine how convenient that has made the last twenty-five years of what I laughingly call my career. I work a lot on trains. And in universities. At home I could just get frostbite and lose a toe.
But there I am barefoot and reading, and then barefoot and writing and all lit up. I don’t even know why, except that I’m no use to anyone, not even myself, but when I write I go to places I’ve never been to, and I can be people I’ll never be and I can do things I’ve never done. Yet. And that’s the beginning of power.
Skip three years of ‘No, we don’t like your story.’
‘No, we hate your story.’
‘No, we hate you.’
And then finally, I’m published. I’m really published – in a whole book. And I have to go to London and do lunch with my editor – I have an editor – and the restaurant for lunch is so posh that the waiter reads the menu to you because you’re going to be far too busy to do your own reading any more. But I like doing my own reading and I’m not posh. I’m currently living on potatoes and cheese my granny sends me because she gets it free from the EU dairy lagoon – in the 1980s if you knew enough pensioners you could live well . . . But, still – I’m published.
I’m so published I’ve had an author photograph taken . . . In which I must not smile, because then I will look like I’ve swallowed a circus pony and it’s trying to climb back out. I have been advised. I went into my publisher’s offices and, yes, everyone there does seem to be called Miffy, or Muffy, or Buffy, and you do feel like enquiring, ‘Is there anybody here who isn’t one of Santa’s little helpers?’ But still – I’m published.
On Writing Page 31