The Sound of My Voice

by Ron Butlin

  Trekker Trail Grade Five:

  The Family Trail. Along a narrow path. Signposted. Kept clean. No ruins. No roads, lay-byes. No place for grief. An unspoiled nature park.

  With the children hand-in-hand between you. Tom and Elise: three small steps to yours and two of Mary’s. A picnic place. Stop. A rustic wooden table-stroke-bench unit. Mary gives out the sandwiches as you look round the hills and forests, pointing them out. Naming them sometimes. Further down there is a small bridge over a stream.

  You begin: ‘Did you know, you two, that if you walked over that bridge and kept walking straight on, then . . .’ You pause for a moment before continuing. ‘If you kept going for long enough you would have to cross it again and again. As long as you kept walking,’ you conclude, ‘the same bridge.’

  You have not explained it very well, and want to try again, but Tom and Elise have begun playing with the grass, blowing it edge-on to make it squeak.

  ‘The very same bridge,’ you tell them for a second time.

  Later, a family walk: three-steps, two-steps. And back to the car. Time to head home.

  ‘You drive’, they say.

  Mary smiles.

  You smile back.

  Birthday-boy behind the wheel.

  Jokes, laughter and confusion.

  Side road, main road, motorway, and nearly there.

  Touching sixty with the accusations in the back seat, and Mary singing them a song:

  ‘Down by the station early in the morning.

  See the little puff-puff trains all in a row.’

  And sixty-five. The suburbs: the three-lane keeps rising. See the engine driver pull a little lever. And rising, a flyover high above street-mud and shop-mud. Above rail tracks, goods yards and steel works. And off we go. Mary beside you singing:

  ‘The owl and the pussy-cat went to sea.’

  The accusations behind you:

  ‘By the light of the moon, the moon.’

  Silver-light in the fast lane: chromium bumpers, wing mirrors, radiators, headlamps and windscreens.

  Seventy: the fast lane narrows two miles ahead. Silver-light diminished to white-road, white-verge, white-sky. The colour white all around you like silence, snow-silence. Your foot flat on the floor to return home before the light fails. Back from the picnic to the colour white where everything that has ever happened to you is still happening. The present moment. Crisscrossing to keep on course, tacking from side to side as the fast lane narrows. Each moment melting into the next like snow disappearing.

  As though you have suddenly caught sight of your father straight ahead where the fast lane narrows.

  As though at the same time he is behind you, shouting your name. You can hear him: his voice calling you from over thirty years ago when you jumped up suddenly at the picnic and began running downhill towards the main road, your arms stretched out in front. He is still coming after you to catch you, to hold you.

  There is complete darkness on either side of the fast lane and mud everywhere: on the road, smeared across the windscreen, the dashboard. The steering wheel slithers under your hands. You grip it tighter.

  You have almost reached your father, but he cannot seem to see you; you shout at him but he cannot seem to hear you. You drive at him, skidding from side to side in the mud. Behind you he is coming nearer. You sense his energy, his strength. His anger.

  All at once you feel the road itself beginning to turn beneath the car’s wheels, like a vast conveyor belt. It is your foot flat on the accelerator doing this: turning the road. A treadmill girdling the Earth. By driving full-speed at your father you are turning the Earth. At your back his anger has almost caught up with you.

  The world is spinning so fast the car is almost out of control. To keep from careering into the darkness you drive faster and faster.

  At the last moment your father seems to hear you; he begins as though to raise his arm in your direction – then abruptly he is gone.

  It is only now that you are aware of Mary clutching on to you, her voice screaming at you to stop. There are tears running down your face as you release the accelerator and begin to slow down. When the car comes to a halt on the hard shoulder you are weeping uncontrollably.

  Your tears – and mine.

  AFTERWORD

  The Sound of My Voice began as a short story. I can still remember sitting on the flat roof of my then girlfriend’s place at the edge of Clapham Common in London, an A4 pad resting on my knee and writing, ‘You are thirty-four years old and already two-thirds destroyed . . .’

  Having already published two collections of poetry and one volume of short stories, I assumed this to be more of the same, as it were. Over the course of the following weeks, however, this particular short story kept getting longer and longer. As I’d saved some money from my recent stint as a Scottish–Canadian Exchange Writer, I was free to sit down every morning, A4 pad on my knees, and write and write. When my girlfriend and I separated, I drifted to Paris, Barcelona, Budapest and then to Edinburgh. Meanwhile every morning, A4 pad on my knee . . .

  Thinking is over-rated, and in the initial stages of any creative work I find it an actual stumbling block. I am a fully-paid up member of the write-about-what-you-don’tknow school. I write to explore, to discover – I don’t do plans. Over thirty years and twenty books later I still get the same kick out of sitting down every morning . . . and letting my imagination carry me where it will.

  The Sound of My Voice took several years to write and then rewrite. It is a short novel, a novella really, but was intermittently much longer. The chapters were not written in sequence and once a section was under way, I’d start on another and trust they would all fit together at some point. Only gradually did I begin to cotton on to what the novel was about. In fact, I’m not totally sure, even now. When no more sections were forthcoming, I began piecing what I had into some sort of order – a bit like doing a jigsaw, but without the boxtop picture to tell you what you’re aiming for. After much cutting, editing and rearranging it seemed to make sense. It felt right.

  As you may be a first-time reader I will avoid all spoilers – save only to say that the main character, Morris, is a fully-functioning alcoholic. He has it all – successful career, marriage, children, his own home. In society’s terms, he has made it. Being Scottish I had drunk buckets of beer, wine and spirits as a teenager, then more or less stopped until Paris taught me the pleasures of wine with dinner – a lesson I still heed. Morris is different. Speaking in the second person, the voice talks him through his day in an attempt to keep him from destroying himself. The problem is, Morris has no wish to hear a word of what’s being said – a not uncommon approach to life. The effects, of course, are catastrophic.

  In 1987 the novel was published by Canongate and promptly disappeared. A Paladin paperback was published the following year – it also disappeared. Most unusually, I received a very kind letter from the publishers apologising for their lack of application.

  I had poured my heart and soul into this novel, and its lack of readers coupled with the bewilderment of reviewers hit me harder than I probably realised at the time. Nevertheless I still continued to sit down every morning, A4 pad on my knee . . . I wandered here and there – Paris again, house-sitting in rural Spain, a commune in the Australian outback, the Far East – living very much hand-to-mouth. Finally I returned to Edinburgh and found, to everyone’s surprise – my own, most of all – that I was going to get married. Regi came over from Switzerland (we had met and corresponded, met and corresponded) bringing a new kind of happiness into my life. Stability, too, sort of.

  Then one day our phone rang. It was the Village Voice in New York telling me that Irvine Welsh had selected The Sound of My Voice as a Lost Classic and would I grant them permission to use quotes from the novel in his piece.

  A few years after the novel had disappeared for the second time, a very small Scottish publisher had brought it out, after which it disappeared for a third time. But somehow, Irvine W
elsh – whom I’d never met – had come across a copy. He saw it as a highly political novel, a polemic against Thatcherism and the consumer society. This had never occurred to me, but I saw it made complete sense. ‘This book is one of the greatest pieces of fiction to come out of Britain in the 80s . . . Morris becomes a far more terrifying ghost at the feast of 80s consumerism than your stock McInerney-Amis character could ever be . . .’ Unfortunately there were no copies for sale in the States.

  But things began to change. With Welsh’s article as a foreword, The Sound of My Voice was published yet again. This time by Pete Ayrton at Serpent’s Tail, and it remained in print until very recently. Critics hailed the novel as a triumph; it began to be widely translated and to win prizes abroad, the French translation twice gaining a Best Foreign Novel award.

  And now it is published for the fifth time. Fingers crossed, it is here to stay!

  Ron Butlin, 2018