Pat Kavanagh Prize

The Pat Kavanagh prize is awarded each year for 'outstanding students' on the Goldsmiths MA and presented by United Agents. With a reputation for supporting 'great writing,' Pat Kavanagh was famously encouraging of emerging writers and I was flattered and amazed to have been shortlisted for the prize. Last night I read at the awards ceremony and was stunned again to be awarded second place - I did not expect that one bit! I didn't even know they gave a second prize. Such a confidence boost - brilliant brilliant, brilliant!!

Below is a short extract from my portfolio which I read on the night. The novel is set on the Niger Delta in West Africa and follows the fate of a community on the brink of potentially catastrophic change as a foreign company moves in to drill for oil. It is told from two points of view: a young Nigerian man who is dragged into the conflict that erupts over control of resources, and a British aid worker who observes what's going on from the sidelines initially but who slowly, inevitably becomes implicated in some of the betrayals and violent events that take place. Here's Frankie, the aid worker, when she first arrives off the red-eye from London and has her first glimpse of the country. The Africa of her mind is not the Africa that begins to confront her here...

She must have slept.  Startled by the boom of men’s voices demanding documents from the driver and some payment or other, Frankie raised her body up in the car seat with the heels of her hands and blinked until her vision cleared. Faces loomed at her through the glass. The driver looked straight ahead.

There was a group of five, maybe six, men.  A wooden pole attached to a rope and stuck with nails had been thrown into the road. A Policeman stepped forward and bent down to peer through the driver’s window, the loop of a whip strung at his belt.

‘Morning Madame,’ he said, the sour smell of old liquor wafting from his pores, as he made a show of asking for her papers.

Frankie eyed the rifle that hung at his shoulder, thought of the shock in its barrel, of what might be seen through its sights. A thick vein at the centre of his forehead pulsed as he searched for something to say. Everything was in order, she knew that much, so she pressed herself back in the seat and forced a smile.

Two appeared at the window to her left, eyes crawling over the open lip of her bag. One of them was wrapping a piece of cotton around his finger. Winding it very slowly and tightly, around and around. The officer barked at them over the roof of the taxi, his shirt buttons clicking against the glass as he leaned into the window, fist thumping on the metal above. The men shuffled backwards and the Policeman relented, muttering something about a good impression for ‘our foreign visitors.’ He returned her passport and waved them on.

The driver fingered a clutch of grubby notes through the window as they pulled away.

‘These sticker boys!’ he exclaimed. ‘Always 419ing, sitting in the pockets of the Mopol! You know these Mobile Police?’

Frankie shook her head and caught his eye in the rear view mirror. Seeing herself reflected there, she looked more drained than she’d realised. Her skin had been withered by the flight, fuzz haloed the dark shine of her hair. She’d taken Valium to help her rest on the plane, but the anticipation of arrival had her lapsing in and out of wakefulness all night.

‘They call themselves Police. But thief and go - That’s what they do. And they don’t even care.’ He spat that last word from his mouth and into the windscreen.  ‘All this chopping-chopping, stealing small-small money from men who have nothing. They will spoil your tyres and scatter your papers and demand your money in tax that will line their pockets and keep their bellies full.’

Frankie watched a badge spin from the mirror – an oval of red embossed with gold letters: Jesus is the Reason for the Season. Slowly, she sank down into the scratchy velour of the seat with its faint smell of mildew and the driver’s voice seemed to fade. Her eyes drifted to the world outside as it revealed itself in the light of morning.

There was no big red sunrise like she’d seen in the guidebooks. Instead, a feeble sun staggered into the pale morning sky. People were on the move, coursing down the roadside at the edge of town. Kids wearing only their pants carried water in yellow jerry cans. Women sauntered in bright fabrics bearing wide enamel head-pans brimming with pawpaw and dried fish heads. Ragged chains of teenagers scuffed along in their school uniforms – they ­could have been anywhere.

The taxi passed through shanties: chaotic, dirty jumbles of corroded iron roofs and timber poles festooned with loose cables. Not a mud hut to be seen. Goats skittered in the muck and filth and men beat out scrap metal panels in makeshift roadside workshops. She’d not expected to see litter in Africa, but there it was – scraps of packaging, cans and plastic bags – crushed into the ground and banked up against the brick walls.

‘It’s very colourful,’ Frankie said to the driver, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

They arrived at a junction where a nightclub was kicking out and tall palms swayed overhead in a gathering wind. A young woman, dressed in western clothes with a bottle of brandy in hand, stumbled to the roundabout and slumped down in the lap of a weathered statue that had its arms outstretched in welcome. The woman caught her eye and made her flinch.

She shifted her weight, trying to yield some space between the springs that punched through the cushion beneath her. On the verge, there were two half-built petrol stations on either side of the road, lorry loads of sand parked up out front.

‘To build anything, even roads, the land here must first be filled,’ the driver chuckled to himself. ‘We are raising our own Atlantis.’

A yellow digger chugged off down a track that had been cut into the bush, puffing black plumes into a corner of flat white sky. Female construction workers gathered by a line of trucks. Dressed in t-shirts and flip flops, they made ready to carry heavy loads of cement and hard-core and bricks and sand, winding small crowns of cloth in their hands.  The driver pointed beyond the women to a mansion set back from the road, surrounded by perfect lawns and piles of mud. The building was palatial – all marble and columns and broad stone steps. 

The driver asked if she’d be taking one of the new homes herself and seemed disappointed when she said she didn’t think so.

‘Your company – they will prepare this for you. Wait and see.’

‘No. I’ll be not be living here. I’m going to Akassa,’ she said. ‘Do you know it?’

He pulled his chin into his neck. ‘Akassa? That place down on the Delta at the beachside?’

Frankie nodded.

‘I see.  You are an oil worker.’

‘No,’ Frankie held out the flat of her hand to push back that idea. ‘No – I’m an aid worker. I’ve come here to help.’ As soon as the words came out, she wished she hadn’t said them.

The driver let out a long ‘Ohhhh,’ sound.

‘Now that is a backwater,’ he said gravely. ‘A serious one. And there is too much trouble in that place. You’ll find no fortune there, Auntie. No fortune at all.’

 

Anisoptera's Escape

A prose response to Philip Cashian's String Quartet No. 1, this post originally appeared  as part of 'Did I Hear That?,' a creative collaboration with the Royal Philharmonic Society.

ANISOPTERA'S ESCAPE 

The plains are black tonight beyond the edge of town. Sitting on the flat roof of the tower block, Anis watches the last embers of the cloud bars fade and day rolls over the horizon. He unfolds his legs and rises to his haunches, gibbous as the waxing moon.

Anis likes spending his days up here, observing the scything gulls and crows, the aircraft taking off and landing. The glistening of the reservoir. It is the only place where he can feel unsullied peace and joy. He looks over the edge and, sixteen floors down, a man backed against the railings by a streetlamp bends steel wire into insect shapes for children. A cue: Anis gets to his feet, checks the clasps on his dungarees and picks up a battered leather holdall. It is time now for his walk.

First he must negotiate the stairwell, the walkways, the recesses, slipping by unnoticed. He is not good at this - a man of such ungainly bulk is prone to being seen. Before he’s taken three steps down he’s barged to the wall by a young man hurtling to the roof before the fire-door swings to again. Perhaps he hadn't t seen him. Perhaps the young man was rushing up to shout a warning: ‘Anis – look out, he’s on his way!’

Anis waits, presses his back into the wall and breathes in time with the warm air gusting through a vent in the bricks. Steam as a bathroom window creaks ajar. A girl twangs on the floss she’s pulling through her teeth.

He moves on, descending past the flat where the seamstresses work, plucking stray threads from their cloth; past the dancers lined up at their bar. He wishes he could watch and linger to absorb their grace, but he knows that is impossible. Water drips from a concrete beam, skips the neck of a green glass bottle and puddles on the floor.

Out in the street, Anis hurries from the estate, cocooned in his coat and careful to keep close to the buildings. Paving soon gives way to open ground and he can push his shoulders back and lift his face up to the night. The walk is not a long one, but he appreciates each pace of it: the scented drifts of mayflower, the scuttling life among the hedgerows, spits of evening rain upon his brow.

Anis’ preference is for freedom, not enforced seclusion – he has tried so many methods of escape. Once, he crossed the metal bridge above the ring-road, stood among the shattered hub caps and the dirty piles of snow with thumb outstretched. He waited there all day, until the light vanished into the grey of the verge and he could be seen no more. Not a single person stopped, slowed down, or even beeped their horn.

Then there was the time he rowed a boat down the canal. He made the coracle himself, bending willow for the laths of the hull and hazel-wood for the weave. He even learnt to steer the craft in clear, straight lines. But soon he ran aground on a dam of soft drink cans, a traffic cone and matted clumps of straw blown from the park-keeper’s cuttings.

Undeterred, he had no choice but to make a bid for airborne liberty.

Anis reaches the door of the lock-up, takes out his key and rolls up the shuttered entrance, taking in a draught of grit and grease. He puts his holdall on the table and flicks the light-switch on. Overhead, brightly coloured stalactites hang from the curve of the roof. Anis takes down a blue china cup from the dresser and fixes himself some tea before setting to work on the finishing touches to his project. It has been a very long day.

Tomorrow has been chosen for the launch of his escape. Long before the local residents start shovelling cornflakes into their mouths or spreading marmalade on toast, Anis will be gone from here. 

His desire – no, his need – to flee had started with the hissing. Twins in matching sundresses swinging from the railings: they faced outwards, arms locked behind them, heels braced on the low wall. Convex grotesques.

‘Pssssstttt, hisssssssssssssss,’ said one.

‘Here, it’s the adder’s servant!’ said another.

‘Pssssstttt, hisssssssssssssss.’

‘Get him, get him, get him!’ they chanted.  

He cannot recall a single daylight outing since that has not been soured by hisses.

 His favourite part to work on is the cockpit – more properly, the thorax - weaving bright cavities that house the heart and hold the legs and wings together. It is delicate work, but Anis possesses a dexterity and patience that is startling. He has built a loom in the lock-up, strung with a sturdy warp and wefted with fine threads. The silks he has chosen are jewel coloured: emerald, garnet, sapphire, roseate pearl. Dazzling patterns emerge as he works the treadles in the quiet of the night and likes to imagine how life would be if things were different, can almost think about this place as home. Almost.

But then the mothers with their wagging fists and tongues flock back into his mind. They have accused him of poking and snatching the eyes of their daughters, of sewing their mouths and noses shut while they slept. It was even said he’d weigh your soul and sell it on for scrap. He never understood their gibes and leers, why they chose him as the object of their bile. He guessed the twins’ taunts had got so out of hand they’d turned a rumour into fact. And he accepted people looked at him and didn’t feel surprise, with his bulbous, florid nose, his giant’s span. But Anis had no courage to fight back or to ask questions, and let himself be bullied into silence.

It is true that Anis didn’t always know success. There have been many failures in the way of his creations: legs that got up and walked off by themselves, eyes that shrank and failed at the light, wings that folded when they were meant to propel. His attempts to revise the blueprints were protracted, agonised over by the glare of a head-torch. Again and again he ran his diagnostics on the lift and drag, assessed dynamic pressure, accelerated all six degrees of freedom, but always test flights turned to wreckage, time trials stuttered to a halt. He looked to birds in flight for the answers to his problems, queried the fall of sycamore seeds for clues.

Anis almost gave up, but then the fathers began to take their turn, attaching rocks to each end of a rope and flinging it at his ankles as he passed. They dragged him to the ground, then set him free again. Afterwards, they allowed their sons their sport – chasing Anis with hooked poles, made sticky with birdlime. There was nothing he could do but press on with his escape, watch as hatred sunk its roots and flourished all around him, firm as weeds in stones.

‘Pssssstttt, hisssssssssssssss.’

At last, one Tuesday afternoon, Anis found hope circling unaided in the skylight and saw that it was possible: the gold flashes of the wings, the majesty of flight. Success! Even with his heft, he felt the lightness of his designs and flung the shutters wide in celebration.

Then, a pass of grief as he watched them go their own way, darning air above the children on the path, who turned and squealed with glee. Would that they weren’t blind to the humanity of their maker, to his gifts, to his capacity for wonder.

But they were. They are. And he must leave.

Tonight’s no time for sentiment.

He has replicated his best prototype and now readies the new fleet, one last frantic assembly of legs, wings, antennae, bodies, heads. Fixing, adjusting, finishing.

When he is done he surveys the work, grabs up the battered holdall and packs his dragonflies in careful, tissued layers.

Sunrise and Anis sets off for the roof. He can afford to be less cautious in the mornings, deserted and still as the benches and the courtyards are at this time of day. He makes his way back up the stairwell, pushes through the fire-door and sets his bag down gently on the ground.

One by one, Anis plucks the hairs from his own head and lays them out. When he is ready he unclasps the holdall, reaches in and takes out a single dragonfly. He takes a hair, wraps it round, fastens it like a rein, then repeats the action until a thousand Skimmers, Hawkers, Chasers, Darters, Thorntails and Dropwings are harnessed, ready to take flight.

Anis takes a needless run-up to the edge and notices the distance is unusually clear today. Still no sign of any souls below, just the electric thrum of a milk-float on its rounds.

His final checks complete, Anis does not waste a single minute more. Eagerly he flicks the reins, watches his fleet rise and takes one final leap of faith.

The New Nature Writers: An Encounter

 

The invitation appeared in my inbox some weeks ago. The very week, in fact, that I had been grappling with questions about how to represent the land-as-character in my fiction, how to give it a voice that was pre-historic, pre-linguistic, while still using words (and not, as a friend put it, sound like a yoghurt weaving vegan fundamentalist). The email offered a conference on the ‘new nature writing’ hosted by Bath Spa University and the opportunity for me to explore this unfamiliar new frontier. It was a classic case of synchronicity – serendipity indeed.

The conference didn’t disappoint. It was a fascinating (exciting even) day of discussion amongst a small group of thirty-odd writers, activists, artists, journalists and poets concerned with how to leverage their combined and considerable talent and their obsession(s) with nature to tackle the urgent issues of climate change and environmental degradation.

As I drove through the summer lanes on my journey there, it hadn’t occurred to me that I might actually be drawn in to a community of writers, inspired by their integrity.


We had Richard Kerridge’s brilliant introduction to the new nature writing’s scuffles with the Romantic sublime, localism and scientific discourse. Brett Westwood of the BBC Natural History unit urged us to eschew jargon and embrace complexity with new languages designed to engage and ‘reach out to the heart’ of audiences. John Vidal spoke to the importance of the new nature writer’s position ‘outside looking outside,’ beyond the industrial and commercial interests that have and continue to ‘corrupt' nature, as well as the mega-NGOs that are supposed to serve it. A seriously smart operator, it would be easy to dismiss Vidal on first meeting as a buffoon, an entertaining relic from the school of ‘60s journalism, but that would be a big mistake. He knows what he's talking about. Melanie Challenger was, I thought, unduly hard on herself and her achievements as she talked of the difficulties and pitfalls of ‘making a difference’ while Paul Evans silenced the room and gladdened our hearts with a moving and lyrical meditation on an ancient, local yew tree. He deserves his reputation as one of the most enthralling writers of our times.

The question of language was central to all of our discussions – how to name things, how to use that naming to enchant and reach out and advocate for the environment. What is critical here – and evidenced so wonderfully by Paul Evans’ reading – is the importance of communicating the particularity of one’s experience, of speaking with a unique voice, inhabiting authenticity.

But what was also critical was this question of how writers can ‘make a difference.’  Coming at this as a complete novice, it seemed to me that the new nature writers, like so many people with very specific expertise, were so involved in tying themselves up in philosophical and idealist knots that they fail to see the ‘difference’ that they can make as staged, specific, small and of necessity short term. It seemed to me it was about expectations and I wanted to cry out to them and say, that the idea of ‘making a difference’ was way too big an idea. Speak to any successful campaigner or advocate and they will tell you that their targets are very particular, often small-scale, approached with the recognition that achieving those targets will enable them to step up and move on to bigger and bigger things over time. Unsatisfactory and frustrating as this can be, particularly to the idealist, it can offer a genuinely radical and achievable change agenda that is sustainable in the long term.

I was left with so much to think about, from the nature of personal responsibility in an age of environmental emergency, to the idea that the practice of being a ‘new nature writer’ must just be a complete and utter bloody blast – all that tramping about in ancient woodlands, slapping around on wet sand at low tide, lying prone in long summer grass hoping for a sighting of the Lesser Speckled Tit Warbler.

My encounter with the new nature writers left me enriched and with my eyes wide open to the nature we have now, as well as the nature that’s to come. I went on my way as a member of a new network to which I hope I can find something worth contributing. I also left feeling relief, that here was a group of genuinely decent, grounded individuals with a passion for the world around them and an extraordinary gift to convey that in some of the most brilliant prose I have heard for some time. For once, here was a series of readings that had me actively listening from beginning to end. And not a yoghurt weaving vegan fundamentalist in sight.