I feel I should explain myself as I am about to sew into the fabric of our culture a short thread which is throbbing at the seams with rape, infanticide, torture, cannibalism, meat-eating and Mariah Carey. Children's Hospice is unlike anything I have ever written before and does not mark a turning point in form for this writer but is in fact an exercise in dusting off the most macabre, sinister corner of my creative mind. All human beings possess this capacity (as is clearly evidenced by our history of delighting in such morbid rituals and pastimes) and it is my belief that the acknowledgement of that breadth of human imagination is likely to sooth the mind as opposed to edging it into a spiral of increased darkness, as is commonly assumed.
Children's Hospice was born as a means of therapy. To reiterate the premise, a husband and wife fall foul of one another during a Christmas day argument and, during a violent clash, the wife attempts to subdue the husband's attack with a wine bottle but accidentally strikes her baby instead. During the baby's period of brain-death and eventual bodily death, the mother undergoes a series of psychological traumas, hauntings, visions and a visit to heaven (dressed as hell), the access to which is located in the bowels of the titular hospice.
The therapy is the exorcism of a trauma from my own mind. Several months ago I was victim to a brutal and unexpected dumping from my long term girlfriend. Prior to her hypocrisy we had shared many talks about our future as a couple, each of us fully intent on sharing the rest of our lives with one another. We had discussed marriage right down to the exact location of the wedding, and had planned to have children too. We named the children Victor and Amelia and from then on they began to develop in my consciousness until they were as real as if they had already been born. Victor was my son and Amelia was my daughter, it was only the dull duty of linear time that prevented me from actually spending time with them or holding them in my arms and as I try not to think linearly (why focus on the end of all things?) they already were. My significant other had birthed them in a nearby plane of the not too distant future and I just had to catch up. When she told me our relationship was over, it was not simply our love that died, it was our children. They were alive to me and thus they died in infancy; a miscarriage - or more accurately an abortion as it was her premeditated doing.
I named the doomed baby in the story Victor. The fact that he is wounded on Christmas day and dead shortly after stems from my consideration that Christmas was truly the last time my significant other and I were really a couple - she neglected my subsequent birthday with vague reasoning then went away on a tour and swiftly terminated the relationship during a flying visit to London. The couple of chapter one - before their fight and the slaughter of their child - are of a tenuous bond. They feign affection for the sake of their child and delegate the arduous task of warm, tender love to a puppy which they buy and rely on to care for Victor emotionally where they need only care for him physically. By the second Christmas depicted they no longer feel the urge to feign anything and the wife stands scornfully in the dark kitchen, aimlessly chopping a turkey while the fat husband glares dead-eyed into a TV screen. This is me and her. I am not and will never be capable of the things he then does to his wife, but as my emotional wound began to heal and the story took shape, I found empathy in her decision and realised that, toward the end of our relationship, I had become gloomy, unresponsive and not worthy of her. It simply took me longer to notice this. I applaud her courage with this tale of domestic abuse and child murder.
The other place from which this story originates was the sudden desire of my friend and I to make music that was a little more courageous and challenging than that of the band we are in. In that respect the title is owed more to this urge than to my personal exorcism, as at first we simply wanted a band name that could raise an eyebrow and attract morbid curiosity. Children's Hospice was a band, which became a musical story throughout six songs, which we then decided we should add dialogue to and which we now believe should be a full on, hour long musical with a small cast and props (including but not limited to a large papier mache baby which would be rigged to climb walls like a spider). We intend to take the musical to the Edinburgh festival fringe in 2015 and the purpose of the preceding novel is that I have always found narrative prose easier to write than drama, so I feel that adapting my own work will be less of a challenge than going straight to script. I have used experimental narrative progression in that rather than a conscious protagonist narrative or omniscient narrator, the prose is made up of clusters of visuals, and subconscious responses to visuals, while the descriptive flows delicately into the dialogue without the usual grammatical indication. It is never immediately clear if it is the God-like narrator speaking or one of the characters but the events transcribed soon offer that clarity and the story progresses as the reader has finished building the scene out of what they are bombarded with - visually.
There is a religious parallel threaded through the tale, as although I am an agnostic leaning further toward atheism I feel that God must be present in fiction as He has been throughout all of mine. Victor - born on Christmas day and fated to ascend beyond the mortal realm in the heaven of mother's invention - is the second coming of Christ whose teachings of love are unheeded in his Earthly lifetime. Mother's rape by father is our cynical iteration of the immaculate conception - Man is the creator and the destroyer and during the assault mother accidentally dooms Victor - thus causing the aforementioned ascension. Then finally, of course, while father is imprisoned and mother driven insane, who really thrives? Baby Victor - alive and well and developing in the heaven of invention - an arguably theoretical existence but an existence nonetheless when mother decides to eat the corpse of her deed at the climax of the story, putting the baby back inside her and offering him hope of a second birth. A resurrection. As she dies the living Victor confined to her imagination is freed and this second life can begin. As such, mother's baby is the only real victor of the story.
I hope to self-publish Children's Hospice and copies will be on sale during the Edinburgh show, should it actually come to fruition.
No comments:
Post a Comment