Turning The Tide

A Writer’s Tale

The writer scurried, head down, tears rolling down cheeks pinched and red raw from a blunt razor and the biting cold. He was crying tears squeezed by bitter winds from the corners of half-closed eyes. The bitterness was not just seasonal, though this winter was sharper than any he had known. He begrudged the deeply frozen creativity his pen skated over every time he sat down in his cramped one room rental to write. Home was where the gurgle of vintage radiators did little more than imitate death throes and words stuck in a throat constricted by unspoken fear. There was a limit to how many layers a man could drape around himself without dousing a spark that had barely flickered in recent weeks. He’d taken time off but he’d have been better off at work. For one thing, the office would be heated on someone else’s dollar. If pressed by his overly-expectant conscience, he could have used world of work demands on his waking hours as an excuse for a lack of progress. Writers, after all, should - as a minimum - put some words on paper. Guilty as charged. All that was left was the sentence. That was the long and short of it. But the words would not come, so he sat anxiously chewing a pencil at that expensive literary festival that hadn’t helped a bit. New words and fresh ideas hovered tantalisingly out of reach. Perhaps, he had concluded around mid-morning, a change of scene would alter his luck.

He sat in the austere public library feeling exposed to the supervisory gaze of the young woman behind the counter. There were rules pinned everywhere and a sense that the regime behind them was watching every move. Overseeing every tartan flask returned to a frayed rucksack, once peacock blue now every shade of faded denim. [no drinks in the common work area]. Counting every sheet that emerged as he reproduced Chapter 2, imagining that somehow fresh words would scratch themselves onto a printed version. Passive-aggressive enforcement of this society’s rules [5 pages ONLY. Double-sided - PLEASE]. He had a profound sense of being watched.

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Against the Tide - Chapter 2

There was a telltale whirring sound that older model cameras made as they swivelled. The more you heard it, the more powerful the waves of paranoid that battered you. Innocence didn’t come into it. The lines between compliance and a cold grey cell at sub-basement level were deliberately blurred to keep citizen workers on edge. Tide knew that. Everyone knew that. They wanted you to assume the lens was peering your way, tallying up traits that deserved a closer look. And you hoped - though hope was in short supply - that the all-seeing apparatus of the Regime decided to take a close look at someone else, that guy over there, or her. Anyone but you.

Tide heard the whirring. If he had been keeping a tally, he’d have guessed at double figures in the last two weeks. Even a minor cog like him knew that’s too many. Maybe it’s just background noise, part of the constant hum of scrutiny. Who knows? Part of him thought ‘who cares’. But someone did. Somewhere, information was being gathered and tallied up? He hesitated to call it evidence because he’d been force-fed Friday night show trials and a varied diet of punishment video compilations. Life had been reduced to the pathetic ambition of making sure you’re not in the dock or stepping out at the Arena to provide entertainment for true patriots.

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Every time he glanced up, distracted by the need to add another line to his draft, her fierce green eyes bored into him. He found himself thinking random thoughts. Does a nose ring hurt? Why purple; isn’t that an old person’s hair colour? Tattoos. Maybe he should get one. What would it be? Would she let him look at hers? Can she tell what I’m thinking?

He looked away, probably too fast. He had a feeling he looked suspicious. But suspected of what? It wasn’t a crime to sit in a public space and struggle with your first novel. Was it? Maybe they were stamping down on the creation of dystopian imaginings. Perhaps the prevailing political direction would put a stop to that sort of alternative commentary. And they are bound to have people looking out for that sort of thing. Where better to place the ‘watchers’ than in public facilities, where the downtrodden and under resourced go to feel something, anything, even some fragile sense of belonging. Some damned warmth too, when the affordable housing provided by the State was in too derelict a state to offer anything other than a hutch for battery humans. Some State that would be. They’d be sure to have Watchers. Official ones and those others, citizen vigilantes, happy to trade their dignity and someone else’s freedom for a leg up the benefits ladder. Watchers. Yes, they could be anywhere.

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Against the Tide - Chapter 3

Some Watchers coped better than she did. A handful relished the footage and the feelings it evoked. For them, the rhythmic movement of the short wooden clubs was mesmeric. She’d seen the type as they were being streamed to their Departments. The ones whose energy fed off the brutality, fists clenching, teeth bared. When she was fast-tracked into Security, earmarked for leadership, recognising that ‘type’ established her reputation. Mostly they picked themselves. The thickset youth whose obvious excitement was pressed against her during a Friday afternoon seminar on surveillance. By then she was already working for the Department. She remembered her supervisor telling her to improve the brevity of her reports. Note his arousal, but leave out the footnote comments about masturbation. Earmark him as an Interrogator and move on. Yeah, there was a type.

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He looked over again, relieved to see her distracted, her attention drawn to a monitor, her voice a disinterested drawl as she interrogated the poor innocent who’d buzzed at the door. Scowling, she was finding them guilty of an intention to return a book.

He watched the watcher.

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Against the Tide - Chapter 1

The reports strewn across the desk simmered with consequences. Not for her, of course. Hand-picked by the Regime at an early age, she had been trained to reinforce its protocols. Emotions didn’t come into it. Why would they?

Like her life, easier without feelings. Head, not heart. As soon as you started thinking beyond the names it felt personal. Like the animals at her grandmother’s small farm. Never gave the chickens names. You’d just get attached to them. So when Violet met a violent end, it would just eat away at you. Anyway, the names weren’t the point. Words, though. Words mattered. Take ‘non-compliance’ and ‘sedition’. They were the kind of words that could get a Citizen on a Watchlist. That’s when names became the only thing that mattered.

Chewed fingernails shuffled the paperwork, trying to keep pace with the connections her mind was used to making. Places, times and patterns were her stock in trade. They were the details that laid the foundations her reputation had been built upon. It had taken a while. Section Heads didn’t warm to new team members whose brains joined the dots too quickly for their liking. She’d got used to the snide retorts when she spoke up at meetings … “you’ll see things a little more clearly when you’ve been here a while, love”, words delivered with barely concealed disdain for the way she looked and dressed, obvious disapproval of the individuality that they’d tried to stamp out of her intake. Unquestioning loyalty from fawning sycophants was how her first boss preferred things. A small man who fluffed up his status at the expense of others. But that was back then.

They pretty much let her be these days.

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Slowly it came to him. He had an idea. He blinked rapidly, nervously, snatching up the chewed pencil and the yellow legal pad, pages curled by the persistent damp in his bedsit apartment. Watcher and watched. Him and her. Could they be linked somehow, two characters bound inexplicably by past events in a tale set in a brutally oppressive society. As his words flowed, he smiled out loud.

“You should smile more”, she said, as she brushed past. He shuffled his papers guiltily. The drafts strewn across the desk in front of him simmered with consequences. “That looks like something important”.

He wanted to tell her, but her attentiveness made him hesitant. He was not at all sure he liked being watched.

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Photo by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash

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Author’s Note:

There is a manuscript. It is 161 pages long, 76,000 words. I wrote it over 80 consecutive days … Around the Words in 80 Days, or somesuch. The story is itching to get out. But the manuscript is not very good. It lives up to the challenge that spawned it. They asked for ‘Two Bad Pages a Day’ and I delivered. It is loud, wordy, tell not show, and not as clever as I imagined it to be two years ago when I drafted it. There is no emotion. Well, there’s that one scene … anyhow, no emotional connecting point. And the storyline is more about things than people. BUT … but, there is a story in there. Over the past couple of months, I have started to write some different words. Same characters, similar world, a new central idea, slower, quieter, more expressive. Snapshots of the story I want to write. Fragments, if you will. And I will. I will use the fragments, as if on an archeological dig, to unearth the story. In the meantime, dropping them into a tale about a writer might help.

If not, at least there’s a short story written and some words shared.

Just Write, Right?