A Kind of Vanishing

IN CAMERA – A PROCESS DEVELOPED:

FOR ME, writing is one element in the creation of a novel. The process is protracted and meandering and begins as a wondering: I wonder what would happen if… Events and scenes develop from this. A Kind of Vanishing began with my hearing an item on Radio 4 about how to support a child when a classmate has died. How can the children come to terms with the loss? Then there is the possibility that a boy or girl might not have liked the child. Perhaps they are secretly pleased that the child is gone. They may feel responsible for the ‘vanishing’; it may be a wish come true. I populate this germ of an idea with sketchy characters.

Central to the establishment of my reality are characters and location. Since I was a child I have scribbled down my characters’ ‘vital statistics’, continually revising their birth date, their full name and their relationship to one another as an idea takes shape. What is their role in the story? What impact do events have on them? What have they experienced? Some of this the reader will learn during the novel, other knowledge they will never know; the character’s back story. My characters have lives beyond the fiction. For me, all characters do, whether David Copperfield or Lisbeth Salander. This is what makes them real. Isabel Ramsay is out there living her life. A Kind of Vanishing, and the novel I am now working on, dip into this life. Each time we read about Isabel we have more evidence with which to construct our own story. If I don’t believe Isabel Ramsay exists, then she not is real and I cannot write about her.

To become intimate with my characters, I must know the streets through which they pass, the pavements, the paths, and the muddied grass on which they step. I must see them in their landscape. I scribble constantly in a notebook. If I don’t have this with me, I ring home and leave a message, usually on the answer machine, to preserve the thought. During the writing, amongst other messages are my own: from a field, my voice lost in a gale; from a crowded bus in an urgent whisper imparting phrases baffling to anyone else: ‘She does not know he has been there before’, ‘The Judge likes Aeschylus’.

I read many books and articles, adding quotes and ideas to the notebook, which grows fat with leaflets and cuttings. I mine Google. I meet people who are doing my characters’ jobs. I am less interested in how they do their work than in how it feels. My characters are constant companions.

Throughout the writing, I use my camera for three reasons:

For the record: I want facts. A literal description is not integral to the veracity of the story, but a photograph will show detail that I do need to get right.

The purloined place: My photograph of a place is not of itself; it is in my novel. When I go there I am not in the present, I am in the fictional place. Be it an office lavatory, a statue or a wrought iron gate into a garden I ‘take’ it for fiction.

Beyond the record: The camera records what I capture through the lens. I am selective so I may miss a detail, or at the time I saw it differently. I can examine a photograph: crop it, enlarge it, perhaps heighten the contrast to see new shapes emerge.

These photographs are not illustrations of my story. Like the characters’ lives beyond the text; they do not need to be included to make the story real. The text must do this.

The camera does lie. Most of these images depict scenes which happen in my story and have not happened in real life.

FOR THE RECORD:

MY CAMERA captures ‘reality’. This is the least important reason for taking photographs.

How many steps are there to the river?

Four up then twelve down. This odd arrangement fascinates a little boy: he has to walk up to walk down. He likes to come here.

I could make these steps up, but they are real. If a reader should visit the Bell Steps in Hammersmith they can follow the footsteps of my character and her child.

A modest bunch of flowers with no message is often propped against this headstone. Before the blooms dry and their colour fades or they become sodden from rain, they are replaced with a fresh bouquet. The headstone is only twenty-nine years old but already the epitaph is yellowed with lichen and will soon be illegible.

Is there somewhere to hide to watch for who brings these flowers? My detective finds a spot some distance from the grave. This picture confirms my recollection of the area; it is possible to crouch behind this wall and see while not being seen.

A woman runs a cleaning company; leasing cheap offices in Shepherds Bush, she has no control over the common areas. She has complained to the landlord about the unisex toilets, they give a terrible impression to clients. She should find new premises but she has become distracted by a murder case. The ‘facts’ are: the sanitary-ware is salmon pink and the roller mechanism is broken so that the towel spools onto the lino. These details may or may not feature in the novel. But I know they are there.

THE PURLOINED PLACE:

IN The Poetics of Space (1958) Gaston Bachelard describes how by polishing a table we develop a relationship with it that heightens its ‘reality’. It finds a place in our world beyond its utilitarian function of ‘table’. I watch a wall being built: it is comprised not only of bricks and mortar, but of the conversation I had with the young man who built it and of my thoughts as he lay each course. To me it is more than a wall.

This leads me to the second reason for taking photographs. I ‘take’ the real location in a photograph and make it fictional. The real place becomes the fictional location. When I visit the toilets in the last image, like Lucy in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the wardrobe has no back: I have entered the cleaning company and my story is not make-believe.

I build a relationship with the location or with objects. My memories of the place are layered with the experiences of my characters. When I visit Tide Mills I ‘remember’ playing hide and seek there. I look for Alice and Eleanor in the undergrowth, through holes in walls, or running along the beach. When I am by the River Thames I am no longer in the present. I am no longer ‘present’.

This is a photocopied page from the file of a murdered woman. Her strangled body was found at the spot marked with an ‘X’ in the summer of 1981. Decades later, in 2010, a woman sits in an empty house late at night. She smoothes out this crumpled sheet and by the light of an angle-poise lamp examines this image.

Blinding sunshine bakes the mud to clay. Sunk into its surface are brick, twists of rope, broken bottles; flotsam and jetsam. Along the top of the wall is a trellis, a glimpse of a shrub, signifying prosaic domesticity beyond the frame of the image. Here is generic familiarity: weeds sprout from a retaining wall that is held fast with steel bolts. Some bricks are green with moss and slime, the strata pattern marking the high water levels.

I have purloined this place: in broad daylight its truth is hidden. It could be a typical riverside scene, altered little over the last 150 years. It is not. It is a shot taken by a detective and later it is given a file number. Its secret is revealed to you, the reader. If you make your way down the Bell Steps – three up, twelve down – you too might become enter the story and forge your own memories. This where a woman’s life ended. This is a ‘fact’ that you may recall.

In 2010 my character pulls the the black and white photocopy out of her jacket pocket. She positions herself so she can see what the photographer saw.

In 2011, yet another woman is here. She snaps pictures, she makes notes in a spiral-bound book, describing the cloying odour of river mud wafting in the still air. Later she deletes ‘wafting’. A person died here, she tells herself. Standing where the body was found, I believe my own story.

BEYOND THE RECORD:

THE THIRD reason I take pictures is to discover what I did not see through the lens.

In Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 thriller, a photographer roaming a London park unwittingly witnesses a murder. He only sees this when he enlarges his picture. As he ‘shoots’ a couple around corners, down steps, from behind fences, the only sound is the rushing of a breeze in the trees. I had not particularly noticed this before I saw the film. Now I hear it and I am in the film.

I enlarge my images and I see what I was meant to see.

The Leaning Woman, a sculpture by Karel Vogel, was erected beside the Great West Road in 1959. She sits on a plinth beside a churchyard, three minutes’ walk from the river where the woman’s body was found. As I examine the shot, I discern marks on the pockmarked concrete. I click the magnifying glass icon until the screen is a mass of grey and brown pixels.

Chalk lines have been scrawled over the woman’s body, an attempt to erase them unsuccessful. I am told that these segments represent a butcher’s jointing of a carcass. My photograph has connected two realities: the actual and the invented. My murderer has been here at night when there is no one around and drawn these lines.

OFF THE RECORD:

THESE ARE images from my characters’ points of view. They are snatches of their lives. They contribute to their back story. To take these pictures I have entered my characters’ lives. I sip a cup of coffee and eat pancakes with syrup in a McDonald’s in Earl’s Court before getting into the cab of the first District Line train of the day. As I eat I avoid the eye of other drivers – they know to leave me alone – I am my character. I know what it is like to clamber over the flint wall, trampling on nettles and rough grass before crouching down. If anyone looks over the wall they will see me. I have to assume they will not. I rest a bunch of flowers against a headstone, seeing for myself that the engraving on the stone is almost obscured by lichen. As I sit on a hillside with my notebook, I ponder the best cleaning agent for removing lily stamen stains from silk.

My characters are based on real life. I am the actor.

This scrap of beach by the Thames is revealed as the tide ebbs. A woman contemplates the spans on Hammersmith Bridge, they seem to shimmer in the heat. Her husband, a civil engineer, has told her that the bridge was designed by the man who created the London sewers and opened by the Prince of Wales in 1887. Her thoughts lead her to the present Prince of Wales. Charles is getting married today.

I look at this photograph and forget that I took it. The point of view is not mine.

A man with the mind of a murderer prefers darkness. He drives a London Underground train, working the Dead-Late shift on the District line. Many tunnels have not changed in over a hundred years. Always walking, always driving, he is never in one place.

He is always absent.

Twenty-nine years on, a retired detective obsesses about an unsolved murder. Parked by the sea, he takes stock of what he has just learnt. He drinks coffee from his flask and, given to snacking, eats a Kit-Kat. He has a lead and imagines telling his daughter, but, grown up and grown away, she is a stranger. Absently he writes her name in steam from the cup on his windscreen. His daughter will never know her Dad did this.

As I slowly sip the scalding liquid, I am the detective.

A three-year-old boy studies ants scurrying to and fro across the path and positions twigs that are tree trunks to divert them. He likes the twig’s curve in relation to the square border stones. The lines in between are paths, they are short cuts, escape routes. People are not as clever as ants, he ponders. Unlike ants, their behaviour makes no sense to him. Alive with possibility this landscape is his.

A man comes out of the Co-op in a seaside town. It is eight-thirty-five am. He carries two soft ham rolls and a tin of coke in a plastic bag for his lunch. He has a massive heart attack. This picture is his last conscious sight.

As I gaze at this snatch of pavement I see a life passing before me.

These images are part of my process of writing novels. I have taken reality for use in my fiction. Using photographs such as these I believe my fiction is reality.

Then I begin to write…