Today’s guest
blog is by author Hanna Jameson. Hanna
is currently reading American History and Literature with Politics at the
University of Sussex. Something You Are
is her debut novel in the London Underground series.
When I was
eighteen, I was a waitress. This was how
I learned basic social skills, because, I assure you, once you’ve been paid to
be polite and cheerful at 06.00 when you’ve been awake since 04.30, you can be
polite and cheerful to pretty much anybody under any circumstances.
©Ben
Grubb Photography
|
One afternoon I
was alone behind the bar serving the room’s only occupant; a robust and
talkative man in his early forties wearing a zebra-print tie. At some point during our chat I mentioned in
passing that I was writing a crime/thriller.
This had quite a spectacular effect.
He became quiet, checked the bar was empty and beckoned me closer.
He said, ‘I’ve wanted to tell someone this story for
years.’
I didn’t venture
much closer for obvious reasons. I was
preparing myself for some pretty epic screaming and running away. Then he pulled down his tie and the collar of
his shirt, and revealed the most horrific scar I have ever seen. A jagged blackened gash stretched from under
one ear across his throat to the other ear.
Most people would think that was hideous. I was utterly enthralled.
I have no idea
what that says about me.
He then proceeded
to tell me the story of how he got the injury, which turned out to have been
self-inflicted in a failed suicide attempt, after getting into debt with
mobsters during a failed property deal in Spain. Having been asked to testify by the police,
and threatened with decapitation by his one-time business partners, he drove
his car up onto a hill, cut his own throat, and survived only because he was
being followed by police surveillance.
To my annoyance,
my shift then ended.
I came back the
next day, having promised I would listen to the entire story and novelize it
for him, but his company had left. When
I searched the company name, I found that they did not exist. To this day, I still wish I could somehow
track this man down, let him take me out for lunch (in an extremely public
place), and write down the details I never got to hear.
A year later,
traveling home by train from a Manic Street Preachers gig in Wolverhampton, I
sat next to the kind of man you literally cannot fail to exchange life stories
with within ten minutes. We have all met
one. He was in his fifties, lanky and
weathered, and loved to ask questions.
I told him I was
writing a crime/thriller. He glanced
back at the seats behind us.
‘I’ve just realized why I recognize the name
of your hometown,’ he said. ‘Winchester.
There’s a prison there, right? A
famous one?’
I reminded myself
that I was very unlikely to be murdered on a train in the middle of the day,
and nodded.
‘I was never there,’ he continued. ‘But a
friend of mine was who I used to work with.’
In the time it
took us to reach the next station, while I was quite clearly taking notes on my
phone, he told me about his friend. His
friend, who used to be a heroin trafficker, and worked for the French Foreign
Legion. At the next station, Birmingham,
he left the train. I never saw him again. I did not even find out his name.
I am now twenty-two and earlier this year I
went to a music festival where I was introduced to a young blue-eyed writer,
who wore a wide-brimmed hat and kept a single dollar in his wallet to remind
him to travel. I don’t actually remember
much of what was said throughout the evening, as I spent most of it swaying
about and crying on the shoulders of a Brazilian man as I sang The Wild Ones to Brett Anderson. However, four days later I received a message
asking me if I had ever listened to Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads. I hadn’t.
When I did, several days later, I scared an entire train carriage of
people with the fifty-eight minute silent maniacal grin on my face. This might not seem like much compared to
chance tales of a cutthroat and a drug trafficker, but thus far I can’t think
of a more important discovery.
My writing has always
been more influenced by music than anything else has. Nick Cave brought with him not just a better
way of passing hours of solitude, but a thousand stories of cutthroats, crimes
of passion, sewage-drenched preachers, methodical serial killers, vacuous
cityscapes, thieves, gamblers, drunks, whores, pimps, and dead children. Music that provides a short cut to hate, or
love, or despair, or the unnameable emotions somewhere between nostalgia and
loss and wistfulness. I guess what I’m
trying to say is... I can’t see myself
ever coming to respect someone’s art more.
So the moral of these stories is to talk to
strangers. Yes, people are scary and
weird. I once saw a man on a train who
looked like Hitler with a four inch scar down his cheek and wearing a golf
jumper (I didn’t speak to him). Yes,
people are annoying. Occasionally when
trying to navigate my way through slow walkers I feel an almost overwhelming
urge to start attacking at random. Yes,
sometimes when you attempt conversation you get nothing more than a panicked
expression as if you are about the mug them.
And yes, more often than not I can’t even be bothered to do this and
just want to listen to my iPod on public transport in defensive silence.
I hope this is
useful advice to someone. I hope that
the man in the zebra-print tie reads this.
I also hope you buy my book and listen to Nick Cave, perhaps
simultaneously.
That would really
make my year!
Something You Are - Nic Caruana
is paid to kill people. Once, he was destined for a white-collar job in a
middle-class area. However, like many kids, he made a fatal mistake. Now, he
inhabits the bleak, dark city that runs like a seam beneath London. His latest
job is to track down the daughter of an arms dealer, using any weapon necessary
to get to the truth. But Nic has fallen in love with his dangerous employer's
wife. When the missing girl turns up dead, this grief-stricken mother starts
playing twisted games with Nic... and this time he has nothing in his amoury to
protect himself.
Head of Zeus publishes Something You Are by Hanna Jameson in
hardback on 6th December 2012 for £7.99
2 comments:
THIS is why I like to talk to people --ANY people, and why (to the chagrin of some of my significant others) I like to go to bars alone. You either get it or you don't. Hanna sounds like my kind of people.
This is really nice a read. Like you have said most people are afraid to talk to strangers and I am definitely one of them. There are really some instances in life that makes you not to talk to someone you don't know because you might end up being hurt and harassed again. Though like you I love to read horror and thriller type of books. I'll make sure to visit and buy one of this book.
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