I TOLD YOU

What is flash fiction? I'd never heard of it until I went to Goldsmiths. Not necessarily fiction that's written in a flash, I discovered. It's fiction that's over and done with... in a flash. Often only a few hundred words or so. Sometimes as few as 150 words. I'm part of a writing workshop consisting of other Goldsmiths alumni and during our weekly Zoom session yesterday, the person running it (we take it in turns) suggested we write some flash fiction: a short story, in 150 words. We were given ten minutes to complete it. She then suggested we try something on the theme prediction, up to 500 words. I put the ideas together and wrote for ten minutes on the theme prediction. So here's my first bit of flash fiction, written in a flash, 150 words exactly, on the theme prediction.

 

I TOLD YOU.

They say no one predicted it but that’s not true. Bob predicted it. Bob had been predicting it for years. Bob read the New Scientist. So when it began, slowly, with a little international news story in the back of the paper – a mysterious sickness in China – Bob was cock-a-hoop. ‘Ah!’ Bob yelled down the telephone line, during their weekly Sunday evening call. ‘I told you! It’s arrived! The global pandemic.’ 

Susie raised her eyebrows, humoured Bob a little, tried to change the subject, and when that didn’t work she passed the phone over to Jez. ‘Your dad,’ Susie mouthed, raising her eyebrows and continuing to stir the gravy.

She told her friends about it in the café on Friday morning. ‘My father-in-law thinks there’s going to be a global pandemic,’ Susie said, because Bob’s voice was still there in her head somehow, niggling, disquieting, worrying. All her friends laughed.

Swap Bob for my father and Susie for me and you might call that autofiction (also a term I'd never heard of until I studied creative writing). When Valentine's Day came around again this year, I remembered how I'd felt on Valentine's Day last year: worried. Back then my father was saying: we're not taking this seriously enough; if it's in Italy then it's also here; our government is sleepwalking us into catastrophe. During February half-term 2020, I travelled to York with a friend and we nervously joked about the two cases of Coronavirus that had been recorded in the city. But to be honest, local flash flooding seemed the more pressing problem.

The last public event I attended in early March was Elizabeth Day in conversation with Josh Cohen at Goldsmiths College. Travelling to New Cross by busy tube and train, I started to feel properly afraid. All these people crammed together, breathing the same air, I thought, is this how it spreads? Is handwashing (what the government was then advising) not enough? In the corridor of the Richard Hoggart Building, I passed Michael Rosen, who's a professor at the college. He was walking towards the exit, flanked, pop star-like, by a gaggle of students. Not long after, (but not soon enough) Goldsmiths College was closed. And as we all know now lovely Michael Rosen was left fighting for his life.

Some friends urged bravery, suggesting we continue to meet for dinners and coffees when our government finally began cautioning against this in late March. It's not about bravery, my father patiently explained down the telephone line, it's about keeping apart in order to break the chain of transmission so our hospitals aren't overwhelmed. Hospitals overwhelmed? True, this was happening in Italy by then. But surely it couldn't happen in the UK? 

My father, Colin, isn't a Cassandra but he really does read the New Scientist and he really did mention the threat of global pandemic before any of us had heard the word Coronavirus. Right at the beginning, when I relayed his fears to a friend, she said: but I thought your father was rational? Well, he is, I replied. And as it turns out, he really was.

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P.S. Perhaps he really is a Cassandra! I just looked her up and as well as predicting future events, 'Cassandra could neither alter these events nor convince others of the validity of her predictions.' 

I Don't Remember

I remember, back when life was normal and I was studying on the MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, in the spring of 2019, Blake Morrison, who taught the Life Writing module, asked us students to do writing exercises in class. I remember that each week he asked us to write for ten minutes or so, then read out what we’d come up with. We never knew what the exercises would be so it was all rather nerve-wracking. Strangely, I don’t remember what any of those exercises were except for one called ‘I remember’. It was simple and predictable enough. We had to write a list of things we remembered, anything at all, beginning each time with the words 'I remember'. I think the idea was that it might spark something we could later develop into a longer piece. Or maybe Blake got fed up with the sound of his own voice and wanted a break? I do remember that I immediately thought of a person: my paternal grandfather, and thought I might write a list of what I didn’t remember, ending with something I did. I sent it to my father afterwards so I was able to look back for it just now in the email. That email is dated February 16th, 2019. Remember what life was like back then? Me too. Anyway, here it is...

I Don’t Remember.

I don’t remember what date it was, or what day of the week it was, or even, to be honest, what year it was, but I do remember how hard his face was – and ice cold to the touch – as he lay in his coffin.

I don’t remember what the funeral director said, or what I said, or what anybody said, but I do remember that he used to say - “It’s only me!” when he came into our house, opening the front door without knocking because he didn’t need to.

I don’t remember what the funeral was like, or what the humanist-guy was like, or even what the day was like, but I do remember what the music was like because it was Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘What is life to me without you?' and it made my grandmother sob, so then I had to turn my head away and concentrate very hard on the EXIT sign above the door, repeating its four letters over and over to myself – E-X-I-T, E-X-I-T, E-X-I-T – so I wouldn’t break down.

I don’t remember what happened about the coffin. Did it glide away slowly? Were curtains pulled around it? But I do remember thinking that the rose I had placed in there next to him would be engulfed in the same flames that licked, then consumed, his silver-grey hair, his well-trimmed beard, his face, his limbs, all his organs, right down to his heart.

Most of all I remember what he was like when he was alive.

That’s it. It's probably the closest thing to a poem I've written since I was a child when I used to write poems all the time. Here’s a photograph of me with my grandfather and grandmother and little brother, taken a long time ago in the garden of their bungalow in the Malvern Hills. My grandfather was called Roy Francis Campbell and I simply adored him. 

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