Paul Magrs's Blog, page 25

'Fancy Believing in the Goblin King'

‘Fancy Believing in the Goblin King’
My friend told me a story he hadn’t told anyone for years. When he used to tell it years ago people would laugh and say, ‘Who’d believe that? How can that be true? That’s daft.’ So he didn’t tell it again for ages. But for some reason, last night, he knew it would be just the kind of story I would love.
When he was a kid, he said, they didn’t use the word autism, they just said ‘shy’, or ‘isn’t very good at being around strangers or lots of people.’ But that’s what he was, and is, and he doesn’t mind telling anyone. It’s just a matter of fact with him, and sometimes it makes him sound a little and act different, but that’s okay.
Anyway, when he was a kid it was the middle of the 1980s and they were still saying ‘shy’ or ‘withdrawn’ rather than ‘autistic’. He went to London with his mother to see a special screening of a new film he really loved. He must have won a competition or something, I think. Some of the details he can’t quite remember, but he thinks it must have been London they went to, and the film…! Well, the film is one of my all-time favourites, too. It’s a dark, mysterious fantasy movie. Every single frame is crammed with puppets and goblins. There are silly songs and a goblin king who wears clingy silver tights and who kidnaps a baby and this is what kickstarts the whole adventure.
It was ‘Labyrinth’, of course, and the star was David Bowie, and he was there to meet the children who had come to see this special screening.
‘I met David Bowie once,’ was the thing that my friend said, that caught my attention.
‘You did? When was this?’ I was amazed, and surprised, too, at the casual way he brought this revelation out. Almost anyone else I know would have told the tale a million times already.
He seemed surprised I would want to know, and he told me the whole thing, all out of order, and I eked the details out of him.
He told the story as if it was he’d been on an adventure back then, and he wasn’t quite allowed to tell the story. Like there was a pact, or a magic spell surrounding it. As if something profound and peculiar would occur if he broke the confidence.
It was thirty years ago and all us kids who’d loved Labyrinth then, and who still love it now, are all middle-aged. Saddest of all, the Goblin King is dead. Does the magic still exist?
I asked him what happened on his adventure.
‘I was withdrawn, more withdrawn than the other kids. We all got a signed poster. Because I was so shy, they put me in a separate room, to one side, and so I got to meet him alone. He’d heard I was shy and it was his idea. He spent thirty minutes with me.
‘He gave me this mask. This one. Look.
‘He said: ‘This is an invisible mask, you see?
‘He took it off his own face and looked around like he was scared and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He passed me his invisible mask. ‘Put it on,’ he told me. ‘It’s magic.’
‘And so I did.
‘Then he told me, ‘I always feel afraid, just the same as you. But I wear this mask every single day. And it doesn’t take the fear away, but it makes it feel a bit better. I feel brave enough then to face the whole world and all the people. And now you will, too.
‘I sat there in his magic mask, looking through the eyes at David Bowie and it was true, I did feel better.
‘Then I watched as he made another magic mask. He spun it out of thin air, out of nothing at all. He finished it and smiled and then he put it on. And he looked so relieved and pleased. He smiled at me.
‘'Now we’ve both got invisible masks. We can both see through them perfectly well and no one would know we’re even wearing them,' he said.
‘So, I felt incredibly comfortable. It was the first time I felt safe in my whole life.
‘It was magic. He was a wizard. He was a goblin king, grinning at me.
‘I still keep the mask, of course. This is it, now. Look.’
I kept asking my friend questions, amazed by his story. I loved it and wanted all the details. How many other kids? Did they have puppets from the film there, as well? What was David Bowie wearing? I imagined him in his lilac suit from Live Aid. Or maybe he was dressed as the Goblin King in lacy ruffles and cobwebs and glitter.
What was the last thing he said to you, when you had to say goodbye?
‘David Bowie said, ‘I’m always afraid as well. But this is how you can feel brave in the world.’ And then it was over. I’ve never forgotten it. And years later I cried when I heard he had passed.’
My friend was surprised I was delighted by this tale.
‘The normal reaction is: that’s just a stupid story. Fancy believing in an invisible mask.’
But I do. I really believe in it.
And it’s the best story I’ve heard all year.

A What-am-I-chopped-liver Post

Something Gerry Potter's just been saying on his timeline has rang true with me - it's about never being asked to do anything for National Poetry Day, even after all his years in poetry, all his publications and success and brilliance as a live performer. It's weird, isn't it?
It rings true to me because, though I'm a novelist rather than a poet, and I don't get asked to come and do things as much as would be nice. I never get asked for World Book Day things, or that many festivals. Some nice festivals - such as Edinburgh - have had me back over the years, and been very loyal. But on the whole I think it could be better. The North East doesn't show a great deal of interest in me - even though nearly everything I’ve written has been set there - doggedly, determinedly (and even when I get patronised to death by people who think fiction should be set elsewhere, and a sign of maturity as a novelist is gravitating south...)
My old agent used to send my new books in proof to Manchester Lit Fest each year - and if they ever did reply, they'd be really snotty about me. (Even though, living here, my expenses would be pretty cheap...!) It's daft, because i'm really good talking about my stuff - and i can teach a workshop like a dream, too...
Sometimes I think - after 20-odd years and 30-odd books, it'd be nice to be made more of a *fuss* of, somehow. But then i rally and just think - oh, bugger it. Get on with it. Write something new. Get on with the work. What do you expect? Just keep on scribbling and knickers to it.


Anyhow - their loss! x

Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix

I've spent the week slowly reading Grady Hendrix's wonderful non-fiction book, 'Paperbacks from Hell.' Anyone who knows me and my wide and varied reading tastes will know that I have huge soft spot for really schlocky paperback horror. This book delves into the ghastly 70s and 80s and brings out some astonishing gems. I now want to spend the Hallowe'en season reading about killer mutant sharks and towns filled with clowns, evil incestuous skeletons, bigfeet, serial killing aliens and jellyfish from hell. The whole book is a lurid, wittily-written and fabulously illustrated tribute to that most idiotically lovable genre, horror.

Friends with friends - and monsters

How to do All the Ruffles - a Guide for Humans by Bernard Socks

Levenshulme Skies

'Haddon Hall' by Nejib - reviewed on 'Writers Review'

Writers Review is a lovely blog run by three novelists, Linda Newberry,Adele Geras, and Celia Rees. They ask novelists to review novels they've loved recently... and today it's my turn, talking about 'Haddon Hall' by Nejib
'One of the reasons I love graphic novels is that they feel like someone has taken hold of a conventional novel and given it a bloody good shake. All the redundant words and phrases and padding and fluff and – especially – all the descriptions have simply fallen out. Leaving lots of lovely empty space.'In ‘Haddon Hall’ – a fabular, fabulous account of David Bowie’s rise to fame as Ziggy Stardust by French-Tunisian artist, Nejib – there’s lots of that lovely space...'  (continues here...)

autumnal cat drawings

i love going through out sketchbooks. These drawings are all from exactly two years ago... when Bernard Socks was called in to pose for some cartoons. I've realised I like these scratchy early versions better than the eventual finished things...!

Four Doctors

Our literary pilgrimage to the Rue Broca

Something I was determined to do while we were on holiday in Paris was make a small pilgrimage to the Rue Broca, where Pierre Gripari lived and wrote his wonderful fairy tales. Earlier in the summer, you may remember, I happened upon ‘The Witch in the Broom Cupboard’, a splendidly anarchic collection of tales from the 1960s, but only recently published in the UK by Pushkin Press. I adored these stories (as you’ll gather from my review – here) and one of the things that made me very happy was learning that Gripari had sat in a café in a small, shabby, tucked-away street, and took all his best ideas from the kids who hung around the café owned by Papa Sayeed. That’s how his stories are all so authentically odd – with their talking guitars and potatoes, rubber jewels and strange witches.
I loved discovering that Rue Broca is only a matter of steps away from Rue Mouffetard and Place de la Contrascarpe (more or less the setting of Puccini’s La Boheme) – places very much on our itinerary when we go to Paris. Rue Mouffetard slopes down from the university and the Latin Quarter, down to the mosque and the Natural History Museum (with its crazy stuffed animal parade…) and its gorgeous botanical gardens. Rue Mouffetard jostles with fruit shops and bistros and toyshops and, on certain Sundays, there is a band and a swarm of dancers in the market place. It’s just the kind of eccentric spot you could imagine Pierre Gripari setting down his stories.
Well, when we visited, I was chuffed to see that the bookshop halfway up the hill featured a copy of his book, along with a witch doll. This made me think of the line in his afterword about how no one on the Rue Broca believed M. Pierre was really a writer, for no one had ever seen his books in the book shop. Writers always obsess about finding their own books in shops…
We wandered about and eventually found our way off the beaten track. Gripari’s own directions are quite complicated, since he starts whiffling on about rifts in the time/space continuum… as a way of explaining how you have to go through an underpass…
But soon we found our way to Rue Broca and, eventually, number 69 and the café. It’s still there. It’s a greasy spoon now. It was deserted and the boy at the counter told us that we could only have fruit juice. There was no more coffee: ‘Coffee is finished.’
We sat in the doorway (with Panda, of course) and thought about Gripari and those kids bustling round him, shoving in and shouting their ideas at him. The mansion blocks are squeezed together. We’re in a strange kind of dell, with more respectable streets rising high above the underpass. This is a hidden little enclave. It makes me think of Gripari as a kind of urban Hans Christian Andersen: his world a somewhat grubbier one, and a more multi-cultural one. I read some of the afterword aloud to Jeremy, telling the tale of how M. Pierre ran out of formal fairy tales and was forced to create new ones, from the strands of stories that the children ravelled up for him. It was sunny and we drank juice and then we wandered off, and found the famous Paris mosque, where we sat in the busy courtyard and sipped hot mint tea from orange glasses and scoffed baklava stiff with honey.
I never really go on writerly pilgrimages. They’re usually so commercial and overdone. Wordsworth and the Brontes and all that gang. I wondered if anyone had ever visited Pierre Gripari’s home and local café yet? It’s just over fifty years since he was down the Rue Broca, and becoming famous because of the stories he wrote there. Maybe there should be a plaque? Or a little sign beside the broom cupboard with a warning about the witch..?