Paul Magrs's Blog, page 31

The Fabulous Animal Jamboree - part 5 & 6

5.‘Christmas Eve again already?’ Eric gave a horrid, scratchy yawn. ‘They come round faster and faster. Oh, it’s you, Maude. Off to Paris, are you? I thought you might. It’s been a long time, dearie.’             The spider crab squinted his jewel-like eyes at Maude and then Deidre and cackled with glee. ‘Really? You’re taking her with you? Will they even let her in? Won’t they turn her away at the door?’            ‘Ssssh, of course not,’ the Tigon snapped. ‘Don’t be unkind, Eric. It doesn’t become you.’            He muttered, ‘You’re right. I’ve become tetchy over the years. People don’t even ask me to do magic stuff for them anymore, in case I turn on them capriciously and do something nasty. It all comes of being on display so much. I feel over-exposed.’ His cabinet was unique in that it could be seen from both inside the hall and from outside in the street. He was supposed to be an exotic enticement to passersby, which he found wearing.             ‘Time’s getting on,’ Maude said softly. ‘And we need your help.’            ‘Time can do strange things on Christmas Eve,’ he mused, and then he swiveled his eyes to study her carefully. ‘I know what you want. I know which spell you want me to cast. Oh, that’s a lovely idea. Oh, yes, dearie. I don’t mind doing that one at all…’ His skinny limbs twitched and his armoured body began to judder and emit a pinkish-golden glow…            ‘Oh, crikey! Oh, help!’ Deidre gasped, clacking her beak. ‘I’m not so sure now, Maude. Is this going to be safe? Is this going to work out as we want it?’            But Maude wasn’t listening. She was busy submitting herself to the workings of Eric’s particular sorcery. There was a rushing and a sparkling noise in the air all about them and they both felt that a transformation was starting to take place…             Maude was patting her friend’s wing with her paws. Deidre was aware of the comforting weight of her claws. And then the claws were gone and Maude was patting her hand. Her hand? Why, they both had actual hands. Warm, fleshy hands with blood – real blood- running through their veins.             It was strange and unknown, this whole sensation of being human and being made of actual flesh. To Maude it was a long-ago feeling, filling her with nostalgia and glee all at once. To Deidre it was wholly novel and queer. She had never been made of flesh and blood.             All at once the two of them were sitting side by side in an aeroplane, with a stewardess helping them to fasten their seatbelts. There were only moments until the plane took off for its Christmas Eve flight to Paris.             Deidre turned silently to look at Maude and saw that she was wearing a fluffy hat and dark lipstick and she made rather a handsome older woman. She was saying to the stewardess, ‘My friend has never flown before. She’s rather nervous.’            The stewardess smiled. ‘No problem, madam. It’s a very short hop. We’ll be at Charles de Gaulle in just over an hour. You’ll hardly even notice the journey.’            ‘Wonderful,’ said Maude, eyes sparkling.


6.It snowed over England and the Channel as they flew. Flakes whirled past the dark windows. Deidre grimaced, sitting back and gripping the armrests for dear life, completely terrified. The look on her face made her companion burst out laughing. Deidre in human form had a large bulbous nose, a receding chin, a skinny neck and hair that came in fluffy grey tufts. She still looked every inch like herself. She was even making anguished, strangulated Dodo noises as the plane caromed through the night. It ascended through layers of cloud and falling snow into unfathomable heights of deepest blue. Maude drank in the ancient stars with a sigh.             ‘Oh, how glorious.’ She encouraged her friend to look.            Deidre was dumfounded by everything for the full duration of their journey. The flight passed in a delirious flash and suddenly they were landing and disembarking and being ushered through customs quite smoothly. (Eric was a marvel! He’d magicked up passports and crisp new Euro notes stashed in their handbags like the lining of a plush nest.) ‘He’s most thoughtful, that crab spider,’ Deirdre said, following her friend onto the travelator and the escalator to the railway station, where the Paris train was waiting.            ‘Isn’t he just?’ Maude smiled, watching her own reflection in the train window as it sped through the concrete suburbs. Their carriage was packed with all manner of people bound for the city. Some were clearly heading home for the holidays, laden with parcels and bags. Others were in their finery, looking forward to an evening of fun.             Deidre sat squashed close to her more worldly friend. She wasn’t used to being out in the world at all. If she was honest, Maude, too, was finding it all quite bewildering. Everything had moved on so much since the last time she had roamed abroad. Everything was lit up and automated. There was electronic voices coming out of the very air, and all the humans had telephones they communed with as the train rumbled along.             And yet the skyline of Paris as they approached seemed very much the same as ever. The pale form of Sacre Coeur on the hill over there. The Eiffel Tower, all shimmering gold. Everything seemed more or less as Maude remembered it.            All of a sudden they were beneath the centre of the city and there was the crush and the confusion of the Metro station. They were hurrying up tiled stairs with hundreds of human beings and then, all at once, they were out in the open. It was snowy and dark and they were by the river. The air smelled different and delicious. Deidre was just about keeling over with excitement.             ‘We’ve made it! We’ve actually made it all the way here! Look at us, Maude! Just look at us! Look how far we’ve come!’             Maude was standing halfway into the busy road, yelling for a taxi.

The Fabulous Animal Jamboree - Part 4

4.Somehow, no matter how much magic was involved, Deidre didn’t think she’d be able to fly all the way to Paris. She couldn’t picture herself floating over the high, dark gables and turrets of the museum, let alone going any further. Just the thought of her stumpy, fluffy wings flapping away made her feel bilious and tired.            She imagined the way Maude would fly. She’d be magnificent and lithe, bounding through the clouds. I’d only hold her back, Deidre thought unhappily. No wonder the Tigon looked as if she was having second thoughts about these Christmas plans.             That night Deidre wandered about the museum, visiting a few old friends and seeking out their opinions.            The British woodland creatures thought she was being a fool. Badger threw up his clumpy paws in horror at the thought of venturing as far as the continent.  Rabbit threw up a number of sensible objections. Fox threw up a stuffed Robin he’d eaten.             Deidre went to ask the painted faces from Ancient Egypt what they thought. ‘This Maude person is dragging you into something rather dangerous,’ one of them said. Deidre looked up at the calm, beautiful faces and sighed. This room was one of her favourites in the whole museum. She was standing before a cabinet of delicately painted faces recovered from sarcophagi. They were so unfathomably old and wise they made Deidre’s papier-mache head spin.            ‘Do you really think it’ll be dangerous?’ the Dodo frowned. Of course, failing to recognize danger was the downfall of her whole silly species. A wave of sadness crashed over the Dodo.             The Egyptian faces gazed down on her with great compassion. But what could they say? How could they help her? They couldn’t imagine wanting to leave the museum and travel elsewhere. They loved being on display here and seeing the variety of faces that came to inspect their own. And it was a thousand times better than being in a nasty old tomb, any day.             Next Deidre shuffled down the hall to visit Brute, the dead dog from Pompeii. He was curled up like he was perpetually trying to scratch an itch. From within his overcoat of once-molten lava she could hear his voice quite clearly: ‘Are you crazy, woman? You must go! You must get out! You must have fun! Enjoy yourself, lady! Dance and jump and skip about!’             This outburst stiffened her resolve. The rest were too timid.             What was the point of being able to come to life anyway, if you weren’t prepared to do anything with it?             ‘I really want to go to Paris on Christmas Eve,’ Deidre told Maude. ‘But I might as well tell you right away – I can’t fly. Look. These wings are rubbish. And I’m a bit heavy. No matter how much magic is involved.’             Maude grinned. ‘I’d already guessed that. Don’t fret. We’ll ask Eric the spider crab to do something a bit special…’            And so the following day they waited impatiently for the visitors to file out of the building and for closing time to come. Outside the early evening traffic plied headlights through the snow that had started to fall on Manchester. As the indoor lights went out and the museum staff bid each other festive farewells and locked  up all the doors, Maude, Deidre and the others perked up.             It was Christmas Eve.             ‘Who will come with us to Paris?’ Maude bellowed at the assembled stuffed creatures.            They quailed at her ferocious teeth and her outrageous plan.             ‘What, none of you..?’ she roared.            It was a tradition which very few remembered. It had been a long time since anyone had left the museum on Christmas Eve.             ‘You disappoint me, the lot of you,’ scoffed the Tigon. ‘Look at Deidre, here! She’s not scared! She’s never been anywhere and she’s brave enough to come with me to France tonight! She’s not even real! She’s a facsimile Dodo! And she’s not ashamed..!’            Deidre looked abashed, but very pleased with the idea of her own courage.

            

The Fabulous Animal Jamboree - part 3

3.The thing worrying Maude was: did Deidre actually count?             If they went all the way to Paris, would she be turned away for not being real enough?            The Tigon nipped out of her glass case one night – very carefully, so she didn’t actually shatter anything and make a mess. She padded through the museum halls to consult with one of the oldest of the revenants in the whole collection. They called him Stan, and he was a T Rex towering two stories high. He was frozen forever in an attitude of ferocious attack (which he actually found rather taxing. All that constant attitude.) Visitors to the museum loved to take selfies with him, and so it was imperative he always looked his most ferocious.            Maude had paid him a number of visits and they enjoyed the camaraderie of high class carnivores. The instinctive rapport of those who had once shared the topmost point of their respective food chains.             ‘Hallo, there!’ he roared down the airy gallery, spying Maude’s approach.            She greeted him fondly and wasted no time in explaining her quandary.             ‘Oh, I see,’ mused Stan. ‘Well, I think you’re quite right to worry. I only ever attended a couple of those French shindigs and I never felt quite welcome. Not that they could complain, though. I mean, you can’t get more extinct than me, can you? But I’m not exactly what you might call stuffed. And the Parisians can by so snooty. There were raised eyebrows about my being fossilized and not being in actual possession of any of my original fleshly-parts, as it were… Well, I didn’t mind. I don’t bruise easily. But poor old Deirdre might be upset by them. I’d hate that to happen to the poor old duck. She’d be mortified…’            Maude nodded her shaggy head. ‘Perhaps it’s best if I stopped encouraging her? Maybe I should never have started her off on these mad thoughts about Christmas in Paris..?’           
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The next night Maude was woken at dusk by Deidre. ‘How are we going to get there anyway?’            ‘Oh, well,’ said Maude, feeling shifty. ‘That’s to do with magic. You know that giant crab spider downstairs in the main hall?’            ‘Eric?’            ‘He can do magic. Any sort. He was always a dab hand. Back in the old days he did amazing things at Christmas. One year he turned us all invisible. We caught the train and then the ferry and another train. It was a hoot! And then another year he cast a spell so that we could fly all the way to Paris! That was the best. Can you picture it? Dozens of stuffed animals, streaming through the starry night…’            Deidre’s eyes were gleaming.             ‘Another year he commandeered a Manchester tram and hypnotized the driver. We climbed aboard and then the whole thing took to the air and soared through a blizzard…!’            ‘It all sounds wonderful,’ said Deidre.             Maude gulped. She was only making the Dodo worse. She was getting her hopes up.

The Fabulous Animal Jamboree - part 2

2.‘You have to be rare to be invited. Or preferably extinct. And naturally you need to be well-preserved…’ Maude was explaining this business of a party in Paris. ‘It’s all very glamorous. It’s chic, in fact. And it’s a wonderful place to be at Christmas. Oh yes, in the Natural History Museum in the Jardin des Plantes on the Left Bank. Away from the main parade of animals there’s a special hall kept dimly lit, so as not to fade the colours of the extremely rare creatures. And here there are amazing specimens… very few of whom still walk the earth…’            Deidre was listening to all of this, agog.             ‘And it was this collection of extinct animals who started issuing annual invitations to all the rare beasts in all the museums and collections, worldwide, to gather in Paris during the festive season…’            ‘It sounds magical,’ said the Dodo.            ‘Oh, it is. To see these creatures, squeezed out of existence by calamity or brutality, all bounding their way happily to Paris by any means they can find… it’s quite something. And for that night all animals are equal and best of friends. Even the Tasmanian Tiger is less snappy than usual…’            ‘Best of friends like we are, Maude,’ said Deidre rather dreamily. ‘Because in real life, had we ever met, I’m sure you’d have made short work and an easy feast of me.’             Maude stared solemnly with her gold glass eyes at Deidre’s plump breast and belly and chunky thighs. She could almost imagine she was starting to salivate. If she’d been the Maude of old, trapped alone in her tiny cell at Belle Vue Zoo where she was never quite fed enough, she’d have gobbled up Deidre in two deft bites. ‘I’m sorry,’ she purred. ‘But I’m sure you were very delicious.’             Deidre shrugged her stunted wings. ‘I don’t have any memory of being alive or what I was like. But if I close my eyes very tight I can picture all my flock scrambling through the undergrowth, screaming and panting like mad. I can hear the guns going off and I can smell… roasting…’ She shuddered. ‘All of which is quite bizarre because hardly any of this body you see before you is actually the real deal. My feet once belonged to some old turkey. I’m mostly made of sawdust and wood. My feathers are goose and swansdown. My face is papier-mache and yet… and yet… My beak is real. This daft old honking thing.’ She could feel a tear forming in her false eye. ‘I know I am a true Dodo in my soul.’

The Fabulous Animal Jamboree - Part 1

The Fabulous Animal Jamboree
By Paul Magrs
1.Deidre was flattered by Maude’s invitation, but she was nervous, too. ‘What if it doesn’t even happen anymore? What’s if it’s all a false hope?’            Maude drew herself up as far as her glass case would allow. ‘It better not be.’             It was very late at night. Once the museum was empty of human beings and the lights were low, it was the usual thing for Deidre to hop over her little barrier and toddle along the hallways to visit her friends. In recent weeks the Dodo had become quite pally with Maude. Maude had been kept in storage for a good many years and only recently had the museum authorities rediscovered her, dragged her out, and put her proudly on display in a case at the top of the stairs.             ‘What’s a Tigon when it’s at home?’ Deidre had asked, the first time she happened by. She squinted at the Maude’s information plate.             Maude was resplendent with pale gold fur and the faintest, most elegant stripes. She held her head proudly erect and crossed her hefty paws, sprawling comfortably in her cabinet as all the stuffed animals came by to examine her. ‘My mother was an African lioness and by dad was a Manchurian Tiger,’ Maude announced.            ‘A Mancunian Tiger?’ asked Deidre. She was sometimes slow on the uptake. ‘Hey, chuck, you’ve got all the animals coming by to see you. You’re causing quite a stir. And they’re all mad jealous of you. You’re so much more glamorous than that humdrum lot. All those plain old monkeys and boring bears.’ The Dodo gave a honking laugh.             Maude had become quite fond of her new friend. The Dodo was squat, waddlesome, foolish and slightly pretentious, but she was frank in her admiration of the Tigon. She had taken to visiting Maude nightly, filling her in on who was who in the museum, and the little bit she had gleaned about the world outside its dark, castle-like walls. She was pleased to show off her knowledge to Maude.             ‘I suppose an awful lot has changed since I was put in that cupboard,’ Maude sighed. ‘1949 it was…’            Deidre squawked. ‘That’s yonks ago! So much has changed! Almost everything!’             Even if the city’s buildings and people had changed completely, and the way that humans lived, and even if the museum and all its displays were different, Maude was sure that the Christmas Jamboree must still happen every year. That couldn’t be changed, could it? One night she cut through Deidre’s chatter with a question: ‘Did you ever go to the Annual Fabulous Animal Jamboree?’            ‘What? The what?’ blinked the Dodo.             ‘Paris on Christmas Eve!’ Maude growled, astonished that the bird didn’t seem to know what she was talking about.            ‘You’ll have to explain,’ said the Dodo.             ‘Really? You’ve never been?’ Maude’s golden eyes were wide with amazement. ‘The annual gathering of all the most fabulous stuffed beasts in the world? The rarest, most fabulous and preferably extinct creatures from all over the globe converge on Paris for a great big knees-up. It was always the event of the year. And you’ve never even heard of it…?’            Deidre hung her head. ‘I’ve never been anywhere. Not since I was stuffed and put on my little podium.’            ‘We’ll have to do something about that,’ Maude said fiercely.

'The Tomorrow City' by Monica Hughes

I think I forgot all about Monica Hughes.            Early this week I found myself revisiting the council estates of Newton Aycliffe in County Durham, where I grew up. I wandered about these very neglected streets and there was mist hanging down all day. All the playparks had been stripped of climbing frames and their gravel was mildewed and mossy. There were hardly any lights in the building-blocky houses. Hardly any signs of life on the misty Agnews and Burnhill Estates. The Burn was practically dead in the middle of the day. It was like visiting pictures of Chernobyl, deserted these past thirty years.            The town precinct has been savagely redeveloped. Those marvelous concretized brutalist ramps and walkways and all the futuristic corridors of the Sixties have been replaced with contemporary retail park Tescos and whatnot. Where our tiny, cardboard-walled town library stood there’s an Aldi.             All the treasure in that town library. I still rack my brains to remember the books I read there in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Some names elude me. Others ping back into my head and I order copies of ex-library books from ebay. I’m reconstructing my own version of a small 1970s New Town library in my study and in my head.


            Monica Hughes is someone who has come back to me, through the toxic mists. This week I read (reread?) ‘The Tomorrow City’ from 1978. Now, here’s a novel that should have come back into print with that vogue for dystopias of recent years. This story is chilling but quite believable. A vast city is put in the control of a super-computer called C-Three. Everything should be marvelous, but of course, perfection comes at a cost. We observe the action through the eyes of Caro, the inventor’s teenage daughter and her friends, as they come to realise that tramps are being removed from the streets and their bodies dumped beyond the city walls; essential life support machines are being switched off and the needy are being sacrificed for the sake of efficiency. All of these terrible, creeping, subtly unspoken changes are recorded brilliantly through the quotidian and ordinary. There are some superb moments – especially with the brainwashing and attempted rescue of Caro’s friend’s Gran.             The implications of the book are horrifying. This is what happens when you allow society to tend, almost without knowing it, towards fascism. And this is what happens when you follow efficiency and machine logic. This is what happens when computers are given everything to do.             And this was written in 1978. Back when I was a kid in misty Arncliffe Place on the Burnhill Estate. I read this then and there, I think – when surely the whole place didn’t look as run-down and hopeless as it does today? There’s been so much time since then, and so much has changed – but what a timely and relevant novel this is. And so beautifully written, too. I want to reread more of her.             

Terra Exitus by Scott M. Liddell

TERRA EXITUS by Scott M. Liddell


I spent yesterday afternoon and evening reading this pithy nihilistic romance by Scott M. Liddell. It’s a novel of ideas in which our narrator is an outwardly inarticulate, seemingly ordinary Scotsman who’s filled inside by rage and grief. Having found his mother dead in a corridor, waiting for A&E, he is shaken entirely out of his old life and sets off, unthinkingly into a new one, down south, in London – a place where people are ‘feral, wide-eyed foxes darting in fear from one overturned bin to another.’ Which sounds about right.            This is the story of a man who unwittingly becomes a kind of clickbait Messiah. He works in IT so it’s a doddle for him, one boring weekend, to set up a website addressed to all the depressed, disenfranchised people round the world. Almost accidentally he raises a fortune by promising them membership of a society of loners who all would prefer to quietly leave the loathsome planet and go off with the aliens. The money he unwittingly makes he sets about distributing to the needy and trying to do some good, and we soon find out what a crushing and complicated job that is. My favourite scene in the whole novel is perhaps the one where he and his self-appointed manager meet with the parents of a terribly ill child in a pub, so that he can be reluctantly thanked for giving them a massive wodge of cash. Needless to say, it goes a bit wrong, and there’s toe-curling embarrassment all round.            What I love about this novel wasn’t really the philosophy and the raging against the awfulness of people – it was how wonderful the supporting cast was. Our hero gets himself a new girlfriend when he trips over in Hyde Park and clonks himself unconscious on the wine bottle from her picnic. Their relationship is sweetly drawn – even if she remains a little bit of a romantic cipher. Their time in Paris with her father and wandering the city is a much-needed respite from the darkness of the rest of the book. I also loved the haphazardly-acquired best friend Jacob, who is a gobby posho befriended during a horrible party through the medium of insults. There’s a great pathos underneath the bluster of Jacob and the scenes in which he breaks down are very effective.            The trouble with a philosophical novel is that it can sometimes feel that the characters and events are being bent too far to carry the writer’s ideas. The danger is that they can start spouting unmediated philosophy at each other. Here, that stuff is cleverly couched in the scenes when our narrator goes on telly to explain his so-called cult. Of course, he starts to actually speak his own mind, and here’s the bit when we get to the heart of the novel’s ideas. It’s also the point where everything starts to go horribly wrong… and there are a few shocks in the last chapters of the novel that made me feel… manipulated, cross, upset, dumbfounded and full of admiration for the ambition and the chutzpah that went into the writing of this slim and thoughtful book.             Our lead character is a bit of a know-all gobshite, and his girlfriend is a cello-playing, life-affirming paragon and there’s maybe not enough counter-balance to the people-are-shite subtext, but I really enjoyed this book. The writing just rattles along and we really want to know what becomes of these people – which is quite something in a novel of ideas. 
(Terra Exitus is currently 99p on Amazon…!) 

My Blog is BACK!!!

It’s been such a weird year, in so many ways. One of the strangest things is that I stopped writing my blog. At some point in January I just stopped, and never really thought about doing it again until quite recently. Also, for a while I forgot how to do it, which didn’t help.             Anyway, how are you? What have I missed..?             I’d like to get back to writing this. I used to love my blog – in its various incarnations, from 2009 until the start of this year. Mostly I used it to talk about what I was reading, but also what I was working on, and publishing, and about events or appearances and projects.            So… here goes. Let’s start again. Are you still out there..?            *


This autumn I’ve been hard at work, every day, on the third volume of my science fiction trilogy for kids, ‘Heart of Mars.’ I’ve been writing about Lora and Toaster and everyone, all over again, and taking them towards the climax of their adventures. Volume two, ‘The Martian Girl’ came out back in September. www.fireflypress.co.uk            My other big writing project of the year has been to do with ‘Baker’s End’, an audio adventure series that Simon Barnard of Bafflegab Productions and I came up with, almost a full year ago. We had both decided to do create a new project together: something new and funny and good fun. And so now we have a series in which Tom Baker plays himself, reincarnated as a gigantic black cat, having spooky adventures in the strange village of Happenstance, alongside Katy Manning and Sue Jameson. Recording these stories has been a complete blast, and the reviews have been absolutely terrific. www.bafflegab.co.uk



            As were the reviews for my Big Finish Doctor Who story, ‘The Peterloo Massacre’, which came out back in March. I’ve written at least one new script or story for BF every year since the turn of the century, and I don’t think I’ve ever had such a wonderful response. It was great to get a crack at writing what they call a ‘pure historical adventure’, of the kind that Doctor Who used to have right at the very beginning of the TV show’s history. A special feature of this story is that my research was carried out, and my initial notes and ideas were outlined, in Manchester Central Library: just about on the very site of the famous Massacre itself. 

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Something I’ve got coming out very soon… ‘The Levenshulme Cats Colouring Book’! Following last year’s ‘Lovely Levy Colouring Book’ I’ve put a whole new series of thirty drawings together and it’s all at the printers right now. It’ll be ready just in time for Christmas. I’ve had an amazing response locally from cat-loving residents sending me photos of their feline chums and vying for inclusion in what I hope will be a very fun book. It’ll be on sale at SumapaBooks here in Levenshulme, or at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, or you could drop me a line (if you’re further afield) ... my email is… pmagrs@gmail.com.





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I should tell you about my reading this year. 2016 was the year I really launched into my Beach House Books project – ie, when I really set about reading the books I already own, rather than buying any new ones. I was marginally more successful at doing both those things than I am in most years, but I didn’t still to the resolutions absolutely. But I have had an amazing year of reading – which I will tell you about, I hope, quite soon.



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Back!

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Keeping Busy Doing New Things

Starting Thursday with 'John, I'm only dancing, (again!)' and a mug of sweet tea. I'm throwing myself into new stuff, new work, keeping busy making new things. It's the only way. Today I'm rereading and editing the middle third of 'The Martian Girl' and making notes on a new, secret, ridiculous, glorious, impossible project, maybe writing about my love of David for a charity festshrift - and hopefully reading some more Laurie Lee. Good morning, everyone - hope you're all well, and doing something you really want to be doing today.