The Life of Almost – and an invitation, if you’re local, like.
First a little extract for you. Then, afterwards, an invitation if you are a local-ish writer or reader and would like to come for some reading and discussion of the first few chapters of the book I am working on, my follow up to Killing Hapless Ally (March, 2016, Patrician Press).
The Life of Almost is a re-working of Great Expectations, with its protagonist, Almost, roughly modelled on Pip. It has a predominantly Welsh setting, much of it being in Pembrokeshire. As such, it draws on the stories I have been listening to my whole life and so I have adapted these for the book. Stories of sailors, the strange dangers of the sea and those who love in it and on it; dark events at steam fairs; predicaments at village shows; kelp, barnacles, tough salty men, the cree of the curlew and the dead across the estuary and of how gentry moved in and spoiled all. Stories of beatings known about but hidden in plain sight; curses and vendettas; strange harpists, madness, mutism; poltergeists who threw pictures from walls and plants from windowsills and vases from above the fireplace. People who went away and never came back: stories, stories, stories. Shootings, hangings, disappearances. My idea of a picnic could still revolve around sitting by graves describing the dreadful manner in which relatives died, except I desist because I’m the mother of three young boys and I think my upbringing was definitely weird and I’m sure the kids think I’m quite peculiar, already.
So, you know roughly the story arc if you know Great Expectations, I’ve told you a little of the settings, but there’s more to it. Because, as Almost takes you through stories of his world – as he tells them to Catherine, who opens the first chapter, so tired of life – you come to realise that he is not entirely of this world and not entirely of this time: he is something more protean and unconfined; a storyteller who can shift substance in an extraordinary way and who is not compromised by, shall we say, temporal and ordinal rules…I hope, when it finds its home, that you will find the book darkly funny, maybe a bit shocking in places and that you’ll enjoy what I have done with my favourite book, Great Expectations, such as reworked Jaggers into a nasty (Ben Jonson’s) ‘Volpone’, basking in his gold somewhere off a great motorway and given you many elements of the supernatural. I did something a bit radical the other day and incorporated, euphemistically, some of the Brexit scoundrels – they are part of why Catherine, who begins the book, is so jaded and sad and thus why she has Almost come to visit. And, you know, one might question: is Almost really there at all? Or is he created by others when….they need him. Oooohhhh.
Because I stand by this and know it to be true: a story can save your life.
What occurs below is part of an episode featuring Evans the Bodies and Muffled Mfanwy. Just as Great Expectations includes Pip’s love for Estella, The Life of Almost has a fractured and difficult love story between Almost and Seren, adopted daughter of Miss Davies the Dowager at Clandestine House on the Cleddau estuary. But not just between these two – also between Evans the Bodies and his beloved Mfanwy, a little piece of which begins below.
Chapter five. Dressing the Dead Dears
Evans the Bodies loved his Dead Dears. He had established a thriving business in the low white buildings out the back of a farm on the coast road. In the past, this had been owned by a rather careless and drunken farmer with an insecure barn so that, from time, those who arrived for Evans’s attention—silently, so silently—might have met with a stray cow crossing the yard or traversed cow pats, so hardly the most respectful of endings, or beginnings, as Evans saw it, since he was fonder of the dead than the living and saw things backwards through his better eye. Nowadays, though, the yard was gravelled, the whitewash immaculate, the cows tidily restrained and a new farmer in residence. This man was laughed at by the locals as a hobby farmer. A man with an antique shop in Tenby who got people in to do the hard work and exhibited his cheese to great applause, although he had not really made it himself and even his dairy herd looked askance, it was said on the coast road, because your dairy cow knew an amateur when it saw one and mocked in its cow-grunt.
So there, in his low white buildings, worked Evans. And I went to work with him when I was older; I was a poor schoolboy, so they farmed me out on an apprenticeship as soon as they could. Technically, I should have been eighteen to be allowed to handle the dead, but we hid from the rules, I looked big and talked confidently and bluffed expertly and then Evans—at least to begin with—kept me away from the worst, most gruesome cases. He needn’t have done, for I saw no fear in temporal things and the sad features of a face rearranged; I saw them as the anagram of thereafter. But as I was saying, I worked with him, learned from the master and saw how he attended carefully to his craft. He had it all planned meticulously and liked to recite the rules of his job to himself and declaim thus to the world, should it be listening. But the best of the words were not really for me, Catherine, but for the woman he had loved his whole life and whose own life and voice had been taken by the abruptly dead of her own.
For with him worked Muffled Mfanwy.
I mentioned her, to you, Catherine, in my list of characters. She went muffled after Philip Llewhellin hanged himself in the shed and then her son, Lewis the Younger, remember? Evans was in love with this quiet sad lady and together they worked with the corpses, a delicate ballet, with tubes and brushes and buckets and pipes and the love of the dead that is known best to those sad with the living, or those born, or otherwise, with their feet half in the next world. And I watched them in the twilight shadows, Catherine. Always I was there. Because he was lonely, even with his Dead Dears and she was sad and her voice was stilled and I wanted to give her flight and for her to sing and cast off her own dead.
Friday 22nd July, 10 am. A read through and discussion of the first few chapters of The Life of Almost, my second book – which I am currently drafting. It has to go off at the beginning of October. If you would like to come, DM me @bookwormvaught on twitter. I will do cake and tea, so just bring your listening ears and your critical voice (eg, well that bit was too weird/a bit shite/didn’t follow that bit/oh yes that was lovely etc etc) and DO be prepared for mermaids and – WARNING – some rather graphic bits about embalming and funeral practice (Almost’s trade).
Like a copy of Killing Hapless Ally? Order from Waterstones, your local bookshop (Ex Libris and Mr B’s have copies in our area), the Patrician Press website or Amazon here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Killing-Hapless-Ally-Anna-Vaught-ebook/dp/B01CA5F21Y/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1468239225&sr=1-1
