Rats (behind the scenes)

I posted the short story Rats a little while back, and now I’d like to share some of the “behind the scenes” stuff behind it. My motivation for doing this is because I find it interesting, and so maybe you will too, and maybe we can inspire each other.

Rats is a short story responding to the prompt “you are the victim of injustice” on TheProse.com, where I originally posted the story. Not for the first time, I was inspired by the amazing Kazuo Ishiguro, and specifially, by the notion of approaching the concept an alternative world a little bit differently.

So that was the first impulse, or piece of inspiration, if you like.

The second was a video I’ve seen where the experience of a refugee child is portrayed using a white child actress, thereby brilliantly confronting the idea of “us” and “them”, forcing Westerners to take in a) that all humans are alike, and b) that it could so easily have been us. The world could have looked different. Indeed, the world might look different in the future.

This idea fascinated me. It may not surprise you to hear that I support the statement “Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.”

And so I decided to go with the idea that the East grows to become the new super power, whereas the West diminishes and becomes poor, factories now being built in the West just like right now, they are in the East, because that’s where cheap labour is.

There is also a historical reference within Rats, namely the factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh in 2013. I have visited Bangladesh once, and met the people there, and I have Bangla friends. They might as well have been Westerners, in some senses, but they live in a country which is extremely poor, which has an incredibly corrupt government, and which is exploited by international organizations. A large number of people lost their lives or were fatally wounded in that building collapse. But who talks about it now? And though “conscious fashion” is a growing trend I wholeheartedly support, it remains true that most people go shopping without it even crossing their minds who made these clothes, and whether they were exploited, or what we can do to better their working conditions and pay.

I am by no means a very structured writer who has a strict plan and writes from the beginning to the end making no detours. Indeed, I am a very messy writer who constantly shuffles things about and tweaks them, thinking of stories as pieces of clay that I can mould into whatever shape I like. What I’ve been talking about before, then, is not so much the short story itself, but the impulses behind the idea. In summary: they are these three:

• The idea of approaching an alternative world differently
• The refugee child video campaign challenging the “them/us” idea
• The factory collpase in Bangladesh i 2013

Now we get to the short story, about which I don’t have that much to say. I wrote it quickly – those of you who are writers will know that some stories seem to write themselves.

The factory collapse in Rats happen right by the Thames in London, which was my attempt at turning things on their head, enganging with the idea “them” and “us”, by actually swapping the geographical locations and cultures that provided the setting for the factory collapse. But I didn’t want to linger on this for too long. Inspired by Ishiguro, I wanted the world of the story to simply be, and to focus on what was happening with my characters and in their lives – as they experienced it, not as you or I would.

The protagonist is a regular woman, in most ways. A Londoner recognizable in some ways, but whose world is in many aspects strikingly different from the way we know it. When catastrophe happens, she becames the newspaper cover girl, the face of the disaster, who has to deal with exactly the same problems as we do, in the real world, except from an opposite point of view.

She wants and desires change, but history’s message is not encouraging, and she fears that the Westerner’s roles as “rats” will mean that the disaster will soon be forgotten in the East. But in the woman’s own life, the disaster will in all probability cripple the entire family, because the media and the wealthy people of the world, only care for as long as their attention span lasts.

I wonder if some people might accuse me of writing for the sake of a “moral message”. Actually, I don’t, certainly not on purpose. I think my inclination is to attempt to get people to think more, and to step out of their own shoes and into somebody else’s.

Sands of Time (short story)

This is a shortstory I wrote as a response to a challenge on TheProse.com, along the lines of “write the most original apocalypse story you can think of”. I didn’t notice it had a maximum wordcount at first, which I exceeded, but I liked the result, so I decided not to participate in the challenge, but post the shortstory as it turned out, here.

*

When my mother found out she was pregnant with me, she tried to abort me with a coat hanger.

She told me this herself, without flinching. She is the strongest, hardest woman I know, with eyes that always gleam with anger and bitterness. And yet, I know that she loves me. Indeed, it was exactly because she loves me, that she didn’t want me to be born. She didn’t want me to have to come into this world.

My mother’s mother – my grandmother – was a naïve woman. I’d like to say she was uneducated, but “disinterested” would be closer to the mark. That woman believed it was a sort of law of nature that the things that are, will remain. So she believed that her parents’ reality would be her own, and that whatever the news proclaimed would not and could not ever change her dreamlike world of blue skies and green grass.

When the naïve woman had a daughter – my mother – she surrounded her with a blissful mirage of denial and wishful thinking. The daughter was taught that the world was beautiful and fruitful, that she could be whatever she wanted to be, that good food and sunshine were the lasting hallmarks of a good life. She even learned how to drive. But though she would eventually come into ownership of a car, it was only because cars, by the time my mother was eighteen, were dirt-cheap. Even I could by a car now, even in reasonably good condition, because what’s a car worth when you can’t drive it?

Besides, even if there was still petrol to be bought, the roads are now in too horrendous state for it to be any use. The asphalt is all broken up by cold and heat, smouldered so badly that some places even cyclists struggle to find a way – some places, you even have to climb, or make your way carefully around the open gullies. Cars are still everywhere, though. They’re as ever-present – and maybe as tragic – as the ancient ruins of Athens. That’s another thing my grandmother had a strangely romanticized view of. She even named my mother after the goddess Athena. My mother hates it, of course; she’s named after a symbol of a lost world. When she had me, my mother decided to call me Kate. I think she felt it was more neutral.

Outside of our house, my dad’s old car is standing, beneath a crooked old oak tree. I don’t know what happened to my mother’s first car, but my dad’s old one, that we still have, even though he himself is long gone.

It’s a 1968 Corvette Stingray. I remember my dad saying, on several occasions, that if you’re going to own a vehicle that you can’t drive, it ought to be a piece of art. He’d be upset if he knew that my mother and I have painted it azure blue. It’s not a brilliant paintjob, I’ll be honest, but I’ve seen much worse. My mother chose the colour, reminiscent of the skies of her youth.

I’ve never seen blue sky in real life. In this city, that just isn’t possible anymore. The pollution covered the sun and sky up long before I was born. You have to travel far out on the country, or to one of the many abandoned cities, to even get a glimpse of that brilliant blue, not to mention – stars at night. The world I know has no sun, no moon and no stars.

These days, there is the dust as well, and the sand, which finds its way everywhere, getting in through the tiniest cracks. In the mornings, I wake up with sand in my eyes and nostrils, and a throat that’s absolutely parched from breathing in the dry air. I can barely even make a sound before I’ve had a sip of water. Thankfully there is no shortage of water yet, though I expect I will live to see wells dry up and water pipes run dry. Horror-struck by her own harsh meeting with reality, my mother certainly hasn’t raised me to be an optimist – I truly am my boyfriend’s exact opposite.

My boyfriend remains relentlessly hopeful. Sometimes it annoys me so much that I can hardly keep myself from punching him, but it’s also what attracted me to him. And somehow he can stand being in my presence even on my gloomiest, most depressed days, when I feel like the dry air and lack of sunshine is sucking the very life out of me.

I must have complained about this one too many times, because now my boyfriend has decided we are going to find it. We are going to find the blue sky.

“That’s what they used to do, you know,” he told me. “With sick people. They’d send them to someplace warm and sunny. And then they got better.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Well, it would do you good anyway.”

“Blue sky. How will blue sky do me any good?”

“Come on, Kate, you know what I’m talking about. It’s like when you see a flower, you know, that’s so bright and fresh, and the sight of the colours makes you feel … just, better.”

“I’m not sure I know that feeling.”

“Flowers in spring don’t make you happy?”

“No, the opposite. They look so lost, and they’re always covered in dust, and I just keep thinking, ‘born to die’ … you know?”

My boyfriend looked at me for one long moment, and announced: “That’s settled, then. We’re going.” And before I could argue, he rushed to add: “How about this: We’re doing it for our grand children. We owe it to them. Because they might never get the chance.”

That night, my mother and I both woke up at the sound of a loud crash. The winds had already been howling when I went to bed, another sandstorm brewing, gathering strength. On the emergency weather forecast – by now a regular occurrence – the weatherman looked clearly unsettled, as he had to admit that it was “unclear” where the sand storm came from. There were, after all, no deserts in this country. But then, the sand storms didn’t just occur here. They were happening everywhere, across the globe. Winds of sand seemed to be blowing from some unknown source.

Moments after the crash ripped me out of my sleep, my mother stormed into my room, flashlight in hand. I was already sitting upright in my bed, and automatically closed my eyes against the piercing light.

“You okay, babes?” she said, shifting the beam of the light so that I could look at her.

I nodded, as I got up. Beneath my bare feet I could feel the rough sand on the floorboards.

“I think maybe –” I began, my voice a weak whisper. I reached for the water bottle on my bedside table and made myself swallow a few mouthfuls. It tasted like rust. “I think maybe the tree on fell – on the car. I thought it sounded a lot like metal … metal and glass.”

Sticking close together, we made our way to the hall, where sand had gathered in the corners and the air was thick with dust. The front door was shaking and rattling on its hinges, the wind screeching.

“I don’t think we should open it,” my mother and I called in unison.

My mother’s eyes were sad, but her face was stern and strong, as always. She crouched down and picked up a handful of sand from the floor. Holding it in her fist, she slowly released her grip a little, letting the sand trickle towards the floor. It caught the light from flashlight, shining like gold dust. The sight reminded me of something, though I didn’t know what, and for some reason, I felt melancholic.

“It means something, doesn’t it?” Though we were only a few feet apart, I had to yell so that she would hear me.

My mother looked at me.

“Yes, my darling. It means time is almost up.”