The Lure of Strange Places

When I start writing fiction I never know where what I write about will lead.  And when I talk to my sister Merran Gunn about the short stories or novels I have written these often in turn become conversations about imagination and about thinking and making...  How text might become a something else: a painting, an object, a collection of objects, a photograph or film, some kind of miniature  theatre or house or scene or play.... Or a something else again.

I guess I have always found straightforward ‘stories’ limiting. That s because I don't want to be led from situation to situation, having all those accounts and representations add up into a bulk of consequence; I prefer fiction that feels like experience, that is like being... amongst, inside, within.... To be roaming around and exploring, reader and writer together, the parameters of this world that is the story. This is my preference in fiction: Not to be sitting outside a text—looking on, reading on—but rather, reading through it to become part of it, to be totally and creatively part of an additional reality, caught up in sentences and pages and thoroughly involved in the experience of how a life might be.

In the case of the following short story, ‘Get Up’ , the writing itself had been strange enough.  A strange piece.  A strange text that read as though it were a kind of silent film. A fairy tale of sorts, caught behind glass, and lit by the moon, a story of loneliness that comes alive in the night. I had that opening image and line - as normally happens with my writing of fiction - and I took it from there. Where was all this going? What did it mean? Was this woman real? Unreal? A victim? A kind of puppet or doll? It seemed she was everything, all of those, and all at once.... And this story felt private, oh yes. I felt I was peeping in at it, peeping in at this woman who was in it....

I told my sister Merran about the story and then read it to her.  Merran is an artist - she paints and sculpts and makes miniature worlds—so I knew she could help me understand ‘Get Up’, that if she was to think about it too the story might finally... find itself, or take itself to the next place in which it could quiver and hover and stay alive and be strange and affecting.  In this way she and I were kind of writing a joint essay together, asking: what was this work? What did these words make us think about? Feel? Remember and imagine? For there was something exhilarating about it, this piece, though a bit terrifying, too; something that felt familiar: ideas about being enclosed and yet also exposed; at home and yet unsafe and in an abandoned place. So yes, to get to the... end of this story, if you like, I had to ask Merran to think about how she saw it.

I printed out a copy so she could have it for reference.  We both talked about how the story made us feel – at once alarmingly at large, without boundaries, and also fully engaged in this space where we had found ourselves. For somehow it was utterly wrecked, the world of this story, and small, and also, in its way very beautiful. 

Merran went off  and took herself down her own line of thinking and imagining. There she travelled, going right through the looking glass and into the dark, following in her own journey the one I had set off on before her—which is the mysterious one of making, discovering, as she worked, what it was that she was creating…. Travelling always, and seeing and learning marvellous things, with eyes closed and without a map.

This story—made of words and film—is the result of our essaying together into the imagination. It is journey that takes place… inside.

Kirsty Gunn

I think I always respond visually when Kirsty reads me her stories. The emotional response comes later  as the story unfolds, but almost immediately I start to see colours that rise out of her words. They have a certain temperature and palette to me that begin to take shape as images.

For this story I felt the intensity of shock and disorientation that waking in the night brings and sometimes even still being in a dream. Not being sure of familiar surroundings. I saw the imagery as fleeting and liminal with colours fading out that evoked a different space altogether.

As an artist I have always been intrigued by creating miniatures, so I turned to making a kind of abandoned doll house for this story- where rooms lead on to other rooms that seem abandoned and not leading anywhere. I hope this conveys the dreamscape and panic within the story but also the sense of light coming into the space.

Merran Gunn

Get Up!

I woke in the night to a shocking cry. A woman, I remember thinking, the second my eyes snapped open in the dark: That’s a woman’s voice. A woman is crying out like that in the night. She may be old.

And this was – what? Two am? Three am?

It was: ‘in the night.’

I woke, and yes, this person in the dark, she was crying out for something. ‘Now!’ So she seemed to be calling to me. ‘Now!’ and ‘Here!’ Don’t ask me why I thought this, and knew it, all at once – that the woman was an old woman, that she was deep inside my house and wanting something, urgently needing something, from me. But I did. My reaction to the cry was as immediate as was my being wide, wide awake.

I was ‘wide awake.’

And yes, she was making of me – how could I ignore it? - some urgent demand. ‘Do this!’ It sounded like. ‘This!’ Crying out in such a way that knives may as well have been involved, pain of a physical as well as psychic kind. ‘You idiot!’ Crying. ‘You stupid fool!’ There was certainly about the voice more than a quality of simple requirement; it was way more than simple requirement that was being levied upon me, from out of the dark.

And how best to act?

Is the kind of question I ask of myself all the time, of course. For it was familiar, the voice, the sound of its cry. That, ‘You stupid fool!’ That, ‘Now!’ I’ve heard myself utter such words and phrases and have had to ask then how best to answer, how best to respond. Not only ‘in the night’ but during the hours of daylight, too, such judgments and demands enter my mind and change it. So, what now? I do think. What relevant reply? What smile or sadness would suit the situation here? What lines of text might I apply?

‘How best to act?’

In this case I simply woke, and my eyes were open like a doll’s eyes click open when you bring her up from sleeping. What? The doll sits up immediately out of her box and speaks. There had been the shut eyes, trembling to the slightest touch of movement, the rigid body lying there, quietly, unspeaking, so still in the night, and then – There she is! She’s up! Her eyes are open! And what is it that she just heard? Who is this woman? So did I leap from the bed where I’d been lying on my back asleep with my trembling doll eyes – and there! I was ‘wide awake.’ I could feel my eyes in the dark all round and seeing, my great dolls’ eyes.

I started moving, then, oh yes, like something quite mechanical. I was moving all through the house. Going from one room to another room. This one, that one. I was on the lookout. There’d been the cry, I’d heard it. From where? What room? I kept moving. Eyes wide open: Look! I didn’t turn on any of the lights in the house. But I was alert! I was going all over the house, though all the rooms of the house, moving through my home in the utter, utter dark seeking out the source of the voice, of the cry in the night, of that sound. I was looking for that woman in my home.

*

Can darkness speak? That ‘utter’ suggests it. As though writing of a speaking darkness...That the darkness of my home had had a voice in it, a life enclosed within a cry.

‘Look!’ The voice had arrived like that, all at once, alive and in the dark.
‘Where am I?’ it cries. ‘Can’t you hear me?’ Crying now as it cried then.
‘Listen! Don’t you care?’

So again, yes, I responded. Reacted, don’t you see? I got up and went through all the rooms of this house where I’ve been living for years, for many, many years living alone here and contented. For there was surely pain in this situation, I thought, great pain. And I was alert and looking for the source of that pain, of course I was. I was seeking out a cry which by now I was starting to think had not been the cry of a woman but of some animal or creature that would be like a woman. A thing caught in the house and in great pain, a thing I might have otherwise never known about, calling out to me here in the dark of my home—would I set her free?

‘Yes, I am coming!’ I might have answered. ‘I am on my way!’

Yet the questions about the voice also did remain. In what way might I release it? Do what, and when? Turn on the lights? Check the smoke alarm? Look to see if there is some element in respect of the house that is untoward? A wrong or broken item in a room? A faulty device? A cracked glass or plate or melted wire? And what pain? What voice? What trap was it caught in?

So I questioned and I roamed, going all the way though the dark rooms. This one, another one. I ended up finally in the kitchen with the benches and the table and the chairs. They stood waiting for me. There’d been nowhere else left for me to go and they had waited for me in the kitchen all that time. And hadn’t I known somehow? That this was where I would find myself? At the end of that long night? That I would end up there in the kitchen amongst the kind of furniture that was gathered quietly in that room, in the dark, as people at a certain kind of party might stand close together, no one speaking. I took my place amongst them, equally mute. I waited. What else could I do? Then, after some minutes had passed, a tall cupboard at my back turned towards me as if he might have been a tall and attentive man. What brings you here? It was as if he was asking. Do you come often? The table, too, I understood, from her corner was looking kindly upon me, Is everything okay? To both I shook my head. There was no trace of that other voice but still I could not be sure it was peaceful here, though bit by bit I admit I was coming to feel familiar. The chairs, exchanging their own shy glances, also wanted to know what I was doing there, arrived so late to join them.

Everything that had been somewhat quiet at first was slowly, interestedly, wanting to put me at my ease. Even the long bench had a remark. Nice to have you with us. And, later, where are you from, initially, I mean? Of what are you composed? All the furniture, I realised, had gathered gently around me, come surely into the fullness of speech - Do you like it here? Might you belong? – as though the sounds, the cries I had heard earlier in the night had been stilled completely by the beauty of their responses and arrangement.

*

By now the dark was lightening. The kitchen, the pieces of furniture standing around me... What did this night expect of me? That I would stay in it? Acknowledge a cry? Find that voice at last and take her inside me? What was I to make of all this? I couldn’t answer – and yet, as though I might find a way out of my situation, I knew I must remain.

And the dark was continuing to lighten, printing slowly, second by second, into day. By this I don’t mean that it was morning; I don’t mean that there was no moon. For, yes, there had been moonlight earlier, when I’d been moving through the rooms of my house. There had been then that deep, deep blue of moonlight in every window, of a clear dark cold that would have had a moon in it, pressed into every glass. And it was still there, somewhere, the moon, only now that same sky was absorbing, I could see here in the crowded kitchen, second by second, the eventual arrival of the day.

‘Not now’ I said, ‘But soon...’

The dark would let the light arrive, and, shade by shade, in the grey dawn I would come to see that those in the kitchen with me were indeed a table and a cupboard and a set of chairs. I would see that that a table and chairs and a cupboard were all they were, were all they had ever been, and I could see, too, by the new grey light of a day, what it was I needed to do.

It was as though – and I can write this fully and with great feeling – I had found myself in a place of utter illumination. ‘Utter’, yes it was, that word again. So it was that not only the dark had had a voice but the morning, too, had earned for herself a presence in this sequence of events. The knowledge of the day ahead coming for me as surely as a mother might come through the dark towards her crying child.

‘Is where all this has been leading.’

And – What happened? What has happened here?

I can only say that there was a cry, a word that was uttered, a phrase... Something calling out, crying with such urgency from the catch of a trap that it had made me wake, that it might as well have been shouting at me, ‘Get up!’ And again. The same words, over and over. ‘Get up! Get up!’ As though the dark and the light both might recognise each other and out of that recognition speak.

So I stayed in the kitchen, waiting by the window until the darkness had lifted completely, the grey light of dawn light replacing, one second of its arrival after another, the deep quantities of the night. I put my arms around me like a lover might and the grey became paler and paler until blanched to white and then finally I saw all was saturated with new colour.

*