Gave me quite a shock to read this. I haven’t read this book for many years. This new character was based on my Mum.
I am standing by a window at the side of my dead father looking out. I tried writing the different characters from varying perspectives.
excerpt – Bodies in a Window
I don’t like it here. I never have done and I never will. I don’t fit in. I’m like a fish out of water. They are all a bunch of snobby gits. They put on their airs and graces – pretentious idiots. All they care about is showing off. They swank around like they’re the big ‘I am’.
It’s Jim’s fault. He wants to move up in the world. Still does. He thinks we should do better than our parents did. I can see that. I want my kids to have better opportunities than I did. Part of me says that we’re every bit as good as any of them. But it is one thing thinking it and quite another doing it. It feels so wrong to me – not how I was brought up. I wouldn’t mind the affluence of the estate but it’s the people. They all seem so false and unreal to me – plastic people living plastic lives. Jim thinks I’m daft. We scrimped and scraped to buy this bungalow. I love it as a house, don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with it as a home except that it’s just not me – well not so much the place as where it is, in the middle of this bunch. It’s not the bungalow that’s wrong as the people around on this bloody estate – the snobby gits. I was brought up among real people and I’m happy with people who are down to earth. I grew up in a community where people cared about each other, looked out for each other. People mattered – not things. This lot couldn’t care less about each other. They’d trample each other to death if they thought they could gain some advantage. They don’t care. I don’t want to fit in with them.
Here on this estate they’re out mowing the grass with straight lines, polishing the car and showing off with their dinner parties, golf and kids in boarding schools. Imagine having kids and even wanting to send them away to some bloody boarding school? What’s the point of having them in the first place if you want shot of them? It’s bloody peculiar, that’s what it is. I can’t stand it. They are so cold and selfish. They’re just not my sort and never will be.
The trouble is that I have no friends here, well, very few. There is Mrs O’Grady, but she’s a fish out of water just like me. The truth is that I don’t want to have friends here, leastways not with the likes of them. I’d rather be on my own. But Jim goes off to work each day and I’m all by myself. I’ve got nothing to occupy myself with. I’m not one for housework. It was fine when the kids were little and my mum was alive. She’d come round with the car and take us out for the day. We went everywhere. She’d knock on the door and shout through the letter box ‘come on open up. I know you’re in there.’ We’d come running. I’m lost without her. The kids loved her. But now she’s gone and the kids are at school and life seems empty. I don’t want to fit in and I’ve got far too much time on my hands.
So I’ve got my bike. I cycle everywhere. I cycle in to Kingston, up the big hill at Esher, to go to the cattle market. I used to take the kids there on the back of my bike. Can you imagine that? It’s a good way – a good seven or eight miles – but I don’t mind. It passes the time. The exercise is good for me. Cycling up that bloody hill you sure get enough exercise I can tell you. I used to be able to do that without stopping, even with the kids on the back. I can’t now. I have to stop and push it up the last bit – fair takes the wind out of me I can tell you.
I like my bargains. That’s why I like the market. I hunt out bargains. There’s plenty of reasonably priced stuff to be had there. Then on Saturdays I go round all the jumble sales. You can pick up stuff for next to nothing – good stuff too. I enjoy doing that. It stops me thinking about my mum. It fills in the time. I live for my bargains – and the kids of course.
Bodies in a Window: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781986269544: Books
I wrote this novel in an attempt to capture reality. A stream of consciousness about the things going on in my head, life and death. This is what reality looks like. This is life.
53 and imploding
I live in a nice house that is three hundred years old. The doorways and ceilings are low because people were smaller back then. Even I have to occasionally duck. It used to be a farm, a pair of two-up two-down cottages, and a shop and now it is my home. The mortgage is completely paid off. I own it. Except in reality I am merely passing through. I will leave it to my wife and then my children. It will be lived in by others after me. It will be altered, decorated, knocked around, improved and no evidence of me will remain. I am passing through.
I love this house. It is warm and cosy. It has room to stretch out. We have invested much time and energy into making it a home. It houses my books, records, CDs and computers. I am comfortable here. There is a sense of history in the walls. They lean and tilt, the floorboards creak, and the ceilings sag. It is happy with the way it has settled into itself and redolent with the memories of unseen people. I have grown into it and lean and sag to the same extent in sympathy.
I am passing through.
Some people are artists with words, creating pictures and stories out of static neuronal sparks. They structure and craft their words to tell tales and plug into that primitive need of all humans. But I am no artist. I have tried that and failed. I admire their skills. I enjoy the stories they weave. But to me they are sanitised. No matter how intricate or complete they cannot capture the real textures of life; they cannot even capture a brief moment in its entirety. A novel is a distillation; at best a selection of highlights. I am no storyteller, wordsmith or creator of tales. My words are not crafted, not honed; they escape on the run. I let them free.
I am no writer; I am a liberator of ideas.
53 and imploding eBook : goodwin, opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
Bodies in a window
By
Opher Goodwin
Dedication
To Margery Olive Goodwin and Ronald Alfred Goodwin
Introduction
I had the concept for this novel in 1981. It has been festering annoyingly in the back of my mind for decades until I finally found the way of writing it.
Many of the characters in this book are embellishments and adaptations of real people, even myself. It is the same with the events; they too are based on real situations. But this is a work of fiction. It has come out of my imagination. Nothing is completely true. The characters I have created are often composites and much of what takes place has been altered – having said that there is a strong element of fact in nearly all of it – particularly the more unlikely parts.
I began writing this in February while on the cruise ship Magellan going up the coast of Australia. I completed the first rough draft in March while cruising around Vietnam.
Opher Goodwin 25.3.2017
Review
A very human moment of painful insight and personal crisis launches this intriguing multi-layered story. Several apparently disparate lives are examined through episodic and frankly-confessional first-person accounts which in their very different ways explore the question of how far we are free and how much we are constrained. How are we connected and what if we could see through the eyes of others? The style is fast-flowing, the language direct and uncluttered. As the old 50s cop show proclaimed: All human life is here! In this case, life and death …
Bodies in a Window: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781986269544: Books
I thought a further extract was in order to show that the book was not all about morbid death; there is morbid life too!
All the characters have different lives, different voices and different stories. There are young and old, sex, madness and fun and a range of different perspectives.
Extract:
I don’t understand it at all. The whole world has gone nuts. I can’t comprehend what has happened to young people. They don’t have any values. They are rude, scruffy and ungrateful. We fought a war, two wars, so that they could have everything we didn’t and they throw it back in your face. It makes me bewildered. Sometimes it makes me angry and sometimes it makes me sad but mostly it leaves me in despair. I just don’t understand – still, never mind, best to get on with it. The whole world has gone to pot. Put it to one side and forget about it. That’s the way.
Best listen to the telly and forget it.
I could feel Tom settling his head on my lap. I ruffled his head and he settled contentedly on the settee with his head in my lap – his favourite position. Margaret would never have stood for it – him being up on the furniture – unhygienic and dirty – not the done thing. She was house-proud. She wouldn’t have had him in up on the settee – not a chance in hell. Makes me chuckle to think about it. He most likely wouldn’t have ever been allowed in the front room. She’d probably have railed against him being in the house at all, but she would have eventually compromised and allowed him a bed in the corner of the kitchen.
I miss Margaret. She had standards. We didn’t use the front room at all when she was alive. She had the furniture covered and put newspaper down on the floor for us to walk on. You should have seen the caper when someone called unexpectedly; all that crumpling it up and shoving it in the cupboard. The sitting room was for guests. She kept it pristine. We lived in the kitchen. The rest of the house was done to a turn as well. She polished the doorstep every morning, dusted, swept, cleaned and washed until everything was shiny and spotless. Even when she was really ill she kept up the same routine. Nothing stopped her. She had principles. It is sad that I’ve let it go like I have, but I was never like that, really. Besides, I’m past caring.
I wasn’t like that back then. She used to nag me rotten. But I’ve let things slip. I know it. She’d be horrified if she came back now. She’d probably have a fit. But Margaret has been gone these last twenty years. She is not coming back. I’m on my own. Well, apart from Tom that is. Tom is my only companion now.
It will be Coronation Street soon. I like Coronation Street. Ena’s got herself in a right strop with Minnie. I can’t wait to see how that one is going to turn out. Then I might watch Harry Worth and call it a night. I’ll take a hot cocoa up to bed with me. I used to like to read but my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. My reading days are over. I even have trouble watching the telly now. I have to watch it out of the corner of my eye. It’s an effort. Everything’s a bloody effort these days.
Best listen to the telly and forget it.
I was unhappy with this novel so I reinvented it with the help of my good friends Kathy and Tobes.
I am a man who is soaked in awe and wonder, who sees beauty and mystery in the whole universe, but who remains incredibly skeptical of ALL religion. I see religion on a par with politics – a power game.
Religion for me is a throwback to our primitive past. All religions reflect the cultures from which they emanate. They are steeped in misogyny, tribalism and hate. They reinforce division and prejudice. I despise them all.
The concept for this novel was to have my character aiming to write a scurrilous book revealing all the dark power games, control, brainwashing, intrigue and hypocrisy that lies behind all religions.
There is a strong biographical element to it as my character weaves in death, the end of a career and the vagaries of life into the story. It’s fast-paced and blasphemous. But it needs telling.
All the characters are straight out of my imagination (even when based on real people). Nothing is real.
Why not dip in and prepare to be shocked? This is the antidote to religion – THE ANTI-THEIST’S BIBLE!
Let me first lay out the framework:
We are a bag of complex chemicals infused with electricity that are capable of thinking.
Our consciousness is created by a neural network much more complex that the most sophisticated computers.
We have a sense of identity that is probably a false construct.
We find it hard to imagine that we could possibly cease to exist or that our lives and the existence of this ginormous infinite universe might be nothing more than chance.
To solve this we invent elaborate eternal afterlives, gods and religions.
We came from nonexistence and will return to nonexistence.
Our conscious formed gradually from an accumulation of cells until there were sufficient to form an intricate network coursing with ionic waves of polarisation, intricate chemistry and patterns. That made us aware.
We are very complex and sophisticated having evolved from simpler bags of chemicals for billions of years.
We live on a small insignificant planet orbiting around a small star out on the spiral arm of a small, normal galaxy.
We crave immortality.
We achieve that through reproduction, through the tangible remnants of our existence (artefacts, machines, structures, words, images, art, music, buildings etc.).
But one day very soon we will cease to live. The electricity will no longer pulse, the waves of polarisation cease and the complex chemistry will grind to a halt. We will cease to be. The identity we had may live on in memories of others or the things we left behind but that is it.
All our history is on this one small precarious planet.
We exist courtesy of a massive ecological network of plants and animals that produce our atmosphere, shield us from cosmic rays, provide our food and inspire us. This ecological web is resilient but also fragile.
If we manage to survive a few billion years more the sun will enlarge into a red dwarf engulfing the whole planet and vaporising every last fossil and artefact so that there will be no evidence of our existence or any other form of life.
If, by then, we have managed to escape our doomed solar system and set up around another star or in the depths of space we may be safe for many billions of years to come.
Eventually, due to entropy, the universe will run down, the stars will go out one by one until the entire cosmos is dark, the heat will drain and atoms will fall apart. All that will be left is a vast puff of hydrogen.
There will be nothing to show we, or anything else, ever existed.
Now we arrive at the purpose of life.
In one sense there is no purpose whatsoever.
In another our very mortality and short lives, coupled with the immense wonder and beauty all around us, provide us with a number of highly motivating purposes.
Instead of becoming depressed at the thought of our demise we should be spurred into action to make the most of every single second of this incredible experience. Ever been on a zip-line? Thrills don’t last forever but they do provide us with excitement!
Our purpose must be something we decide for ourselves. It may be creative, fun, exploratory, educational or simply thrilling. We might find it in competitive sport, in investigating history, in designing the future, helping others, travelling and discovering, filling ourselves with awe and wonder at nature and the universe or a wealth of creative project. Anything that is rewarding and fulfilling.
We have one life measured in seconds. We can fill it with joy, pleasure and wonder or we can waste it.
Futility is in the mind of the terrified.
The purpose of life is to use every second wisely and create a fulfilling lifetime for our bag of chemicals.
May your electricity zing!
The First Second
In the first second
I opened my eyes
And the world began;
The light flooded in,
Followed by sound,
Touch and bewilderment.
In the first second
Everything began
All at once.
It keeps stopping
And starting.
Every night
It stops.
Every morning
It starts afresh.
I live,
Sandwiched between oblivion,
In spurts
Of outrageous majesty.
Opher – 19.12.2023
There had to be a first second when I opened my eyes and the world began. I cannot remember but I can imagine.
I live each day in a wonderland that people are doing their best to destroy.
I am surrounded by the most incredible majesty. It is all around me. I am so used to it that I do not even recognise how amazing it is. Every second, every ray, every touch, sound and particle. Above all the other creatures.
Every night I close my eyes and it melts away.
I came from oblivion.
One day I shall close my eyes for the last time. That last second will be the reverse of birth. The light and sound will fade and I will melt away into nothing once again.
Bodies in a Window: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781986269544: Books
A very human moment of painful insight and personal crisis launches this intriguing multi-layered story. Several apparently disparate lives are examined through episodic and frankly-confessional first-person accounts which in their very different ways explore the question of how far we are free and how much we are constrained. How are we connected and what if we could see through the eyes of others? The style is fast-flowing, the language direct and uncluttered. As the old 50s cop show proclaimed: All human life is here! In this case, life and death …
Introduction
I had the concept for this novel in 1981. It has been festering annoyingly in the back of my mind for decades until I finally found the way of writing it.
Many of the characters in this book are embellishments and adaptations of real people, likewise with the events; they too are based on real situations. But this is a work of fiction. It has come out of my imagination. Nothing is completely true. The characters I have created are often composites and much of what takes place has been altered – having said that there is a strong element of fact in nearly all of it – particularly the more unlikely parts.
I began writing this in February while on the cruise ship Magellan going up the coast of Australia. I completed the first rough draft in March while cruising around Vietnam.
Opher Goodwin 25.3.2017
Chapter 1 – Perspectives on a Sunny Day
Life goes on. That’s all I know. As far as I’m concerned, right now, life is trivial, pointless and boring – a repetition of the mundane, periodically interspersed with equally nonsensical novelty. Nothing makes sense. There is no purpose to anything. It appears to fall into a reassuring pattern -but that is an illusion. Change is all there really is. You can be sure that nothing will last for long. Everything you do is doomed to be destroyed in the vagaries of time. Nothing lasts. It’s a pretty miserable state of affairs when you really get down to thinking about it.
I stood in the sanitised room, breathed the Dettol and allowed my mind to run freewheel. Well, I didn’t really allow it to run free so much as lose control of it. I’d let go. There was no hand on the rudder. It went where it wanted and that appeared to entail a long string of gloomy observations. Right at this moment in time life looked pretty miserable to me.
Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t always been this morbid; my brain has not always flowed in such a melancholy manner. I used to be a happy, easy-going, positive sort of guy. But that seems a long, long time ago now. I’m no longer that person. Life knocked that naïve optimism right out of me a long time before today.
It is days like this that have robbed me of my positive outlook, and I’ve had a few of these kinds of days. Though fortunately not too many on a par with this particular doozy of an example. This was in a category of its own – a kind of one-off. This truth is, for obvious reasons, you can only experience this once.
Back when I was young ….. I could laugh at my own naivety ….. I used to postulate solutions to the world’s problems. I even used to have faith in the intrinsic goodness of human beings and believed there were things worth striving for. What a fool I was back then. That was before I realised the true nature of all those movers and shakers out there, the wealthy and powerful, greedily clawing in all they can, and willing to carve up their own grannies for self-advancement. They are a bunch of callous self-servers.
I woke up to the reality of humankind.
It is strange what pictures play out on your eyeballs as you stand helpless in a situation like this; what horrid thoughts go through your head. I was certainly no longer in control of my own thoughts. My mind was rampaging down an extremely morbid track. The dark thoughts distil out of nothing and chase each other around.
It occurred to me that, when it boils down to it, we are just glutinous sacs of chemistry; bags of minerals dissolved in water and suffused with ionised electricity.
Right now I had a pretty dim view of my species – not surprising, given the circumstances, I suppose.
We’re all to blame.
I was angry. I can’t remember ever being this angry before. I was angry at my Dad, angry at my Mum, angry at that stupid damn doctor, angry at the consultant, the whole fucking system and all those who hadn’t got it sorted. Most of all I was angry with myself.
Selfishness and greed are not just confined to the rich, are they?
I had begun thinking of myself and examining the depths of my own psyche looking for clues – for the evidence to condemn myself. I reckon most people would be just like those wealthy fuckers given half a chance, me included. I have come to believe that the whole human race is a savage, callous, selfish group of mindless monkeys out for nothing more than sex, power and wealth, and they don’t give a toss for anything or anyone – least of all nature or the plight of other creatures. If it isn’t about that trilogy of crassness, then it’s about cretinous fun – usually involving some form of cruelty or abuse.
I’ve always had a soft spot for nature. I detest cruelty.
I gave out a deep sigh which came out more like a sob as I absently pondered my own philosophical views on the nature of humanity. They weren’t currently very flattering, particularly when it came to our record with fellow creatures.
Indeed I have a pretty low impression of mankind and the circumstances were providing me with opportunity to give vent to it. I have come to realise that the majority of people are insane, shallow and stupid. I am convinced that they won’t be happy until they’ve destroyed the whole planet and laughed themselves to death as they busy themselves with slowly frying the last living creature on the sphere.
I played with that image in my head. My mind seemed to attach to it.
They have no scruples – as far as I can see they wouldn’t even want to eat that poor creature, they’d just want to watch it squirm, to make it suffer. That’s how they get their kicks. I believe that. They really would – they would enjoy watching some poor creature, the last creature on earth, as it screams its way to a horrendously painful death and all for nothing more than their own amusement. I believe that.
People are nasty.
Why was I thinking like this? Why was my mind going over this morbid scenario instead of what was happening in front of me. I tried to pull it back to the present but my mind refused to stop going along its depressing rut.
That sort of callous nastiness – it’s beyond me – and I’m human. How can anyone gain pleasure out of inflicting agony on other people or animals? Yet they do. They get off on it.
I shuddered as if to rid myself of the images filling my head. I really did not want them. I tried to reason with myself.
I know – not everyone is like that. I argued pretty unconvincingly. You might even say that it is only a minority. Most people are not cruel.
I considered that for a minute. It was a lame defence.
I lost the argument.
I was in no mood for any amelioration of my stance. I was fucking furious. I disagreed with the very attempt to defend my species. We are all guilty. Our very lifestyle is based on cruelty. That cruelty that we all perpetuate through the very act of living is merely kept out of sight. Most of us do not even think about the various cruelties that are carried out in our name. But I reckon that even mindlessness is no excuse. I suppose, in a way, what is even worse is the way the majority of people live in complete ignorance of the harm they are causing. They do not even see it. But I had such a bad opinion of all of us that I reckon they probably wouldn’t even care if they did.
I stood in the room looking down at the bed standing there as still as a statue. Inside my head it was like an angry cyclone.
Right now the thought of all that cruelty instigated by my own race sends me into great morbid fits of despair. The rage welled up as I looked for a focus for my anger. Deep down I knew it was displacement behaviour. A part of me remained apart, cold and analytical. I watched myself. Who knows? It might do me good to let that pent-up anger out? Who cares what the target was?
I despise them all. I hate them – all of them – even myself – every last human bastard on this planet. I have come to the realisation that we are the stupidest creatures who have ever evolved on this beautiful green sphere – and there have been a few monsters that have evolved here, I can tell you.
I think the worst thing about us is our damn intelligence. We can’t even claim ignorance for the vileness of our acts. That makes it all far worse. Everything we do is consciously done with intent. We know exactly what agonies we inflict and we thoroughly enjoy inflicting it.
But life goes on – at least for a while to come. We’ll eke out the last days of our vainglorious reign and probably still be around to witness our total annihilation of what once was a beautiful green planet full of beauty and potential. We’ll leave behind a legacy of pain, garbage and senseless destruction.
But hey – that’s probably just the mood I’m in right now. It’s chemical. And I have good reason. You’d probably be feeling a tad down if you were standing where I am right now.
Death goes on too.
I’ll feel differently in the morning.
It is strange the morbid, dismal thoughts that go through your mind while you stand in a hospital ward, beside a bed on which lies the remains of your old man, the person who begat you, who looked after you, nursed you, cared for you, loved you without limits and then fucking goes and dies on you – the bastard.
Except that wasn’t him in the bed at all. That was just an ice-cold marble sculpture of some haggard wretch whose cancer-ridden body some master sculptor had seen fit to replicate in stone. He’d done a fucking good job too. The sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks were perfect. The nose stood out like some grotesque beak. He’d captured it. It was a perfect replica of the man he had been yesterday. But he’d got the colour wrong. This marble effigy was as pale as snow. There was none of the sallow, jaundiced pastiness. The smell had gone too. Obviously there are some things even a great artist cannot replicate.
I could tell he wasn’t there the minute I walked into the room. There was no presence. I’m not a big believer in all this spiritual stuff. I don’t believe in gods or heaven and all that indoctrinated crap that they force-feed kids. But life has a presence that you can feel with some sense or other. I only reached out and touched his rock-hard face to confirm what I already knew. He was as cold as ice. The bastard was gone. I was alone in an empty hospital ward. I was in the presence of a big absence – a black hole where my dad had been.
It was over.
All the long days of pretence and acting; all the performance; it was finished with. The chapter was well and truly closed.
The tears streamed down my face. I missed him. Already I missed him. I could not quite believe that I’d never hear his voice again, never dial that number and hear his voice. The thoughts and emotions tumbled away behind my eyes as I stared vacantly out of the window at the world outside and watched it going about its business. Nothing had changed out there. How could that be?
I stood silently and stared out with glazed eyes.
In my world everything had changed – the ground had shifted. Nothing would ever be the same again. But out there it went on as usual.
*
It’s the little things
It’s the little things,
Like the stars,
That are really so big.
Please,
Thank you,
And don’t give a fig.
It’s the big things,
Like life and death,
That are really small,
Too little,
For us to worry about at all!
Opher – 11.11.2022
I guess that what I’m really saying is that we should care about the things we can do something about and not worry about the things that we can’t.