Well, I missed out the really sexual part of the girls. That was based on a real account but I thought it was far too explicit for a blog. I’d probably get banned.
I’ve skipped on to a different character. The novel is a mosaic that all comes together. I am standing at the side of mt dead father.
Excerpt – Bodies in a Window Paperback
I was brought up Catholic. It’s all I know. I go to church every Sunday without fail. When my girls were at home I made sure they went and had confession every week. I have brought them up properly. My Bill isn’t a Catholic. He doesn’t go to church. I don’t really know what he believes in. We never talk about it. He is not the type of man you have conversations with let alone talk about God, for sure. He’s a good man and that is good enough for me and it’ll have to be good enough for God too, or I’ll want to know why. My Bill is a simple man. He’s not one for thinking, or praying, come to that. He is a groundsman and is very handy with his hands. Bill is very loyal and quiet. He’s not one for telling you what’s on his mind. He spends most of his free time out in the garden on his own. We have a lot of garden with many hedges, vegetables and flower beds. He does a really good job. We might not be the wealthiest on the estate, in fact we are among the poorest, but we do have the best gardens of anyone. Bill ensures that. He’s at one with nature and I believe that is where you’ll find God.
I take people as I find them. I don’t care who they are, rich or poor, Christian or Jew, I treat them the same. Our next door neighbours are Jewish and they are fine people no matter what our priest says about the Jews. He’s a dappy sod anyway, that old priest. I think he’s a man who is too fond of the booze with his big red nose. At the blood of Jesus a bit too much if you ask me. I’ve never known anyone as stingy with the confessional wine. I think he begrudges every drop. He told me that God forbids contraception and that the Jews killed Jesus. Well I told him straight that our next door neighbours haven’t killed as much as a fly and that six girls is quite enough for anyone. I’m friends with them, Jews or no Jews, and from now on my Bill wears a hood. He didn’t like it much but he soon shut up and got used to it. I’m one for straight speaking. No priest was going to lay the law down to me. He could see my mind was made up. I saw what having twelve kiddies did to my old ma. I don’t wish that on anyone. God wouldn’t want that. I go to confession and do my penances. I reckon I’ll be alright with God when my time comes.
I’m friends with Madge too. She’s one of the few I have any time for round here. She’s like me – has no time for all this pretence and putting on airs. She calls a spade a spade and I like that. You know where you stand with someone like that for sure. Not like with most of the silly sods on this estate. They are all trying to be something they’re not. My priest tells me I shouldn’t consort with her either. Madge is a spiritualist. I don’t hold with all that mumbo jumbo spiritualist stuff myself – talking to the dead sounds peculiar enough to me. My priest says that it’s the devil’s work. Well that’s rubbish too. I just think it’s daft but I don’t think there’s any harm in it. Madge tries talking to her poor mum who passed away. If that helps her come to terms with missing her poor old mum then that is OK with me. Besides, it’s no difference to what the Pope and the Cardinals do when they have their holy communion. As far as I’m concerned she can do what she likes. It’s no business of mine what other people believe. Madge is a down to earth woman. She’s not evil. There’s no harm in wanting to speak to yer ma, is there? That priest of mine talks out of his arse sometimes. Don’t the Pope and all those bishops hold séances? They talk to the dead. What’s the difference? I think he consumes too much of that communion wine myself. I’ve never seen a man with such a red nose. I don’t hold with this spiritualism, and talking to the dead myself but I don’t see how it can be evil to want to talk to your old mammy. There’s not an evil bone in Madge. She’d do anything for you. That’s the proof of the pudding for me.
As far as I’m concerned a person gets on with their own life and leaves others to get on with theirs. If everybody in the world did the same thing we wouldn’t be having all this trouble. That’s my honest view and I tell that to the priest. There’s good and bad sorts everywhere. The Catholic Church hasn’t got a monopoly on goodness. There’s good and bad everywhere. He’s at a loss. He doesn’t know what to say to me, for sure. But I’m like Madge – I call it as I see it.
Bodies in a Window: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781986269544: Books
Conexion is a Drug. Conexion is a Sci-fi novel – Paperback/Kindle
It’s the future. Conexion is a drug that takes you back through your DNA to the lives of your ancestors. The past sure is strange. Then we have aliens. Where do they come in? The past and future meet in this tense tale.
Excerpt – Conexion
Nova City was the biggest place on the whole of Titan. Ten billion people lived in the honeycombed labyrinths carved into the rock under the protective dome of Titan’s rocky surface.
Despite the hopes of the early pioneers no sign of life had been found in Titan’s underground oceans. Far from the sun, which only appeared as a large star one hundredth the size of Sol as seen from Terra, but with the large globe of Saturn looming over it through the gloom of its hazy atmosphere, Titan had presented many problems for the early settlers – the frigid temperature being just one of the many. But Titan proved fruitful in many other ways and gave up its bounty in ice and minerals which amply supported the cost of its terraforming. Besides, new homes were required for the billions of human offspring. There was little option but to make use of any available rock that could be made habitable. Titan proved a useful tool in the re-homing of the progeny of Homo sapiens prolific fertility.
The trouble was that life was not fair. People were not equal. Life on Ganymede, Europa and Titan lacked many of the luxuries taken for granted elsewhere in the system. Pay was low and conditions were poor. People felt distinctly second class, outcast from the pleasures and artistic hubs of the major planets. It bred dissatisfaction and resentment. Many felt that they were getting the rough end of the stick and that their world’s resources were being bled away to support the lavish lifestyles of the planetary elite. That was why there were moves to break away and declare independence so that they could better their lot and free themselves of the shackles of the federation.
Then there was the social and artistic separation that was felt so acutely. The rich panoply of social and artistic life that was so abundant elsewhere was only focussed on the planets. Very little found its way out to the further regions. That sparsity of culture generated a provincial mentality. People felt abandoned and treated as second-class citizens. It created a sense of bitterness.
Nova City was ripe for Nationalistic terrorism and religious fanaticism.
This was the background that Jesus De Monde encountered, from which he had emerged. He was a truly charismatic figure who rose out of nowhere to address the concerns and fears of the extra-planetary masses who felt both oppressed and discarded. Jesus De Monde was a huge bear of a man with ebony black skin, dreadlocks, a sharp mind and a smiling face with glistening white teeth that seemed to always shine with love and optimism. He brought the people of the outer worlds hope and provided them with a vision of the future that was more promising than anything they had ever imagined before. With Jesus it was not ‘pie in the sky’ but the real possibility of progress and equality right now.
His message was clear – progress could be made without the threats of bombs and hatred, without the need for separation and segregation, without disunity or even the false succour of religion. By unifying the disaffected people and peacefully demanding greater rights they could win a better standard of life to that of their present iniquitous oppression of life while living out in the boondocks of the outer worlds. His passion and charisma made people listen and believe in him. He made them believe that a better future could be achieved out there on the fringes. He promised them that their grievances could be addressed, and that they, the Moonies, as they described themselves, need no longer be second class citizens. He assured them that they deserved better
As testimony to his personal magnetism and growing power Jesus De Monde had managed to bring together representatives of the various religious and political factions to hold discussions about a way forward. The very fact of managing to get such aggressive and violent groups together under one roof was almost a miracle in itself. The fact that they were actually listening to him and taking his ideas seriously was beyond belief.
For all the oppressed people of the rim it was a giant step in the right direction.
I wrote this novel based on my daily journey through the country roads into work. I imagined my protagonist trapped in a car, upside down in a ditch, slowly dying, drifting in and out of consciousness.
Excerpt – Reflections from a ditch
The whole damn world is run on exclusive little clubs geared to keeping people down – making outsiders of them. The real power resides in grubby little dives and huge faceless palaces. Quiet thin lipped men in suits look down their nose at you and feed sops from the table. Here nothing is important except power and power can be bought if you have the price and know whom to ask – having the right name and connections help. Behind the overt corridors of power there lurks a dim recess of real power. Narrow eyes watch your every move. The games are played out with winners and losers but the strings are pulled by the faceless power brokers. They use religion. They use drugs. They use politics and they are patient. They sit in dingy leather chairs and think in terms of centuries. Fashions come and go. Life goes on.
Love and intrigue? Nothing matters except the hypocrisy of the meetings behind the scenes. Rich or not those rooms are sealed to all but the necessary. You may even rise to sit at their table, but voice your views, as they smile, tilt their heads and acknowledge your genius, and it slides off them like shit off a window. Jeff and Blackie are meaningless little snotty kids with no value, worth or purpose other that to be manipulated like pawns on a board. Little pageants played out on inconsequential stages, which will not touch the minds of the masters – the fashioners of destiny. Us little zits, pimples on the face of the universe, worthless units to become consumers, their work force, and then die our grovelling little impoverished deaths in the meaningless mediocrity of everyday nowhereism. Suckered with the carrot of possibility – ‘You could become one of us – if you work hard – get lucky – get rich’. Bought with little sops – ‘Find your place in life’ ‘Be happy’ ‘There’s a place for you in Heaven’.
Bullshit.
And we are all, masters included, pimples of inconsequence, self-obsessed simpletons. In the face of a raging eternity, before the cataclysmic silence, we scream and stand our ground with the magic Tantric repetition of the word ‘I’. We are just leaving our mark for eternity, a name for ourselves, our place in history; just changing the world, imposing my views, sharing my perspective.
What I have to say and do is important, worth listening to.
Listen!!!
Every true story is a work of fiction.
Nothing matters in eternity. The sun will grow and the Earth will be subsumed. The sun will die. The universe will die. There is no God. Even a life made of air will fade away. Some way off all there will be is darkness and cold lifeless space. Long before that we will all be dead. There will be nothing to leave for eternity to mull – no fossils – no archaeology for future civilisations.
What does it matter if that’s a million years hence or four zillion.
What the fuck does it matter.
Every moment in the whole universe has contributed to this moment. This is true magic.
Reflections from a ditch eBook : Goodwin, Opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
Writing about my Dad’s illness was hard but cathartic. Using his illness and death as a backbone to this novel gave me an opportunity to rationalise and come to terms with it. It messed me up for a long while. He was far too young. I was angry. It puts life in perspective.
Bodies in a Window
It was Auntie Di who first alerted me to what was going on with Dad. She rang me up. I was at the other end of the country. I didn’t get to see him too often but I rang him up every week and he sounded fine. He’d come up for Christmas and he’d seemed OK. I let him carve the turkey. He didn’t have much of an appetite though and left most of his Christmas dinner. That wasn’t like him at all – but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. He was just a bit off colour.
Have you seen your dad lately? Auntie Di asked ominously.
There was a lengthy pause while I ruminated on the import of what she’d just said.
Not since Christmas, I informed her hesitantly.
I think you should go down. He’s not well. She kept all emotion out of her voice and somehow that made it worse. It was what she was suppressing that came through loud and clear – something serious was up with Dad.
What’s wrong? I asked with a feeling of panic welling up in me. What was she telling me? For her to ring me up and say that meant that something bad was up.
I just think you should go and see him.
Dad had been complaining of being off his food and having an upset stomach. But it hadn’t stopped him going in to work. But that meant nothing – the man was a workaholic. He never took any time off work. He was a juggernaut. He went in even when he had flu. I knew he’d been ill for some time now but was making very light of it to me – just an upset stomach. The doctor was sorting it. But Auntie Di wouldn’t have phoned unless there was something serious would she? I had this horrible sinking feeling.
I couldn’t wait for the weekend. I drove down as soon as I could. It was quite a journey – 250 miles in my old jalopy. It took me nearly six hours.
I could not believe my eyes when I got there. He’d withered away to nothing in three months. His suit hung off him. His cheeks were hollow. He was yellow. I’ve seen worse victims coming out of concentration camps. To say that I was shocked didn’t come close. But I tried to cover it up as best I could. I didn’t want him to see my reaction. I covered it up by giving him a big hug and averting my face.
Bodies in a Window: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781986269544: Books
I have to laugh to myself. I am reading extracts from the past – some kind of memoir/diary posing as a novel. I’ve changed the names to protect the guilty. Is it a novel? Is it an antinovel as I imagined? Is it anything?
Excerpt – 53 and imploding
The phone rings.
Tom has just rung and I have to go and pick him up. He is working at a pub a few miles away. I will be gone fifteen minutes.
……….around camp fires, our ancestors…………
It is twelve ‘o two. I have brought Tom home. He was chirpy.
…………passed on their tales and metaphors while we listened in awe and ran our own pictures in our heads. They embellished life with gods and power and sought to understand the weather, seasons, heavens and life. They failed miserably but they did shed a little light and make it all seem so feasible and interesting. We all loved it – the mystery; the wonder; the answers. It made everything so neat and tidy. It was structured, salutary, educational, practical and made sense of the awesome chaos of the universe in which we tenuously teeter. It made us feel protected and secure.
The shamen had immense power because of their supposed knowledge. People were in awe of them.
But this is an anti-novel. I am no shaman. I offer you no comfy solutions or havens, no eternal life or nurturing gods. If you find yourself tied to the rails with a steam train thundering towards you awaiting the intervention of a hero the express train will certainly decapitate you. This is reality. I write of a heap of tangled spaghetti that inevitably twists, knots and breaks. I slide along the slimy entrails of life, real life. I realise that I have not had a piss yet. Ironically Tom is cooking pasta. That is one of those coincidences. He has come in while I type and complained that there is no fucking food in the house. Have I got any goodies? I have two kit-kat chunkies hidden in my drawer but I keep quiet. He went off to cook pasta. He is coughing and clattering in the kitchen even as I write that he is coughing and clattering. He is making a coffee. I wonder if he will make me one? I call out ‘Yes please’. He grumbles. But I think he is making me one.
This is a heap of life served up with a mess of sauce. Fuck knows what is in the sauce. Everything is in the sauce. This is no delicacy served up by a chef, arranged on a plate with a garnish of fresh parsley and a twirl of rich sauce. This is no result of following a recipe. This is a mess of whatever comes to hand. This is how I live.
Tom brings me a coffee. He asks if I have any dope. I have not. The dope has been smoked long ago.
I am making no sense of this. It is twelve twenty and I am getting tired. I am also approaching the end of the first page of red scribble. This is the scribble that I wrote yesterday morning when I arrived at work. I conceived it in my head at about 8.00 to 8.30 as I drove in to school. Unfortunately I forgot most of what I had mused over before I came to write it down. It seemed interesting to me at the time, interesting enough for me to write out here. I am sure that the stuff I forgot was even better but none f us will ever know. Us. You see – I am presupposing an audience. After twenty eight books and no sign of a spark of interest I still imagine someone actually reading this. In reality I am both the recorder and the audience. Even my wife gave up on me years ago. She would not deign to even glance at a single sentence I have produced. This is some stupid hobby, an indulgence, a pointless exercise I go through. She does not even bother to question it any more. There is no logic to it. I am satisfied. Strangely, knowing that nobody would ever bother to read this, gives me a freedom I would not otherwise have. I do not have to worry about the effects of my words as they rattle other eyes, jiggle neurones and skid across synapses. Are they clear? Do they convey? Will they change anything? Do I create empathy? Who gives a fuck! I can write what I fucking like! There is no audience.
53 and imploding eBook : goodwin, opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
I wanted to capture the naïve innocence of that age in the writing. I wanted the writing to be as juvenile as the person I was. This is me at eighteen in 1967. I was full of it. Somehow I fitted this into the patchwork of the novel. Nothing could go wrong yet here I was standing next to the corpse of my father.
Excerpt – Bodies in a Window
I was on a high. I was eighteen years old and the whole world had opened up for me. It was like waking up from a long sleep. I was seeing so much. I was free to do what I wanted. There was nobody telling me what to do or ordering me about. I was shining with the brilliance of it. I felt like all the forces in the universe were conspiring to come together in some great ecstatic wonder. It all made sense. Every day was new – a great new adventure.
I had just read The Dharma Bums. Finished it last night. It was brilliant. I thought it was even better than On The Road. I reckon it was Kerouac’s masterpiece. I rate Kerouac as the best writer in the world. He was a crazy mad genius. He’d summed it up. Life was a mad journey. You had to live it to the max, get your kicks and seek out the meaning in it. There was an underlying truth to everything. All you had to do was dig it out. It made sense to me. There was a vibration running through the universe that connected us all. There was poetry, music and madness. I knew what I wanted out of life. I also knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want a boring career like my parents were pushing me towards. I wanted a big dollop of Kerouac’s craziness. That would do me fine.
My parents were all caught up in this mind-numbing, unreal trip. I wanted none of it. I looked at their humdrum life and thought it was all such a waste. It was all empty. I wanted something much more exciting and real. They wanted me to get into some heavy bread trip. Who was interested in that? That was like dying. You only had so much time in this life and I wanted my life full of wonder not working my arse off in some career to earn money to buy things and then being too knackered when you got home to do anything other than watch some vacuous rubbish on the telly. That was like being some boring zombie. I certainly didn’t want to become some boring zombie like all those deadheads on the estate. I wanted a lot more than that. I wanted to live and find out what it was all about – life, love, poetry and madness. I wanted some of that craziness that Kerouac wrote about. I wish I could have lived in the US back in the fifties. I would have loved that. He was a true pioneer. That would have been just great.
But anyway, I’ve found Kerouac – and Ginsberg, and Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Roy Harper. There’s no end to it. I’ve finally woken up and come alive. The whole of life is a revelation. It feels like I’ve just woken up.
Not only that but I’ve met this girl and everything is great. I’m on a constant high. It never stops. Life is a buzz. There is a Zen to it. When you got it right it all came together. It is like all the currents in the universe are conspiring – a perfect moment. Marvellous. It was certainly coming together for me right now.
I felt that I had it sussed. There was a vibe around and I was hooked into it. I could feel it. The music, poetry, beat stuff and now this girl. It was all in some perfect harmony. The world was a wonderful place once you got into the positive groove. I was riding the biggest wave and hooked right into that groove. Everything was coming together. Nothing could go wrong.
Bodies in a Window: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781986269544: Books
I’m finding it interesting to visit myself from twenty years ago. This antinovel is a slice of reality.
Excerpt – 53 and imploding
You can already discern from the way I meander that life is not very organised. There is nothing neat about me. Around me, on my desk, are stacks of unsorted CDs. And junk. I type in the midst of this chaos. My dog sleeps beneath my desk with his head on my feet. He is thoroughly content. He does not have to ponder the state of the world. He will know if I move. That is all that is important. As long as I am there, there is food in his belly and he is warm he has everything he needs.
Life is not like some well-constructed tale. I do not see things clearly. I do not understand too well. I see life as convoluted spaghetti of intermingled lines. Each strand’s a life. Each has two ends but they are so intertwined that this is not obvious or important. And the sauce is a corruption of greed, avarice and cruelty but worst of all indifference. No. This is no novel. This, if anything, is an anti-novel.
Incredibly, I wrote this novel twenty-three years ago. I was suffering some kind of mid-life crisis in that I was questioning what I was doing. We have 4000 weeks of life (if we’re lucky). I had spent twenty-eight years teaching. I’d become a Deputy Head. I had spent twenty-eight fighting the system, pushing the limits, in order to make education vital – to bring young minds to life, to broaden their perspective. I was tired. I wanted my life back.
I had started out in my teens full of radical enthusiasm. I was jaded. I was looking to get out. Little did I know I was on the brink of change. Instead of retirement I took on headship and really changed things. But that’s something else.
This ‘novel’ was my antinovel. I had no structure to work on. I just wanted a stream of consciousness that told it as it was.
This is me. You are in my head.
53 and imploding – Me
I am no writer; I am a liberator of ideas.
So what is this I am doing? Can you imagine me sitting here? It is eleven in the evening. Outside it is dark and raining. It is pleasantly warm. I am sitting at my desk, a burnt out old 53-year-old small guy with longish thinning hair and a threadbare ambition. I have standing in the community. I am a deputy headmaster at the third oldest school in the country. Some would envy me this position. I spit on it. It keeps me warm, well fed, and comfortable. It pays for the wine, the music and the car. It has enabled me to raise and care for my family. It takes time from my pointless writing. It is a noose around my neck strangling the vitality out of my ageing synapses. I am suffocating in this shit. It is true that it affords contact with some extraordinary young minds, as well as a larger number of less extraordinary young minds, but it is none the less a role I go through; a set of challenges I have to rise to. It eats away at my nerves and erodes my mental health. It robs me of time, ease, friendship and thought. It buys that with money and comfort. This is addictive but probably not a good trade. Who can say? It depends on what your purpose for living is. It depends on your ethics and morality. Ha!
Can you picture me yet? I am sitting here at six minutes past eleven in front of a computer screen typing in Microsoft word. This is page five of Chapter one. I have two sheets of A4 paper in front of me. One is covered in my own indecipherable scrawl in red ink on both sides. The other has black scrawl on two thirds of one side. They are the only clues I have as to where the next pages will take me; that and some weird idea that I want to explore the reality of life and delve into what is really important. You see – I do not lie when I say I have no plan or structure. Life has no plan or structure. We impose that on it with hindsight and the absurd need for order. We are programmed to look for the patterns and meaning. That is the secret of our evolutionary success. Why should life have meaning? I do not believe in destiny. I do not believe in God or some equally absurd after-life. I believe in haphazard circumstance that leads from one thing to another. Sometimes this serendipity is fortuitous. When remarkably unlikely events conspire to occur we marvel. We proclaim them miracles or mystical intervention. They are merely life. That is what happens when you throw seeds to the wind – they sometimes fall to create a picture.
I am standing in the hospital next to my dead father, peering out the window.
Here is another body or two. I introduce another character. Can you glimpse where this is going?
Excerpt – Bodies in a Window
Joe and I are mates. We go back to the year dot – blood brothers. We were brought together as babies as we were the same age and lived a few houses away from each other. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know Joe. We grew up in each other’s houses and were out on the streets as soon as we could totter along. It was quiet on our estate. There was hardly any traffic, and the cars there were had careful drivers who always looked out for us kids. We rode our little trikes up and down on the new concrete slab road without any danger. Our mums knew we were safe. They didn’t have to worry. Those streets were out playground. We learnt to roller-skate, played tennis using the concrete blocks as our court, climbed the trees, hoicked frogspawn out of the ponds, played football, cricket and block. We were as wild and free as leaves in the wind.
When we were little Joe and I had our gang – the Black Arrow Gang. We had our flag that we’d made together – a black arrow that we’d painted on a square of old sheet that we’d tied to a stick – Joe and I had drawn it and stitched it up ourselves. We were right proud of that flag. We’d also built a gang house out of mud. We’d dug up clods of grass and made cement out of gooey mud to stick it together. We’d built these walls up as high as our chest and then covered it with an old tent to create this huge room where we held our parlays. It was serious stuff that gang. We had solemn discussions about what we were planning to do and took notes and everything. No messing about. We really got into it. All the members had to swear allegiance to the gang. We cut our thumbs with penknives and mixed our blood so we were blood brothers until death.
Bodies in a Window: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781986269544: Books