Week Seven
Welcome back to Three Things. This week's offerings:
"Bag of Tricks," "Knavery's Plain Face" and
"Sounding."
Bag of Tricks
Oddly enough, two of this week's fictional “leads”
involve imaginative cross-pollination between British television and
travel on the TTC. The first began with an eccentric-looking old woman who
shared my seat on the King streetcar. Not long after she sat down, she began to
root through her overstuffed handbag. She revealed no end of interesting
articles, including a zippered change purse full of gaudy costume rings that she
proceeded to model on her knobby fingers.
As I watched her out the corner of my eye, I suddenly
recalled an episode of New Tricks, a British television drama about the London
Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad. (Here's a clip of the team talking over a
crime that took place in a library!)
The episode in question features a teenage
girl whose mother disappeared years before; the UCOCS team finds the missing mom buried in the grave of a woman who faked her own
death. The "telling" moment – the one I flashed on while sitting
beside the handbag-lady – occurs
when the girl receives her mother's purse, opens it and begins to grieve.
In retrospect, I suppose I was also influenced by the subconscious
memory of "Found Objects," the opening chapter/story of Jennifer
Egan's wonderful novel and/or collection of linked stories, A Visit from the
Goon Squad. In it, the protagonist steals various items in a misguided attempt
to connect with other members of the human race.
In any case, I began to imagine a bag-snatcher who steals
the purse of an elderly woman not unlike my seat-mate. He usually discards
everything but the cash and any valuables he can sell without undue risk; this particular bag, however, he keeps. Its contents – the costume jewellery?
the photos? the grubby little doll attached to the key chain? – fascinate him
in a way he can't quite understand. The bag and the particular personality it
represents begin to work some kind of change in him. Does he perhaps seek out
the woman to whom it belongs? Or does he go further, seeking the source of the
grief (or guilt? or both?) that brought him to the precarious life he leads now . . . ?
Knavery's Plain Face
The second TV/TTC-inspired story idea began with one of
those oversized promotional ads that "decorate" our busiest subway
platforms. When the train I was riding on came to a stop in the station, the
window across from me framed the enormous face of a sinister looking young man
with partly-concealed fangs and a dribble of blood at the corner of his lip.
I've since learned that the ad was for Being Human, a
British television series that features a group of supernatural flatmates. At the time, however, that larger-than-life face came to me devoid of context, save the
real-life scene alongside which it was juxtaposed. Inside the subway car, a
teenage couple were piled together in their seat like a pair of exhausted puppies. In the
adjacent seat, another boy sat scowling. The couple were blessed with easy good
looks; the friend might have been handsome once, but his face was a mask of
small, shiny scars. (Had he perhaps gone through a windshield as a child?)
The girl's stop came first. She and her boyfriend kissed
goodbye passionately; she acknowledged the friend with a dismissive nod. When
she passed me on her way out the doors, I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke and
booze – perhaps the three of them had spent the night at a house party and were
now making their hung-over way home.
Once his girl was gone, the baby-faced boy shifted over
to sit beside his sullen friend. They began talking, but as is so often the
case in our diverse city, the language they shared was one I didn't understand. This left me free to imagine a conversation between two fictional friends.
In my mind the vampire in the ad and the angry boy became one. I began to see
him as an Iago of sorts, jealous of his Othello's happiness, pouring pestilence
in his friend's ear in a bid to turn him against the young Desdemona in the
bright pink sweatpants and Uggs.
BBC TV meets subway scene meets Shakespeare – whatever
works, my fiction-loving friends.
Sounding
This week I had the dubious pleasure of having my organs
viewed on-screen. As I lay on the examining table with sound waves echoing through me, I began to
wonder it would be like to be an ultrasound technician. I've long been
fascinated by the routine intimacy of certain medical procedures – and what
could be more intimate than looking at a person's insides? Imagine sitting in
that dark little room with a series of semi-clad individuals who are often filled with emotion – fear or joy or even rage. Human nature being
what it is, there must be some patients who behave with less than the ideal
decorum. In any case, a story set in that little room would do well to include
at least one such encounter that tests our technician's fortitude.
And what about her life outside that room? What if our
technician (I see her as red-haired, thirtyish, Eastern European) has a
husband/lover/child who’s keeping something from her – something big? Such a
thematic link would call for subtle handling (nothing even close to
"Sometimes she wished she could see inside David too . . ."); that said, it
might well contribute the emotional resonance that would make the story sing.
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