Chapter 4. Angie
1. What I Want
I want to write the simplest book about creativity linked to creation.
For all artists, not just writers, to access their creativity.
Trying to keep it simple, I have missed out vital information at the beginning.
I'm remedying this now.
2. Strategy
· The book will be in 2 halves.
· The first half is 8 chapters.
· In which me and you are practicing 12-words together.
· It is our dialogue.
· Building your writing muscle memory.
· Creating content easily.
· Embedded in science — rooted in a philosophy.
· In the 2nd we'll mind-map this content with 8-stations to excavate the subtext.
3. Personal
Title: Angie
Object. Her deathbed.
12 associations.
1. Her arms are in the air.
2. Her last words are where is my mum.
3. Our mum has died 3 months before.
4. Angie’s body is in the home of her husband’s longterm affair.
5. She is always sad.
6. Her little toe arches like a bridge.
7. She sits forward her shoulders hunched.
8. I can see her sad eyes now
9. There is only one glamorous photo of her.
10. When she ran away to the nurses’ home and that bastard went and found her.
11. But he was great with my mum.
12. But it was Angie who brought her the drink.
Angie
I do not remember the day she knocks on our door. I do remember she brings my brother a bow and arrow. She brings us pick-and-mix when she works in Woolworths. Her hair is always blonde. This means she has white- blonde hair as a kid in the house that overlooks the Shannon River with her mum and her dad, and Mr and Mrs Stanners who are really good to them, and her two uncles and their wives and their kids.
Did my mum never love Angie? Is Angie just the product of the self-survival trick my mum manages to pull off. Her own mum is a prostitute.
This makes my daughter laugh when she unearths the amount of times my nana — May Lynch — is in court for loitering. The woman in the town hall, Limerick, calls us forward, 2018, to get my mum’s birth and wedding certificates so we can have Irish passports. There’s no one else there. No one at all. Just me and my daughter. The woman gestures. We go to the counter. She whispers, ‘Your mum has no dad.’ We laugh when we are outside. She tells us to go within the walls of the castle there are Stanners there. We walk to the castle walls. ‘I was born within the castle walls.’ She wasn’t. She was married in the little cathedral. It is declared on her wedding certificate. It is probably in the newspapers. You have to take your hat off to her.
But Angie loves her. She gives it up, the house on the River Shannon and the suitors she most likely had, to chase her mum here. Knock on her door. Never treated any better than a nanny to us. I don’t remember where she sleeps. I vaguely remember leading my brother outside in his nappy and getting the chair to stand on to lock them outside. Angie, gossiping with the neighbour. No, she lives with us before we move to Maine Rd. She is Jill Roddy’s friend. On Grafton St. She takes me to the park. She ties me to the fence. She hates me. But she loves Elaine when she is born.
Elaine. Sat in her navy Silver-cross trolley. Plates are flying. The blue and cream milk jug. Over our heads. We are staring at each other through the handle of the navy Silver-cross trolley. I am too small to save her. Angie seems to be at the bottom of it again. Or maybe I am making it up. She always seems to be at the bottom of it.
They continue their ascent up the housing ladder to Cowesby St. They have lost most of their friends. They’re not that young when I am 6. She’s 39. He’s 46. Friends are a thing of the past. He no longer stands with his trilby pushed back. At the bar looking like Humphrey Bogart. You have to admire him. Holding court. There are no new suits. There is a mortgage. And a black man by Angie’s side. Like mother like daughter. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. My dad hates this. He chases them up the street in Maine Rd. But let’s them into Cowesby St when Angie is pregnant. They live upstairs. In the big front room. It’s him who says Carlton is blind. He’s more than blind. He’s small for his age. He never walks. He never talks. My mum says that’s cos he beat the living shit out of her when she was pregnant. But you can’t believe a word out of her mouth. It’s poison now. She’d have to be mad to think this is okay — swapping the house by the River Shannon for this. The 3 up 2 down that she is renting from the man who said he loved her enough to make her leave her 4 kids — Angie 12 — little Margaret 18 months. Little Margaret hasn’t spoke to her since. Carlton is put in a home. Angie sits forward. Her shoulders hunched. Her eyes sad. I can see her sad eyes now. Her feet bare. Her little toe arches like a bridge. Her fingers digging into her cheeks. Her hair still strawberry blonde. Silk Cut. One after another after another. Her mum’s confidante. ‘When that bastard tells me to go for his milk and bread, he never gives me the money back. This shop and that shop. How the fuck would he know? He can’t read. That half a fool. He can’t read. Who’s to pay for the bus fare?’ Angie’s fingers leave their mark as she pulls them away. She goes missing for a few months. I’m so relieved. She sends back the only glamorous photo of her. Dressed like ever young woman of her age. Her strawberry blonde is piled high. She has eyeliner. Like Julie Christie in Dr Zhivago. Her dress is Mary Quant. Sat at a table with loads of other nurses in the nurses’ home. She is happy. Drinking Babycham He does the big I must save her. One of the few black men with a car back then. Drives over the Snake Pass. Whatever he says, she is back. Her fingers digging into her face. ‘When that bastard asks me to go for bread and milk …’ Guinness under the sink. Angie buys them. Her mum’s birthday. It must be her 40th. They get some of the old friends around. She fills her tumbler of whiskey. ‘You’re all bastards…’ Delbert carries on playing because he is good with our mum. He brings her around. Every time. ‘You remember this one Peggy, John Holt! You’ve always love John Holt.’ She raises her arms. Her belly stiff in its corset below the Crimpelene. Her wrists thick below their polyester. She rolls her belly. Her sexy dance. We cringe. Delbert is good with her. He plays another she likes. Her man leaves the room. ‘Fuck him! Fuck him!’ Sweeby is up. Sweeby will dance with anything. If we want to keep the windows tonight best let Miss Peggy have what she wants.
Angie is dead. The girl who cries wolf. All the time. The girl who cries wolf is dead. I cross the park to the house of the kids of Delbert’s long-term affair. The eldest opens the door. Angie is sat up on her deathbed. Her arms in the air. Stiff. Beseeching.
‘She was asking, ‘Where’s me mum?’
‘Her mum died 3 months ago.’
4. Craft
Everything in the universe is made of 92 natural elements.
Evolved from the first element hydrogen.
Created in the Big Bang.
Gravity crushes the hydrogen into stars.
90% of a star’s life it is alchemising hydrogen into helium.
Explained simply by real astrophysicists, in this 4 minutes video https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/ess05.sci.ess.eiu.fusion/the-elements-forged-in-stars/
The universe does not have to worry how it will do this.
It follows a law.
It cannot deviate from this law.
5. Eureka
In the 1st half of this book your Big Bang is the minute you begin this process.
Your hydrogen is the memories being ignited in all directions.
12-words is the gravity crushing these memories into our chapters, the stars of your early universe.
Alchemising the hydrogen into helium.
In the 2nd half of this book, 8-stations will fuse the helium, into carbon, nitrogen and oxygen the building blocks of life.
You do not have to worry how you will do this.
You follow a law.
You cannot deviate from this law.
6. Muscle Memory
I want you to write down the first object – you have to be able to touch it — the first object you see when I say, 'What is the name of your mum’s eldest child?'
Title the chapter that name.
List the numbers 1 — 12.
List 12 things you associate with the object you see.
Your title is: Your sibling's name. You have 15 minutes to write. You must use your title, your object, and your 12 associations. Strike them off the list when they are used. Type it up. Date it. Log it in your file.
A word of encouragement.
Maria Popova. The Marginalian. ‘All writers write about their own experience, however many degrees of abstraction it may be refracted through. The great writers make of the personal a handle for the door of the universal so that others may enter the secret rooms of their own experience, those regions of our lives we are too afraid or confused or alienated from ourselves to visit, those places where ultimately, we discover who we are and what we want.’
To me this means you can write about your brother or your sister truthfully in private while we practice this law. But you can abstract it so it is not recognisable for your finished product. Hydrogen makes many things. Water for example. But first it is a pure element. And your Big Bang and my Big Bang begins in our family. Even if we were given up for adoption.
7. My Discovery
Though I didn’t think I did, I have an emotional connection to Angie.
8. Your Discovery
· What have you discovered?
· Journal about it, every day, except Saturday.
· Choose a safe, comfy location.
· Make this your habitual place at your previously chosen habitual time.
· Enjoy all the amazing thoughts about your characters and their journey.
· These are the photons of light caused by hydrogen being fused into helium.
· In traditional writing these are drafts. We are not gonna write these drafts.
· We want to generate a life-giving star, not chase illusive photons.