In 2008, CRAIG CLIFF aims to write one million words. That’s like writing War and Peace, twice. Sort of. You can follow his progress here.



It is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing , life never finishes.
Robert Lowell—‘History’

YOU JUST keep hanging in there, David told his dying mother. Keep hanging on. For Christmas. For the kids.
She passed away the next morning. No one noticed until the man in the room next to her complained about the television. Not the noise. Just the channel.
She’s been watching infomercials for three hours, the man had complained.
The family buried her and ate a Christmas turkey in the same week.
During Christmas dinner David kept thinking of those lines in Hamlet:

...the funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables

It wasn’t a wedding, though. Just Christmas. Nothing they could control. Then it was New Year’s Eve.
He’d had a dying mother for so long, it was hard to break the routine of visiting the hospital. Like an amputee with a phantom limb, or an ex-smoker with the urge to put pens in her mouth, David still felt the pull of the hospital.
He created characters. The workaholic husband who’d left it till the last possible moment to witness the birth of his first child. The straight-laced brother of the bi-monthly heroin overdoser. The boss visiting the storeclerk with an inner ear problem and buckets of self denial who persisted in falling off ladders.
The receptionist and the security guards, however, all recognised him as the son of the woman from Ward Nine who had, eventually, inevitably, lost to bowel cancer, but let him pass unhindered.
As he walked along the hospital corridors... what?
Where are we going, reader? We have stepped off the train at the wrong platform again, haven’t we? I am tired of this. Reader, I want to know your name. First and last and any middle ones you have. Middle names are important, the relationship a person forms with their middle names. At school I was embarrassed about my middle name because more girls than boys were called Lindsay. Sometimes I quibbled about spelling, but mostly I conceded it was, ‘a bit gay.’ As I grew older, I found reasons to like Lindsay. It was my great grandfather’s name. He died when I was a baby, but he was a golf champion and a greenskeeper. I would like to have a chat with him, if someone’s willing to organise the séance. The name Lindsay, depending on where you look or who you ask, means an island in the middle of a lake, possibly with Linden trees on it. I imagine this would make a good golf hole.
It’s no bother if you do not have a middle name. I’m sure there’s something else we can talk about.
Do you like Robert Lowell? He’s an American Poet (1917-1977). I like Robert Lowell. For a summer when Robert Lowell was six or seven, he watched his mother bathe from a secret hiding place or something. I never did this, but I find it interesting. It makes me think of a Tragically Hip song called, ‘Pigeon Camera’:

Over there that’s my room
And that’s my sister’s
And that’s my sister
With something we could no longer contain

I don’t want to talk about incest with you. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.
Change of subject.
I hate stories written in the second person. Ones where the main character is referred to as “you”. Like the reader is going to fall for the trick and believe the story is about them.
This story began in the third person, but it is now in the first person. I am talking to you. I was talking to you from the beginning, but I was pretending I didn’t really exist, that there was this other guy, this Third Person Narrator, who knew everything that was going on in this other guy’s head. David’s head. But now I’m done with that. It’s you and me.
Do you like Kate Bush? I never used to like Kate Bush. Her voice was too high. I remember watching someone pretend to be Kate Bush on Stars in Their Eyes. I think she sang ‘Babooshka’. I think I was a little scared. But then I heard The Futurehead’s cover of ‘Hounds of Love’. I didn’t know it was a cover at first. When I found out, I downloaded Kate Bush’s version out of curiosity. Now I don’t find her voice annoying. I think she sings songs like I want to write stories. I think. I’m not sure. If I was sure what I wanted to write, this never would have happened. David would have lived his whole life, but in a Kate Bush kind of world. People would dress a bit different. Maybe tie gauzy things around their wrists which would blow in the breeze. Maybe he and his mother would haunt the hospital. One living, one dead.
Two of my favourite poems by Robert Lowell are ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’ and ‘Home After Three Months Away’. I like the lines:

Dearest I cannot loiter here
in lather like a polar bear

because Robert Lowell stops talking to us and talks to his daughter. Maybe I should write poetry instead of stories. In poems you can be yourself or someone else or both.
I once wrote a poem pretending to be Robert Lowell, but instead the person I was pretending to be turned into an unfaithful university professor with a large vocabulary.

Tantrum
She said, ‘I hope you melt, daddy,
Into a puddle too deep for wading’ –
And all my laminae (or ‘padding’)
Flaked. An adult desquamation
At the snub-nose of a novice.

Have you written poetry? Maybe you pretended to be writing song lyrics. I wrote song lyrics when my favourite bands were Soundgarden and Bush (no relation to Kate Bush).
In the Kate Bush world, David would take a job at the hospital as a janitor and steal rolls of medical gauze which he would then rip into smaller strips and tie about his person and late at night run through the wards pretending to be a ghost. He would also buy one of those universal remotes that can change the channel on any make of television and go around changing the television channels so that infomercials were always playing. He would spread rumours that the woman who passed away in Ward Nine was haunting the hospital. When it rained, he would run outside and kneel in the mud like Andy DuFresne in The Shawshank Redemption, looking like a melting mummy as the gauze strips all hung down, and feel the grief kick inside him like an unborn child, as Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ played over the hospital PA at full volume.

How could you leave me,
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you. I loved you, too.

I would name this story ‘Give Me A Kate Bush Afterworld.’
I do not know how to end this thing that started off as a story but went horribly wrong. I no longer agree with my epigraph (or is it still Robert Lowell’s). Unlike life, writing never finishes.