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Following the muck-cart

Update - January 2003

Happy New Year to everyone!

I've spent the last few days humming a slightly irritating song I remember from my school music lessons. Yes, those days gathered around the old Joanna in the dining hall, feet slipping on peas and chips left on the parquet flooring from dinnertime, shivering cold and pretending to sing songs that must have been popular once, while a teacher assigned music classes because he knew how to open a piano lid shouted at us to show some enthusiasm. But I digress. The particular song I can't get out of my head is called Right Said Fred (Cup of Tea). An amusing little ditty about men trying to get something large down some stairs - perhaps you're already humming it? If not, maybe this little snippet will refresh your memory and irritate you for days to come!

Google tells me that the song is from 1962, by Myles Rudge and Ted Dicks. Well, credit where credit's due!

There's nothing mysterious about why this particular song is playing itself like a loop tape in my head (a very annoying loop tape, as for a long time I could only remember one verse). I've been trying to help a friend from up the street get a sofa bed upstairs and into her front bedroom.

Of course, saying we were trying to get a sofa bed into a bedroom doesn't quite do justice to the situation. My street is a street of Victorian miners' terraced cottages (this is the Midlands, after all), originally two-up two-downs but now mostly with extra extensions tagged on the backs and extra staircases up into loft conversions. Good solid houses with character. I'm sure an estate agent would call it character - and they are cosy - but 'character' and 'cosy' translate into 'completely bloody impractical' when it comes to getting furniture up the stairs.

I made a decision very early in my time living here (when faced with the task of flexing a solid wardrobe through a doorway, round a tight corner and up three stairs in one swift movement) that the only furniture making it upstairs in my house would come in convenient cardboard flat-packs. However, sofa-beds don't tend to come flat-packed, so my friend was faced with quite a challenge when she decided to put a sofa bed in her front bedroom. Before I arrived on the scene she and her ex-boyfriend had already tried dismantling the bottom half of the staircase, hoping that would give them the room they needed, but to no avail. I was part of a task-force of neighbours (five of us altogether) brought in to shift the sofa bed out into the street, down the side alley, through two neighbours' yards and then lift it up eight feet and onto the flat kitchen roof. The window was levered out of the wall, and the sofabed then slipped easily through the hole and into the back bedroom.

Once in the back bedroom, however, we had to get it out through a door and round a sharp corner, under the stairs that lead up to the loft conversion and into the front bedroom. We tried everything. Approximately sixteen different angles, taking the door off its hinges, unscrewing the feet from the bottom of the sofa-bed, everything. Could we get it to go? Not a chance. We dismantled shelving units under the stairs but even that left us one inch short of space. Eventually, several hours later (well, it felt like several hours!) when the sofa-bed had paint scraping along its bottom and a nice tear in its fabric, we gave up.

But that sofa-bed was not going downstairs again - we'd got it upstairs and by God it was staying there. The only solution was to swap the bedrooms over. Transfer all the furniture from the back room into the front room and from the front room into the back room. I'm not sure what the thirteen year old son thought when he came home from school and found his bedroom had moved to a different part of the house!

My friend looked exhausted. As frayed as the fabric on the sofa-bed. She said, 'I really thought it would fit.' Then she let out a long sigh and said, 'But you know what thought did? Thought followed a muck-cart thinking it was a wedding.'

The English language is a wonderful thing - there's a suitable expression for every occasion.

I used to think that writing a novel was like putting a jigsaw together, but now I realise that it's not like that at all. Finishing a novel is much more like trying to get a sofa bed into an upstairs bedroom. You know it'll look great once it's in place; it's just working out the best way to get it there. You stand there scratching your head, trying to picture the best way forward, and then you start unscrewing things, dismantling things, pushing and squeezing and trying from different angles. Before long, the novel is in pieces - it's an effort to imagine being able to put it all back together again, it's an effort to patch up the scratches and rips that appear in the process. At every moment it seems that you have no choice but to give up, but something drives you on - that conviction that it will work, that conviction that once it's in place, the whole thing will come together, and nobody will ever know the effort that went into it.

Which is a very roundabout way of saying I have finally completed book number two. I hope it will seem effortless, but who knows. I'm pleased with the final product, and that's really all I can ask for.

I'm very pleased that it's complete before Beholden comes out. It's only a couple of weeks until Beholden is in the bookshops (on 3 February), so I'm very excited by that. Things are happening - reviews are starting to pop up all over the place, which is fantastic. It's exciting to know that people will be reading the book - experiencing the dark world that I imagined when I wrote it - because, after all, writing is about communicating, and telling a story, and that involves finding an audience who want to experience that story with me. I hope you'll be among those who do exactly that!

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