Category: Creative Writing

In a word: Choice

We are often told that it’s the choices we make that shape our lives.

It’s true.

What distinguishes the basis of those choices is the circumstances of the individual.

What a lot of people don’t realize is the diversity of backgrounds of everyone, and that in a minority of cases, the few that really have no choices at all.

Yes, there are those who have no control over their circumstances, and therefore no choice whatsoever.

Inevitably, the people who are first to criticize those who apparently made the wrong choice, are those that have never found themselves in similar circumstances.

And probably never will.

This perhaps is the biggest problem with governments who are staffed with advisors who do not understand the plight of the common man.

I never had the same opportunities as those who could afford a university education.  My family were working class and were relatively poor.  Had I not hot a scholarship who knows what sort of education I would have got, if any.

Certainly, my father never got an opportunity to get a good education, but, at the time, during the great depression, his choices were limited, whereas those with any sort of wealth it was a different story.

And his lack of choices reflected on us, and that lack of opportunity haunted all of us as time passed.

It was always a case of the haves and the have not’s.

Yes, we all have choices, but sometimes it really is the lesser of two evils, and not whether we will have the fillet or the rib eye steak.

Skeletons in the closet, and doppelgangers

A story called “Mistaken Identity”

…

How many of us have skeletons in the closet that we know nothing about? The skeletons we know about generally stay there, but those we do not, well, they have a habit of coming out of left field when we least expect it.

In this case, when you see your photo on a TV screen with the accompanying text that says you are wanted by every law enforcement agency in Europe, you’re in a state of shock, only to be compounded by those same police, armed and menacing, kicking the door down.

I’d been thinking about this premise for a while after I discovered my mother had a boyfriend before she married my father, a boyfriend who was, by all accounts, the man who was the love of her life.

Then, in terms of coming up with an idea for a story, what if she had a child by him that we didn’t know about, which might mean I had a half brother or sister I knew nothing about. It’s not an uncommon occurrence from what I’ve been researching.

There are many ways of putting a spin on this story.

Then, in the back of my mind, I remembered a story an acquaintance at work was once telling us over morning tea, that a friend of a friend had a mother who had a twin sister and that each of the sisters had a son by the same father, without each knowing of the father’s actions, both growing up without the other having any knowledge of their half brother, only to meet by accident on the other side of the world.

It was an encounter that in the scheme of things might never have happened, and each would have remained oblivious of the other.

For one sister, the relationship was over before she discovered she was pregnant, and therefore had not told the man he was a father. It was no surprise the relationship foundered when she discovered he was also having a relationship with her sister, a discovery that caused her to cut all ties with both of them and never speak to either from that day.

It’s a story with more twists and turns than a country lane!

And a great idea for a story.

That story is called ‘Mistaken Identity’.

“Trouble in Store” – Short stories my way: Adding more to the second part

The story fleshed out for the second section, discussed in Point of View

 

Annalisa looked at the two men facing her, a shopkeeper who, despite his protestations, was a dealer, and the other man, a customer scared shitless.

The poor bastard was not the only one scared. 

It was meant to be simple, arrive at the shop just before closing, force the shopkeeper to hand over the shit, and leave.

What had happened?

The shopkeeper laughed at them and  told them to get out.  Simmo started ranting and waving the gun around, then all of a sudden collapsed. 

There was a race for the gun which spilled out of Simmo’s hand, and she won.  No more arguments, the shopkeeper was getting the stuff when the customer burst into the shop.

This was worse than any bad hair day, or getting out of the wrong side of bed day, this was, she was convinced, the last day of her life.

Her mother said she would never amount to anything, and here she was with a drug addict coming apart because she had been cut off from her money and could no longer pay for his supply, which had led them to this inevitable ending.

She heard a strange sound come from beside her and looked down.  Simmo was getting worse, like he had a fever, and was moaning.

 

If Alphonse had thought his day was going to get any better after the delivery disaster earlier that day, he was wrong.

If he thought he could maintain his real business and his under the counter business with no one finding out, in that he was wrong too.  He’s know, inevitably, some useless punk would come and do exactly what Simmo was doing.

It might have been salvageable before the customer came in the door, but now it was not.  The customer had heard the words, and given him ‘the look’.  A drug addict telling the cops he was a dealer, it was his word against an  unreliable addict, but this local chap, he had that air of respectability the cops would listen too.

Damn.

But he had to try and salvage the situation, there was a lot of money involved, and other people depending on him.  He looked at the boy, on the floor, then  the girl.

“Listen to me, young lady, I have no idea what you are talking about.  Please, put the gun down before someone gets hurt.  Your friend needs medical help and I can call an ambulance.”

The girl switched her attention back to him.  “Shut up, let me think.  Shit.”

The storekeeper glanced over at the customer.  He’s been in once or twice, probably lived in the neighborhood, but looked the sort who’d  prefer to be anywhere but in his shop.  More so now.  If only he hadn’t burst in when he did.  He would have the gun, called the police, and brazened his way out of trouble.  Now, that remedy was off the table.

Now he had to deal with the fallout, especially if the girl started talking.

 

 

 

© Charles Heath 2016-2020

Children are all the same

They just live in different houses

…

It’s quite remarkable to discover that your children are not unique.

For years I thought that we had spawned monsters that had quite likely come from another planet because the other children in the family seemed so different.

I didn’t realise that the parents had issued death threats if they so much as looked sideways while out.

It was where I suddenly realised that parents of children if taken at their word, could be mass murderers, or at the very best, the worst kind of bullies.

The threats of violence that they used, in any other circumstances would elicit a rather lengthy jail sentence.

I was guilty of it myself, and such threats had come to roll off the tongue so easily that you didn’t really know you were doing it.

If you don’t do this, I’ll kill you. There’s no thought to the significance of this statement, or the consequences if you were to actually do it.

No wonder the children just look at you like you’re deranged.

Of course, there are fewer murderous ways of dealing with the problem, but the sad fact is they have probably driven you into a blind rage and just past into that zone where you really have no idea what you’re saying.

Been there too.

But the revelation that all the other parents are the same, that you see them threatening their children with death or worse.

Then, after they’ve grown up and moved on as all children do, they return on odd occasions for Sunday lunch and there you begin to learn the stuff they did when younger that you never knew about

It’s seeming a rite of passage for all children, and it’s odd to hear others discussing it, especially when you hear someone else referring to their children the same as you do.

Did they come from the same planet too?

That’s when a friend told me the truth of the matter. All children are the same, they just live in different houses.

Ain’t that the truth!

The cinema of my dreams – I always wanted to go on a treasure hunt – Episode 52

Here’s the thing…

Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.

I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.

But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.

Once again there’s a new installment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.

“So, how do you know your way around this place?”

We walked slowly and carefully because there was a lot of rubbish in the alleyway, mostly from cracks in the walls where the concrete lining had broken away. At times there were mounds of rubble, and we had to carefully walk over these.

The ground was dusty and signs of footprints from past visitors, but it had been a long time, they had almost disappeared. There was also a dank, musty aroma, just short of being nauseating.

“The result of a misspent youth. Not many people know there’s a passageway around the whole perimeter of the mall, with only four entry points from outside, and two inside. This was how we escaped when we came along for some shoplifting.”

“Did you ever think of going straight?”

“Wasn’t much chance of that. There were expectations, and when I did try to give it up, I got ostracised, and ended up having to commit bigger follies to regain acceptance.”

We reached the end of the passage, where it turned right. At a guess, I would say we were in one of the corners of the mall, near the front entrance.

She turned left and then stopped. I could see the bottom of the steps leading up.

A stopped next to her and we shone both torches up the stairs. The light only went as far as a landing.

“What’s up there,” I asked.

“Offices. A holding cell. It’s where the security team used to be. It was separate from everything else. The security guys used to shake down the teenage girls up there, and not in a nice way.”

“You?”

“Once, but I told Vince and he sorted the bastard out. Didn’t happen again.”

A small sidebar to life in a mall.

She started up the steps. “If anything is going to be anywhere, this will be the place. The front of the mall was the safest part, built properly on solid foundations. As work continued, heading sideways and back, corners were cut. It’s not the only shoddy building there is in this area.”

The Benderby’s construction company had built most of the buildings in the county, always coming in at the lowest price. The only place not cracking or falling to pieces was the town hall.

At the top of the stairs, there was another wide passage with rooms branching off it.

It was a little less dusty and musty up here, but the rooms were quite messy, with papers scattered everywhere. It looked like someone had been looking for something. The first room didn’t look like it had been used since everyone left, nor the second.

The third was a different story. It was reasonably clean, a large desk in the middle of the room, and several boxes on the side with rolled-up papers, probably blueprints or plans.

I went in. Nadia kept going up the passage to check the other rooms.

I pulled out one of the rolls and laid it on the table.

It was a map, one that stretched a hundred miles in each direction and giving a very clear view of all the river systems, lakes, mountains, and coastline. Our town was almost in the middle of the chart.

I pulled out another and it was almost the same.

I looked at the writing at the bottom. One was dated 1972, the other dated 1956.

I kept rummaging through the rolls until I found one that was dated 1935. Our town wasn’t a town back then, nor did Patterson’s Reach exist.

And carefully examining the inlets, bays, and coves, given the parameters of what remembered from Boggs’s map, it could be any one of a dozen locations. I didn’t take that much notice when I’d been looking at Boggs’ collection.

“Hey, Smidge,” Nadia yelled out.

I wished she wouldn’t call me that.

I went out of the room and down the passage, past about four other offices, until the second to last. She was standing outside an office with a shut door. I tried it, and it was locked.

“A locked door in an abandoned Mall. What are the odds?”

“That there’s something in there that someone wants to keep secret. This has to be Alex’s lair. What was in that other room?”

“Maps.”

“Any use?”

“Perhaps. Boggs probably had the same, but I never took much notice of his. Trouble is, I was having difficulty believing there is a treasure buried out there somewhere.”

“A lot of people seem to be looking for this non-existent treasure, so there must be something in it.”

“Any of your keys fit?”

She tried the first, no, the second, the same one she had used to get in, and it worked. A skeleton key perhaps, that oped every lock in the place.

The door swung open and we shone the torch lights inside.

“What the hell happened in here?” she muttered.

© Charles Heath 2020-2021

“Strangers We’ve Become” – The Final Countdown to publishing in 2 Days

All’s well …

…

After an uneventful trip back home with some friendly Russians, it’s back to business for David and Alisha.

There’s the compound in rural England, the one with the fence that would normally be impenetrable.  David and the team, forced into action because of a basic mistake, take the fortress by storm, and discover … nothing.

The birds have flown the coop.

Well, they think they have.

Then there’s the castle, and discreet movements at night mean something’s afoot, and there’s yet another fortress to be stormed.

And, in the process, David is reunited with an old acquaintance.

But, a search of the new buildings finds something David never expected to find.

Back in London, David goes to visit Prendergast, not so well protected these days, at his private residence.  After a meaningful chat, the association between them is over, and Prendergast has played his last game with David.

Then it’s simply a matter of going to pick up Susan from the airport, and Boris getting the word she can come home.

They, too, have a meaningful chat in the car back to the London residence, and then the Castle, where Boris has accepted an invitation from David for a short stay.

Skeet shooting is only one of the things David has lined up.

Then, after a few months, life returns to normal in an unusual place, far, far away on the other side of the world.

…

Searching for locations: The Yu Gardens, Shanghai, China

The Yu Gardens or Yuyuan Gardens

The Yu Gardens (or Yuyuan Gardens) are located at No. 137, Anren Street, Huangpu District, very close to the Old City God Temple, in the northeast of the Old City of Shanghai at Huangpu.

Yu Garden was first built in 1559 during the Ming Dynasty by Pan Yunduan and finished approximately 1577, created specifically as a private garden of the Pan family for Pan Yunduan’s parents to enjoy in their old age.

Yu Garden occupies an area of 5 acres, and is divided into six general areas:

  -Sansui Hall which includes the Grand Rockery was originally used to entertain guests,

  -Wanhua Chamber is a delicate building surrounded by derious cloisters,

  -Dianchun Hall, built in 1820, includes Treasury Hall and the Hall of Harmony,

  -Huijing Hall which includes Jade Water Corridor.

  -Yuhua Hall which is furnished with rosewood pieces from the Ming Dynasty, and,

  -The Inner Garden with rockeries, ponds, pavilions, and towers; first laid out in 1709.  As the quietest part of Yu Gardens, it includes the Hall of Serenity and the Acting and Singing Stage.

The Mid-Lake Pavilion Teahouse, within the gardens, is the oldest teahouse in Shanghai.

A centerpiece of the gardens is the Exquisite Jade Rock, a 5-ton boulder that was originally meant for the Huizong Emperor (Northern Song Dynasty from 1100-1126 AD) but was salvaged from the Huangpu River after the boat carrying it had sunk.

These gardens house a lot of buildings that seemed to be a perfect blend of the old and the new, and if it was up to me, I’d keep the old.  Both the building and the gardens they are set in are like an oasis in the middle of an industrial complex, and perhaps impractical for the number of people living in Shanghai.

All of the ponds had a lot of fish in them

 

It was a pleasant afternoon, for both a stroll through the gardens

In and out of the rockery on narrow pathways

And to look inside the buildings that were sparsely furnished

 

There was even an area set aside for entertainment.

 

Sayings: Irons in the fire

There is an expression you hear a lot, here, there, and everywhere when referring to someone who is very busy, ‘oh, he has a lot of irons in the fire’.

These days we use it as an analogy not to have too many things on the go at the same time, and, in the end, none of them will be finished properly, or finished at all.

There are two old-time literal meanings that can apply to this analogy, the first being that in laundries, they used to have their irons in the fire, warming so that clothes could be ironed. Having too many meant sometimes one would be left too long, and end up scorching the clothes being ironed.

Hopefully, that didn’t happen to a very expensive dress!

The second meaning came from a blacksmith’s foundry where he had iron bars in the fire, heating up so that they could be worked on. Having too many in the fire at once sometimes meant that one became overheated, and ruined.

Conversely, having too many pieces of iron in the fire might cause the fire to be too cool to heat any of the metal bars.

These days, a lot of people need to have a lot of projects on the go at once, in the hope that one or more might suddenly become a winner.

Sadly, that doesn’t happen very often.

And, no, buying a lot of lottery tickets hoping one will win, that is not very likely either.

Will it be time to get on the plane yet?

What I wanted to say is the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but the truth is, it’s probably just me.

If it’s possible and seeing it’s the only time we can go away, as we live in the southern hemisphere, it seems logical to go north.

OK, that’s probably not as rational as it sounded in my head a few seconds ago, because where we’re planning to go it’s about minus 16 degrees.

Where on earth could it be that cold, other than the North Pole?  Lake Louise.  Canada.  Somewhere up in those snow-peaked mountains.

Why do we want to go there?

Because it’s there.  Because we have been there before, and it literally took our breath away (notwithstanding the severe cold).  And no doubt after we’ve been there in the dead of winter, we might have decided we won’t want to go back?  Who knows.

But…

Oh, yes, there’s a but…

I need some good background for a story I’m writing, and if you’re going to do the winter thing, or the white Christmas thing, when your Christmases are usually 40 degrees Celsius in the shade, then Canada is the place to do it.

Aside from the fact, we might run into Detective Murdoch (from Murdoch Mysteries) in Toronto, and, definitely, the Maple Leafs, yes, I can see myself saying ‘go leafs go’, whilst sipping on a large glass of Molsen beer.

Then, perhaps we’ll go to New York for a week.  Perhaps everything will be back to normal, but maybe not.  Hopefully, there will be snow in Central Park, or, if not, the squirrels, and if not them, perhaps a movie star or two walking their dog.

One can always hope.

“Sunday in New York”, a romantic adventure that’s not a walk in the park!

“Sunday in New York” is ultimately a story about trust, and what happens when a marriage is stretched to its limits.

When Harry Steele attends a lunch with his manager, Barclay, to discuss a promotion that any junior executive would accept in a heartbeat, it is the fact his wife, Alison, who previously professed her reservations about Barclay, also agreed to attend, that casts a small element of doubt in his mind.

From that moment, his life, in the company, in deciding what to do, his marriage, his very life, spirals out of control.

There is no one big factor that can prove Harry’s worst fears, that his marriage is over, just a number of small, interconnecting events, when piled on top of each other, points to a cataclysmic end to everything he had believed in.

Trust is lost firstly in his best friend and mentor, Andy, who only hints of impending disaster, Sasha, a woman whom he saved, and who appears to have motives of her own, and then in his wife, Alison, as he discovered piece by piece damning evidence she is about to leave him for another man.

Can we trust what we see with our eyes or trust what we hear?

Haven’t we all jumped to conclusions at least once in our lives?

Can Alison, a woman whose self-belief and confidence is about to be put to the ultimate test, find a way of proving their relationship is as strong as it has ever been?

As they say in the classics, read on!

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