Steven Savile

A precursor to the actual essay. This one is personal. It goes against everything I believe in in terms of a writer putting their lives out for public consumption in this new blogosphere of ours. I wrote it, I wrestled with it and thought about leaving it on my hard-drive, because I’ll tell you right now I wrote this for me, not for you. Just as the title says, this entire essay is about catharsis. These are my demons. This is my life. I sent it to a few friends, and love them, they all wanted to edit it because they could see I had put more of myself out there than ever before, and probably ever will again, and they know me… Knowing me, they want to protect me from the regret they think will come from standing naked before you. Part of me held back because not only is this personal, it feels uncomfortable. I mention twice being a ghost in your own childhood, I think that is the most relevant image of the whole piece. And then one basically slapped me and reminded me what my job as a writer is. The real job. It is to put myself out there. It is to stand there naked in the rain with my arms spread wide and say: “Look at me!” And this, well, it is a celebration of sorts, in the same way that a funeral is a celebration life, this is a celebration of the girl from 20 years ago. It is me saying goodbye the only way I know how. And in there, hidden in the words, I believe there is something valuable for writers and people interested in writing to think about. If I didn’t, believe me, this essay would be living inside my head still. So, with that said…

I write because often I can’t express myself in words – that is probably the big contradiction of my life. I have all of this stuff swirling around inside me that won’t come out face to face. I can charm a crowd when I have to. I can spin a story, perform, whatever you want to call it, but close up, one to one, I’m an emotional mute. I don’t share. I am a rock, and the rock feels no pain. And the rock stands alone.

The crime of my life is that I almost never tell the people closest to me what I think or feel. I lock it away inside me until it breaks something – and that something is usually my link to the world around me and to the very people I should be talking to. Over the last few years I’ve actually developed a decent amount of self-insight. I am not the kind of person who cherishes his friends. People come and go, I am the only constant in my life. It’s a terribly selfish attitude, I know that, I honestly, sincerely do. That doesn’t mean I can re-paint these spots into stripes, no matter how much I might want to, so instead the grief, the sadness, the guilt, the remorse, and sometimes even the hope, comes out in my writing instead from my mouth.

I’ve said it often enough in conversation when I’m holding court, but it bears repeating: I don’t write stories, I write little pieces of myself.

What that really means is writing is a form of catharsis for me.

I love it for that, and I hate me for that.

Contradicting myself? Moi?

Yeah, probably. Let me try and explain what I mean, and I’ll take my life this week as the foundation for this essay. I don’t normally put my ‘real life’ out in public, but this is one of those rare exceptions where I just need to talk. I need other people to hear, so then maybe the universe will remember, because as I get older the one certainty I know is that I will forget and that as much as anything breaks my heart.

So that is, in part, what this essay is about, breaking hearts and remembering. It’s about the human me and the writer me, and the parasitical relationship of one to the other. It is not going to be light and breezy reading, I warn you know. But it is going to be painfully, brutally honest.

In the summer of 1985 I met a girl.

Classic starting point for any story, boy meets girl. Her name was Vicky. I loved Vicky body and soul from the first moment the young sixteen year old me set eyes on her. No exaggeration. I saw her, she owned me. It was that absolute. That complete. She had me before hello. We were in the same Business Studies class in Newcastle. A quick potted Steve life, some of that stuff I don’t usually share – I went to an all boys school, didn’t so much as talk to a girl between the age of 11 and 16 who wasn’t the house mistress, one of the cleaners or a teacher, so none of those counted. I wasn’t happy in London. I wasn’t happy at school. So, when I was old enough I turned my back on the ‘posh life’ of London and the opportunities that would have been mine if I had stayed there with my father. Instead I went north, to Newcastle, and lived in the same village my mother had grown up in, where my grandfather still lived, where my little sister Sarah lived, where my aunts, uncles and cousins all still lived. If there was anywhere on this planet I should have felt was home, that little village, Prudhoe, was it.

Instead of the grammar schools and the life of money, I went to the local college. It was a culture shock. It changed my life in so many ways.

On the first day, after registration we had to go and get our library cards and do the tour. I was the proverbial fish out of water. I didn’t know how to mix with other people – well the ones with the ‘different bits’ at least. I remember as clear as if it was yesterday filling out the card and having this girl – older than me by almost two years, I was young going in to college, the curse of being bright. My 16th birthday was actually a month and a half into the first term when everyone else was turning 17 or 18. She was almost 18 – come and sit on the other side of the narrow table facing me. She smiled and started to talk to me. My mouth moved but no words came out. A few sounds eventually made it.

I’m going to tell you know she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was. She was she was she was. Christ you have no idea how much I hate writing those two words.

It wasn’t just the eye of the beholder talking, or looking, should I say. I remember thinking (in registration about an hour earlier) that there was no way she’d want to talk to me. I was wrong. She not only wanted to talk to me, eventually she unlocked me and we had something approaching a conversation. I confessed that I had never been in the same class as a girl, that in fact I thought girls were an alien species and had no idea how intelligent they were, how funny, how charming… and confessed, too, that I couldn’t look into her eyes because my heart started to race and I got light headed. She was sweet. She decided we were going to be friends. I decided I was going to be in love – that was a much easier choice for me.

For two years we really were the best of friends. She was my first everything. My first hope, my first smile from a stranger that stopped me dead in my tracks, my first kiss that made me feel like I was there, like I was being kissed back. She was my first walking hand-in-hand in the rain, soaked to the skin and oblivious. She was my first slow dance. She was the first person I ever put in front of myself, the first one who came first. She was my first best friend and she was my first heartbreak because she had lousy taste in men and I ended up being the guy whose shoulder she cried on, and she had no idea it was breaking my heart every time. I held her. I told her the other guy was an idiot. Believe me, he was. I told her she was too good for them. Believe me, she was. And somewhere in all of that, she realized I was there and best friends became something else.

Of course, college life is a time capsule. It’s removed from reality because it has this utterly finite nature so little else does. Eventually we left. I went to university, and she went to work. During the summer of this monumental transition our friendship changed. I went to live with her for a week while her folks were away and my folks were away. She loaned me her father’s clothes so I didn’t have to go home. And for a while I got to feel like this wonderful life was there for the taking. We danced in candlelight to Elkie Brooks, we talked, we watched Agnes of God, we laughed, went sweaty down to Mrs Miggin’s Coffee Shop and sat there smelling of each other.

She was the first girl to ever cook a romantic meal for me.

And then at the end of the week she broke my heart.

I told her I wanted to be with her, to be together properly, not a stolen week. She told me I was too young, and at work, her new job, she had met the man she was going to marry.

She wanted to take me upstairs and I just wanted to go home.

I stormed out of the house and cried the entire twenty miles on the bus back to home. I think I can count the number of times I have cried in my adult life on one hand. Twice they have been because of Vicky, then and now.

We spoke once more after that, for about nine minutes when we met in the city so I could pay her back twenty seven pounds that I had borrowed, and I was an absolute arse. I mean I was stupidly stubbornly angry. I was still in love and so bitter that I wasn’t enough because I knew, even then, barely 18, that I would have married this girl and given her the best of me and the worst. All of it. It was love and there are no other words for it. It was as strong as anything I’ve ever felt. It was brilliant. Iridescent. Full. And it wasn’t enough. The older me realizes now I could have won her forever had I really tried instead of licking my wounds and acting like an idiot. But she was right, I was young, and my youth is what lost her for me. I was so intent on my own pain that I didn’t even say goodbye. Now, today, in 2009, that hurts. Christ, I can’t begin to tell you how much it does. The twenty-twenty agony of hindsight.

I tried to find her a few times after that, but it wasn’t easy. The first time I tried to swallow my pride and just say sorry, I found out that she had married the guy, just as she had predicted she would, and her ex-boss told me she’d just left to have a baby. He had her address, but thought she was in the process of moving to a bigger place. I tried the number, but as he had thought, they had moved on. I didn’t try much harder than that.

Instead I contented myself that Vicky was out there living brilliantly.

There was nothing more I could have asked for her, as a best friend.

I would think about her from time to time, and every time I did I would try to find her. I’d use the internet, scouring websites like Friends Reunited, then Myspace and Facebook and all the other social networks, hoping to find her. After my divorce in 2002 I tried again, seriously to find her. I don’t know whether I had this dumb idea that I could find my first love and sweep her off her feet, or whether I just wanted to say sorry, and save myself, re-connect, or if I was determined to become a ghost in the country of my childhood. I really don’t know.

I never did find her again.

But just before Christmas I did find her baby sister, Emma. Emma and I had sort of dated for a short while during that college time, when she was too frightened of boys and I was still utterly terrified by girls. Just seeing her name brought so much feeling sweeping up inside me, so I wrote to her. Just a short note saying hi, asking how she was doing, asked her to pass my love on to Louise and Vicky, and basically just playing catch up. The internet is amazing like that. My cunning plan was that she’d pass on Vicky’s email and I’d finally get to say all the things I should have said when I was 18 and we’d laugh about it and share all these great stories of how our lives and worked out – and we’d become friends again.

A friend of mine offered me a quote yesterday, I will share it now by way of explanation: you can never begin to know how someone will imprint themselves on your soul. Vicky imprinted herself on my soul. I didn’t have any idea how much until I got the mail on Thursday.

Emma filled me in: she’s a new mum, having a great time, Louise is a Teaching Assistant, two girls, Vicky’s two kids are smashing, they’ve got a great relationship… and there was a way the letter was structured that long before I read the part about Vicky I knew that she was dead, I just knew it and I knew that it was being held back because Emma didn’t want to say it. I read it a dozen times without it sinking in. She had hanged herself. Somehow this brilliant beautiful funny knowing charming clever girl who had made me a moth to her flame for two and a half glorious years had fallen into such tragic darkness she couldn’t find a way out.

I went through so many responses to this.

The first, the obvious one, was grief. But it was a weird grief because I felt like I had no right to it, if that makes any sense? She had this huge life I had no part of. 18 years before me 18 years after me, basically, but there was that overlap, and that part, those 30 months, that was the girl I grieved for. I cried – actually I didn’t cry until now, but I am writing all of this in tears, so they are finally here. I felt this huge emptiness because I felt I’d let this friend down by being stupidly selfish all those years ago, by not trying harder in 2002 to find a way back into her life to make her laugh and smile at my dazzling stupidity. I can do dazzlingly stupid, it’s my superhero superpower. I felt so staggeringly sorry that the last time we spoke I had been a such a stupid childish brat because I couldn’t cope with my love not being enough for her. And now I suddenly remember the fit of anger when I said I never wanted to see her again. How’s that for cutting yourself open in grief? I made her cry. That was my parting gift to the girl from 20 years ago. I made her cry.

The second response was sadness that this life hadn’t been enough for her. That two kids hadn’t been enough to keep her here. That she’d gone to such a dark place she’d driven her family away and ended up in hospital care for her own safety when no one around her could cope.

And then third this crushing anger that she’d chose a death that meant someone who loved her would have to find her and cut her down.

These were the human responses, the honest emotions.

And this is where the essay stops being a walk down memory lane and a eulogy for a girl I loved, and becomes the lesson of the writer, and hopefully goes a little way to explaining the parasite that has its hooks in my back and feeds off me.

I know myself well enough to know that if I had never set these words down on paper I wouldn’t have cried, and Vicky wouldn’t have got the tears her impact on me and my life deserved. So I am weeping openly and I really and honestly don’t give a damn. I want to cry for her.

But the writer in me never turns off. It’s a voracious bastard who almost immediately said: “This is why he goes home!”

Let me explain a little more…

I’m about done with ‘genre‘ writing. I have no great love for the trappings of science fiction, fantasy, and least of all horror. I want to write about people, about life. For the last three years on and off I have been noodling with an idea I’m calling Kings of Emotion, a story about a 39 year old who emigrated when he was much younger and returns to his home town where he hasn’t been for 20 years. You might suspect it is about me, and maybe it is, but it is not autobiographical. Until this week I didn’t really know what it was all about, not really, not without it being cheap, a cheat, which goes a long way to explaining why I haven’t written anything outside of notes for it.

Now I know.

It’s about the people this guy left behind and about how he becomes that ghost haunting his own childhood I talked about up there at the top. And for all of those three years I haven’t known why my hero would ever go home. Why would anyone go back after 20 years? I’ve been an exile for 13 myself, and save one bout of homesickness I’ve never had the urge to go back. That makes it hard to find a motivation for a character when I can’t find one for myself.

And then there it was.

Vicky had given me the answer.

That is what the writer in me meant when it said: “This is why he goes home!” He was going home to say goodbye to the girl from 20 years ago. To leave flowers on her grave. To cry in front of her one last time. To talk to her even though she couldn’t hear him. To say the sorry he had never managed while she was alive – it is all for him, not for her of course. That sorry was always for him because the girl he loved stopped growing age 19 and was living brilliantly in his imagination (and of course in real life she would have forgotten that stupid argument a few weeks later. It wouldn’t have haunted her the way it has suddenly returned to haunt me). That’s where Kings of Emotion will begin. I know that know. I know that was always how it had to be. And I know that it is going to be Vicky’s book. And I know that I am going to cry again, and again probably a dozen times before I am done with saying goodbye to this girl I haven’t spoken to in two decades.

But I will, they only way I know how. In words.

And how did the human react to the writer?

Honestly? The first raft of emotion was abject disgust that I could take this huge grief, this tragedy of a childhood sweetheart and turn it into a story.

But that’s what the writer in me is, it’s a parasite that cannibalizes grief and sadness and happiness and all those other moments of my life and turns them in words, and those words are little pieces of me. That’s why I don’t write stories.

I can’t live my life here and now, I live it in retrospect.

It’s how I express myself, it is how I say the things I could never say face to face.

While we’re confessing, I never cried when my grandmother died. I never cried when my marriage collapsed and I filed for divorce. There are so many things in my life that didn’t touch me enough to make me cry. People have drifted in and out of my life that I couldn’t care less about. It’s not about being tough. I don’t think I am. I think I am an emotional wreck. Sitting here now, writing this, I am crying and I am in public, and it is the second time I have cried for Vicky. I am in a cafe with eleven other people. One guy is reading a magazine with glossy pictures, two girls are sipping over-sized teas, one woman is sending a text on her phone, a young couple are playing with their baby, lifting him up in the air and twisting the seats they are sitting in, and another couple are just getting together, you can tell. They are coy, reaching across the table to touch hands but not quite making it all the way before they pull back sheepishly. The girls are working behind the counter preparing food. And then there is me, red-streaked cheeks, mourning a girl I haven’t spoken to since 1988, but who, if you asked me a week ago to write a list of the five people who were my great loves, who made me who I am, would have made it right up near the top.

She was always was my first everything – and today she is my first great loss.

The title of this essay is a clue – I needed to write about Vicky because it is what I do. I needed to put these words out there because if other people know, if they can understand, then maybe the universe will remember her with me because I cannot bear the idea of her not being out there somewhere living brilliantly.

And maybe someone out there has their own Vicky, or there’s a Vicky reading this and they need to know that somewhere they’ve imprinted themselves on a soul, because they have. I know they have.

I don’t know if Emma will read this, or Louise, and it doesn’t matter, because it isn’t for them. It’s for me, these are the words I never needed to say because the girl from 20 years ago knew, she could see it in my eyes and in my smile and feel it in my hand as we walked down the street in Hexham, she could taste it in my kiss. I am talking to myself, writing the words down, because that is how I process my life. It is how this physician heals himself.

And when I die, if there is a heaven up there, she’ll be the first person I go looking for, and I will find a way to SAY all of the things I needed to say then and still need to say without hiding behind paper and ink.

Until then, I am a writer, I write therefore I am.

Steven Savile