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Doctor to patient: ‘And just so you know, even if you did take all your Fluoxetine at once it wouldn’t actually kill you.’

An imagined stage, flickering like an old cathode ray screen rose between them. The scene a history play of scientists in white coats, formulas and official reports. Doctor and patient looked at each other; their eyes hinted at a smile, searched momentarily to collude in a mild joke. But off stage, under faded newspapers were the dead, the ones who had succumbed, still mourned. They kept silence.

The patient nodded and rose, discharged.

Doctor to patient: ‘Come back and see us again, before you do anything.’ And they both knew he would.

University of Warwick: Literature and Mental Health
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Liam pressed the CD into the slot on the dashboard, shoving the cracked and broken case into the map pocket.
‘That’s it, Bryan. Keep straight on, Rhayader.’ Through the windscreen a wonderland of greys: silver and blue of the sky, washed grey-greens of the land, dark greys of hawthorn and ash.  Inside, in the stuffy air of the car, reluctant grindings as the machine cleared its throat. From the feeble speakers came a scattered cheering.
Students, thought Bryan, dismally, surely Liam’s too old now, for this student stuff - then a guitar slid into action: low to high. Unmistakeable, E to B. The Welsh national anthem, on a garage amp, it sounded like. What was it called? It seemed a matter of faith to Bryan, a proof of his Welshness as he glanced down at the ticker-tape of led letters running across the faceplate: H-e-n-W-l-a-d-f-y- - then back to the road to take the bend, following the tail lights of the car ahead. Liam’s lined and yellowed face was enraptured under its greasy greying hair.
‘Sounds like Hendrix’, said Bryan.
‘That’s where he got the idea’, said Liam, with reverence.
Bryan thought that unlikely. Hendrix would have been long dead by the time . . . no, Bryan interrupted his own thoughts, Liam must mean the other way round. Perhaps he had even said ‘they.' Bryan looked to the led for help: J-a-r-m-a-n-A-‘r-C-y-n-g-an-e- -
‘You couldn’t do that with God Save The fucking Queen’ intoned Liam, solemnly, his shoulders giving a little quiver.
‘No’ agreed Bryan, lamely, thinking someone already had, and trying to remember who. Was at it the Olympics? And all this swearing. ‘Prince Philip.’ He blurted.
‘Wha? Phil The Greek? What about him?' Liam jerked out of his reverie.
‘He likes swearing.’ Bryan wished he could stop his idiotic thoughts escaping. A car overtook impatiently, the driver giving a leer as he did so. Bryan felt the sluggishness of the old Astra with mounting frustration.  His suit was pinching him; too tight around the crutch and he wished he’d taken off his jacket. And hung up it in the back, he mocked himself.  The CD jumped manically from scratch to scratch and then ejected itself with a burp of disgust.
‘You should get a new CD player, Bryan. Yeah,’  Liam added, returning to the topic ‘An’ not just swearing. From what I’ve heard.’ He made it sound like a private confidence.
'What do you mean?’
Liam pointed vigorously at his groin, the too-long sleeves of his tweed coat swallowing most of his hand so only his boney fingers protruded.  ‘Just like Old Uncle Alfred.’
‘No!’ exclaimed Bryan, in a voice like a maiden aunt. Ahead, as the road straightened he realised they were behind a long tail back of other cars and had lost sight of the hearse. ‘Damn’ he said.
‘Don’t worry, they’re all going the same way as us. Funeral.’
‘Really? Was he that popular?’
‘Aye, you could say that. Not with Siobhan Kelly’s mum. She might be there. Just to piss us off.’
‘What?’ Bryan already regretted his exclamation. He felt he didn’t want to know. Not slow in coming forward, Alfred was, as they said back then.  Only three years older than him, and now  . . .  the word ‘dead’ wouldn’t enunciate, even in the private tumult of his own brain. ‘Well, he was a bit of a ladies man.’ He wished he could stop himself issuing banal cliches.
‘Not just ladies, exactly.’
‘Really?’ Bryan felt the car swerve outwards just as another car, one with heavily tinted windows overtook, giving the driver an excuse to blast the horn in rage. Bryan over-compensated, brushing the verge  and just avoiding a sign for Llangurig. He wanted to take himself in hand. I’m 69, I’ve lived in London for forty years, I’m a trained counsellor, for God’s sake. I’ve been around. (Unwontedly, Heidi on the saggy double bed in the coaching inn in Marlborough eddied into view). ‘I didn’t know he was gay?’ For once he sounded composed.
‘Nah! Siobhan, she was only seventeen.’
‘Christ. What happened.’ He was back to sounding stupid.
‘Oh, she went off with Kevin Hitchcock. More reliable,’ Liam rolled the word salaciously. ‘Better drugs, too, I ’spect.’
Bryan looked at Liam’s stern and creased profile, trying to fathom if this was an elaborate joke. Revenge played out on the one who got away, who’d stayed away, who’d missed his own father’s funeral. The Astra was some several lengths behind the car in front, trying pluckily  to keep a lemon yellow VW at bay. ‘I think I’m quite tired, ‘ said Bryan, with resignation, ‘Do you mind if we pull over at the next layby, get some fresh air?’
‘No need. There’s a pub up ahead. We can stop there, get a drink. That’ll buck you up.’ It might have been Bryan’s imagination, but he thought he detected compassion in Liam’s voice.

The Open University: Start writing fiction: U8.2 https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/start-writing-fiction

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The Open University: Start writing fiction U7.3

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The Open University: Start writing fiction U7.3

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Any Human Heart by William Boyd (2002)

This is a history. It’s the story of one man - The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart, the subtitle tells us - but also the story of a century. It’s first entry (in Spanish, Mountstuart was born in Uruguay) is dated 1912, its last in 1991.

In the hands of a less skilled writer the supposed journals of a man who was alive in all ten decades of the 20th century, who had a spat with Virginia Woolf, met Picasso and the Duke of Windsor and operated as a spy under Ian Fleming in the second world war might descend into a parody. But Boyd carries it off with great sensitivity and realism, underpinned with humour. He is wonderfully alive to to the desires and jealousies of young men coming of age in the inter-war period. So we read ‘Down the corridor Lucy lies in her bed - is she thinking of me, I wonder, as I think of her?’ and the pals’ need to arrange a ‘witnessed kiss.’

Despite the starry support cast, Boyd never looses emotional depth: the death of the narrator’s wife and child in the last days of the war is harrowing. In fact, most of the events of the 20th century touch him in some way, from the great strike of 1926 to the Biafran War and Bader-Meinhoff, but we never feel Boyd is straining to fit them all in, they come naturally to the narrator, whose voice changes subtly with age and circumstance. The epigrammatic form and natural solipsism of journals are suffused with the character's curiosity and humanity. We see, re-live, the century through the eyes of this man, Logan Mountstuart.

A post-script, though: Mountstuart’s narration ends with his death in France in 1991; Any Human Heart was published in 2002. Mountstuart’s final observations are warmly optimistic as he watches French youths on the beach and reflects on his own past ‘ . . . boys and girls are relaxed and at ease with each other in a manner that would have been unthinkable to schoolboys of my generation . . . ’ Had this novel been set later, continuing into this present millennium I wonder if Boyd would have been quite so positive. But then, perhaps the answer is there too: 'You must live the life you have been given.'

The Open University: Start writing fiction: U7.3 Formulating and sharing technical opinion
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University of Warwick: Literature and Mental Health: a gift for my Dad.

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found in Dad's loft, Feb 2017

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University of Warwick: Literature and Mental Health: Reading aloud

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University of Warwick: Literature and Mental Health

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University of Warwick: Literature and Mental Health

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“Bryan, it’s Alfred”
“Alfred. How’re you?” I seemed to be shouting, thought Bryan. He’d offer to turn his radio down - but it was on the other side of the kitchen. Kirsty had just asked the castaway for their second piece of music. He just hoped it wouldn't  be something  too loud.
“No, it's Liam. It’s Alfred.”
“Liam?” Who was Liam? “I thought you were Alfred.”
“No. He’s dead. I’m Liam.”
“Dead? I thought he was at a wedding.” Could you be at a wedding and be dead too?
“No. Well, yes, he was.” Liam, if it was Liam, weighted the ‘was’ like a portent. “The thing is Ah Ah . . . ” Now, strangled, like a suppressed laugh or cry or -  Christ, not a stammerer - thought Bryan ungraciously. “Ah, Ah, Alfred died. At the wedding.” There were other voices in the background, Bryan could hear them now. Women. Were they wailing? Maybe they were laughing, too.
“At the wedding?” He couldn’t help sounding incredulous. It wasn’t as if the death shocked him, it was the wedding.
“Yes, laughing.” For a moment Bryan thought the caller was reprimanding him for laughing, which he wasn’t. “He died laughing, he just keeled over. At the wedding.” He seemed to be spelling it out, as though for an imbecile, and Byran, at last, recognised the voice, from years back.
“Ah, Liam!” he exclaimed.
“Yes. I told you that. Are you alright, Bryan?” Alright in the head, he was really saying, before adding: “Laughing, that’s Alfred.” And they could both allow themselves a relived chuckle. “So, we thought you’d like to come down, I’m sure he’d like to see you before he goes.”
Wasn’t that the wrong way round? But Bryan wasn’t going to quibble, not after getting this far. Kirsty’s castaway was talking about meeting her husband. Funeral, think funeral, Bryan told himself. “So” Breathe. “When is it, the funeral?”
“Day after tomorrow. Or the day after.”
“That’s quick.”
“He was Catholic. They don’t hang around.”
“I thought he was  . . . ” He stopped himself. You could be Welsh and Catholic he realised, just in time. “OK. Leave it with me.” He hadn’t used that expression since he retired, when it meant remind me in a week or two if it’s still important.
“Okey-dokey. See you then” Free of care, Liam hung up.

* * *

Bryan looked at the phone, now settled  innocently on the breakfast bar. He considered then ruled out ringing back, to check. What could he say, are you sure? Kirsty’s guest was now choosing her books. She didn’t want The Bible but was insisting on taking all the holy books. “Christ!" said Bryan out loud in the general direction of the radio, "you won't find him like that'. Did he really say ‘Him’? He meant 'It.' The Truth, It. He had shuffled towards the bottles and jars near the hob, hoping still to find the dregs of a whisky he  finished off a few nights earlier. Rapeseed oil, olive oil, another olive oil, this time with some value-adding twig drowning in it, a gift from Connie, vitamin pills, also from Connie - he had given them up after she left him - but no whisky. Relieved - it was still not midday - he riffled through the cupboard till he found the rooibos his son had brought back from South Africa. That would have to do.
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U3.2 Reviewing and redrafting  Start writing fiction

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He stared blankly ahead as though under interrogation. He didn’t move to the window seat. It was marked P. For Priority, he thought. There was an admiring ooh, from behind him. They’d clocked it, the twenty-somethings who’d been lost in their own chatter. The woman with the rabbit.

The plump rabbit with a red spotted bow knotted to its head. Fine, fawn-coloured angora fur, long floppy ears, black faced. He knew, even before he took in the flat face with the black penny eyes that it couldn’t be a rabbit. But he insisted on thinking of it as a rabbit, out of spite. One of those Dutch ones. What was it then? Pekinese seemed too obvious. It must be a shih tzu. He rolled the word malevolently around his mind.

She was wearing an equally red, equally fine woollen jersey. The dog looked out from under her arm, perched imperially between the straps of her leather burgundy bowling bag. He had to twist his legs to one side, squishing them together so she could get in next to him. There were other seats, nearer the back of the bus, but he knew that that would be the way. She smiled down at him. He wasn’t prepared for her pleasant features, her pale eyes smiling under arched brows. Her ‘thank you’ added a touch of grace. His legs sprang back, his right thigh just settling against hers. Now the dog - rabbit, he reminded himself - gazed up at him, its face scrunched with stupidity.

Behind him the couple couldn’t wait to pay obeisance. 'Isn’t he lovely?’ The young man cooed. His friend added her shrill glottal: ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’ The woman addressed the dog, patiently, ‘You’re a girl, aren’t you?’ Despite the inanity of the exchange her voice retained a simple ease. The bus jerked on. Another passenger, an older woman in a shapeless felt hat had joined in, at length, about her sister’s pekinese. Pure-bred like this one. Five or six more stops. He wondered how long he could take it. Four stops, now, along the dual carriageway. Suddenly, like a prisoner wanting release he pressed the buzzer. He stood and half-staggered as the bus came to a halt.

He didn’t acknowledge the driver’s look which was to reprimand him of the lack of good time. He had half a mile to walk. The voices had stopped. He thought he could smell a scent of fine, washed hair. Slowly the warm impress faded from his thigh.

4.7. Developing your plot line  Start writing fiction
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