Tag Archives: stories

Halloween, and the Art of Psychologically Scarring Your Children

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We love to be scared. It’s why we love horror movies, roller-coasters and day-trips to Alloa. It’s thrilling to experience the excitement of peril without the threat of consequences (with the exception of a day-trip to Alloa, which really can be fatal).

There’s a long tradition of horror-based pranks in my family, most of them emanating from my older cousins. I say pranks. Many of them skirted the edges of full-blown psychological torture, but I guess they were character-building in their own way: people dressed as vampires, complete with cloak and fangs, waking you up in the dark of night; legends of a creature living beneath the bottom step of my aunt’s and uncle’s staircase, ready to grab you and drag you down into the sub-dimensional depths of the universe that lurked just beneath the carpet; being locked in a room with a particularly gruesome horror movie playing on the TV without any means to turn it off.

Later in life, my older brother-in-law took up the mischievous mantle. Once when I was at his house, when my nephew was a baby, he tied a string to a bedroom door and tugged on it hard, delighted to see me vault my nephew’s baby-gate in terror at the sight of the suddenly and inexplicably animate door. Another time he collaborated with my sister to make it seem like my mother’s house was encircled by intruders then took me out round the garden with an air rifle in the pitch black, organising a few jump scares along the way.  It was family time with a sprinkling of Guantanamo Bay and a garnish of Resident Evil.

Still, possibly as a consequence of all this, I became a life-long horror fan. As a young teenager I watched movies like Hellraiser and Candyman with my older cousin; gorged on his brutal and bloody 2000AD comics. I started collecting horror posters from video rental places like Blockbuster and my local shop to put on my bedroom wall (Dannii Minogue and Pinhead made strange wall-fellows indeed). I’m not as prolific a fan of horror as I used to be, but I appreciate a bit of gore-bite-bleed-kersplat as much as the next man, especially if the next man is Freddy Krueger.

Being scared is cathartic. It sparks the mind and the imagination. It reminds you a little of what it is to be alive. I couldn’t wait to pass the torch on to my kids, albeit not in such a way that would risk leaving them quivering mental wrecks.

Or so I thought…

It’s apt that I should have used a torch-based analogy, because a torch was at the root of the misjudgement to come.

We visited my mother and father (he’s my step-dad, but I’m going to call him father, because it’s less clunky, and there’s something reductive about the ‘step’ prefix) in their cottage in the countryside. The kids were messing about with a torch. They eventually found themselves in the only room in my mother’s house capable of encapsulating day-time darkness, a little box room with no windows that was at one time a bedroom, then a wine cupboard (my father always called it a ‘cellar’ in a bid to lend it some sophistication), and now a pantry and general junk-room. Swinging a ray of light around a wee dark room apropos of nothing holds enough fascination on its own to enrapture a child for weeks at a time, but I thought I’d help diversify and enrich their beam-based shenanigans, starting with shadow puppetry. After a few minutes of rabbits and raptors – about the only creatures we were capable of conjuring, besides hands – we moved on to ghost stories, each taking turns with the torch held under our chins, illuminating our faces like haunted pumpkins.

I went first, spinning a simple but atmospheric yarn about a concerned neighbour chapping on the door of a musty old house. The house’s equally musty old occupant hadn’t been seen around the village for a while, and people were worried. So the man knocks, shouts, and gets no answer, so he moves around the house trying to peer through the windows. He notes the grime on the insides of the windows, so thick he can hardly see through them. He notices a flicker through the gloom on the pane, figures it’s the old lady. Goes back to the front door, tries it, and discovers it’s unlocked, though there’s something blocking the way forwards. He barges it and it gives, ripping through thick swirls and strands of cobwebs. How long has she been stuck in here? he wonders. It’s dark in the house, suffocatingly dark, so he brings out a torch, swinging it this way and that through the murk. Gets to the door that leads into the lady’s living room, pushes it open. Calls her name again. Uses the torch beam to survey the dank and dingy room, finds the old lady. She’s stuck up on the wall, her mouth hanging open, quite dead, her body wrapped in place with spider webs. Before he can even scream, a giant spider – much bigger than a man – emerges from the shadows in the corner of the room, and barrels towards him as fast as a jungle cat. He realises it’s too late to run. More than that, he can’t move. The torch drops from his hand into the springy, clinging carpet of cobwebs woven at his feet.

They were spooked, but smiling. I’d given them the general idea of how to build tension in a scary story; how to weaponise the ordinary; use the tone and pitch of your voice to lull, unnerve and shock. Little Chris, 3, took the next turn. He nailed the tense poise and grave whisper, peppered his story with lots of husky ‘and thennnnn’s. His plot also revolved around a seemingly deserted house, but lacked an ending. Or a middle. People – a daddy and two boys – crept into a cottage, reacting to noises, sensing danger all around them, and thennnnn, and thennnnn, AND THENNNNN… a monster came and ate them all up. It was an amusingly perfunctory ending, one that had me chuckling. At least it was decisive. None of this ambiguous, ‘you write your own ending’ shit. BOOM. Eaten by a monster. THE END.

I had another turn, inadvertently ripping off the basic plot of Jeepers Creepers 2. Then Jack used the abandoned house template to tell a tale of toys that came to life – animatronic Santas, toy soldiers – and pursued the plucky protagonists through and out of the house, and down deserted country roads in a spooky night-time chase. Both boys were good at this, and seemed to really enjoy our time telling terrifying tales around the virtual campfire we’d created inside the tiny room. But I wanted the session to go out with a bang. So I started a new story, a story within a story, a meta story, about a dad and his two sons who were swapping spooky stories in a darkened box room by torch-light, while above them, through the open loft-hatch, sat a swarm of hungry creatures just waiting for their chance to jump down and feast. But they couldn’t. Because they were allergic to light. So as long as the torch stayed on, so long as the batteries held, they were safe. But at any moment… if their torch was to run out of batteries… if that light was to go of….

Click.

You see what I did there, right? This was a miscalculation on my part. I knew it as soon as my eldest son, Jack, threw open the door behind him and fled for his life down the bright corridor, screaming in terror. My youngest, brave little Chris, looked up at me in the half-light cast from the suddenly opened door with a look on his face that seemed to say, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’ Jack had locked himself in the bathroom, and wouldn’t let me in. His fright had given way to anger. A flood of Diet Adrenalin was thundering its way through his little circulatory system, breaking his rational thoughts against the rocks of his temper. I kept knocking. ‘Come on, buddy, I’m sorry, if I’d known it would scare you that much I would never have told that story. I thought you’d laugh!’

I felt as I’d felt when my nephew was a nipper and I’d granted a piece of burnt toast sentience before dropping it into the fiery clutches of my mum’s coal-fuelled central heating system. ‘Noooo, please don’t burn me, mister, I’m burnt enough, I don’t deserve this!’ I thought he’d laugh. Instead he’d screamed.

After a few minutes Jack padded through to the kitchen and sat down at the table, completely recovered from his traumatic experience. Since the little fella has evidenced a burgeoning talent for both creative writing and thinking I decided to turn his terror into a teachable moment.

‘You know ghosts and monsters and things like that aren’t real, right?’

I’ve always stressed this, because I know how much kids worry about ghosts and monsters even when they’re sure they don’t exist, never mind where there’s doubt.

‘Yeah.’

‘And you know the creatures I created in the story weren’t real either, right? They were just words out of my mouth.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you were still scared of them, right?’

He nodded.

‘That’s the power of stories,’ I told him. ‘You can use stories to make people think and feel real things about things that aren’t real. And you can’t just make them scared. You can make them happy, you can make them laugh, you can change their minds about things. Stories are powerful.’

He nodded sagely.

It must have got through to him, because later that day, back at home, he started writing his magnum opus, The Abandoned House, its front cover dotted with monsters and spider-webs.

It’ll assuage my guilt at terrifying him somewhat if he becomes the next Stephen King.

Plus, a premium retirement home would be nice, too.

My Boy Lollipop: A Cautionary Tale

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Ideas for stories jump into my head every day. The vast majority of them never come to anything. I scrawl them on scraps of paper that inevitably end up scrumpled at the bottom of the bin; or trap them inside word-processing documents (a series of short, disjointed semi-sentences that won’t even make sense to me when I come to review them a few days down the line, much less a few months). Most end up buried – fading and crumbling – in the graveyard of my memory.

I’ve carried the brief outline I’m about to share with you – one of many of thousands of proto-stories that will probably never come to fruition – inside my mind for years. I think it’s lingered there because the themes and emotions thrown up by the story still resonate with me, but also because the message – or plea – at the heart of the story only becomes more relevant as the years pass by.

I wonder if this is the first time that somebody has ever critically evaluated one of their own stories that doesn’t actually exist because they could never be arsed writing it in the first place.

Anyway, without any further ado, here’s the essence of my never-was-story:

When Will I be famous?

A man auditions for The X Factor, or some fictionalised variant of the show. He can’t sing, but he can certainly entertain you, if laughing at the afflicted is your idea of a good time, which historically it has been – and still is – for the vast majority of people who watch televised talent shows.

He’s auditioning at a time in TV talent-show history when a contestant’s first meeting with the judges took place in a small room without an audience, and not in a packed theatre as happens now. Besides the camera crew, the only people in the room with the contestant are three judges, a panel which comprises a woman and two men.

The contestant starts to sing, a haunting ballad (haunted entirely by him). There’s something both earnest and disturbed about the way he moves his body in time to the music, and the force with which he pours his passion into the song. The look of rapture on his face suggests he believes himself to be in possession of the voice of an angel, when in reality the timbre of his voice is a closer fit with a hoarse old dog howling at the moon.

The two male judges almost fall from their seats laughing. The camera crew is laughing, too. The female judge struggles to banish her own laughter from her lips and thoughts, and finally manages to maintain an air of respect and kindness. While the most famous of the judges – the story’s Simon Cowell proxy – waves his hands for the performance to cease, and issues an emphatic ‘no’, the female judge says ‘yes’, an act that is motivated either by misplaced compassion or a desire to irritate not-Simon. The other male judge says no, and the contestant is rejected. He locks eyes with the female judge and smiles through the tears that are forming in his eyes.

He becomes a celebrity in his town and its surrounding areas, and is booked to appear in pubs, clubs and gig venues. Local and regional newspapers interview him, or run small pieces on him. He’s so swept up by the attention and his new pseudo-celebrity status that he doesn’t realise he’s being transformed more and more into a bizarre novelty, a laughing stock: a lightning rod for the town’s anger and cruelty, and a scapegoat for its shame. He isn’t savvy, or smart, or articulate. He’s powerless to divert the course of his fame; he doesn’t want to let go of it, even when it starts to hurt.

At the end of the story he stands on a small stage in-front of a crowd of drunken revellers in some smoky city pub, grasping the microphone uncertainly in his hand, a hand that’s now shaking. He now realises that he – and his song – mean nothing to these people. This time when he sings there’s no passion or conviction in his voice. He can hear the laughter spitting from their lips, see the disdain and arrogance shining in their eyes. He tries to push on to the end of the song, but the tears well up in his eyes with such great weight he feels like his head might capsize. His voice quivers, falters and dies. Worse than their laughter, they’re now ignoring him. He’s alone up there on the stage, frightened and confused.

He sees, in his mind’s eye, the soft, apologetic smile on the lips of the sympathetic judge. He goes back further, back to his childhood. He remembers cowering under his covers as a young boy, scared and helpless, listening to his father beating his mother with his belt in the other room. He remembers the screams. The cracking and the yelling. Then the front door slamming. Then his mother would shuffle into his bedroom, eyes heavy and hollow, and slide under the covers next to him, forgetting herself, forgetting her own pain and fear. All she wanted to do was make him feel better. Happy. Safe. She soaks up his tears and strokes his head until he closes his eyes and falls asleep in her arms, all the while singing a lullaby.

The same lullaby he’d one day sing on stage.

He takes a gun from his jacket, puts it to his head, and squeezes the trigger.

The irony is, he now gets the fame – and more than that, the acceptance – that he craved. People are kind about him. They cry for him.

And then they forget him again.

I can’t help but think about that story-that-never-was every time I think about Denise Ferry from Coatbridge, the woman who rose to notoriety on the back of an on-line video – since gone viral – of her singing ‘My Boy Lollipop’ at her mother’s graveside burial. She’s now making appearances in nightclubs and pubs across Scotland singing that same song, once a tribute to her mother, now a loud drunken chant down the local disco. Watch a video of any of her recent ‘performances’. Look at the smile that keeps creeping on to her face. She thinks she’s made it. She thinks people love her. She doesn’t understand that she’s in the process of being chewed up and spat out.

I laughed when I first watched the video of Denise singing at her mother’s funeral. It was so unlike any funeral I’ve ever seen or been to: bleak and bizarre and strange and funny and sad and gallus, all at once, and somehow also uniquely Coatbridgian. All of the ingredients that make up the video, from Denise’s over-sized suit and her giant aviator shades; to the cowed and weary man silently smoking behind her; to the choice of song itself, combine to create one of the weirdest and most discordant viral home movies I’ve ever watched. It’s like Rab C Nesbitt meets Twin Peaks.

I’m not laughing now. While it’s undoubtedly ghoulish to use your own mother’s funeral as a launch-pad for ‘fame’, it’s downright deplorable to exploit a deeply damaged woman’s desire to be noticed in order to fatten your pockets. Giving people what they want isn’t always the right thing to do. Because…

Well.

Because people are cunts.

Young Jamie: Portrait of the Artist as a Wee Bastard – Part 1: Merlin

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Have a read at this story I wrote when I was eight-years-old, and then wallow in the pointlessness of it all as my 35-year-old self tries to provide some context.

MERLIN

It all starts off very innocently, like Enid Blyton meets Tolkein with a homeopathic splash of Clive Barker. A bunch of lads on a quest for treasure, facing adversary, fighting foes and helping each other out along the way. Aaarrgghhh, a wolf! Never fear: you can always bet on karate Callum and his sharp sword of lupine vengeance! Yay! Aaaarrrgghh, a canyon! Never fear: we’ve got bridge helmets! Ya… wait a minute, we’ve got what? You know, bridge helmets; it’s not phallic or a horrible medical condition or anything, it’s literally a helmet that shoots out a bridge to aid safe passage in times of trouble! Oh well, in that case… YAY! ‘Mon the bridge helmets!

Aaaarrrgghh, a pit of snakes…It’s at this point where everything becomes a little bit Tarantino-y. A new cast of characters from my class is introduced, who are all summarily dispatched in a series of increasingly brutal ways. Oh, Hi Brian…KABOOM! Brian? BRIAN? Hey, Kenny, how’s it goi… AAARRRGGHH! Into the pit with you, Kenny, and you’d better not even think about inexplicably finding a sword in that pit of snakes! Oh, you’ve inexplicably found a sword in that pit of snakes, have you? Well, I haven’t got time to ponder the ridiculousness of that plot contrivance, for I am about to ENGAGE THE BRIDGE HELMET, AN INSTRUMENT OF MERCY THAT I DOTH REPURPOSE AS A WEAPON OF WAR! SAY TOODLE PIP TO YOUR NECK, YOU SWORD-FINDING MOTHERFUCKER! Any more baddies want to try their luck? Oh, hi James Dick… I Hope you’re a fan of… face-punching! Biff! Boof! Badam! As if it wasn’t bad enough already for the poor boy having to suffer through primary school with a surname like Dick (subtlety and compassion are rare bed-fellows indeed among the male under 20s), he gets put into my story and further brutalised by enduring a murky, open-ended fate at the hands of a gorilla.

‘A gorilla found him.’ It says so much without really saying anything at all, leaving you, the reader, to imagine for yourself the specifics of poor James’ treatment at the hands of this savage bipedal beast. I’m leaning towards a biblical interpretation of ‘found’. I always imagine a gentle ‘tap tap’ of the shoulder followed by a blood-curdling scream, and an angry, whispered warning from the gorilla that ‘what happens in the dark, dark forest, STAYS in the dark, dark forest, son.’

At least Craig gets the kind of quick death that can only come from being ‘found’ by a comet (it’s too weird to consider a biblical interpretation of ‘found’ in this instance, although feel free to imagine a frightened boy being fucked by a comet). Thankfully for my band of merry goodies, and the wider planet, the comet only seems to scorch a one-human-sized area of ground, leaving me to doubt that what we’re dealing with here is actually a comet. They’re not renowned for their precision. By my young self’s comet-related reckoning, the dinosaurs should’ve been able to harmlessly header their comet back into space and get on with lumbering about and eating things.

The ending’s a bit rushed, in the sense that there’s a fire, the all-too-convenient discovery of WATER HELMETS and a whopping one-hundred-grand pot of prize money. I dunno, death, murder, cold-heartedness, greed. It’s clear I was a child growing up in Thatcher’s Britain. All that was missing from the narrative was a magical poll-tax riot.

A lot of elements in this tale that are ripe for Freudian analysis: extending helmets, helmets that spray liquid, a pit of snakes, a boy called Dick. This story was clearly about my own penis.

I love my teacher’s red-pen critique at the end, which boils down to: ‘Loved the story, Jamie, really loved it, right up until the bit where you murdered all of your friends, you fucking sociopath.’