BOOK LAUNCH
Mystery Revealed At The Book Launch
During an interview being recorded for the launch of Death By Column Inches, I related the story of exploring an abandoned underground maze of tunnels. Afterwards I began to have doubts. This would have happened a long time ago. I’ve been writing fiction for decades. Had one of my made-up worlds seeped into my head masquerading as a real memory. Had I just recorded an interview that would be aired with a whopping lie right in the middle of it?
It’s an often-asked question; Where do the ideas come from? and I knew it would crop up in the interview for the launch, so I had been thinking it through. The problem was that I created that book — in my head at least — over 30 years ago. It’s a long gap to bridge to retrieve the things that sparked the story but a surprising pastiche of vivid memories came back to me.
- Memories of working in the Pathology Department of a half-built hospital and experiencing the chaos that ensued from carrying out clinical procedures within a building site;
- Facepalm moments of unravelling the logic of 11-year-olds, such as learning how two of them, perched in the branches of an oak, had watched a robbery unfold, seen the perpetrators getaway car, taken down the details, but not told anyone for weeks for fear of being told off for climbing the tree;
- And several more including that illicit urban exploration of crumbling tunnels in the dark.
Had I really been part of a group exploring underground? If so, when? I had trouble fitting it into the timeline of my life. Had I dreamt it? After all these years, I began to doubt myself. I even considered asking for the interview to be pulled, but it was part of a larger event and would have been disproportionately disruptive.
In the end, I needn’t have worried. When the video aired, I compelled my spouse to divert attention from the football to watch it, and as the topic veered to urban exploration, he said casually, “Oh yes, I remember that.”
“You were with me?” I was amazed.
“Yes, we got through the fence at the back. We had that useless torch, couldn’t see a thing.”
Pooling our combined fragments of memory, I could at last anchor it in time. And yes, we’d had a torch, of course we had. There were no lights down there. All the wiring had been ripped out. And yes, it was a useless torch, a big unwieldy thing, possibly handy as a weapon, but a total fail when it came to generating light.
I had worried for nothing, but it hadn’t felt right not to worry about something. Counting down the last few days to a book launch is usually packed with last-minute bits and pieces of preparation. Just because it was all online, all prepared in advance, it would have been tempting fate to assume everything would go smoothly.
Now it’s launched along with its crumbling tunnels, chaotic buildings, fierce 11-year-olds, and the ghosts of the ferrets it acquired very late in the day.
More to the point, the mystery of the expedition to explore those tunnels is solved. We must have been out of our minds but it definitely happened.