I'm not sure how to feel about that. Rocky Flintstone, the pseudonymous author of the Belinda Blinks series on which the podcast is based, may not be lauded by the literati, but his son, Jamie Morton, decided to share his prose with his best mates, James Cooper and Alice Levine, in their brilliantly funny podcast. James, it seems, has overcome his initial horror at his father's pornographic musings. I'm not sure Mrs B will be able to say the same.
That said, what I've written isn't overtly graphic, and I also suggest that it's unlikely to be included in the pantheon of the pornographic, but that doesn't prevent Mrs B from wondering what the heck is going on in my head. I'll allow you to judge, although in my defence, like much of what I've written in 'A Little Something To Hide', what landed on the page was not always what I intended.
In my original notes for Tim, his story began with him happily married to Alicia, both huge Breaking Bad fans, planning a trip to Albuquerque to visit the locations where they filmed the show. I recorded other details too, none of which make a great deal of sense to me now, although I think perhaps I intended to provide him with a backstory that involved a hit and run while under the influence.
According to my notes, which have no mention of Briony, Tim and his wife concealed the death of a vagrant on a strip mall after Alicia tried to stop Tim driving three-hundred yards from a bar to their roadside motel. The plot didn’t work for me, neither did the name Alicia, when I found it too close phonetically to the name of Rosa’s favoured daughter, so Briony came to visit.
When I changed the character’s name from Alicia, her personality changed. Prior to becoming Briony, I had Alicia measured as a dowdy woman; a little short, carrying too much weight, fastidious around the house, everything tidied away before the dust had a chance to settle, not that dust featured in a house belonging to Alicia Bovary, her practices were far too virtuous to allow the intrusion. Cleaning was her forte, so covering the tracks of her husband’s felony drew upon her talents.
It soon became apparent to me that Briony was the antithesis of Alicia and with her character’s transformation, Tim’s needed to follow, and I began envisaging the awkward young man that found his way onto the page.
Tim’s fantasies, played out in the confines of his imagination and his room, became a surprising reality when he met Briony. I suspect there are fantasists out there, entertaining similar visions, who wonder what it was that piqued Briony’s interest in that unremarkable man. I don’t want to disappoint them, but I’m not entirely certain that what happens to Tim occurs in the real world.
Having created an improbable situation for Tim, however, I discovered a freedom to create scenarios where the visions of the fantasist occur on the page as real events, developing faster than our protagonist is able to invent, leading Tim to think that perhaps he is more of a man than we, or even he, perceives. I had fun building up his ego, only for him to realise that he had little to do with the circumstances within which he found himself, failing to appreciate that he was little more than a willing participant in someone else’s story.
As for Alicia Bovary, I have no idea what happened to her. I believe she's loitering in a draw at Chez Brown, knocking to come out occasionally when I wander into the room, reminding me that perhaps there might be just another story to be told. Either that, or she's telling me to stop being a creep.
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Craig Brown is an author living in Newbury. Discover his serialised novel, 'A Little Something To Hide' at craigbrownauthor.com
BlueSky/Threads/Twitter: @GOMinTraining
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2024
20 August 2024
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