Meeting Mr Fox

Arabian Red Fox picture taken in Al Sukhnah, Jordan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I wrote this simply ages ago for Jordanian website/writer's collective Project Pen, but the site's down nowadays. So I'm putting it up here, just so's I can link to it when I want to and stuff. Enjoy!

Meeting Mr Fox 

The shell that almost killed them all came with no warning, sounded no different to the thousands of others scudding around the blue summer skies like little birds. Baba was reading a newspaper, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Ahmed was sitting under the wooden kitchen table, playing. The shell exploded and suddenly Ahmed wasn’t under the table anymore. There was a lot of dust and smoke. Baba looked asleep, but mother was holding her head in her hands and crying. Ahmed wanted to go to her but his legs wouldn’t work. Baba had eventually woken up and Ahmed had walked with a limp ever since.

After the shell, they had a big piece of orange plastic sheeting over the hole in the wall. It stretched from the floor to the roof. Now summer had fled and the winter had come, it billowed and flapped in the wind and let the cold in. Finding wood for the fire had become very difficult. The winter took everyone by surprise. This proved, Ahmed’s father growled as he hunched over the mean fire in their damaged kitchen, they were all donkeys. Winter always came, this year was no different. Except this year they were distracted as the fighting became worse, the houses shaking with relentless concussions. Ahmed didn’t go to school anymore, so he was at home when the soldiers came.

His mother was making bread, the bakery having been shut by an explosion that took away ovens and bakers alike in a single savage wrench. Baba had salvaged a sack of flour from the ruins before the flames took hold and the stock room collapsed on the heads of some thirty men trying to do the same. They ate bread every Friday to try and make the flour last. Baba was out looking for fuel and food. Foraging, his mother called it. Jamal said it was called looting, like taking the flour, but everyone had to do it because there were no shops. And anyway, nobody had money.

The soldiers shouted a lot and one of them punched Ahmed so stars came. His mother begged them but they didn’t listen to her. She cried as they held her arms and pushed her onto the floor. She screamed when they pulled at her clothes until one of them hit her too and she was quiet.

Ahmed ran and ran through the streets, his ankles twisting on the rubble strewn on the pock-marked ground. He called out for his baba but nobody replied. There was fighting but Ahmed didn’t care about the bullets and they seemed not to care about him, either. None of them plucked at his skin. They buzzed, whistled and spattered on stone. They called out to him. But he didn’t want them, he wanted baba to come and stop the soldiers hurting ummi.

He left the city behind as he tired and stopped running. He walked now, no longer certain of where he was going or why, but impelled by some instinct to get away from buildings and the soldiers and the vague idea that perhaps he would walk and walk until he found his baba. Perhaps God would help him. He started mumbling God’s names, just in case he was listening. He had learned ten of them when school had stopped.

There were soldiers on the road. Ahmed was tired and scared. His legs hurt. He bit his lip when he saw them and slipped off into the woodland. The light was fading and it started to snow. There was a big tree that hadn’t lost its leaves and the patch of ground around it was clear of snow. Ahmed sat down on the damp ground, shivering. He pulled up his knees and wrapped his arms around them, listening for the soldiers in case they had seen him. The woodland grew darker. The silence ached. Occasionally there would be a creak. There were no shells or machine gun fire here. Ahmed could hear his teeth chattering, the shivering convulsions making his weary body ache. The snowflakes became bigger.

Light-headed with exhaustion and cold, Ahmed tilted his head to catch a faint scratching sound. He noticed a hole in the ground. The scratching was coming from the hole. Something glittered in the darkness of the opening. Eyes. A head emerged, red fur and a snout with a black nose.

‘Good evening,’ said the fox in fuzha, the formal Arabic like they had taught at school.

Ahmed closed his eyes and shook his head as if it would make the talking fox go away, but it was still there when he opened them.

‘You’re not a very polite little boy,’ the fox pointed out as he came out of his set and padded over to Ahmed. He sat down a few feet away and cocked his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ahmed tried to remain calm. ‘I’ve just never met a talking dog before.’

The fox sniffed. ‘I am not a dog,’ he said pointedly. ‘I am a fox.’

‘Sorry,’ Ahmed mumbled.

‘And don’t mumble. There’s nothing worse than people who mumble. It’s the height of rudeness.’

Ahmed stopped shivering. He felt very calm. He fancied he saw the fox smiling, but he couldn’t be sure. The woodland was serene, the snowflakes calming and soft as they touched his cheek. ‘Where did you learn to talk?’

The fox rubbed his snout with a forepaw. ‘What sort of question is that? Where did you learn to talk? Humans really do take the biscuit. You’re an arrogant bunch aren’t you? All superior, yet you’ll not find us animals killing each other with weapons like you do.’

‘I don’t kill people. The soldiers kill people.’

 ‘Same thing, child. It’s your species kills people. Whether they wear uniforms or not. They kill foxes, too, when they can. They kill for sport. I wonder you don’t get sick of killing. You don’t even do it properly, to eat. You just kill to kill. Nasty lot, really.’

Ahmed wanted to cry. It seemed so unjust yet he didn’t have an argument against the wiser fox. ‘The soldiers do it. Not me.’

‘You’re just a child. You’ll grow up to it. All those soldiers were children once. The men who came to the wood with spades were children once. Mind you, the chickens were worth the trouble. Delicious.’

‘So why are you even talking to me if you hate humans so much?’

‘You looked lonely.’ The fox shifted and flicked his tail. ‘Where are your parents?’

‘In the city. I ran away from the soldiers. They were hurting ummi. My baba was out and they came.’

‘Shouldn’t you go back? It’s cold out here and you look blue.’

Ahmed nodded. The fox was right, yet he was too tired. He tried to move, but he was frozen to the spot. He felt frozen, too, like a chicken. They used to have a freezer in the house before the electricity went away. It had chickens in it. Ahmed’s eyes started to close, sleep overwhelming him. He moved to lie down and the fox came up to him.

‘Here,’ the animal said, not unkindly. ‘You can have some of my heat. I have it to spare.’

The warm little body snuggled against Ahmed's chest. He smiled. The fox had an animal pungency, his fur was soft. Ahmed closed his eyes.

Later on, the sky black and the moon casting shadows in the white woodland, the fox woke. He turned to the boy’s face and sniffed it. The warmth had left the still form. The fox licked the child’s soft cheek.

After a while, he started to eat.

The Long And Short Of Stories

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have been asked once again by the Canadian University of Dubai to be a judge of their short story competition, '100 words'. This statement is laced with mild surprise that any reputable academic institution would repeat the same awful mistake: I was a judge last year, too.

It's a fascinating task, weeding through submissions from three groups, Under 12's, high school and university level entrants. For a start, you wouldn't necessarily be able to divide the submissions if all three groups were mixed up. Birth and death are themes that run through a number of the stories. Some chose not to send in a story at all, but an essay. Quite a few tried the old trick of setting us up for a punchline ending: a couple delivered with quite astonishing verve.

I always feel a bit sorry for them: while 100 words may not seem too daunting a task - 500 or 1,000 words seeming too much like 'real work' to encourage entries - 100 words puts us in the realm of 'flash fiction', stories of extreme brevity - it's actually quite hard to pull off well. For a start every single word counts and lazy habits like redundancies, filters and adverbs stare out of the screen accusingly at every turn.

She screamed with her mouth. Suddenly the gun fired. She cried deeply and agonisingly, her soul bared for all the world to see her pain. He laughed with joy, the sound of her lovely, golden voice reaching him across the wide yawning gap of the ages. The trophy dropped down to the floor and landed with a bang.

These are all remarkably common occurrences and when you've got 100 words to play with, you can't really afford them. Actually, I'd argue you can't afford them even when you're playing with 90,000 words - I'm currently reading one conventionally published author's second book and his publisher seems to have decided it wasn't worth hiring an editor this time around. I'm actually finding it hard to wade through the text at times, there is so much of this sort of thing going on. So it's no surprise to see them creeping into students' short stories - but they needn't be there. They're cuckoos, stealing space that other words deserve to occupy.

I find Twitter one of the most useful editing tools of all time. Expressing yourself in grammatically correct English using 140 characters (no 'text speak', please) can work wonders in encouraging the habit of actually constructing sentences as elegantly as possible. It's a skill I think we lose when we sit down to type stories on a word processor rather than a clackety typewriter or even, saints preserve us, grabbing a pen. Writers like Durrell, Waugh, Greene and Hemingway had time to think about every sentence, to roll it around in the mouth and savour it before committing it in inky scratches to that sheet of fine vellum. When they weren't busy beating their women or carousing in low bars, of course.

The perfect example of a short short - probably about the flashiest flash fiction you'll find - is often attributed to Hemingway, but sadly it's apocryphal and there's no proof it was Ernie at all...

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

There we go: six words and it never fails to punch way beyond its weight...

Meeting Mr Fox

The shell which almost killed them all had come with no warning, sounded no different to the thousands of others scudding around the blue summer skies like little birds. Baba was reading a newspaper, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Ahmed was sitting under the wooden kitchen table. The shell exploded and suddenly Ahmed wasn’t under the table anymore. There was a lot of dust and smoke. Baba looked asleep but mother was holding her head in her hands and crying. Ahmed wanted to go to her but his legs wouldn’t work. Baba had eventually woken up and Ahmed had walked with a limp ever since.

After the shell, they had a big piece of orange plastic sheeting over the hole in the wall. It stretched from the floor to the roof. Now winter had come, it let the cold in. Finding wood for the fire had become very difficult. The winter took everyone by surprise. This proved, Ahmed’s father growled as he hunched over the mean fire in their damaged kitchen, they were all donkeys. Winter always came, this year was no different. Except this year they were distracted as the fighting became worse, the houses shaking with relentless concussions.

Ahmed didn’t go to school anymore, so he was at home when the soldiers came. His mother was making bread, the bakery having been shut by an explosion that took away ovens and bakers alike in a single savage moment. Baba had salvaged a sack of flour from the ruins before the flames took hold and the stock room collapsed on the heads of some thirty men trying to do the same. They ate bread every Friday to try and make the flour last.

You can read the rest here at Project Pen, where this fantastical short story by me resideth...

Book Review: Jamila's Thread And Other Stories

Jamila's Thread is a lovely little book to hold in your hand, it truly is. It's almost enough to make me give up my 'a book is about the words, not the physical form' argument in favour of ebooks. As booky books go, it's very sweet.

It's a tiny little thing, really - we're looking at 100 pages of pocket-book format set in large type. It's a collection of ten short stories that set out to rediscover the beauty of the traditional folk tales of the Middle East and North Africa and comes from Project Pen. With illustrations as richly Arabesque and fantastical as the stories they adorn, it's truly a pleasure to read.

 

Project Pen is a Jordanian collective - incubated by Oasis500 - that aims to create a next generation of storytellers and encourage the development of new forms of narrative and literary expression. They've got up to all sorts of shenanigans in their journey to challenge, explore and discover the somewhat moribund world of story-telling in the Middle East. This, their latest project, is probably the most culturally valuable because, in my humble opinion, it has the power to inspire others to follow in its path.

The stories are simply told and themselves are simple enough. Jamila, the star of the show, is an ill-fated little girl, the most beautiful of seven lovely daughters born to a cursed family. The only way to lift the curse is to banish Jamila and so her fate is set, to be eventually determined by two reels of thread, one gold; one silver.

The resolution of her story is clearly set from the first word: this is a world where wrongs are righted and justice is done. Cynics will clearly need to leave their shoes at the door. But every one of these tales has a wealth to offer that you won't find in the empty, research-driven world of Frozen or Tangled. These are stories from a world where the magical is a wide-eyed possibility, not a revenue opportunity from an untapped demographic.

This is a book to enjoy if you want to find a few moments of serenity and spend a while in a Middle East we've all left behind - a world of ogres and djinn, fairytale princes and envious neighbours who have the power to turn boys into bulls. It's a beautiful little collection to read to your children at night and a tiny inspiration for story-tellers in the Middle East who thought there was no outlet for their work, for their first steps into a new world of imagination shared - a baby step in the direction of rediscovering the region's love of narrative and creative story-telling.

In its Arabic edition, it's called 'Abou Alfoul'. It should be on the shelves of all good booksellers in Dubai in February, as well as on Kindle and iBooks.

And I really would commend it most highly...

Fact From Fiction

I thought long and hard before posting this, but I think there are some issues around it that really strike to the heart of our region and some of the attitudes that shape it.

A lady has taken exception to the use of the family name Dajani in my novel Olives, which is set in Jordan and which deals with some of the issues faced by many people of Palestinian origin. This has also been a reason cited to me by distributors in Jordan who have declined to handle the book.

Olives is a novel, a work of fiction. It features a number of characters who are Jordanian and all have 'real life' Jordanian names. It would be patently ridiculous to give them Scottish names, but you would expect to see Scottish names in, say, Monarch of the Glen. And, in fact, we can see that indeed Archie MacDonald, a Scottish name, is the main character's name.

The MacDonalds are a great old Scottish family, or clan. As, indeed, are the McNabbs. But I think we can all accept our names could well be used for characters in a Scottish fiction. My own has been used, in fact, as a pseudonym by another author, a certain 'Andy McNab'. For the record, McNabs, MacNabs and McNabbs are all the same thing. It's just we're a particularly dyslexic clan. Most of the clan chieftans have been called Archibald over the years, a particular disappointment to me when I found out.

There is no malice in the act of naming characters in a book and no intent to harm or defame. It's simply something you do in the process of creating your fiction. Each and every book published in fact carries a piece of text standard in the publishing industry that asserts the fictional nature of the work which neatly hedges against a mild-mannered librarian somewhere called Hannibal Lecter taking it personally.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 
And that text duly appears in Olives. Because Olives is fiction.

There is no intent to malign or otherwise slur the name of Dajani or cause any harm or hurt to the name or anyone who bears it. Because Olives is fiction. There is no reflection of my personal view of the probity, decency or indeed history of the family. Because Olives is fiction. It features a lawyer called Emad Kawar, a spy called Gerald Lynch (an Irish name for a Northern Irish character) and other Jordanian names - Arafi, Mchouarab and Shukri, for instance. I could make up 'alternames' for the characters, names that sound like Jordanian names but aren't, but it'd be a rather silly book for it and still wouldn't guard against coincidence.

I picked Dajani because it sounded right for my characters. It's a Palestinian name and the family is spread throughout the Levant (and, indeed, world), so it's common enough for this particular fictional offshoot of the family to avoid being identified as any particular 'real life' Dajanis. Because I had considered that, something that few other authors elsewhere in the world would have to give two seconds' thought to. And yet for them to 'live' in the fiction, they have to be realistic, they have to have a history like so many other Palestinian families, they have to have suffered loss and tragedy, because that's what Olives is about. Many, many families have suffered like the family depicted in Olives. Because it's about all of them, not one family's name. And.it.is.fiction.

The thing that struck me more than anything else was the objection was lodged before the lady had read the book. That, with so many forms of censorship and repression, is so often the case. It's the very idea of it all that's bad enough to call for a cry of 'down with this sort of thing'.