Déjà Vu sb-1

by Ian Hocking

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  David laughed. She was there, finally. ‘You look—’

  ‘I know.’ She kissed him and sat on the bench. She wore a black greatcoat with the collar turned up. Her hair was short. She smiled as he stared, and he noticed the lines at the corners of her eyes and dimples in her cheeks. She was older but her face was leaner and more striking. ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘I thought it was best,’ she said.

  ‘Walk me back?’

  He broke up the remainder of his sandwich and scattered the pieces. He and Saskia then made their way towards Westminster Bridge.

  ‘You lost your accent,’ he said.

  ‘It’s still there. Today, I’m playing British.’

  ‘And what could be more British than a stroll along the river?’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Westminster,’ David said. Unconsciously, his hand rubbed his chest, where pre-cancerous growths had been found a month before: a vestige of the radioactive dust in the West Lothian Centre. His nano-treatment was scheduled for January. ‘I’m still trying to explain myself.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘A closed parliamentary inquiry. Closed to the public, that is. Ostensibly, they want to find out what happened at the West Lothian Centre. The Chairman is Lord Gilbert. A Lib-Dem guy. He’s OK.’

  Saskia looked at the Palace of Westminster. ‘What are you telling them?’

  ‘I’m singing like a bird.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s good. Don’t worry about me. I have a new life.’

  ‘So what do I call you?’

  ‘I’m afraid you don’t.’ She linked her arm in his. ‘I suspect that we are under surveillance. Now, what would be the best outcome?’

  David sucked air through his teeth. ‘They’d advise the state prosecutors not to proceed with a criminal trial. Unofficially, that is. Even better, they might clear my name. Then I could get my job back at the university. I’ve got another ten years before I retire. Or I could retire now. Why not?’

  They walked in silence for a while.

  ‘Tell me about Jennifer.’

  ‘She’s back in America. I’ll see her again at Christmas—and her new boyfriend, worst luck. Do you have any plans for Christmas?’

  ‘Some. I’ll be visiting a friend in Berlin. Then another in Moscow.’

  They continued towards parliament. The Westminster Bridge was quiet. Cold air had come down from the North Sea. They turned against it. After ten minutes, they came to an elderly building near the Ministry of Defence. ‘I’ll see you very soon, David.’

  ‘Where?’

  In reply, she placed a finger to her lips. Then she touched his with the gloved tip.

  ‘You know,’ David said, ‘I could do with some help in there. Another witness.’

  ‘I’m sorry, David. Take care.’

  He waved. ‘I understand. You take care too. And thanks.’

  He showed his ID to the duty officer and passed through into the main courtyard. He found the committee chamber. It was a small room with an oval table. Conversation ceased as he entered.

  ‘Ah,’ said Lord Gilbert. He looked at David over the top of his glasses in the way that David would look at a late student. ‘The star of the show.’ Gilbert chuckled. The men on the panel chuckled back. The two women pursed their lips.

  Tony Barclay, the MSP for West Lothian, took a nod from Gilbert. ‘Perhaps we could go back to the man who you met on the Internet, Professor Proctor. The man who supplied the explosives.’

  The stenographer watched his computer screen.

  David sighed, and began again.

  ~

  David’s hosts were confident that he would not try to leave the country, so he was not held in custody. His hotel was a small one north of the river. It was dingy but, he guessed, not cheap. He entered his room and locked the door. He decided to cheer up. He was making progress with the committee, after all. He threw off his coat and walked into the bathroom. ‘Lights,’ he said.

  He took the measure of himself. He was a rumpled, tired version of the man who had arrived at the West Lothian Centre two months before. But he felt no different. He washed up and returned to the main room.

  There was an envelope on the floor near the jacket. He remembered Saskia linking her arm in his. The envelope was addressed to ‘You’. He opened it and withdrew a single sheet of paper.

  Down in Marseilles there’s a nice bar run by a man called Dupont. It is famous for its cat, which turned up one day and never left. The cat thinks she’s a loner but, really, she likes company. Now can you remember all that?

  David smiled and watched the text fade until the paper was blank.

  Exeter, York, Canterbury, UK; 2004-2011

  ---

  Saskia Brandt returns in

  FLASHBACK - Book Two

  In 1947 a Santiago-bound plane crashes into the Andes minutes after confirming its landing time.

  In 2003 a passenger plane nosedives into the Bavarian National Forest during a routine flight.

  Although separated by more than 50 years, these tragedies are linked by seven letters:

  S, T, E, N, D, E, C.

  And in

  THE AMBER ROOMS - Book Three

  It is the night of September 5th, 1907, and the Moscow train is approaching St Petersburg. Traveling first class appears to be a young Russian princess and her fiancé. They are impostors. In the luggage carriage are the spoils of the Yerevan Square Expropriation, the greatest bank heist in history. The money is intended for Finland, and the hands of a man known to the Tsarist authorities as The Mountain Eagle—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

  Author’s Note

  Dear reader,

  Thanks for finishing my book. I really appreciate it. Honestly, I lose count of the books I’ve given up on halfway through. I’ve tried to make Déjà Vu the kind of book that you can’t put down. To do this, I’ve taken Elmore Leonard’s advice and carefully removed all the rubbish bits, printed them out, and sent them to Dan Brown as suggestions.

  IF ‘fan of Dan Brown’ = TRUE then

  Awkward pause.

  ELSE

  Suck air through teeth and looked pained. The Da Vinci Code, eh? Blimey.

  END IF

  So, back to this important Author’s Note. You know when a street juggler performs the last, amazing trick, and then whips out a moth-eaten beret and invites the audience to help him eat?

  That.

  By all means, close this book, think no more about it, and good luck to you.

  But cast your mind back to my amazing trick with the chicken, unicycle, and the unctuous child from the front row! If you’d like to help me out, and you liked Déjà Vu, please let people know about it. If you thought the book was total flapdoodle, please tell no-one, and it will remain our dirty secret. You see, I’m an independent writer and I pay for my own editing, proof-reading, and marketing. And the coffee! You wouldn’t believe how much the cost of coffee mounts up over the course of a book. Even the cheap stuff I get from Lidl. Seriously. It’s criminal. And I usually let it go cold before I drink it. So, feel free to tweet about Déjà Vu, write me a review on the Kindle store (these are particularly helpful), or otherwise spread the word.

  If you look at my Amazon page (US or UK), you’ll see that there is another Saskia Brandt book called Flashback. (The stonkingly huge advert just before this Author’s Note would be another clue.) Furthermore, I’m nose-to-the-grindstone on the third book: The Amber Rooms. Should be out by early 2013. It’s taken me four years and God alone knows how much coffee. I can let you know when that one comes out if you sign up for my mailing list. (I don’t write fiction as part of an elaborate scam to collect email addresses, or I’d write like Dan Brown. Your email address is safe with me.)

  You can contact me via my blog, This Writing Life, drop me an email, or tweet me @ian_hocking. I’d love to hear what you think of my work (typos/formatting screws-up also appreciated). I’m particularly
keen to hear more from the lady who gave me a one-star review and suggested that I have the reading age of a ten-year-old. Because. Of. My. Short. Sentences. Oh, and to save you some effort: yes, of course I have a real time machine; no, you can’t use it, because that would create entertaining paradoxes, as anyone who’s watched Back to the Future will know.

  Once more, thanks for reading.

  Ian

  The Story of Déjà Vu

  Acknowledgements for the First Edition

  The original manuscript was read by my intrepid friends Daniel Graaskov, Karen Jensen, Alex Mears, and Arie van der Lugt. Their comments vastly improved the final book. Further constructive feedback came via the Psychology Department Book Club at the University of Exeter (Rachael Carrick and Kate Fenwick were particularly helpful). Thanks also to Rachel Day for permission to use her copyrighted word ‘tit-full’. And not forgetting my editor at the UKA Press, the redoubtable Aliya Whiteley, who helped transform the manuscript from the bloated pug of yesterday to the svelte whippet of today (any errors of breeding, such as an extra ear or a penchant for chair legs, must be left at my door).

  For specialist assistance, I must thank Paul Johns, who helped out with some of the medical conditions and procedures described in these pages. Where errors exist, I am the goat. With respect to the time machine, David Gardiner checked my calculations, rubbished them, and redid them from scratch.

  My partner, Britta, has gone beyond the call of duty in giving me time and space to write this book since its inception, many moons ago, when the year 2003 was still in the future. I dedicate this book, and everything else, to her.

  The author, late 2004; Exeter, UK

  And In The End

  An excerpt from my blog, dated 20th August, 2010. Read the original

  What follows is a very personal post, for which I do not apologise. It is likely to be the last post I make to this blog (though perhaps not; see below). I hope that it will not be sentimental. That said, it will be honest. I will write about something that has been very important to me since I was a wee scamp.

  A long time ago—when I was an undergraduate, fifteen years back—I read an interview with Stephen King in which he described the moment his novel, Carrie, was picked up by New England Library. He was living in a trailer and had so little money that the telephone was disconnected. The original news about the publication of Carrie came via telegram. King wanted to buy a gift for his wife. He went into town and found the only thing he could he imagine she wanted: a hair dryer.

  Fifteen years ago, reading the interview with King, I already had two novels under my belt. They were awful. Since then, I’ve written four more. These last—Déjà Vu, Proper Job, Flashback and The Amber Rooms—are quite good. Déjà Vu has been published and the other three have been with my agent, John Jarrold, for some years. Four, I think. A long time.

  Someone wrote—King again, I think—that a writer is a person who will write no matter what. In other words, if you lock them up in a cell without pen or pencil, they’ll write on the wall in their own blood. I didn’t believe that when I read it and I don’t believe it now. Even Stephen King comes to a point when the blood dries up. Writers are people. We—they—would want to play football if they were footballers, not sit on the subs bench; they would want to have a workshop, tools, and customers if they made furniture for a living; writers want to be read.

  Fifteen years is a fair crack of the whip. As of now, I am no longer a writer of fiction.

  For my part, I cannot write fiction these days. There are too many words unpublished behind me. To write a novel is to commit years of your life. Nobody wants to commit them in vain. They will do this, of course, in the beginning, with a certain faith that if the end product is any good, then it will be published. Right now I do believe the books I’ve written are good. I believe that sections, elements, moments of them are very good. My agent is an excellent one and he would not be wasting his time with me otherwise. The reality is that the publishing industry is small. Only so many doors are open to a writer of science fiction thrillers, and, when you’ve been round the doors once, it’s the same people opening them next time.

  What is to be gained by retirement? Why not take a break? These are questions that my agent—who has been very supportive of my decision—has asked.

  Since writing the first draft of The Amber Rooms, I’ve felt a deepening disillusionment with the craft of writing. This disillusionment is almost certainly superficial. Much as I hate to write this, the feeling is probably based on something akin to jealousy. It is not jealousy per se. Rather, it is the feeling expressed by the sentence ‘I could do better than that’. Not an easy thing to admit. But with each instance of shoddy, clichéd, or generally below par published writing that I read, my faith that my own long years of effort will ever count for something (that is: readers) diminishes to the point where I am barely picking up a book. The process has become painful. As a child, books were like fuel, crack cocaine, and world travelling rolled into one. My writing has taken me to the point where I am in danger of poisoning the well from which, it seems, the greater part of my mind has sprung. Given a choice between the two—literature and the stuff on my hard drive—I choose literature.

  My fifteen-year crack at a writing career has had other consequences. We all know what it’s like to be served at a supermarket by a sulky teenager who might well work in Lidl but, you know: it isn’t what she does. Her mind is on greater things. So too has my mind been on greater things. Not all of it, not all the time, and I’ve tried not to be too rude. But many sacrifices have been made by me and the people who love me in order that I have the time and space to write. There is a cost to this; they deserve the benefit of seeing that the cost was not wasted and, as far as I can see, this is not going to happen.

  This post is not meant to be a dollop of ‘poor Ian’ schmaltz. I had enough of that in one glance when I bought a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook around the turn of the century. As I gave it to the middle-aged, friendly cashier in Exeter Waterstone’s, she sighed at the cover and said, ‘Aw, you want to be a writer,’ as though I were Grandpa announcing my wish to take tiffin with the Maharajah. The empirical evidence suggests that very few people who write fiction seriously ever ‘make it’ in the accepted sense. We only hear the stories of the successes. But in these days of Web 2.0, and blogs, the process is more public.

  A colleague said something to me a couple of weeks back. We had read psychology at the same university, though his was the year below mine. This colleague is now a world-renowned researcher and someone I look up to. I remarked that I was glad he had made such a success of it. He looked at me, blinked, and said, ‘Well, I’m surprised it turned out like this. You were always the golden boy.’

  That startled me. Then I recalled sitting in Dave Earle’s advanced statistics class and skimming over page after page of equations, barely taking them in, because I didn’t really do psychology. I was a writer. Meanwhile, there were hard-working friends who had not made it onto the MSc or, if they had, could not afford to take up a place. I was sitting pretty with a full-time competitive scholarship keeping me in pen and ink, not to mention another scholarship lined up to carry me through my PhD—and as the Chi-square contrasts flowed before my eyes, I was more concerned with the opening paragraph to Déjà Vu. In my defence, I did work hard on the book, and the book was good.

  Several years later, however, it’s time to do psychology.

  So now we come to the end of this post, and this blog. It is likely that I’ll continue to tinker with my extant manuscripts (not least to incorporate some notes kindly provided by writer friends). When these are complete, I’ll make them available as print-on-demand books, probably via Lulu, and then archive the site.

  Stephen King made me want to be a writer. Or, rather, his book The Stand had such an effect on me that the half-formed idea of writing books for living became what I did for the next fifteen or so years. When asked what I wanted to do as
an adult, I would, instead of shrugging in a morose teenagery way, say, ‘A writer,’ and the response would be a nod of approval; no doubt it doesn’t hurt to encourage this ambition in a young man, particularly when good English is such a transferrable skill. The model of Stephen King was the one I aspired to: he wrote a thousand words a day, rain or shine, and produced vivid, good quality, character-driven stories that I loved. At the end of each book, he would write his name, his location (usually Maine, USA), and dates between which he had written the book. I looked at those dates and thought ‘That’s what I’ll be doing’ and I relished the prospect of those years.

  In 2005, I read a short, handsome review of Déjà Vu in The Guardian as my friends in the Rashleigh pub at Charlestown harbour slapped me on the back. The theme of the evening was that this review marked a milestone on the way to some great, literary city. Outwardly, I wholeheartedly agreed. But I also knew there was a good chance that I was holding the high-water mark of what would serve as a my literary career. It did; that felt OK at the time, and, in the end, it’s still OK.

  Thanks, Aliya, the UKA Press, UK Authors, Ken, Neil, the Exeter Writers’ Group, Debra, Scott, and, of course, my agent John Jarrold. John has been tireless and faultless in his efforts to get my work under the right noses. A top man. And not to forget my partner, Britta: she put up with all manner of consequences while I spent time creating alternative realities. I never did get her that hair dryer.

  Ian Hocking

  This Writing Life

  Canterbury, UK