During the residency I will be working on a new novel, The Bare Bones of Now, a patchwork tale of a post-truth world. The fictional story strands will be interspersed with news clippings and explanatory historical and philosophical notes from the authorial voice in a bid to interrogate the meaning of ‘now’ and the Orwell-esque concept of post-truth. In this vein I hope that the writing itself will cross the threshold of what ‘fiction’ is and means in this new context, and the boundary between research and writing. If equal justice can only be sought when a more accurate or balanced ‘map’ is created then I hope that this novel will work towards this aim.
The novel itself is based in the moments of border crossing, it exists within the liminal. The work hopes to draw a new species of map where the borders become the territory to be explored, a negative, as it were, of the traditional map. As I am in the early stages of this new novel the residency would also allow me some time and space to focus on my writing during this delicate stage in the novel’s development.
Novel synopsis: Sol’s first love is killed in a hit and run when they are teenagers. He sees the perpetrator, Barry Knight, a famous singer, but the police do not believe him. Sol drops out of school and turns to drug dealing to survive until he is recruited as a people smuggler. He meets an Iranian girl, Anahita, who he is supposed to deliver to an address he does not trust in an abandoned industrial estate. Fearing for her safety, he cannot take her there but having gone against the wishes of his boss he cannot return to work either. Together they set up a new business, helping people to cross borders illegally to allow them to start a new life. Gradually they fall in love. However, after one of his ‘jobs’ goes wrong Sol is stranded in an isolated refugee camp. Barry Knight comes to the camp in the pay of a large international charity to make a promotional video and is discovered and murdered by Sol. The murder is disguised by the destruction of the camp by a bomb blast, friendly fire from a UK bomber. Sol is the only survivor. Dr White, a forensic pathologist, must piece together the evidence to work out the sequence of events and Anahita must convince her to let Sol walk free.
Questions my novel will ask – who has the right to cross borders and why? What are the human, cultural and political consequences of border controls? What does it mean to cross a border illegally if the prevention of your freedom of movement is against your human rights? What are the implications of the increasing poverty gap between rich and poor? What can being rich buy you and what do you lose as a result? How can human relationships work towards healing these perceived divisions? How can we redraw the map? How can we reach equal justice and what would it mean?
A Short History of Lines by Emma Musty
Chapter 1
Paris
Such short shelves. Stubby. The books running along in little lines, cut off, contained in these inadequate boxes. It had never made sense. The ceilings were so tall, the room so big, where were all the other books? There could be so many more.
Theo turned back to the computer. The Google search screen blurred and refocused. He moved his face closer then further away. Where were his glasses? His hands hovered over the keyboard, they were still large for his height, but now ink stained like old parchment, weather-beaten as an eighteenth-century sea chart. Would he find her? It seemed impossible. Yet just the other day an ex-colleague had told him about a cousin whom he had not seen in thirty years. An old man, who had emigrated to Canada as a young one. His cousin had got in touch with him after ‘Googling’ his name. ‘Googling’. It was not even a word yet it connected a cabin on the edge of a frozen lake in the Rocky Mountains to an apartment on Lafyette Street in seconds, straighter than the crow flies. A voice came over the Sorbonne library loud speaker to inform him that they would be closing in fifteen minutes. He was running out of time.
Marianne Anouar. He typed it, spelling in approximation. He closed his eyes and saw a hand groping in a locked box, scratching away, searching for knowledge. The face was covered, the eyes blind. The map only expanded as far as the hand could feel.
She could be dead. This heap of wire and plastic could tell him that she was dead. He tried to recall her date of birth but it escaped him. She was younger than him by a year or two or three, he knew that, or thought he did, but that was all. She had a beautiful smile.
How long had it been since he had seen her? When had Algeria gained independence? When was the drowning? Thirty, forty years ago, more? Such big numbers. So much had happened; life had marched forward, filling all the moments between then and now, a marriage, a birth, more funerals than he wished to count. Had she married? Had a family? Been happy?
Been happier than him?
He had messed up a lot of things with his big clumsy hands. He had made bad choices. Acted in ways he was ashamed to recall. He tried to forget it all and forgetting was easy for him now, he should be pleased. Yet, while yesterday was a mystery to him, he could clearly recall the look on his mother’s face the day that de Gaulle walked into Paris, the heat of the Algiers sun, the backstreets of Cairo. And Marianne; small and angry and perfect, a jagged rock in the river of his life, became sharper every day. He had never forgiven himself for what happened and now it was time to apologise; to make good before it was too late.
He had been looking for something else, a tie he was sure he had bought, when he had found the letters, yellow and dry as dust. It was a long time since he had seen her handwriting, but to see it now brought tears to his eyes. He had forgotten, almost, how much he had missed her. He had become used to this hole inside himself.
He read them all again in one sitting. It was their story, or at least a part of it. He had been capable of so much emotion, so much love. Where had it gone? In one of the letters there was a photo of her. She stared right out of it, challenging him all over again. There was nobody else in the world that looked at him that way. It brought him right back to that day he had first seen her. The dress that moved around her, full of flowers as if she were a sapling and the dress was made of honeysuckle. He could see her cool stare, the way she leant forward, brushing her hair behind her ear, when she had something of importance to say, the feel of her breath on his cheek.
The library loud speaker came to life once more. There were only five minutes left. He would have to open his eyes. He thought of his late wife; her perfect face and cold eyes, and his daughter, her expression containing a life’s worth of unspoken accusations. There were so many things he needed to explain, but she had barely spoken to him for months.
The seconds were passing into minutes. He had his hands over his eyes like a small child in the middle of a war he did not understand. He felt foolish. He was seventy-nine years old. He had fought for his country. And yet, he was terrified. Even if he found her she may not want to see him, or worse, may not remember him. A blank where a man used to be. But he had to try. The empty rooms of his apartment had become unbearable to him. The silence.
And if he did by some miracle find her, how would he approach her? Email? It seemed so crass. A letter? He had once written her so many, but he would need her postal address, something which, in the modern age, had become a strange intimacy. The world had changed so much yet he had stopped, stuck in some past time, in some place that no longer existed. She would help him make sense of it all. She had always been ahead of him, always running further and at a faster pace.
He peered through a crack in his fingers at the clock on the wall, careful to avoid the computer screen. One minute to six. He had to do it. The receptionist was staring at him oddly. He had to do it now.
He opened his eyes slowly and then a few more seconds passed as they focused, rheumily, on the screen.
Zero results.
A shiver passed through his body at the hopelessness of it all and in the undertow of history he fell into unconsciousness.
Chapter 2
Paris
The metro map confronted Elise. Its ugliness pleased her. It suited her mood. She hunched her body into a corner in the too bright, white-tiled Odéon platform. To her, the map looked like the bars of a complicated cage, something designed to trick you, and as she stood to take her place in the crush of Parisian commuters, she decided that this was correct. She was trapped.
When they reached Duroc she changed onto line thirteen. Finding a seat, she leant back, her head resting on the glass, and listened to the roar of the rails. She closed her eyes and concentrated on not thinking. At Gabriel Péri she disembarked. As she reached the steps she felt the vacuum of the green and white metro leaving the station and, for a moment, wished she could be sucked back down into the darkness along with it.
Forcing herself up the steps she saw an advertisement for a Frida Kahlo exhibition. It was a large self-portrait, the one with the single monkey wrapping her in a protective embrace. Her serious eyes took Elise in. She wanted to reach out and touch the arch of her eyebrows, trace their magnificence with her fingers. Once, as a child, she had drawn a thick black line above her own eyes using her mother’s kohl. She had always wanted to be an artist.
That morning she had awoken already exhausted, her dreams lingering, her body reaching for Mathieu yet finding, as always, his absence. She concentrated on getting to the top of the steps. As she reached the street she pulled her black woollen coat closer around her. There was a winter’s chill in the late November air and she wished she had remembered to bring her gloves. She was approaching the edge of the metro map. It barely even felt like Paris; the buildings had lost their height and age. The streets were almost deserted. She crossed the main arterial road that led back into the city centre and made her way down the narrower streets to her office. Outside a café with a faded sign, a group of men sat in the cold, winter dust to smoke: Iraqi, Kurdish, Eritrean, Sudanese. They eyed her suspiciously as she passed, the border between them clear. Elise sighed and pulled her coat even tighter around her thin frame. Her morning mantra, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ running through her head.
When she reached the UKBA Application Centre she was greeted by her own reflection. The front of the building was covered in blackened windows. Her thirty-two-year-old face looked pale and her dyed red hair only served to highlight the circles under her eyes. She readied herself and went through the door with the ‘staff only’ sign on it. The building was sectioned into two main areas: the first one for the public, a waiting area with chairs and a line of counters, the second for the staff, which began at the other side of the counters. On both sides the carpets were scuffed with use. There were also two small rooms for private interviews regarding emergency visa applications. These were the only places in the building designed to hold both staff and visa applicants at the same time.
As she was about to log into a computer Simon called her over.
‘You’ve got an interview in room two, Love,’ he said in his harsh English accent.
She winced slightly at the use of the word ‘Love’ but decided to ignore it. She nodded in response and wondered who would be facing her on the other side of the Formica table today.
Cantara Bourguiba was Tunisian and spoke rapid, fluent French. Elise liked the sound of the words, the way she layered her parents’ language with that of her children as if her body itself were the site of a fundamental transition. Her English nephew was ill. He had been in a car crash. Cantara paused in her tale, possibly concerned by Elise’s silence, and looked her directly in the eye.
‘What chance do I have?’
Elise already knew that this would not be considered a close enough family member for an emergency visa. Mrs Bourguiba was still waiting for her French citizenship, suspended between two nationalities, and the British authorities did not seem to want to let anyone in these days. Everyone was categorised by potential problems: job thieves, benefit scroungers, disease carriers, rapists, murderers, terrorists.
‘I’m very sorry, but there isn’t much chance. We can do the form, but like I said, I wouldn’t hold out much hope.’
‘He is my sister’s son and he may die. That is not enough?’
‘If he was your son…’
‘If he was my son? You are telling me I am not in enough pain already? You are telling me I do not care about my sister? What are you telling me?’
‘I am telling you that under current regulations…’
‘Under current regulations I am not allowed to care for my family. That is what you are telling me. I don’t know what a girl like you is doing in a place like this. You must have made your mother sad.’
‘My mother is…’
‘Your mother is what? In the UK? Good, at least you can go and visit her.’
‘I am very sorry,’ she repeated and stood to signal that the interview was over.
On the metro home Elise could still see the woman’s face. That night she was sure she would dream of her, her worry lines and anger. She was reminded of her grandmother and the way her hands shook whenever she told the story of her own mother, a Jewish woman, turned away from Britain when she sought sanctuary there.
It was only as she climbed back out into the open air that the missed calls began to register on her phone. As she was checking the numbers, it rang again.
‘Elise Demarais?’
‘Yes?’
‘Your father is in hospital. He is currently unconscious and his condition is critical. We would advise that you get here as quickly as possible.’
As she headed back down to the Metro she tried to remember the last time she had seen him, the last conversation they had had, but she could not.
Alone in the hospital corridor Elise bit at a ragged piece of nail. She had seen the doctors. Her father had stabilised, but his brain scan showed up as a rainbow, areas absorbing blue and yellow and presenting as red, areas absorbing red and yellow and presenting as green. The electromagnetic waves which were constantly vibrating to create these images, to create even the physical presence of her father, were shifting. Every scan showed Theo’s synapses oscillating into non-existence, slowly shutting him down. His past and his future would disappear. He would become trapped in the eternal present.
It was upsetting for all the wrong reasons. She paused at the door to his room.
‘Are you OK, Ms Desmarais?’ one of her father’s doctors asked in passing.
‘Fine thank you. Is there anything he needs? Anything I can bring him?’
‘A clean set of clothes, some pyjamas, toothbrush… it’s always nicer to have your own things around you.’
‘Okay.’
‘And when he gets home he’s going to require a lot more support. I don’t know if you’ve considered…’
‘Yes, of course. We’ll be fine,’ she said, but it was only then that she realised she would have to look after him, there was nobody else to do it.
She hovered for a few more moments at the threshold before finally entering. Theo’s body looked small in the expanse of white. She was shocked by how old he suddenly appeared. He opened his eyes when she took his hand, worked his mouth like a fish gasping for air on the beach, but no sound came out. A tear rolled down through the hills and valleys of his cheek. She wiped it tentatively with her sleeve as if he were a child and they were at the beginning of everything and not the end. She stayed there in silence until a nurse told her it was time to leave.
‘I have to go. I will be back tomorrow,’ she whispered, and left the room without turning back.
It had been a long time since she had been to her father’s apartment, the place where she had grown up, the place in which her mother had died. As she entered the building the familiar damp smell of the entrance hall greeted her and she made her way across the ancient tiles to the staircase. As a child she had thought there was nothing more beautiful in all of Paris than this grand, curving sweep of steps with the Art Deco banister made of stylised flowers as if it were a freeze frame taken straight from a meadow. With her hand upon the wooden rail she walked slowly up the steps to the third floor.
The place was a mess. Dust covered the photograph of her grandparents in the hall; their faces peered through it, proud in front of their pile of rubble, 1944 scrawled in the corner. A yellowed snapshot of her and Mathieu dressed up for a party was jammed into the frame of the hall mirror. The photo curled in on itself partly hiding Mathieu’s face. Her mother’s umbrella stood discarded in the stand, abandoned for twenty years, never thrown away yet never used. The apartment was always cluttered, the possessions of three generations of one family stacked upon each other, but now it carried the feel of decay. In the disarray she saw his loneliness and realised how closely it mirrored her own.
In his room the bed was unmade. A stack of letters, yellowed with time, was balanced precariously on the night stand. She looked at the one on top, an Algiers address, and moved to pick it up, but as she did so the rest cascaded to the floor. Under them was a black and white photograph of her father in uniform. She had always assumed Theo had not completed National Service. He had never mentioned it. She picked up the letters and heaped them all unceremoniously on the bed. In the wardrobe she looked for clean clothes, but found none other than a couple of old suits he had worn for work. She would have to buy him something new.
She returned to the hospital via the shops and was informed by the ward nurse that he was ready to come home. They needed the bed. She had not expected him to be released so soon. She had thought she would have time to move her possessions, to clean the apartment, to prepare herself, to get drunk. Hastily, she handed the clothes over, unwilling to meet her father’s eye, unsure of how they would cope with this sudden intimacy. She went to wait for him in the corridor and again she felt a sense of claustrophobia. She was trapped in this building, in this life, in her skin. She wished she could slough it all off and start again, allow her atoms to re-organise in to some other life form. As a nurse wheeled her father towards her, she could almost see it, the endless jumping and shifting, the unstoppable transformation which every object, living or inanimate, was constantly undergoing. As she stood to meet him, his new clothes making him appear even more of a stranger, she felt dizzy and had to grab the back of the chair for support to prevent her from collapsing right back onto it. Nothing was solid and there was nothing she could do about it. It was simply the nature of the universe.
In the taxi on the way back to the apartment they did not speak. Her father stared out of the window, his expression blank. She tried to think of something to say but nothing came to her. The void between them seemed too vast. Theo was, as he had been most of his life, elsewhere.
The doctor had explained it all to her, briefly. Her father had suffered a stroke. Her father had been suffering from undiagnosed Alzheimer’s for some time. She had been asked to imagine a filing cabinet.
‘…when your brain is working normally you can go to the draw you need for the memory, or word, or idea you are searching for. With Alzheimer’s patients the draws become muddled, their contents get mixed up, eventually some of it begins to disappear. Your father is in the early stages. A lot of the mental confusion he will suffer in the next few days is actually a result of the stroke. He will get better, probably almost back to his old self, but this will be temporary. I’m afraid we can’t give you an actual time scale, but given his age…’
Back at the apartment she re-ran these words countlessly as she stacked and hoovered, dusted and sorted, re-organised and labelled. Her father would need a map now, even here, a place he had known all of his life. She had confined him to his bed until the apartment was cleaned, but he was so confused and upset it was unlikely he would want to leave his room even then.
A deep ache stretched itself from her chest into her limbs and whenever he called her name it worsened. She would go to the door of his room and stand there while he took her in as if all he needed was the sight of her. The medication was supposed to take effect almost immediately and yet still he mumbled incoherently and rambled through his past until the early hours, as if searching for something or someone. Occasionally she heard him say another name, ‘Marianne’, but she had no idea who this was and could only assume it was the name of one of the many women with whom he had had affairs.
Eventually he came round and she found him sat up in bed.
‘Hello,’ he said as if this was the first time they had seen each other for a while.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Tired.’
She brought him a coffee and rushed back out of the room. For the majority of her life she had put a lot of energy into hating her father but now when she looked at this frail elderly gentleman she found it hard to believe that he was the self-same person. Who was this tiny man resting against pillows to hold himself up, who cried out in the night, whose shirts were all too big for him, who was lost without even leaving home?
In the days that followed her emotions swayed wildly from sorrow to anger, from frustration to something almost approaching love. She had taken time off work to care for him, but it could not last. Now there were two sets of bills, two rents, two lives. But they were each other’s only family. Whatever their differences Elise felt a responsibility she had not expected. She remembered the look on her grandmother’s face whenever she left her at the end of visiting hours in the old people’s home. She could not do that to Theo.
She would have to give up her apartment and even then she would still need to work. Theo needed someone to be there during the day. She held interviews and showed strangers into the apartment, sat them on the sofa, offered them tea. She ushered her father out to meet them. They all had one thing in common. He hated them, and the better he got the more he hated them.
Chapter 3
Paris
Outside the day had withered, curled up in on itself into a tumble of waste; old fruit crates, plastic wrap (in France, everything was covered in plastic wrap), cigarette ends, the dead brown leaves of chestnut trees. Everybody else was walking home or going to dance in some sweaty backstreet. The mouth of the metro spat them out to their separate fates as if they tasted bad. Nebay was headed down into the snakelike caverns of Paris’ underground. Between twelve thirty and five thirty in the morning the darkened train lines belonged to him. He fixed what was broken so that these workers and revellers would never realise there had been anything to fix in the first place. His labour was as invisible as he was.
At the top of the steps the Doctor and the Lawyer greeted him, slapping his shoulders, laughing in their throats, a constrained and rasping noise. Nebay extended his arm theatrically towards the entrance, ‘Shall we, gentlemen?’
They showed their work cards and slipped through the barriers as the last customers slithered out. They made their way to Châtelet and from there to Line 4 to continue their maintenance check in the direction of Porte d’Orléans. The journey was automatic, they barely spoke. This was a transition from one world in to another. A rite of passage. It felt sacred in some way. Their matching boiler suits were their ceremonial robes.
Armed with their torches and tool belts they waded into the darkness. The tunnel whispered to them, breaking the silence. The transformation was complete. Each of them had now taken the night inside of himself. Their shadows loomed up the walls. They were giants among men. They were free.
‘Who will begin?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Tonight we will walk under Notre-Dame,’ replied Nebay.
‘Correct, Professor. The most famous church in Paris.’
‘It makes me glad we do this job at night. Otherwise fat American tourists could collapse the whole thing and crush us,’ the lawyer added.
‘I feel it important to note that not all American tourists are fat…’ replied the Doctor.
‘Just most of them.’
‘The most famous church, but not the oldest,’ Nebay brought them to order.
‘However, given that the oldest was largely destroyed in the French Revolution and only the pillars remain from the original sixth century building this could be considered a moot point.’
‘Which brings us to the Cult of Reason,’ replied Nebay.
‘The death of God,’ said the Lawyer in a booming voice that echoed off the tunnel walls.
‘Man cannot kill God.’ The Doctor had retained his faith.
They shone their torches around the tunnel as they spoke, bending to pick up rubbish and check the rails. It felt unnatural to be under so much water. Nebay could feel the weight of it crushing him, pursuing the air out of his lungs.
‘Yet God can kill man.’
‘But never the ones I want him too…’
‘Ours is not to reason why…’
‘Hébert would have disagreed.’
‘Robespierre would not.’
‘Which brings us to the Cult of the Supreme Being.’
‘A movement that not only resurrected an impotent God but had far less interesting art.’
‘Since when, Mr Lawyer, have you been an aficionado of art?’
‘I like the Jungle Book.’
‘He’s lying,’ said Nebay, ‘he’s been to Rousseau’s house. If his parents had not made him study law he would have been an artist.’
‘Is this true?’ asked the Doctor in mock seriousness.
The Lawyer looked at the ground and knelt to examine the rail. ‘Maybe.’
‘Then there is hope for you after all.’
They had come to the platform of Cité and sat on the edge with their feet dangling into the tunnel to have a cigarette. While Paris slept they tarried in her intestines. Nebay wondered if anybody above ground was dreaming of them.
‘Any word on your sister?’ asked the Doctor.
‘No,’ Nebay replied, looking down at his muddy work boots. ‘I need to be in the UK.’
‘You and every other African in Paris,’ the Lawyer scoffed.
At Odéon, Nebay left the Doctor and Lawyer. He would see them at home later but for now he needed to breathe above ground. It was still dark, but slowly the city was rubbing the sleep from her eyes. He wound his way up into the Latin Quarter. At a book shop he paused, imagining his own work positioned in the window, a thought that sent a shiver through him. So many writers had pounded these streets, filling the air with words. Who was to say that he would not someday be one of them?
He continued on to a Turkish café that opened early and ordered a coffee, watching through the window as the street woke up and the night faded. He roused himself as day approached and continued his walk, but a winter rain began to fall. He stopped to take cover in the doorway to an old apartment building. A young woman came out on her way to work. He smiled at her and moved towards the door, she held it ajar as he walked through. In the entrance hall he shook himself like a stray dog and only then noticed the intricate staircase. He walked over to place his hand on the rail. A field of flowers grew out of the metal. He almost laughed. He had found summer in the middle of winter.
Emma Musty is a writer, activist and academic with ten years’ worth of teaching experience in both academic and community settings. She was awarded my PhD in Creative Writing from Aberystwyth University in July 2016. The novel she wrote during her PhD, A Short History of Lines, is currently out with agents. Her work has appeared widely both in print and online in publications including Aesthetica and Cheval 5, published by Parthian. Both of her novels were longlisted in the Mslexia Novel Prize 2014. In 2015 she completed two publishing internships with Honno Press and The New Welsh Review. She is currently working on a new novel, The Bare Bones of Now and edits the news site ‘Are You Syrious’ once a week – https://medium.com/@
In 2016 she co-founded a co-operative social centre, Khora (www.khora-athens.org), for the refugee community in Athens in response to the ongoing refugee crisis. Khora was created as ‘a radical otherness that “gives place” for being’ (Derrida). The current EU border system creates the illusion of the ‘other’. It divides humans into categories of those who have freedom of movement and those who do not, those who have valuable lives and those who do not, those who have the right to make choices and those who do not. Khora stands in opposition to this system and wants to create a space in which all people can come together, where everyone is ‘other’ in standing against this mode of oppression and thus equal.
