DO GHOSTS EVER DIE?

 A very short story I wrote a few years ago. I used to work in the textile industry. This was written after I left driving past a factory (not the one I worked in) in the process of being demolished. A workman was sitting eating his lunch. I imagined all the other workmen through the years when the factory was a factory.

 

DO GHOSTS EVER DIE?

The man sat on the loading bay in front of the rotting corpse of the factory, that rose fully four storeys above him.  All about him the bulldozers cracked the factory like an egg, for the silent workmen in helmets and masks to fill lorry after lorry with the dust strewn remains of the buildings.    

The man did not have a hat. The man did not have a mask. The man carefully unfolded the package that lay beside him and began to eat his carefully prepared lunch.

Dust swirled, and bricks tumbled, and wood cracked, but the man sat, and ate, and wiped his face free from the sweat of the mornings work.

A sudden tilt of the head back towards the factory, and a disappointed face, and the man rose and stretched, then folded his carefully prepared sandwiches away.

He looked out at the small crowd that had gathered on the hillside opposite the factory, that watched and winced with every whip of the bulldozer against the crumbling building.

A sudden shout and the workmen turned to gather at the safety of the gate. Then the sudden gathering of noise and the man walked deep into the bones of the factory that crumpled to dust, and he was gone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE REMOVAL MAN

 

Some people, maybe most people, you can’t see their younger selves when old, or older. 

Not the removal man.  Everything about him, the way he rocked as he moved as if listening to some long forgotten (to most people) song; the constant jokes and stories; the whispered confidences; you were his mate as soon as he met you.

You could imagine him being the centre of a teenage group, not gang, the restless one, the one that drove the others on, kept them on their toes, filled their space with energy.

I could see him as a Mod.  Not the sixties variety but the seventies and eighties. 

‘You’re a fan of the Jam.’ He asks.

I nodded and thought removal men must get so many glimpses into other people’s lives.  The sadness, or maybe the joy, of leaving one home, the joy, or maybe the sadness, of moving to another.  The books you read, the furniture you’ve sat in, the bed you’ve slept in. 

Also the music you like and love.

‘The Jam.’

Paul Weller guitar and vocals; Bruce Foxton bass and vocals; and Rick Buckler Drums. 

Temporary connections are made over the packing of lives into a box to be transported elsewhere.

He holds up ‘In the City.’

‘Can never box this and put in the attic mate.’

I hadn’t mentioned putting anything in the attic. Maybe his mind transported on the magic music carpet to another place and time.

Here comes the proof with the Mod dance in our living room, and even though no music is being played, the record player already packed, it’s loud and clear, the jerky rhythm in his movement, the joy and energy in his face.

Where is he?

‘Taking over the dance floor mate.’

I hadn’t asked out loud but he’d tapped into the unspoken question.

‘You can shove that Disco crap. This was music.’

I imagine the gang all in a circle, arms tight, dancing with their elbows, feet stamping to the rhythm.  This was a boys only circle, lost in the moment, not even aware of any admiring female glances.  The pick-up lines would come later.

He sings ‘Sounds from the Street.’

‘Sounds from the street, sounds so sweet

What’s my name?

It hurts my brain to think.’

When I say sing I mean shout!  And suddenly I’m in his group dancing and sing/shouting like on the middle of the dance floor, lyrics bellowed forming word clouds above our heads, there for all to see amongst the packed dance floor.

When was the last time I had listened, never mind danced, to The Jam?

On my own magic music carpet now.

Where you taking me music?

 

A cottage just outside Galashiels when I was at the college.  A place I rented with another couple of students, far enough away from civilization to blast the music to the hills, and dance like there was only that moment.

Back before grey hair and jerky non rhythmic movement of age and too little exercise.  The present drags me back.

` Mate you a bit out of puff there! `

I was.

He laughs, not in a harsh way, on his way back out to the van.

I wait for the next half forgotten boxed memory.

MY FIRST LIBRARY

A short reminisce about my first library  that was published on the Cilips website in support of their campaign #librariesareessential

Apart from the school library the first library I joined was Airdrie Library.  I would like to claim it was to explore further my love of Shakespeare, or delve into ancient philosophy.

More prosaic reason:  to help me, so I naively believed, talk to girls.  My defence is that I was fourteen at the time, and the phrase `wouldn`t say boo to a goose` springs to mind.  I loved football and sports in general, and my reading was comics especially Roy of the Rovers.  Still love Roy of the Rovers, received an annual of stories as a Christmas present a few years back. I can`t remember back then ever, apart from in school, reading a book.

Airdrie library is a magnificent building with an observatory as part of the building.  I didn`t know that at the time and for a good few years after. Rather than study the stars I had the more pressing need to study words to impress the girls. Naturally the first books taken out were mostly eight hundred pages of close type.  A lot of words in type barely able to read without a Sherlock Holmes type magnifying glass.  Dickens was an early choice. Barnaby Rudge if I remember right the first novel I took out the library.  I got as far as the blurb and a drop jawed flick through the endless pages.  Not then but Dickens is now one of my favourite authors. Reading likes aren`t always instant but can grow with you. I also took out Victor Hugo`s Les Miserables mainly for the fact that it included some poems in French and English translation.  I imagined it casually falling out of my school bag.

` You speak French? ` She said.

` Oui. ` I casually replied.

It stayed in my imagination as I never had the confidence, or good sense prevailed, to try it.  It took me a good while but I did read Les Miserables. 

I still love a hardback full weighted book.  My bookshelves groan with them.

Even though I never did learn how to talk to girls in French, joining the library was the start of my discovery of a world I barely knew existed.

I had always been a dreamer, making up stories inside my head.  That walk through the library doors was the beginning of the realisation that I could write my own stories.  I did and eventually became a full time writer, after many years working in a textile factory.

There are many other reasons to enter a library alongside taking out books.

Company; information; the road to confidence; escape into another world.

I always think of the library as like the Tardis.   So much bigger on the inside than out.  Once you travel in a library you are never the same person again but an expansion of yourself.  A library doesn`t belong to anyone or exist in the now, but to everyone and is timeless

Tom Murray Writer

Scottish Book Trust Reader In Residence to Scottish Borders Libraries 2013-2014

I CAN ONLY BE ME—NO LABELS PLEASE.

 Why do I write?    

Good question?  Or irrelevant?

Haven`t made my mind up yet but here we go having a think about it by asking another question.

Who am I?

This?

Tom Murray was born in the village of Chapelhall which is a couple of miles from Airdrie, and fifteen or so from Glasgow. He worked in the Textile industry for a number of years in East Lothian and then in the Scottish Borders. After many years living in in the Scottish Borders recently moved to Dumfries.  He is married with two sons.

 

Or maybe

Tom Murray is a playwright, poet and fiction writer. His recent plays have been widely performed, his stories and poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies in Scotland and further afield.  He was co-editor of the Eildon Tree magazine from 2000-2011

I might be?

Tom Murray likes football and tennis (watching, the days of playing long since passed).  Coffee and cake.  He loves reading, and a good murder mystery featuring a disgruntled detective with a disastrous home life, especially if teamed with an enthusiastic rookie who is everything they were before turning cynical.

That last part about the detective I`m exaggerating but the truth is sometimes I do like those programmes and sometimes they annoy me.

To summarise I`m male, working class Scottish from the west coast,  worked in a factory for number of years while writing all the time, and since 1999 have been a professional full time writer. 

Sorted?  Do you know me now? Can you see all of me, or the above in my writings?  

Is the above the all of me? 

No it isn’t and I recognize some of me in the above.  Truth is still discovering who me, is!

How to do that through the writing?

Write what you know?  

Never sure of that as writing credo.  I understand the basis of it to write about your direct experience adding a dose of imagination and storytelling editing to distance it from straight memoir.

If I don`t know all of me how do I know what I know? 

This is why I don`t believe that memoir, autobiography or biography strictly exist in the space advertised.  No such thing as a ‘true’ story but a version from a particular angle still edited like any story told. Memoir to me is a question not an answer. 

Not saying the facts aren’t correct but there is always interpretation and that interpretation comes from emotion as well as intellect, and of course always after the fact, and with all the other history since the time of the facts described.

So I would rather write to discover what I haven`t discovered I know yet! And then question that knowledge.  Use my imagination to create a character who is complex and whose actual reality is shifting all the time even if they don`t acknowledge it. Characters are not me but built from my knowledge drawn from direct experience, vicariously through others, films, TV, books, in fact everything I have ever seen, heard or felt.

My plays and stories may not be about me but they come from me, and not any outside or spiritual mystical process.

Place:  I do not believe in place.  Reading about Brion Gysin at the moment and he is described as a foreigner in every land.  I feel that and am fine with it. 

I write in many ways to escape place, to disappear as an artist into the art, as Joyce`s description of the artist in Portrait of an Artist. To me that means disappearing from the potted biography of yourself.  To escape a singular defined identity free to explore the multitudes that is lived life.

I used to live in a house with a spectacular view.  Visitors commented on it all the time, and if they knew I was a writer assumed it would be a point of inspiration for me.

When I was alone I pulled the curtains so I didn`t see the view.  The landscape I needed was inside my head and consisted of all the landscapes I had witnessed and processed via walks, and visits, and holidays, through reading, movies and TV and other folk`s descriptions.

If I do have a preference it is for industrial landscapes rather than hills and glens.  It might have come from the fact that my father worked, and then owned a factory, and then I worked for many years in one.  I look for stories and find them where people are, and still are in their absence in a forgotten and desolate industrial complex. I don`t look for defined beauty but where the stories are to me.  If part of me inhabits these places as an emotional memory that is fine.  Like the example of the TV detective comment above, some days I`m drawn to this emotional memory other days I`m not.

My imaginative emotional landscape shifts and grows all the time.  That`s one of the reasons I write—to explore truthfully and without judgment that shifting landscape.

I believe this type of landscape is where people truly live daily but it is difficult to pin down.  I don`t need to pin it down.  I love the ebb and flow of it.  I appreciate the places I have lived, and where I was born and brought up, but they are each only a changing part of me. 

Does the need for an identifiable place in fiction come with age? Is that why it is assumed that fantasy and science fiction are the preserve mainly of the young?  We have no actual home only thoughts but in the end the need to believe we have is emotionally strong especially as the actual end comes into view.

Subject for a play I think? 

Magritte`s painting This is not a Pipe.

It is not a pipe; it is a painting of a pipe.

One of my poems My Father.

It is not my father it is a poem about a father. 

To summarise I`m male, working class Scottish from the west coast,  worked in a factory for number of years while writing all the time, and since 1999 have been a professional full time writer.

I am male but a lot of my characters are female because I write from emotions and everyone feels the same emotions of fear, anger, and joy.

I am working class but I write from the emotions everyone feels the same emotions of fear, anger, and joy.

I am Scottish but I write…

I want to go on and discover what I know, which I`ll never do because every day more is added. I`m fine with that.

Labels:  Male, Working Class, Scottish, husband, father, son, brother, cousin and on and on.

My writing can contain them all and none of them.   I can write realistic stories with a father the main character one day, a mother the next, or surreal stories of falling into your own head or waking up as a shadow.  I can write both types of story one after the other. 

No labels please, I can only be me.  Whoever that is.