'New Developments'
A sneak peak at my new novel
I’ve been working on my second novel since summer 2022 and this week put together the first query to an agent. It’s a nice little milestone and I thought I’d celebrate it by sending you an extract from ‘New Developments’.
The book is a mystery novel about the disappearance of 18-year old Caroline Smith in the early 2000s. It has a plot but I think this section works as a stand-alone. Hope you enjoy, and if you like it - well, the first one is still out there to buy.
When you arrive in the afterlife the first thing they make you do is paperwork. Bienvenida!
It isn’t, as you might think, in order to ascertain whether you should head to heaven or hell, but to work out exactly whether you should go on anywhere at all. They also want to check out whether you’ve paid any outstanding fees. I was never quite sure how payment worked.
Then you have an interview. I’m unclear what the information you give there is used for - it’s sort of a consumer feedback form. They ask you to describe your life experience, highlights and low points, though they make clear that they’re only interested in what occurred in your life rather than the circumstances of your death. They’re concerned with the content of your life rather than the precise manner of how you left it – that’s a detail.
I remember only one of the other questions – that they asked me what the point of my life had been. Now, even at the time I was inclined to think, “Maybe you should be telling me that!”, but the thing was I felt immediately able to answer: Freedom.
My life had been an attempt to live freely, to push the envelope a little further of what was allowed to people like me. I mean women. Not that I remembered much about what happened in my life, or maybe I could back then. What I remembered was the feeling my life had given me. They offered no comment on my response, just typed it into the computer system – the system wasn’t terribly up to date if I recall. Bit clunky. I think I even once saw an Amstrad, though of course that could have been someone’s nostalgia trip. I guess you can choose which generation of technology you want to use in heaven, and it’s all backwards compatible.
Anyway after that you wander around in the districts for a bit and you try and find your people. It’s sort of a bit like late-‘90s internet chat rooms, just moving through until you find something which seems to have a good vibe. It’s then, as you move through abandoned ice floes or rusted industrial railyards that you begin to forget – begin to forget the specifics of what happened to you and particularly the circumstances of your death. Oh, you never forget that you are dead; you just become increasingly vague and foggy as to how you came to be so. You just never forget that you are.
A charitable explanation for why they make you forget your precise life – and I’m sure it’s a decision from above – is that it enables you to embrace your new realm of possibilities more enthusiastically. They want you to get caught up in the sweep of bars and spectacle and believe me, for a while, I did.
But after a while of it – years, I suppose, though time passes in an odd way here, and sometimes they call something a year which felt like a month last year and then it’s like a decade before another year is called – I realized that I could no longer quite remember who I had been. I could tell you a few salient details; I knew I’d been alive at the end of the 20th century, I knew I loved and still love music, and I knew I was born in a coastal town. I knew that I was, as I said, a woman. I think I’d even been beautiful, or I remember thinking that I might be.
But I couldn’t in all this have really told you who I was or even what I was like – and when I catch myself in one of the rare mirrors here my body seems like an answer without a question. I tend to present a somewhat unchanging appearance, even down to the clothes I’m wearing, and it seems only with huge mental effort that I was able to shift this outlook; one day I remember thinking that I’d like an orange dress and ages later I passed a mirror in the forest and I was wearing an orange dress.
For about a decade, I threw myself into the afterlife nightlife; I even have some memories of running my own bar, although I may just have been going to one. I went to so many pool parties and castle retreats. I remember a castle with blue turrets which looked out over a great plain. In this phase my days were often dominated by lie-ins with hangovers, which only worsened as time passed, the presence of increasingly debilitating hangovers being a sure sign to me that I was not in heaven.
I walked one day through a city and saw a quote on a billboard. It said:
In our dreams we have seen another world, an honest world, a world decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live. We saw that in this world there was no need for armies; peace, justice and liberty were so common that no one talked about them as far-off concepts, but as things such as bread, birds, air, water, like book and voice.
But if I lived now in the other world what use were dreams of the old one?
What use are yesterday’s dreams?
One night in one of my favourite districts, I went to a bar I hadn’t been to before. It was full of the golden-eyed and big-bellied elite crowd who ate their big tubs of caviar and bellowed out their company songs.
Still, there were also rumours that it was a hang out for engineers, namely the people responsible for the design here, for making the worlds. And sure enough at the bar that night was a quiet bespectacled man in a thick blue polo neck who could only have been from the designer class. I saw that he seemed lonely and, being confident with tequila, went up to him.
‘Hello!’ I said.
‘Oh, hello. I haven’t seen you here before,’ he replied.
‘I’ve never come here before. Well, I’ve come here but this place wasn’t here.’
‘It only pops up every few months – we don’t want it to be overrun.’
‘Are you an engineer then?’
‘We prefer to use the term designer. But yes, a lot of us like to hang out here. You’re a client?’
‘I guess so, yes.’
‘Because some of the people here are NPCs. We don’t want you to feel lonely.’
‘I wouldn’t thought that was an issue here.’
‘It’s about new people joining. If there’s fewer babies down there, less people join us up here.’
‘I’d never thought about it like that before.’
‘Yeah, who’d have thought fertility issues impact the dead,’ the man smiled.
‘I didn’t even think you people were allowed to mix with us.’
‘You people?’
‘You know. Creatives.’
‘Now and then is fine. It’s mainly a rule so we don’t get distracted from our work.’
‘I guess you already know who I am then.’
‘I mean, I have access to that information. But I prefer surprises.’
‘Me too. But I guess everyone asks you all manner of things anyway.’
‘Yeah.’ He looked stressed. ‘Before you ask – no, I don’t know what you’re doing here either.’
‘But you must know something.’
‘I know that we’re awaiting further instructions,’ he said. ‘And in the meantime, we’re to provide you with distractions.’
‘Holding us here for what?’
‘The Day of Judgement, presumably,’ said the designer.
‘You don’t honestly believe in that.’
‘I don’t know. I just do my job,’ he said. ‘Do you like the music?’
It was catchy, but it wasn’t my focus.
‘Were you alive once too?’
‘I don’t know. I lost my last memory some time ago.’
‘How did you know it was the last?’
He smiled. ‘I suppose I don’t.’
‘But you remember you’ve forgotten things.’
‘Yes, wonderful things. A whole life –’
He made the sign of a puff of smoke.
‘There you are then.’
‘I remember a Client came down and gave a talk to us once,’ he said. ‘All the engineers.’
‘Can you remember what they said?’
‘I remember they said there’d been a lot of unintended consequences with their product. And he quoted something - Sub specie aeternitatis.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s Spanish I think; I don’t have any relevant books. It must have been relevant to our situation. Or was.’
He showed his arm, where the words faded into view as a tattoo before they faded out again.
‘Huh.’
‘I shouldn’t say too much though. We still have pretty robust guidelines on sharing with clients.’
‘I didn’t really get a life, I think,’ I said.
‘No?’
‘No. I have a feeling that it was a very short life. I see a lot of old people here and when I see them I react instinctively with, Well, I never got to be like that. Though I don’t know the details.’
‘Your image is normally presented at the time you were at your happiest.’
‘So – those old people were at their happiest?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘Shame I didn’t get to see it then.’ I thought about it. ‘You know, it does make me wonder if I could do something.’
‘What like?’
‘You know, on the production side of things.’
He considered it – he gave me that.
‘Like what?’
‘Well, I could be a designer.’
‘It’s not the easiest process. You have to take an exam.’
‘I could so take an exam,’ I said. ‘I’d love to take an exam. That’s definitely something I used to do. I was good at it.’
‘But there’s enough down here to be going on with, isn’t there?’
‘There’s plenty but –‘ I said after a pause, ‘There’s no story.’
He paused for a long time. ‘And story’s what you’d like?’
‘Story is what I need,’ I said, ‘And I speak on behalf of a great many of your clients.’
‘You’ve tried communicating this to them,’ he said.
‘I mean, I’ve written things on trees.’
‘To be honest, I think if they’d have been interested they’d have contacted you by now.’
‘Right.’
‘Well, you know. If you keep going around, maybe someone will notice you.’
‘What, you mean just wander round for another few decades?’
‘I don’t know what else to suggest.’
‘Yeah, if only I could talk to someone in the design side of things, right.’
I’d shown at best American levels of subtlety but he had at least got it.
‘Look, I can’t promise you anything but – write down your details. I’ll mention it when I get back up; maybe not for a few years, but I’ll mention it when the moment is right.’
He stood up now. I had the feeling he had quite a long trip back home, that he didn’t live in a fancy district.
‘Lovely to meet you,’ he said. ‘I need to get the lift back.’
‘Before you go,’ I said. ‘Just a moment. Listen – I don’t expect you to contact me – I know a polite rejection when I see one. But just don’t contact me to say no, right? Let me keep the hope alive that you might be in touch one day.’
He said, ‘I promise, but I can’t promise you that you won’t forget this talk.’
But I never did. At least not yet. I sometimes run the chat through my head to make sure I can remember it all and I always find it. In fact, it’s the last clear moment I can always remember, before the day I sensed you were somewhere near and came to guide you around.