While Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ebo is extremely intelligent, he has no way of knowing that Charles is running scared of the bailiffs. Lucky for Gyasi, though, Charles announces this fact as soon as he discovers Gyasi (up to his knees in kapok and rifling through large piles of teddy-related detritus) in his sewing room.
Charles all but bellows: ‘This is forced entry! Which creditor are you here for? What have you taken control of? I demand to see documentation!’
‘The door was open, my friend,’ Gyasi responds coolly, with a shrug.
The sewing room is very small – it’s really just a large cupboard which an optimist trying to sell Charles’s house might call ‘an office’. Charles is a tall man but he is extremely good at compressing himself into small spaces when needs must. And Charles is very sensitive to the idea of work/life balance and therefore refuses, on principle, to allow his work to take up too much space (either literally or metaphorically).
Charles has no intention of becoming a workaholic.
He’s way too complacent and savvy for that.
Bear making is ‘just a job’. It’s not ‘a calling’. It’s not ‘a drive’. It’s not ‘a passion’.
Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ebo is magnificently slender. He is exactly six feet tall.
(The Subject is six feet one inch tall.)
He dresses in an elegantly feminine manner.
(The Subject finds this analysis ‘patronising in the extreme’.)
Not as a woman, but as a fine-boned man who enjoys wearing feminine-style clothes (tight, white jeans, pretty, pastel-coloured shirts, a bright yellow mackintosh, cinched at the waist with a little belt).
(The Subject finds the above description ‘odd – disquieting, even borderline disturbing’.)
He is a pretty boy.
(The Subject says, ‘What?! Does she seriously expect to get away with this?!)
He has knock-off designer sunglasses pushed up on his head.
(The Subject’s Tom Ford ‘Dimitry’ TF334 [£181.33] sunglasses were purchased at the Cardiff branch of John Lewis – 2-/0-/2018 – with a gift card on the occasion of his birthday. He has all the relevant documentation to prove it.
The date has been partially obscured to avoid identity theft.
The Subject wishes it to be known that he laughed – out loud – at the rich irony of the above statement.)
He is sporting a pair of lemon-coloured loafers. His eyebrows are nothing short of sublime.
(The Subject insists that he has never groomed or plucked his eyebrows – or managed them in any way – and that the above sentence represents a personal slur ‘cleverly couched in the language of a compliment’.)
No. No. This is ridiculous. It simply isn’t workable.
Not only am I incredibly tense re the (possible, future) want of italics and the potential horror of AMERICAN TYPEWRITER undermining the calm fluidity of the text, but Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ebo’s perpetual interruptions (in smug legalese) and his hectoring, self-righteous tone are completely intolerable. Everything is contested. Everything is contrary.
And I need full access. I demand it! Why this sudden reticence on Gyasi’s part? What does it mean? Why can’t he just pull his head in and comply – roll up his sleeves and muck in – like everybody else? Wang Shu is grumpy – lumpen – self-determined – hard-boiled – borderline obnoxious – but even she has been a dream to work with by comparison (yes, always on the phone to her Chinese agent complaining about the number of words she and Ying Yue have in the text as a whole, but generally very open – very good-natured).
It’s the pervasive atmosphere of ill will seeping into every line that I’m really struggling with. And I find myself over-compensating – over-thinking – being excessively complimentary and sycophantic – granting Gyasi favours that none of the other characters get (he has lovely eyebrows, sure, but do I really need to make ‘a thing’ out of them? And this ludicrous middle name ‘Chance’ which he insists upon because it helps to identify his page on Instagram). I’m nervous around him! I’m tentative, which (I firmly believe) is severely deleterious to the free-spirited atmosphere that my unconscious mind/muse/blah demands as a prerequisite to true, unencumbered creativity.
Enough is enough.
I am henceforth kicking Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ebo out of the novella (as I type this I notice – with a slight smirk – how spellcheck repeatedly changes Gyasi’s surname from Ebo to Ego. That can’t be a coincidence, can it?).
Although … hmm … Although … might it be good for me (for my wayward spirit) to try and be a little bit more considered – a little bit more careful – in general? Doesn’t Richard Grannon often say that the urge to ‘naive innocence’ is a neurotic one? Is my urge to create uninhibitedly a neurotic one, therefore?
Shouldn’t a person’s Inner Child (cf. I’m OK – You’re OK) be gently curbed by their Inner Adult on the odd occasion?
When I consider how obliging the other characters have been … I mean Charles has been incredibly helpful. He didn’t turn a hair when I exaggerated his ‘collections’ into wholesale hoarding. He accepted that it worked as a kind of extended metaphor in the text. And he hates the name Charles but accepts that it’s suitably bland and uncontentious with a ‘royal’/‘sovereign’ undertow.
I am Sovereign.
I am Sovereign!
I am Sovereign.
I am Queen of my own serenity.
Yes.
peaceful entry
(Sorry – this is just a note I left on the page to remind myself of something else.)
Abigail (who is now Jewish, and called Avigail, although Charles keeps forgetting this and calling her Abigail, which has my poor copy-editor, Morag, literally pulling her hair out) is tremendously obliging. And this runs counter to her character, which is fractious, at best.
Ying Yue? Who can tell with Ying Yue? Who knows what Ying Yue will do next? Although there was an interesting sub-plot with her brother – Fei Hung – which she suddenly went cold on and I suspect this was Gyasi’s malign influence. I’m not certain what it entailed, but I think it involved Fei Hung getting a graduate student pregnant during his time studying Business Law at the University of Bangor.
Huh.
‘Golden Child’.
And Wang Shu is still none the wiser.
I am going back to Chapter 2. It will take me literally a couple of lines to rework the whole thing …
So, from page 57, two paras down.
‘There’s a small issue with the bailiff,’ Charles explains, ignoring this.
As they walk up the road and approach Charles’s house they stroll past a tiny, elderly man who is wearing a giant pair of dark glasses and holding a white cane. He is standing next to a large, blue, waste disposal bin. He is perfectly still.
The blind old man is illumined.
I have actually changed the font into AMERICAN TYPEWRITER as a gentle ‘screw you’ to Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ego – Ebo
Ebo Ebo.
The revised version runs:
‘There’s a small issue with the bailiff,’ Charles explains, ignoring this.
As they walk up the road and approach Charles’s house they stroll past a handsome, dark-skinned, willowy youth who is leaning, nonchalantly, against a large, blue waste disposal bin. Avigail’s eyes return to him, several times, slightly perplexed, to peruse his pretty, yellow raincoat (there is no sign of rain).
This yellow raincoat man is illumined.
I don’t think it works so well. Begs more questions. But what the heck. It’ll do.
Then Chapter 6. Second from last page, first paragraph:
Well, whatever the story Charles is living now about this situation –
Poltergeist?
– it is 99.9 per cent unlikely that his story (creative as he undoubtedly is, inventive as he undoubtedly is) involves a fiercely intelligent, immaculately attired, twenty-three-year-old Ethiopian professional carer called Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ebo riffling furiously though his teddy bear collection.
Now changed to:
Well, whatever the story Charles is living now about this situation –
Poltergeist?
– it is 99.9 per cent unlikely that his story (creative as he undoubtedly is, inventive as he undoubtedly is) involves an incredibly persistent, highly intelligent, terrifyingly indignant, partially sighted seventy-eight-year-old man of diminutive stature called Denny Neale (wearing filthy, green dungarees with a neatly plaited Robert Crumb’s Mr Natural-style beard and a giant magnifying glass) riffling furiously though his teddy bear collection.
Actually, I think this works better.
Overcompensating with too many descriptive words, though.
Screw Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ebo.
Need to bring Denny Neale completely TO LIFE!
Ka-pow!