Wedding Ritual #14: Jon Fortgang
Jon Fortgang
is a writer of some distinction, and distinct not least for ably leading the writing group at my local library (I won't say *precisely* which locality this is, to avoid multitudes flocking to join the group, which already routinely busts at at its metaphorical seams). Jon's short fiction is published by Galley Beggar Press. In 2019 he was on the longlist for The Royal Society of Literature’s VS Pritchett Memorial Prize; he is a previous winner of the Writers & Artists Travel Fiction Writing Prize. Fortgang's work has also appeared, among other places, in the anthology City of Stories. Once a professional film journalist, Jon now works for Hackney Libraries. A novel is under construction. More about that below...
Here is Jon Fortgang's Wedding Ritual, in his own words:
Something Old
"This short piece won the Writers & Artists Travel Fiction Writing Prize a few years back. The journey is mostly inwards, though I’ve always thought an anthology of stories about UK roads would be a great idea."
-
Kites
So, this is where you brought me, that hot afternoon in '76. A rolling plain of sun-bleached green off the A34 near Twyford. You parked the Mini in a layby. We walked away from it down the track. You picked up a stick from the ground and waved it ahead like a wand. I wasn't going to come, but for weeks you'd been quietly persistent. It's beautiful up there, you said. There's never anybody around. You said there was a chance we'd see kites – the birds, not the things on string. Birdwatching, I thought. Aye aye. I didn't really know you then. You were a map I couldn't yet read. Kites, you said, are part-carrion. They mate for life and feed on the dead. You made it sound so darkly beguiling. We were young enough to yearn, that year, for the half-light at life's far edge.
We trod carefully through the long, sharp grass. The distant blue above was scored with thin, high clouds. They were cirrus, you said. Made of ice. And I was wearing this clingy purple dress. Totally unsuitable attire. Jagged blades and pointy sepals grazed my ankles and caught the hem. At the centre of the plain was a solitary tree. Silently we walked towards it. The air was thick with buzzing insects. Their volume seemed to grow. It was as if we were standing beneath a pylon or suddenly apprehending radio waves. We reached the tree and I thought we'd stop but no, you said, let's carry on. Okay, I said. I'll follow.
And then, like birds shaking out their wings before rising into an epic migratory voyage, that first exploratory kiss. For years we said we'd come back. Somehow, we never did. Now the Peugeot's parked up in the layby. The tree twists in retreat from the wind. And I'm here on my own in these scratchy polyester slacks with your old binoculars round my neck, following the trajectory of a single, far-away kite, falling through the endless depth of the sky.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Something New
"My novel-in-progress 'Paradiddle' is an odd-couple-road-trip-melancomedy. It takes its title from a drumming rudiment that enables the player to switch their leading hand from the left to the right (or vice versa), without interrupting the rhythm. Here’s some blurb followed by an excerpt from the opening chapter, Drip.
"Twenty-eight years ago, Terry briefly played drums with an unremembered heavy metal band called Monolith. Now he lives a carefully contained existence in Aylesbury, working in a bookshop and visiting his silent mother in her care-home. Over the years Terry has maintained an on-off friendship with Monolith’s former bassist Dennis, who’s dedicated his life to a variety of failed ventures. When Dennis says he needs somewhere to stay, Terry reluctantly concedes. But when Dennis turns up, he’s homeless, suffering a mysterious disability, and pursued by debtors. Against Terry’s better judgement, they embark on a road-trip to Wales in search of Monolith’s third member, Phil. Up for the ride are Dennis’s twenty-one-year-old daughter Polly and her aspiring filmmaker boyfriend, who’s decided to document the venture. As Terry’s dragged into the chaos of Dennis’s past, it becomes clear that the pair of them are bound by a secret Terry didn’t know he kept."
-
Extract from Paradiddle
Drip
Five hours after Terry Harding had given up waiting at Aylesbury station, Dennis Huckstable turned up at the front-door. It was approaching midnight on a Tuesday in April. Terry was listening quietly to Neil Young in the bungalow’s neatly ordered kitchen and had been considering a second mug of camomile tea. The alleged soporific effect had to be weighed against the fact that he'd need to get up at three in the morning to deliver a stream of flowery piss. Terry could tell it was Dennis by the knock. He slid the catch back on the door and a blade of light fell across the front-yard. Dennis was there with a suitcase on wheels and a fraying rucksack. He was also on crutches. During his journey from the bungalow’s gate to the front-door, which was two modest strides, he'd displaced the food recycling bin and unpotted a freesia. Hanging from Dennis's arm was a plastic carrier bag from which something was slowly dribbling. It was as if he'd constructed a home-made drip. Dennis hadn't crossed the threshold yet, and already Terry felt he was being asked to relinquish control of his life.
"Wouldn't have a tenner for the cab, would you?" said Dennis. "I don't seem to, ah...?"
He was wearing a complicated combat jacket that consisted mostly of pockets, zips and flaps. He patted them meaningfully, indicating that whatever the pockets contained, it wasn't cash.
"Dennis," said Terry. "Where the hell have you been? I was there at the station to meet you at seven."
"Sorry. Got waylaid."
"Why are you on crutches?"
Dennis didn't answer. Instead he did a theatrical double-take and then lifted one crutch to the dark suburban sky as if admonishing the gods with his metal staff. The effort threatened to unbalance him, and he had to lean heavily on the handle of his suitcase, which retracted under the weight. A sprinkle of sticky liquid issued from the carrier bag. "Well observed, Terry. Yeah. Currently employing a bit of… ambulatory assistance. It's nothing, mate."
 |
| Admonishing the gods with his metal staff |
There'd clearly been a drink or two over the course of the evening. Terry didn't want to know. He paid the taxi driver, then took Dennis's luggage and hauled it into the bungalow's narrow hallway. Dennis followed with his leaking carrier bag, puffing as he made his way into Terry's kitchen.
"You could have called," said Terry. "Two hours I waited for you in that carpark." This wasn't true. Terry had driven off after forty minutes, by which point Dennis had failed to disembark from two London trains.
"Phone ran out of juice," said Dennis. "Bumped into someone at Marylebone. Got chatting. You know."
Terry took this to mean that Dennis had spent three hours in the pub. Or maybe, looking at him, a park. But he said nothing. The leak, it transpired, was from an unfinished can of cider. Terry put it in the sink.
"Who d'you bump into? Couldn't you have used their phone?"
"No one you know. I didn't want to ask."
"I didn't want to wait."
"Yeah. Alright." Dennis smiled contritely. "Sorry and all that."
Terry sighed. "It doesn't matter. How are you?" He didn't wait for an answer. "I'll put your stuff in the spare room. Want a tour of the place? So you know where everything is?"
"I’ll figure it out. Let me sit down." Terry watched as Dennis eased himself into a chair at the kitchen table and leant the crutches against the wall. Dennis’s greying ponytail caught against the chair's back. As he tugged it free the blue-green jaw of a thirty-year-old snake tattoo was evident, coiling round his wrist. If you viewed Dennis from a distance, or in the half-light of a murky bar, he just about looked okay. Uneven nutrition had provided him with the angular upper body of a teenage boy, though the swell around his middle was a little more fertile looking than Terry remembered. His hairline had maintained its integrity too, which was more than Terry's had done. But when you got up close you saw that time had left its mark on him, like tyre tracks in the sand. Dennis was in his mid-fifties now. Five years older than Terry. There was a lot to remember. There was a lot to forget. On the stereo Neil Young was serenading his cinnamon girl.
"Shall we have a drink, then?" said Dennis. "To mark the occasion."
"I haven't got anything in."
"Jesus. Good job I came prepared." Dennis produced a quarter bottle of supermarket brandy from one of the pockets in his jacket and placed it triumphantly on the table.
"I don't think I've got..." said Terry.
"It's alright. As usual, Den has the situation under control." He pulled a bottle of coke from another inside pocket and gestured that Terry should bring some glasses.
"Cheers then," said Dennis.
"Alright. Cheers."
Dennis continued to rummage through the interior of his combat jacket and produced what looked like a small field radio. That was Dennis, thought Terry: always fighting the wrong war, with the wrong equipment. The device turned out to be an electronic cigarette with a hefty power-pack attached.
"Do you mind if I...?"
"Yes," said Terry. "I do."
Dennis, evidently, was going to use it anyway.
"Christ," said Terry. "Go on then. If you must."
Dennis took an appreciative suck on what looked like the device’s areal. "A present from Polly," he said. Polly was Dennis's daughter. "What's impressive is the work that's gone into creating totally authentic-looking smoke. See?" Dennis inhaled and then exhaled demonstratively. A plume of what looked and smelled like scented exhaust fumes hung in the air between them.
"Right."
"And it's good for you too."
"I don't think anyone's said vaping is actually good for you, Dennis."
"Relatively speaking."
"No doubt."
 |
| Always fighting the wrong war, with the wrong equipment |
It had been a week since Dennis had called. Eighteen months since he and Terry had last been face to face. The two of them went way back; Terry remembered when the snake on Dennis’s forearm was new. Their relationship was like one of those spiky stalks that sprung up between cracks in the pavement. Terry wasn’t sure how it had had got there, or exactly what it was, but over time it had proved unexpectedly resilient. It wasn’t always clear what Dennis was doing during those periods when he dropped out of Terry’s orbit, though rumours reached Terry, sometimes. There would be plans and projects and schemes that never quite came off, and the reason they didn't come off was usually because Dennis was their author.
It had taken Dennis a while to get to the point when he’d called the week before. As far as Terry could tell, the story involved some escalators and a van. It seemed an unlikely combination, but Dennis had a powerful ability to bring together things which under normal circumstances never met. Whatever the details, the upshot was that Dennis needed somewhere to stay and Terry had been coaxed into offering him the spare room. As far as Terry was concerned it was for a week – two weeks, max – but he knew from experience that Dennis operated according to his own timescale. He had his own notions of geography and economics, too. It was late, and Neil Young had fallen into silence. Though Terry had to be at work in the morning he knew he wouldn't sleep until he understood the nature of whatever crisis Dennis was currently navigating. The effects of Dennis’s actions tended to ripple outwards until they reached the shore, which in this case was Terry’s kitchen, Terry’s bungalow, the carefully regulated circumstances of Terry’s life.
“So,” said Terry, cautiously, because the answer was unlikely to be encouraging. “You want to tell me what happened? This time?”
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Something Borrowed
 | |
| The opening of Christopher Petit’s Robinson |
"Just to be clear, this piece, newly written for Wedding Ritual, is entirely fictitious. James Devon does not exist. Except in the dusty record shop of my mind."
To: SamC@me.com
From: dan@automaticfreq.co.uk
Re: Re: ‘Secret Life of The Song’ Series
London UK 21/08/20/ 09.01
Sam, I received the copy. Thanks. Been trying to call you for five days now but you’re not picking up. What’s up? You getting this, mate?
Dan
To: dan@automaticfreq.co.uk
From: SamC@me.com
Re: ‘Secret Life of The Song’ Series
Bristol UK 14/08/20/ 04.10
Hi Dan,
Apologies for the slow reply. As requested, below is some copy for AutoFreq’s Secret Life of the Song series. I’ve gone for James Devon’s Indigo Throw. I know you ask writers for personal responses to the tracks they choose, but I hope I haven’t gone too, ah, deep here. It’s been a weird couple of months. You’ll have heard about Kate by now. I’m sorry I didn’t tell people directly. Just put it up there on Facebook. Couldn’t face the prospect of calling everyone up, and, y’know, talking to them. Shitty of me I know, but… Anyway, hope this looks ok. I was grateful for the distraction, tbh. Happy to make any changes before it goes on the site. Actually, don’t bother sending it back. No need.
One step takes you home…
Cheers,
Sam
Indigo Throw by James Devon (Red Road Records Reissue, 2002)
On 14 September 1980, the body of James Devon was found by neighbours at his flat in Stoke Newington, north-east London, five days after his suicide. Devon was thirty-three and had worked for two years in the council’s parks service, but in 1978 he’d had signed a one album deal with minor indie label Skeelum Records. Devon recorded but never delivered the album, claiming that when he took the tapes home, they were destroyed by a burst waterpipe. They were not. Discovered among Devon’s effects were the unmastered recordings that would become Indigo Throw. Released posthumously in 1986, it’s a woozy blend of red-eyed blues, eerie atmospherics and experiments with early electronica, which Devon once described as ‘psychic static’. A spectral record about sex and death, made by one ghost and dedicated to another. It’s haunted me for years.
 |
| James Devon’s Indigo Throw, posthumously released on Skeelum Records, 1986 |
I first heard the nine-minute title track as a teenager in the early nineties. Someone I’d just met had it on an unmarked cassette. We didn’t know what it was. It drifted out of her speakers at three in the morning, the endlessly repetitive bassline rising and falling, swelling and receding, always promising to break into a new refrain but never quite doing so. The repetition articulated a longing that was strong in me then. Contained within it was a delicious tension. ‘Again’, runs Devon’s lyric in the final minute, his intonation ecstatic or tortured, depending on how you choose to hear it. ‘Again, again, again…’
Back then, when Shazam was still the name of a kid’s TV show, I had no way of identifying the track, but I carried it with me, writing it into my personal mythology, the way you do when you’re nineteen. That song I heard that night. It was AutoFreq’s own Dan Howard who helped me discover what it was, and in 2002 Indigo Throw got the full reissue treatment. Devon, the eremite who wandered Clissold Park and looked at the sky when you spoke to him, was inducted into the class of mysterious lost boys – Syd, Nick Drake, the Buckleys – and with the re-release came fragments of his story.
In 1978 Devon had fallen in love with Annie Prior, a Scottish artist living in Walthamstow. They rented a flat and she encouraged him to write, eventually helping to secure the Skeelum deal. From what’s known of the couple and their relationship, Annie was the bridge between Devon – so shy that he shook for days before the very few live performances he gave – and the rest of the world. Annie died in an accident on New Year’s Eve, four hours before the eighties began. Mike Pelling, brother of Dave Pelling who ran Skeelum Records, says Devon punished himself with guilt. The couple had been spending New Year’s Eve at home and Annie had run out of cigarettes. Devon said he’d get some for her. No, said Annie. I’ll go.
 |
| Red eyed blues: James Devon in 1978. Photo by Dave Pelling |
Over the following months Devon ploughed his grief into the Skeelum recordings. That may be why he claimed the tapes were ruined. The experience was too raw to share. But it’s a strangely sensual form of mourning, filled with images of the body, abandon, remembered pleasure. Sadness ‘Strokes the heart, a hand warmed by our private heat’. The throw of the title suggests hempy hippie homeware. But listen carefully (no mean feat considering Devon’s soft consonants and the reverb that drenches the record, mimicking memory’s echo) and it becomes clear that the material – in every sense – is not what it seems.
In Life Sitting, the most conventional track here, Devon seems to celebrate domesticity: he and Annie are alone, together, silent on the ‘sand-soft sea-blue seat’. Two notes harmonise over an oscillating drone. Togetherness has quelled anxiety. Nothing needs to be said. But in Sleep Spoke, the throw becomes a winding sheet to hide what was once revealed. In Leftunder, it’s a shroud. In Skin World it’s a shucked-off dress on the floor still bearing the contours of the wearer’s body. The sting of death, so breezily dismissed by Donne, has sparked a powerful erotic charge. This is Devon’s psychic static, perhaps: the negative seeking a positive as he dreams of his electric re-connection with Annie.
Maybe I recognized Devon’s thread, and followed. Maybe I drew it along behind me, like string trailed through a maze, but at key points in my life, this record would reappear. It was playing in a quiet Bristol pub the afternoon I first met the writer and musician Kate Fournier. She was on her own with a book on the table, next to a pint of Guinness. I went over. These were the days when I drank. I was all over people all the time. And though I may have had a line in mind, when I opened my mouth, what came out was, I love this song. At which point she sat back, considered the bedraggled man in front of her and said, with languid curiosity, Why’s that, then?
Indigo Throw played at our wedding six months later, which raised eyebrows among the few who recognized it for what it was: an anguished lament for a lost partner. But what is loss, if not love without the lover? Marriage acknowledges mortality: death alone undoes it. Death, alone. Undone. And thus, to complete the circle, in a bid to re-establish the broken connection, the same song played at Kate’s funeral earlier this year, reverberating through the rafters of a chapel in Montpelier, the profane made sacred, somehow.
Had Devon not died, it’s tempting to wonder whether Indigo Throw would ever have seen the light of day. That first encounter between Kate and I would have to have followed some other course. It might never have happened at all. ‘These are the tiny turns’, sang Devon on Left, Right, Left, Behind, as he re-experienced, I imagine, the moment Annie went instead of him. ‘One step takes you home, another takes you away. Where you go, I’ll follow. You were right. Now I am left. But I am only just behind.’
[Ends]
Kate honey. I’m only just
Comments
Post a Comment