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Blurb for upcoming book - Order of the Stone - Book 1 - The Dreaming Crystal

Releases Nov / Dec 2022

It’s 2096 and the ancient ghost of a murder victim rages in a lost gemstone, striving to win free. The chains of power that bind it are weakening and disaster looms though the world is unaware.

More than ever, humanity is beleaguered by drought, flooding, poverty and society shot through with corporate corruption.

Tina wants to stay dry, make enough money to get stoned and get by, and figure out if she should dump Nate.

Nate is small fry with a big brain on a mission for equality in the corporate-run world. But he’s got to eat too so he side-hustles hacking jobs. That’s how he finds out who Tina really is.

Strange earthquakes gather force off the cost of Akarana and nobody has time to care. But when an old house is demolished, something unbreakable is broken and Nate, Tina and everyone in the world will be drawn into the legacy of the curse of the ghost in the Stone whether they believe in such nonsense or not.
***

The idea of this is not really (or at all) to give a plot synopsis. It's more to give the reader a feel for what they can expect of the contents. It can be changed easily enough right up to publication date but I'm starting the marketing now. So what I need to know is less how good it is and more how much it doesn't completely suck. I used various popular sci-fi fantasy novels as a guide.

Typical word count recommended for a blurb is 150-250 words and the less the better. For the A Song of Ice & Fire novels, it's usually down near the 150. This is 164 so... acceptable creepage.

Who wants to read this book? Who doesn't want to read it?

I think three problems with writing are firstly that I’m positively biased towards my own writing, secondly, I know how I want it to come across when I’m writing it and thirdly, writing can be a lot of work. So as well as feeling personally sensitive to criticism as any human does, if the criticism is actually reasonable, it could spell a whole lot of boring do-over and push back an important part of any creative work: the feeling of finishing it. Reading others’ work helps me maximise my objectivity about my own work, increase the quality of my creative output over time and minimise do-overs. This article tells you how.

Firstly and relevant to all the other points in this article, when reading another author’s work, especially if I’ve actually paid money to read their book, while I want to enjoy the read, I’m also somewhat indifferent to their feelings about their reviews (not quite true since I’m only human and can’t help sparing a thought for the fellow author behind the book). For all intents and purposes, 100% of the time, I don’t personally know the authors of the books I read, so their feelings don’t figure largely in my judgement of their creations. Unlike with my own writing therefore, It’s very easy for me to take their writing at face value and feed back bluntly and honestly via Amazon reviews etc. It almost doesn’t matter whether other authors’ books are good or bad. What’s more interesting to me is why they’re good or bad. I think this key concept unlocks the following opportunities which are less available to me reviewing my own work and much more so when I read others’ work.

The next way reading other people’s work helps is that the more I read, the better I get at neutrally identifying and articulating praise and criticism of a book. In other words, rather than just responding to the book as a reader and saying it was moving, exciting, suspenseful, frightening, disturbing, dull or annoying, other people’s books give me the opportunity to try to explain what it is about a book that moves me the way it does, without upsetting myself and also without the benefit of insider knowledge of the plot and character creation (also see later). Think of it like surgery. It may be possible to perform certain surgery on yourself but it’s generally easier to perform any surgery on someone else!

For example, recently I read a horror-fantasy book which I didn’t enjoy very much. One important reason for this was its overuse of sign-posting later plot points combined with its verbose narration and descriptive material. In other words, I was given too much information about what was going to happen next or later and then it took a very long time and a lot of unnecessary detail, to read my way there, only to discover no new information (Mheah! I paid money for this!). Coincidentally, reviewing a chapter I wrote a couple of weeks back immediately after reading the horror-fantasy, I started noticing exactly the same pattern of sign-posting (gulp!). Here reading others’ work comes to the rescue in just the same way as it highlights problems. In Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, there are some masterfully done suspense scenes. To fix the problems with my work in progress, I’ve been re-reading some of those scenes to pick up tips on how they manage to give just enough information to keep me on edge and not so much as to blow the resolution of the tension too soon. Better to identify and understand the problem even if you struggle to solve it, than be clueless about where the one-star ratings are punching you from.

The next reason I find others’ work helps improve my own is that – as touched on above – objective analysis of a piece of writing is more difficult to do with my own work, not only because of the above-mentioned personal bias but also hugely, because of simple human limitation. It can sometimes be very hard to separate the content in my braincell (with all the insider knowledge about my manuscript in progress oozing through its cytoplasm) from the text on the half-finished page (this probably touches on a lot of factors not covered here like the writer’s environment, quality of sleep, time constraints, emotional state, general stress levels etc). Generally though, I often find the ideas are flowing, the desire to finish the book and get it out there is strong but the fingers are arthritic and disobedient when I command them to intuit my every writing intention and convert it into text with perfect eloquence (pah! Insubordination!). But such omissions are blindingly obvious in other people’s work I read at leisure (because I just don’t have their insider knowledge). I find identifying them time and again in others’ work is very helpful in sharpening my own ability to catch the accident in real time, before it happens.

First here’s a made-up technical example of this – my real life one follows it: You may think you understand this sentence: ‘The, uh, dogs. Yep.’

Though sensible in a colloquial sort of way, it could mean anything, right? Especially out of context as it is. But I determinedly had an exact sentence firmly in mind when I wrote it, so that I could maintain my personal sense of integrity when I told you this: The actual sentence was meant to be ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.’

What I intend to show from this example is that when I’m writing something, I know what idea(s) I want it to express. My readers on the other hand are not privy to my inner thoughts and feelings. They only have the words on the e-Reader to go by.

Look what happens to the example when we add some context: ‘His evil typing tutor locked him in her basement with the ancient rusty contraption, a monstrous mockery of his Surface Pro. She told him he would be not be fed or shown the light of day again until he could type a certain line flawlessly, one hundred times over, in no more than three minutes and twelve seconds. “But Mother! What is the line?” His voice was pleading. Her eyes went glassy and filmed over with the tell-tale maggot-white of her enchanted ailment. No! He thought desperately. No! Please! Not now! When her voice came again it was absent and empty. “It’s, uh…” She paused, a trail of drool starting from the corner of her mouth and he could see pictures moving across her dulled pupils as visions of other planes began to possess her. ‘The phrase is.’ She strained against the magic and her eyes cleared for an instant. ‘The, uh, dogs. Yep.’ She said before the magic closed over her and she slammed the door leaving him in the hopeless guttering gold of the dying candle and the sharp iron tang of rust. ‘Oh, that’s it?’ He said to the dusty contraption, feeling much cheered. ‘Jeeze. I can handle that. But, uh, why that one?’ ‘Because, idiot boy, it contains every letter of the alphabet at least once, so it’s great typing practice,’ came his mother’s demented shriek from upstairs…

So where’s the reader left now? Maybe the half-baked sentence could still work as a plot device to show how the crazy mother / typing tutor’s illness wrecks her relationship with her son. Or maybe it was an unintentional gaff by the author who did or didn’t know it was there and did or didn’t decide they’d fix it later except they forgot and the editor thought it was meant to be there and so it was unleashed on the open market much to the readers’ confusion. In the latter case, depending on how important to the plot the scene was (say it was a book about learning to type), it could make for quite a confusing read.

Incidentally, if you hadn’t really been paying attention to the above example, can you see how even it could be a demonstration of the exact failure it’s trying to show you how to avoid? If so, post in comments!

Now for the real life example: I recently read a fantasy book which I found very confusing for this exact reason. I couldn’t even work out what had happened in the end and felt compelled to rate the book poorly even though some elements of it showed a lot of promise. There was just too much niche vernacular and ‘insider knowledge’ used, for me to understand the plot. Then reading a bit of work I did very recently, I saw that in an attempt at building a character using their unique ‘voice’, my own plot had deteriorated into impenetrable regional vernacular (aaarrrrgghh!!) from – probably – most readers’ perspective.

I actually identified this by noticing the same emotion in myself that I’d felt when reading the whacky fantasy novel. Incidentally, in lockstep, my beta-readers have also alerted me to the issue, so it’s definitely a thing! It was actually quite a thrill to find the problem myself then hear it from beta-readers after a slight delay. I’m not sure if that’s kind of perverted or not… In any case, again, it was the practice at identifying the problem in someone else’s work that made it easier to spot in my own. And note too, it wasn’t just about spotting technicalities, but also using my emotional response(s) to a piece of work as a clue to understanding what was wrong. Now I am indeed faced with approx. 80 pages of intense editing and this is of course the pitfall of improved ability to critique your own work. But I’d rather do it over and eventually publish a good book than throw it out only to see it land with giant clang in my readers’ trash cans.

In summary, reading other authors’ books frees me from personal bias towards a book and eliminates the unavoidable insider knowledge I have of my own plots. Thus unburdened, I am more free to hone the skills I need to objectively identify and articulate why a piece of writing impacts me the way it does, all the way from my instant emotional response to the technical aspects of the writing that gave rise to it. Increasing my ability to critique writing using others’ work in this way allows me to better identify good and bad aspects of my own work and finish better quality work sooner.

Sometimes I’m prob’ly a bit stubborn for my own good. Before the lib’r’y turned pay-as-you-go and, let’s face it, heh, after it turned pay-as-you-go too, not that the fuzz ever copped – geddit? – on to that one, I read that you should exercise. ‘Eah-nah-yeah, I knew you c’ld j’st take the pills and end up jacked, shredded, skinny, bulimic, ultrathon fit or skinny-bulimic-ultrathon fit (but prob’ly not jacked, then) at the same time if you were weird enough to want that. But I swear those things gave me headaches even though, apparently, they’d been tested not to. But the corporates who sell them would say that wouldn’t they. Nah, fuckit. I was sticking with my exercise; walked every day, weights in the health-hazard shitbox block gym every other day and a few kaze on the anteek treadmill which I got back to working, in between days. Since when did we evolve from monkeys in trees and stuff to taking pills? Bullshit. Whadever a bull is.

That’s why I was out in the rain when maybe even I should o… have…. whatever, should’ve been. It was a stonker of a storm! A bloody baaa-yeauty! I actually cou’n’ see a medre in fronna me. I’d just gotta new set of overs on takeout points from K-Bell corp (the wankers). Too bad for them I hacked their delivery network with a virus built by yours truly so the points were…. Well, heh, they weren’t.

Yeah-nah-but anyway, I was warm as a motherfucker in a maternity ward and dry as some richfuck’s penthouse, on my walk that day. Just that I couldn’t see through the rain. And the wind! Man! I actually was gonna just head back and let Tina laugh her arse off at me for being a stubborn dick, not that I would’ve minded since she was basically a good girlfriend. It was just about blowing me sideways and definitely not in the good way.

And then I stood in a puddle that prob’ly wasn’t even there a second ago. I was walking the pavement outside the Cornwall estate. The rain was shitting down with the wind blowing it from all directions at the same time and I coul’n’ hear jack all. It was freaky-cool looking up through the high-rises either side of the road, ‘cause you coul’n’ even see the tops through the rain. There would just be a drone now and again appearing and flying off into the grey again, or maybe just its red light if it didn’t get close enough for me to see the whole thing. I’d got to the bottom of the hill and I could feel the cold of the water ‘round my ankles a bit, even through my flash new gear.

So I was standing there thinking now would definitely be a good time to turn around. I was trying to look down the road ahead to see how far the flash flood’d spread, whether I could at least go to the corner and back up the other way to get a bit more mileage in, or just cut it short and bugger off back the way I come. I’d pretty much decided on the latt.. lates… on the second one then I heard this cunt shouting at me.

‘You! Oi! What did you do that for?’

I couldn’t exactly hear where the voice came from but it soon came again.

‘Hey! I’m talking to you, arsehole!’

Eh?

I turned around and there was this dork getting out of his car! GPS must o… must’ve been off. That or he was doing something shifty and didn’t want the car to record the address he was going to. Which he prob’ly was because he was a richfuck and they’re all into fucked-up shit. I could tell he was money ‘cause he wasn’t getting out of an uber like normal people would. If I pinged his car for the reg an’ all that, I prob’ly could’ve even worked out who he was since there was so few private vehicles in Auckland Island nowadays. If the car wasn’t proof enough, the overs he was wearing clinched it, ones like mine.

He’d got out of his car and was waving back in the door, arms like spastic limp cocks. Honestly, I di’n’ have any idea what he was on about ‘til I saw the drops on the seat.

Well what the fuck’s your bladder problem gotta do with me pal?

‘What did you do that for?’ He shouted through the storm at me.

I couldn’t see his face through the rain through his overs visor but he sounded pissed.

I tried to stay cool and used my suavest voice. ‘Chill man. I didn’T do anything-K.’

‘You bloody well did so! You waited ‘til I opened the door and splashed bloody water into my car!’

‘I didn’t.’

Why the fuck would I do that?

‘You did bloody so! I’ll get your arrested over this, you know! Bloody rough elements ‘round here, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself!’

Now you’re being a massive dick.

‘Look, seriously, man, I di’n’ do anything. I di’n’ even see you through the rain – look at it! How could I of? – ‘til you yelled at me. Sorry, I di’n’ mean t’ wet your seat an’ all that, I honestly didn’t.’

‘Bullshit you didn’t, you lowlife thug. I’m calling the police.’

Well fuck this.

I just shrugged my shoulders then turned around and walked back the way I come. No way he’d call the cops for that. Who would do that? The water would’n’ do any damage anyway. His posh bloody seats would o… would’ve all been nano-tech, they’d’ve dried ‘emselves and laid him a genuine fuckin’ egg and fried it for his lunch before he got back from his dominatrix or whatever the fuck. Jesus!

‘Cept he did. He actually did!

I felt the arrest come down on my tech as soon as I walked in my door. I was gonna peel off my overs and go straight next door to Tina’s. Ok, I got my overs off but then my arms and legs locked up and I suddenly felt like puking with the tightness in my gut. I coul’n’ even put my overs back on before I was marching like I had a carrot up my bum. Back out my shithole apartment door, down the mildew-stinking hall, past the door t’ the on’y-me-using gym and the empty pool, back to the poor-door us worker-ants scuttled into daylight from so the richfucks di’n’ have to smell us, soaked to the skin in one second flat, and jerked back out to the block entrance where a paddywagon was already waiting with its blue light flashing through the rain for all the world to see, in case I di’n’ already look like a big enough twot with my cop-controlled walking.

Whether I liked it or not, my body got into the paddywagon. The car di’n’ talk to me like an uber or anything ‘n’ I w’s too shit-scared to ping it with my tech even though the thought crossed my mind. They di’n’ seem to have firewalled me which I s’pose made sense ‘cause I was’n’ actually a criminal or anything, on’y being arrested for nothing. But anyway, the paddywagon w’s just all business.  It grew its door closed and drove off. Jesus! I knew they could do this but it w’s one thing to know and another to bloody find out!

Course, they didn’ ‘ave to do this. They could of just called me into their online space. It w’s all just to show me who w’s boss. Never mind if I was having a piss of handling hot food or what. Just drop everything and interrupt your day to make a shit-useless trip into the station for not doing anything wrong.

I acshly di’n’ know I lived so close to the local station. I wasn’ even far from the scene of the not -crime; jus’ down the bottom of the old One Tree Hill where Cornwall estate now was and a block over. With my guts doing backflips, I got remote-controlled through the front door. The paddywagon parked under cover at least so I di’n’ get any more soaked.

It was the first actual time I’d been arrested and I gotta say the experience had me shitting my pants. There was only a coupla big things I could get busted for but there w’s also a thousand and one bloody small things too. If I was’n’ for my stressing about them pulling up some arsehole audit records and saying Ah, Mister Richards-Mann, we know all about you, my eyes would’ve been popping out at how much of a shid’ole the cop-shop was.

It had old and I mean old yellowy plaster walls which w’s cracking and flaking all over the shitty green lino – faark, lino! – floor with acshool cracks and rips in the lino. I could even smell how it was kin’ of going rotten. It must’ve been eighty years old or something. There w’s a pissed-off half-asleep looking fat dude in a too-small cop uniform at the massive front desk behind a fuckoff plastic screen.

Sheesh, I know he looks ready but the good peeps of Auckland aren’t that fuckin’ starving yet are we? Well…

I mean, surely the way I got here was proof nobody was gonna come at them with a knife and fork or anything. You’d be frozen by remote the nano you even thought about it.

I could see behind the, uh, pretty receptionist, all the pigs sitting at these old-school office-type desks with crumby old petitions made of something that w’s prob’ly illegal now. It couldn’t of been much more like some B-movie set before the COVID plague way back near the turn o’ the senchirry if they’d had antique laptops and phones on their desks and bits of paper stuck to their petitions with pins or something.

But even the cops were a bit more modern than that. They had the desks and the petitions and the mildew and rotting lino-smelling building ‘n’ that, but otherwise they were just sitting gassing.

The reception blimp did nothing when I slopped in. There was some huckery looking plastic seats off to one side which I would of sat in just to say I’d touched anteek plastic ‘cept the cop-tech still had me in a strangle-hold. So I was just remote-controlled to stand and wait, but not for long.

A door beside the reception fort opened and even the crappy figure-not-hugging uniform didn’t do much to cool down constable hotness who came out t’ see me. By the freaky blonde bun and the not-spots tan, the constable was a fledgling corporate kid, prob’ly not long hatched from university or whadever pricey corporate brainwashing joint they sent ‘em to nowadays. I would of done ‘er, ‘specially if she wore some of the uniform during.

She was bloody rude as any richfuck. She just kind of half walked over to me, did a little tech-twitch of her expensive little face and u-turned. I found myself following her back through the door. I would of turned to look ‘round the pigsty just to suss it out, if the tech let me, but I w’s made to just keep eyes forward and quick march. Seeing as how the cute constable w’s leading the way it wasn’t all bad.

We ended up in a beaten-up room with the same crap décor as the glorious fuckin’ station reception, only it was smaller so it stunk more. Nothing but two chairs and a lump of a table. Acshly just like turn-o’-the senchiree movies which I watched a shit-ton of for my minimum wage CGI job remastering them for virtual spaces.

Still mute, Constable Cuteness waved me into a chair an’ then I decided pretty fast, the experience of touching scratched up cold anteek plastic wasn’ really worth it. I realised the cop tech had let me go as I sat down and it was just as well ‘cause I hadn’t been too far away from hurling, the way it had locked up my gut-muscles.

Is it meant to do that? Or is it just legacy crap they can’t afford to upgrade, like their station.

And then, boof! A fossil of a dude virtualed into the room at the end of the table. I jumped. Not because he’d appeared but because of who he was! It was bloody Jason Zhang himself! I was actually a bit freaked then. This was the Jason Zhang! He was best buds with his royal techship Tristian Laufala himself! Plus ‘e owned half the construction business in the known faarken world. All the high-rises. All the roads, all the fuckin’ cheap-arse seawalls that kept leaking corrosive poison bloody ocean into basements, if they weren’t bloody bursting and drowning poor families on the coasts all over the country and prob’ly the fuckin’ world.

Yeah, so unlikely he’d been going for a BJ or BDSM session at his age. The guy was known to be going fēng kuáng in the head, seeing as how he was nearly ninety or something.

I’m toast.

So I was just starting to sweat in the cold plastic seat when Cute-cop richfuckling said, ‘Mister Nathan Richards-Mann, thankyou for coming to the station so promptly.’

Like I had a choice.

‘This gentleman, Mister Jason Zhang…’

Who, by the way, didn’t have to drag his arse down here like me who am just as fuckin’ innocent until proven guilty.

‘…has accused you of vandalism.’

‘Not guilty.’ I said. ‘I di’n’ do anything.’

‘You bloody did s… He did! He splashed water into my car!’ Zhang squawks. He sounds like ‘is throat’s lined with wet tarmac.

‘All right then, this should be easy enough to sort out. Let’s take a look at the video.’ Coplette was trying not to sound bored. Poor thing, if this job wasn’t challenging enough for her, she’d have to go back to bumming ‘round mummy and daddy’s fifty-bedroom apartment destroying real food trying new recipes in her ready-made influencer space or something. HashTagSoFuckin’Sad.

So then, bam! We w’s suddenly out in the rain which kind of made my brekkie uppity about staying down after the beating it’d took from the cop-tech. There would’ve been nanos on photo-sensor duty aggregated all over the sides of buildings and prob’ly even on the pavement so it could film up the crack of your overs. I reckoned we were on the side of a building from the angle of the view, ‘cept it was just like any virtual space, you could look ‘round and it would pan the image like you were really there. No other sensory, thank fuck. I’d had enough wetness and roaring bloody rainstorm for one day.

We coul’n’ see much more than pissing rain at first but all right, there was his car pulling over to the pavement on the street a block away from my building. It stopped right in fron’ ‘f ‘s. You wouldn’t’ve been able to see much details of the car but nobody could say it wasn’ a car. The door peeled back just as some dickwad – that’s me – came slopping ‘round the corner – Jeeze I can walk fast! So ok, I hadda ‘dmit, pretty bad timing. The puddle, well, flash flood, w’s right b’side the car and I walked right into the water, right when richfuck w’s sticking his poncy leg out into the rain an’ the rest as they say, w’s hist’ry.

‘Yeah, see.’ I said. ‘It w’s just an accident. Seriously man, I didn’t mean it!’

He couldn’t really argue. But he w’s a richfuck and he w’s used to getting what he wanted and he was ninety cents in the dollar to throw in with the rest. ‘Check his tech!’ He ordered the coplette.

Christ! Is he dribbling?

‘Well, really, Mister Zhang, I think we can see what happened can’t we? It does look like an accident.’ I coul’n’ be sure but she was giving ‘im this look and it was like…

They know each other?

I gave her my best smile. I guess she thought I looked like a crim since my hair wasn’ long and in a bun like all her pretty liddle gender-neutrally-dressed richfuck buds’ prob’ly was. But still, best to stay positive, I’ve read that in shitloads of self-help stuff in the libr’ry. She di’n’ smile back.

‘Mister Zhang, I need to make you aware there is a fee associated with…’

He w’s already waving it off, course ‘e was. What did he care about fees? They all somehow dribble through the systems back to the richfucks anyway, he w’s just basically paying himself his own money back, like sucking the end of an enema tube.

‘Mister Richards-M…’

‘Call me Nat.’

‘Mister Richards-Mann, you’re not at this time required to submit to an examination of your tech. however if you do not, your refusal may be viewed with suspicion and used as evidence in any subsequent criminal proceedings.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. Nothin’ to fear, nothin’ to hide. I geddit. So what can I do? Guess I just gotta toe the line and let you perve in at all my biometrics to prove my innocence. Well, just doin’ your job I guess.’

She had the decency to look a bit sorry at least. ‘Mister Richards-Mann—’ 

‘Please call me—’

‘Mister Richards-Mann, your data will be treated with the utmost confidence and stored securely. Nobody but relevant police personnel and judiciary staff will have access to your, uh, raw data and when on-sold, we guarantee it will be in aggregate or anonymised form only.’

They actually just say it! Jeeze! It’s a bloody racket!

I tried to keep the anger off my face but not that hard. See, all this bullshit disclaimering w’s giving me time to make a few adjustments to my tech, just to make sure the hatches w’s battened an’ that. They’d see a bit of weirdness but it wouldn’t stop ‘em getting at my biometrics and in the end, it was just the principle that got on my tits. They were bloody welcome to it, really. So I looked a bit pissed and said, ‘Yeah, ok, I consent, or whatever I gotta say.’

What’s the bet there w’s even some official words you had to say and if you did’n’ say ‘em you could use for a legal technicality in your defence or something. I even think there was ‘cause I partly remembered learning something like it in the lib’ry. But Peaches-cop wasn’ standing on ceremony. She did a tech-tic and I felt the cop systems root-user into my brain.

She could see the data getting mined and so could I and we both knew there w’s nothing. My heart had been doing what a heart at walking pace should do. Frontal lobe and cerebellum ‘n that were jus’ saying was go right, go left, go straight ahead an’ all that shit. Not that they could acshly read your mind but near as dammit nowadays, and getting closer all the time. Course, the amygdala fired the signal and there w’s a bit of left hemisphere wakeup, catecholamines, adrenaline ‘n that. But that was only after Mister J. richfuck shouted at me. Well, who wouldn’ get a fright if some arsehole in a dark vehicle opened the door and shouted at them outta the blue, well, or the pissing grey anyway. Basically, I was just chilling on my walk and I knew it and she knew it. They had nothin’ on me. Nothin’! Which w’s why they hadda make somethin’ up.

Constable Peaches pursed her lips which ‘til then looked deliciously like a moist sideways richfuck. She fired a rabbit-in-the-headlights look at Mister JRF’s holo-ghost. He looked like he w’s gonna hit someone. She says in this pissy weepy voice, ‘It does look as if he’s telling the truth U… Mister Zhang.’

That w’s too much! ‘Course I’m bloody telling the truth! I was going for a walk, getting some exercise in! There’s no fu… law against it!’

It acshly felt cool when neither of ‘em looked at me funny for saying exercise. She would’ve had to of done proper exercise to be a coplette and he was a fossil, so back in his day it’s prob’ly all they could do to keep in shape. Not that our little three second brotherhood, well, or whatever-hood, did me any good, but. She just ignored me like I never said anything and the pale-under-wrinkly-tan of JRF’s face told me he was about go critical.

PC Peaches must’ve seen it too and who knows, maybe she was ‘is niece or ‘is granddaughter or some shit like that. I had all my illegal tech cloaked with, uh, even illegaler tech so I coul’n’ packet-sniff to see if they w’s messaging. Di’n’ look like it though, their faces were both, y’know, here, and not spaced in that tech kind of way. But whether her nose was up his hairy brown crack or not, I had still just become a latent prisoner.

PC Peaches. said, ‘As I said, Mister Richards-Mann does seem to be telling the truth but…’

‘Too right!’

‘Excuse me Mister Richards—’

‘Call me N—‘

‘Excuse me Mister Richards-Mann! If I could continue.’

I cracked a decent grin and saluted but she didn’t seem imused.

All the time I was thinking, she was doing her continuing and I tuned back in when it got worrying.

‘When I connected you to our system, Mister Richards-Mann, the system had to adapt to your tech—’

‘Well course it did, I’ve got— ‘

‘If you’ll let me finish Mister Richards-Mann.’

JRF looked like ‘e’d spotted the quarry which didn’t make me feel too flash so I shut my cake-hole and waited though I had a bad feeling about where she was going. I’d heard of it before, when they can’t nail you for anything, they’d nail you for nothing. And sure-a-bloody-nough!

‘Now while your tech did eventually allow a connection…’

Fuck eventually, it took all of a bloody nano!

‘…the requirement to adapt to your non-standard configuration suggests tampering. We can’t therefore guarantee the validity of your biometrics since your non-standard tech configuration could have corrupted data, lost data or even deliberately interfered with data before delivery to us.’

A big white-toothed grin opened up on JRF’s ancient-arse mug, then. About the same time, I felt my guts sinking out my arsehole and through the illegal plastic right in the beating heart of the nation’s law enforcement service. Everyone, everyone dicked around with their tech. Customised the visual overlays, tuned the senses up and down, muted ad’s from freeware overlays. It was made so you could easily do it. There w’s even software the corporates sold to help you do it easier. But of course, there was always that pissy little disclaimer that it might somehow fuck you up and well, now, I w’s finding out the somehow of the up-fucking.

I could even see a spasm of sympathetic human-ness struggle like a mutant tape-worm under Peaches’ expensive smooth cuteness before she got it under control and carried on somehow-ing my life.

‘So, Mister Richards-Mann, Auckland Island province has no choice but to find you guilty…’

‘I want to appeal!’

Could I appeal? W’s thadda thing? I’m sure I read it in the lib’ry but maybe it w’s before tech.

‘…of illegal tampering with public property and intent to conceal criminal intentions from the police. You are invited to spend five years in Spume Inc. therapeutic stasis from which you are guaranteed to resume normal life in at least comparable physical condition to your condition on the day you initially engage with the service, less reasonable aging. Since the system reports no previous convictions or cautions, you may be invited to end your psychological therapy after two years depending on therapeutic outcomes.’

Jesus you’d just gotta love their wording. Invited, therapeutic, comparable. Jesus fuck! Did they think I was alliteration or something! Anything’s bloody comparable to anything! And as for the bloody invitation, I could already feel it inviting my arms and legs to let the police tech take control of them and march me out to a paddywagon. Yeah, some fuckin’ invitation.

Constable Peaches di’n’ even bother to follow me out. She just stayed in the bullshit ‘court room’ and I di’n’ see if JRF popped back off or what.

They definitely had me firewalled now. My skin’d gone numb and most’ve my senses were jammed as the paddywagon drove me home. I guessed they let you still see ‘cause the police tech needed to know where your body was going somehow. Nothing they could do to stop me thinking though ‘cept I’d almost rather not of been able to, right then.

Jeeze! Therapeutic outcomes. Fuck! Those Spume arseholes brainwashed you! I was gonna be fuckin’ slowly lobotomised for doing nothing! This system was fuckin’ shit! It was fuckin’ rigged! Nobody could see me in the paddywagon but I di’n’ give a shit about the tears falling which I coul’n’ even lift a hand to wipe off. They w’s righteous fuckin’ tears. I was on fire inside even though I cou’n’ move. More than fire. I was a fuckin’ volcano-ic eruption inside. Not that it did any good.

The paddywagon cruised between all the high-rises in the rain, which was so heavy now it was like being under the water. Through the windscreen, I saw red drone lights come in and out of the grey and a few taillights ahead. That w’s the final shithouse view I was gonna get on what might ’s-well of been the last day of my life.

Course, I’d get my one call once I was safely banged up but I wasn’ in the mood. I mean, course I’d do it, it’d be to Tina, course it would. I coul’n’ face Mum and Dad like this, they’d prob’ly find out sooner or later anyway and maybe come and visit me in the joint but by then I’d’ve been so fucked with I woul’n’ even know who they were.

I even was’n’ sure what I’d say to Tina.

Hey Teen, See ya in a coupla years when I’m a vegetative sack of braindead good citizen.

Jeeze, she wa’n’ gonna take this too well. I hoped she wouldn’t do anything stupid and get herself chucked in the joint with me. She was basically an all-right girlfriend but I hadda ‘dmit, she could get a bit freaky sometimes with all the praying stuff I taught her. I’d tried to teach her the good stuff too, the mindfulness ‘n’ lucid dreaming ‘n’ all that which I taught myself from the lib’ry. But she kinda latched on to all the weird kids’-story stuff about gods and shit and got arsey with me when I tried to talk her out of it.

I mean, don’ ge’me wrong, I was into revolution all right. I fully wanted to get people together, change the system, make it fairer, make the richfukcs listen, make ‘em fuckin’ notice us. I done a few hacks in my time too. I got around the lib’ry paywall after they put it in, so thousands of poor people like me could at least have a pissing Jesus of a chance to move up in life.

And thanks a lot to me, thousands of kids would at least get a bit better food so their brains wouldn’t grow up deficient on shithouse government-issue pure processed mush; which you could technically live on if you did’n’ mind shitting through the eye of a needle all your life; which wouldn’t be long after the bowel cancer came for ya. That was my genius K-Bell points hack I said about before. It was all through their drones, virused into their delivery system. I s’pose they’d sniff it out one day but every month they didn’t was another month some babies w’s getting fed actshool solids.

Yeah, see? University-shmooniversity, everything you could ever need to know w’s right there in the now theereticly-public lib’ry. As long as you knew how to pirate a translation overlay to get all the ol’ books into the standard hanzees from the old alphabet which I also helped people do, you could learn anything a richfuck fledgling like PC Peaches prob’ly got taught at posh corporate university. Course, even then, fuckall peeps could read nowadays anyway, not ‘cause they di’n’ get taught it in basic school but ‘cause they di’n’ keep it up.

So yeah, I done some illegal shit. But I done it all seriously cloaked, not for the glory like some of these wannabe do-gooders who accidentally on purpose would let their handles get found out so they could suck up a bit of ooohs an’ ahs from the crowds before changing their private keys again. I acshly was playing the long game for the greater fuckin’ good. Tina, I di’n’ think she quite goddit. She w’s just kinda, angry. I’d always try to keep ‘er calm, try t’, y’know, show her the best way and keep trying to nudge along the idea of maybe the gods aren’t gonna save us… But I worried about that girl. An’ all the weed she chugged di’n’ help either.

So it w’s pleasant fuckin’ thoughts like that which were in my mind as the paddywagon pulled up at my block entrance. The police tech forced me out of the car through the rain, into the poor-door, down the stinky hall, even right past Tina’s door which I coul’n’ even look sideways at ‘cause my neck was locked in forward position.

Please don’ come out Teens! Not now!

I came to a shin-splinting halt at my door and jerked ‘round.

Fuck man! I’ve got legs not bloody wheels!

The door peeled back and I was force-marched inside where the cop systems had already repurposed public nanos, which was building my pris…uh, fuck, sorry, therapeutic stasis chamber over my bed.

Another wave of fuck me this can’t be happening iced up my back and this time I wouln’ of wanted anyone to see me crying like a child and dribbling through my locked-shut mouth. I would prob’ly of shit myself too given how crook my guts felt but the cop systems had a strangle-hold on everything. I watched as the chamber grew, the nanos eating into my bed, spitting it back out as the standard issue blues and whites of Spume Inc. It w’s harmless-looking enough really. It shoul’n’ve shit me up the way it did considering it w’s basically just a bed, some tubes and a bio-containment bubble which in the end, was achshly for my own health and safety while I was in stasis.

Man if I could hijack those nanos, they’d be worth a farken fortune!

All the best richfuck geniuses worked on those firewalls. Not that I woul’n’ of given it a run for its money if I got the chance. Just one more thing I’d never get to do.

While I stood there dribbling and weeping like a haizi, my apartment was getting a refurb. All the grime on the walls and cupboards was getting cleared and the damp bits down in the corners where the social-housing quality JRF construction was rotting, magicked clean and dry as the nanites got to ‘em. I’d almost’ve been happy for the free maintenance jobby if I didn’t know it wasn’t just all for shit-show.

Couldn’t have pris– Aw, sorry, Spume therapy clients, being seen to hibernate in squalor. There was a scam-deal…. scamdal…  There was a big shitstorm about it a coupla decades ago when I was still liddle and sleeping in the bed between my mum and dad in their government issue ground-floor shitbox. Yeah, my gaff’d be kept clean and tidy while I was getting my state-funded brain-damage all right.

Well, the memories w’s running like the tears which was a shit way to spend my last sane moments in life, but what the fuck else could I do with my body hijacked by the law enforcement service? The deranging tomb was all set up and my apartment looked like an old-school hospital room b’fore long and then this voice – PC Peaches’ voice! – said, ‘Mister Richards-Mann, your therapy space is ready, you’re entitled to a call before you engage with the service. Normally there is a time limit of ten minutes but…. I can be, uh, a bit flexible.’

Whoa! Generous! I get to act like a wimpy dick in fronna my girlfriend for even longer. Prob’ly while Peaches watches and pisses ‘erself laughing at the loser wet-foot ground-floor crim, too.

She hadn’t virtualed into my home, just her voice sounded in my ears. And it sounded kind of regretful, even. I reckoned now the high and mighty richfuck had left her alone she was prob’ly regretting the whole thing since she knew she was outta line. Poor li’l’ Peaches eh? It’d haunt her for maybe a few days! ‘Til she decided to pay a shit-ton of cash for a few of her own Spume sessions – the nice touchy-feely customer-focused ones – to clear her sad little richfuck conscience of destroying a nasty smelly poor guy for a crime she thought he might of committed. Yeah, sheesh, My heart would of gone out to ‘er if my fuckin’ fist was’n’ first in line.

My limbs stayed locked which showed they knew their stuff, really. I reckon there was a good chance I acshly would of offed myself in that few minutes when I saw the chamber all set up and there was just a useless chat with my girlfriend between me and the end. I could breathe normal again and my stomach unclenched. My tech was mostly firewalled ‘cept comms which was back online.

Do I get to go for a last shit?

It di’n’ really matter ‘cause the tubes and stuff would take care of all that once I was under but it still kinda sucked ‘cause it meant I’d have to clench my way through my last ever sane conversation with another human bean. I thought of begging Peaches to let me go, I could even see my toilet door right b’side me out the corner ‘f my eye. Man! So close! It made me need t’ go more.

But I reckoned Peaches would think I was taking the piss and even if she di’n’, she prob’ly wouln’ let me anyway so there wasn’ anything left but to dimeen myself in fronna Tina and say goodbye to her and the cruel world.

So with tears drying on my face and poo fighting for escape from my bum, I called up my girlfriend one last time. I holo-ghosted int’ her place and she said, ‘Oh, hi babe.’ She was wearing knickers and a t-shirt which would of got me horny at any other time. I had’n’ planned what t’ say, who the fuck does? I just stood there. ‘What’s wrong?’ She came over and tried to take my hands outta reflex.

‘I…’

I coul’n’ think of what to say.

‘Nat, where are you?’ She w’s starting to freak.

‘I’m at my place Teens. But…’

‘Shall I come over?’ She wiggles her hips which again should of given me wood but di’n’.

‘Teens, you can’t. I’ve been…’

The tears came and now she really started to freak. She turned around and got some hemps on. ‘I’m coning over!’ She said.

I coul’n’ think of what to say so I just ghosted after her and then had the freaky experience of watching her hammering on my door which I was acshly behind, when it wouldn’t peel back for her. ‘Nathan what’s happened?’ She started tearing up herself and that got me t’ man up and talk.

‘Teens, I got irrested. I got fuckin sentenced! I can’t leave my place now. You’ll get visitation, prob’ly, I dunno how it works but prob’ly you can visit sometime but I’m about t’ be put under so you’re my last call an’…’ Then I ran outta words again.

‘Jesus! Nat! What did you do?’

Well that w’s a dumb question coming from her. She knew everything I done. But I knew what she meant.

‘Teens, I achshly di’n’ do anything. Y’know, not that they’ve… Uh, acshly nothing. I acshly got busted for just fuckin’ annoying this richfuck when I w’s out on my walk, seriously, I accidentally splashed the guy and he got me farken arrested! They checked the video and found me not guilty and busted me for non-standard farken tech instead!’

‘Nat! That’s impossible! Can’t you, I dunno, can’t you use all your law stuff to get it re-checked or something? Everyone has non-standard farken tech! Even the richfucks!’

‘I tried Teens. They jus’ di’n’ even listen.’

Jeeze. Did I try hard enough? Maybe the constable di’n’ hear me or something? Maybe there is some kind of appeal proseedja or something.

I w’s gonna try and be cool. I w’s all ready to tell her It would be a piece of piss, that I’d be out in a coupla years and she could visit me anyway and it would be all good so I said, ‘Teens, I’m freaking out. I can’t believe what’s happened. I just can’t believe it. I’ve just come back from the cop station. They’ve got my farken body jammed so I can’t move my arms and legs. Teens, they’re gonna fuckin’ lobotomise me! I’m done, Teens, I might’s w’ll fuckin’ die.’ Last bit came out like a little haizi wailing about a broken toy and then the sobs took over my body and the tears rolled like my brain fluid was leaking.

I hope you fuckin’ watching this Peaches you spoilt little cunt! Are you happy you’ve done your fuckin’ civical fuckin’ judy now? Does seeing me like this make you feel good? Can you see my fuckin’ girlfriend now, Peaches? See what you’ve done to her too? Look at her! She struggles at the best of fuckin’ times, now look!

Tina had flopped down outside my door crying. Nobody’d be getting in there in a hurry. I was sealed off behind nano-reinforced active fuckin’ alloy like one of those insects there used to be which had the honey-combs. Ants or something. Put their grubs inside the wax thing ‘til it was ready to hatch out. Only I’d hatch out a dribbling pissing invalid instead of something which could fly and make honey.

‘Teens.’ I said, tryna pull myself together. ‘Teens. You gotta keep the movement going ‘til I get out, ok? You gotta keep recruiting. You keep dishing out the pir… you know what. Teens, ya hear me? You gotta access the public records, use what they’ve done t’ me t’day? Geddit, Teens?’

She looked up, all blotchy and red, hair stuck to her face. I wanned t’ reach down an’ pull ‘er up, fix up her hair ‘cept I coul’n’ ‘cause I was’n’ really there. Tech w’s a mindfuck! I swear It did more bloody harm than it ever did good in the world! There w’s this new hardness setting over her face right as I watched, like she w’s turning into a vampire from one of those old movies. And her face began to change…wooooh!

It chilled me into a kind of calmness and when she spoke it w’s in a kind of voice I’d never heard her use and sure as shit di’n’ like the sound of. ‘Yeah, I’ll do it babes. All of it. Don’t worry. And I’ll find a way of getting you out too, before they wreck your head. I’ll get money, I’ll get a lawyer or something. I’ll find a way, you just have t’ hang in ok? I’ll visit you inside when I can, all right?’

‘Yeah, all good Teens. Brave girl. It’s time now, but. I gotta go. The system’s got me on the bed, Teens. The needles are coming. Gotta say bye for now, ok?’

‘Ok, Nat. Yep, bye for now. But we’re gonna get your out ok? Just hang tough babes! Ok?’

‘Yeah, course Teens. I’ll be—’

And that’s as far as I got. The first of the needles pricked me as I tried t’ say goodbye to m’ damn girlfriend. My own voice went kind of weird and slow in my ears and that was that. Fair enough, in a way, I mean, the ionic-ness of my predictment w’s that in a very big fuckoff no two ways about it kinda way, they we’right. It just wasn’t fair they di’n’ have t’ bother proving it.

Berry – 10,000 BCE, Banks of the Yellow River, Present-day North China – Berry renders the fusing

It was rain time, not that there wasn’t always rain. But now there was rain. The trampled earth between our caves bled red and pus-yellow. Chickens took to the lower boughs for shelter. Pigs rolled in mud ‘til they seemed blood-soaked and the forest exploded urgent green. The nights chittered and groaned and the days bore down, the sun burning orange through a hot damp blue-white haze. Things bit and crawled and we itched and bitched and ate. The river swelled as if angered by thunder grumbling from the sky. We watched the water at this time of year though I’d never seen it come too far up its red-yellow banks in all my moons and for all the elder’s tales of angry floods in generations past; dead maggots and wound-rot, the lot of them.

Sometimes I sneaked among the skulls atop the graves in their quiet patch past the main cave, ‘neath the rocks hanging from the cliff where it met the riverbank. There I’d listen to the rushing brown torrent and watch it turn rose-gold through the trees at sunset. After dark, I’d look up at the smudge of a moon in the clouds and listen to frogs singing from the riverbank and the trees. They could think I was disturbing the spirits of the ancestors all they liked. I knew I wasn’t because there weren’t any.

When the smell of charring pig and hot grain wafted over, I’d creep back among the living, who I liked less, in time to eat and be plagued by clouds of moths and mosquitos at our fires. The few spirits there were, were there if they were anywhere, not that anyone believed me.

The runt-sow, Flower, Tree’s woman’s dim-and-only daughter that lived, had been getting on my nerves forever. She was thin like an insect so would have choked a baby on its way out. Not like me, robust and more ready than that uptight little hen-finch would ever be. She could channel the Flow, so what? So could I. She had her basket of tricks with it, all copied by slow dull-eyed rote. But I already knew as much as the healers from my own experiments; more even, not that I could tell them given how I came by the knowledge.

I was better looking than Flower, smarter than her, quicker than her and everyone knew and nobody cared because she was a little butterfly flitting in the sunshine, working chores like a slave, licking clay off feet – and pus off wounds, probably – if it would make her a friend. Me, I was sensibly lazy, honest, said what I meant, meant what I said and didn’t mean to say very much that wasn’t worth saying. Apparently, that made me strange. That and the things I said I could see.

So Healer’s son Boar – who couldn’t channel the Flow – sniffed around Flower like one of his namesakes and never pointed his tusk in my direction. The healers and the elders and the family in general quietly encouraged the burgeoning match and I could see the catastrophe happening like a slowly collapsing cave on a sleeping baby, with me powerless to stop it.

When Healer died, Boar would take his place with goggling-carp-eyed roach-hips at his side to learn what she could from Bud until Bud died and passed the Stone down to them and they would never let me use it even though I’d be an elder too, by then. Then the river choke us all with yellow mud if we were ever sick or hurt or dying giving birth. There would be nobody left with the knowhow to use the Stone to fight, mine rock, haul or heal since neither of those two possessed a meal-grain of sense between them. One excuse to do what was right for the family was all I wanted. Just one. Too bad I got it.

The one thing I could do was practice with the Stone when I got the chance, even though I wasn’t allowed. The few times I’d channelled It had been enough to make me gasp for more. To the rest of the family, even the elder channelers, Healer, Bud and Tree, it was just a pot to trickle Flow into for later use. A good enough use of it, all right, I’m not saying it wasn’t. It sure held more than a person ever could and unlike our souls, it never leaked once you’d filled it up. A lake of Flow just sat there waiting, a dam ready to be burst and wash away wounds, obstacles and enemies.

But they didn’t know half what I knew, just from the few times I’d lurked in the shadows and done my tinkering. Their dullness set my head on fire sometimes, how they could just have the Stone all the time and never see what more could be done with it; what more it was! I could just look into it for hours. Even to just my eyes, it was a beauty, violet- black and shiny as ice, its many edges sharp as rock.
Not that I could tell them or they’d know what I’d been up to but I had learned the Flow could be shaped inside it to fit more in. And even more odd things besides. If I just could just have it to hold, to study more, I could… Well, I don’t know what I could do. That was the point.

Today, it turned out, I’d get another chance to fiddle and that fiddling would be the beginning of the end for me, not that I knew at the time. It was a hazy drowse of an afternoon and most of the family had fled into the caves to sleep away the heat.
The Stone was among us again after a few risky days away, I could tell, another thing nobody believed me about. Maybe that’s why I found myself lurking in the shade at the mouth of our gathering cave in the afternoon heat; following the light of the Stone in my soul’s eye like a moth into fire. I slopped my feet in a red puddle and idly hooked my foot under a worm so I could feel its cool body slither over my skin.

If the Stone was here then Healer must have come back in from his own cave, far upriver where he went sometimes with Bud to do who knew what. Sure enough his croaking drone rolled into my daydreams. Bud, who was as much a healer as Healer, was in there too, shut away with some other elders, planning some walk into the hills to get building-rocks or something. So that would be another few days we were without the Stone. I was more minded to follow the others to sleep, than lurk and listen to their drivel, but the Stone was calling to me and I needed every chance I could get.

I yawned and reached out to the world to gather a wisp of Flow to my soul, just enough to sharpen my ears and eyes – something else nobody believed me about. Tree was prattling. He was as old as Healer, fat as a full pig’s tick and about as fast. He’d not much to show for his age but the age itself. That and he could channel a wisp of Flow, not even as much as his skinny daughter. ‘Now, we won’t be gone for so long. Not likely anything will happen but what about leaving Flower in charge while we’re away hmm?’
No! Please no!

That would be a good way of me getting on the hardest chores the whole time the elders were away. I’d be out of sight and out of mind of the family and too busy to show her up if anything went wrong.

‘Well, Berry’s a sensible girl, maybe she could help? We’ll only be a day or two, it doesn’t really matter does it? She can channel the Flow.’ Bud, standing up for me.

‘Eh? More’s the peril to us she can channel the Flow! Would that she could skin pigs faster than it took them die of old age and make pots that didn’t leak instead of being born with the gift. Your daughter is clumsy as a blind pig with a bone through its nose and mad as a snake, Woman! She’d have them digging up the ancestors to eat if you gave her a voice for a night! Her with all that wound-rot about seeing ghosts and the Flow! I swear she’s eaten a wrong mushroom when someone wasn’t watching her!’
Nobody argued.

Wild pigs can gore the lot of them. You can’t eat ash, anyway, idiot!

I sighed and channelled into the stone, didn’t pull from it, didn’t fill it, just sent a misty vine of the Flow into the cavemouth, questing like the ghost of a leech, for the violet-blue facets of our ancient treasure. It always felt like I was stretching my soul out, riding the stream of Flow. It was hard this far away but I was used to that. It always set me on edge, sneaking in so close to them but they said it, I was mad thinking anyone else could see Flow like I could, and sure enough as the vine of my presence drifted down the cave, they prattled on, apparently oblivious.

What can I try today?

I’d found the Stone, but today it was as if I hung in the air beside it and saw it in a new way. Maybe it was my fear of being caught that made me quest my tendril of Flow slowly through the air and see what I’d always been too hasty to notice before. Or maybe it was some flea-sized change in the way I channelled. Or who knows what. That’s how it always went when I stumbled on a new learning. I could never say how I’d come by it. Anyway, here I was, the Stone filling my soul’s’ eye, glittering dark violet in the dim light from the cave entrance, as if I was a heron gliding above a moonlit lake.

What if I dived in?

I couldn’t have had that new thought if it wasn’t for the other accidental one that got me here. But so it always went, and so I tried it, going in, not just sending in or drawing out. I couldn’t say how I did it. I never could other than I just bent the Flow to my purpose in a new way I’d just dreamt up. My soul rode the power down, diving through the crystalline surface, into its violet depths. And now I was inside the Stone but not just inside it, somehow, I was it! And then, seeing further beyond the horizon of my old knowhow, from atop the shoulders of the first two, I spied yet another new idea. Burning with my lust to learn, I could never have foreseen the woe it would later rain down like fiery rock from the sky.

Inside the Stone, I reached to the world and channelled the Flow and oh how it came! I gathered and gathered and gathered Flow to me, cramming it into the empty spaces I only now saw, lay between the strands of earthly substance that made up the Stone. Once there, the power lay locked in the glittering lattice of the stuff of the Stone, of me.
Until a soul touches the Stone and calls it forth!

Except I was a soul inside the Stone so maybe I could… But I couldn’t. I could gather such a rush of Flow to me as never before in my flesh but here I could do nothing with it.

I should probably leave in case one of them finds me outside.

And that’s when the trouble started. I tried to pull back, get back to myself the same way I always did only the Stone wouldn’t let me leave. It gripped me in its violet depths and try as I might, I couldn’t breach its surface. My fear rose up and I could feel my heart fluttering like a moth in a web though the core of me was still in the Stone, in the cave with the droning elders.

I panicked and struggled if a soul can struggle. But the pretty violet crystal face that had lured me was now unyielding as rock from within. The voices of the elders came to me, then. Or had I been hearing them all the time and not paying attention? I couldn’t say. All I knew was that I sure as rotting fish, was paying attention now! For they were setting up to leave the cave and take the Stone with them.
With no skin to feel the hands lifting me or eyes to see the world tilt, I still somehow knew they had picked me up to take me out and I had to get away. It was my body that did it, in the end. I gave a strangled growl of anger and ran and suddenly I was free of the Stone, bolting through the trees for the place of the dead. Voices neared the cavemouth behind me but I was already hidden. Though the steaming heat had almost fought it away before I came properly back to myself, I still didn’t miss it; the ghost of a sinister chill like you’d never get that time of year, leaving my body as I ran.

The trees were dropping their load after the latest shower and frogs were making a din. It was some time before the elders finally appeared in the cavemouth so I was sure they hadn’t heard me, clumsy as I’d been in my fluster. I watched them from the forest as they walked up towards the smell of cooking meat, with the Stone tucked in Healer’s leathery old fist.

Will they see how strangely full it is?

I doubted it. Dumb crawling old grubs.

Spatters of red mud flecked me from head to foot as if I’d been in the way of a pigs throat at slaughter. Bugs whirred around my face as I stood hidden in the trees. It was a long while before my shivers subsided. I still wasn’t sure how I’d pulled free of the Stone and that made me scared of what other dark snares it could be hiding. But compared to the idea now turning in my mind like a star hanging low in the sky, the fear was nothing.

So much Flow, it would never need filling again.

For its brightness in my mind, the idea was only on the edge of my knowing, something I knew I understood but couldn’t put to words. Like the way I sent my soul out with the Flow, hung in the air and moved. Just a sort of knowing in my body and soul that couldn’t quite come clear in my thoughts. And I was out of time for any more of those too, because about then the crashing and screaming started. For a time being, I forgot the Stone and my idea and just about everything else and I ran for my family.

Healer and Bud always came around to us from their own distant cave, gliding over the water with Flow, skirting the rocks that stuck out over the river, always promising to fall in and never quite allowed by the tangle of roots binding them. Feet dry as cicada-shells, they would drift to ground in the trees on the riverbank and skirt the place of the dead to come to the gathering cave where someone would soon find them and call the family. Everyone would come and pay their respects and get hurts and hearts healed or most often, complain like children about some tick-picking thing or other.

The ground rose up steep, from the gathering cave to the rest of our caves which pocked the feet of the tree-covered cliff face. There the river was less tempted to gulp at us. The cliff veered away from the river so the forest spread wider and wider over the rising ground. We cooked outside when it was dry but at this time of year we cooked inside and ate outside if it wasn’t raining. Still there were a few hopefuls trying with their fires, even now more was the pity.

The afternoon sun had cleared the clifftop and burned down on me as I ran up towards the commotion. Were we being raided? I thought so at first but as I got nearer the shouting, I knew it was almost worse. A monster was among us. The family were in chaos when I arrived. The elders had beaten me there, that I’d made sure of, running behind and to the side of them through the trees so they wouldn’t suspect I’d come from the same place.

Roaring and grunting in and out of caves and trampling pots to shards was a black mountain of anger and tusk; an ancient demon of a boar come in from the forest. Everyone was both trying to drive it away and stay out of its path. They threw stones and broken pots and the watchers had come in from the forest and were trying to get it with their spears. It all just seemed to anger the beast more and I could see at least one person crawling across the ground, the scent of their blood mixing with the thickening smoke of scattered embers and smouldering wet loam.

The other elders had scattered and Healer was holding the Stone. I knew it wouldn’t be long before they put an end to the creature. I was almost excited to see them work. Would they set it alight? Use Flow to grind its bones mid-rage? If it was me, I’d just stop its heart, quick and clean. I was even thinking of doing it, more than thinking! I’d already reached with my soul to the Stone and as the Flow came into me, I saw they were indeed not channelling.

What were they doing dithering about? Even as I watched I saw Boar himself knocked aside as he tried to prick the beast with a spear. He staggered and went down and the thing would have been on him if a rock hadn’t flown from the smoke and thwacked it on the side the of the head. It turned in fury and charged in the direction the rock had come from, leaving Bear to struggle to his feet and stagger after it, picking up his spear as she went.

I looked back at the three elders. They still weren’t channelling! What was wrong with them? I gathered Flow from the Stone, filled up my soul ‘til my soul’s eye could see tendrils of it rising from my skin like steam. But then I was frightened. They didn’t know I’d channelled the Stone and even if they looked my way, according to their high and mighty shrivelled up ancient selves, they couldn’t tell I was dripping Flow into the forest around me. Even if they gathered their addled souls and started doing what they should, well, the Stone was extra full from my tinkering before so they wouldn’t even notice any Flow missing.

But I was still afraid and as I wavered the animal burst from the smoke and rammed full into Healer, tossing him into a Tree trunk like he was a dead twig. It turned mid-charge, terrifying quick for something so big and knocked Bud on her back then fell dead on top of her frail old legs, the sound of bones cracking loud across the clearing in my Flow-sharpened ears.

That was me. I’d come unstuck when I saw the elders were all about to be crushed and trampled. I’d flashed my soul across the clearing, reaching into the beast’s chest with a claw of Flow and squeezing its life out through its heart between one beat and the next. Another new learning for the day. A wisp of purple-black rose like mist from its body and quickly faded to nothing. Like babies, Animals didn’t have ghosts, not really.

I heard my mother’s croaky old moans as the beast’s dead weight crushed her broken legs. I watched through wisps of smoke as Tree retrieved the Stone from a puddle with shivering old hands. Healer lay still among the roots where he’d landed but I could tell he was still alive, the dark light of his ghost still firmly fastened to his rattly old bones.

Tree would fix them up, healing was even easier than moving things. You didn’t even need to know what to do. Spirits clung to the walls of their meaty caves, wanted them for shelter as long as they could give it. The spirit knew how to look after its house if only given half the chance. It was just that most of them couldn’t channel the Flow and so if help came from someone who could, well then, the ghost would use what it was given all too gladly. I knew. I’d practised on bugs and seen wings and legs uncrumple and even grow back. Not that I could tell anyone seeing as even Healer wasn’t that good. Questions would be asked about how I’d managed to channel so much Flow.

I didn’t go to the elders. I walked off into the smoke shrouding the clearing. Let them try and puzzle out what happened to the beast once they were fixed. I wasn’t afraid there was any fire to speak of. Everything was too wet. But the smoke was getting up my nose and making me mad so I got a mind to find out where it was coming from and snuff it out. I stumbled over things in the white gloom and that’s when I found Flower. I thought she was dead at first but my soul still held Flow so I changed my mind on that score soon enough.
I squatted beside her and turned her over. There was no blood. I felt up her twig of a body, none too gently, making her groan. Her eyelids fluttered open as my prodding fingers found the ruin of her ribcage. ‘Oh Flower.’ I gloated softly.

‘Berry. Help m….’ Her lips fought to part against sticky white strings of spit and a trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth.
A mixture of dread and elation thrilled through me and without thinking, I reached back through the smoke and filled myself to overflowing from the Stone, its lake of power even now barely a hair’s breadth emptier. I shook my head in mock sadness. ‘I don’t know how, Flower. Nobody’s taught me. You were always so much cleverer than me…’ I lied.

‘You know… I’ve seen y…’

Had she now? Sneaky little crotch-louse!

Her voice was a bubbling whisper and talking cost her a cough of dark blood. It burst from her mouth and spattered her face, causing me to flinch back. She was fading now. I could see her ghost, eager to slip its fleshly leash. I just had to let her go and pretend I was never there. It was just blind luck that made me find her anyway, could just as easily have not. But that’s when my thoughts from before came back to curse me.

‘There… There might be a way, Flower.’ I made my voice timid. ‘Can you channel the Flow? I know it hurts, just try. Reach out, the Stone is near, there, back behind me through the smoke. Just try Flower! I know we aren’t allowed but… it’s all I can think to do.’
And she did, the silly carp. I could see her feeble wisp of Flow twined with her soul, reaching, costing her, her final breaths, not that she knew. I reached alongside her, just so I’d know when she was there. When her soul touched the Stone, I said, ‘Now, take power from the Stone.’ And I snapped my own soul back.

She started to as well. Weakly. If she’d taken enough her soul would have done the rest. It’s why we channelers of the Flow lived oh so much longer than other people, see? Every time you channelled, you swatted away a moon or so of age. If I’d stopped to think I would have doubted she could draw enough to her, soon enough to save herself, but still, who knew? Not me.

Me, my limbs turned to water and terror and excitement burst in tingling numbness through my body as I channelled every curling wisp of Flow in me, spitting it out like a striking snake to make sure we never found out if she could save herself or not. Before she’d drawn a drop of Flow from the Stone, I’d pinched out her life the same way I had, the boar. Then I stopped channelling as the size of the thing I’d done struck me like a blow.

I goggled at the corpse, struck stupid as its owner for a few heartbeats. Its chest heaved and its back arched as the ghost whistled up from inside and out the nose and mouth with a wet cough of dying breath and a geyser of dark lifeblood. For half a breath she stood over me and she was the spit of her body, even to the colour of her skin. I’d never seen such a thing.

In that heartbeat, I felt the betrayal in her eyes raking my soul, that and its burning rage. I flinched back in spite of myself. Oh-ho! Yes! She would have haunted me to my grave, that one. I could already feel the new bond between us, reaching, forming, trying to twine around my soul. She knew what I’d done, all-right, I could see it in her vengeful scowl. The ghost put up its arms as if to reach for me and drag me from my body to share its death.

But my little trick had worked, for all that I would come to wish it hadn’t. No sooner than I’d traded looks with the most fearsome shade I’d ever seen, did it whistle away through the smoke, pulled into the Stone with no body left to save it. The haunting was torn from my soul and over the din of the family lumbering about in the haze of smoke, I could hear her anguished shriek. A haunting spirit cannot leave its haunt, see? It finishes its business and passes on – disappears actually but only I knew that – or it lingers and pesters. But there is no in between. Such a thing goes against earth and sky. Even the dumb elders knew that.

And yet this one had been torn from me, its haunt, even against earth and sky. And now I trembled like a leaf in the first buffeting coughs of storm-wind, afraid of what I’d done, of the rules I’d broken. Shivering with roaring thoughts I stumbled from the twitching body brushing off spatters of blood that weren’t there.

Just like fish-eyes not to know she was dead.

I tried to laugh at the thought but I was shaking so hard I could hardly walk. Panicking, I staggered through the smoke, bumping into this person and stumbling over that broken pot, going anywhere as long as it was away. But I was never much given to storms of the soul. My heart slowed before long and I could think again. Nobody had seen me. The smoke had been too thick. At least, that’s what I thought desperately, trying to make it so.

When I came even further back to myself, the smoke had at last started to thin. Whatever pile of wet leaves causing it had been found, I thought. But something else was happening. Voices came up in confusion and that’s when I noticed the smoke was getting brighter as if lit by midday sun. Except now the sun was cooling to an ember as it rolled towards the hills across the river.

I stopped walking and turned and saw the light behind me, growing brighter by the heartbeat. I shaded my eyes and walked towards it, emerging from the smoke to fall on my knees and curl up against the blinding blue-white that burned through my eyes to the back of my skull.

There were shouts and the glow dimmed a little. I raised my head slowly and looked sideways towards the light. Healer and Bud were standing by the dead boar and the light seemed to be coming from underneath it.

The Stone. Oh no! What have I done to the Stone?

A figure was crouched between them and Tree’s voice carried across the clearing to me. ‘I can’t channel! I can’t channel the Flow anymore! What’s happened to me, Healer? Bud? Help me!’

And it was then that I reached out to the Stone to see what had happened and knew that I would never again see the dark of the cave lit with the misty blue of swirling Flow rising from my skin as I held it in my soul, or the purple-black of the sleeping souls around me and the drifting trails of blues and violets like glowing mist on the air left by those that sleep-walked from their bodies in their dreams. Nor after today, would I watch a dying spirit rise like steam from its corpse after a hunting accident or birthing, a deep violet mist, flowing from the body, maybe taking the shape of the person for a breath, or just breaking apart and fading into earth and sky like mist burned away by the sun.

Now the world was only what my flesh could sense: reds, blues and greens and dull browns and the smells of water, earth, fire and flesh. It might as well have all been hues of grey and different kinds of rot to me from then to the end of my days. For I found in that moment that I had lost the only thing precious to me beyond my family to whom I would now be no more than a lazy useless girl, bad with her hands and wrong in the head. When I reached for the Flow it wouldn’t come. Like Tree, I could no more channel than the dead beast at the elders’ feet, or the corpse I’d made of Flower only moments ago.

As is my wont, being both ahead of my time in that I haven’t owned a TV for years (decades?) and rely completely on on-demand streaming services, and simultaneously (apparently) an insufferable luddite in my refusal to illegally obtain content, I finished watching Game of Thrones about a century behind the rest of the world. Then I ventured online to see whether everyone else thought the ending was as good as I did. Full disclosure: that’s not quite true, I’d heard rumours people were disappointed but didn’t want to spoil it for myself so didn’t look too hard. After finishing the series, speaking with people offline and looking online, I was at first surprised at the vehemence of people’s dislike. But after reading and hearing the same complaints repeated a few times, somewhat overgrown neural psychotherapist pathways sparked off their dust and yielded the diagnosis of, well, basically, separation anxiety.

There was a lot of disappointment about Jon Snow. He was all built up, people complained, then the character just turned into nothing and went nowhere (I beg to differ, actually, he was all over the place…). Danaerys Targaryen, they complained, went completely off-piste and behaved inconsistently with her personality.

How? I asked them. Nobody could really say. They just screwed up their faces and said they were done with the series and wouldn’t be reading the last books when they were eventually released and that was that. Again, I was struck by the intensity of their anger and found myself thinking, Jeeze, peeps, it’s just a TV show! Well all right, and a book. But still, really?

‘You know what happened?’ One person said, in a conspiratorial voice. ‘All the actors were offered jobs on another show and they just said the filming was taking too long and demanded it was wrapped up fast. That’s why it was so crap. They had to do a rush job.’ Maybe true, I said, but what do you think was so crap about it? No answer other than that it was crap and that [the rush job] was why. Still… What other characters disappointed you? I asked. Like the rest of them, that person also could only confabulate on the topic.

It mostly came back to Dany and Jon Snow and screwed up, disappointed, angry faces with no concrete explanations offered. A half-hearted google also throws up disappointment about the end of House Stark, Tyrion not getting a girlfriend and Arya not being the one to cap Cersei. These all in my view, support my opinion about why people really didn’t like the ending. Incidentally, I gather there was even an online petition to have the last series re-shot! Offline, one person gave me the desultory offering that there were just so many characters that had been built up to ‘be something’ and just not turned out to be anything but in my view this is yet more evidence of the real reason and where my suspicion began to dawn. Behind the confusing intensity of passion, It was all just starting to sound like standard disappointment, which many psychology texts offer is a much refined descendant of its more primal squalling ancestor: infant abandonment.

I thought both plot and characters came to reasonable conclusions and met fates befitting their personalities.

Leaving aside the characters for a minute, I thought that without getting preachy, the plot was an excellent comment on present day humanity. Cersei made her calculations with the distance and unreliability of information travelling across it – not too much Internet in Westeros – in mind. The North, from whence the common existential threat came, was far away and set apart from the warmer more hospitable and populous regions in Southern Western (sounding like anything familiar yet?). The story of what went on up north was, as far as Cersei was concerned, mutable to her purposes, much as real life narrative about climate-change – where the north, funnily enough, is also a key location – is mutable to corporate and political agendas.

Similarly, gaps in privilege in general and even actual north-south cultural and socio-economic divisions exist in many countries, not least the United Kingdom where rumblings about Scottish independence refuse to abate. I think these (or maybe some equivalent somewhere else in George Martin’s mind, I’m always numb to cultural references) were represented in the differing views and nature of Winterfell and Kings Landing. As in the series, so it is in real life where the underprivileged bear the brunt of the first assaults of climate change and the privileged can literally and figuratively afford to ignore it and remain self-absorbed in power and wealth squabbles for a little longer. That’s without even getting started on the far more obvious parallel of serfs and feudal rulers represented nowadays by corporations and wealthy individuals versus the less powerful and poorer workers who slave away to keep the rich wealthy and the powerful in power. Who knows, in future, maybe it will also be the descendants of the currently ‘well connected’, rich and powerful who live in the coveted paradise areas of the globe still warm enough and dry enough to produce abundant food and crops while the rest of humanity dies back from cold-driven starvation and disease through rising sea levels and encroaching swamplands. I’ve always been shit at interpreting poetry and the deeper themes of stories but I don’t think I’m miles away in this case.

Drilling down on the characters that have so disappointed people, again, nobody has been able to supply me with a coherent explanation for their disappointment. Anyone who, like me, has worked in investment banking could not argue that Eddard Stark’s death was the most plausible outcome. Honesty and truth don’t prevail in the face of greed, insecurity and paranoia. It was a shame for poor old Ed; believe me, I had to mourn him twice, first in the book then on film! But, set in his unsophisticated northern ways and determined not to accept the new reality in which he was thrust, he, well, got eaten alive by the lions he refused to believe existed. It’s what happens when you can’t adapt to any situation.

In Westeros where illegitimacy was taboo, Jon Snow couldn’t fail to have low expectations for himself; if people keep telling you you’re a bastard, you’ll start acting like one. But watch out. It’s dangerous to afford a bastard with no prospects a privileged upbringing. It means they’ve got the education and the skills to question everything and since the world is flawed, they will inevitably find everything wanting in seeing it for what it is and this will lead to a healthy disrespect for pomp and ceremony. With the lack of prospects their illegitimate status affords, they also tend to pose little political threat and if they’re smart, they’ll learn how to work it and quietly start to pose exactly the kinds of political threat nobody expects them to offer. In the end, they’ll have little conscience about standing on ceremony and that’s why Jon Snow was able to break his Night’s Watch vows with Ygritte and cross and double-cross the wildlings and the Night’s Watch for the greater good as he saw fit. Form and tradition and oaths and promises don’t mean much to you when you grow up a product and outside-observer of their mutability. Being a forced observer of the hegemony rather than a part of it Jon Snow would also be crippled by his inability to feel the tide of public opinion like those truly invested in it. Hence his difficulty understanding why, if he just said he didn’t want the throne, it would hardly matter what he wanted if the tide of public opinion weighed in for or against Danaerys. She on the other hand could see it all too clearly so when Jon’s true heritage was revealed the tension between them was right on the money.

Danaerys herself was brought up with a vengeful sense of entitlement to reclaim her stolen birthright. Rightly or wrongly, that was the reality handed down to her since before she could talk. But she also suffered abuse heaped with trauma stacked on further abuse. And on top of that she got some big breaks in life, being unburned by real actual flames and, figuratively, the mother of dragons where there had previously been none. It’s no surprise a very young human mind would fortify itself with an uncompromising sense of entitlement sublimated from the hurt and rage at the abuses and trauma she had endured. I think her eventual breakdown into rageful destructiveness and tyrannical ambition was a very plausible developmental arc as was Jon Snow’s killing her when he realised what she had become. Something has to give when a child is abused and hurt repeatedly. Put someone as scarred as she was in a position of such power as she had and it’s bound to go to their head and unhinge them even more. Power corrupts everyone. It’s doesn’t end well in the hands of the most sane people and Dany was crazy (sorry if you liked her) so it was double-bound to not end well.

Coming from a somewhat numbed emotional perspective, I was baffled throughout the earlier decades of my life, by people’s waxing lyrical about East-enders, Friends, Seinfeld, Neighbours and Shortland Street (look it up – I still call it ‘Shitland Street’ in my mind and have to consciously adjust speech and typing when in company), all of which I still find tedious to the point of unwatchability. Possibly assisted in understanding by years of having, studying and practising psychotherapy, definitely nudged in the direction of comprehension by a few stints living alone and turning to binge-watching for company during the long nights between weekends (when I could binge-watch even more), my confusion has grudgingly evolved into desultory and unreliable empathy for people who like soaps. I now understand at a felt level that it’s possible for even the most balanced individuals to become emotionally invested in plots and characters and the relationships between them as if they were real, or in the least worst case, more real than they are.

Actually what kind of crappy show would it be that you couldn’t feel at least a little about? A bit sad that Eddard died, a bit disappointed that Dany went crazy, a bit downcast that Jamie stayed on the wrong side in the end or a bit sorry for Tyrion that he didn’t get a girlfriend and grew such a conscience that even the pay-as-you-go option closed to him behind a door of his own making. It’s also well-known, that some less-balanced people form personal relationships with fictional characters, which they struggle – and sometimes fail – to distinguish from reality. That’s how you get hate-mail and death threats sent to actors in said shows. And I think it’s also how you get a lot of angry GOT fans when the pretty young things they’ve fallen in love with go and act all human and not the way they wanted them to.

Whether I’ve got the makers’ intentions for character development or sub-themes right or not, I don’t think the quality of the story is the source of viewers’ disappointment. I think it’s the fact that the best-dressed couple on set didn’t get their multi-orgasmic Disney honeymoon and the keys to the kingdom like in the olden days’ stories. Instead, there’s some weird guy with questionable social skills running the joint (rather than the populist vote winning out). Dany’s dead, Drogon’s MIA and Jon’s sitting around a campfire getting old in obscurity somewhere in the frozen wastes north of the broken-down wall; he doesn’t even have Ygritte to cuddle up to. What’s worse, there’s no hope it might all come right again because we were bereft of the show altogether when it had the indecency to come to an end and take all our favourite friends and secret lovers with it. There was nothing wrong with the story or the characters, other than that they went away.

“When I came to China, the cold-water taps on the water dispensers at the airport didn’t work and all these Chinese people were just getting hot water out of the machine and I just couldn’t believe it! I tried to tell them and they just ignored me and kept getting the hot water out of the machine and even drinking it! Once I got to my apartment, I was scared to go outside for weeks. When I finally did, I discovered some Chinese people are even really friendly and some of them are actually even quite smart! I just couldn’t believe it! Also, I’ve tried and tried to learn Chinese but I just can’t. About all I can say is shay-shay and I prob’ly even am still saying that wrong”

The above isn’t miles away from a verbatim quote; accuracy limited only by my memory. It was part of an expat’s speech in praise of China at a seminar at the foreign employment bureau (FEB) in Guangzhou (2019). Many readers may find the quote harmless and wonder what it’s doing in a blog-post about expat racism. Others may be wiser. Read on to find out why the above is more racist than it sounds and if this blog-post turns out to be old news to you, then share it with someone who could learn from it. Or if you disagree with anything here, I’d like to hear your views in the comments section.

Present during the FEB speech in question were a couple of hundred expats (including me) but more importantly, various Chinese officials and FEB staff who were (still are, presumably), as fluent in English as native speakers. And worse again, far more articulate expat speakers took the podium and even if they used bigger words and more eloquent turns of phrase, they delivered the same message; they were surprised to find Chinese people were as human as anyone. I all but hid my face in shame to be associated with any of them. But I’ve realised it does little good to be hard on these people. I don’t think they knew what they were doing and if they realised, they would probably be shocked and not want to make the same mistake again. But how can they ever realise and learn if nobody tells them what they are doing, in a non-confrontational and helpful way? So this is me, trying to do that. I hope this message is received in the spirit of helpfulness in which it’s intended.

I suspect the speaker in question remains to this day, completely unaware of the extent of his xenophobia (fear of foreigners). He may even (definitely, actually, he said so at the time) think he has reached a lofty vantage of culturally open enlightenment, through his exposure to Chinese culture. It’s also fair to say that while misguided, his intention was genuinely to praise the locals; all he probably thought he was saying was, “China is a pretty good place in the end.” While his altered view is definitely a step in the right direction, it still shows that he views Chinese people to be very different from him, as if they are almost a different species and not people, just like him. It’s a bit like saying, “you’re not bad at this…for a woman” or “For a disabled person, you’re pretty cool”.

For those who don’t understand the lightning-quick and often unconscious thought processes and sets of beliefs “innocent seeming” comments like these come from, they probably come across as harmless and well intended. It’s not until you understand what a person has to unconsciously believe, feel and think, in order to use the exact words they use, that you see how damaging they are. To help illustrate this idea, let me decode his speech for you, in chunks.

Here’s the first chunk:

When I came to China, the cold-water taps on the water dispensers at the airport didn’t work and all these Chinese people were just getting hot water out of the machine and I just couldn’t believe it! I tried to tell them and they just ignored me and kept getting the hot water out of the machine and even drinking it!

Here is the decoded version:

I am used to drinking cold water. What I am used to is what everyone in the whole world must be used to. So if I discover the machines don’t have cold water then the only possible interpretation of the situation is that there’s something wrong with them! They must be broken or something. And I don’t know what’s wrong with all these people that they don’t seem to have worked it out. I’ll try and help them, here I go… Oh! They’re ignoring me [possibly because I’m speaking in a foreign language they don’t understand and gesticulating at the machine like a madman but…]! Oh my god! They’re crazy! It’s the end of the world! I knew things would be all weird here! I was scared to come in the first place and now it’s all going wrong like I thought it would!

Next chunk:

Once I got to my apartment, I was scared to go outside for weeks.

Decoded version:

I was scared of being in a new place where people drink hot water. What other evil madness might be lurking in wait to kill me?

Next chunk:

When I finally did, I discovered some Chinese people are even really friendly…

Decoded version:

I thought Chinese people and possibly all people who weren’t from my country would be unfriendly and hostile. I was surprised that they weren’t. And not a little relieved.

Next chunk:

…and some of them are actually even quite smart!

Decoded version:

I thought all people who weren’t from my country, would be really stupid and uneducated [because they can’t speak English].

Last chunk:

Also, I’ve tried and tried to learn Chinese but I just can’t. About all I can say is shay-shay and I prob’ly even am still saying that wrong.

Decoded version:

It’s hard to learn a new language and easier to stay in my English-speaking expat bubble and just get along as well as I can buying things, taking buses etc.

What this all boils down to is that Mr Speaker was scared of leaving home and functioning in fear mode, he interpreted even the most workaday of things as threats. There being no actual threats in the vicinity, he, like almost all of us tend to do, pinned his fear on random elements of his surroundings (more about this later) and acted accordingly; effectively running away from the hot water machine, trying to warn others off it (like any sensible herd animal would do…if there was a genuine threat) and hiding in his apartment until he was able to regulate (calm) his fear and felt safe enough to come out. Note that in this case, his fear was not an accurate reflection of the environment. It was disproportionate.

Although our speaker spoke in an unfortunate place (within earshot of locals fluent in his language), it’s far from the worst I’ve heard expats say, since I got here a year or more ago. If you are still wondering what’s wrong with it and still think it sounds fine, that he was saying they’re friendly and smart… Keep reading.

Given many expats feel fear of their new surroundings in the same way as shown above, sadly, a very easy target on which to pin it, is the local population and this can lead to some bizarre situations. I have seen many expats make ‘friends’ with English-speaking locals and take advantage of these friends’ good natures in all kinds of ways including but not limited to trips to the post office, ordering goods online, dealing with customer service staff at various organisations. Ok, so far, so innocent. I’ve also asked Chinese people for help in navigating complicated form-filling when the translation apps won’t cut it and the consequences of getting it wrong might actually be serious or seriously inconvenient (I’m talking about on a scale of having to leave the country to validate a visa or something, when ticking the right box will allow me to stay) . I would do the same for a visitor to my country.

But there’s a difference between asking for help and shameless use, abuse and insult. In re-enactments of the opening example, these same people complain about ‘the Chinese’ and everything ‘they’ do wrong (in the given expat’s opinion) right in front of their newfound Chinese friends who can understand them perfectly! These are not isolated incidents. It’s fair to say that in any given outing with any given group of expats (whether there are locals present or not), there will almost always be some stereotyping of Chinese locals whether positive, negative or neutral. And in about 100% of such cases, I have found myself silently disagreeing with the stereotype or not seeing why it’s relevant or worth mentioning. Ok, a lot of Chinese people prefer drinking warm water but so what? A lot of Dutch people are tall. Some Chinese people are superstitious about running in the rain being unhealthy. So what? A lot of American people are superstitious about Donald Trump being a decent head of state… Every culture has its skin-deep nuances and in my experience, they’re usually little more than skin-deep.

My partner and I have both found Chinese people to be much like…. uh, um, people! I know, sounds crazy eh? While our Mandarin slowly progresses and opens more and more doors for us when it comes to interacting with people here, we have in the meantime managed to put goodwill and the benefit of the doubt to powerful use, easily enabling us to do things that expats who have lived here for longer than us warned us against trying. For example, we have travelled independently to a lot of urban and rural destinations throughout China. We have bought from Chinese online stores, taken rides with local private drivers, received deliveries to our home (rather than my partner’s employer’s address as recommended by many expats), stayed at hotels where English isn’t spoken and generally managed to interact at a far more personal and workaday level than many people who have lived here for years ever do. We know of people who were still too afraid to take a taxi after living here for five years.

So what makes the difference between the expat who says ‘they’ in fear and vexation during daily life in China and the expat who just gets on with it and is surprised at the meltdowns going on in the expat community around them? I don’t think there’s one simple answer but as an experienced expat, psychotherapist and person, I think it’s a combination of the following.

Firstly, I am privileged enough to have not just an education but a vocation which eventually afforded me a lot of time to think and deeply instilled beliefs that people are people, more or less everywhere. That’s already a ton of weighty privileges many people don’t have. You might say, half the reason I’m not as xenophobic (I like to think not at all but we don’t know what we don’t know about ourselves) as many people is because I’m lucky.

Secondly, after moving from New Zealand to Britain where I lived for 21 years and spending extended periods in Germany, this isn’t my first rodeo as an expat; and to be fair, that is yet another privilege. It’s a privilege because people who have never moved countries before (or more accurately ‘moved cultures’), don’t have the experience of adjusting to their new surroundings but if you’ve already done it once, you have a far better idea of how you’re likely to feel in the new situation and just knowing can take some of the sting out of it.

I think expats stereotyping Chinese people and struggling to integrate is a lot to do with being a frightened stranger away from home, who lacks the reflective ability to process the emotional experience objectively. In fact, it’s known that more privileged immigrants tend to assimilate better than less privileged ones – and by ‘privilege’ here, we mean, someone who was well supported on many fronts throughout their life and particularly emotionally and during their childhood). In other words, common garden variety fear of the unknown but also inadequate emotional tools to regulate that fear. How do I know this personally, though? Because I’m no better than any of them. Well, maybe I am now but I wasn’t always. Maybe my therapy training helps me put it into words a bit better too. You’re reading this, you be the judge.

Aroha embodies (or doesn’t!) a lot of ideas. First and foremost, she’s lost her mind but crazy people are as unique as everyone. How she’s gone mad is rooted in a number of inspirations.

Firstly, early in life she struggled to break free of a family background that was violent, unloving and underprivileged. Her life’s mission was to prove she wasn’t just the sum of her background. Having to embark on this journey in childhood, Aroha was forced to sacrifice her childhood and devote her energy to growing up and becoming self-sufficient too quickly.

As is, sadly, often the case with such people, Aroha instinctively pulls the ladder up behind her. She has no empathy or tolerance for the visible weaknesses and struggles of others; Joanna’s artwork is anathema to Aroha. Painting pictures and apparently dreaming of fame is the very portrait of laziness and ‘not getting on with it’ that Aroha can’t stand. Aroha’s inner mantra is ‘Just deal with it (I had to)!’ While not a sufferer of typical PTSD, Aroha is the victim of long-standing childhood trauma (little-t trauma as it’s called in psychology terms), and the psychological developmental arrest this often causes.

Aroha has fallen prey to a common health hazard endemic in those who have striven through hard traumatic lives right from the start. She clings to her sparse achievements and stays set in her ways, close-minded and inflexible in her thinking and ideas. Being a doctor was an accolade in Aroha’s day but she was never able to deal with hospital politics. She thought getting her qualification would earn her a ticket to acceptance and wasn’t emotionally able to deal, when she found just another level of rejection. She may have been a doctor but she never got far in the profession owing to lack of people skills.

In life, particularly because of the physical nature of her childhood rejection, Aroha also needed to feel in control and worked her body hard to be strong and tough in an attempt to make herself feel the safety her parents not only didn’t provide her with but actively threatened with their haphazard violence and inconsistent moods. Now Aroha feels she’s having it rubbed in her face if people appear occupationally or physically lazy. Deep down, such people as Joanna hold the mirror up to Aroha’s unconscious envy.

Before writing Aroha (both the novel and the character), I would probably have said such rigidity of thinking and feeling is more commonly seen in elderly people (which it may be because keeping an open mind is a creeping challenge for all of us as we age). And Aroha is indeed getting on a bit, in a way.

But in the process of developing Aroha’s character, I changed my view. I now think that inflexible and close-minded people are usually that way all their lives and only more visible in old age because the world has changed around them and left them behind and unable to adapt. If you grow up with smart phones, you’ll be as good (or bad) at using them as anyone in your generation regardless of how emotionally immature you are. But if smartphones disappear and become nano-tech you are afraid of or struggle to understand, your peers are more likely to adopt the new stuff and leave you behind, lamenting the good old days when a phone was something you could damn well hold in your hand!

As is evident in her interactions with the people around her, Aroha gets it wrong at the interpersonal level all the time. This is because for both practical reasons and a lack of capacity to accept change, she can’t understand other people if they think and feel differently to her about and in, a given situation. She spent so much time growing up early when she was a child that she never developed the ability to be empathic and see things from others’ points of view; this also curtailed her ability to learn and evolve in her thinking; it made her somewhat of a rote-learner. She found her way and invested a lot of hope for a better life in that way being the only way. She backed herself into an emotional corner.

While the exact ways Aroha has lost touch with the world are clearly my fantastical inventions, the idea came from a phenomenon I’ve seen in many people from my generation and subsequent ones. Though it’s far from universal, many people my age and younger seem to lose touch with their parents and vice versa. Aging parents become a burden and people we tolerate and ‘do our time with’ and feel obliged to take care of, but don’t particularly listen to any more. Interactions with such parents and other elders are fraught with conflicting senses of duty, loyalty, sympathy, dismissal and sometimes even resentment and revulsion. Think of grandma and her casually despicably racist jokes and clanger generalisations beginning with things like ‘they all…’. Or grandpa and his screaming misogyny offered up at mealtime as a compliment for your new female partner brought home to visit for the first time. I think you know what I mean.

I think this is probably a result of many factors including but far from limited to times of unique change with the onset of new technology etc, some elderly people having more capacity to accept and embrace changing technology and society than others (like anyone), and parents and adult children’s shared capacity (or lack of it) to give up their respective roles as parent and child and re-unite as adult friends. The Aroha character, aside from being just a part of the story, is also a metaphor for a nightmare case of failure on all these fronts.

Another idea that inspired the Aroha character and her bits of the plot is the impact of loneliness on a person. It’s well known that people in enforced sustained isolation of whatever kind, lose their minds. Our brains are physically wired to need social contact and at least some degree of closeness or meaningful connection with others. The parts of the story around the impact of Aroha’s isolation on her and also of her changing abilities in interaction with other people were inspired by the way we shrivel in isolation and grow through interaction even if it’s not necessarily a pleasant experience.

And the final facet of the inspiration for Aroha’s character was Freud’s old but tried and tested idea of that which is repressed eventually always finding expression; much like the vast heaving fat-berg discovered in the London sewerage system in the last few years. At the same time as being a real character in the plot Aroha is also a metaphor for a painful past that demands resolution no matter how torturous that resolution will be.

While I think it’s a light-hearted and entertaining read, Aroha is a story with its feet in the shade in more ways than one!

Tristian is slightly narcissistic. This means he has made to feel such shame for the person he was, for a long period during his early years that he has been left with a great lack of certainty about his own goodness and ‘lovableness’. Tristian needs, more than most people, to feel liked by people he cares about and when the people close to him hurt his feelings, he struggles to physically tolerate the feeling of shame the hurt triggers. All people have some measure of narcissism and everyone is familiar with the kick in the guts certain types of emotional hurt can cause. But for people on the narcissistic spectrum, the hurt is often significantly more of a visceral, physical experience, usually felt in the gut.

Tristian’s parents often didn’t accept him for who he was. They were inconsistent in their role modelling. They were the kinds of people who could change what they considered to be ‘good’ suddenly, for example when they became religious fanatics in Tristian’s early teens. They expected Tristian, in his childhood and after, to follow suit and poured derision on him when he didn’t. In order to keep up with his parents’ changing versions of loveable, Tristian had to become a ‘chameleon’ personality, able to assess and adapt at the drop of a hat.

Tristian also suffered a minor trauma as a very young child and this combined with his unresolved childhood need to be loved drove him to find his own answers about the things that frightened him when he was tiny and also to be as successful as he could at anything he did so that whoever he met had the greatest chance of being impressed by him (aka loving him).

Crucially, he had to make it all look easy and also to feel easy. Tristian not only needs to be seen to feel calm and confident, he also needs to actually feel calm and confident. It pays for him, more than most therefore, to be healthy, to get enough sleep and to be generous and charismatic since these things are highly valued by others and more likely to maintain calm in himself and his interpersonal relationships. Most of the time, because he’s only slightly narcissistic, Tristian is more or less genuinely who he purports to be, but his darkest fears and deepest secrets are buried far below his likable uber-successful shell. Violent or loud confrontation with Tristian and starving him of his physical wellbeing routines are Tristian’s largest sore spots; they touch on his deep dark insecurities and resentments which remain too hard for him to bear if brought to the surface.

Narcissists are often seen as bad people which is a shame because treating them in this way double-punishes them for their fundamental vulnerability. To dislike a narcissist is to make them even more narcissistic. They will defend themselves the only way they know how.

‘High functioning’ narcissists like Tristian are often multi-talented and serial high achievers. Tristian’s excellent physical condition and huge scientific and commercial successes have their feet in the shade of his early childhood fears and his parents cruel and constant rejections.

But Tristian also experienced the stabilising influences of a tight-knit group of school friends including Joanna. His regular visits to Joanna’s parents’ home also supported him in a more loving way than his own parents did. Children cling to these things and a single calming, validating influence can go a long way toward redemption for a struggling narcissistically wounded child. This is why Tristian is only slightly narcissistic. He gained plenty of validation outside his home.

Tristian’s other key vulnerability is the sheer energy he needs to invest in maintaining the external successes he places so much of his sense of identity in. To feel good about himself, Tristian needs to stay ahead of the game which means he’s always pushing hard on all fronts to move his successes to new heights (it’s common that such ‘narcissist-lites’ burn out physically with the onset of middle age because their bodies just can’t take the strain of maintaining their multiple fronts any longer).

In his late 20s, as he’s just about to pass his physical prime, he’s becoming aware of the physical toll his way of coping with the world and his psychological processes take on him. It’s thought that all sufferers of narcissism in any more than a healthy trace quantity are prone to respiratory illnesses and back injury because of the cumulative stresses brought on by postures they adopt throughout life to hold in their emotions and this is manifested when pressure on Tristian from Joanna and Aroha begins to tell as shown in the story.

Joanna was traumatised as a child. She has mild PTSD which has made her an anxious person. Her anxiety in turn has prevented her from becoming a rounded emotionally mature person even if she is highly talented. Her tendency to retreat from human company has probably also helped fuel her talent since painting is known to be a meditative activity but is also representative of a passive way of reaching out to other people to express herself. This was the inspiration for the skeleton of her character structure. When I was writing her chapters, I tried to live Joanna’s experience. I asked myself questions like, how does an anxious person who doesn’t know how to deal with their anxiety cope? That’s where her weed and tobacco smoking and coffee drinking come into play but also her painting. In creating Joanna’s narrative, I used my understanding of PTSD to flesh out how Joanna might react to moving house, seeing a ghost, getting into a relationship.

PTSD is a very real condition and also an elusive diagnosis. PTSD can remain hidden for years and suddenly be triggered then never stop triggering. Triggers are thought to form links in the sufferer’s brain for example, a panic attack is triggered by a red car seen on a road. Once triggered, the trauma keeps coming back and the road reminds the trauma victim of the red car and becomes a new trigger itself. Then the front gate becomes reminiscent of the road, the path reminiscent of the front gate, and so on with each becoming a trigger linked to the other until, in extreme cases, PTSD sufferers become completely housebound.

In Joanna’s case, there are two initial triggers. Firstly moving house doesn’t exactly trigger her trauma but ‘primes’ her for the next trigger. Because of the upheaval of the unfamiliar situation, she becomes stressed and vulnerable to PTSD attacks. Without realising it, she ups her self-administered doses of weed, coffee and tobacco which destabilise her state of mind further. Her trauma is finally triggered definitively when Aroha makes her first appearance and then Joanna begins to lose her sense of reality. She struggles to trust her own perception and falls faster into self-doubt and a sense of hopelessness. As the story unfolds, you can see how the combination of society’s treatment of ‘sick people’, the particular dilemma in question, namely of Aroha’s disturbing presence and Joanna’s ailing self-esteem conspire to make her buckle under the stress of unfolding events but also not feel as if she can share her problems for fear of being judged.

At the same time, Joanna’s is determined and talented. Just because somebody has PTSD doesn’t mean they can’t be a high achiever. She has at least in one respect made a huge success of herself. She is also the product of a loving and diverse childhood environment, at least, after the traumatic events of her story’s beginning. Joanna isn’t troubled by confusion over gender expression or identity, these things were handed down to her implicitly as she grew up. She doesn’t think about them, she doesn’t know what she knows and that’s why Aroha’s out-dated judgements confuse her. They are of another time when such things were in huge flux. But she still suffers from a crisis of confidence and wants to be liked and desired as much as anyone and is more than most, prone to worrying that she won’t be. She’s therefore only got a handful of people she’s close to and she leans on these close relationships and drugs to cope. Her artwork is a testament to her determination but also her desperate need for self-expression. Her clipped knowledge of the world and inexperience with adult relationships show how her trauma has curtailed her maturing into full adulthood with the result being disproportionate fame and a somewhat withered personal life.

Want to get to know Joanna better? Grab a copy of Aroha here or at any Amazon near you!