Alex Barclay: Out of my tiny mind

Trails of anything: breadcrumbs, stones, destruction, and I’m in. This week, I followed a trail that began at my earliest writings – from copybook to book book, from four-year-old child to my latest crime commission, The Drowning Child.

Yes: my mom kept my school copies and I’ve been reading them. I shall bring them to all future publishing meetings slash psych evals. The extracts below are not riddled with [SIC]s. The mistakes you see are because I made them back then, which, of course, horrifies me. I would prefer to imagine myself as a US-style spelling bee champ.

Wake up, champ.

Luckily, becoming a champion anything was never forced on me by my parents. If I had children, I’m not sure I would go so gently. Then I discovered this beautiful quote from The Parent’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents by William Martin: “Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.”

Age 9, in my religion copy, I was expressing wonder and marvel at The Dukes of Hazzard. That’s devotion. I wanted to meet them because “they are fabulous and brilliant”. Plus, “I’d love to ride in the General Lee. That’s their car. It’s orange and the numbers 01 are written on the car in big white numbers.” A copyeditor’s dream passage. In another religion copy extract: “Dear Lord, Thank you for the gift of choices. I use this gift every day. Life wouldn’t be nice if we hadn’t had choices. Amen.” In the illustration below was me, contemplating a profoundly spiritual choice faced by many children in the ’80s: “Coke, Cidona, or… Lilt???”

Another piece was called Faces and Feelings, which hummed with unresolved anger. It was essentially about my siblings and I battering each other. It was at the height of the kicking movement; when kicking was the most popular response to an emotional slight. “Very imaginative” my teacher had written at the end. “It was reportage!” I would have cried if I was a spelling bee type.

Then there was the formative passage from The Early Writings Of – one that was clearly the result of a TV night supervised by my older siblings, because at six years old, I had watched Snowbeast: “a very scarry film about a big Snowbeast. He had big long claws. Two ladies were sking in the snow and one of the ladies heard the Snowbeast and went back and she left the other girl there and the Snowbeast got the girl and she was all cut on the arm.”

Very scarry. Snowbeast, first released in 1977, is on YouTube, so, of course, I had to take a look. It turns out the cut on the arm was revealed only when a man stumbled across the girl’s body. She may have been “all cut on the arm”, but she was all dead too. Don’t go sking, people.

Later, the sheriff gets a call from his deputy:

“Sheriff, some ski patroller wants to talk to you.”

“Yeah? What about?”

(deep tones) “The man said: murder.”

Then there was the exchange about the victim’s identity:

“Maybe I’ll recognise her when I see her face.”

Pause from the sheriff. “She doesn’t have one.”

Dun. Dun. DUN. These are the kind of things I was storing away for future use. Over the 30 literally odd years since then, these interests surfaced in all kinds of ways. My first bad guy is called Duke. He is a hazard. There is a replica General Lee on top of my fridge. There is Coke and Cidona inside my fridge – no Lilt (bad experience on a school bus riddled with sic(k). I’m still big on the gift of choices. I like to box, but am no champ. I still use ellipses for dramatic effect. And Snowbeast, it transpires, is set in… a Colorado ski resort, which is how my Ren Bryce series kicks off. There’s a body on a snowy peak, and the sheriff is called in. In The Drowning Child, when my heroine’s psychiatrist is pressurising her into opening up about her grief, she thinks: “I feel. I feel. I feel. F**k feelings”, followed later by “Feelings. Jesus. Christ.” Avoiding feelings is a habit he wants her to kick. She kicks back.

Criminals are caught because of the habits they keep. They may be on the run, but they can follow their passion right into the waiting arms of law enforcement. People change, but what truly interests them won’t. And people who are stuck in life, who want to find what excites them, are told to look back to their childhood and see what captivated them then.

A few months ago, on one of those rubbish days of following trails through the internet that can lead a person to look up what Stifler’s mom looks like now (the exact same), I did one of those “dream career” surveys. I got: writing, in case I was in any doubt. I’m so grateful it’s what I do. Tiny Me would have been blown away.

However, Tiny Me seemed to have nailed down her entire future, aged four, in the short piece, I Am Alive: “I can run, walk and move. Also I can learn. I can read, write. I can love too. I am alive.”

God bless the child.

The Drowning Child by Alex Barclay, the latest in the Ron Bryce series, is published today by Harper