This is a more recent story, less constrictive than the previous ones, and written for The Verb in 2016.
The broadcast went out from a glass box in the Royal Festival Hall, so the commission from Ian McMillan and the producer was — write a story that takes place in a box.
I decided to write about a Jack-in-the-Box. When I was little, I had metal one that played Pop Goes the Weasel.
What I remembered most about it was not the wonky sound but the plasticky colours. In a house full of antiques, such as ours, it stuck out.
For you, what might be interesting about the story — technically — is that, whatever else it does or doesn’t do, it attempts throughout to build anticipation.
As we read, we are turning the handle on the Jack-in-the-Box, getting closer and closer to the moment it will jump out and shock us, again.
Certain kinds of fiction, horror stories and thrillers, use this effect repeatedly. It is an interesting question whether or not that jumpscare or sudden attack needs to involve a twist.
In theory anyway, little children are still delighted by the reappearance of the scary clown on the hundredth occasion. That it’s the same clown every time doesn’t dismay or bore them.
Genre fiction can often contain generic moments. The same clown from the same box. Most of the time, though, the writer is to present something the reader hasn’t exactly seen before. To surprise them in a new way. They don’t want the same same, again and again. They want the same but different.
Surprise is a very one-dimensional emotion. I’m not sure it’s even an emotion as the other emotions are. Perhaps it’s more a brief state, a reaction pending an emotion. And it doesn’t vary much, because we don’t know, yet, what we’re reacting to.
There is delighted surprise and appalled surprise. But whilst we’re going Agh! we’ve still not made up our mind what the moment means.
As a child turning the Jack-in-the-Box’s handle, I was readying myself for appalled delight.
In genre fiction, by our very picking up of a book with that title, that cover design, that blurb, and by starting and continuing to read it, we have committed ourselves to receiving certain generic shocks. (And maybe, by choosing to read literary fiction, we’ve by and large protected ourselves from putting ourselves at their generic mercy.)
Genre readers are ahead of the action, to this extent: they know exactly what genre they’re reading, and what does and doesn’t happen in those kinds of stories.
The genre I was aiming for here was social horror. The horror of long wasted years of colourless life, and the sudden horror of an eruption of distasteful joviality at a funeral reception.
I was thinking of Joe Orton, and of the wake scene in the biopic Prick Up Your Ears written by the wonderful Alan Bennett.
in-the-box
How he remembered it, now he was back — when he was two years old like his grand-nephew, 1946 that would have been, this room — the ‘drawing room’ — had been brown. He hadn’t noticed it at the time, because in 1946 most things that weren’t olive, navy, grey or black were brown. Telephones were brown. Soup was even browner.
Later, when he grew up and grew old, he wondered how people had stood it — the brownness of most things. They breathed it in as smog and somehow, when it was inside them, it turned their words and then there lives brown. Anything that brought a bright colour or even a different pattern — he had always adored that.
That had been the first sign, he thought, colour had been the first sign of how he might be, and how he would utterly refuse to be.
At the crematorium today, many of the relatives had thought his tie disrespectfully patterned and coloured: purple and pink boxes stacked in 3D. They knew already, all of them, but he wasn’t going to drab down for a dead father — however much the relatives might want him to. Might want him not to be there at all.
Here again in the house, after so many years, the brown he remembered was gone. Some time in the late 1980s, he estimated, the drawing room had become the living room, and had suffered a near fatal attack of magnolia, and had never recovered.
If possible, he thought, as he looked around, magnolia was worse than brown — because it thought itself so superior to brown. Brown and magnolia, they both meant the same thing.
Stuff from the attic had been brought down by the relatives and left on every available surface, except the buffet table. If anyone wanted any of the stuff, they would help keep down the cost of the house clearance.
There weren’t many at the reception; the buffet would go begging. Dad had buried most of the folk who could still stick him. He saw the collection of crystal swans — only swans. As if monkeys or frogs would obscurely offend the Church of England. Even his mother’s frivolities had been fearfully constrained. Poor woman.
His darling grand nephew was bumbling around in blue and white horizontal stripes, looking delightfully chubby. No-one disapproved of his colours — a toddler would look weird in black. The little boy was close to pulling the radio off the table, grabbing hold of the big black plug, when his father caught him and said, ‘Easy now.’
Perhaps it was the big brown radio reminded him, or perhaps it was the blue and white stripes, or perhaps the grand-nephew himself, but he began to look for something — something he hadn’t thought about in decades.
Was it really still…? Might it have been…? What colour had the…? And there it was, beneath a pile of cigar boxes full of fishing floats and lures – his father’s.
Absurdly, he felt that, as soon as he noticed it, some relative would put their white wine down and snatch it — but he made it across fairly steadily, considering, and moved the traces of his father’s joyless hobby to the side.
It was another box, cube-shaped, candy-striped, containing what used to be an obvious surprise. He remembered, as he felt the lightness of its weight, how he’d adored it — how, in the house of brown silence, it had jumped out in blue and white stripes and clown-face and made the now long-dead aunties shriek with fear and then laugh with joy. His Jack-in-the-box. It had always stood on the sideboard, near the back. When the radio came, in October 1946, there was no room — that was they excuse they used. It disappeared one day to the next. He knew he must have made a fuss, even aged two. He had adored the box, and carried it around to hand over to staid aunties, asking ‘Sweetie? Wanna sweetie?’ Just about his first word, sweetie. He still used it. The radio took its place on the sideboard, and brought many more colours into the house, subtler colours, more resplendent colours – opera!
Opera, too, had been a sign of his future life. Oh yes, wasn’t it just? And Jack, when he sprung out, had looked a little clown-like — perhaps that was why he himself so loved Pagliacci.
He held the Jack-in-the-box in his hands and began to feel something he hadn’t felt in a long time — he felt mischievous.
He looked around at the mourners, none of whom were really feeling all that sad — except that there wasn’t anything worth having among the attic junk. Nothing Antiques Roadshow.
His nephew’s wife, who he’d always thought would have been right at home in 1946, with rationing and all that Call the Midwife malarkey — she was on the sofa, holding back her son, the chubby little boy. The boy who would be about the same age he himself had been when some passing saint, perhaps a great uncle, had given him the Jack-in-the-box for his birthday — the only object in the house that surprised with a fine excess, colour and pattern.
An overwhelming sense of mischief, among the fake long faces and magnolia — he couldn’t resist.
How appalled his father would have been at Jack making a sudden appearance at his funeral reception. Shame he hadn’t had Jack with him at the crematorium.
It was a gamble, he thought, trusting a seventy year old spring, but he had to take it. ‘Here,’ he said, approaching the modern family, but speaking to his grand nephew, who was playing an electronic game on his phone. ‘Hey,’ he said, a little louder, ‘what do you think this is?’ He was worried his nephew would say, ‘It’s a Jack-in-the-box,’ and explain it. He didn’t, though he and his wife were both suspiciously eyeing the box. Perhaps enough time had passed for it to be a real surprise – perhaps young people, with all their technology, had forgotten. ‘Look what I’ve found for you,’ he said. The boy’s attention was fully on the box now. ‘What is it?’ asked the mother. ‘It’s not smelly, is it?’
‘No,’ he said, delighted.
‘Is it an egg?’ asked his nephew. ‘An ostrich egg?’
They didn’t know! — they didn’t know!
‘Why don’t you open it?’ he said, handing the faded box over to his grand nephew — passing it on, with hope of a joyous life.
Poor Jack! Seventy years — such a long time to wait in the dark, all coiled up with potential energy, never hearing a shriek or seeing a laughing face. He was already starting to cry, at the thought of his own not seventy more like forty years of shrieking and laughing, of colour and pattern, of opera.
The grand nephew’s finger’s fumbled.
‘Just flip that catch there — just flip it up. You’ll see.’
Seventy years — seventy years in this brown-souled house, never, until now, poor Jack, never getting to escape, never getting to —