Another Coincidence
BRIEF ADVERT
A month or two ago I put a little album online. It went on Instagram but I forgot to share it here. Solo keyboard, seven tracks, six original compositions. All recorded on the same sound. It’s a very “headphones” kind of thing, quiet and strange and on the mournful side. It is called no signal under the name Dacre Bears: here it is.
Ok, on with post:
“You might have warned me! I hate spiders!”
“What did they ever do to you?”
“They’re doing it right now!” The prince made faces of disgust, and imitated spiders with his hands, all over himself. “I hate them! Why, by all the horizon, are we — what are you doing? Magician!”
The magician had plunged his arm deep into the hole, and was rummaging intently.
“Stop that at once!”
“Aha,” said the magician. “I’ll tell you what doesn’t hate spiders…” And he pulled his arm back out.
Sharply the prince recoiled again, because the magician’s arm was covered in a hundred of this most despised creature. His gloved hand was closed, and the prince had a growing conviction that it might be concealing some sort of spider overlord, the size of an apple, hideously strong-jawed and able to leap the height of a man, hissing as it did so.
As the magician gently shook normal-sized spiders from his arm, he turned, looked the prince up and down, and asked him, “Do you know why it is that the tunic you are wearing is worth the wages of the largest city in the kingdom, for a whole month?”
The prince was completely taken aback. He had absolutely no idea what he was being asked. Besides, there were spiders everywhere.
The magician opened his hand — and the prince gasped in wonder. There on the scuffed white leather of the glove, to match the orange panels on the prince’s summer tunic, was a tiny orange frog, no bigger than the end-joint of his thumb. It blazed bright in the sun, as if it was a gemstone filled with fire.
“If you kill this fine creature, the colouring turns a sickly blue. The only way to get that colour is to fix the cloth you want to dye around the tunnel entrance to a nest of spiders, like this one, and wait, oh, twenty-five years? By then, if you are lucky, a frog, like this one, will have left some specks of healthy colour on every fibre.”
“Rare indeed,” said the prince. “Can we go back to the path?” The magician seemed to have got what he wanted, and the prince, for his part, wanted to get away from the nest of spiders.
“Not yet, not yet. I need to rest a moment. But yes — rare indeed. It’s tricky enough a process that firefrog cloth, after the long wait for it to be safe to wear, is as precious as the most precious of metals or gems,” said the magician, raising his eyebrows disapprovingly at the prince’s tunic. “And you seem to have got some pastry on yours.”
The prince made a face, but he had been observing and was thinking.
“Isn’t that a tree-frog?” he said. “We’re an afternoon’s walk from any of the great forests.”
“It is, and we are! But we all enjoy a treat — and what this little frog cannot resist is a kind of honey, made by these particular spiders, when they are living behind this particular species of fungus, and only when this fungus has died having spent five hundred years feeding on this particular kind of tree, on the banks of a river with — where are they? … there they are! — those particular fish living in it. Living and excreting.”
“I don’t think I much like the idea of eating spider honey.”
“Good,” said the magician. “It would kill you quicker than you’d register the flavour. And it’s not the only thing that would. It so happens that this precise arrangement of nature leads not only to the colour and the texture of this marvellous little thing” — they both peered at the frog again, as it blinked bright yellow lids over sky-blue eyes — “but also to its toxicity. On its skin — don’t touch — is an extraordinary substance, from which is derived a compound…”
That’s from something I haven’t finished yet. An excerpt from Chapter 9. This really is unlike anything I’ve ever written before; as you can see, it’s splashing about in fantasy tropes, a temptation which I have never really indulged before. It is also overtly mathsy, a sustained homage to Borges, and contains the single longest timespan I have ever included in a narrative. Why? Because. And I am having a lot of fun. I’m very lonely, and the world of this one, even though I haven’t added to it since November, was a particular relief to spend time in, back then. The two characters you just briefly met have a trust in each other, a fondness for each other, that makes me happy.
It’s also different in that the main reason I’m writing it is because I want to release something as audio. Partly this is because over the last five years I’ve had a surprising number of people tell me I ought to try something with my voice — so I’m writing something to read. That’s part of it. Even more, it’s an excuse for me to write a soundtrack, which I am also having a lot of fun doing.
In Brighton three weeks ago I was sitting in a cafe trying to work on the final quarter of this story — it’s only 3/4 written, and has been stalled at that point for half a year now — when I solved a major problem, or thought I did. The last annotation I made on a particular paragraph was “firefrog!”, because the creature in the excerpt above, and the properties of the chemical on its skin (of which a big deal is made elsewhere) arrived suddenly as the solution to what I had believed was a different problem.
If you’ve been reading my substack for any length of time you’ll know how much I love a coincidence. So it made me very happy when pretty much immediately after solving that little problem, I was wandering around Brighton and found this in the gutter:
That’s all from me today. I have two more coincidence stories which make me tingle even to think of them, but one is a part of something else I’m writing, and the other is directly related to Old Owl and Matt, my first novel, out in October from Book Works — so I will hold off on writing about that one for now. But I expect to be posting about that quite a bit, when the time comes. Probably. I’ve never done book promotion before!
And, yeah: when I’ve finished writing the story quoted from above (it’s called Hell) I will put that online. I won’t use substack to share it, but will certainly link to it here.
We should make some music together, I’d be interested to see how that turns out. I’m on 719 days by the way. 🙌🏻 x