A talk and two extracts
This month I was delighted to talk at two library events about The Fulcrum – the book club talk at Obs Library and the Author Talk at Tokai Library.
I loved putting the talk together and thought I’d load it to the site as part of the book information page and then I thought, well, in for a penny, right?
And so I’m sending it out to you, with extracts… which makes it a massive read and so probably an instant scroll-past for most.
But, if you’ve been interested in The Fulcrum but not 100% sure what it’s about or you’ve read it and you’re interested in some backstory, it might interest you.
Apart from the written-to-be-read pieces, it’s not to be read as a written piece because it's written as a read-out-loud piece so there you go.
Oh and I’ve just dropped you in past all the intro stuff…(and here are two pics with me and the wonderful librarians who hosted me.)
The Fulcrum is a work of speculative fiction, magic realism, and urban fantasy...a genre-blending story about why – no matter how hard we might try – humanity never succeeds in flipping the self-destruct switch.
Because we have a great fascination with apocalypse, don’t we? It’s reflected in our myth making and our story telling.
Most cultures and religions have a story not only of creation but one of destruction…a flood, a fire, a great war…the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, the libido – the life instinct – and thanatos, the death instinct.
In our story telling, we revel in end-of-days movies and books – the asteroid obliterates the earth, the aliens take over and turn us into food, the centre of the earth explodes, the terrifying disease turns us into zombies…
And each generation faces what it believes are the end times.
In the last hundred years or so this has been especially evident – the Spanish Influenza, the World Wars, the Cold War and nuclear devastation, the ozone hole and HIV, fears of crop failure and global starvation, and now climate change, and each at their time the fear that this was truly the end for our species – and yet? Here we are.
How is it we never quite kill ourselves off the way we seem so very keen to?
Well, let’s imagine that – rather than a finite, linear experience of beginning and ending – the history and future of humanity is a dance between life and death, creation and destruction.
And then, let’s imagine that when the scales seem set towards annihilation a balancer is born, bringing equilibrium and correcting the course.
And so, by way of entry into this idea, I’d like to start with an extract.
We’re in Verona, Italy. It’s before dawn. And Father Antonio is about to explain the crux of The Fulcrum to Pietro his Second, a fully grown man he still refers to as boy. It’s the morning after the priest has essentially saved Pietro from a terrifying vision that’s been visited on him.
35
It wasn’t yet dawn, but the time for explanation was upon him. Pietro had woken before the crow of the rooster and had come to find him, shaking him awake. Father Antonio had to stop himself from cursing at the boy.
It had been a difficult night. Pietro’s sleep had been disturbed and he’d made it perfectly known, dragging his mattress to the kitchen with as much noise as he could make and, when sleep had eventually found him, tossing and turning like a ship at stormy sea. Considering all he had done for the boy it was an unkind punishment for his efforts. Wasn’t it enough that he endured the discomfort of the musty sheets of the matriarch’s abandoned room? When Pietro was back to normal, he’d make sure to point out that he’d saved the boy’s life and deserved some gratitude. Possibly in the shape of cookies or dinners. But that was a conversation for another day.
“Father Antonio,” the boy whispered again, shaking him.
“Yes, yes. I’m awake, I’m awake. Go on. I’m coming.”
He pulled on his robe, found the book, and followed Pietro out into the garden, wet with dew. The boy had placed two patio chairs for them at the far end of the plot with a clear view of the pastures.
“I need to be able to breathe deeply for this thing you are going to tell me,” Pietro said as they left the warmth of the house.
A likely story. It was probably just a clearer path into the distant hills should it all become unbearable. He accepted the coffee and blanket Pietro offered and yawned. They sat in silence for a while and he rubbed his face and patted his cheeks to wake himself up. It was colder than he would’ve liked.
“So. Now we are here,” he said, glancing at the boy.
“Yes.” Pietro held his cup of coffee close to his face for warmth. “I want you to start at the beginning.”
“The beginning?” This was a tricky suggestion. “There is no beginning I know but the one that changed the world as we know it.”
“Then start there.”
Father Antonio pulled the blanket over his legs and crossed himself. This was either going to be the key to unlocking Pietro’s willingness – or the very thing to end it. “Well. If the story of one of the world’s most famous messiahs had to be told again – only this time without its embellishments and its political manipulations – it would be told like this.”
The priest cleared his throat and began.
“It was 40 BCE, and two sisters lived in the small agricultural town of Nazareth. Their parents had passed on and, because there had been no other family whose house they could join, the sisters stayed in their home together, vowing to protect each other against the harms that could come to an unprotected woman. But harm came nevertheless. The younger sister fell pregnant and, since she was outside of wedlock with no husband to claim her, she was shunned, struck from the community for her crime. Her sister, older and wiser, provided her care and brought her food. They were alone against the townspeople who judged them both harshly and unjustly.
“One day, a new couple came to the village, a midwife and her carpenter husband. These foreigners had strange customs for sure, but Nazareth was a place renowned for its profusion of mystics and miracle workers, and they quickly found their place providing their services where they were needed. These two strangers soon befriended the sisters and when they learned of the coming child, did not turn their backs on them as the others had. Instead, they strengthened the household, providing food and protection.
“When the time came for the birth, the midwife held the room with the older sister, while the carpenter welcomed a Rabbi under the cover of darkness into the house to bless the child. The Rabbi was from Bethlehem, the head of a sect that still worked in the language of the old gods. For years, there had been murmurings and whisperings between the magic makers of the day about a change and, when that change came in the form of a new teacher, it was the Rabbi who made the journey to bless the new body.
“It was not an easy birth for the child. Or the mother. While she fought for her life, her sister offered prayers and promises until all she had was her life to give and this she gave also. But it was not enough to save two. The baby boy was delivered while the mother died quietly, her blood leaving her body and staining the mud floor. The Rabbi spat into the earth, mixing the blood and soil into a pot of his own unguents and blessed the child with this. He named the baby Yeshua. Before the sun rose, the midwife and carpenter took the child and left with the Rabbi, making their way to Bethlehem to be registered as a family. This is the true story of the birth of the man we know as Jesus.”
The priest paused, waiting for Pietro to say something. But the boy only drained his cup of coffee and kept staring into the far distance.
“The balancer known as Jesus became a great teacher, to be sure, and the impact of his birth was to stretch far beyond anything The Fulcrum could’ve guessed at the time – but it was one of many such births throughout history, before and after.”
“Many such births,” Pietro repeated quietly. He set his cup down carefully and ran his shaking hands through his hair.
Well, it couldn’t be helped. It was shocking news after all. There was no use stopping now.
“Yes. Important births, important figures. Chosen ones who have saved humanity from itself countless times.”
“Like who then?”
“Does this upset you Pietro?”
“This is difficult to for me to believe, Father. If I hadn’t seen with my own eyes what I saw last night, I don’t think I would be able to sit here talking to you about this, like this. As if what you are saying isn’t madness…” Pietro took some deep breaths before continuing. “Who else then? Who else can be like our Lord?”
“Many people, as a matter of fact. All of us capable, but only a few sanctioned into this specific role. Differently to Jesus, of course. Not every one of them might be considered ‘good’ by the usual standards. Then again, Jesus himself wasn’t exactly thought to be good in his time either.”
“But they are messiahs?”
“Anointed, yes.”
“Just normal people?”
I chose this extract because it neatly encapsulates the central mechanism of The Fulcrum: subverting the “The Chosen One” trope by reinventing the story of the prophet known as Jesus – and others – to answer the question "How is that even with humanity’s death wish, we’ve never actually flipped that terminate button?"
It’s a thought that tickled me for a long time…how we always pull back from the brink…how we maintain this precarious balance despite our best efforts to upset it.
And what to do with this thought came to me in Verona...
It was late spring in 2016 … May … and we were in the small city for a few days. This particular morning we’d come to a small, unassuming piazza with a similarly unassuming basilica – the Basilica Santa Anastasia – and wandered in for a looksee. It was a beautiful cathedral, much lighter and prettier than the exterior suggested and I spent quite some time exploring the fine botanical mosaics and frescoes.
But what I really like to do in vast spaces like this is to sit and feel into the space, and so I found a cosy spot on one of the hard hand-carved pews in the side chapel and just…listened…
… and then an image: a very tired priest and a dark force fighting it out together right there in the chapel. And pointedly, the priest was tired because this kept happening.
It was only a moment, it was only the briefest vision.
I almost didn’t take it seriously. My teen years were spent in the 90s and goth horror was very fashionable. It would’ve been easy to discount this flash of inspiration as nothing more than a kind of nostalgic reenactment … but then, I felt this compelling attraction to these two characters … who were they? What was going on? Why was the priest so tired of this all?
As Tom and I walked through Verona I talked these two out.
The priest stayed but the fighting spirit of the tired hero became Joe, the dark force, the Imp – and then not so dark after all – and then, pulled in by the gravitational force of these three characters, the story came and so the other players – Em and Camille next, Jacob and TJ, Pietro…each bringing with them my experience and beliefs, ideas and interests, until these coalesced around this central mechanism of balance – life and death, libido and Thanatos, creation and destruction.
That was in May.
When we got back home I bought a notebook, but it was only in August that year that I started writing.
I had no idea what I was doing. I had never finished a work of fiction before. I hadn’t studied creative writing.
All I knew was to follow the characters, to guide them along the broad story that I wanted to tell, and to let them plot how we’d get there.
And those characters took me places and challenged me to learn.
Camille, the unwilling mother of the next balancer, a burlesque dancer and ex-addict trying to find her way back from grief, would go through experiences I needed to speak to specialist doctors about.
Jacob, the unwitting agent of death that initiates the necessity for the balancer, is a brilliant but deeply egotistical and troubled virologist and I needed to learn about smallpox and the difference between RNA and DNA viruses. This was before Covid and the language of viruses and spread not yet in the zeitgeist.
Father Antonio, this generation’s Sanctifier – the one who blesses the child – is a grumpy, self-absorbed hedonist and a Catholic priest so I needed to learn about structures in Catholicism and the Holy See.
And then Joe, who is actually someone you would’ve heard of before, is an immortal tired of and disappointed in the world, who struggles to find love because he smells so terribly bad. Joe took me everywhere – to the Stonehenge to the Battle of Stalingrad to…well he took me across times and dimensions and I’ll just leave it at that.
And then each place challenged me to learn. I couldn’t set this in South Africa because of the political scope and realities around who keeps the smallpox virus.
I loved Italy and had lived in Taiwan for almost four years, but I knew little about Chicago and Baltimore and Russia and New York other than being steeped in American pop culture from when I saw my first TV show at the age of six.
So I had to research. I spoke to Chicagoans, watched endless YouTube clips, followed the social media accounts of photographers in the area. I interviewed doctors, joined forums and probably got flagged for bio warfare by the US’s CIA for searching their databases on disaster scenarios and smallpox – all of which was readily available and now … is not.
Mostly, I was challenged to trust – and would learn to trust – the creative process.
I had no idea, going in, just how big and broad this story would go. And that was probably for the best because if I’d known I’d probably have been too scared to continue.
In fact, when I started writing this I had to contend with a lot of my own limitations. Not just the limitations of skill, you can learn and overcome those, but self-limiting thoughts.
And they were pretty wild. I felt like I didn’t have a right to tell the story that wanted to be told. It was too big for me. I felt like I didn’t have a right to write something that wasn’t about South Africa and our history or our present. I felt like I didn’t have a right – and this is difficult to admit – as a woman to write this story. I came up hard against that weird piece of internalised misogyny. But I persevered because I knew if I didn’t I would regret it for the rest of my life.
Well, at least it started off that way.
Because somewhere along the line, I just fell deeply in love with the characters and the story and if I’d walked away from finishing it I would’ve left them stranded, without completion, without actualisation – and no creation deserves that.
And so I wrote and so the story grew. I got to 70 000 words and then a 110 000 and then 180 000 and then 200 000 and finally 205 000.
And then I was done.
Or at least I thought it was. Because a whole new process starts when you’re finished writing: editing the story into a readable piece.
Writing a story is a work in two parts: the writing and the editing-writing, which is its own level of writing. Terry Pratchett says, “The first draft is just you telling the story to yourself.” The second and third – that’s when you get into the meat of telling the story for others.
When I got to the end of writing the story down I balled. There are events that happen that I never expected to happen and I was so sad when they did.
Characters can tell you where they’re going and go there even if you don’t want them to. Even if it will hurt.
And every one one of the main characters here gets hurt, every one faces a choice – even the side characters: TJ Camille’s best friend and M, Joe’s partner. Edie, who I loved deeply since she was somewhat modelled on my late aunt. Krieger the broker who presents Jacob with a proposition that will change everyone’s lives…everyone is faced with choices they don’t want to make.
No one gets what they want. But they all get what they need. Because everyone is subject to the balance. Even the immortals.
And on that note, I’d like to end off with another extract.
So our story is beginning…
Camille is in Chicago with TJ, her wealthy bestie, who has taken her to a fancy hotel for the weekend.
In Baltimore, three states away, Jacob is striking a bargain with Krieger.
In Verona, on the other side of the world, Father Antonio is revealing what he believes to be the truth to Pietro.
Each one about to discover a truth, each one about to be faced with a choice…
(And, just a word of warning, Camille swears a lot…)
10
The bathroom was an art piece in eggshell white, the underfloor heating pure luxury, and everything sparkled like crystal under soft lighting. A neat cluster of hotel freebies was arranged on the marble counter between the dual basins. TJ had annexed the left-hand mirror and added his own array of products, a miniature army against aging. Her own battered Chinese silk toiletry bag, her mother’s once, sat like a lost stranger in a vast kingdom of wealth.
Camille studied herself. The mirrors and lighting in these places could make anyone look like a rock star, and she liked what she saw. Mostly. She was underweight, but her face was still round and her eyes bright. A fucking wonder given her history.
She let a desultory forefinger poke her cheek and pull her bottom eyelid down. Too pale though. Looked sickly. And there. The first sign of wrinkles had started etching themselves between her brows. Maybe she was getting too old to parade herself on stage. She traced a line with her finger down from her eye to her boobs, cupping them and bouncing them, before letting them go, to hang disconsolately on her body as if insulted. No, it wouldn’t be wrinkles that’d keep her off the stage.
Camille sighed and opened the toiletry bag slowly. Inside, a long rectangular box challenged her from between her toothbrush and tweezers.
Lookalike Max. What the fuck had she been thinking?
She pulled out the pregnancy test and studied the instructions without reading them properly. Just follow the plan. Pee on the stick, take a shower, see the results. A shower while waiting seemed like a reasonable time waster to wrench her mind from possibilities she was nowhere near prepared for. She pressed the sides of her boobs again. Was this a good time to find religion again?
Camille set the shower running and went to sit on the toilet. Small drops of warm urine splashed against her fingers. One line: Life carries on as usual. But no unprotected sex ever again, dear God I promise, and I’ll go back on the pill. Two lines: Fuck. She placed the stick neatly on the gleaming countertop and without looking back stepped into the shower to let the hot water and steam soak into her skin. She felt around her breasts, and let her hands do a soapy slide down to her lower back, over her hips and then a sweep around her stomach. If this was for real, there was no question as to what would happen next. She had no issues with scraping out a few unwanted cells. Even if those cells were as close as she’d ever come to Max again.
No. Fuck it.
This wasn’t Max’s kid. If there is a kid at all. Even if there was, she was in no position to raise one. And even if she was, she wouldn’t. A child was never something she’d ever considered, and her body had appeared to agree. Erratic periods and an on-again, off-again relationship with polycystic ovaries meant her junk wasn’t exactly prime real estate for a baby. And yet, here she was. Nearly forty and doing a pregnancy test for the first time in her life. A pregnancy test for banging a stranger who brought in the ghost of the only man she’d ever loved. A man who’d been dead almost a decade. Awesome.
Camille flipped the shower tap off, wrapped herself in a towel, and picked up the stick without looking at it. She sat on the edge of the bath. This was it. And maybe it was okay. People missed their periods all the time. Boobs could feel weird for any reason. Maybe she was just working herself up into sweat for nothing.
Okay. It was time.
She looked down as slowly as she could.
And there it was.
Fuck.