You know, by this your imagined fifth novel, that when you have an idea for a book and strike out, the embryo of it may prove itself so wrong; that as it evolves you look back and think, sweet Jesus, how could I have started there and ended up here? How could I have even gone down that path, or the other path, or another, or a fourth, a fifth? Because by then you’ve taken the stunted seed and nurtured it to a point where the birth will still be painful, but the issue at least recognisable as a cogent narrative. A head; a torso; and at the extremities of the limbs, twenty digits clasped together, one extending always as if to say fuck you, because the book always wins.
So. Aqua Destillata. Distilled Water, in English. Water with the impurities removed, like liquor passed through a hillbilly still – or so imagined because of the process, when despite distillation impurities always remain. Apparently people may go blind, or die, from the issue of such a process.
But there’s the desire, the obsessive desire for the process to fulfil the belief, that magic drawn from somewhere will trump the science, despite the knowledge that afterwards you will be left with nothing but purity. Imagine the horror, then, at finding extraneous substances in it. A flaw in the diamond you have pressed yourself into creating. Water in the oil. Grit in the salad. A fly in the ointment. Or, by pure chance, in tiny instances, the impurity is an unexpected grain of sand, drawing to itself layer upon layer of nacre until it is turned to a pearl.
Such it is when you begins a book. A knowing that you are doomed from Chapter One (the optimistic heading), Page One (typically blank, and hungry – but for what?); that the physics of the keyboard and the chemistries of the brain will somehow interact to produce something – no matter the strain of the effort, no matter the outside interventions and weighty injunctions and incalculable reworkings of the material – always imperfect. Yet still, you set out upon your course, with your faulty compass, your insufficient victuals, your vessel that leaks and seldom heeds your commands, and a squeaky bum in the hope of making it to The End.
Thematic stuff. The meat and grist. You’ll laugh later at how you struggled to keep your story congruent with your themes, at how the tail insisted upon wagging the dog. Your mountain of notes, the dead ends they led you down, the weeks, months, of agonizing, the impasses impassable until the solution presented itself unbidden, in the traffic, during a conversation, over a half-boiled kettle. And you’ll also weep, later, at the infinity of things that never found their way onto the page, at what should have been said, or how. Or: you’ll abandon the whole thing and use the sheaves of notes, more voluminous than the book would have been, to kindle a winter fire.
Anyhow. There is real life, the life of solids, liquids and gases, and then there is this:
Four boards of old pharmacist labels framed and hanging on the wall that leads to the guest loo, each eleven labels wide by seven deep. Seventy-seven per frame, three hundred and eight together. They are tantalising: what exactly are Ext.Traxaci, Fldxt.Sarsap, Trigolii, Pituatar.Totem? How were they combined? For what maladies were they prescribed? They are so old, the labels, that you consider pox, ague, dropsy. From the remnants of your primary school Latin you understand little more than Aqua Distillata. If distilled water – surely the simplest of purifications – is far from pure, then what of the rest? And is there a word for the feeling you have when you look upon something with no idea of what it is?
Just you read a package insert for any OTC medication bought from your local supermarket. As with anything these days, there are claims and disclaimers: the substance will do this, won’t do that, or may cause the other. In rare cases, the manufacturers are happy to disclose that their product effects nothing at all: This medicine is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. That’s a verbatim extract from a modern pack of pills found on the Colds & Flu shelf; yet still it bestows upon itself the mantle of “medicine”. This car is not intended to go forwards or backwards, or transport any person.
The labels seem almost alchemic in their mystery. Some of them appear dangerous too: Cannabis, Liq.Acid.Arsen, Ung.Belladonnae; some harmless: Aqua Rosae, Syrupus – and some veritably Gothic: Leeches, Mammary Extract.
What’s the story?
It must have at its heart an impure essence – or better, one that appears pure but is not.
There needs to be change, a dramatic change, a chemical reaction, as when potassium is dropped into a beaker of water: dramatic in the moment, and the aftermath leaving little or nothing than a foul odour, and shattered windows.
It might, one day, bear chapter headings that reflect the labels.
It might be called A Roomful of Chemists, a title I’ve wanted to use for twenty years, where the Chemists in question are lunatic gods, tossing together their materials with a careless caprice, and producing tragic, comic, indifferent, perhaps fatal results for the mortal subjects.
I suppose the main character should indeed be a chemist, a pharmacist, or if set a hundred or two years ago (there are leeches, after all), an apothecary. He will be a man, lest I am berated for writing a main female character (again), and for the same reason, white.
If he has a little shop from which he works, he will need customers. To kill a rat, he sells a young man arsenic; a month later he dispenses Lithii Citras to comfort the customer whose wife has died.
Perhaps he has a wife of his own, or a sidekick as interesting as Igor – a wife to keep the apothecary’s morals in check; Igor to provoke the apothecary into ever darker experiments.
Perhaps on the first page he receives a letter, out of the blue, and it causes him to close his shop, pack a rucksack and take up a stave, heading out into a world where he will never again practise as an apothecary.
Or – what if it is a time of war, and an enemy officer stumbles in, wounded but nonetheless boasting of his conquests? The apothecary finds himself forced into a decision: should he tend to the injured officer? Should he feign helplessness and passively allow his enemy to die? Or should he take charge and administer a strong dose of Liq.Acid.Arsen, reassuring the officer (who by now is crying for his mother) that it is merely Mammary Extract?
So you might begin, in medias res of course, on a course you know will not be the course you set.
“Are you the apothecary?” he says. Blood, fresh and dark, leaches through his uniform. To his chest he presses a filthy wad of fabric and his hand shakes; it appears too weak to stem to the flow.
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