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Fire Damage

Just before old injuries caught up with me, I managed to visit T in his new home. He had relocated from the city with his wife and two small children to rural Somerset. The invite had been there for months, but then repairs on the A303 began, so I postponed until they finished rerouting heavy traffic through surrounding villages.
 
  T had bought ten acres of woodland with his house. He planned to set up a retreat there, one based on principles from the many communities he visited whilst researching his book. Having been in forestry, I was keen to see the site. I had already put him in touch with an old friend in woodland management and the best deerstalker in the county.

Thanks to Google Earth, I found him easily. His house was a rambling affair with many outbuildings just begging for conversion. Though mainly scrub and goat willow natural regrowth, the woodland offered potential for a sustainable income through careful long-term development of its thin soil. It nestled within an ancient quarry, which was also a haven for some unwanted wildlife. You could see deer grazing in the trees from his living room window, hence my offer of a deerstalker because – pretty as they are – they would eat or otherwise destroy most of his hard work if not culled.

T seemed genuinely pleased to see me. His wife and children were away that day, so he was on his own. He used the time to sent off the final edit of his new novel that morning – by my count his fourth – and felt slightly miffed that his publisher was away on holiday in one foreign country and his agent away in another, so I was the first person with which he shared his achievement.

I was quite sore that day, so declined a tour of the woods, saying I would do it the next time I visited. The drive up had been wearying enough, and I sensed a shadows of what was to come.

T is a successful journalist and novelist; his first book a well detailed and researched piece of academic journalism. His second sold well, and was serialised on the radio. His third was a proper novel. All three were on my long list of books to get around to, but they kept getting set aside for other works. Articles have been published about his latest venture, and doubtless more would follow as he charted his progress.

As for me, I was many rungs if not whole sections down the literary ladder – if I was on it at all. I had the modern consolation of being a "published" author in that I had novels, poetry and a film script available on the internet. Granted, some on big lists like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, with others on Kindle. I knew by now I would never achieve riches or fame from it. Kudos was my coinage. I had long grown too old and tired to fume or argue.

  Despite this, T treated me as a fellow wordsmith. Being a trustee of the Christian community I had close dealings with, he may have read my collection of poems, Guilty As Charged, published to raise charitable funds for the place. He may even have waded through my "affrontary" when I dared to reinterpret Eliot's Four Quartets a few years earlier. Little Gidding was the community's inspiration, and East Coker lay nearby, so I had thought it fitting for the community's fiftieth anniversary in 2008. Unfortunately, not many others did. It was too cerebral and painted an honest picture rather than a selective one.

Both being authors, however, we did the usual thing of politely steering conversation away from having to comment on one anothers' works. Either that or each waits for the other to start. I am never sure.

As I was much older and not in the best of health, T's vitality and early success made him appear very contented.

We talked of many things: the management of his woods; the running of the community; but with T the father of toddlers we also discussed those childhood illnesses most adults soon forget, and how with a simple inoculation one will never again be troubled by them. I mentioned that I had once heard a pastor saying that organised religion could innoculate Christians against ever having a real relationship with God. Somehow that led on to the subject of opportunity: that most opportunities come but once, and one had to grasp them quickly and firmly despite them arriving at the most inopportune of moments.

My intended flying visit was generously extended as he asked me to stay to lunch. He offered to cook a simple Italian meal, which I knew would be the real thing.

The heat of cooking seemed to enliven him, and we moved past a discussion about plot, pace and through-lines to his description of his ideal job.

I must admit that as he was a young and successful author, I thought he had that already. He, however, said he'd seen an ad for someone to teach Creative Writing to prison inmates part-time.

This surprised me. Decades his senior, I had faced more rejections and failures, and grown stronger and more cynical from it. It is probably fair to say that while I persist with my writing, the effort is not as fervent as it once was. T, however, was still filled with an infectious enthusiasm about being creative; so much so that he wanted to share his obvious passion with others.

Seeing that spark in his eyes as he spoke, I recalled my own youthful ambitions, and became acutely aware of my jaded pallate. Sure, I was published – and sporadically bought and read – under the new definition of authorship, but I chiefly wrote for myself now. I would shove out a story or poem from under my time-grown shell to be accepted or spurned as others saw fit.

Yet I no longer burned with a passion, and because I didn't, no reader caught a flicker in my works, and no budding scribe burst into a flame of their own.

But T was a lightning-struck tree in the forest, a burst of bright flame that caught other nearby trees alight. I felt his radiant heat – even through my cold thick skin.

I, though, had burned alone long ago in a barren clearing. No other trees had caught my heat. No one had even noticed the smoke. I flared unseen until – unfed – my hopeful flames gutted and died, leaving a blackened stump that bore only the slightest resemblence to the once living tree.
 
  Two days later, my body finally reacted, and twisted itself into a new shape – like a parody of fire damage.

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