Lesley Thomson - A Kind of Vanishing

Central to the establishment of my reality are characters and location. Since I was a child I have scribbled down my characters’ ‘vital statistics’, continually revising their birth date, their full name and their relationship to one another as an idea takes shape. What is their role in the story? What impact do events have on them? What have they experienced? Some of this the reader will learn during the novel, other knowledge they will never know; the character’s back story. My characters have lives beyond the fiction. For me, all characters do, whether David Copperfield or Lisbeth Salander. This is what makes them real. Isabel Ramsay is out there living her life. A Kind of Vanishing , and the novel I am now working on, dip into this life. Each time we read about Isabel we have more evidence with which to construct our own story. If I don’t believe Isabel Ramsay exists, then she not is real and I cannot write about her.

To become intimate with my characters, I must know the streets through which they pass, the pavements, the paths, and the muddied grass on which they step. I must see them in their landscape. I scribble constantly in a notebook. If I don’t have this with me, I ring home and leave a message, usually on the answer machine, to preserve the thought. During the writing, amongst other messages are my own: from a field, my voice lost in a gale; from a crowded bus in an urgent whisper imparting phrases baffling to anyone else: ‘She does not know he has been there before’, ‘The Judge likes Aeschylus’.

I read many books and articles, adding quotes and ideas to the notebook, which grows fat with leaflets and cuttings. I mine Google. I meet people who are doing my characters’ jobs. I am less interested in how they do their work than in how it feels. My characters are constant companions.

Throughout the writing, I use my camera for three reasons:

For the record:I want facts. A literal description is not integral to the veracity of the story, but a photograph will show detail that I do need to get right.

The purloined place:My photograph of a place is not of itself; it is in my novel. When I go there I am not in the present, I am in the fictional place. Be it an office lavatory, a statue or a wrought iron gate into a garden I ‘take’ it for fiction.

Beyond the record:The camera records what I capture through the lens. I am selective so I may miss a detail, or at the time I saw it differently. I can examine a photograph: crop it, enlarge it, perhaps heighten the contrast to see new shapes emerge.

These photographs are not illustrations of my story. Like the characters’ lives beyond the text; they do not need to be included to make the story real. The text must do this.

The camera does lie. Most of these images depict scenes which happen in my story and have not happened in real life.

MY CAMERA captures ‘reality’. This is the least important reason for taking photographs.

How many steps are there to the river?

Four up then twelve down. This odd arrangement fascinates a little boy: he has to walk up to walk down. He likes to come here.

I could make these steps up, but they are real. If a reader should visit the Bell Steps in Hammersmith they can follow the footsteps of my character and her child.

A modest bunch of flowers with no message is often propped against this headstone. Before the blooms dry and their colour fades or they become sodden from rain, they are replaced with a fresh bouquet. The headstone is only twenty-nine years old but already the epitaph is yellowed with lichen and will soon be illegible.

Is there somewhere to hide to watch for who brings these flowers? My detective finds a spot some distance from the grave. This picture confirms my recollection of the area; it is possible to crouch behind this wall and see while not being seen.

A woman runs a cleaning company; leasing cheap offices in Shepherds Bush, she has no control over the common areas. She has complained to the landlord about the unisex toilets, they give a terrible impression to clients. She should find new premises but she has become distracted by a murder case. The ‘facts’ are: the sanitary-ware is salmon pink and the roller mechanism is broken so that the towel spools onto the lino. These details may or may not feature in the novel. But I know they are there.

IN The Poetics of Space (1958) Gaston Bachelard describes how by polishing a table we develop a relationship with it that heightens its ‘reality’. It finds a place in our world beyond its utilitarian function of ‘table’. I watch a wall being built: it is comprised not only of bricks and mortar, but of the conversation I had with the young man who built it and of my thoughts as he lay each course. To me it is more than a wall.

This leads me to the second reason for taking photographs. I ‘take’ the real location in a photograph and make it fictional. The real place becomes the fictional location. When I visit the toilets in the last image, like Lucy in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the wardrobe has no back: I have entered the cleaning company and my story is not make-believe.

I build a relationship with the location or with objects. My memories of the place are layered with the experiences of my characters. When I visit Tide Mills I ‘remember’ playing hide and seek there. I look for Alice and Eleanor in the undergrowth, through holes in walls, or running along the beach. When I am by the River Thames I am no longer in the present. I am no longer ‘present’.

This is a photocopied page from the file of a murdered woman. Her strangled body was found at the spot marked with an ‘X’ in the summer of 1981. Decades later, in 2010, a woman sits in an empty house late at night. She smoothes out this crumpled sheet and by the light of an angle-poise lamp examines this image.

Blinding sunshine bakes the mud to clay. Sunk into its surface are brick, twists of rope, broken bottles; flotsam and jetsam. Along the top of the wall is a trellis, a glimpse of a shrub, signifying prosaic domesticity beyond the frame of the image. Here is generic familiarity: weeds sprout from a retaining wall that is held fast with steel bolts. Some bricks are green with moss and slime, the strata pattern marking the high water levels.

I have purloined this place: in broad daylight its truth is hidden. It could be a typical riverside scene, altered little over the last 150 years. It is not. It is a shot taken by a detective and later it is given a file number. Its secret is revealed to you, the reader. If you make your way down the Bell Steps – three up, twelve down – you too might become enter the story and forge your own memories. This where a woman’s life ended. This is a ‘fact’ that you may recall.