The Baku Beyond - Why are the Media Afraid of Abroad?

As the Europa League final approached, the absurdity of having a London derby in Azerbaijan was much in the news. The ex-Soviet nation became the byword for a strange/foreign/far-flung place, like Timbuktu before it. How would fans reach such a destination? And if any intrepid travellers did happen to make it, what in God’s name would it be like?

I don’t deny that it was a long way to go, and expensive, and there was fury and despair, and thousands of tickets were returned.

But the press coverage was reminiscent of other panics about foreign hosts. Rumours of catastrophe are rife before Olympic Games and World Cups: the stadium won’t be finished, the local fans are vicious, racist and homophobic, the hotels and cafes will rip off travellers, the police will weigh in with batons and tear-gas and our fans will end up banged up abroad, where the judicial system is corrupt.

I know there are genuine concerns, for instance for gay or black travellers. But it always gives me a warm feeling when fans who actually make it to these alien places not only survive, but thrive. 

Reporters interviewing British fans in Baku invited gripes about gruelling journeys and local difficulties – how lovely, then, to hear them reply,

‘It’s so beautiful here! And we’ve been treated like honoured guests.’

This fear of ‘abroad’ so often turns out to be unfounded – but it’s not only the media who indulge in it. 

We all get anxious before travelling. As a trip approaches, anxiety rises. What if they don’t have this or that in the shops? What if they feed us things we’re allergic to? What if they steal from us or rip us off?

I love travelling, but I confess to packing my favourite teabags, and vitamins, and Diocalm (usually years out of date, because it never gets used). But then I arrive, and I relax, and my happiest memories are made.

Perhaps this is the reason for the sure-fire holiday, the place you return to year after year so you can bypass all that fear of the unknown and hit the ground running, doing all your usual things.

In my next novel, The Year of the Ghost, a family go on their annual trip to a house in Wales, cheerfully mocking themselves for doing the things they always do, and have done for years. Only this time, something terrifying has invaded their usual holiday. Who could be haunting them in the place they all love?

Family Secrets: The Terrible and the Wonderful

Family secrets fascinate me – they are at the heart of my writing. So I was a captive audience for the BBC’s drama The Boy With the Topknot, based on the memoir by Sathnam Sanghera.

Sathnam is a rather arrogant, westernized journalist, who goes home to Wolverhampton to tell his family that he wants to marry an English girl. In the bosom of his Punjabi Sikh family, he can’t face breaking the news.

He then discovers that his father has for years been a paranoid schizophrenic and only his mother’s management of his medication has kept him out of a psychiatric ward. His older siblings have always known, and dismiss his shocked reaction. Torn between the new life he wants and the explosion of the old life he thought he knew, Sathnam unravels. He asks strangers questions for a living, but he has never investigated his own family.

How could he not have known?

This might seem bizarre, but it rang utterly true to me. Families conceal things, or don’t mention them; things that peek out from the heart of often-told stories, but are never asked about, never questioned. I know this because I hoard such things, gathered from people I know or from the media. People discover that a parent was a spy, or a Nazi. I know someone who was in her thirties when she found out at a family gathering that her Dad, now dead, was not her real father. It came out through a casual comment from an in-law; the whole family knew except the woman in question.

In Unspeakable Things my heroine, Sarah, knows nothing about her mother, who died when she was four. Pregnant and newly inquisitive, she visits the abandoned family home with her husband, who asks why her father moved them away.

 ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’ Dad had not talked about any of it. She didn’t even remember looking at old photographs with him, and wondered now why they had never pestered him about their dead mother, their abandoned first home. But during his life it had seemed unthinkable. Did they hesitate to test that resolute strength of his, in case it crumpled?

Families are different from other groups. They’re home to our most profound relationships, our dearest loves and deepest resentments – and yet they need to operate on an everyday level. Everyone needs to get fed, clothed and off to school or work; to rest, mooch around together and sleep. We are not our outward-facing selves in our families, the way we are with our colleagues and friends. They see us grumpy or distracted, picking our noses, grunting responses: the real people who emerge when we’ve shut the door on the outside world.

Things go unsaid in families, both good and bad. I read an article by a man who decided not to save a eulogy for his father’s funeral, but to tell him his feelings for him while he was alive. He did so. It was awkward. He wasn’t sure if he regretted it or not.

There is a reason we don’t do these things. Huge feelings and shocking revelations might tear apart the everyday functioning that makes up family life. If someone at a family gathering says something profound, we are just as likely to shrug or squirm with discomfort.

Older siblings, like Sathnam’s, sometimes patronise younger ones and pull the wool over their eyes. It becomes a habit in childhood and they can’t shake it off later. At fifty-three, I sometimes still get a whiff of it: that sense of being the youngest who can’t be taken seriously. When she protests or tries to make her mark, she’s just showing off.

There are terrible things in families, and as a writer of dark fiction, I dig them out. Secrets concealed and secrets discovered form the darkness behind the suspense.

Sathnam’s mother won't  talk about her husband’s illness, which came to light when she was a young bride in an arranged marriage. Family friends fill Sathnam in, and then ask him about his sister. Suddenly, Sathnam knows that she is a schizophrenic too – and that the day she was sectioned as a teenager was the day he turned his back on his family, cutting off his Sikh topknot and throwing in his lot with the western world.

Back in the present day, Sathnam’s mother’s insistence on arranging a marriage for him threatens his chance of happiness, and her obstructiveness when he questions her is maddening.

But the story’s conclusion is touching. Sathnam realises that his family’s secretiveness has made him what he is. He has made it in life because of them, not despite them as he thought. ‘I always thought you were happy,’ he tells his Mum. Her strength in concealing the painful truth has given him the happiness and confidence to succeed.

My second novel The Year of the Ghost confronts all the family failings that infuriate us: the things they won’t talk about, the awful things they conceal. The stress, pain and anguish this causes come to a head during the annual holiday – when there’s a ghost in the holiday home and nobody knows who it is.

But I hope I have touched on something Sathnam discovered. There are wonderful things in families, – things we don’t talk about either. The Year of the Ghost delves into secrets and lies, but it’s a love song to family as well.

A Magician's Sleight of Hand - Julie Myerson's The Quickening

I read this Hammer horror novella on holiday and found it a compelling page-turner. Picking it up again to review it, I read the entire book again and realised how very clever it is.

In this haunted honeymoon story, Myerson uses a magician’s masterly sleight of hand in order to distract us from what’s really going on. Newly pregnant, Rachel has been bulldozed into a quick wedding and a honeymoon in Antigua. On the way from the airport, the driver bizarrely says that her husband is on the island. ‘Not now. Always. He cannot leave.’

This echo from The Shining (You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know. I’ve always been here) sets the tone, and when they arrive at the resort, even the words, ‘Rachel held the towel to her wrists, her throat,’ made me see her stemming blood, rather than enjoying scented towels.

Myerson’s staccato style, without inverted commas, makes the writing feel tense and fast-moving. Rachel’s point of view is edgy from the start – the empty suitcases look ‘depressing’; she sees a figure on the beach and shivers. Every tiny observation is used to ramp up the tension.

The real horror of the piece, however, is Rachel and Dan’s marriage. We’ve all known a Dan – he’s the partner of a friend of yours and none of your women friends can stand him. He’s a foul-mouthed, irritable loser, a liar and a bully. When Rachel is first upset by a horrible ghostly encounter, he is drunk and bad-tempered. ‘What now?’ he says, and then drags her into his lap. His lack of sensitivity and sudden, selfish advances make us see him as a sexual predator rather than an amorous newly-wed. When she wants him to feel the baby moving, he can’t drag his eyes off the cricket. Most food nauseates Rachel and Myserson brilliantly uses descriptions of Dan gobbling with gusto to make us feel revolted on her account.

The depiction of the haunting and the way it overwhelms Rachel is skilfully observed, but what is truly masterful is the way Myerson uses our suspicion of the odious Dan to distract us from other possibilities in the story. Reading the book a second time, I realised that I had taken in details that screamed of someone else’s guilt, but brushed past them when Myerson, with expert timing, threw in another despicable facet of Dan’s character. And I’m not giving away the ending here, because Dan is also a guilty man.

I write psychological suspense stories myself, and I can only admire Myserson’s clever ruse. Rachel is pregnant and has been rushed into marriage. She is partially in denial about the nature of her relationship and later reveals that she suffers from anxiety. This all makes her vulnerable and unstable in our eyes. The ghostly events and real murders on the island destabilise her further so that we accept gaps and inconsistencies in her point of view, which only serve to make us more fearful for her and her unborn child.

The only downside to this is revealed in other reviews – many readers are irritated by Rachel as a  hapless victim, always spoiling the holiday fun with her fainting fits. It is true that this could detract from our identification with her, but it is part of the book’s masterplan, which certainly worked on me.

Read it twice – once to be taken in and a second time to admire how brilliantly Myerson achieved this.

School Run

She was there when I got back from the school run, sitting in my kitchen as if nothing had happened. Even through the shock, the disbelief, it was good to see her.

‘Em?’ I said.

‘Of course.’

‘But how did you get here, how..?’

‘I don’t know what you mean. I always come.’ She looked away as though my face worried her. ‘I need to ask you.  I don’t get it.  I mean, where is Ella?’

‘She’s – with your Mum.’

‘But why?’

‘Em,’ I said, gulping. ‘You died. We buried you.’  I blinked away tears, and her chair was empty.