A Smallness in Their Being

James Everington: exploring ambiguity

Welcome to STRANGE LITTLE STORIES, where writers can share real-life incidents that haunt them, memorable events, peculiar occurrences, uneasy encounters, the kind of thing writers usually transform into fiction. Here, we give them a chance to focus on the raw material of real life, to discuss what makes these memories so indelible, and examine the mysterious relationship between truth and fiction.

This time it’s my pleasure to welcome James Everington, author of The Quarantined City, Paupers’ Graves, The Shelter, and Trying To Be So Quiet and Other Hauntings. With Dan Haworth, he has edited the anthologies The Hyde Hotel, Pareidolia, and Imposter Syndrome, which was nominated for the British Fantasy Award.

In this brand new strange little story, James gives us a new twist on the doppelganger tale, and one of the most deeply unsettling strange-but-true stories I’ve ever heard.

Unseen

by James Everington

When I woke up hungover the next morning, it was the end of the night I remembered first:

There was obviously nothing supernatural or even that strange about what had happened—I was eighteen, mad as hell, and drunk as fuck. And I stepped out into a busy late-night road without looking.

The car that almost hit me was black; I remember it as being completely black, tinted windows and all, but that’s probably not true. But it was night-black and shadowy and blurred with speed in my vision. It was so close that I felt its dark closeness, and the velocity of its passing spun me around, left me on my knees on the wet and dirty Northern streets where I didn’t belong.

They say that, if you see your own doppelgänger, you are soon to die. But that’s not what I saw, just my own face in a tinted car window, doubled by my own drunken vision.

Before:

I’d gone to university down south; two of my best mates had gone up north. At some point in our first or second term, I went to visit them. It’s important to note this was the mid-90s and no one had mobile phones. No easy way of contacting people or finding out where you or they were. You had to rely on your wits, gut-instinct, and sobriety in those days—which explains a lot.

We went out that night to a bar with a small group of my friends’ new uni mates; we were going to a Britpop club later. I didn’t know anyone other than my two friends; didn’t know quite where I was; I had never been to this city before. I did know more people were joining us later; one of my friends was in a hockey team and they were all due to turn up.

I went to the toilet; the bar was so busy at 9pm that there was a queue for the gents. By the time I got back to where we’d been sitting there were a load of new people there. Ah, I thought sagely, the hockey team.

With false confidence I sat down among them, did those things you do when you are in a social situation with people you don’t actually know: I smiled too much, made sure I was visibly following the conversation, made sure I audibly laughed at jokes told. Maybe they looked at me oddly but I was so eighteen and awkward—cooler people in bars were always looking at me oddly. It took me a stupidly long time to realise: this wasn’t the hockey team. There was no one in the bar I recognised at all. My mates had moved on and left me, and I was sat with a bunch of strangers.

No mobile phones, remember.

What else could I do but keep sitting there and hope my friends returned? I was in a city I didn’t know with no way of contacting anyone. Eventually, I told the people I was accidentally sat with what had happened. They were super-nice about it, laughed but not unkindly. Turned out, they were going to the same Britpop club later, so they said I could hang around with them until then. They included me in their rounds of drinks, although they bought me lager which I normally disdained; I drank Guinness back then. But I was a literature student, and had learnt not to refuse the kindness of strangers. Or free beer.

When I eventually got to the nightclub and found my mates, I was both very drunk and furious. Not that they’d accidentally left me, that was okay, but at the fact that they’d not realized and come back for me.

They looked at me like they didn’t know what I was talking about. But you’ve been here all the time, they said. You came back from the gents in that bar, and we went to a few more, then came to the club together. We’ve been buying you Guinness all night, and you’ve been cadging cigarettes from us despite claiming you don’t smoke. You started singing Pulp in the street until we got you to shut the fuck up. You snogged that woman by the DJ booth who is twice our age, you drunk twat, but she was sort of fit so fair play. We didn’t leave you behind, you’ve been with us all night…

I haven’t, I insisted, raging. I’ve had to drink fucking lager, I said, and got even more annoyed when my friends, and the hockey team now in attendance, started laughing. It’s not funny, I said, you left me. Whoever you’ve been with, it wasn’t me.

Well, they were the spit of you, they said. Looked just like you. And whoever it was, it’s still your round. We’ve been buying you Guinness all night.

I was so angry, and drunk, I turned around and stormed out of the nightclub. I had the odd feeling that they didn’t even realize I had left.

They say that, if you see your own doppelgänger, you will soon die. But what if you don’t quite see them, what if it’s a close thing but there’s no contact, something black coming for you with heavy momentum but which doesn’t quite connect? What then?

I was eighteen, mad as hell, and drunk as fuck. My friends were buying someone else Guinness back in the nightclub I’d just left, and I stepped out into the busy late-night road without looking.

Talking Truth and Fiction With James Everington

DS: Hi, James. What a fabulous story! Not only because it’s a crazy-amazing true-life event, but because of the wonderful way you use time in the story, twisting around and doubling-back on itself, all the way to that great last line.

When I invited you to share a strange-but-true story of your own, how long did it take you to settle on this one? Also, have you ever attempted to write about it before? If so, how did that go?

JE: Glad you liked it, and thanks for the kind words. I settled on this one pretty quickly because, to be honest—my life must be pretty boring, it’s the only real contender I had!

I’ve not attempted to write it directly before, but thinking about it, it’s obviously influenced things I have written: ‘Falling Over’ kind of features doppelgängers, for example. Also there’s a few stories of mine which have the same feel of someone just missing something supernatural or missing its significance at least.

DS: I like what you say about writing other stories that “have the same feel” as that real incident. It seems to me that’s a great alternative approach to using real-life stuff in fiction, not so much by trying to recreate or “mask” the incident itself, but to use the “feel” of it, and let new physical particulars grow around it––building from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.

If I may ask, can you say why you’ve not attempted to write about this incident directly before?

JE: I guess the answer to that is while I might find inspiration from my life for my writing, it’s very rarely in terms of the sequence of events. It’s more a single event or feeling or image that I then build from. So, from what happened to me that night, if I was writing fiction from it I might zoom in on that single moment of realization when I realized I didn’t recognize any of the people I was sat with in the bar. And think about what fictional, supernatural elements might cause such a realization, and what kind of character might best have such a realization from a story perspective, and so on.

DS: I like what you say about "the same feel of someone just missing something supernatural or missing its significance”, and using that as the seed of new fiction. At one level, that sounds like a Yes-vote for ambiguity, a preference for not explaining strange things in a strange story. But (correct me if I’m wrong) it feels like you may mean more than that. It seems to me that you may be referring to the character’s experience of having "just missed" something supernatural or extraordinary––their awareness of having missed it. If so, can you say what it is about that experience or sensation that you find compelling and/or useful in your fiction writing?

JE: I mean definitely, a Yes-vote for ambiguity! But also, you’re right that sometimes it’s about the characters missing something. There’s a strain of cosmic horror when what’s encountered is awe-inspiring in the literal sense as well as being terrifying. And even if it’s not cosmic horror you’d think an encounter with the supernatural would be life-changing in some way. But there’s a few stories where I’ve played with the idea that, due to a flaw in the character, a smallness in their being, they aren’t changed. The Affair gestures to this idea, as does Size Isn’t Everything. The supernatural exposes what’s lacking in their being.

DS: That third way that you’re talking about is really fascinating––that of a main character not being deeply affected at all by a supernatural encounter, or sort of failing to receive the message. I really like how you say it––"the supernatural exposes what’s lacking in their being." That’s a truly glorious way of putting it. I’ll confess it made me think of Professor Parkins in ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’––deeply clueless till the very end––but he does finally manage to get a full-look at what he’s been blind to throughout the story, and is at least partially destroyed or damaged by it. And because he is, in that way, changed by what he sees,I guess he may not really belong among those in that third group.

One final question (from one fellow ambiguity-lover to another)––I’ve heard it said that ambiguity in fiction can “cheat” the reader from having a satisfying emotional experience. What do you think of that?

JE: On the topic of ambiguity, I do love it in fiction, but I also think the word is often used, uh, ambiguously. There are different types of ambiguity a story can exhibit - for example, a story might be ambiguous at the literal level of what actually happened. Or it might be clear what happened, but ambiguous about the protagonists motivations of feelings. Or have an ambiguous meaning at the thematic level. A specific one for the types of fiction you and I write is ambiguity around whether what happened was genuinely supernatural or had some psychological or otherwise ’natural’ explanation.

I think an ambiguous story (as opposed to a completely experimental text) still needs to be unambiguous in at least one of the other ways. An early story of mine, The Shelter, is ambiguous about how real the narrator's memories actual are, and about what the actual presence or otherwise in the shelter is. But it ends with the narrator decided (after years of not doing so) to go back to the shelter; it ends on an unambiguous resolution in a character arc.

So I think a reader might justly feel cheated with narratives with no resolution of any type of ambiguity of any type or level. But otherwise, I think it’s all fair game.

DS: Thanks, James. I love how you break-down these different types of ambiguity in a story, and your belief that at least one of them ought to be unambiguous is a good one.

Thanks again for sharing your story (which, again, is a terrific one). And for taking time for this chat––I’ve really enjoyed it.

JE: Me too!

Many thanks to James Everington for joining us at STRANGE LITTLE STORIES. If you’d like to learn more about James and his writing, you can visit his website here.

And, just another reminder that my new collection These Things That Walk Behind Me from Lethe Press is now available from Amazon or direct from the publisher. Hope you’ll check it out.

Thanks for reading STRANGE LITTLE STORIES. See you next time.