Charlotte Tierney
October 28, 2024

Submechanophobia

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Bill knows, without reading it, the book is boring. It is a thick book. The cover art is nothing but the back end of a whale. The tail. The horrifying part. The bit that seems almost inanimate, almost unattached to the head. Two flukes balanced on the narrowest spit of body – where the vertebrae finally ran out – splitting apart beneath the vintage serif font of the formidable title.

‘You might like it. It’s a classic,’ Laura had said to Bill last Christmas, when he was still her elusive obsession. Still a possibility. Still a glimpse. ‘Strong pelagic energy,’ he agreed, politely, for him, running a thumb through it too quickly, like it was a flipbook.

Bill had never worried about how others received him, or his behaviour. He prioritised, instead, being as much himself as possible, for the sake of his art. But he must value Laura, her solidity. He must not want her shifting, tectonic, beneath his feet. Why else, ten months later, would turgid details about whaling send him to sleep each night?

*

Bill is a friend of a friend of a friend and they are both writers so, apparently, they have things in common. With no reason not to, Laura agrees to meet. Bill is handsome so makes no effort with his dress, or hygiene. The pub he suggests is so unpretentious it feels like a test. Laura feels exposed by her feet, bared in heels in late autumn.

On wooden benches built into the walls, Bill describes his own virulent-sounding strain of brilliance.  ‘I never needed encouragement. Structure. An institution,’ he says. ‘My work is what it is.’

Laura is unable to get comfortable on the stiff plush of her seat, but is glad of the bench’s immovability, giddied, as she is, by Bill’s lack of a writer’s workshop. She needs someone’s gaze for her efforts. Her own stories are painful amputations – Gladwell’s ten thousand hours of getting it wrong and the internalising of every least, ill-conceived piece of criticism. Ten thousand deaths by ten thousand cuts to reach a single word.

‘So, when you write, you always know what you’re saying?’ Laura asks.

‘No.’ He laughs. ‘I just know I said it.’

‘Cool,’ Laura says. Bill’s massive locus of the self, is the self of Laura’s dreams.

*

Bill has his own blubbery buoyancy of sorts, so Laura quits her job in a fancy bar and stays with him in his unheated static caravan in an unbeautiful piece of countryside. The caravan reminds Laura of a boat, always wet, all the furniture fixed to the walls, and never touching firm ground. ‘This is how we can afford to pursue real, uncommercial art,’ he says, when she has questions about a damp stain on the engineered-wood wall panel.

Laura writes at set times, pursuing paid freelance work at others. Each morning before she starts, she wipes the fold-down table in an area that looks like the living room, but feels like the kitchen. She imagines the space pretending to be a room it isn’t, and then can’t concentrate.

From the table, she witnesses Bill’s singular, explosions of genius. They happen from the pull-out lounge-bed, in a deckchair, on the toilet. He leaves words – sometimes images, diagrams – on sticky notes around the caravan, never bothering to collect them up. Sometimes he’ll write his words as shopping lists, or he’ll make a note and stick it in the form of an appointment on the calendar she bought them. He insinuates his words throughout the caravan, and they always appear as something other than themselves. Wherever she can, Laura gathers them together, puts them into envelopes she dates carefully, begins a pile next to the television. She doesn’t quite understand the sticky notes or the lists, and feels embarrassed about her senior-prefect style routine, taking herself to bed hours before Bill, and setting an alarm for 5 am. Her full sentences. Her banal punctuation.

One day, she goes to the library to print her manuscript. She reads it a trillion times and, a week later, while they are watching television on the thinly padded, wrap-around L-shaped seating, asks for Bill’s thoughts.

‘If I read it, how could I be sure I hadn’t been influenced by it?’ he says, keeping his raw material moist, out of the air, so it doesn’t heal. ‘Books are someone else’s idea of a thing. If I spent all my time reading about living, instead of actually living, what would I have to write about? This is real life.’ He gestures to the episode of a reality television programme they are watching. One woman confesses to stealing another woman’s breastmilk to treat her psoriasis. ‘This is watched by more people than you can ever hope to read your books. So why bother following the rules? Think about it.’

Laura does think about it. She has not had anything published in the three years since that first story, which she now considers a fluke. Each new rejection makes her tearful, and a bit confused, but Bill is not only not judgemental about Laura’s lack of achievement, he is actively against such expectations. ‘Why do you do this to yourself?’ he asks.

Bill’s generosity and kindness are a huge relief. He’s an extra limb she never realised she needed, and when she too watches reality television for six hours straight, she decides the experience is generative, if not experimental.

*

Someone in Laura’s writing workshop tells her about an old amusement park in Massachussetts, ‘Pleasure Island’.

One of its main attractions was the Moby Dick Hunt. A boat ride across a man-made lake where a giant fibreglass animatronic white whale would rise and spray the riders with water. The park shut down after ten years, because it was built for New England summers, not New England winters. There are pictures of the park, dilapidated and forgotten, but the white whale has been lost. There are rumours it is sunk in the lake, that it is beached in the desert, that the owners dismantled and destroyed it. Laura’s writing group find the missing replica whale being relentlessly pursued by online enthusiasts hugely funny, in a scoffing, annoying way.

But now Laura doesn’t like it. She lives at least three thousand miles from Massachusetts. Although she is not likely to come across it, she wants someone to find the replica whale, soon. She doesn’t want it existing, secretly, in dark water. She doesn’t want time to slowly camouflage it. She doesn’t want it greened with solicitous algae, obscured by colluding water weed.

She wants to know where it is, and where it isn’t.

*

Bill tears the wrapping paper from his Christmas present and looks into his hands like Laura’s taken a blunt knife to them. She’s given him a book. He doesn’t like reading.

They discuss the difference between being conformist and popular, standing next to kitchen cabinets affixed to the wall panels and featuring internal push latches so, were the caravan to tip over, the doors would not open and none of their contents would spill out.

Where Bill uses the word transgressive, Laura would use the word juvenile, leading her to wonder if he knows what either mean, but she feels grateful to be discussing meaningful things and not just watching television on Christmas Day.

Bill has not bought Laura a gift, so he writes her a poem, while she watches. It is romantic. She puts aside grammatical prejudices, embracing the lack of spelling, for the sake of its immediacy.

‘I’ll frame it,’ she says. ‘I’ll hang it—’ She goes to point at the manufactured wall she can’t bang a nail into and is overcome by the feeling that it is only the wall-moulded furniture holding the caravan together.

Bill places a hot cup on his new book. ‘In my defence, even people who love this book, say it’s boring,’ he says.

‘I love it, and I don’t think it’s boring,’ she says, and smiles, brightly, trying not to imagine stepping straight through the thin chipboard floor covered in carpet to look like a normal house, on to the steel chassis. Below her is nothing but a breezy foundation-less void.

*

Laura takes the advice Bill has given her and stops following the rules that have caused her pain and failure. Instead, she does something different. She pursues something with a beginning, a middle and an end, and, although she doesn’t mention it to Bill, she barely even feels the shame. She’s so single-mindedly determined to stop following the rules now, that she’s lapped full circle back to following the rules.

Despite the independent publisher, the following year Laura’s debut novel wins an award and sells well.

The award is delivered and when Laura places the package on the table, Bill slaps her back like she’s pulled off a heist, or won a game she didn’t realise she was playing. She stumbles forward, hands out, putting all her weight on the fold-down table. Its wall-mounting strains under her.

The award’s worth disappears into some bewildering, murky depth of herself. She never bothers to open the box, hides it away, and for the next few months feels triggered when, on occasion, she comes across it.

*

Laura looked up a black-and-white image of the great animatronic whale before it was submerged into the amusement park’s lake – when it was still a land mammal, not yet devolved to the water – then wished she hadn’t.

The thing was mounted on a rail cart, wheeled to move along the tracks underwater. The white head had a strangely thin jaw – like a freshwater pike, not an ocean-going whale – and eyes with raised eyebrows, even though whales don’t have eyebrows.

Laura didn’t like that it was only a huge rectangular head, no body beneath the waterline. No body, just that one high, arched brow.

*

Bill reluctantly visits Laura in the new, heated, flat she’s rented.

‘It’s part of a religion. Why is grey the new white?’ he mutters, prodding at a solid wall. ‘Talk about metanarrative.’

Laura shows him the desk she has assembled from a kit to write at for a fixed number of hours a day, on a fixed number of firm legs.

‘Great,’ he says. ‘But remember, all you need to create art is yourself.’

‘Exactly. Let’s just be ourselves, creating art, but in central heating,’ she shouts, pushing the sofa from one great, grey space to another, just to show it can be done. She’d like to show him how the brick and mortar walls of the building run flush with the tarmacked ground, but knows it would be weird. ‘Move in,’ she says, ‘and let’s reconceive all this.’

Laura hears herself and wonders if Bill is the religion. If he is, she thinks, she must be heresy, which is equally important.

*

Late summer, and Laura, a little tired of Bill leaving his sticky notes everywhere, asks Bill over supper if he has pages he would like to share with her.

‘It’s not about words,’ he says. ‘It’s not about pages. You wouldn’t understand. It’s not what you’re into.’

Bill describes the simple winning formula of Laura’s best-selling book: a strong female narrator undermining the same stuff all women want through jokes and tears in the name of progression. He describes her pre-menstrual tension similarly, although not in the same conversation.

‘You have to award that stuff if everyone’s reading it,’ he says.

‘Not everyone’s reading it,’ she says, pointedly, because it’s a strange way of congratulating her and she’s fed up of excusing her huge, unexpected success by convincing herself that she did something formally unimaginative, but for secret, artistically-progressive reasons. But during that long, sleepless night she panics that she had simply relieved herself of the book, straight from her guts and into the toilet bowl.

The following day she takes the shiny glass plaque of her etched name out from the box sunk beneath her socks. She buffs it a bit, then notices Moby Dick on Bill’s bedside table. Circular stains billow across a skin of dust, telling the age of the book in cups of tea, like rings in a tree. Then she notices, a few pages in, a bookmark. She weighs the book in her hand, feels the words heavy in her palm, making sure there’s something to it. That the story is all definitely in there.

She remembers the rotten, sunken whale, and imagines swimming over it. Legs flailing in winter-cold, murky water, one naïve foot almost catching on the half-jaw. She retches.

*

Bill’s paperback Moby Dick is enchanted. He reads it for all eternity, yet never seems to move from the same page. It follows him wherever he goes. He turns to put his tea down and it is always right there. He fantasises about escaping it. He stops writing entirely, and paces Laura’s flat for days, inventing ways to destroy it. When he thinks of confronting Laura, his monomania overcomes him – an argument will not be enough. He wants to go back to when she believed in him, and everything he believed in.

Flicking through the pages fast – the boring pages, and the, possibly, not boring ones – the book heaves and swells. He must sink the book fathoms deep in the sea. But he hasn’t got a boat, or the train fare to the coast, or the bus fare to the train. He feels a tingling, burning sensation down one side of his leg and shouts for Laura.

‘I can’t feel my leg,’ he calls. ‘Is this a stroke?’

The hospital insists it is not a stroke. Following multiple tests, the doctor diagnoses Bill with localised anxiety numbness, and tells him about a charity where he can get a second-hand crutch, if it would help.

*

Laura tries to make their break-up amicable, as if everything between them could be put down to a joke. Like she, too, should not take everything so seriously. ‘We’re half an animatronic whale,’ she says, as she drives Bill back to his static caravan.

‘What?’

‘I mean, why bother dredging it back out of the lake?’

She knows from all the googling, from all the YouTube channels she’d followed, all the Facebook groups she’d joined in her desperation to find out where the half-whale was, that some people have submechanophobia, a fear of submerged man-made objects. Some minds react instinctually in fear of alien objects concealed and obscured in natural environments, whether or not they can cause actual, physical harm.

‘I can’t believe you’re dumping me when I’ve lost my leg,’ Bill says. ‘This is your fault.’

He’ll never get it, she thinks, perhaps if he’d read the book—

Although, Laura, herself, has not read Moby Dick. She’d never say it out loud, but she doesn’t especially like ‘long’ books. But she has seen the film. She has, also, read plenty of support and criticism of the book and is glad Bill will never read Moby Dick, so he will never encounter the idea that revenge is the most powerful motivator in the world.

*

‘Why is grey the new white?’ Laura writes this on a sticky note and smooths it onto the grey wall above her grey desk. It stays up as she changes publishers, writes another shameful beginning, middle and end, and is nonetheless unable to buy a house.

One day, when the sticky note falls from the wall onto her work-in-progress, she goes to find another, stickier note to write on. To give fresh life to an old idea.

In a kitchen drawer, mixed in with some old birthday cards, and one very sweet Christmas poem, she finds a wedge of sticky notes she doesn’t remember writing. Each one a great idea. A beautiful line. An aphorism. A witticism. She recycles them. With no structure to pull them all together, they might as well be the rantings of a lunatic.

As she rewrites her sticky note, she stops and wonders, is grey the new white? Can one ever speak anew of religion and obsession? Of blasphemy and distraction, or of the human fear of action, and inaction? Of trying to be good, trying not to be too bad? Will there ever be a new way to magnify the tiny details of something obscure and huge? A new way to make the incomprehensible and unknowable, visible and familiar? How to do any of it, she thinks, without shoving a monstrous white loaf-of-bread sea monster right in the middle, and then embracing the challenge of trying to hide it?

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Charlotte Tierney‘s novel The Cat Bride will be published in April 2025 by Salt Publishing. Her writing is also forthcoming in Conjunctions Fall ‘Revenants’ issue, and Best British Short Stories 2024. She (as Charlotte Turnbull) has been short-listed for The Galley Beggar Short Story Prize and the LiFTS Wild Writing Prize, Honourably Mention’d in The Cincinnati Review Awards and published with New England Review, 3:AM Magazine, Litro and Nightjar Press among others.


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