The Followers

It was Boxing Day in 1996. I was at my parents then-house in another small village in Worcestershire. Despite the fact that I was 24, I still hadn't told my parents that I smoked, and, for some reason, thought that I could get through the Christmas period without smoking. By the time that Boxing Day came, I discovered that this was not a tenable idea. Bretforton, the village my parents lived in (and incidentally, one of the most haunted villages in England) only had two shops, one of which was closed on Boxing Day, and the other was run by people who knew my parents, ('Hello Mrs Hermolle, yes, we saw your son earlier, buying 20 Silk Cut!') All of my ridiculous and paranoid thoughts did actually belie the fact -as I was to discover the following summer- that my parents had, unsurprisingly, known for quite a while I smoked. Still, I was unaware of this on that distant Boxing Day, thirteen years ago today.
At the time, I was living in Worcester, in the first year of a degree in English Literature. Bretforton was only ten miles away or so. I came up with some ridiculous excuse (I can't remember what now) about why I needed to return for a few hours, and my Father drove me there in the afternoon.
I remember it was one of those typical 'dead days' weather (the period between Christmas Day and New Years Day), all white and depthless skies, cold and empty. I have some vague memory of going to the shops to buy 20 Silk Cut, or I might have had some cigarettes stashed in my room somewhere.
The house was empty, my housemates having all gone home for Christmas, and the house seemed different somehow, in a way I couldn't quite pin down. It felt like, as a child, seeing your school on a summer holiday afternoon, something you weren't supposed to see. Accentuating this strange atmosphere was the fact that, just before Christmas, we found out that the owner was selling the house, and we had to leave by the end of January. Living inside a place you knew that you would never see again, haunting you already. Nostalgia for the present.
I smoked cigarettes in my room, whose walls, in my memory, had dark wood panelling; mahogany, or oak. This was not true at all - the walls were pink, a pastelly pleasing wallpaper, but on that Boxing Day, I remember wood panelling, like some antique grandfather clock, or a dusty library, lost in some forgotten English Manor.
After growing bored of smoking, I fell asleep.
I woke up when it was growing dark, lit another cigarette, grabbed a pad of paper and wrote a poem.
It was a poem about a man, whose friend was complaining of being followed. The friend had no reason, that he knew, for why he was being followed, and nor could he actually describe who he was being followed by. Shadowy figures, only glimpsed on horizons; alleyways, fields, lost streets, snowy wastegrounds. The figures were indistinct, sillhouettes really, but they were dressed in a slightly old fashioned way; smart jackets, trilby hats, long coats. The friend disappeared, leaving the man with a hollow, melancholy feeling (the empty flat, the unanswered phone). The man himself then started glimpsing these indistinct figures, always on the horizon, and amongst them, the half familiar figure of his friend.
I called it, of course, 'The Followers'.
I had, and still have, no idea, where the poem came from, but it struck me as being the perfect ghost story.
I thought this might make a good novel, no explanations, no rationality, just a long, meandering trawl through atmosphere only; sinister, lingering, mysterious. As my time at Worcester continued, and ended, leading into my move to Brighton ten years ago, my obsession with the Followers continued. Ideas were added, things were discovered, theories postulated. Vincent James, a ghost story writer who vanished in the summer of 1956, his last story being a piece about a writer being followed who eventually vanishes. A motorway flower seller called Cathryne who read the tarot cards. A lost book of ghost stories called 'Across The Fields'. In a flash of inspiration (sat in the garden of my second flat in brighton in 2001) I even discovered who the Followers actually were.
The last time I tried to write The Followers was in the late winter / early spring of 2004, then in my fourth flat in Brighton. I haven't attempted it since, but every few months or so, I find myself still writing down notes for it, ideas, scenes, sketches.
An idea I can't leave alone, a word I can't remember, just on the tip of my tongue. A song I can't get out of my head.
When I lay down to sleep on that distant Boxing Day, when I was 24 years old, I couldn't, obviously, concieve that, thirteen years later, when I would be 37, I would still be writing about that strange poem that came out of nowhere, and all because I returned to an empty house to smoke cigarettes.