Erskine

Weighing in at just under 7,000 words, ‘If you’re done’ is definitely classed as a short story.

By way of a backstory, I’d already written ‘Skin Deeper’ and ‘My Constant Moon’ that year, and in the warm afterglow of the reception that the latter had received, I wanted to to write again. I wanted to do something different.

Spoiler alert: if you aren’t familiar with the story, you might want to read it before you proceed.

Lizzy Bennet has previously outed me as a Terry Pratchett fan, and she’s more-or-less correct: I have other influences, of course, although you might think I’d read nothing else if you’ve read the ‘The Natural and Inevitable Transmogrification of Dronekk the Dwarf’ (although, at this point in time, few have seen that one…)

For my money, the pinnacle of Pratchettness was achieved with ‘Mort’, the fourth Discworld novel. Certain bits and pieces after that were nice to have, but Mort stood head and shoulders (skull and collarbones?) above the rest. And within that highly amusing book, one piece stuck in my mind: the notion that people get the afterlife that they think they deserve.

Thus, Pratchett has a pseudo- Dalai Lama character who quite looks forward to nine months of R&R in the womb, each time he’s reincarnated, and others who face oblivion, or go on to haunt the battlements of castles until the end of time… et cetera. That’s a significant influence on what happens in ‘If you’re done’, I have to admit.

If there is such a thing as an afterlife, what better system than one in which you get to choose your own? I can think of only one form of l’apres-vie that is more intriguing, and that’s the one espoused by Victoria Wood in a song called ‘I Want to be Everyone’: for reincarnation on an ambitious scale where it appears that you get to lead every single person’s life, once.

I acknowledge that I write a little too often about suicide. Perhaps it’s not always been quite as unthinkable as it ought to be… but they say you should write what you know, so perhaps I was on home ground.

When the ghostly gender dysphoric boy who never quite crossed over meets the girl who’s on the brink of suicide for reasons of her own, he asks her a difficult question: “Your body: if you’re done with it … can I have it?”

I think the synopsis I wrote for Fictionmania put a lot of people off. Two years on, it’s still only got 2,000 views, which makes it my least popular story. Well bugger them if they can’t take a joke: that’s what I say. Bugrit. Millennium hand and shrimp…