Last year I was invited to take part in a collaborative writing project that tested the limits of endurance and perhaps even sanity.
I’m a member of… well, a coven, quite frankly… of writers of TG fiction, and one of the regulars suggested that we ought to get to know each other better by working together on a collaborative writing project. It was to be a trans-themed murder mystery, the victim being our host, Bernard Manlyman.
I had given the world Bernard Manlyman, unintentionally. It was a throw-away mention in a discussion, reproduced below:
“Suppose I have an Amazon account, and bank account in my real (male) name. Kind of hard to have anything else… If I write a piece of TG fiction and publish through KDP, do I get a 100% watertight pen name such that buyers and readers won’t know my real identity? And could an author compartmentalise their books, with no way for readers to know that ‘Bernard Manlyman’, author of a book on bear wrestling technique, is also moonlighting as ‘Cindy Slutvixen’, whose tastes might surprise them? Inquiring minds want to know.”
Both Bernard Manlyman and Cindy Slutvixen became minor memes in their own right, but it was Bernard whose name would live thereafter in infamy.
Poor old Bernard: slain for reasons unknown, by persons unknown, and all of us stuck in his castle, marooned Scooby-Doo style on a small island somewhere off the coast of Scotland.
Most of the other authors accepted the invitation to bring trans characters in from existing writing projects, but I didn’t want to mire Michael / Harriet from ‘My Constant Moon’ in a smutty comedy, Jordan Kelly didn’t have any trans-anything leanings, and somebody like Noelle the cybernetic killing machine from ‘In Armour Clad’ would be a bit hard to constrain within a murder mystery, for the purposes of ratcheting up the tension.
Thus, I offered the character of Drusilla Spankwell, headmistress (retired) of a finishing school for gir– er, boys who… girls. Well, that is to say… a finishing school for young people.
The school in question was St Slattern’s in Pant-y-Gurdol, mid-Wales. Her backstory (never fully explored in the writing that followed) described how Drusilla had made the school her life’s work, but had been forced to resign in disgrace a few years before the events on MacGuffin Island.
Years before, Drusilla had taken part in a pagan ceremony somewhere in the south seas, on an island that was engulfed by the waves almost as soon as she left. The high priestesses of an icthyan cult had promised her tremendous power… but she was never entirely sure whether it was all a sham. Certainly, she had enjoyed a lot of power and good fortune during her working life, but maybe that was just her good luck, and there wasn’t a debt to be paid?
She wasn’t sure… but she chose Pant-y-Gurdol as the location for her finishing school because it was a long, long way from the sea, in an area of geological stability.
Drusilla hated being on MacGuffin island.
(Can you tell that I’d listened to H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ in the days before we commenced the project?I liked the idea of a character who is always looking over her shoulder, with supernatural dread. This source also furnished me with her fancy dress costume for the masked ball. (Bernard had discovered shameful secrets about every person he’d invited, and given them costumes to match. Drusilla’s outfit copied the robes of a high priestess in the fish cult.)
My other influence at this time was Vivian Stanshall’s ‘Sir Henry at Rawlinson End’. I saw Sir Bernard Manlyman as inevitably being a buffoon, because that’s aristocracy, innit? Strange bedfellows those two stories make, but perhaps they serve to explain some of the madness that followed.
Meet Drusilla Spankwell. As we join the tale, the other guests have been brought to the island on a yacht, but Drusilla is already in situ…
Drusilla sheltered from the worst of the rain beneath an outgrowth of the Castle that extended from the ancient wall like a brick hernia. After a violent crossing, the yacht had moored up. Drusilla flexed her riding crop compulsively, regarding the new arrivals with distaste.
Ye gods save me, she prayed. They’re going to think me nothing but a common housekeeper!
Aaron Salty-Seaman (was there any other kind?) was struggling up from the causeway with a huge assortment of luggage. Drusilla loathed him utterly – on a chromosomal level and without any particular effort or enthusiasm. She longed to flick his inner thigh once again – perhaps his scrotum, yet – with the whip-crack expert application of her riding crop.
That first dahlia-blossoming of pain upon an innocent buttock as it succumbed to the sting of her goad: even imagined, it could make her forget the vile circumstances of this meeting. The thought was almost enough to drive out the pervasive cold. Almost.
In her mind’s eye, if only momentarily, Drusilla succeeded in overlaying memory upon reality. She imagined that the new arrivals were first years, trooping up the long driveway to St Slattern’s Academy, wondering what the forbidding school held in store for them… but Pant-y-Gurdol was more than four hundred miles away – and for Drusilla, three years in the past. She knew she must count herself fortunate that Bernard Manlyman had invited her to live here when virtually all others had shunned her following her disgrace at St Slattern’s, but that didn’t do anything to assuage her bitterness.
Small wonder that she took her frustrations out on fools like Aaron. He had learned of her proclivities the hard way, and thus he hastened to pass by. He strove to look industrious and worthwhile, and simultaneously to interpose a soft-sided suitcase such that he might use it as a shield, without appearing to do so.
In front of new guests, she couldn’t really use the riding crop without a pretext. Still, there were other ways…
“You, there!” She barked, timing it to perfection: “have a care with that!”
The hapless henchman was startled, and missed his footing. Cases tumbled – as did he. He received a warm welcome, printed painfully across his face by the stiff fibres of the doormat. ‘OCLEW’, it read, in fact.
This was ironic since of all the party who ascended from the dock, the sailor was the only one who wasn’t welcome: he would be returning to the mainland.
“You imbecile,” she said quietly. Few could have heard her. She towered over him, so close that he couldn’t rise for fear of touching her and thus earning a real beating.
From the corner of her eye she could see how uncertain the guests were as to how they should proceed. As another squall rolled in the miserable gaggle of visitors decided that pragmatism must trump protocol and they hastened to retrieve their items of luggage. Several pieces had sprung open as they bounced down the steps, and the rain looked set to soak their contents in seconds.
With cases hastily refastened and reclaimed, some items remained on the rain-sodden steps: a ball gag, an illustrated book on the history of the trombone and a monstrous purple phallus. Activated by the fall, this last undulated like some kind of large, hairless caterpillar and proceeded on its obscene way, into the undergrowth.
Drusilla spun on her heel, leading the guests into the entrance hall.
Predictably, Chrissy the diminutive (some would say, demented) maid was nowhere in sight, and failed to respond when summoned.
Drawing herself up to her full height, Drusilla held up an imperious finger, waiting until all the new arrivals fell silent.
“That will be all, Aaron,” she waved the retainer away. He retreated, back out into the storm where he could count his blessings.
“Since the maid appears not to be on hand, perhaps it falls to me to welcome you to Castle MacGuffin. Like you, I am Bernard’s guest, although I have been here for some time…”
She was also careful to demonstrate, through the use of Manlyman’s first name, that she was no mere flunkey.
“I’m told that Bernard – Mr Manlyman – won’t be with us until after dinner. In the meantime, I see that each of you has been left an envelope, with a key inside. These will provide access to your suites, down the corridor over there.”
She waved a languid hand, mortified at having to perform a task so menial as to direct visitors to their accommodation – and there was worse to come. She would have to make a social announcement, like some lackey at Butlin’s.
Her riding crop flicked, quite unconsciously, like the tail of an angry cat.
“Tonight’s entertainment is a costume ball, for Halloween. I believe you will find that a costume has been left out for each of you…”
She shrugged, as if to convey her disdain for such frivolity, but then her gaze became much more intense.
‘The eye of Sauron’ – that was how one of her second-years had described the penetrating glare of Drusilla Spankwell, headmistress. (The boy in question should have kept his observation to himself, and he might have kept his testosterone privileges a while longer. Still, he’d made such a sweet Cordelia in King Lear just two years later: in matters of gender at St Slattern’s, things tended to work out for the best, sooner or later.)
Now that intense gaze swept the room, scrutinizing all present and returning more than once to some. Ultimately, when she spoke again, Drusilla was looking at the girl with the northern accent – Esme Entwistle, was it? The journalist was unable to meet that gaze. Drusilla could tell she was seized by the feeling that she ought to prostrate herself the way the sailor had.
“I see that some of you are already well acquainted with… costume,” Drusilla smiled at some private joke.
After a pause, she added: “In this household, aperitifs are served at eight. Be punctual.”
She swept out of the room, a black galleon under full sail.
The fruits of our collaborative writing project may someday see the light of day – if certain people can face the Herculean editing task that would be required, to hammer the assorted ideas of ten different people into a more conventional narrative. It would be nice to see a definitive version.
As far as collaborating goes, I wasn’t a terribly good co-author: the timing never seemed to fit and I usually found myself writing in airport lounges or something. Worst of all, my ad-hoc approach to getting something written meant that I seldom managed to negotiate with my appointed writing buddy. It was “take it or leave it” from me.
Still, we stuck with the project and made it all the way through to an Agatha Christie style denouement. (All the best mock Tudor Scottish castles have a denouement room for just this purpose.) I was quite surprised to discover that I wasn’t the killer. It could have gone either way… I mean, when you’re nuts, you’re nuts.
Here’s another snippet revealing something of Drusilla’s character:
If I’m to go to the library with those two I should arm myself, Drusilla thought. The killer might not be satisfied with just Bernard.
Excusing herself for a moment, she wondered if it might be worth trying to break open the gun cabinet, but when she reached Sir Bernard’s suite she found the door ajar and the gun cabinet already ransacked. It now contained only a collapsible bassoon, of the kind used by marching bands operating far behind enemy lines and supplied by airdrop.
She glanced around, seeking clues. Many a time, she had visited this room. If the weather was fine, she would sit in the window seat. Often they had debated the finer points of restraint, pain and compliance, or the ethics of brainwashing. While Sir Bernard had never been so crass as to offer Drusilla employment, he had expressed his desire to see her ideas reach a wider audience. In the end, it amounted to the same thing: she remained a guest at MacGuffin, but she was expected to sing for her supper. Or, more accurately, to write for her room and board.
Sir Bernard persuaded her that fiction would be a good vehicle with which to communicate her ideas. Her original hope of developing her treatise – basically that the wrong piece was disposed of when circumcision took place – was soon drowned out by the endless stream of sissy stories that Sir Bernard had her writing. Within the first six months she had a dozen pen names, and was churning out an apparently endless stream of implausible claptrap about boys who were suddenly orphaned and had to go and stay with their man-hating maiden aunt; about wives who would enter into an exhausting and complicated ménage à trois rather than simply leaving their wimpy husbands; about boarding schools where the punishments were far-fetched, bad for discipline and in most cases downright unsanitary…
Each time she thought she’d finally achieved a piece of biting satire that demonstrated the ridiculousness of the whole genre, Sir Bernard would clap his hands, praise her… and demand more of the same.
Drusilla recalled their last conversation in this room. She had been arguing that she should try to write a longer piece, with more plausible characters, with proper human emotions.
“No,” Sir Bernard had insisted. “Any story longer than three thousand words is a waste. I commissioned a study: the typical reader of these stories is a male… more or less… aged between thirty-five and forty-five, and from what we know about the reading ability of such people, and their virility, he’ll reach orgasm well before three thousand words. And if he doesn’t, you’re writing it wrong!”
While they’d talked, Sir Bernard had been polishing his Webley. He’d been altogether too enthusiastic when it came to polishing his Webley, in her opinion… but she wasn’t the headmistress of this domain, and her feelings counted for little.
Like the villain in a film, he talked too much. He had to explain how clever his schemes were. So, his profit margins had been hit by a website that offered fetish stories for free? No matter: he would drive all their visitors away by uploading an endless procession of sissy stories that were nothing but formulaic drivel.
That drivel, of course, was the fruit of Drusilla’s efforts.
Perhaps she should have seized one of the guns back then. She could have forced him to disrobe, and mocked his manhood. He’d always maintained that he’d got something the size of a midget submarine under his sporran, but Drusilla very much doubted this.
Get them naked. Get them scared: everything shrinks.
Pop him into one of those medieval chastity cages that he collected, while his naughties were shrivelled. Lock him up… and then if things attempted to grow back to a more impressive size, well and good.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
With genuine regret, Drusilla realised that she’d never get the chance, now.
At least that means I probably didn’t kill him, she thought. Certainly, she had no memory of killing him… but memory could be a fickle beast, in her experience. There had been times during her near-slavery as a writer when she could cheerfully have choked him on his hard-boiled egg.
But she hadn’t. And that meant she hadn’t shot him, either.
Didn’t it?
+++
Let’s hope the whole story sees the light of day, someday, but even if we don’t, we had fun. If you’re a writer, write: don’t wait for perfection. He who waits is a waiter, not a writer. Something like that, anyway.
Well, why not? Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Well, you know what they say: always leave them wanting more…
Sugar and Spiiice 