This is, I suppose, an example of working class, social realist body horror – a story about what tough work does to human flesh.
It started life as a passage in a novel I was working on which I used to describe, only half joking, as War & Peace on a council estate. Why should only aristocratic families get the dynastic epic treatment?
That book featured characters not based on members of my family, but certainly borrowing details of their biographies, and mannerisms, mixed up until they were no longer quite recognisable.
The specific incident that prompted this story, though, did involve my late father.
For a long stretch he worked nights as a lathe operator at a piston factory. He’d come home in the morning with curls of metal embedded in his fingers – like splinters, but worse. He or my mum would remove them before he could go to bed.
That also got me thinking about how my mum and aunties, and various women I worked with in factories, would eventually resign themselves to cropping their hair and trimming back their nails, to make factory work easier
‘Industrial Byproducts’ takes that process to its logical conclusion, perhaps also inspired by this amazing, or awful, advert from the 1980s which burned itself into my brain when I was a child:
I could tie myself in knots worrying about whether I’ve got all these details right, or whether they reveal some internalised snobbery, or whatever.
But if part of the point of writing is catharsis, and if we value honesty, I need to crush that urge to self censor. I need to let it, whatever it is, stream out.
The last lines of this story were painful to write. They’re even more painful to read back from the other side of the loss of my dad.
Catharsis. Honesty. Confronting the things that scare us most.
Intervals of Darkness, a collection of 14 weird stories, is out today as an eBook and paperback:
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 