The Night Brother

I have just finished reading The Night Brother by Rosie Garland (2017). I will hold my hand up now and state for the record that I know Rosie and that over the years our paths have crossed many times. Rosie is a good fifteen years older than me – that’s not rubbing it – but it does have an impact on what comes next. Rosie’s first novel The Palace of Curiosities (2013) was a glorious debut and Vixen (2015) also caught my imagination but because I know Rosie, because I didn’t want our paths to cross and for her to ask me that question, ‘Have you read my latest book?’ I have held off until all the reviews petered away and all the book clubs turned to the latest fashion, and read each of her novels around five years after they were published. This is nothing against Rosie but I didn’t want to confuse the person I have met, talked with, interviewed with the blurb or the press. I like Rosie. I always have. She manages to both exhiliarate me and scare me in equal measures and though there is distance between us, in terms of age and gender, urban and rural, I closed The Night Brother with tears in my eyes because Rosie is a rare thing, all three of her novels show a writer growing in confidence, the themes, ideas and voice resonate with me long after the book has faded. That is a rare gift.

I am going to reveal a truth now, not about Rosie, but about me. Rosie is the kind of writer I wish I was. Rosie is the kind of writer all us wish we were. Thankfully, there is only one Rosie and it saddens me that six years after The Night Brother there doesn’t seem to be any more novels on the horizon – maybe there is, I hope there is, I wish for them because by the time I get round to reading them, Rosie may be no more. That’s not a threat but that generational gap again and my desire to only read people I know long after the blurb, long after the press. I hope she lives a long time. She might do if she’s figured out how to be a vampire yet – that’s her alter ego – Rosie Lugosi – I met her first and Rosie Garland second and I have to admit here, and to Rosie if she reads this, I prefer Rosie Garland because the other one scares me shitless but that has more to do with my nature than the vampire poet. Rosie Garland and I have spent time together in retreats in Yorkshire, community workshops in Manchester and in the unexplained nature around us. However, I met Rosie Lugosi, the vampire poet, first back in the 1990s. I was fresh faced, green as they come working numerous jobs. I was an entertainment officer at a singles agency for awhile, worked bars in posh hotels because I could fake diction and through it all I started a career in freelance writing on a number of Manchester publications. Back in the 90s the publishing scene in the city was like a fractured mirror, each break erupting a new publisher somewhere along the fault line. If you had a photocopier or access to one, you were an editor. I remember working on one magazine in the back bedroom of semi-detached house in Bolton, my hands permanently warm from the copy paper churning out and my nails chipped from stapling. I was writing for a magazine back them keen to bring arts to the masses, I won’t mention it because what it was and what it is now are two different beasts and I admire both of the beasts but not the chasm between them. I remember interviewing Bill Bailey for the magazine and talking about ming vases and my editor having a shit fit that I spent half an hour doing this and not asking about his tour. I wish I could say I got better but my mind was always on a tangent. I started to bother other editors with a new Manchester, having been a fan of the Mancunian independent music scene and having been a footnote in it as a roadie and one time musician, I was interested in the new scene of poetry and writing, the rise of Jeff Noon, the voice of Lemn Sissay, the working-class drawl of the late Hovis Presley and the darkness of Rosie Lugosi. I nagged for months one editor to greenlight me interview them and he agreed as long as I stopped going off on a tangent and do some bread and butter journalism. ‘Fucking write me copy,’ he said and I did. I sold my soul to push through names no one had heard of and, in some cases, never heard of again. I wrote under several pseudonyms. Different voices. Different opinions. It was better than helping middle-aged people find love or serve someone who never tipped. Now I am middle-aged and I do tip – small mercies. Back in the 1990s it wasn’t easy to get in touch with people, I had a pager, a fucking pager that held a grand total of 100 letters, my Mum would often relay messages from my Dad’s business phone – our home number was the business phone – but by the time she’d said, ‘Andrew, it’s your Mum, someone phoned for you, I didn’t catch their name…’ it was over and sent me running around to find a telephone box. I actually arranged to meet Rosie Lugosi, through friends of friends at the Pop Cafe on Oldham Street, or maybe it was another street or another cafe but I arrived early, was about to leave when she came in, leather on every inch of her and a presence that cut cut through any of my retorts and sarcasm. Back then as a journalist I was hiding my own secret, to be a writer, to tell people I was a writer and to have the middle-class reply of, ‘That’s a cliche, a journo wanting to be a writer’ from my editor or my working-class friends who would simply buy me a pint and remark on why people thought I was a ponce being a journalist and being a writer was a step too far. Rosie Lugosi saw through that. I had it on tape for years, stored and then lost in house moves, a minute into our conversation, the interview, she had taken control and simply said, ‘You want to be a writer. So do I.’ I remember that, even if Rosie doesn’t, it was the first bit of honesty I had heard in an interview. I had met Rosie Lugosi and then Rosie Garland stepped through for a moment. It stuck with me. That’s what scared me shitless. That step into the abyss. When Rosie Garland stepped into the abyss she was given a publishing deal, I whooped, it was like paving the way for the rest of us to step off the edge and say, ‘Fuck it. I am what I am.’ I lost friends because I became a writer. Working-class people I knew didn’t like it, didn’t trust it, thought I would steal their souls. I am a working-class introvert, the worst kind on the scale of introverts because I mask, my words are my armour, my over the top enunciation and projection of voice a warning to stay the fuck away. An ex-friend of mine said getting a letter off me was something they dreaded, as if I had rehearsed all I wrote, I didn’t, that’s what hurt the most, it was me and behind the mask I consumed voraciously. Vo-rac-ious-ly. My tastes are wild and wide, and after nearly five decades on this planet I have started to realise I am not wired up like other people. Maybe in Rosie Garland I saw a kindred spirit and in Lugosi the mask. Over three decades of knowing Rosie Garland, I have always championed her because her words are doing something that I strive to do, reach for a truth, to pull down my own mask and not to be afraid, to truly give myself to the abyss. The truth of Gnome and Edie in The Night Brother resonated with me like the truth of that early performance poetry scene in Manchester which was so angry, so defiant, so in your face that it went beyond the swagger of the city into the marrow of it. Truth is everything. The only truth I have to give you is read Rosie Garland, go now, step into the abyss and be consumed.