Keep a date free in your diary: the second
of May 2025.
Why?
Canadian publisher Dark Winter Press will
be releasing Neil Randall’s latest novel The Professional Mourner – Book
One from the soon-to-be-fabled Yugoslav Trilogy.
Written in incredibly challenging
circumstances, many consider this to be the author’s finest work to date.
As you know, Neil was deported from his
home country back in September 2021. His crime: approaching perfection. Little
did his detractors know, he would rise phoenix-like from the ashes in his Balkan
exile. Moving from one brutalized architectural anomaly to another, he
eventually came under the influence of a flame-haired temptress – part-soothsayer,
part-succubus, part-time bus conductress. In exchange for the ancient pagan storytelling
gift, he made a pact. He gave her his heart but she wanted his soul. A transaction
he happily transacted: money for nothing.
Over the course of the next eighteen months,
they travelled up and down the country, attending dozens of funerals in small Serbian
towns and villages. Not due to any fatalistic obsession with the darker side of
life (or death), rather to watch a much-feted professional mourner perform: one
Milica Stankovich.
Thus, the seeds for the novel were well and
truly sown.
Needless to say, Neil paid a high price for
the exchange. Having lost a foot in an industrial accident, and gone completely
bald due to an epic bout of stress-induced alopecia, soulless, friendless,
hairless, living out of the back of a wheel-less 1981 Yugo, with only the
Mirijevo street dogs for company, all he can do each day is chronicle all he learnt
from watching the same Milica Stankovic prostrate herself before one coffin
after another.
Nikad. Nažalost. Volim te.
Here’s a short sample from the start of the
novel to give you a flavour for the story:
On a rainy overcast
Wednesday in the small town of Velika Plana a baby
girl was born to Dragan and Nevena Stankovic. Seen very much as a miracle – the
proud parents were in their mid-forties and had almost given up hope of ever
conceiving a child – it would be no exaggeration to say that little Milica (as
she was soon to be called) came kicking and screaming into this world. A
perfectly natural state of affairs, many would assume. Only she didn’t stop
screaming. Not from the moment she was safely delivered into her mother’s arms,
to the moment Dragan and Nevena left the local hospital the following morning.
Nothing seemed to pacify her. No amount of shushing or cradling or rocking.
Even when her exhausted mother, in the hours immediately following the birth
itself, presented the baby with a teat, she somehow managed to both greedily
suck the milky goodness from Nevena’s swollen breast and continue to cry, sob,
wriggle around, and prostrate herself in a manner the midwife (a veteran of
over ten thousand deliveries) or any of the physicians on duty that day had
ever seen before.
“It’s the most curious thing,” observed Dr
Ivanovic. “If I didn’t know any better, I would say the infant actually enjoys
being in a state of utmost distress.”
*
On their return to the
family home, a modest apartment in the working-class district of town, the
concerned parents did everything in their power to try and settle the baby down
– more shushing, cradling, rocking, and feeding. They even let her suck on a
wine-soaked finger (a now frowned upon but nonetheless effective technique
routinely deployed many years ago). And while their efforts were rewarded with
brief periods of respite when Milica had literally screamed herself to sleep –
it didn’t last long. A matter of thirty or forty minutes at a time.
After two sleepless nights, they were
nearing their wit’s end.
“Whatever are we going to do?” asked
Nevena, red-eyed and haggard through exhaustion. “I know all babies cry. But
this isn’t natural. It’s as if God has blessed and cursed us in equal measure,
as if He has given us the one thing we most wanted in life, only for that great
gift to be the most onerous of burdens.”
“I don’t rightly know,” Dragan replied.
“But you can cut out all that superstitious nonsense. Milica is a perfectly
healthy baby. You heard the doctors say so yourself. This is probably just a
tetchy period of adjustment. I’m sure she’ll be right as rain soon.”
But that didn’t prove to be the case, and
it caused untold problems in town.
*
By the end of the
first week of constant bawling all through the night and early hours of the
morning, not to mention the vast majority of the day, the neighbours started to
complain. Not just about the noise, you must understand – if many a resident
did bang a piece of wood against their radiators time and again when the crying
fit reached a feverish late-night or crack of dawn pitch. But because these
were still a deeply superstitious people, regardless of the incredible
technological advances made in recent decades. They saw something strange and
worrying, portentous of evil spirits and bad omens in an infant who simply
wouldn’t stop crying.
“Mark my words,” they said. “This don’t
bode well for any of us. That there little girl is possessed by dark forces.
She be cursed. If we don’t watch out, she’ll bring bad luck upon every decent
man, woman, and child in the region.”
They openly displayed their annoyance, if
not outright hostility towards what, up until the birth of their daughter, had
been a popular and well-respected couple. If they saw the father, Dragan
Stankovich, on his way to the steelworks in the morning, or returning home
after a hard day’s toil, they either crossed the street or, if they hadn’t had
the good fortune to see him approaching, turned their back on him completely.
If they saw the mother, Nevena Stankovich, with her pram, they did likewise.
Some of the older women went so far as to openly make the sign of the cross in
her direction.
“Be away with you,” they hissed. “You
should’ve drowned that one at birth. Now all of us will have to suffer.”
Irrational, unkind behaviour which only
added to the Stankovich’s plight. Not only did they have an infant who cried
from dusk till dawn, they were now treated as pariahs by the local community.
If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read so far,
why not check out my published novels on Amazon.
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