Neil Randall is delighted to announce that his new (long) short story Another Kind of Kindness has been published by literary journal The Write Launch. In the story, a daughter recalls her often strained relationship with her father, a world-famous novelist. A distant figure throughout her childhood, he nevertheless tries to instil in her the purest of human qualities – kindness, compassion, empathy. Only as she gets older, she realises that he himself is singularly incapable of displaying the same qualities towards other people, so obsessed is he with his literary work.
In terms of inspiration, revisiting
David Lynch’s The Elephant Man during the COVID-19 lockdown period
planted the seeds for this story. I hadn’t seen the film for many years and was
struck, more than anything, by the contrast between the kindness and compassion
some characters display towards John Merrick and the utmost cruelty and
nastiness of others. For I felt it represented what is best and worst about
human beings in general.
Here’s the opening scene from the story:
It was no secret that I hadn’t seen or spoken to my father
for many years prior to his passing. A fact which fascinated a great number of
people – literary aficionados, academics, biographers and journalists. You
don’t achieve that level of professional success without your personal life
coming under intense scrutiny. In that respect, I cannot even begin to recount
the number of interviews I have declined over the last decade. But my desire to
tell my story now has nothing to do with appeasement, or of trying to set the
record straight. Nor will it be sensationalised nonsense penned purely for
financial gain. I want to write about my father to try and understand our
complex relationship, and work out exactly how I feel about him today.
In my early
years, father was a very distant presence in my life. Naturally, he spent a lot
of time locked away in his study. Each evening, I distinctly remember him
coming into my bedroom to kiss me goodnight. Most vividly of all, I recall his
subtle pinewood cologne mixed with pungent cigarette smoke, the bristly feel of
his stubble on my cheek, and the soft, whispered words he invariably spoke:
‘Sweet dreams, my child’.
To say the
least, he kept very peculiar hours. It wasn’t uncommon for me to get up in the
morning and find him sprawled out unconscious in an armchair, or sitting
outside by the swimming pool, bare top, dishevelled, in only his underwear,
drinking wine or whisky at what constituted dawn or a little thereafter. In
those moments, he could be incredibly tender and affectionate. He would beckon
me over, pick me up and perch me on his knee. Again, a collection of very adult
smells assailed my senses – the strong liquor and distinctive Turkish tobacco,
the almost sweetish smell of his sweat, the earthy scent of hair that had gone
unwashed for many days. None of which was unpleasant, I must stress, but things
which, even now, evoke memories of those stolen moments we shared before the
rest of the household woke up. ‘You see the way the breeze stirs the surface of
the water?’ he said to me once. ‘You see that slight rippling effect, like
crumpled sheets upon a love-spent bed? You see how beautiful it is, how a
breath of wind, a mere caress, can create such a wonderful, calming vision?
That, in so many ways, is the best that we can hope of each other. If, in some
small, infinitesimal manner, we can produce even the most fleeting moment of
beauty in this life, something which touches and moves another person, we will
have ascended to the level of the gods’.
If you want to carry on reading, you can read the whole story on The Write Launch website now:
https://thewritelaunch.com/2020/10/another-kind-of-kindness/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neil-Randall/e/B00JYXI862/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1
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