'I only ever let something go when I'm at the point of barely being able to see straight anymore'
Ruby Todd on prose style ^ Plus Part 30 of The Demon Inside David Lynch
In today’s issue:
—’I only ever let something go when I'm at the point of barely being able to see straight anymore’: Ruby Todd’s masterclass on prose style. Todd’s literary mystery Bright Objects is our second pick from books submitted by our paid subscribers. You can read an extract here.
Our previous pick was Susan Hayden’s Now You Are a Missing Person. Read an extract here.
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—’Slim fit, never skinny. Big difference. In a middle-aged guy it’s a different moral universe’: Part 30 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com.
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RUBY TODD ON PROSE STYLE
What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?
Unlike my little sister, who would doggedly filch my parents' literary novels and hide in cupboards to read them as a child, I actually indulged more often than I'd like to admit in what I'd call fairly trashy high school serial novels for teens. I knew they weren't challenging or enriching, but like the even trashier glossy teen magazines I also coveted, I found them drug-like for the way they permitted an easy escape to other worlds, worlds in which people my age were actually enjoying life, and because I was increasingly appalled at the predicament of being an adolescent, I suppose they served as a kind of compensation for the fun I felt I was missing out on, if not also as a dose of hope.
Unlike these books, the adult literary novels I read during this same time demanded the full spectrum of my attention, and I began to learn that words in certain arrangements, like the most artful picture books of my childhood, could conjure images and voices in ways that could cast a kind of enchantment. I'd always been a reader and also a child who was read to, but now in my teens I began to become more consciously aware of the formal and material qualities of prose. This was when I'd already been writing stories myself for years, and while I'd long been aware of the aesthetic and conjuring powers of words, until this point, I'd been focused mostly on story as a totality. Now, I became entranced by the dizzying number of registers at which prose can work to produce effects on the page and through a reader's senses. Some of the books I recall from this period are Wuthering Heights, The Go-Between, The Great Gatsby, Picnic At Hanging Rock, Lolita, The English Patient, Beloved, The God of Small Things, All the Pretty Horses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Ethan Frome, Fugitive Pieces, and Holy the Firm.
One of the reading experiences I remember most vividly from this period was when, one summer afternoon during a visit to my grandparents' house in Queensland, I lay on my bed beneath the ceiling fan, reading my mother's copy of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. As I read, I became hypnotised by the effects the writing was having on my senses, and wanted to understand why. The prose seemed almost material, and gathered force as I read, and this effect, I realised, seemed to a great extent created by the quality of its narrative voice, its intimacy and sense of testament, and its conjuring of image, place and time in combination with a particular rhythm and cadence, until I felt pervaded by an atmosphere that seemed as alive to me as the tropical day outside my room. It was the feeling of being visited by another world, and I'd repeat phrases and sentences to myself, to savour the effect and also to see if doing so would help me understand their power, as though they were equations I might solve.
Please quote a favourite sentence or passage from one of these and describe what you admire about the writing.
To follow on from the above, I've always found the ending of Housekeeping uniquely charged. (For anyone who hasn't yet read the book, you might prefer to skip this response!)
We are nowhere in Boston. However Lucille may look, she will never find us there, or any trace or sign. We pause nowhere in Boston, even to admire a store window, and the perimeters of our wandering are nowhere. No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.
I've always loved the way that this final passage (along with those that precede it) offers narrator Ruth's speculative imaginings about her sister Lucille's adult life in the years since their parting. Through Ruth's eyes, we glimpse Lucille living on beyond what she mistakenly believes to have been the deaths of Ruth and their aunt, Sylvie, and we experience how despite in fact being alive, in the wandering isolation of their lives, there is a way in which they both haunt and are haunted, a truth evoked from the start by the spectral quality of Ruth's narration. The above-quoted passage is the last in a series of Ruth's imaginings, in which she envisions scenes from Lucille's life without them, scenes that contain truth despite never having happened. Like so much of the novel, this description is animated by absence, by loss and by what is not, and this is mirrored on a technical level by the use of grammatical negation, which accumulates until the closing line. I've always been struck by the power of how Robinson in these passages combines the effect of speculation with testament through Ruth's voice, in combination with the incantatory potential of negative words like 'nowhere', 'never', 'no one', and 'does not', which (along with building rhythm and emotion) serve to evoke with such immediacy the truth and presence of exactly what they negate.
As both a reader and a writer, I've always been drawn to such effects, which foreground on a narrative level the negative power of language itself. I'm thinking too of passages in Marguerite Duras's The Lover, in which she summons with strange immediacy the vision of a photograph from the narrator's youth, decades ago, that was never taken, also using the present tense, and employing declaratives like, 'On the ferry, look, I've still got my hair'. Like Robinson above, Duras in this passage imbues her description with specifics that carry with them a kind of pointedness—'I use Crème Tokalon, and try to camouflage the freckles on my cheeks'—which contributes to the effect of a kind of blurring between hallucination and reality. And Roland Barthes in his essay-elegy, Camera Lucida, does something similar in describing a photograph of his late mother that does exist, yet which the reader is unable to see except through his words, which only lends those words a greater force.
Without being prompted to copy the style, could AI ever write as well as this?
I don't believe any synthetic intelligence, divorced from the full-spectrum, sensory experience of love and beauty, cruelty and pain in a mortal body on our planet, will ever be able to match the best of human literary expression. So, I'm unsurprised that attempts to do so using AI rely on parasitic mechanisms and ultimately, unacknowledged theft, that undermines the integrity and sovereignty of genuine human expression, cultural production, and art. It's a scandal, to say nothing of the other risks posed by this technology, and I was heartened to learn recently in this post on Substack by Ted Gioia that perhaps more of us are feeling this way than I'd previously dared to hope.
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Bright Objects?
Part of my intention in Bright Objects was to create a world in which inner and outer experience are constantly reflecting each other and converging, at times revealing truth and at times distorting it. For example, throughout the story there is an oscillation between, on the one hand, the inner space of meditation, mystical inquiry, and adventures in consciousness; and on the other hand, the external world of form, scientific rationalism, evidence, and outer space itself. More specifically, I wanted this world to be pervaded by the atmosphere of a celestial object, a comet, which, at different points, to a person seeking meaning in the skies, might appear as a beacon or an omen, and at other times as simply a reminder of the vastness of space, its relative eternity as contrasted with our mortality, and the mystery of how we came to be here in this version of existence on this particular planet.
On a stylistic level, I wanted the novel's language and its images to reflect these things, and so there are planetary metaphors used in reference to human lives, and reflections in which the comet is seen as a kind of private oracle. I was also interested in exploring the ways in which comets in particular have, for much of human history, often involved qualities of haunting and ghostliness in our experience of their visitations, and in our interpretation of them as mysterious, divine signals of trouble. At the same time, I'd been interested for years in the ways we ritualise death, and made narrator-protagonist Sylvia a funeral attendant partly to mark her as an intimate with death, as someone who doesn't shy from the darkness, who wants the truth at any cost, and her narration of the story also reads as a kind of elegy for her dead husband and for the version of herself that she lost when he died. Through these elements and others, the writing led me toward a style that interwove both cosmic and gothic atmospheres, in addition to both tragedy and (I hope) some comedy (although pacing and economy required the cutting of some fittingly absurd funeral scenes!).
But more than anything, I found the style in which to write Bright Objects through the voice, sensibility and consciousness of Sylvia; through her way of seeing the world and through her gifts and flaws. The reader's experience is completely enmeshed with Sylvia's deeply subjective lens, and her propensity to experience her own emotions and fantasies in ways that colour reality outside. So, an element of unreliability, emotional intensity and even claustrophobia became part of the style, as the reader journeys with Sylvia through grief, obsession and rapture, on the way to a kind of freedom and release which she never expected. To me, Sylvia's voice produces the novel's prose style, which, in its first person point of view and framing of the story as a kind of testament from the opening, has always felt to me like a murmuring in my ear, or a soliloquy from a stage.
Did your editor suggest anything that improved the style of Bright Objects?
Absolutely. Among many other things, one of my editors reminded me that it was perhaps necessary at a few key points to retrieve an aspect of Sylvia's foreshadowing voice, that somewhat prophetic tone which is present in the novel's opening. I was surprised and relieved that he mentioned this, as it was not only true, but also not usually something that I'd need to be told, as it's one of my favourite modes to write in. I think that early on in the drafting, I'd been making an effort not to overindulge it, before I'd established a sense of groundedness in the narrative's present (although Sylvia is actually narrating it from a future time). That was on the advice of my agent, who, I’m fortunate to say, is quite editorial and probably knew that this was the best approach for the early drafts.
Another element this same editor (Simon & Schuster's Tim O'Connell) alerted me to was my tendency to overwhelm the reader with names of characters so peripheral that they were unnecessary to mention and only risked creating a sense of false importance for the reader, when encountered alongside references to central characters. As I've always tended to prioritise concreteness and specificity where possible, the logic of this economy of naming hadn't occurred to me earlier. Tim also offered some great insights regarding my tendency in the original draft to commence chapters in very similar ways, usually with some reference to time or day, often because of how the novel's events are so locked into the orbital progress of the comet in the sky. So this made me consider the importance of seeking variation across these openings where possible, and also made me more conscious of other tendencies I'd been unaware of, such as often commencing paragraphs with 'when'.
Both Tim and my Australian editor, Genevieve Buzo, also brought to my attention the need to introduce a central character (Joseph) much sooner than in earlier drafts, which has made me more conscious of a kind of pacing logic that can be involved in the introduction of key characters. Tim also inspired me to rewrite the novel’s ending at a certain point, which was exhilarating as it presented itself as a kind of natural surprise that had been hiding within the structure of the story all along. So the insights of my editors and agent, which I experienced like a series of precious gifts, helped to improve the style of the book, but also enhanced my awareness of principles that I'll bear in mind in future work.
What do you understand by ‘voice’ in writing, and how much does this matter to your own?
My experience of voice, as both a reader and a writer, is multifaceted. To me, it's like the radio frequency through which a reader receives and experiences all the characters, images, and happenings that a certain story might encompass, which would be entirely transformed had its author decided to explore the same elements at a different frequency setting. Voice is so intimately connected with the narrative consciousness that the reader enters into and which conditions their sensory experience of the world of the prose, across aspects as diverse as tone, emotion, narrative logic, rhythm and pacing. So, voice to me is fundamental and deeply tied to overall style and atmosphere.
As a reader, I'll sometimes pick up a book that appears to explore certain of my favorite themes, but find that the voice simply doesn't "speak" to me. Conversely, I'll sometimes find myself seduced by the voice of a book whose apparent subjects are of less obvious interest to me—Houellebecq's Submission, for instance—and the voice is what carries me forward, allowing me to experience those subjects from an orientation that feels resonant and alive. It's also probably true that my deepest enjoyment in both reading and writing comes through engaging with first-person voice, due to its potential immediacy and intimacy, frequent unreliability and performativity, and capacity to appeal to the power of testament over time and experience—this is what happened; let me tell you what I saw that day; this is what I've learned since—while foregrounding the ancient act of a story being told by a living, breathing witness who is not god-like or impartial.
Have you ever read your work out loud with someone waking up in bed beside you? If so, please describe their facial expression at the time and this event’s long-term impact on your relationship.
I've not yet tried this, but imagine I would receive a swift rebuke! My husband has two settings only—awake or asleep, nothing in-between—due, I suspect, to many years of night watches in the navy, so if I so much as whisper a word while he's sleeping, he snaps into alertness immediately as though there’s been some military strike. But I've certainly had occasion to witness his facial expressions, and the impact on our relationship, in response to my immersion in various kinds of edits during our waking hours. He's very supportive and often my first reader (he shares that joy with my long-suffering mother), but I've noticed him looking quite haunted at times, and he's actually described me as turning into a kind of ghost, as well as suggested that next time I enter into months of deep edits, he might check into a hotel! And I don't blame him at all. Wrestling with a manuscript in its final stages is so all-consuming, emotional, and energy-intensive, and I know I'm hard to live with during those times—I tend not to feel fully embodied in the time and place of the present, so there might be truth to his ghost metaphor.
George Saunders proposed on his substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges -- the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Do you agree with this?
Far be it for me to disagree with George Saunders, and I feel I can only speak for myself, but this hasn't seemed to be the case for me. I certainly believe in the importance of rewriting, but in my experience, access to the particular voice that feels right for a certain piece is a precondition for its creation. I tend to choose which ideas to proceed with based on which voice begins to yield itself, which for me, as I've mentioned, is closely tied to atmosphere. It's a seam of oxygen and aliveness that I know will give me the final work if I can only remain with it for long enough. I can be unsure of the year a story might be set, certain key characters or the sequence of events that might transpire, but if I can't hear and feel the voice early on, I can't write the story, and if I try to work on it anyway, the work will not feel true and I will not feel alive writing it. For me in such a situation, rewriting would be to override my instincts and to fasten cladding on a flimsy structure. Not that I'm a proponent of the romantic notion that one must only ever be inspired to write; this is of course untrue. I'm speaking of personally needing access to some thread of voice that feels vital and correct for a story I've been considering, in order to be able to make a real start. In any case, one of the many reasons I love reading books and essays on craft is because of the window they offer into the incredible range of working techniques that different writers develop and evolve over time.
How close have you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the miniscule nature of the prose issues you were working on, and what were those issues?
I always come closest to doing this when I'm on the brink of having to finally declare something finished, whether for submission or publication. It's the second-guessing of decisions I'd thought were already made, the siren call of "one more check", that does me in. I find this point in the process to be, beyond question, the hardest part, even though I only ever let something go when I'm at the point of barely being able to see straight anymore, and longing for it to be over so I can again experience the freedom and possibility of beginning something new. (This is actually one aspect of craft that I've always longed to read more about from other writers.) The miniscule issues that most often seem to drive me around the bend are the persistent popping up of repeating words or metaphors within close range, and having to find synonyms, in addition to weighing up the pros and cons of retaining or deleting dialogue tags, making final calls on paragraphing, and realising that two words that I don't wish to change unfortunately produce a jarring rhyme—I had this recently with 'life' and 'wife' and had to go with 'existence' instead of 'life' to avoid a rhyme that might have undermined the passage. My tendency to go deeper and deeper into these torturous, miniscule things in editing, which at a certain point, when working toward publication, also of course risks introducing new errors, is why I tend to appreciate schedules and deadlines, whether external or self-imposed. I respect them and I need them—they tend to be the only way I can let go.
Name some contemporary writers you admire for the quality and originality of their sentences, and describe what’s accomplished and original about them.
I loved Rachel Cusk's Outline series, in which her sentences combine immediacy and visuality with often a quite wonderful traction, that ultimately delivers an observation that contains a dry joke, which builds across the course of a passage. And I'm compelled by her use of free indirect discourse in these sentences, to convey the voices of the narrator's interlocuters while allowing those voices to be coloured by her observing consciousness, so that this otherwise unremarkable technique is elevated into a kind of overarching tone, atmosphere and structure. I've always been mesmerised by Jeffery Eugenides' sentences in The Virgin Suicides, which are rendered so potent not only through their obsessive references to the relics that remain of the long-dead Lisbon girls and their quotation of witnesses left behind, but also through their use of the first person plural, and their sense of prophecy. There's a wonderful way in which an almost mystical tone is blended with starkly concrete observation and drollery. I love Annie Dillard's sentences for the way they so often combine musicality with a driving momentum, that ultimately offers some kind of revelation about lived experience that feels visceral and deeply rooted in a singular time and place, despite being somehow universal. John Banville, Donna Tartt, W.G. Sebald, and Anne Michaels are some others that come to mind, as well as Shirley Hazzard, whose sentences can be such labyrinths, and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose sentences can be deceptively simple in their elegance. And I absolutely love George Steiner's sentences, which are always so beautifully structured, resonant, and rhythmic, including when conveying philosophical ideas that in the words of another writer could be communicated with affectless dryness.
And lastly, the subject we’d like to explore with you in most detail: do you have any stylistic tips that Auraist readers might not have heard before?
I can make no claim to originality in what I'm offering here, but most of the techniques I'll share have to do with creating particular atmospheric and sensory conditions for writing, which can potentially induce slightly altered states that allow for a more ready access to the voice or style required by a work. I've found that if I have access to a certain emotional register that's right for whatever it is I'm writing, everything else follows naturally (which is not to say easily), and many of the techniques that work for me were discovered in pursuit of this.
Music, either instrumental or choral, has been a part of my process for a long while. Sometimes, I've found that discovering the right piece of music for the emotional range of a scene I need to write ends up clearing a blockage I might have been experiencing. For example, once, when I was working on a challenging rewrite and was emotionally drained, I was having trouble with a scene of quiet devastation for my protagonist, which would also deliver a kind of truth he'd been seeking, which was beautiful and eternal in its way. When I began listening to Tchaikovsky's Hymn of the Cherubim, as sung by the USSR Ministry of Culture Chamber Choir, I was suddenly able to enter the scene, and the words came to me through the music. (And I've found that the evocative powers of smell can be introduced to this same end, if, for instance, you burn the same oils during writing spurts on the same project over time.)
In a similar way, whenever my writing is going poorly and I feel dried up, I always find renewal in galleries and museums. There's something about the wordless materiality of paintings and objects, their sensory immediacy, that both relieves and energises me, and always ends up returning me to words. It can be a wonderful exercise to sit silently with a painting or object that moves you, as long as it takes for words to well up, and then to form a portrait in words that aims to evoke it for someone unable to see it except through those words.
As someone who often wrestles with restlessness and anxiety while working, I've also found that writing on moving trains (the comfortable kind, with mini-tables—how I'd love for all trains to be like this!) can have a lulling, productive effect. The only time I ride on trains like this here in Australia is when I visit my parents in their country town by train. On these trips, when I combine music with the shifting scenery of farms and fields, I often find that my writing flows swiftly and with more grace, to the extent that I wish the journey were longer.
Like the rest, I don't think the following is a technique that would suit everyone, but lately I've been experimenting with delay. In the past, I'd often rush into an idea in the effort to "be writing", not considering how much emotional depth and sharpness of vision accumulates in the process of activities like daydreaming, contemplation and exploratory research or notetaking over time. Yet all these activities contribute to striking a connection to a piece of work that's strong enough to sustain it to completion. Starting too early with the formal writing, for me, has sometimes led to losing the creative charge I'd had to begin with, being unable to find the integrity and logic of the work, and creating problems that might have been avoided with more foresight. I was schooled in the literary tradition of diving right in, creating messy first drafts and excavating the true work through endless rewrites. It's taken me a long time to discover that I don't like working this way, despite how many writers do, and I'm wary of craft books and essays that present (however well-meaningly) one writer's process and logic as universal, whether they are literary or more commercial writers. Through experimentation, I've found that outlining can be exhilarating, exploratory and surprising, especially when approached loosely, and because I'm easily preoccupied by details, it provides me with the freedom to focus on details within the momentum and support of a broader structure that I continue to test and engage with even as I focus on the more micro levels of image and scene. It's like moving in a more elegant way between levels—between being in the crow's nest and glimpsing the course ahead, and getting lost on the sea floor. (And of course, I still rewrite.)
This broad practical change to my process has, I think, affected my style as much as specific techniques like emulation or reading work aloud impacted it when I was younger, and I feel similarly about switching from M.S. Word to Scrivener, which in assisting with structure and organisation, frees up energy and space for more detail-oriented stylistic work.
Finally, in the spirit of experimentation, I think it's always useful to test stylistic decisions, like writing in a certain narrative mode or tense. It can be so useful to rewrite a key scene in third person instead of first person, or in present tense instead of past tense. Even if this exercise reveals the original choice to have been best, you will usually have learned something new about the work in the process. I think the same is true of linearity in the act of writing. Some naturally write in linear order, while others tend to approach the writing of a narrative in a less linear, more haphazard way—and it's always worth trying the less familiar route now and then, to see what it might reveal.
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Ruby Todd is an Australian writer, creative arts researcher, and teacher, with a PhD in Writing & Literature. She is the recipient of the inaugural 2020 Furphy Literary Award, the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest award for Fiction, and the 2016 AAWP Chapter One Prize. She has completed residencies at The Wheeler Centre and La Trobe University, and her work has appeared in Ploughshares, the Guardian, LitHub, Crazyhorse, Overland and elsewhere.Â
Shortlisted for the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, her debut novel, Bright Objects, is out now through Allen & Unwin (ANZ), Simon & Schuster (US), and is forthcoming through Éditions Gallmeister (France).
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire. But the descriptions of The Return’s content are not fiction, no matter how much you come to believe or wish otherwise.
End of the Line
We were discussing Ella’s recent dinner with the French-fork-bearded minstrel. When I asked if she’d put him right about his favourite show, his trousers, hair, lyrics, gigs or his approach to life in general, or asked if his beard represented, from his perspective at least, twin mountaintops, twin peaks, she said the subjects hadn’t come up. When I asked if she ever missed sex with him she just blew Fortuna smoke at my face.
3-FEA shot round my blood and moments of our years together came to me in a burst. Skeletal sparrows chittered along the windowledge and the curtain’s web shimmered along the floor—we’d come out of a drug bender to find we were now engaged. We stopped to look at shop mannequins with mascara running down their cheeks and Ella’s face brushed mine as she released a bereft-sounding OOewOOeww. We wheeled Chica/Tammy through a Vox rally and got Santiago Abascal to shake her oddly warmth-free hand.
As we approached her flat Ella seemed tired. She was often tired these days. We climbed the stairs, Ella ahead of me with her head bowed and shoulders curled, then went inside and through to the bedroom. Faintly green moonbeams shot through the window and across the floor. I watched her undress and said, ‘You look drained.’
‘I am drained. And I am drunk.’
‘You don’t feel sick?’
‘I am just drained and drunk.’
She stood before me naked. I pulled her closer and said, ‘So what have you been thinking about?’ She resisted me a bit, pressing her hands into the tender muscles of my chest. I took hold of her hair and said, ‘Maybe Laura versus Frank Booth tonight.’
Crinkling her nose she said, ‘I was thinking that I have had enough of it.’
She pulled away and lay down on the bed, her fake breast throwing across the floor a cartoonish shadow.
‘Enough of what?’
‘What do you think?’
In the wardrobe mirror my face lost its sickening grin. The side of Ella’s head was reflected there as well, the blonde faintly greened by the light outside. She poured herself a brandy, drank some and said, ‘Frank and Laura is one of Mateo’s. But I am not Laura. I never have been.’
Taps at the window from green-tinted raindrops. Somebody somewhere was watching a comic turn thwaakk BOB.
‘And you’re going back to the minstrel. Or are back with him already, for more Laura and Frank. The roleplay, you got it from him, from an ancient singer-songwriter who wears trousers like that.’
Again I looked at the mirror, at her hair as it gleamed inside a shroud of green moonlight. Then at her shadow along the floors and walls, at her unfinished brandy.
‘Your own trousers are not always so great, chico.’
As it caught its reflection, my face in the mirror crumpled. ‘Slim fit.’
‘Qué?’
‘Slim fit, never skinny. Big difference. In a middle-aged guy it’s a different moral universe.’
‘Who cares. Really.’
‘So I’m being dumped for an old rocker who wears kaftans and a bifurcating beard. Who got you into the roleplay.’
‘He can be mucho… ’ she growled the word: ‘inventive.’ She finished off her brandy. ‘You should not be taking the drugs if you cannot cope with them.’
‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’
‘You’re too unstable, too bitter.’ Quietly she added, ‘And too different on los fundamentos.’
Mascara trickled down her Laura cheeks. I took her glass and poured myself a brandy.
‘Poor Mateo, he can be so very tender. Please do not drink that.’
I inhaled fumes of Hennessy. ‘Tender before turning into Frank Booth.’
Panic now seized me, as though some old tormentor had crept up behind me. Or was lying there on the bed.
The glass of brandy flew through the air.
It smashed against the wall.
And that was the end of that.