‘Mary is a composite character’.

A thought on character building which arose from this phrase I can’t get out of my head: ‘Mary is a composite character.’ It is from a book I am writing. I like to call it ‘a book’ because it sounds better. ‘Manuscript’ is too medieval. Likely to be lost or burned.

Mary is a composite character as we all are. Many parts, many petals, although they may not all smell sweet. How do you get behind a character: build her, layer her, overlay her with history? Tell her story well? Mary, which is my middle name.

I think of Mary in a play; I think of most of us being in a play of our own devising. This is how we tend to see life. We are in a play devised and directed by ourselves. I think of my friend driving to work, which happens to be a theatre; I think of him weaving and wheeling his way through central London traffic: clotted, congested, fumy, fuming – my friend I mean. He spent so much time devising this drive into the city, to park his car in an underground carpark, not owned by the theatre but somewhere nearby. Somewhere in Lego land, and perhaps he did too, imagine it this way. Built the carpark in his own mind. Saw the space waiting for him and claimed it. Saw that shiny carpark ticket gleaming through the gloom like Charlie Bucket with his golden ticket – I’ve found it, I’ve found it, I’ve found the golden ticket!’ This is how we like to imagine ourselves in life, collecting our own special series of golden tickets.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently losing tickets. Not deliberately, but somehow it has happened. I haven’t planned it so – in fact if I were planning things better, if I were a more skilled deviser, I would not be losing my bus ticket every day. Or my taxi receipt, or my train ticket, or my book. The one I always carry in my bag – a rucksack too small for its purpose, but that is the point -- to make it too small so I can’t cram stuff into it: teabags (which inevitably split open), hand cream (my hands are dry; it is genetic); face cream (it is a very neat cylindrical shape, modest, although worryingly there is no lid. It went missing a while ago; a while is quite a long time); a slim novel written by a man called Malcolm Lowry. I mean you have to give someone called Malcolm a chance, don’t you? I have started to read Malcolm: not bad, but definitely not Joseph Conrad. Malcolm was only ‘early twenties’ so the back cover says. I put him at 19 to be fairer (Once you start thinking of Joseph Conrad nothing is fair). At 19, a real talent. Also, I love the cover, it is a Raoul Dufy, whose seascapes remind me of home but not home: a more romantic adjustment. Perhaps somewhere in Cornwall off a rocky coast. Ultramarine is Malcom’s novel. Not bad, not with the Dufy on front.  

If I were a true artist, I would be compositing my life (a word used in film making to describe a layering technique -- I learnt it from my friend -- she is a very good film maker, and her bag works better than mine). If I were a true artist I would be operating more knowingly. But I have a hunch life doesn’t work like that; at least that’s what I tell myself to save face. You can’t composite the ideal scene; there is no ideal scene.

When I get on the bus and fumble through my purse and drop my purse and my purse spills out all over the bus, it is not because I have devised it. I might start to think, ‘here is a scene I am devising, this was always meant to happen,’:  to make me feel better, to make me feel -- what’s the word -- more like an auteur. More like Alfred Hitchcock who liked to make cameo appearances in his own films. A fat man in a mackintosh mounting the bus behind me who picks up my purse from the floor and hands it back to me. Alfred. A great director. He had the whole scene devised before I even knew what it was I was doing with my trembling hands. (They really are starting to let me down; I must keep them in my bag: I shall call my hands Mary; Mary Mary Quite Contrary, and outsource her part).  

Meanwhile, I hope I said thank you to Alfred for retrieving my purse. Did I? I must have without realising, in the way you do without thinking because you’ve been trained to by your mother years ago to say your please and thank yous. Of course I did; and Alfred nodded and went to sit at the back of the bus. And I proceeded to the nearest seat which is one of those awkwardly laid out areas with a sizeable gap in-between for pushchairs and wheelchairs. And I hung my head hoping no one would notice Mary fumbling through her bag looking for her ticket.

For my friends: Stephen and John and Will and Bevil and Sarah and Suzie: because we are all composited parts. I don’t have a friend called Alfred, but I wish I did.