Pansies (Spires #4)

Chapter One

Chapter One

1 . Paragraph begins with: “An’ wharraboot ye, pet?”

Alexis: Representing regionality is, of course, very important to me, but there’s always a balance to be struck in how to capture dialect phonetically. I know I sometimes go the whole hog, like with Darian’s Essex-flavoured dialogue in Glitterland , but I think Geordie (the accent of the North East) is potentially less accessible and somewhat more caricatured than Essex. It’s one of those accents that’s notoriously difficult to “do” unless you yourself hail from the north.

In the end, I decided to capture a flavour of Geordie in the rhythms of Fen and Alfie’s speech rather than attempting to fully render a Geordie accent over, you know, however many hundred pages of book. But in compensation, here is Great Aunt Sheila, right at the beginning of the book, being as Geordie as balls.

2. Paragraph begins with: Great Aunt Sheila rolled her eyes.

Alexis: Oh God, another book about marriage, expectations, and trying to live authentically as a queer person in a heteronormative world. Looks like I continue to be not done with this story.

In terms of this wedding, though, I very much didn’t want Great Aunt Sheila to go down the expected gently queerphobic route of believing Alfie should be married because he’s straight. Instead I wanted to confront him with the idea that being queer isn’t a get-out-of-heteronormativity-free card.

3 . Paragraph begins with: The centrepiece of the whole arrangement…

Alexis: There is nothing in the world more sophisticated, or less pleasant to eat, than a cheese and pineapple hedgehog.

4 . Paragraph begins with: “I dunno, man.”

Alexis: I’m pretty sure there are northerners of certain generations who genuinely believe this is what happens if you go down south: your lose your accent and then you turn gay.

5 . Paragraph begins with: “I just meant,” Kevin was saying…

Alexis: I think friendship over time can be incredibly complicated. Like, there are some people who, for whatever reason, it doesn’t matter how much distance or however many years stand between you, you can still pick up the threads as though no time has passed at all.

With people linked to specific times and places in your life, it can be much more difficult. I think with Kevin here, Alfie assumes the fact he’s gay is what’s playing into a sense of disconnection between them. But actually, it’s more that Alfie has left home, built a different life, and come to understand himself very differently (including wanting to talk about his feelings. Gasp ).

6 . Paragraph begins with: If his hands hadn’t been full…

Alexis: I think this is another really difficult dynamic—given quite a lot of straight men (of all generations) will talk queerphobically in ways that are genuinely not intended to be either queerphobic or hurtful. Except intent is not impact, and feeling your friendship is dependent on you accepting language or “jokes” that are generally not deployed in safe contexts is messy and unbalancing—like you’re paying an emotional queer tax.

And so we get Alfie, who desperately wants to retain this friendship and the link to where he came from that it represents, unable to tell Kev he’s making him uncomfortable. Obliged instead to rationalise and then join in.

7 . Paragraph begins with: Lisa—he was pretty sure she was called Lisa…

Alexis: For the record, I’m not sure if Kev would think that. Clearly, they have a friendship built on liking the same things and affectionately running each other down, but I also think Alfie feels so fractured by the collision of all the men he is and wants to be, his past and his future, his queerness and his understanding of masculinity, that he’s just seeing everything through a prism of “does this come across as gay?” Which is understandable but silly, and slightly unfair to the people around him.

8. Paragraph begins with: Which left Alfie trying to remember who he used to be. “What is she,” he managed, “a mental case?”

Alexis: I’m aware that this is not, you know, the sort of language one should be casually using; but, the fact of the matter is, it’s the sort of language Alfie would use. He’s a bluntly spoken northern man, for all he’s trying to do “better” (whatever that means).

9 . Paragraph begins with: God, he really was a soft southern ponce.

Alexis: Facts, Alfie. A proper northerner does not feel the cold. Like ever.

10 . Paragraph begins with: He wandered down to the beach.

Alexis: I love writing about place, about the specificity of places in particular. You could go to South Shields and find this exact spot. See the red groyne lighthouse. And North Shields shining across the bay.

11 . Paragraph begins with: His TVR Sagaris was tucked into one of the bays.

Alexis: Well. Here’s one of those little moments where a book shows its age. I think Alfie could probably have been able to get his hands on one of these for about ￡35k in the mid-2010s, but you’d be looking at more like ￡70k in 2023.

As is probably evident from the love Alfie’s Sagaris gets in the book, I had a lot of fun choosing a car for him. I mean, he’s the sort of man who’d want an amazing car, but also he’s well off rather than super rich. I knew he’d want a sports car, probably a British-made one, so that left Jaguar or TVR in his price range. I personally, and I believe Alfie would agree with me here, cannot be doing with modern Jaguars: it’s classic E-type or bust.

So that left TVR, a company with a reputation for making deeply charismatic but unreliable cars. The Sagaris, though, was kind of their masterpiece: being both utterly wild (just look at the design of it with the gills down the wheel arches and side exit exhausts) but also surprisingly functional. I mean, as long as you don’t expect airbags or traction control. Sadly, it was also the last car they ever made, with the company closing down their factory in Blackpool in 2006.

The TVR Sagaris is also banned in the United States for being too fast, too daft, and too unsafe.

Perfect car for Alfie, I feel.

12 . Paragraph begins with: As he drove by the Rattler…

Alexis: There’s still a pub here, but it’s called Platform 33 these days.

13 . Paragraph begins with: Another glance: he was drinking rosé.

Alexis: Poor Alfie. The “Is this person of compatible sexuality?” dance is the worst. Especially because you have to dance it at the same time as the “Is this person interested in me full stop?” dance.

14 . Paragraph begins with: The man started and turned.

Alexis: Fen is so ahead of his time. I’m pretty sure that, when I wrote this, glasses like these weren’t in like they are now.

15 . Paragraph begins with: Over the years, Alfie had got pretty good…

Alexis: I’ve never had this experience myself, but I had a friend at university who was (presumably still is) built like Alfie—notably tall and broad and muscular—and it was kind of startling how many other men would take that as a kind of challenge. I mean, personally, whenever I see a massive bloke walking down the street, I don’t immediately think, “That’s an ideal person to shoulder-bash in a display of ill-advised machismo.” In terms of Alfie, though, I think this is another clash of masculinity/queerness that he doesn’t know how to navigate—in the sense that he’s used to his masculinity being legible to others, and even comfortable with it, good at de-escalating when he needs to. When it comes to his queerness, however, the idea that this is something that can be—err, forgive the loaded word—potentially penetrated by strangers, and may change how they perceive him and relate to him, feels violating and vulnerable-making to him.

16 . Paragraph begins with: It was probably good advice.

Alexis: I cringe for Alfie here. Like, this feels like some kind of queer nightmare scenario where you come onto someone extremely gently and they react in visceral disgust. Of course, there’s a lot more going on than that in this particular scene, but Alfie is still seeing everything through the lens of his own queerness.