Pansies (Spires #4)

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

1 . Paragraph begins with: He tried to imagine Fen there but couldn’t.

Alexis: I’m now trying to decide if David does, indeed, wear pointy shoes…

I think he’s a bit of a dandy, but not a pointy shoes type of dandy.

2 . Paragraph begins with: There was a pause. Alfie watched the wavering shadows…

Alexis: I know it’s gross to be smug about your own writing but, to this day, I like this line. I like it because it feels so true to Alfie’s perspective and Alfie’s voice.

3 . Paragraph begins with: He thought about giving up and going back to London early.

Alexis: This was a really daft thing for Greg to say, given his feelings for Alfie. I think he just assumed that a stage of promiscuous sex was an inherent part of queer identity, and Alfie took it as a sign that Greg wasn’t interested in developing anything emotionally significant with him. And, again, with Greg I wanted to show that it’s possible to invest in or take for granted very narrow perceptions of queerness and queer life, in exactly the same way that it’s possible to do with heterosexuality.

4 . Paragraph begins with: Alfie had expected to be basically miserable…

Alexis: Minchella’s, I’m delighted to report, is still there. You can Google it for pictures of delicious ice cream.

5 . Paragraph begins with: Alfie had expected to be basically miserable…

Alexis: This is a regional dialectal feature I was super happy to slip in. Basically it’s tautology ( massive long here or geet big, to use another northern term) for emphasis, similar to the double negative ( I didn’t do nothing ), which is also for emphasis. Both of these tend to get dismissed as ignorance or a lack of education, because they’re not as present in standard English.

6 . Paragraph begins with: “They better not,” said Kev.

Alexis: This was another moment where I wanted to demonstrate that just because Kev is working class and has those values, those values are not oppositional to being a decent human being.

7 . Paragraph begins with: Once they were done with eating…

Alexis: And makes me feel even older now…

8 . Paragraph begins with: He felt the contact ripple outwards somehow…

Alexis: Obviously Alfie and Fen had particular experiences of queerness while growing up, Alfie being so embedded in a particular culture that queerness became almost unthinkable, and Fen so alienated from that same culture for his queerness. But it felt important to not portray South Shields (or any small town with a strong working-class community) as the place where queerphobia happens—especially because there’s already a strong (and historical) devaluing of the north from the south.

9 . Paragraph begins with: Eventually, he left the pond behind…

Alexis: One of the many fascinating things (and yes, I stand by that many ) about the history of South Shields is the fact you can witness fairly readily the layers of history there. Like, there’s the remains of a Roman fort. It was regularly raided by the Vikings. It’s been a fishing port. I think there was a salt-panning industry. And, of course, there was the coal mine, the shipbuilding, and all the other maritime industries that the twentieth century ultimately destroyed.

It’s strange to think—especially if you visit South Shields today, see the remains of so much, and feel its quiet—that it’s significance as a port was such that it was heavily air-raided, and bombed, during the First World War.

For our purposes, however, with Alfie Bell looking at the relic of an artificial waterfall, it’s South Shields’s past as a fashionable Victorian seaside resort. Now it’s kind of a backwater, but the Victorians left some typically Victorian shit behind, like this waterfall. Apparently the North Marine Park (across the road to where Alfie is now) used to have peacocks wandering around it in its Victorian heyday.