Jem walked to the veranda. The wind was northerly and unkind. She stopped at the rail and folded her arms and lowered her head. Here she cried again looking down at the muddy snow on the edge of the lake and then up at the lights of Bad Saarow.
At midnight, she found Saskia’s wardrobe and put on two of her jumpers. Both smelled of that particular perfume from the south of France. She went into the kitchen and put some coffee on. At least the gas still worked. As Jem sipped the coffee, she decided to walk to Bad Saarow. She swallowed the last of it and walked along the hallway to the front door and looked for her coat.
It was not there.
She held her breath. Her grief was suspended beside a greater fear: Was there someone else in the house? Had Saskia come back? Slowly, she held up her lamp. The hallway was empty.
When she turned back to the hat stand, she saw that her coat had been folded neatly on the wooden floor. There was a parcel underneath it. On top was a note that read:
Jem, I listened at the church door and heard you speak to Wolfgang. I know why you chose to ask me for help that day in the café. I don’t care. I never did.
P.S. Despite our—whatever you might call it—I like the look of the Italian football team, don’t you?
There were no more tears. Jem was physically out of them. She folded the paper and placed it in her pocket. The parcel comprised a piece of folded cardboard. It had been sent to a post-office box in Bad Saarow. Jem ripped it open. Inside was a book called Resources and Parsing. Jem smiled. She removed its bookmark and said, ‘Hello, shorty.’
‘Hello, Jem,’ said Ego.
From: twentyfourcaratbitch@hotmail.com
To: d.shaw@frobischer-ewing.co.uk
Subject: Your friend and mine
Danny,
She’s gone, babe. I got a call yesterday and she sounded bad, so I came right back to Berlin… despite everything. She wanted to go back. You know what I mean? Don’t ask me where she is now. I saw clouds, I think, and a lake. She wanted it to be the future—I hope it is.
I don’t blame you for anything. How could I?
By the way, get Mum to remortgage the house and put it all on Italy to win the World Cup—if you want to cop a metric assload of loot, that is.
I’m coming home too. Brace yourself.
End of.
---
It is the night of September 5th, 1907, and the Moscow train is approaching St Petersburg. Traveling first class appears to be a young Russian princess and her fiancé. They are impostors. In the luggage carriage are the spoils of the Yerevan Square Expropriation, the greatest bank heist in history. The money is intended for Finland, and the hands of a man known to the Tsarist authorities as The Mountain Eagle—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
I’m an independent author and I work without an agent or publisher. If you would like to help others find Flashback, please consider leaving a review on the Kindle store.
Do you want to know when my next book will be published? Email me at ihocking@gmail.com and I’ll let you know. You will also find me on Twitter: ian_hocking.
The Story of Flashback
Acknowledgements for the First Edition
As you can see from the dates above, it’s taken me five years to write this book. Flashback would have been published in 2007 if my plans went to plan. Of course, they didn’t. The mice got at them.
I’d like to thank a few people whose help made the book possible. Steve Fitzsimmons generously helped me research the interior of the Avro Lancastrian. Ed Waters of Plane-Design.com answered my many queries about the Lancastrian’s cockpit layout and managed to dig up the RAF flight manual for the Lancaster Bomber. Other pilots and aeronautical experts—including my friend Daniel Graaskov—helped on further technical points. Thanks also to Roderick Murray-Smith, Professor of Computing Science and member of the Brain-Computer Interaction group at Glasgow University.
Ah, my fearless beta readers: Neil Ayres, @by_tor, @Chobr, Sharon Coen, Isabel Ewart, Ana Fernández, Debra Hamel, Alex Mears, Nadège, Dennis Nigbur, Paul Roberts, and Aliya Whiteley. I sweat like Tom Jones to think of the rubbish I gave you all to read. You have my solemn promise that I will not do this again. For at least a month.
Jay Rayner’s book Star Dust Falling was an invaluable guide to the circumstances surrounding the crash of BSAA flight CS-59.
I refer to several poems in this book, sometimes explicitly, but sometimes not. (I’m using the term ‘refer’ in the sense that Elgin intended when he ‘referred’ a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures to the British Museum.) These poems include Because I could not stop for Death, by Emily Dickinson, Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past, by Francois Villon, and Richard Cory, by Edwin Arlington Robinson.
Pia Guerra very kindly allowed me to include her illustration of Saskia Brandt at the beginning of the book.
My partner, Britta, has been supportive in the countless ways that only she can be.
The Magic 50,000
An excerpt from my blog, 30th December, 2005. Read the original.
One of Stephen King’s classic novels, The Stand, took me about six months to read. It’s a tale about post-apocalyptic America, where the survivors of a devastating plague form two antagonistic groups for a final battle between good and evil. The book is staggeringly long. Really, really long. Length is, I would guess, one of those things first-time authors find most daunting about writing a novel. In his preface to second—uncut—edition, King replied to fans who asked him how he could write such long novels. ‘One word at a time, man,’ he wrote. ‘The Great Wall of China was built one brick at a time and you can see that fucker from the moon.’
Though I’m past the point where I’m daunted by the blank pages ahead of me, I admit to feeling relief when I pass a particular word count. The fact is that, if you’ve managed to write half a book, there’s a good chance that your choice of characterisation, situation and theme have worked out. I write without a synopsis, so I never really know whether the story is going to ‘work’. On the other hand, because I make it up as I go along, I’m closer in my perspective to that of a reader; like the reader, I’m experiencing the story for the first time, and it makes decisions about pacing, toning, and overall story arc more straightforward. I’m not forced to write duff set-up scenes. I write the scenes I think will be fun and, in the second draft, I cut the ones I don’t need.
This morning, I passed the 50,000 word mark on my new science fiction novel, a sequel to Déjà Vu. According to my excellent novel-management software Copywright, I began the manuscript on November 3rd, 2005. I’ve spent 290 hours writing it. All just numbers, of course. Is there something special about the figure 50,000?