3. Lost and Found
I wrote Lost and Found in 2001 for inclusion in Joel Lane’s Beneath the Ground, published by Alchemy Press. Daniel Faulkner, the lost soul of the story is a clear analogue of Nick Drake, with some echoes of Syd Barrett and Peter Green thrown into the mix.
I still recall how much fun I had writing it. I lived in the village of Tanworth-in-Arden one summer in the early 90s. As fans of Nick Drake we’d stopped at the village one afternoon, to see where Drake’s family home was, and to visit his grave in the tiny little churchyard. We stopped at the pub afterwards and discovered that there was a flat to let over the post office, which looked onto the village green. I’d like to say it was an idyllic summer but it wasn’t. It ended, quite literally, in bloodshed. I still have the scars to prove it.
Nonetheless, my love for Drake’s music remained undiminished, and I’d harboured the urge to write something about him for years. It wasn’t until I read about someone who’d attempted suicide by jumping in front of a train on the London Underground and surviving that I had the first seed of an idea. Danny goes from recording studio drug haze to fugue state to the platform of Leicester Square station and wakes up to discover that his left arm is gone below the elbow; for a guitar player it feels like a joke waiting for a punch line.
There’s another time-line happening in Lost and Found. Its narrator is 45 years away from Danny, and just beginning the first faltering steps in a relationship with Danny’s sister. It’s their second time around and both of them are hesitant. Life has that effect. I recall staying at a stranger’s house in the East End somewhere on the day Chris Monk and I were in London (the same day I mentioned in my notes for A Box Full of Darkness). It was the early 90s. We’d gone down to London to appear on a show on MTV, for some reason that I can barely recall. I was sleeping on the sofa in the living room of this draughty Victorian townhouse and was woken by one of the many residents. He was up early for his morning coffee. A middle-aged man. He seemed quite old to me then, but I suppose he was younger than I am now. He was recently divorced, he told me. He missed his kids. Every morning he’d have his coffee and go and stand outside in the backyard and listen to the last ragged sounds of the dawn chorus before work. I left him to his routine but the image of this suddenly abandoned middle-aged man in the back garden with his coffee lingered in my head. It was a life I couldn’t quite grasp at the age of 21 or so, but, as the years went on, it became quite clear to me how life could go astray so easily. That image of the narrator in chapter 2, standing in the back yard in yesterday’s clothes, watching his coffee go cold was the other starting point for Lost and Found.
But, Beneath the Ground — It didn’t take long for me to ask myself the question: what is pulling Danny down to the Underground? It took some left turns along the way: magicians, folding air into boxes or origami shapes, the flower-seller, a woman with lives to spare, and something vast at the edge of the world, calling out to the lost. I had an absolute blast writing that story.
And I was enormously proud of Lost and Found. I still am, hence its inclusion in this collection. I was writing it for Joel, which made me push myself harder. I wanted him to be happy with it and he was. I still vividly recall him coming over to the house I was living in and reading me what he’d written about the story in his introduction to Beneath the Ground: ‘The complex, subtly Lovecraftian narrative of Simon Avery’s Lost and Found weaves together the threads of madness, failed love and sounds from another world.’ To say I was happy at that moment is an understatement! I’m still very much writing for Joel. Every story, I think to myself, what would Joel say about this? Is it good enough for him? I suppose it’s a good yardstick to measure yourself by. He’s been gone for almost eight years and I still miss him.
Simon Avery 