I needed a new routine. I felt I needed to start writing in the mornings. I had read up on the topic: all good writers rise early. But my usual writing routine was an afternoon thing. The year previous, I’d written a failed novel in my afternoons. Each day after lunch, I’d sit at my desk in the spare room and listen to Far Beyond Driven by the power metal band Pantera as I worked feverishly on the manuscript. I found it had to be that specific album — I did try Vulgar Display of Power — and it had to be loud and on the stereo, no headphones. The writing wouldn’t come without it.

So the problem I had in February of 2012, was the question of how to combine the old with the new, to marry what I suspected would work with what I knew would help.

On the first day, I went brute-force on the issue. I rose not long after dawn, turned my stereo up and pushed play. For twenty-five minutes — from ‘Strength Beyond Strength’ through to the stuttered intro of ‘Slaughtered’ — I tested my new writing routine and found a type of productive bliss. During that one tiny window of time, I wrote the first two stories I’ll be publishing here on Mirror, and a third story would have come too, had it not been for my upstairs neighbour Brent.

Brent and his girlfriend Mona had long been one of the worst parts of living in Brisbane. They were worse than the disgusting apartment and worse than my various creative failures with writing. Brent and Mona lived a life that raged on top of me. They ruled over the whole building with an iron will, stamping their feet on the floor (my ceiling) to express all sorts of emotions. When a downstairs neighbour had friends around, they stomped on my ceiling. When Jehovahs Witnesses disturbed a Sunday breakfast, my ceiling paid the price. They stomped when they argued, when they were excited, and when they were sad. They never ever danced or frolicked. They just stomped, and the stomping would never end. It became the time signature of my whole existence and they seemed to live only to provide it.

So it was quite an event when Brent came down to see me that first morning of Pantera and the new writing routine.

‘TURN THAT FUCKING MUSIC DOWN,’ he screamed. He was furious.

I didn’t let it get to me. ‘Look, Brent, I need to concentrate and that music helps me,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to write flash fiction. It’s really fucking difficult. Nobody likes it.’

‘WHAT?’

He couldn’t really hear me because I still had Far Beyond Driven playing. Instead of shouting further, he pushed his way inside the flat and found the stereo, shutting it down with a fast punch. On the way back out he said, ‘If you ever fucking play that music again at this time of the morning, I’ll come down here and I’ll punch you. You get it? I will punch you and your stereo.’

He was very close to me when he said this and Brent is a lot taller than me. The man squinted constantly, day or night. Combined with his eternally pursed mouth and his bald head, his face looked like three pins pushed into a cushion. Even worse, the skin covering that cushion was impossibly thin, as if stretched to breaking point across his skull. He was a monster of a man.

‘I will fucking punch you,’ he said again, for clarity, and left.

I should have been terrified. Instead, I sat on the couch and felt an incredible sense of accomplishment. Despite all the trouble with Brent, my new routine worked. I had finally gotten some new writing done. I had forged my way into flash fiction. I felt I was onto something.

The second morning I repeated the whole thing. Fifteen minutes later, Brent stomped on the floor and Mona screamed. Mona was a safety valve of sorts. Brent would, occasionally, send her out to deal with people when he was on the cusp of violence. One weekend, the neighbours in the adjoining house had a party and invited Spanish dancers. Brent sent Mona over first and when that didn’t work, he went back and fractured someone’s leg with a squash racket. We were all spooked by it. He didn’t seem like the squash type.

‘Turn that music off,’ Mona said, on my doorstep. ‘Brent’s pissed.’ I assume that’s what she said. I couldn’t really hear her over the music.

I could see the morning sun peeking through the tree line past her shoulder. ‘I think it’s going to be a nice day,’ I said.

She started to poke in the chest, ‘Turn. That. Music. Down. Mother. Fucker.’

‘Jesus Mona, damn. I’m done anyway,’ and it was true. I had another story finished. It’s flash fiction. It doesn’t take hours to produce. So I was happy. I had no idea what I would do with these stories back then — web3 was still a long way off — but this was of little consequence. The writing life is always its own reward.

With three pieces of flash fiction to my name, I went out and celebrated. The next morning, I was in no shape for Pantera’s Far Beyond Driven or writing. But the day after, a Saturday, I got back to my routine and Brent was especially, especially displeased. He didn’t even make it to the bridge of ‘I’m Broken’ (track four, the single) and even I’ll admit that five-twenty AM is, perhaps, a little too early for power-metal. I mean, it was still dark out. So dark I didn’t see Brent’s gun at first. He rushed into my flat, without knocking, and proceeded to ram something solid and heavy into the stereo. It was only when he dragged me away from my work and showed me the gun that I understood exactly what was happening. He didn’t point the gun at me, he just held it up for me to look at. It was a small shotgun with a sawn down barrel.

‘If I come down here tomorrow Iain, I’m going to shoot you,’ he said. ‘You understand? I really will.’

I understood. I nodded.

‘Good.’

He let me go. For a few seconds, we stood there, close together, almost as if we’d hugged.

‘Look. I don’t know what your fucking problem is,’ Brent said, ‘But, no more music. I get…I get angry. And when I’m angry, people get fucked up. That’s what happens. I will fuck you up, Iain. I will shoot you.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I get it. I do.’

It was a terrible moment. He left quickly, but the damage was done. Brent had interrupted my creative flow. After all the drama with the gun, I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I was headed with this one particular sentence.

Things turned pretty bad for me after that. I believed that Brent might actually shoot me and this was troubling. That would have really interrupted things with my flash fiction. Added to this, a woman I’d been seeing, an ex, returned to the apartment and took her furniture back. I was being diminished on every front. Creatively stifled, with only a mattress, a laptop and a motorised camp fridge to my name. Losing my routine and my stereo was devastating. It was a huge intrusion on my creativity, and however I looked at it, there was just no way I could get my daily word count done. I couldn’t make a major contribution to flash fiction in these circumstances. It just wasn’t possible. This was not a scenario conducive to anyone’s talents.

My dreams seemed to be fading.

I stopped leaving the flat.

Friends stopped messaging.

My parents gave up. They were incredibly upset by the motorised camp fridge. They wanted it back. They had a trip planned.

To survive, I took a job packing shelves in the local supermarket. In my downtime, I spent weeks lying around the apartment with a wine cask. All the while, Brent and Mona kept up with their stomping. My downfall bore no relation to their stomping. They went on stomping and stomping and I sank further into the carpet downstairs, as if pummelled by them. My depression dragged on right through winter, and back out again into December,  churning away until the day Brent and Mona’s apartment fell eerily quiet.

At first, I assumed they were dead. During my darker days, I had often indulged in vivid daydreams of their demise. I had visions of Brent choking the life out of Mona and placing a plastic bag over his own head, or of Brent spraying Mona’s face across one wall before turning the gun on himself. I dreamed of other horrifying ends for them, of home intruders and mail bombs and disease. But none of this carnage would have been a silent process. Even with the plastic bag suicide, Brent would have stomped his feet on the floor as he gasped away, delivering a final crescendo, something to let me know how displeased he was. No, the fact that they disappeared without a sound made no sense at all. It left the whole building buzzing at a weird tenor. It was almost worse.

It was a strange time all over, in fact. A few days later, the Brisbane River flooded. The water didn’t reach our apartment but the weather was wild enough that we had to sandbag the front doors and secure the windows and bins. It created all sorts of havoc in the neighbourhood. We had power outages and cut roads. We all had to take time off work. It was a boring mess throughout, and the line for the bottle shop stretched longer and longer as the days wore on.

It was during one of these dull powerless days, with Brent and Mona still missing, that the radio predicted another bout of rising water. In anticipation of this, I decided to refill a few sagging sandbags. The flood had made us all a little more civic-minded and this was how I found myself doing something very unlike me: digging soil out of the backyard. I was standing out there in the light misting rain, knee-deep in mud, working over the soft ground where the bins normally stood. And there, a few feet down, I came across a sports bag. Inside the bag, I found Brent’s shotgun and sixty-thousand dollars in cash, all piled together in tight cling-wrapped bricks.

A week into the new year, I boarded a plane for Germany. For the next six months, I lived like a king in Berlin. It was cheap there. I had a beautiful apartment and endless time to myself.  Best of all, the walls of my new place were solid — to protect us from the German winter — and thus my neighbours made no mention of my early morning broadcasts of Pantera’s Far Beyond Driven. It was a golden time. A string of magic days. I wrote hundreds of stories there, all of them rushing out of me as the snow blanketed the Lidl across the street. This was the true beginning of my Mirror project. All these stories I’m about to publish, they’re all the products of Berlin, circa 2013.

I have no real idea what became of Brent and Mona. I do know they returned home to Brisbane. They were in Bali apparently. Whatever Brent was doing for a living, I didn’t get all the spoils. Actually, we ended up fairly even. Brent got his nice trip away with Mona and I got my compensation, for the stomping.

Unfortunately, Brent didn’t see it that way. Years later, I published my first novel, The Student, and it created a few issues. My debut made me visible to all sorts of people. My former landlord wrote angry emails. An ex-bandmate wrote asking after the money I owed. Someone from the University of Queensland chased a completion date for my thesis. And, of course, Brent managed to track me down. One afternoon, the phone rang in Germany, and there he was.

‘Hello Fuck-face,’ he said.

I recognised the voice immediately. It was incredibly strange to hear from him.

‘Brent. I was thinking about you the other day. How’s Mona? How’s Brisbane? Hot, I’m guessing?’

‘I think you have something of mine, don’t you?.’

‘What? Who told you that?’

‘LISTEN HERE I—’

‘Don’t stomp your feet, Brent. Just don’t. I can hear you doing it. I can hear you doing it through the phone. Stomp, stomp, STOMP, STOMP—’

‘WHAT THE—’

I put the phone down and contemplated the room.

Silence.

The Germans were terrible with their endless bureaucracy, dry humour and cured meats, but they really did know how to build an apartment building. They had that part of life figured out.

That afternoon I went to the local Media Markt and bought a copy of Far Beyond Driven on compact disc. I found a wonderful edition of it. It was one of the limited-run they made with the album’s original uncensored artwork. Instead of the usual drill bit grinding into a human skull, the original album cover features the same drill bit burrowing into the spread butt cheeks of some unfortunate. It’s wonderful stuff, a perverse image for a perversely important band. This is the edition I mailed to Brent and Mona with a thank-you card.

I felt I had to. I didn’t like doing it, but I thought they deserved it. They deserved something. They may not have completely agreed with my actions, but I had to acknowledge them somehow. For it’s an amazing and precious thing, the writing life, and one doesn’t always find a valued patron as I had. What writers do in their work is so fickle and fragile. It can be so easily disturbed. Yet I had succeeded in eluding their disruption. And in the doing, I had made a very reasonable and responsible stab at my creative dreams. I had so much to show for it: a collection of flash fiction and a debut novel that dozens of people bought. All the while Brent and Mona probably toiled away in that terrible uninspiring place from which I escaped. With this in mind, I had to do the right thing by them, I just had to. So I mailed off the CD, with the cover image of the drill bit going down into the stranger’s butthole, and I placed a cold kiss on the envelope before dropping it into the mailbox.

END

Iain Ryan grew up in the outer suburbs of Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of three novels. He predominantly writes in the hardboiled/noir genre and his work has been previously published by Echo Publishing (Aus) and Bonnier Zaffre (UK), with shorter work appearing in Akashic Books Online, Crime Factory, Kill Your Darlings and Seizure.

Buy signed copies of my novels here.

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