Liner Notes for Opals

 

Liner Notes for Opals

Schneemann in Australia was a note I’ve carried around for many years now. A good hook, now all we need is a plot, characters, some period detail, and maybe a joke (sorry). Instead we've got this, one scene, the memory triggered by the framing story. The framing story of course shows Schneemann’s carelessness, his failure to live up to his obligations, how all this can slip the mind. I’m sure none of this will come back to bite him.

What I tried for here was to convey an intense feeling of heat. If you’ve never been to a desert then it can be hard to describe it; still I’m trying here. The sun is pleasant in the early morning, hot later, and even before noon it hits like a hammer. You can stay in the shade, yet it’s too powerful, sapping strength from you, sucking out the moisture. And this is me as a tourist, I don’t have to be out in it, at any moment I can return to somewhere cool, get a cold drink, rest, even catch a bus back to an air-conditioned hotel. The desert is a powerful place, that’s what I’m saying.

Schneemann would probably do better to drink the water. Keep drinking it until it’s gone, maintain your strength. On the other hand he’d also do better to abandon McClory, yet that’s not the kind of thing you do. The camel will probably be okay whatever happens, it’s strong enough to walk out, and smart enough not exhaust itself.

Victorian and Edwardian thrillers (“shockers”) loved to be about fabulous and exotic gems, usually mysterious stolen by suspicious foreigners. It’s a joke in this series, entirely for me, that Schneemann, having previously got caught up in some jewelry shenanigans, always tries to avoid gem thefts. Whether on the investigating side or the other. Here he’s forced into it, though this is not a cursed diamond being sought after by a cult or anything like that. Just regular Australian opals, they can’t cause trouble.

I don’t think I could maintain the intensity of this scene for longer, hence the shortness of this month’s story. Frankly writing a longer piece would have cut into the time I have for the final story in the sequence. In a novel you can get away with a sharp stylised chapter, but another thousand words here on the betrayal or whatever would make it unbalanced. I feel as though this is a better choice; one good thing rather than have it surrounded by some tonally different bits.