Annotations - Little Boy Blue

Okay, here we go with the annotations. This references both earlier and later pieces, most of which have yet to see print here, so I've had to chop a lot out of the notes for the time being. Instead, you get a bit of an insight into the brain as it attempts to make sense of he whole thing. No chance.

In this piece I'm laying the groundwork for another DW concept - Monk Blue as Christ The Redeemer. Maybe. Little Boy Blue is the old nursery rhyme which goes:
Little boy blue, come blow your horn.
The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn.
Where's the boy who looks after the sheep?
Under the haystack, fast asleep.
Will you wake him? No, not I
For if I do he's sure to cry.
A bit of a stretch maybe, but here's my reasoning - Monk is a man of the cloth. He has the power to reanimate dead matter and to create new life (the sand city in this very tale). Little Boy Blue looks after the sheep, while Christ is frequently referred to as a shepherd of men. Basically, the rhyme says that the world is going to hell, cows and sheep causing mayhem etc, while the shepherd (or more likely, the shepherd's son...) is fast asleep, buried. And when we wake him, he will kick up a ruckus the likes of which we've never heard before. Armageddon baby! Of course, Phil's long term plans for the character may be completely at odds withthis, and my own thoughts can change byy the minute, so this may never be touched on again...

It's not named, but this takes place on Glenelg Beach in Southern Australia. Blue is Australian, which allows him to be a little less brash and a little closer to the very English Fliss but still participate in Nam etc. Blue is a popular Aussie nickname of course. Glenelg Beach is where the Beaumont Children were last seen in 1966, their disappearance sparking four decades of debate and speculation in Oz. This ties into the mention of children on the English moors - At the same time as the Beaumonts went missing, police were closing in on the moors murderers. This puts us squarely in late 65, early 66. As this wasn't as obvious as I'd hoped without some of the other peieces to reinforce the idea, I've also given Norris an extra line about putting a man on the moon.
Ern Malley - A famous Australian controversy surrounding the publication of poems by the late Mr Malley. Met with rapturous approval by the literatti of the day, the poems were later revealed to be the work of two disgruntled poets who created a fictional life for their tortured genius and intentionally wrote the worst poetry they could imagine, just for a laugh. A book of poems by an author who doesn't exist - A DW idea if ever I heard one...

Blue builds a castle... This is another one of those surprise moments, where what I'm thinking and what I'm typing go in two completely different directions. There was never any indication of this when I thought up the plot, but here it is.

Morgan T Norris - Psycho Killer. And once it was out of control, this really got away from me. Norris was going to be a throwaway character who would pop up, initiate Blue with a forced jellyfish sting then bugger off, never to be seen again. I made him dress in black because I thought it made him sinister, I gave him the knife to make him more menacing and I made him bald because xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxx and it made me chuckle. I was up to the point where he kills all the fish before I realised that he was Death with a capital D, and I had to reread it to see that, yes, I'd actually written him as Death from the start. He even looks like the classic Bergman version, updated for a night out in the 21st Century. Truly odd.

And yes, that mention of Psycho Killer should really be followed by Qu'est Que Ce...

So Death and Christ sit in the classic lotus position, facing each other across the clay The Redeemer has raised to life. Norris clearly knows everything there is to know about Blue, and he knows that he's infected. He begins the long, slow process of waking Blue, firstly by forcibly ejecting the toxins from his body. The clear goop is meant to evoke Morrison's Magic Mirror substance, but this is a twisted, distorted version of it, controlling and subduing its vessels.

I like the fact that Blue is almost completely powerless in this passage, and that the mention of the Moors children has set the reader up for some really nasty business, but in fact, Death is here to help. I also think that the moments when Blue is unconscious are the moments when his mum goes. Norris flashes the knife after he's used it (instead of a scythe) to keep Blue away from the body until the lesson is done.

God, The Devil and James Bond - Strange in DW that a boy would think of these three, then ask instead, "Are you my dad?" It's the return of the abandoned child with parental issues! Norris's response suggests that Blue Snr was no prize catch either.

Do you ever feel like you've done everything there is to do at least twice? - When I wrote this, I was beginning to wonder whether Norris was really an alternate future Blue. (and strangely, that was phil's reading of the character too). Now I think it just makes him sound old and tired. He stands at the edge of the land and daydreams about how it will all end.

I spent about three nights rewriting the dialogue for the next few paragraphs. Hendrix, Nixon, Kennedy and the moon landings all came ino it at different times. I suddenly realised that I had no clue what Norris was really here for, what he was going to tell Blue. Finally, I realised that he didn't know either - It was just a vague warning. Things got a bit easier then.

Old men wandering home, children playing out in the sun - Three of them will go from this very beach. - That's xxx xxx xxxxxxxxx, and the Beaumont Children, gone without a trace.

every stoner in the free world will be looking to the skies and singing Good Morning Starshine, actually inviting them to come and make contact with you - Good Morning Starshine is from the musical Hair, which didn't exist untill 1967. And the whole idea of singing it while looking to the stars for UFOs comes from the crossover X-Files/Simpsons episode where Mr Burns gets mistaken for an alien...

the man who called himself Norris felt compelled to look away - Little Blue has the power to face down Death.

That's right little monk - This is the first time Blue is ever called by that name. Norris knows the man he will become.

And that's about all I can give you for now - There's more going on here than I can readily reveal in the annotations, with stuff that won't be touched upon for another six months or more.

(Originally Published 19/05/09)