New Devilry

Book summary

Dive into D.A. Watson's eclectic mix of tales where the mundane meets the macabre. From an accountant's unexpected Alaskan adventure that takes an apocalyptic twist, to an office Halloween party that turns deadly, and a chilling confession from the Scottish Highlands, this anthology showcases a blend of suspense, horror, and dark humor. Prepare to be both amused and alarmed by green-eyed monsters, sinister squirrels, and much more in this collision of comedy and carnage.

Excerpt from New Devilry

They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. A little trite perhaps, maybe a cynical person would even say it’s a naïve, simplistic credo, unrealistic in a world that more often than not seems to like nothing more than giving someone a right good shoeing when they’re already down, and fuck your lemonade.

Whatever. Being a generally upbeat sort, personally I always quite liked the expression. In theory anyway. I have to admit that until fairly recently, my life was pretty much lemon free. Never had any serious financial woes, no bereavements, serious illnesses or any of the other random bad turns of luck that the universe delights in dealing out to most people.

No one goes all their days without a bit of bother though, and in my case, my personal crate of lemons came in the form of the breakup of my marriage. Even then, it was a relatively small crate. More like a bag of four. Or just a squirt of Jif lemon juice in the eye.

Truth be told – and what’s a journal for if not telling the truth? – Jillian and I shouldn’t have got hitched in the first place, but, tale as old as time, we were young, stupidly in love, and as dumb as a couple of starry-eyed twenty-three-year-olds could be.

We’d met as first years during Fresher’s week at Strathclyde Uni where I was studying accountancy, Jillian computer sciences. We dated all through uni and graduated at the same time five years later, both of us lucky enough to find employment in our chosen fields practically before the ink on our diplomas was dry. We didn’t so much take a gap year as a gap fortnight, and cliché of cliches, on our first holiday abroad together, eloped and got hitched by an Elvis impersonator at a drive-through wedding chapel in Las Vegas. Both of us raised in very straight laced families, the spontaneous reckless cheesiness of the whole thing appealed to us, and in all honestly, we’d had more than a couple of cocktails beforehand, and were giddy with booze and a few wins on the slots. Like I said, young, dumb, and stupidly in love.

The inevitable separation was a lot less messy than it could have been. We’d no kids to mess up, thankfully, so when reality kicked in a little under two years later, and we realised we weren’t happy and that we’d made a mistake, all told, the divorce was a pretty clean and amicable business. There was no adultery involved, no bitter arguments, no resentment or the throwing of ornaments at each other’s heads. There were barely any tears. We both just realised we weren’t ready for a lifetime commitment to each other. In the end, our life as husband and wife was wrapped up in a matter of weeks. We managed a quick sell of the flat we’d bought and done up together without much drama, even making a modest profit on it, which we split fifty-fifty. My half of that little windfall was the sugar in the aforementioned lemonade from my divorce lemons, and it’s the reason I am where I am now, sitting in the departure lounge of Glasgow Airport.

A few months ago, a couple of days after the divorce papers had been signed and finalised, I was at work, sitting at my desk in the accountancy firm where I’d been employed since they took me on as an apprentice in my fourth year at uni, and I had an epiphany. In a moment of clarity, I realised that I’d had a house, a spouse, a stable career nailed down, and had been living a settled, mortgaged-up, middle-aged lifestyle before I’d even hit my mid-twenties. But with the house and spouse now gone - and a few shekels from the sale of said house burning a hole in my bank account – I realised that I was, as Mr Jagger (and later, the Soup Dragons) said, free to do what I wanted, any old time. As they say in law enforcement, I had the means, motive and the opportunity.

So, I took a few days off work to think about my life and what I really wanted from it. If I desired, I could have a very easy, modestly comfortable life. And all I had to do was… nothing really. Just stay where I was at Milne and Parker’s Financial Services, crunching numbers and making good money, climbing the company ladder. I could do it for another thirty or forty years if I wanted. As long as there was such a thing as money, my dad always said, there’d be a need for accountants. It was there, my future all laid out for me. Planned, stable, and unsurprising.

Or…

Channelling my inner man-child, I thought about the things I’d been in to when I was an idealistic teenager, before my parents had begun grooming me for a career in the money markets. In the end, I was able to whittle it down to three things: music, travel writing, and nature.

I’d played in a band in high school, strumming rhythm guitar for the questionably named rock quartet Raging Beavers, and had for a time dreamt of becoming a career musician. It soon became apparent however that though I knew a few tunes and scales and could batter out an F chord and maybe even the occasional guitar solo with passable ability, I couldn’t sing a note, and my attempts at song writing were painful at best. I was never going to be the next Jeff Buckley.

When I was sixteen, I’d also had a brief liaison with journalism, immersing myself in the work of Bill Bryson, Jack Kerouac, Anthony Bourdain, and Frances Mayes. I’d imagined myself as a globetrotting travel writer, visiting exotic locales, drowning myself in far flung cultures, enthralling readers with my vivid prose and profound literal ponderings. That idea was likewise binned when I discovered I struggled to write more than about fifty tortured words at a time and found myself cringing at what little I had managed to put on the page. It was probably something to do with the fact that at the time, I was a spotty teenage virgin with no real life experience and had never in all my puff ventured further than the annual fortnight in the Algarve with my parents. Or maybe it was just a simple lack of writing talent. In any case, I was pretty sure I was no Hemmingway either.

The only other thing that really piqued my interest as a young pup was nature and the environment. I’d been a dedicated boy scout, and loved camping trips, hiking, studying animal tracks, birdwatching, even the days our troop spent doing community beach cleans and picking up litter around my hometown. I became something of a teenage eco-warrior, went to a few anti-pollution protests, bugged the shit out of my parents about recycling, saving energy and buying sustainable products, and when I read up about the clearing of the rainforests, for a time I swore off Nutella and anything else containing palm oil. For a time, anyway. I was only fifteen after all. And, well… it’s Nutella. I’d been convinced helping save the world would be my life’s work, and was set on studying marine biology, conservation, or zoology at uni after high school. Thing was, the science subjects, which I’d need to get onto the uni courses I was set on, were never my strongest suit in school.

But perhaps more important than my lack of any God-given natural talent in the various potential careers I was interested in, I was raised the son of a sober-minded bank manager (Dad) and even more sober minded council financial officer (Mum). Though they were tolerated by my parents, none of my aspirations in music, travel writing, or environmental concerns had been encouraged as viable career paths, and I’d been half-gently nudged towards a more realistic and employable vocation in accountancy and finance, which I admit to not resisting against too much. I had a natural affinity for numbers after all and had always found a great deal of satisfaction in the neat, orderly laws of arithmetic. I might have been a C student in sciences and the arts in school, but maths and accountancy, that was my jam. Plus, I knew how much money you could make in that field. We all have our price.

In my defence, I will say that even though I sold out and went down the route of financial services instead of working for the Rainforest Alliance, to this day I still have a few Direct Debits on my bank account paying monthly donations to environmental charities. I still detest litterers, and while I’m not as avid as I was as a pissed off, banner waving teenager, I do still make the effort to shop sustainably, recycle my paper and plastic waste and do what little I can.

Anyway, the point of all this was I’d had a taste of a stable grown-up life, and now, single, footloose and fancy free for the first time since I was eighteen, I wanted something more than spending the rest of my days immersed in spreadsheets. I was young, had no real commitments, and had a decent pot of disposable cash, so I decided to let fate take a hand, and trusting in the gods of the online ether, Googled ‘music travel writing nature’ to see what came up.

The top result, weirdly enough, turned out to be the Plenty of Fish user profile for one ChadThunderpecsXXL, a self-described fitness nut, nature lover and aspiring musician and writer from British Columbia. Clearly something of a Renaissance man, Chad – whose profile pic showed a shirtless, square jawed, tattooed behemoth holding an old-fashioned quill and gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance - listed his interests as hiking, jamming, working out ‘mind, body and soul’, and most importantly, ‘gettin jiggy wit it’.

Though this wasn’t the pivotal, life-changing moment I’d envisaged, just like that, I knew what I was going to do.

I remembered a Discovery Channel documentary I’d seen when I was a teenager, sometime in the period when I was in between dreaming about being either an environmentalist or a rock star. It’d been about this marine biologist studying the communication methods of orcas, doing so while paddling a kayak through the fjords of British Columbia, home of the esteemed ChadThunderpecsXXL. It’d fascinated me at the time, the idea of being somewhere so remote, so wild, lost in nature, studying the eerily beautiful, musical language of these extremely cool animals. I’d even bought a CD of whale song at the time and experimented with using it as ambient instrumentation in my own tortured compositions for Raging Beavers. Needless to say, it didn’t go down well with my bandmates.

So, thanks to the unlikely inspiration of ChadThunderpecsXXL, I had a plan. Take a few weeks off work, dust off the old six string, pack a bag and just go, full on Bilbo Baggins style, leaving behind my comfortable but ultimately boring hobbit hole and go off on an adventure. I’d travel halfway around the world, throw myself to the mercy of the wilderness, check out some whales, play some guitar, and keep a travel journal, which I even entertained thoughts of trying to get published afterwards.

It was exciting and scary, which was what convinced me it was the right thing to do, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been truly excited or scared. And even if it didn’t work out, I could always come back to the safety net of Milne and Parker’s Financial Services. At least I’d have given it a shot.

I didn’t overthink it. I might not have done it otherwise. I booked the time off work, and dove right in, and after a few more minutes of Googling, I’d booked up with Running Wild Tours for a nine-day adventure holiday in the Gulf of Alaska, hiking, kayaking, camping and whale watching in the remote wilds of the Prince William Sound.

I spent the next several weeks getting ready, buying all the gear I’d need for my jolly, going to the gym three nights a week to get in shape, breaking in my new hiking boots with long walks in the country during the weekends, and getting my hands reacquainted with my old Yamaha acoustic. That was the hardest part, but after a bit of practice I found I can still manage that F chord, and I’ve developed some wicked calluses on my fingertips. I also binge watched a shitload of survival shows. Ed Stafford, Bear Grylls and Naked and Afraid. You never know!

And so now here I am, scribbling away in a nice new leather-bound notebook, sitting at my departure gate in Glasgow Airport. I’ve found the writing part is a lot easier now than it was when I was that spotty teenager. Probably because I’ve lived a bit, and now actually have some experiences to write about.

I’m in front of the big glass walls giving a view out on to the runway and the planes parked outside. It’s a fine July morning, clear skies of the deepest summer blue, the early sun still low enough on the horizon to make me wince. My wings sit at the end of the umbilical, a sleek white jet with a blue and yellow tailfin. I’ve got quite the jaunt ahead of me. My flight to London Gatwick takes off in thirty minutes, and from there I’m pretty much straight onto a connection to Los Angeles LAX for a six-hour layover before the final leg of the journey takes me north to Anchorage, Alaska, where I’ll meet up with my tour group at the Anchorage Armada Hotel.

On the TV up on the wall, which is tuned to one of the rolling news channels, it’s all depressingly familiar. Politicians in the UK arguing over Brexit and an underfunded and understaffed NHS. Another mass shooting in America, seventeen dead while the Democrats shout gun control and the Republicans shout second amendment. A car bomb outside a mosque in Kabul. Another Hollywood movie producer disgraced over sexual assault claims. A bad landslide in Indonesia, wiping out a town and some two thousand residents.