Never Be Unsaid

About The Author,

Perry Gamsby is a former soldier, bodyguard, self defence instructor, salesman and ESL teacher who lives in far western Sydney with his wife and five daughters. Since his untimely death (and subsequent resuscitation, coma and rehabilitation) during experimental robotic heart surgery in 2009, the author decided to pack in his day job with a Fortune 500 company and earn his living with his words.

He holds a Doctorate in Contemporary Literature, a Master of Arts in Writing and a Diploma in Business. In addition to writing for money, he presents courses in online writing and becoming published at two major community colleges and via distance learning.

Perry Gamsby has written and published dozens of eBooks and hard copy editions of self help and How To books as well as novels and novellas.

For NaNoWriMo 2011 he completed 'Twenty Seven Seventy', which was subsequently entered in the 2012 Miles-Franklin and Prime Minister's Literary Awards. For NaNoWriMo 2012 he was attending the Singapore Writer's Festival and travelling through S.E. Asia. 50,000 of the words in this book were completed during NaNoWriMo 2013, an annual event enjoyed by over 300,000 writers worldwide.

Preface

Never Be Unsaid is a novel written for writers, about writers and writing. When I finished writing ‘Twenty Seven Seventy’ at the end of NaNoWriMo 2011, I began this novel because I still had a lot of things I wanted to get said. I’ve said them here and now I will turn my writing mind to other genre because, as well as not being able to unsay them, they don’t need to be said over and over if you say them right the first time. I hope the reader enjoys what I have to say.

Perry Gamsby,

Whalan 2013

Chapter 1 A Good Idea… At The Time

You can’t unfire a gun. There is no way to tell the bullet to turn around and go back into the gun and in just the same way, you can’t unsay something. Once it is out of your mouth, it is said. Once said, it can never be unsaid.

I once read that people will forgive you for what you do to them far more easily than what you say to them, or about them. I can’t recall the specifics but I know it included physical violence and extra-marital sex, both far more easily forgiven and even forgotten than a sentence or two. Even a phrase. Perhaps just a word.

Powerful things, words. We’ve all said a few strong ones and had them said to us in our time. If you haven’t then you don’t get out enough or you’re just not trying very hard. Have you ever had one of those situations where, too late, you think up the perfect come back? It could be an hour later, a day, a lifetime or even just a split second but timing in life, as in comedy, is everything.

Life is pretty comedic as it is, I mean think of how we get here. Our parents doing the beast with two backs thing and by the time we figure out that is what it took to make us the mere thought of our parents doing that is just too icky. My middle daughter uses icky for anything and everything she doesn’t approve of. I tend to find myself using it too, which can be embarrassing when you are trying to sell someone a fifty thousand dollar car. Funny thing though, by the time you hit the really pricey ones, say six figures and no change, icky seems an appropriate term to use. But I digress and I tend to do it a lot nowadays, digressing that is. Since everything happened, anyway.

It all began about three years ago, online. I was a member of one of those LinkedIn Groups where you can post your comments and opinions and someone else replies and if it gets too heated then a moderator will slap everybody’s wrists and make you play nice again. As it was a group for writers it tended to get opinionated pretty quickly, in fact half the reason I was there was because I had this plot idea of a writer joining such a group to get inspiration for his novel about a serial killer, but then he decides to act out the suggestions and see which ones were plausible. I never wrote the thing and by now no doubt it has been written, published, won thousands of dollars in prize money and is in treatment with some Hollywood type who pretty soon will also be in treatment but then that’s show business. Mind you, I did get to meet Scott so the whole thing wasn’t a complete waste of time and typing.

Scott Straub is, like me, a writer who paid the bills with a day job selling new cars. We both like to think we are a cut above the used guys but the truth is we are all selling hunks of steel that lose most of their value the moment the buyer drives them off the lot. The difference being, new cars lose more value quicker and used ones are unique. Despite being in New, I prefer to sell used cars because that car is the only one exactly like it in the world. New cars are all the same until someone owns them. I mean a new red Ford Fiesta manual is a new red Ford Fiesta manual, put two side by side and they are like identical twins. Give it a few months and sit the same two cars side by side out on the lot and they are two very different individuals. One has more kilometres on the clock than the other, that one has a tiny scratch and the other one has a stain on the carpet you are going to spend a month of Sundays trying to remove. See, very different beasts. Just like people.

Scott and I are both writers, although he specializes in sci-fi and some paranormal. I like to tell real life stories, always with a twist in the tail to bite you on the way out. We both write short stories and we have both written and published our first novel. But that is where the similarities end. He lived in a small town in south western Minnesota, called Marshall. Population about 15,000. He was married and has one son, a step-son, aged about 14 now, I think. I am married but I live in Whalan, a suburb in the same post code as Mount Druitt, one of far western Sydney’s more notorious ‘working class’ suburbs. I have three daughters aged 12, 13 and 15 around this time so the tight age spread made things interesting at times.

We didn’t stay long on that LinkedIn Group. Once we seemed to hit it off we started our own small group and kept it exclusive, inviting a few other writers from time to time but we never had double figure membership and we liked it like that. The group was small, intimate and things didn’t get out of hand because even though we were all pretty much like a yard full of used cars, all the clunkers got sold off to the auctions as soon as we figured out they were not the kind of car we liked to sell. So to speak.

Both Scott and I dreamed of being able to say goodbye to the car game and write for a living. The reality of life, as in mortgages, kid’s needing shoes and families getting into the habit of eating three squares a day meant that it never seemed to be doable. Then a funny thing happened. One of those ‘who would have thought it’ things that never seem quite real but they are and it did happen. We both decided we would quit selling cars and write full time, together, for a whole year. What my dad called a ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ thing. As I said at the beginning, things once said can never be unsaid and once we said this to each other, we were locked in. Blokes are like that. We could quickly realise we were on a hiding to nowhere and yet, male pride, macho ego, call it what you will, would not let us back out. That’s girlie stuff. If men behaved like that we would never have landed men on the moon or dropped the atom bomb on Japan. Twice.

This idea was different. It was our idea. I forget who exactly said it first and it really makes no difference because the way the conversation developed it was going to be said by someone, sooner or later. In fact, there is every chance neither of us actually said it, or came up with the idea. I have a sneaking suspicion it was one of the other Group members. The thread was going along the lines of ‘what if you had a year’s paid vacation to do nothing but write’ and before we knew it, we were planning how to make it happen.

I was at fault. I had read how Harper Lee was working as a clerk for an airline in New York when one of her well off literary friends gave her enough money to take a year off work and write a book.

You know she wrote ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’, then never wrote another novel I pointed out to Scott during one of our VoiP exchanges.

Why did she stop at ‘Mockingbird’? queried Scott. Such a waste of talent.

Perhaps we should have given that last bit some more thought. As in why did she stop at ‘…Mockingbird’?

I know. I think it’s a superb novel and I read it at 15 and then again at 35 and it was far better the second time around. Twenty years had done something for my taste in literature, no doubt. Such talent, never shared with the world again. Why?"

We debated that for a dozen posts each before the thread got around to doing what Lee did.

I’m talking about taking a year off and writing. Just writing. No nine to five, no eleven day fortnights I said.

Or six day weeks said Scott. He worked six days in a row but they were virtually twelve hour shifts. I did about eight and a half hours a day but only got one day off one week and two the next, mid-week. I was lucky to have a weekend free to spend with Cath and the kids once a month.

Free to write.

Free to get it said, get it done, do what we were on this earth to do.

Write. Not sell cars or push paper or answer idiotic Help Desk queries or insert whatever it is you do to pay the bills. But to write.

To create.

It was a dream, a pipe dream. Something we could only aspire to and never make it happen, surely? I mean we had commitments, mortgages, school fees, debts, bills, expenses, you name it. We had them all making demands on us, our time, our effort. We were too busy paying bills and affording the life we lived to really live one. At least to live the life we wanted to live. We wanted to be writers, not wage slaves.

We would be selfish if we indulged ourselves like that, surely? We have people who depend on us.

I know, agreed Scott. But what if…?

Yeah, what if…?

Scott’s wife Denise worked but Cath, my wife, was still trying to find a new job after playing stay at home mum until the youngest hit high school. Getting back into the workforce was proving a challenge for her to say the least but she eventually found one. Back then we had one income and a mortgage, a block of land in the country to pay off and a top of the line treadmill on a plan that would have us owning it about the time we lost so much weight using it we disappeared up our own colons.

Scott was worse off, even though Denise worked part time at the local major employer in town they had American size debts.

We got the lot, the whole nine yards, the full enchilada. I mean we have a mortgage, car payments and fifty three credit cards or whatever it is you have to have to qualify as god fearin’ law abiding citizen consumers.

Mate, we’re not much better off. If we don’t keep selling cars we’re screwed, not to put too fine a point on it.

We talked about the practical aspects at length, sharing pretty intimate details of our personal financial situations as we tried to brainstorm the problem and come up with something workable.

Scott said, we need something. Something that would let us, if nothing else, make this dream happen.

Or reach a point where we can live with our disappointment and let the dream die while hanging on to the last shred of our dignity and artistic identity. Given we are authors that should be authortistic identity.

I don’t know about Aussie English but there’s no such word in the American variety. Maybe we could borrow autistic?

I politely declined but then had a brainwave. What if we could claim some kind of disability payment and work our expenses to suit?

The USA is a very different animal to Australia, in many ways, but especially when it comes to social welfare. Suffice to say there was very little Scott could obtain, even though he had this old fashioned work ethic thing that went out with Nixon and hasn’t kept up with the harsh fiscal reality of his country and the plunge into Global Financial Crises that came along around about this time. Which is what made it all possible, funnily enough.

They say that as one door closes, another opens. Well, we had the door fly open while the vehicle was in motion. What fell out of the open door was life as we knew it, or at least as Scott knew it. It wasn’t just one thing though. I mean it never is, is it? It was a series of little things, much like what causes all those plane crashes you see on Discovery Channel nowadays. One little event by itself means nothing. Two hardly get noticed but when several things start to occur, one after the other and some at the same time, that is when you get LCMs, or Life Changing Moments. The GFC was just one of those. By itself the outcome would have been inconsequential, at least for Scott and myself and by extension, our families, friends and colleagues. As it was, the GFC kicked off a chain of events that would lead to Denise falling in love and leaving Scott for another woman. His step-son decided he preferred to live with his mother and Scott’s boss lost the dealership, his wife Debbie and his life. Honest John shot himself and would have shot his wife only she had already left him and was, at the moment he did a Hemingway with the 12 gauge in the study, professing her profound same sex love for Denise.

You see, Greg, the GFC makes selling cars in a small town problematic and it’s shut up dealerships across the nation. While the manufacturers got tax payer dollars to bail them out as they were too big to fail, not so the dealerships. They are too small to have any clout and so they are expendable. They call it rationalizing and downsizing the dealer network, streamlining. Scott was telling me how it really was for average Americans in those heady days of crashing stock markets and massive public money bailouts. People can drive a bit further for their brand new gas guzzling V8 and they know sales will be down anyway, so this way at least they aren’t so exposed on their floor plan.

Or whatever excuse made sense in Dearborn that day. That was the day Scott’s boss, we’ll call him Honest John Johnson, learned there was no point arranging the dealership’s 30th Anniversary Sale for the following month. They were shutting up after twenty nine years, eleven months and four days of operations. They had been making money but with no credit and a ton of steel owing money every few square yards of floor it was time to close the doors and cut their losses.

Honest John Johnson took it hard, as you might expect. He had inherited the business from his pappy and he had made the gutsy decision to include those little Korean things on the line up alongside the big Amurricun metal most of the farmers around Marshall bought. The college students from SWMSU ate them Kimchee-mobiles up. Now that was all finished, done with, over. And out. So Honest John went home and told his wife, Debbie, the news. Bad news of course. Debbie took it like a trooper. She trooped upstairs, packed a bag and said she was leaving him. For Denise. The wife of one of his salesmen. Denise Straub. Scott’s wife. How long? A long time. Years. Yes, you never knew, never suspected a thing, ever wonder why? She was gone. Called Denise on her cell phone as she drove off in her little Korean econobox and met her at their usual motel fifteen minutes later. It would have been five but she stopped off at the package store on the way for a six pack of Corona. Denise liked Corona. So did Debbie. Something about the bottle, Scott said.

I found all of this out later that night, or rather first thing in the morning for me. Scott was in shock, as you can imagine.

It’s still early days. All any of us have been told is the dealership is closing down and would be locked up by the end of the month, so finish off any loose deals, deliver what you can and anything you’re waiting for will be handed over to Schummann’s in Lyon. He sounded lost, disoriented. Not the Scott I had known over the cyber waves for a few years now.

They said we will all get our pay and severance but benefits will stop within a month. This is America; no job means no health insurance. No health insurance means you are one surgical procedure away from bankruptcy.

Scott went home to find Denise already knew what had happened and she was going to meet Debbie now. To talk about this? Debbie, the bosses’ wife? Yes, that Debbie but no, to have sex. Huh? Then Denise gave Scott the Reader’s Digest version of something that had been going on for years and finally they figured they weren’t getting any younger so they were taking this as a catalyst and making the break.

She just walked out the door, small weekender suitcase following behind like a faithful puppy, even tripping over its own wheels on the carpet. I said nothing, what was there to say to that?

He told me how he’d sat at the dining table and read the note Denise had penned just in case she was already gone when he got home. Stephen, their son, was staying with his best friend and he had said he would prefer to live with her, or his gran, nothing personal but you’re such a crap cook and can’t get the coloured and the whites separate to save a life and anyway, you’re his step father after all, even if he has never known the deadbeat who made him, so don’t take it too hard.

Scott didn’t take it too hard at all, given he thought the little shit was perhaps the soppiest kid he had ever had the misfortune to be legally responsible for and since there had only ever been the one, that said something. He decided to make the most of it and got online to me, sucked on a few Corona’s of his own and said a few things he could only say to his best friend. A best friend he had never met face to face, yet we were closer than many who had. We had shared thousands of hours online and via Skype. We knew the other like a brother and without the sibling rivalry. I didn’t have any Corona and besides, I rarely drink beer at six am on a work day so I had a coffee and commiserated. Until we got to the part about how he was free now.

Free? I asked.

Yes, free. I can sell the house, or leave it with Denise and let her worry about the mortgage. I’ve got some savings Denise has no idea exists, let alone any way to get her carpet munching mitts on. I’ll be paid off at the end of the month and be free to do whatever I want to do. To write.

Lucky bastard! I wish my wife would run off with her lesbian lover and take the kids and cover the mortgage and leave me free to write.

Really?

No, just trying to be supportive. Still, it would be magic to be able to live the dream. Go for it, Scott, I said. Go for it old son. And he did.

Chapter 2 The Sleepover

I guess I decided to go and visit Greg in Australia right about the time my boss used his shotgun to resolve his personal issues. It certainly was to have a similar impact on my life and several others, albeit not in such a lethal manner. The thing about shotguns is that they don’t take sides and they don’t take anything personally. They are, for the most part, inanimate objects until such time as someone animates them. At that moment they have phenomenal explosive force and can change lives as quickly as they can end them.

I was pretty sick and tired of selling new cars in Marshall anyway. I used to sell the same brand in Las Vegas, only then I was on the graveyard shift, from 11pm to 8am with time off around 3am for a meal break. We called it our lunch break but it wasn’t really lunch. It wasn’t dinner or breakfast either, it was pretty much the kind of meal break you have at three in the morning. It played havoc with my colon and everyone else’s except the two guys who were always drunk by that time of the shift and only sold any cars at all because they had worked the motor trade in Vegas for thirty years or more. They had connections and by that, I mean they were connected, if you get my drift.

I had a hard time making weight simply because I have this inbuilt aversion to taking some drunken lucky gambler’s money for a car they wouldn’t dream of buying if they were sober and hadn’t just had the only lucky streak of their otherwise pathetically losing lives. Pretty dumb when you think it through. If I didn’t get the sale, some other schmuck on the strip would. Be real; anyone who buys a forty thousand dollar sports convertible at four am, with cash or by signing over the check from the casino to us… well it’s not my job to save them from themselves. I got on with the job but I never felt right about it.

I landed in Vegas after I left the Navy. I had spent the best part of a decade sailing nowhere, I mean I never went anywhere other than one Naval Air Station after another and I never got duty on a carrier. The only time I set foot on a ship was an open day in San Diego when I was on my way to a weekend in TJ from Miramar. I spent my entire career counting flight suits and parachutes and never used either of them. I was a storeman, a bean counter but I had the uniform and the service ribbons and knew how to walk that cocky, just got in port after a month at sea kind of walk and besides, I get seasick on a wet lawn.

I had sailed before, on a lake at home in Minnesota. That made me a bit queasy but when I tried a lap around Puget Sound while stationed at Whidbey Island I knew I should have joined the Army. Even watching the machine do my laundry was a hit or miss affair, those watery suds slopping up against the window of the front loader, it was enough to make me remember my last meal.

So when my discharge came due I decided to try my luck inland a little, maybe the desert. Look after a ranch for a while like Louis L’Amour did between stints in the Merchant Navy back in the 1920s and 30s. I love L’Amour, even though I’m more into Heinlein, Bradbury or Dick when it comes to my writing. I like science fiction that has a social conscience, but I don’t mind a good western now and then. The great thing about a Louis L’Amour was that you knew the hero would get the ranch, the girl and defeat his enemy by the last page and that was comforting. Even knowing how it would end, every time, L’Amour’s brilliance as a writer, a story teller, was that you enjoyed the journey. It wasn’t about the destination at all. It really was all about what happened along the way.

Which is kind of analogous to my story and what happened to me and my Aussie buddy, Greg. Or mate, Aussies have mates, not buddies. You’d think I would remember given how long I have lived in Australia now, which is a long way from Las Vegas and even further away from Marshall, Minnesota. I got to Minnesota because I tired of the graveyard shift at Vegas Prestige after about two years. Even counting ‘Boards, Map, Thigh Strap Equipped’, for a Navy stocktake was more fulfilling, especially when you were two down and eventually found them tossed casually behind the ‘Boards, Ironing, Legs Collapsible’.

I chose Marshall for the simple reason I came from there and so did my wife. I met Denise one morning when I was having my meal break, or 3am lunch. She had just started working in the diner across from the dealership and I used to watch her with the binoculars the sales manager kept in his desk. The diner was lit up and completely glass fronted. Even at that time of the morning there would be quite a few customers but I managed, over a few visits, to make sure she always gave me a little extra attention when pouring my coffee or serving my food, clearing the table or giving me the check.

Do I know you? I know that is probably as lame as ‘do you come here often?’ but it was an honest question. Denise I added after staring at her name tag. I was also staring at her left breast but that just happened to be where her name tag was pinned. The other breast had ‘Lucy’s Diner’ embroidered on it so I knew what that one was called.

Does that work for you often? she replied, not looking at me