Maeve: Hi, I’m Maeve Marsden and you’re listening to Queerstories. This week Kerry Bashford started his queer career as a baby activist, organising rallies at the age of 18 in 1982, before escaping south to the big smoke. After several years of apprenticeship in gay, street and independent presses and countless queer arts endeavours, he scored a job at NineMSN where he worked as Producer of Online Portal and Entertainment and ended up as movie critic for the network. He ended his corporate career and became a copywriter, buying an apartment near the beach back in Newcastle where he lives as a semi-retired journalist, which is a polite way of describing an unemployed writer of a certain age.
Kerry: One evening a few years ago I was at home bored and started googling my own name. I’m not ashamed to admit this as sometimes I like to know what exactly I’m up to. But what I found shocked me and led me to perhaps the most surreal moment in my life.
I discovered that years earlier, I had become a character in a novel, that a person called Kerry Bashford inhabited a novel called Cedilla by a British author called Adam Mars-Jones. Now I am not narcissistic enough to assume that a character bearing my name must have been based on myself. But it wasn’t my name that suggested such a liberty, but the name of the author: Adam Mars-Jones. You see, the writer had in fact been my first love, or at least my first boyfriend. We had dated in London decades before. Not only that, but the fictional character he had created for me bore several real-life similarities that would have been difficult to deny.
Now to give context, I need to tell you a bit about the book. Cedilla follows the life of a man who, after a childhood of rheumatoid arthritis, was largely wheelchair bound, although my character had no such encumbrances, apart from entering the story rather late. As flattering as it is to have a character named after you, I do wonder why it was almost 600 pages before I showed up. That shit is just insulting.
But allow me to quote from page 595 from a chapter called ‘Adjusting my bow tie’, where I first make my appearance as a literary figure.
QUOTE
“The public bar of the Cambridge Arms had the advantage, from my point of view, of an outstandingly friendly and cooperative Australian barman. He was called Kerry Bashford, and after a while we evolved a routine. I would park outside … and Kerry would come out and help me get into the wheelchair, after lifting it out of the boot of the car. He lifted the chair one-handed, swinging it in an effortless arc. He was quite unselfconscious about his strength and the grace it produced. I liked the fact that he didn’t suddenly freeze up with the realisation that he could do such a lot with his body that I couldn’t …
Kerry always insisted on fitting the wheelchair with its footplates. I didn’t usually bother asking people to do this — say what you like about ankylosed joints, but at least they don’t need support. There was something motherly about Kerry’s attention to detail in this, as if he wanted me to be turned out at my best, the equivalent in wheelchair terms of adjusting my bow tie.”
UNQUOTE
Now I must say I rather like this characterisation. My namesake manages to demonstrate both strength and sensitivity, be both matey and maternal, even in the same gesture, and manages to present as both butch and balletic in the same moment. If I have ever achieved either state, it has certainly not been at the same time.
But the reason I like this character is because I know this man. There is something authentically Australian about this depiction: it’s mateship at its least toxic. He is the ‘too easy’ man, the ‘no worries’ guy, the strong shoulder, the helping hand, an image I admire, even if it may only exist in beer commercials.
As I said I know this man. It just isn’t me. I am not the ‘too easy’ guy. Believe me, there is no situation I cannot complicate. The depiction did get one thing right. I was a barman when we first met, working in a tavern in Knightsbridge. Far from being friendly and cooperative. I was in fact introverted and incompetent, but I never served the author a drink in a commercial establishment, so how was he to know?
Mr Mars-Jones continues with his fictional appraisal of my character, with a description and detail drawn once again from real life.
On page 596, he declares …
QUOTE
“Kerry was a Jehovah’s Witness from Newcastle, New South Wales. My first time Jehovah’s Witness, though he’d more or less grown out of that strange faith. He had fair skin and a big broad face, with a scrawny beard more or less holding the whole unstable gestalt together. He told me of a time when he’d gone to an open-air pop concert back home and been so sunburned he went a sort of purple. To finance his European adventure he had worked on a gang repairing railway track.”
UNQUOTE
Now at this stage I really must set the record straight. Whether they are liberties, lies or the result of lost memory, there are details here that I need to challenge.
Firstly, I have never been a Jehovah’s Witness. I was brought up Seventh Day Adventist. You could at least get my cult of origin correct. But the author is correct in other ways. I did come from Newcastle, and in fact came from there tonight. And I did once get so sunburned at a musical festival, I returned home purple. In fact that happened not so far from here at the Narara festival, not to be confused with the Narara suburb which lay on the other side of town. And I did raise my trip to London by working on the railway, just not by laying track. I was a storeman at the Eveleigh workshops, but I agree, my fictional career sounds more suited to the character and a lot more exciting.
I do have to object to his physical description of me. I don’t believe I have an unusually broad face and though my beard may get scruffy, it has never been scrawny. And I can assure you my gestalt has never been unstable (whatever the fuck that might mean).
But hold on. It gets worse …
QUOTE
“Kerry would always be reading Howards End out of sight behind the bar, but he wasn’t exactly spoiling for literary chat. If I asked whether he was enjoying the book, he’d just say, ‘Bloke can write,’ sometimes with neutral appreciation, sometimes dogmatically. Once he even struck the closed book lightly with his fist, but the verdict was always the same. Bloke can write. He wouldn’t be coaxed into detail. He’d said all he had to say.”
Now it is here that I must object most emphatically. While it is true that when I met when I met Mr Jones, pardon Mr Mars-Jones, I was as yet undeveloped in the art of conversation, lacking in the discursive abilities and not yet to attain the critical skills on display tonight. But I could never imagine as asinine a comment come out of my mouth. “Bloke can write.” What kind of patronising colonial clap trap is that?
Despite these quibbles, I rather like this appraisal of my person. Elevated to fictional status I find myself immensely likeable, uncannily sensitive, instinctively helpful and an all-round nice ‘bloke’. (Fuck me, he’s got me saying it now).
But the question remains: why did the author write me, a real-life person, into his book, some 30 years after we had met, and share personal details from my life? Surely, he would not be short on ideas, or names, or Australian stereotypes? And why did he go as far as using my name? Was he trying to get my attention?
The answer to this may not be in this book but in another, called Boy Meets Boy, edited by Laurence Schimel which contains a story I wrote called ‘A Little Past London’ in the late ‘80s, only a few years after we met. There I detailed the tale of a young Australian lad who had travelled to London, only to meet an upper-class and well-educated writer.
As you can imagine, this story was based on my relationship with Adam Mars-Jones, a detail I am only admitting today on this stage, but surely one that would not have passed the attention of the author turned character. But I have no proof that he has ever read that story. Perhaps he was just looking for a barman and his mind wandered back to that summer in 1984 when he crossed paths with a bearded and broad faced Australian called Kerry Bashford.
It made me think that maybe this was an attempt at some kind of literary conversation he was instigating, flattering as he is a far more accomplished writer than I. So if that is what happened and his story was a reply to mine, well I guess what you have heard tonight is the next instalment in a continuing conversation that has spanned decades and countries.
So Adam, it’s your turn now. I eagerly await your reply. But be aware, I am much better in the practice of discourse and critique than I was as a shy and unsure young man.
Because rest assured, “bloke can write”.
Maeve: Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to check out Queerstories on Patreon where you can support the project for as little as $1 per month. Follow Queerstories on Facebook for news and event updates and follow me, Maeve Marsden on Twitter and Instagram.
