Zaph Mann : Writer

Excerpt #1 from Be Seeing You... a complete novel from the trilogy A Free Man

It’s Nick Caistor in Nueva Venecia, on the BBC World Service. And there is Our Man in Bogotá again with a wind-up – a battery-less short-wave radio – ‘The Beijing’ – and he’s tuning in. Nick must be there, he thinks, there in Bogotá. Nick probably came back to the capital to file the report, perhaps Nick is somewhere near. He should ask around, get in with the out crowd. It seemed like a reasonable proposition: He could do what Nick does – file audio reports back to London on the goings on in a country. It could be a dangerous business, but rewarding. Meanwhile, the news, shocking. He just hadn’t got it before, it hadn’t registered; the numbers, the gruesome details… had been abstract. He’d been clueless; the conflict had his adventure completely surrounded but he’d never noticed. For once he thought he understood how Geoffrey Pine’s world had been. Geoffrey had been a bit of a freak, a ‘stupid’ genius; but had he been unhappy? Maybe ignorance was bliss.

‘The Cienaga Grande has an unfortunate name – it means the “great swamp” – but to me it’s one of the most beautiful places on the planet.’

So opines Nick over the airwaves in his latest correspondent bulletin. It’s a unique twist, that these words have travelled from Nick Caistor’s mouth in Colombia to London and back to his ears… a kind of magic, a new appreciation of sound waves.
Nick describes news, usually horrific news, for programs like From Our Own Correspondent. The current problem area under media scrutiny is the Cienaga on Colombia’s northern coast, where, he reports, fishermen and their families had lived peacefully on salt-water lagoons for generations (I must have flown over there, Our Man realises, on my trip to Barranquilla). It’s part of Nick’s journalistic approach to set up the story for dramatic effect. ‘Nueva Venecia,’ Nick continues, ‘means New Venice, and it’s a place of beauty under the spotlight. A place of quietude and harmony, a timeless, simple place with people whose every action is as simple and effective as if it had been bred in the bone’. Nick’s doing a good job, making the place come alive so that people can relate to the news ahead.
He thinks it wouldn’t be a bad job this, observing things, or just noticing and describing things as they are, telling it to other people, anonymous people listening to radios all over the world. When the places were remote and exotic, even the basic details were of interest. The good correspondents slipped in details, like ‘it’s the rainy season; behind her the giant desert crocuses are blooming.’ He could do that.
Of course Nick Caistor’s report is going to end badly, with the dreadful news that prompted the report in the first place, but along the way he’s painting a pretty vivid picture. It’s sparking Our Man’s interest. It’s exciting – understanding what’s happening in this crazy country. It suddenly feels like a mission, a thing of substance that he could pursue there in Colombia.