FISH GOD

Magic happens, but then again, so does sh*t.

 

A novel by Mick Devine

 

Nora is on the dirty side of 50 and has the language to prove it. Hardly surprising given the two talking tattoos on her backside - one an etching of her hopelessly romantic teenaged self, the idiot girl with the idiot poem about her God-like private parts, the other a portrait of the relentlessly sensible woman she later became. Fish God Nora? What were you thinking? Totally inappropriate. But not totally impossible. Listen Nora, you can either Tourette-a-tut-tut the morning away or you can do that which you were born to do... and  perform a  f*cking miracle. You’ve got an hour or the boy dies.  

 

Download from Amazon for US$9.99

 

 

Mick Devine

 

My glittering career began in late 1971 when I was a student at St Martin’s Art School in London’s West End. It was, according to Joni Mitchell’s hit song of that year, ‘coming on Christmas’. One of the tutors walked in and offered me the opportunity of a lifetime: a holiday job in the PR department of the biggest theatre in London. To be honest, I’d been expecting early success, I was dazzlingly talented and they’d seemed little point in hiding that light beneath a bushel. I grabbed my fur coat, draped a floral scarf round my neck, planted the fedora and marched down Charing Cross Road to present my credentials at the stage door. ‘Hello, I am Mick Devine. I am an artist.’                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             By the time dusk had settled over Soho I was sitting in a tiny, unheated, only partially lit room at the top of The Palace Theatre adding, first glue, then glitter, lots of the stuff, sparkly silver, red and gold dust, to a pile of shop-bought Christmas cards. The Jesus Christ Superstar neon sign blinked on and off outside my window to remind me, repeatedly and in colour, that I wasn't the Messiah, I just had a wire loose.                                                                                                                                                                                                        

I know now that buggered synapses are not necessarily a handicap, in fact, in the art game, it's what people pay to see: it makes them feel better about the tangled mess inside their own heads. So I wrote a book.  The star turn in my novel Fish God is a cuttlefish and cuttlefish have a layer of cells under their skins called iridophores, enabling them to glow like butterflies' wings: they sparkle much more pleasingly than cheap Christmas cards. Miraculously so. And though Fish Gods only live for two years, they enjoy the sort of glittering careers we mere mortals only dream of.  

 

However, if you really can't stand swearing you won't like Nora, the heroine of Fish God, so please look away now.