Vehicle: a verse novel

By Jen Calleja

In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets.
One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers.
Compiled from the Researchers' disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prototype Publishing
• Release date: Oct 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913513337

Jen Calleja

Jen Calleja is a poet, writer and essayist who has been widely published, including in The White Review, The London Magazine, and Best British Short Stories (Salt). She was awarded an Authors’ Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors to work on Vehicle, and was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize for an excerpt from the novel. She has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize as a literary translator from German into English and was the inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library. Jen is co-founding editor of Praspar Press and played and toured in the DIY punk bands Sauna Youth, Feature, Monotony, Gold Foil and Mind Jail.

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Jen Calleja is a poet, short story writer and essayist who has been widely published, including in The White Review, The London Magazine and Best British Short Stories (Salt). Her short story collection I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For was published by Prototype in 2020.

She was awarded an Authors’ Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors to work on Vehicle and was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize for an excerpt from the novel. She was also longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experimentation in Text.

She has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize as a literary translator from German into English and was the inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library.

Calleja played and toured in the DIY punk bands Sauna Youth, Feature, Monotony, Gold Foil and Mind Jail, spanning a period of over a decade as both a drummer and a vocalist.

She is co-founding editor of Praspar Press, an independent publisher of Maltese literature translated into English and originally written in English.

Vehicle: a verse novel

Jen Calleja

For Peter, Kat, Henry, David and Emmanuella

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Vehicle

List of Central Players

Vehicle

Glossary of Terms

Timeline

She and I could sit and recite passages to each other as if it were a play, so if the text is [ever] lost, we can get together and reconstruct it.

Hilary Mantel on her and Clare Boylan’s love of Good Behaviour by Molly Keane, Speaking Volumes, BBC (1990)

The countryside is beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it. Thatched roofs on the houses. Snow everywhere, the sky is so blue. I’m 22 years old today.

Henry Rollins, Get in the Van

List of Central Players

The Researchers

a group of desperate academics

Hester Heller

musiker / student at the Institute for Transmission / translator

Boyd Breakwell

student at the Institute for Transmission / journalist

Fraiveru Alma

musiker / author of A Refugee’s Diary

Sandringham ‘Sandy’ Heller

ex-diplomat / father of Hester Heller / translator

Cicilia Hershy

Boyd Breakwell’s research assistant / forensic archivist

Franżiżko ‘Franżi’ Alma

a triole of The Islets / father of Fraiveru Alma

Charles Mirr

professor at the Institute for Transmission

Vehicle

a musik band

Runaway Cart / Getaway Car

a musik band

Johannes Cubic

a cult musiker / ex-husband of Hester Heller

Maxi Undankbar

editor of musikarchiv magazine

Rita X

curator of the exhibition Vote For Me Not To Be PM

HMS Tradition, ship’s log, May 2000

… a quake was felt off the coast … flotsam and jetsam … what’s this nonsense daubed on that floating wooden door … a caramel-coloured cat casually swam up to us but we were seemingly miles from anywhere … captain, when I look starboard, I see a shimmer like an oil spill, and a flicker of green … two nights back I heard a huge quantity of creaking bouncing off the ocean … ash, sparks, heat came on the wind … delays due to unforeseen flux in pressure …

Nationwide Telegram, July 2000

Earlier today, a foreign messenger entered parliament to hand deliver word of a remote disaster, and, as protocol dictates, they were shot on sight. We are in danger. The Nation is now on high alert. Do not accept telegrams from unverified sources; return to sender. Do not look out to sea, do not look into the sky. Unless it is completely necessary, do not look out of the window …

THE RESEARCHERS NEED TO GET THE ART OUT OF THERE

It felt like a trap. But feeling trapped is also a feeling, a certain regard. It is a coming in from a bitingly cold disdain. The open call was in many respects an amnesty. The volume got turned up on reflective, critical and morose practices, anyone not living in reality, now, considered filth or froth. They say that banning the past will make everyone happier. Historians and their kin have been underground for a long time, giving lectures in basements, rehearsing theories in the mirror, telling stories in small groups, among fellow delvers and miners.

The Library Research Residency, the chance to reside and read at the Central Library during autumn 2050, is the first sniff of credit and cash in years. We, the ‘first cohort’, have been put up in private quarters above the Central Library, each with our own room, a communal space, a stipend. None of us dares speak of our research. We fear everyone else is a spy, or, worse, someone from our own field. There might be fruitful overlap, but then, what if there were fruitful overlap! Nobody wants that, a dilution of the unique niche we have crafted; collaboration is in any case in violation of our residency agreement. Collaboration is a sign of weakness, a mark of a lack of confidence, according to the Solo Manifesto distributed by the government years ago. This could be a vehicle to long-term funding, a permanent position; maybe we are all in competition. We isolate ourselves, like the Bordering when the Nation left the Mainland; wall ourselves off, present our vague, mythological, aloof selves.

We are all under pressure. There are only three months to complete our self-initiated projects. Typically, three of us will be in the archives, three shut in our rooms, three in the living space, two in the bath. Two months left. Every other night we have parties, we are the only people in the whole austere building after seven. Dinner parties, dance parties. We are sealed in, no guests permitted. The stress of work and the tension in the place creates eruptions, outbursts, floods of emotion break their banks, outbreaks of exhaustion. We are strangers shipwrecked on a desert island, one with an endless supply of food, booze, zigarettes and powders. One of the librarians is a certified tablet dealer with a satisfying cataloguing system; their case is a pixelated work of art. Check out docs and books, check out a dose to focus, a vial to relax, a tablet to make you float a foot above the ground, a lollipop to make you sink down into the floor or the pages of the book you are reading, the lines bobbing just underneath your nose. Everyone is constantly wearing something off, something as toxic as concepts.

In the early mornings there is the open and close and open and close and open and close of sneaking back to one’s own room or slipping into someone else’s after everyone has gone to bed. It is good to forget one’s brain. One’s identity. Translate into something abstract, only touch, not thought. In these moments of presence, of timelessness, we feel ashamed to see why the government is pushing letting go of the past, of who we thought we were, and just existing. By the second month this clandestine behaviour seems ridiculous. There are plaited limbs on sofas with a shared bowl of cereal, compression in the stairwell down to the Library, no shirts in the kitchen before carrying two or three coffees back to rooms, a hoarse cheer goes up from within as the door clicks shut.

We fantasise about the figures and places we dedicate our lives to. It makes us euphoric, melancholic. We write little stories about them. Sometimes we are in them. We daydream, but we will never meet them, be them, be there. They would understand us, they would really understand us.

There are vague hints dropped late at night. I’m looking at:       subcultural       the depiction       a survey       a study       the construction       the dynamics.

One month left. Yolanda finds a graffito in their bathroom, scratched into a tile by the bath: too good to be. Work is frenzied, sleep has left the building. The abundant lunches and nourishing dinners left on the long dining room table by invisible hands become smaller, oilier, saltier. Bottles breed. No one can claim whole bags of tablets and powders.

It is our final week. Most of us are in our pyjamas, unwashed, greasy, stinking at four in the afternoon. There are papers, books, files everywhere. Lidless pens, blunt pencils, indecipherable notes. No one dares ask how things are going. In a few days we will be giving a presentation to the funders and the public of our findings, read from our drafted manuscripts furiously typed on the Library machines in our private basement study with its own coffee maker and complimentary snack display.

The phone rings: Yuri overheard a Library assistant asking off-handedly if those artholes’ desks would still be cleared out at 5 a.m., and their supervisor put a finger to their lips. You better get down here, Yuri says, I don’t think this is good. Someone else is trying to get through on the line. Call me back! Yuri hisses. The door slams in the meantime, it is Wanda. It’s all gone. My writing, my scans, the arting Library system deleted everything.

Get out, now, the voice on the phone says. You need to grab everything and go!

Who is this?

I can’t tell you who I am, they will take everything you found for them.

Who are you? What are you talking about?

We were all researching, all the same thing, then they took everything, they have a list of histories and peoples they want wiped from the archives, and they draw researchers in to find every scrap. You need to leave!

But this is the first residency, isn’t it?

There have been dozens! You were all targeted specifically, they know researchers never share opportunities or confer … I need to go, someone’s coming, grab what you can and get out of there, they’ll probably come first thing tomorrow, or tonight, you can’t be sure.

The residency phone can only make calls within the Library, or receive calls from somewhere in the building. Are you a librarian? A visitor?

They are gone. It was like getting word of the imminent assassination of all our dear departed subjects.

Yuri? Yuri? We’re coming down! What were we going to do? Stefan had been seeing someone called Coy who drove a school bus for a living before this. There is no access to a telegrammer in the living quarters, only in the Library, and our accounts are blocked for the duration of the residency. Coy worked in a bar near their flat about a mile away. Stefan ran out the door shouting, meet me downstairs, out front in half an hour! Please get as much from my room as you can!

While most of us went to the Library to get what we could, the others got drawers and bin bags and scooped everything into the dark. Down in the Library, we checked the systems in vain: every word and image, gone. A moment to mourn, before grabbing armfuls of loose paper, bent-back books. The librarians were alarmed, alerted. They ran over, tried to grab our notebooks, our crumbled waste. We started running, throwing everything down the stairs, between the bannisters, kicking folders, throwing heavy directories at the panicking librarians.

When we got to the foyer, a few of us had barely anything at all. Stefan pulled up outside in a navy blue van with white writing on it and a crest bearing an open book, then jumped out to help. Bin bags came flying from the penthouse windows, bursting onto the road. We chucked everything into the van, paper crushed in our fists, stuffed up our jumpers and down our trousers. We pushed off the security guards, Hiromi throwing a punch that was caught by a guard trying to take Shaz’s rucksack. They wanted the paperwork, not us. We pulled away, watching them throw buckets of water over the transcripts, print-outs, letters left to die on the pavement.

Once in the van, Ffion, driving fast, turns their head slightly and shouts for abstracts from everyone. No interruptions!

MOSES is researching the former Institute for Transmission, a school used to train government agents of the future, including former key students Hester Heller and Boyd Breakwell.

YURI is researching Hester Heller, the translator of International Prize-winning Isletese author Fraiveru Alma.

HIROMI is researching the Isletese territories and terrains, specialising in the Isletese Situation and the Isletese Disaster.

STEFAN is researching popular journalist Boyd Breakwell.

WANDA is researching musik in the Nation and On-The-Mainland, including Hester Heller’s band Vehicle.

GRAHAM is researching for a comparative study of the translation and retranslation of Fraiveru Alma’s A Refugee’s Diary by Sandringham Heller and Hester Heller.

YOLANDA is researching A Brief History of The Islets (unpublished) by Sandringham Heller and his rejected letters to the Isletese triole Franżiżko Alma.

BENJAMIN is researching public art created around the Isletese Situation and Disaster.

FFION is researching the life and work of the poet Cicilia Hershy, who started her career as a research assistant to Boyd Breakwell.

SHAZ is researching National–Isletese Relations, particularly during the Isletese Situation and Disaster.

ARMANDAR is researching National customs and rituals.

We head north out of the city. Someone puts Vehicle’s album Fast Lane on in the van. The sound of feedback comes in and everyone empties their pockets and hoods, holds up scraps of notes, counts boxes, frozen by a bombardment of memorised fragments. A drumroll comes in. Everyone starts talking at once.

IT’S DAY EIGHT OF THE RESEARCHERS’ EXILE TOUR AND, WHILE DRINKING IN A RURAL PUB, YOLANDA IS DARED TO RECALL EVERY ISLET

THE ISLETS: A roving clutch of small islands of no fixed location. One of the Three Soughtafters: rare and prized locations that offer advantages – legend has it that should a world power attain all three simultaneously, they would hold ultimate sway, though the other two are deserted and in ruin. Official language: Isletese, and dialects thereof. The Isletese language is thought to be a Scandi-German dialect of a Greek-Arabic dialect, formed over hundreds of years of settler contact, with each Islet speaking contemporary Isletese majeure alongside a range of other languages and hybrid tongues. The Islets are comprised of numerous small islands of diverse appearance and climate.

DUTCH EILANDJE: Red brick smokeries are scattered around this Islet. One whole village on the Islet bakes a special kind of stroopwafel or syrup waffle that was once shipped over for the enjoyment of the elite classes in the Netherlands. This Islet was also partnered with the city of Paris for a stretch of time lasting over a hundred years, and they have an annual festival celebrating their twinning.

NATIONAL ISLET: Once named Salford Island. This Islet was selected by the Nation for its climate, which is the complete opposite of that found in the Nation, and for many years it was a very popular holiday destination. Curiously, the houses are almost identical to those you would find in the Nation, and famously get too hot. This Islet received National terrestrial television until the 1970s. The study of National was popular here until the late nineteenth century. The second university is based here.

PEA ISLET: A very small Islet, uninhabited, which has been used for residencies for international writers. It contains a small writing shed and sleeping quarters and nothing much else. Writers-in-Residence have included Greta Jarvis, Lionel D. Dilbert, Siri Sil and Marm.

ISLET ITALIA: A group of six families lives on this island. The Isletese and Italian cuisine have fused, so you might find a lasagne layered with fettle weed, or gnocchi made from the large, knobbly wixke variety of potato. The families (the Amissos, the Bêts, the Creefis, the Duuqs, the Eiolis, the Fiws) have all lived here both harmoniously and unharmoniously for many years.

DEUTSCHE INSELCHEN: A stunning Islet known for its coffee production and sunsets. Infamously sided with the Lithuanians during the Treble War and sheltered many soldiers and sailors during their respite months. There was one pathetic opposition meeting and a weak rally on the Islet. The Lithuanian Prime Minister almost visited to assess the usefulness of the spot, but ultimately disregarded its people for their ‘complicated’ heritage. There were rumours turned myth that she came here in exile.

ISLET ESPAÑOLA: A central fishing industry was housed on this Islet. The glass-roofed factories and houses are indistinguishable from one another, and every man, woman, and child works towards the fishing, gutting and packing of seafood.

ISLAND PORTUGUESA: A long trajectory of The Islets passes around Portugal, so this Islet flourishes seasonally. The Spanish famously rushed across the border to catch it as it went around the coast during the mid-to-late sixteenth century, settling on it for a hundred years.

ÎLE FRANÇAISE: The greatest cultural influx was the modes of dress from France. Other Isletese came to the Islet to visit the Library, built here by the French. The Islet was used primarily to encourage a certain species of chicken to flourish. They were everywhere for decades. Then one day the French came and took them all, bar a couple of dozen to distribute in the French countryside.

SPIT ISLET: A small, long, thin Islet, also called ‘thread’, ‘vein’, ‘lick’, ‘scratch’ and ‘the comet tail’ due to its appearance and relational distance to the small, round Deutsche Inselchen. It is frequently used for feasts and parties by all the Islets. Only three groundskeepers live here – each the apprentice to another. There is always an elder who trains the middler, a middler who trains the younger, and the younger who retrains the elder.

DISH ISLET: A skerry. So called because it has a peculiar lip around its edge. Also called ‘the pom-pom’ and ‘nap Islet’, it is a small, bushy scrap of land that is the perfect spot for snoozing away the whole afternoon. You simply raise an orange and red flag to signal that it is occupied. It is blanketed with springy, dark green moss and its lip prevents people rolling off it in their sleep. Many couples have been caught off guard here frolicking at night – and sometimes during the day. The spot was spoiled by tourists and constantly occupied before The Islets turned away from the world.

MAIN LAND ISLET, f.k.a America Islet: Three fat sausages of islands joined at one end like a chubby pronged fork, was how America Islet was described by one president. The Amainlandians came to save the Islet when it had gone slightly off course and suffered an attempted invasion by Denmark, and they stayed on afterwards. One ‘sausage’ was for holiday homes, one for a casino, the other for industrial production testing. The first Isletese skyscraper was built here.

CORPSELET: An Islet used solely for battles, either in Isletese civil war (conducted by Isletese people from different Islets, or by settlers under the name of the Islet they reside on) or used by other countries as a hired space to act out their problems to their conclusion. It went on to become a site for scientific experiments.

SCANDILETS or NORVEGE ØYA, DANE OYA and SWEDISLETS: A constellation of twenty-six closely grouped skjærgård, or skerries, originally gifted to Greenland hundreds of years ago at the height of the Isletese–Greenland friendship founded on the migration of walruses back and forth from the two nations. The walruses were killed off in just a handful of years after the invasion.

INSEL-BELGE: This Belgian-settled Islet contained a city of breweries. They eventually gave the Islet to Germany for a few years before it was turned into a museum of remembrance for Isletese lost to war, enslavement and murder. The grounds house a park and a few homes on the outskirts.

INSEL SVIZZERA: Also known as ‘Swiss Cheese Wafer’ (a popular snack invented on Insel Svizzera) due to the many bodies of water that interrupt its landmass. These include four lakes collectively called ‘the Moons’ and smaller distinct pools and ponds, each with their own name – even the tiniest puddle has one. A diplomat was sent to reside on this Islet and stayed for twenty years. He kept a large staff of Isletese in involuntary servitude. When his youngest child, born and raised on the Islet, fell in love with one of the family’s servants, they packed up and left within three days.

CLIFFLETS: Chunks and hulks of cliff that are repelled and attracted by The Islets. Drifting cliff faces forming a