MICHAEL Morrison arrived in the original first line of The Choreography of Ghosts with a clumsy attempt to evict a moth from his room in a Bradford block of flats.
That scene survived in the first chapter for the first three or four drafts, before being moved back to somewhere near the halfway point of the story and eventually settling in chapter four, which pitches together a sequence of events leading him to make the decision to leave his hometown for a new life in Italy.
I found this one of the most difficult chapters to write and it underwent several amalgamations with other scenes and the culling of a thousand words before reaching its current state.
The moth survived. Well, it didn’t, but the scene containing it did, and despite, on the surface, seeming to be a somewhat innocuous event, it collides with a number of other incidents and proves to be the tipping point that informs Morrison’s life-changing decision.
Here are a few paragraphs:
He slipped a thin piece of paper between the glass and the wall and carefully carried his temporary prisoner out of the flat, down the stairs and onto the scruffy untended scrap of garden, where he lifted the glass and retreated.
When he returned he saw the moth had remained on the paper, motionless, dead. He had put out its light for ever.
Morrison fixed a prolonged gaze on the newly lifeless creature, its dull, at first sight almost colourless body and wings covered in scales. He noticed two intense blue and black eye spots set against a pinkish background on its hind wings. Captivating really.
Braver, he pulled its fore wings — folded roof-like over its body — forward and saw its eyes were now deadened, no longer able or needed to scare off potential predators, its antennae down.
A curiosity to him, maybe two to three inches wing tip to wing tip, he took a picture and would later after searching a website conclude it to be of the Eyed Hawk variety.
Does the moth head to the light to facilitate its dance or is it trapped by the brightness? Its mission surely always ends in disappointment; a window to crash against, a dim bulb in a terrible room, a fire to scorch its wings and a moon out of reach, its flight spent way before its intended terminus.
Morrison determined he would never again be afraid of the moth and its quest for light. He would also search for a new life, a new light. He was aware he would eventually have to fight his way through the dark and take the risk of getting burnt, but that was for later.