Forgiveness – but for whom?
I’ve always had trouble with the concept of forgiveness. Sometimes it’s explained not as accepting that someone did you wrong, but as letting go of the hurt you feel. I guess that’s a sane way of looking at it (from my perspective as a grudge-holder), but still, I’m not entirely sure I buy it. If what happened to you made you a different person than you would otherwise have been, how can you let go of it?
As I go through my last round of edits on Cutting Edge, it suddenly hits me that this book is my answer to that dilemma. In it, Michael meets a former bully who wants to apologize. Since he’s brought up to be polite, Michael immediately accepts the apology, but the ease with which he releases the bully from his bond sets in motion a series of internal struggles. By saying that he forgives, he opens the door to a host of self-accusations that threaten to crush him.
The problem is that the bully gives Michael a reason for why they picked on him, and somehow, it hits home. Because there’s always a reason for everything – an explanation, if not an excuse. As Michael’s band Pax is drawn into a lawsuit, he’s forced to question his own actions, not only as the lyricist who’s on the stand for romanticizing death, but also as a person who once refused to conform and was ostracized for it.
The received wisdom is that it’s never the victim’s fault, but those words don’t help Michael. He starts wondering if he ever even was a victim. It’s the old hen and egg conundrum: did his classmates bully him because he despised them, or did he despise them because they bullied him?
On the surface, it’s such a black and white matter: you shouldn’t bully people. But in reality, the mechanisms can be really subtle, and bullying can happen to someone who’s worn out their welcome in one way or another. It can be punishment for behaviour that just isn’t okay. I once saw a girl pick on her friends until they finally had enough and turned on her. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and their behaviour towards her wasn’t okay either, but there was a reason for it.
Not the most popular way of looking at it, I know, but in this book, I needed to do it. Michael had to turn his gaze inward and work through all that fear, shame and anger he’s carried for years. He had to face his demons and decide what to do with what he discovers about himself.
Through him, Cutting Edge asks some really hard questions, and I’m not sure it even goes halfway to answering them. But in the end – and hopefully avoiding any spoilers – I think Michael finds a good middle road between forgiving and holding on to the grudge. In a way, he lets go of the past, but at the same time, he holds on to what it has made him. He doesn’t exactly forgive, but he changes, and that in a way that is beneficial for him personally. It has nothing to do with the bully, because the bully isn’t important any longer. What’s important is what Michael thinks about himself.
As I look back on his story and the way it told itself through me, I’m quite content with how he handled the situation. I would have hated it if he actually did explicitly forgive the people who hurt him. That would have diminished him in my eyes. Instead, what he did was to forgive himself, and that’s a thousand times harder.
TITLE: Cutting Edge
AUTHOR: Ingela Bohm
PUBLISHER: Self-published
RELEASE DATE: 06/04/2016
LENGTH: 77 000 words
COVER ARTIST: Ingela Bohm
BLURB:
After ten years of hard work, rock band Pax are enjoying a stable career, but not everyone rejoices in their success. Just weeks into their first holiday in years, a family files a complaint against them for causing their son’s death. Their lawyer assures them the lawsuit will go away quietly – after all, a rock band can’t be blamed for some poor kid’s fate on the streets.
Or can they? This is the eighties, at the height of the moral panic surrounding heavy metal, and no accusation is too ridiculous. When Jamie takes on a guitar pupil who pushes the boundaries of artistic freedom, he starts to question his own responsibility for what he puts out. At the same time, Michael meets a former bully who insinuates that Michael wasn’t as innocent a victim as he thinks.
While Michael fights his personal battle against demons from his past, he also prepares to give evidence on the part of the band in a court of law. The question isn’t just whether Pax will survive this latest blow – it’s whether Michael will.
When Jamie finally came out from the bathroom, Michael still hadn’t hung up. “But we’ve done nothing wrong!” he could be heard shouting from below. “Evan, this is just ridiculous.”
Stomach knotting, Jamie tiptoed down the stairs.
“Christ, that too?” Michael groaned. “Seriously? I mean, what do we even say to that? Alright, alright… We will, Jesus… Don’t go all dad on us, we’re thirty years old, for God’s sake.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Fuck.” Michael collapsed on the chair beside the telephone table. “Hang on, Evan.” He put the receiver against his chest and looked up at Jamie. “Bottom line is, we’re fucked. No, sorry, we’re screwed. Is that a nicer word than ‘fucked’? Or should I say that we’re ‘in a bit of a pickle’?”
Jamie kneeled in front of him and took the hand that wasn’t holding the receiver. “Michael, calm down. Tell me. Has something happened?”
“You could say that.” Michael laughed without mirth. “We’re… we’re…” He looked up at the ceiling, like a sinner begging for absolution. “We’re being sued.”
Jamie just stared at him. There was a muffled outburst from the phone, and Michael raised the receiver to his ear. “That’s what you said, wasn’t it?”
More shouting from Evan.
Michael’s jaw set. “I have to tell him what you said.” He turned to Jamie again. “You won’t believe this. It’s our music. They think we’re…” He shook his head and laughed again, and this time, it was a sound of pure disbelief. “Devil worshippers!”
Jamie sat back. “Devil…?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“But we’re not even… what?”
“Apparently, it’s our fault that this girl torched her school. Or something. No, it was…” Michael stopped to listen to Evan’s hollering. “That was the tabloids, right. The court case is in Virginia. No, West Virginia.”
“Court case,” Jamie repeated dully. He wasn’t sure what the word even meant, he was so shocked.
“They’re accusing us of… well, I don’t really… Fuck the reason, we’re being called to court. In front of a judge and everything!”
“But… devil worship? I mean, where do they–”
“We’re ‘seducing America’s youth’,” Michael said, making quotation marks in the air. “Apparently, Prey encourages vandalism.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“And murder. Let’s not forget murder. We’re inveigling young working class people to rise against authority and… and… promoting anarchy, and…”
“But it must be a joke.”
Holding his gaze, Michael shook his head. “It’s not, Jamie. You want to talk to him yourself?”
“Yes, I do, dammit.” Jamie grabbed the receiver. “Evan?”
“Hi.”
At once, Jamie’s heart sank. In that one word, he heard the full weight of what they were up against. Their usually upbeat manager sounded dejected, beaten.
“Okay, listen,” he said. “This is the situation: they think you’re encouraging Satanism and homosexuality in the young. General depravity. That kind of thing.”
Jamie couldn’t help a weary laugh. “‘That kind of thing’? What does being gay have to do with Satanism?”
“I don’t know, I’m not a priest. It doesn’t matter. Thing is, they’re calling it negligence. Law mumbo-jumbo which means you should have known better.”
“You can be punished because you should have known better?” Jamie asked, on the fence between laughter and anger. “Not a single human being should go free, then.”
“But for the actions of the tortfeasor, the harm would not have occurred,” Evan read aloud from something. “Meaning, but for these songs of yours, this kid wouldn’t be dead.”
Jamie gasped. “Dead?”
“Look, you have to come up to London so that Mister Harrison can explain.”
“Mister Harrison?”
“Your lawyer. According to him, your best bet is to plead the first amendment. Freedom of expression.”
Jamie stared into space. After an eternal moment, he repeated, “Freedom of expression.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Believe it. But look,” and now Evan started to sound like his normal self again, “I’ll take care of it. Mister Harrison is flying over from the States, and he’s positive that we can dismiss their claim. That it’s not, you know… viable. Or something.”
“Some legal word that means the people who’re suing us can go to hell?” Jamie smiled acidly.
“Pretty much. But the two of you need to come up here and meet him, okay? We need to talk strategy, and you have to be present to hear it all. You understand.”
“I think so.”
“We’ve scheduled a meeting a week from now. Mister Harrison couldn’t get away from his other duties before that. So next Thursday at ten o’clock, okay?”
“Okay…”
“You don’t have a school talk that day, do you?”
In a daze, Jamie reached for the calendar on the telephone table. “Nope.”
“Alright, see you then.”
Evan hung up, and Jamie slumped against the leg of the telephone table. “Jesus. Was this what Ferdinand was talking about?”
“Okay, don’t panic.” Michael rubbed his forehead. “As long as we don’t panic, it’ll be okay.”
Jamie made a wry grimace. “Really.”
“He’s going to take care of it. Mister Harrison, I mean.”
But Jamie could hear the fear in Michael’s voice.
“And if they insist that we go to court,” he went on, “we show up, we tell them that they’re being ridiculous, and then we walk away. I mean, what’s their case? Death by music?”
Jamie shrugged.
“You’re not even going to talk to me about it?” Michael snapped.
“What’s the point? We’re at their mercy now.”
“So we’re just going to ignore it?”
Jamie shot him a sullen look. Then his gaze slipped to the black strands of hair that lay drying against Michael’s shoulders. A pang in his chest made him sit up straight. “That tape. The death metal thing.”
Michael hesitated. “Yeah…?”
“Don’t talk to anyone about it. The last thing we need is to be associated with a band like that.”
Michael fell quiet, half a breath down his throat. He searched Jamie’s face, and Jamie felt it redden. “‘A band like that’?” Michael repeated. “He’s the nicest guy I’ve ever met.”
“Yeah?” Jamie sneered. “Just to be clear, we’re talking about the same guy here? The one with the eyeliner and pentagrams?” He was almost hyperventilating now.
Michael gripped his hands. “Look… Okay, okay. I’ll pretend it doesn’t exist. We’ll go to London and meet this lawyer, and we’ll appear in court if we have to – we’ll do everything they tell us, and it’ll be okay.”
“Yeah.” Jamie’s voice snagged on a dryness in his throat, and Michael pulled him close for a hug. Breathing into his shoulder, Jamie whispered, “This couldn’t have come at a worse time.”
Michael pulled away and sought his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“The school talks! We’re supposed to be role models, aren’t we?”
A stiffness came over Michael, and his gaze dropped to his lap. “They don’t know about this, though. I mean, we only knew about it five minutes ago, and we’re going to our first school tomorrow. The grapevine is an impressive thing, but it’s not that fast.”
Jamie leaned his head on Michael’s knee. “I hope so.”
Michael stroked his hair – cautiously, as if he didn’t know if he was allowed. “Don’t worry,” he said in a voice that sounded tinny. “It’ll all be just fine.”
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Ingela Bohm lives in an old cinema, tucked away in a northern Swedish forest where she can wander around all day long and dictate her books. She used to dream of being an actor until an actual actor asked, “Do you really need to do it?” That’s when she realized that the only thing she really needed to do was to write. She has since pretended to be a dietician, a teacher, a receptionist and a cook, but only to conceal her real identity.
Her first imaginary friend was called Grabolina and lived in her closet. Nowadays she has too many imaginary friends to count, but at least some of them are out of the closet. Her men may not be conventionally handsome, but they can charm your pants off, and that’s all that matters.
Ingela’s more useless talents include reading tarot cards, killing pot plants and drawing scandalous pictures that no one gets to see. She can’t walk in heels and she’s stopped trying, but she has cycled 12 000 miles in the UK and knows which campsites to avoid if you don’t like spiders. If you see her on the train you will wonder what age she is.
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One commenter will win one book in the Pax series (the winner picks the book).
I absolutely love this series and can’t wait to read Cutting Edge!
I have not read the series and look forward to doing so.
I really enjoyed the first 3 books in the series. Thank you for the post and giveaway chance.
Wow, what a great post. And so much truth in it.
havent read this series yet
This sounds like a really intriguing series, and Cutting Edge looks great.
This sounds like an awesome series that I have missed somehow! Awesome post!