Short story: Collective Tissue, by Craig Cliff

Newsroom

12-07-2025

Terry Voss (born 1975) is the author of the story collection The Boring Aurora, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Supplement's best first book award in 2001. His poems and stories have been published in many print and online journals, including Visigoths, 2B/X2B, Sundown and Herringbone. He is currently working on an as-yet-untitled novel about Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. Voss lives in West Tapping with his wife, K.M. Kildare, author of three highly acclaimed novels, and their two young children.
Terry Voss is a writer and failed home handyman. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a filleter on a fishing ship, a milliner's assistant, a sandwich artist and a sock model. On his blog, Aurora, Aurora, Voss has described the decision he and his wife made to both become full-time writers: It was bonkers. We'd both sold our first books but the advances were meagre. We had two other mouths to feed, but we were so open to the idea of success. I shudder to think what would have happened if Katie didn't have The Ontologist's Niece in her bottom drawer.'
Terry Voss is an author and birdwatcher. Gianni Hill, his companion on many twitches and the author of the Booker shortlisted Far Flies the Dunlin, has called Voss 'quietly brilliant and brilliantly quiet.'
Terry Voss is a fiction writer and film reviewer (www.filmbuffs.co.uk/tvoss). His favourite film is the woefully underappreciated The Last Valley (1971), starring Michael Caine and Omar Sharif. He lives in West Tapping with his wife, K.M. Kildare, the author of six highly acclaimed adult novels and the bestselling High Salvage young adult series, and their own young adults, Dulcie and Cody.
Terry Voss is a proud father of two. 'Cody and I are incredibly lucky to be surrounded by brilliant, original and driven women,' he said during his speech at the launch of Dulcie Kildare-Voss's debut novel, Quintessence. 'As Katie, Gianni and Ms Mackenzie have said, this book is all Dulcie. It's thrillingly honest about life as a teenager in the first decade of this new millennium.'
Terry Voss is the author of The Boring Aurora, described by the West Tapping Courier as 'a promising debut from a local scribe'. His novel-in-progress, Connective Tissue, is a fictional account of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet, during a zombie apocalypse. Dulcie Kildare-Voss, Terry's daughter and the author of Quintessence and Aftermathematics, recently described her father's project while onstage at the Hay Literary Festival: 'It sounds bonkers. I guess that's where I get that strain in my own writing from. The bonkers gene. A computer nerd battling zombies—I know! But he's actually very good at the sentence level. He does a wonderful line edit, if you catch him in the right mood.'
Terry Voss was born and raised in West Tapping, a small town notable for the preponderance of published authors. 'It's worse than bloody Iceland,' he recently told the Observer, although the paper attributed the quotation to Terry Moss.
Terry Moss is a brave new voice in English letters. The well-respected social commentator's first book, Connective Tissue, is the kind of debut you can't believe is from a first-time author.
Terry Voss is a short story writer and the husband of K.M. Kildare. In an interview with the Guardian, Kildare described life in the Voss/Kildare household: 'Oh, it's a finely oiled machine. Terry's a great father. He always proofreads the kids' work and attends all their book launches. And mine, of course. When Cody got his deal with Bantam last autumn, Terry went out and bought champagne, proper French champagne, even though Cody was only fifteen at the time.' What Wisdom Could This Head Contain, Cody Kildare-Voss's first novel, has been described by Adam Mars-Jones as 'self-assured yet sweetly vulnerable and utterly, utterly compelling'. According to Michiko Katukani, 'Kildare-Voss, whose elder sister and mother are also writers, casts no shadow but his own.'
Terry Voss (www.terryvoss.co.uk): writer, father, vegetarian.
Terry Voss was the proofreader of the Fury's Reach trilogy by Dulcie Kildare-Voss. He is credited with questioning the decision to set all three books on a spaceship travelling to a distant planet without ever reaching that destination, and coining the phrase 'a claustrophobic space opera', which appears on the covers of each book in the bestselling series and the recently released posters for the Hollywood adaptation. Voss admitted on his blog that the full sentence was: 'A claustrophobic space opera without aliens or ray-guns is a recipe for sedation,' though he later claimed on Ms Kildare-Voss's Facebook page that it was an extended joke he shared with his daughter.
Terry Voss is the author of the story collection The Boring Aurora, which was out of print until the author figured out how to use Amazon Kindle Direct. He is married to K.M. Kildare. In a recent interview with Radio 4, Kildare described life in the Kildare-Voss household: 'It's no picnic in a house full of writers. No one ever wants to do the dishes. And don't get me started on the Green-Eyed Monster.'
Terry Voss was born in West Tapping in the mid-1970s and raised by his mother, memoirist Anita Custer. To friends and even his wife he claimed to have never met his father, but as Custer explains in her memoir, The Ship We Built at Sea, she regularly took Voss to see his father in London. 'Terry was always a bit of a cold fish. He never warmed to Reinier. Maybe it was the age difference, or Reinier's bohemian lifestyle. I gave Terry every chance to know his father but as soon as he was old enough to make his own way in the world, he broke off all contact. I don't think he's read a single one of Reinier's books.'
Terry Voss has a foldout bed in his office, which comes in handy when progress on his novel, Connective Tissue, is slow, or when close friends or family publish memoirs disclosing his deepest secrets to his wife, the publishing phenomenon K.M. Kildare.
Terry Voss is so fucking tired.
Terry Voss is the son of the poet Reinier Voss (1929–1994). As a child, once a month he would be dropped off at his father's house in North London, which backed onto the grounds of Friern Hospital. Voss Senior liked to talk about his 'neighbour', previously known as Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, during rambling summer evenings as he and his guests drank dandelion wine. The main asylum building was famous for having the longest corridor in Europe. Terry Voss never drank the dandelion wine on offer, nor set foot inside the asylum, missing the chance to walk the nine kilometres of corridors before the facility was converted to luxury apartments for footballers' ex-wives and reality TV elites.
Terry Voss is taking a break from fiction after two decades of toil. He is not writing a revenge memoir.
Terry Voss is the new treasurer of the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum Historical Society. He admits he was never that good with money, but his recent return to bachelorhood has shown him the importance of careful financial management. Growing up in a single-parent family, he took for granted the scrimping, saving and sacrifices on the part of his mother, perhaps because his father never seemed to work a day in his life. That house in Friern Barnet was forever filled with a revolving cast of blurry-eyed men in cardigans, incense-burning, barefooted women, and cloth-nappied toddlers at home in ambiguity. A proper-seeming woman, Mrs King, came and cleaned the house and cooked one-pot-wonder meals for whoever was around. As she worked, she sang one of three songs: 'Doo Wah Diddy Diddy', 'Da Doo Ron Ron' and, when she was feeling more eloquent, Bowie's 'Let's Spend the Night Together'.
Terry Voss finally broke the back of his Tim-Berners-Lee-faces-the-zombie-apocalypse novel when he decided to set the majority of the action in and around Princess Park Manor, on the site of the former Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. 'I became interested in the old asylum when I returned to that part of London after several decades away,' he wrote on his blog in September. 'I joined the Colney Hatch Historical Society pretty soon after and feel more than a little dense that it's taken me twelve months to see what is now blindingly obvious. My father wrote a sequence of poems about the fire at the asylum in 1903, in which at least 50 female patient-inmates perished—the worst peacetime fire in London since the medieval period. Now it is a site of pilgrimage for One Direction fans, as members of the pop group lived there for a time. Disaster, insanity, the ephemeral, young blood—it writes itself.' Voss hopes to complete his novel before Christmas.
Terry Voss (@Terryvoss75) was the first person to see a wild Scopus umbretta, otherwise known as hamerkop, hamerkopf, umbrette or anvilbird, on UK soil. He was birdwatching in the wetlands south of West Tapping with his friend, Gianni Hill, whose play, A Feather for My Aunt, remains the number one non-musical production on the West End. 'Gianni and I have been to that marsh dozens of times, but not since I moved down to London a couple of years ago,' Voss told BBC World News. 'I rang Gianni to discuss a tricky section of my novel, which asks what if Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, and the members of One Direction were the only ones who could stop a zombie apocalypse? Gianni suggested a spot of birdwatching to clear my head and I drove up Saturday morning. About three minutes after we settled into the hide, poor Gianni, he gets a call from his agent. I know, poor form having his phone on in the hide, but he had a film script that was going to auction. Anyway, he leaves the hide and heads back to his Land Rover to get better reception, and not five minutes later I see this self-assured brown wader walk right past me, so close I could probably touch it. I noticed its bill, its head—how could you not? That hammer shape. It's like nothing I'd seen before. I turned on my phone and in a few seconds I had identified it, tweeted, and here we are.' Voss's photos of the hamerkop have been hailed as 'historic' and 'not that shaky, given the circumstances'.
Terry Voss does not know what a hamerkop was doing in the wetlands south of West Tapping, when the territory for this non-migratory bird typically does not extend north of Mecca. He does not know whether climate change, creeping urbanisation, deforestation, salination of waterways or any other Anthropocene horror is to blame. He still holds that it could be an escapee from a nearby bird park, though it wasn't tagged and no operator ever came forward. Yes, he has been told the various myths about the hamerkop. If you look into the water at the same time as a hamerkop, someone you love will die. If you disturb a hamerkop nest you'll develop leprosy. If you steal its eggs you'll be struck by lightning. Voss did none of these things. He simply took a couple of photos, shared them via social media, gave a few interviews with carefully deployed plugs for his novel-in-progress, and went back to his quirky bedsit in North London to knock the bastard off. He hasn't been struck by lightning. His kids are returning his texts. His ex-wife and mother are not, but they have both tweeted within the last twelve hours. His fingers are not about to fall off, though maybe that would be for the best.
Terry Voss foresaw his own death. Before passing, he made sure both of his kids still had the playlist for his funeral he had emailed them a couple of years ago. It read: Waiting music: 'Da Doo Ron Ron' (The Crystals), 'Sigourney Weaver' (John Grant), 'Vein of Stars' (The Flaming Lips), 'There is a Valley' (Bill Fay). In lieu of a hymn: 'More Than This' (Roxy Music). For when you walk the coffin out: 'Don't Let it Bring You Down' (Neil Young).
Terry Voss is prone to bouts of melodrama. He blames his childhood.
Terry Voss woke one night when he was seven or eight. He called for his mother but she didn't come. He called long enough to forget for all time the content of the nightmare that had woken him. He got up and walked to his mother's room. He switched on the light. The bed was still made, but several dresses, scarves and jackets lay on the quilt. In the kitchen, dishes were stacked in the wire drying rack. His mother's keys weren't by the telephone. The clock showed quarter to twelve, not nearly as late as he had supposed. She was out—somewhere—safely betraying him. He flicked off the light and fumbled his way into the living room to turn on the television. He slid the volume down so he could hear it but if his mother returned home, unscathed and unaware, she would not be able to before he could leap up, switch off the set and slink down the dark hall and back to bed. On screen: the late film, part-way through. 'The next time I see you, Vogel,' shouted a man leaning against a tree, 'I'll cut out your eyes.' The other man, Vogel, ran to comfort a young blonde woman on her haunches. She was dressed, young Terry thought, like a milkmaid. Before he could get any further bearings, the film cut to a different man and woman lying in bed, a bearskin for a blanket. The man's torso was bare. Only her head was showing, but that was enough to be striking. Tanned skin, sharp features—the black-haired temptress to the innocent milkmaid. They were interrupted by a knock at the door. The man rose, pulled on a shirt and gestured for the woman to hide in the next room. She sat, facing away from the camera, allowing a second-long glimpse of her bare back. Terry sat down, cross-legged, two paces from the TV. The village, apparently under the protection of this man—the Captain—was being attacked by thirty men with swords, axes, a mace, bows and arrows, but also guns. Horses hurtled their riders into wooden spikes. A man licked another man's blood from his knife. It was a gift, all of it. A reward for conquering his fear. After the carnage, a priest threatened the Captain with an eternity in Hell. 'There is no Hell,' the Captain shouted. 'Don't you understand? Because there is no God. There never was.' Terry Voss, who still believed in the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus and the Heavenly Father, but was beginning to question practical aspects of their feats, received what felt like definitive proof of an adult conspiracy. There was no God. This heroic Captain knew the truth and wasn't afraid to speak it. But then the priest found Erica, the dark-featured woman, praying to Satan—Satan!—to protect the Captain and she was swiftly thrown on a pyre. When the Captain returned, mortally wounded from an extraneous battle, he mistook Inge, the blonde milkmaid, for his dark-haired lover. Young Terry could not quite fathom this. Inge and Erica had already become the two poles between which all alluring women must sit. But sweet, compliant Inge, encouraged by the other men, pretended to be fierce and fiery Erica and comforted the Captain as he expired. After the credits: the weather forecast. Terry Voss, aged seven or eight, pushed the on/off button of the boxy TV set and found his way back to his bed in darkness. The next morning he looked up the name of the movie in the Radio Times. The Last Valley. Already a dozen years old and relegated to late-night screenings. A commercial flop despite the star power of Michael Caine (the Captain) and Omar Sharif (Vogel). But The Last Valley was a place his imagination returned to again and again over the next weeks and months. He defended the valley from invaders. He convinced Erica there was no God and, therefore, no Satan. That it was better to lie in bed with him than be accused of witchcraft and burnt on a pyre. He started staying awake at night, waiting for the phone to ring and his mother to be invited somewhere so that he could watch the late movie. It happened once or twice a month. Sometimes he'd turn the set on before the late film had even started and catch the end of the news headlines or Wogan. He soon learnt that they didn't play late films on school nights, just Fridays and Saturdays, and, though it was still thrilling to rise once his mother had left, turn on the TV and position the volume slider just so, after a couple of minutes of Question Time or Italian language programming, he was completely deflated. As far as he knows, his mother never learnt of his late-night viewing sessions. She certainly has not mentioned it in the first two volumes of her memoirs. When he met Katie Kildare at university, he was struck by her resemblance to actress Madeleine Hinde, who played Inge. The straight blonde hair, the narrow nose, the slightest dimple in her chin. He was confounded, however, to learn by degrees that her personality was much more closely aligned to Erica. Not that he ever caught her praying to Satan, but she loved fiercely. There was something carnivorous about her approach to life and to writing. She would not abide the word 'something', for example. Early on in their courtship, Voss rented The Last Valley and watched it with Katie at her flat. She criticised the lengths the filmmakers went to make Omar Sharif's skin appear more pale. 'He's suffering from suspected plague,' he said. 'A convenient device,' she replied. She could not believe the scene in the first half of the movie where the Captain and Gruber, the town's de facto mayor, roll dice to decide who will get Erica. The Captain rolls a three but Erica announces 'Eleven', a winning score. 'Not only have we been given no reason for her to prefer Michael Caine over Gruber,' she said, 'but there's no way she'd be willing to risk everything she has to betray the most powerful man in the valley.' 'I guess,' he replied, though in the years to come he'd often find himself feeling his beloved had acted on similar hunches to Erica. That night back in Katie's flat, she announced the plot was confusing, the pacing poor. He did not agree, could not. He did concede that perhaps the first hour was not as striking or memorable as the second, and that he may have felt differently about the film if he'd seen it in full that first time, but he hadn't and he'd love the film forever as a result. This made her smile and lick her lips. They never made it to the end of The Last Valley, retiring to Katie's bedroom somewhere around the time Captain announced there was no God. The marriage of Terry Voss and Katie Kildare lasted thirteen books (one for him, twelve for her) and nineteen years.
Terry Voss's Connective Tissue took nineteen years to write and was rejected by seven publishers (not such a large number when he started the project, but there are so few of the buggers left these days) before he decided to selfpublish. For legal matters, Mr Voss first asks lawyers for Mr Berners-Lee, Mr Styles, Mr Malik, Mr Horan, Mr Tomlinson and/or the estate of Liam Payne to consider the minimal financial gain likely to accrue as a result of this book's publication. Failing this, enquiries can be made via email: [e-mail].
Taken with kind permission from Landfall 249: Autumn 2025 edited by Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, $30), the latest issue of New Zealand's premiere literary journal, which includes new writing by Elizabeth Smither and James Pasley, a long, outstanding review by David Eggleton of CK Stead's collection of reviews and assorted prose, Table Talk (the best line in it is by Stead, when Eggleton quotes him saying of Maurice Shadbolt, 'Maurice could be good company, but he seemed to be constantly on the brink of hysteria'), and the winner of the Landfall young writers essay competition, Ava Reid (Te Ātiawa, Pākehā), who is studying anthropology at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka.
The issue is dedicated to the great Brian Turner (1944-2025). It's also the last issue that the journal will be known as Landfall. To mark its historic 250th issue later this year, it will be renamed Landfall Tauraka. The new name has been gifted by Te Irika o Wharawhara Te Raki, the Office of Māori Development t the University of Otago.