Work in Progress

by Paul Thomas

  To Susan

  And in loving memory of my father

  Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,

  With my red veins full of money,

  in the final direction of the elementary town

  I advance for as long as forever is.

  Dylan Thomas, Twenty-four Years

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  part one

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  part two

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  About the Author

  Copyright

  part one

  one

  It begins, as momentous days do, like any other.

  I wake up with a headache like distant thunder and inflammatory bladder pressure. You have to be deeply, congenitally lazy to abide this mushrooming discomfort, which can only be relieved — unless you’ve really let yourself go or have an ultra-docile domestic — by getting out of bed. I stick it out for fifteen minutes. As I stand over the bowl urinating like a buffalo, I probe my ear canals with a cotton bud, an activity that has given me a certain curious pleasure for over forty years.

  The thunder gets louder. It’s the fallout from another small failure of will — those few extra drinks that separate civilised self-indulgence from decadence. For a couple of decades I’ve been thinking about — to the point of visualisation — cutting down or even giving up, and during that time my consumption has galloped over the horizon like a runaway horse. But what’s done is done and I’m all too well aware of the futility of pious waking-hour resolutions.

  I shower and dress in baggy shorts, an extra-large T-shirt and jandals. A silly get-up for a man of my age, you may think, but I am, after all, a bohemian. I leave the flat, coins clinking in my pocket and a paperback under my arm. On Ponsonby Road the traffic is at a standstill; motorists and passengers do their makeup or babble into cellphones as they wait for the system to unclog. It’s high summer. Ahead of me, the harbour is a swathe of chemical blue, shimmering temptingly like an exotic cocktail. Away to the right, the Skytower looms freakishly above the skyline, a monument to the art of the deal. The juxtaposition says all there is to say about this careless conglomeration: nature did its best but it wasn’t enough.

  The only free table at the café is right down the back where you can hear the toilet flush and the smokers dredge up their two-toned phlegm. A girl with a stud in her upper lip and milky puppy fat sagging over her belt takes my breakfast order: orange juice, pain au chocolat, double espresso. She serves me most mornings but I don’t know her name.

  ‘Hey, how are you today?’ she drones.

  ‘Fine,’ I reply. ‘And you?’

  My cold smile/grimace forestalls further interaction. She’s inert, uninteresting, undesirable and I haven’t had my coffee yet. I would happily interact with the manager, a svelte Brazilian whom I once saw at the beach, a fluorescent yellow thong trapped between her caramel cheeks, but she’s nowhere to be seen.

  The salesman at the next table departs in a sweet-sour miasma of aftershave and hair gel. I take his place, putting another metre between me and the lavatorial noises off, and claim his abandoned newspaper with a mock-regretful little smile at another regular who doesn’t possess my scavenging speed off the mark. These days I don’t take much interest in what’s going on in the world or, indeed, my own back yard; catching up with the news is like shaving — something one does every few days. I do, however, feel obliged to stay abreast of celebrity culture, if only to keep up my side of the conversation.

  I’m beginning to feel better. The thunder is faint now, like the bass from the flat next door after I’ve thumped on the wall for the third time. This, I tell myself, is the benefit of having a routine. The surge of optimism that accompanies a fading hangover is a dangerous thing, a form of hubris. It will encourage me to have a second double espresso, which can’t be good for me. How much caffeine concentrate can an overloaded system absorb before the fuses start to blow? It will send me back into the fray at lunch, which in turn will cause me to help myself to someone’s cigarettes and what could be more hubristic than smoking? Sometimes late at night and the worse for wear, I have the sense that everything I’ve ever ingested which is bad for me is still in my system, stacked up like unsold books in a publisher’s warehouse, and I’m running out of room.

  I pass the paper on to the other regular and turn to my paperback, a 1972 edition of Goldfinger that I picked up in a second-hand bookshop, drawn by the cover, a still-life with camera, putter and iron, nail polish and applicator, binoculars, golf ball, semi-automatic pistol, silver tankard, cigarette and lighter, martini glass, speargun spear and, mysteriously, lump of Swiss cheese. By 1972, Goldfinger was into its 22nd printing and, according to the blurb, 26 million Bond books had been sold by Pan alone. These numbers would give any writer pause for thought, however lofty their aspirations, however indifferent to commercial success they profess to be.

  There’s a risk attached to reading in public. The dungareed and ponytailed young man at the next table cranes his neck to see the cover, undergraduate mischief stirring in his watery eyes.

  ‘James Bond?’ He retracts his neck and lounges as if he owns the place. ‘Titty titty bang bang.’

  I flash my repellent smile/grimace. ‘In a nutshell.’

  His gaze slides over me like a damp cloth. ‘I’ve seen you around somewhere,’ he says, nodding sagely. ‘You don’t work at varsity, do you?’

  If I ignore him he’ll bother someone else, but vanity gets the better of me, as it usually does. ‘No, but I give the odd lecture.’

  ‘What on?’

  ‘Writing — it’s what I do.’ I hold up the paperback. ‘You could call this professional curiosity.’

  ‘Are you rich and famous?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Poor and obscure?’

  ‘Somewhere in between.’

  ‘Maybe I’ve heard of you.’

  I put the book down. ‘Do you read?’

  ‘Not much.’ He bares yellowing teeth. ‘Porn, mainly.’

  That’s inconvenient but I’ve never had a problem lying to strangers. ‘Can’t say I’ve tried my hand at it.’

  ‘You should. Think about it: you’d never run out of wanking material.’

  ‘You have that problem, do you?’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing worse than trying to squeeze one last wank out of something that doesn’t really do it for you any more. As I always say, there’s nothing worse than a bad wank.’

  I stand up. I resent being driven out of my café by this maniac but there’s no telling what he’s leading up to. ‘If you’ll excuse me …’

  ‘Off for a wank, eh?’ He consults his plastic digital watch. ‘Aren’t we the early bird? Personally I try to hold out till morning tea.’

  ‘Happy wanking.’

  ‘Cheers, mate.’

  I set off briskly. He calls out that he didn’t catch my name but I don’t look back.

  My flat is on the ground floor of a squat concrete structure that was already an eyesore before some prankster decided to paint it shocking pink. It consists of a kitchen/laundry, a living/dining room, a study/guest bedroom, a bathroom/toilet and a de
fiantly sole-purpose main bedroom. By now normal, responsible, acquisitive citizens are at work, but I’m not a morning person. I don’t mean that I’m a little slow and fuzzy first thing and seldom hit top gear before lunch; I mean that it takes me a good few hours of procrastination to get in the mood for work. I take comfort from Raymond Chandler’s dictum that a writer is working when he or she is looking out the window. I seem to have spent half my life staring out windows. You could say it’s got me where I am today.

  Today will be a write-off in more ways than one. I’ve got a three- or four-bottle lunch, after which I won’t be an afternoon person either. My career is littered with lost afternoons but I don’t beat myself up about it. If you can work drunk, there’s no reason for restraint, no fail-safe.

  It’s not as if I’m neglecting a potential masterpiece. I’m between projects, as they say; have been for a couple of months. The older I get, the more time I spend between projects. Given that the projects take progressively longer, my productivity, which wasn’t spectacular to start with, is declining to the extent that I wonder how many more books I’ve got in me. When I was young and fanciful, I saw myself pegging out at the desk in liver-spotted old age, having filled several bookshelves. That expectation has gone the way of all the others.

  Not content with running out of steam, I’m also trending downmarket. My first novel, The Ghost in the Cathedral, was a searing indictment of the British class system as experienced by a New Zealand war hero at Oxford in the late 1940s. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was more favourably received in the colonies than in Britain. The second, Forsaking All Others, chronicled a doomed love affair between an aristocratic young Frenchwoman and a New Zealand painter starving for his art in a Parisian garret. It, too, went down better in the new world than the old. This turbulent Kiwi has since popped up in various parts of the world in various guises — hippie backpacker, revolutionary volunteer, diplomat. His most recent manifestation was as a private detective tracking down a runaway on Sydney’s mean streets. True to form, When All Else Fails failed to storm the Australian bestseller list.

  My flamboyant handwriting covers some thirty pages of my current notebook but there’s no progress here and no momentum. There are plenty of ‘ideas’: woolly premises cocooned in a few woolly sentences. They remind me of the writer who was convinced that his dreams were a motherlode of sensational material. He would often wake up in the night, his chest tight with excitement, in awe of the creativity of his resting mind. Come morning, though, these seeds that would have brought forth great work had dispersed, and no amount of feverish mental effort could bring them back. The solution was to keep a pen and paper on the bedside table; even the sleepiest, sketchiest note would be enough to jog his memory in the morning. Next morning and every morning thereafter he lunged for the pad to find the words: ‘Boy meets girl.’

  The other day my search engine salvaged an article by Ian Fleming explaining his modus operandi. There was only one recipe for a bestseller, he insisted — the reader simply has to turn the page. No doubt he’s right but in my heart of hearts I fear that I lack the peculiar talent — or indeed the will — to pull off this trick. I disagree with Fleming’s view that most people have sufficiently vivid imaginations to come up with a blockbuster storyline if they’d just put their minds to it. He was ahead of his time: Dr No, Sir Hugo Drax, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and those other foaming arch-villains were flush with weapons of mass destruction. Besides, if you’re going to tackle big-picture terrorism, you’ve got to top not only September 11 but all the doomsday scenarios subsequently aired in op-ed page think pieces: anthrax, nerve gas, dirty bombs, cruise missiles, container ships stuffed with nukes. In other words, you need a livelier imagination than some furrow-browed bore from the University of Manitoba.

  I put in a bridge-building call to the books page editor of our daily newspaper. She used to bombard me with review copies until the Saturday morning I went to savour my spiky little piece only to find that some illiterate had tampered with it. I’d written: ‘Sad to report, this — the tenth instalment in a series that began in 1984 — doesn’t live up to its predecessors.’ What appeared under my name was, ‘Sad to report this, but the tenth instalment in a series which began in 1984 doesn’t live up to its predecessors.’ Spot the difference you might say, in which case don’t bother sending me a postcard from Disneyland.

  The point is, some comic-reading clerk had decided that that’s what I really meant to write or — and it was this possibility that caused me to splutter like a thermal pool — had taken it upon himself to improve what I’d written. There are some areas of activity on which I’m prepared to take advice from the man in the street — how to get from A to B, for instance — but writing isn’t one of them. So I rang my pal the books page editor and suggested, in the sort of casually brutal way I thought she’d expect from a bohemian, that she should keep her fuckwit staff on a tighter leash. The fuckwit in question was, of course, the lady herself.

  She’s sent me one book since, a slab of highfalutin pornography written by an attractive young woman, as this crap usually is. I couldn’t be bothered with it but when I heard on the grapevine that it was selling like hotcakes and being hailed as dazzling, ground-breaking art, I set about a review with murderous zeal. Having delayed firing off this incendiary device to give it a final, killing polish, I ran into the author at a party. The cover photo was flattering — as they invariably are — but not outrageously so. She was familiar with my work and enthused about it with a shiny-eyed admiration I hadn’t encountered for years. I claimed I’d bought her book (breaking my rule about never buying first novels) and was impatiently waiting for a couple of clear days to revel in it at leisure. As her date farewelled the hostess, she slipped me her card (when did writers start having business cards?) and told me, huskily and with a fiery stare, to give her a ring.

  More on Tania in due course.

  The books page editor greets me with frigid silence.

  ‘Haven’t forgiven me, eh?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Last time we spoke I was a bit rough on your editing. It obviously still rankles.’

  ‘I’d forgotten all about it, to tell the truth,’ she says, clumsily emphasising the lie. ‘God, if I took it personally every time someone kicked up a fuss over their copy being changed, I’d be in therapy.’

  ‘So you’re not expecting an apology?’

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ she says. ‘I have low expectations.’

  ‘No hard feelings?’

  ‘There never were.’

  ‘So how come you don’t send me books any more?’

  ‘You sent the last one back.’

  ‘As I said in the covering note,’ I say, ‘I had a conflict of interest.’

  ‘Do you still have it?’

  ‘You mean the same one?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What do you mean, “Oh”?’

  ‘I’d heard you and Tania had a fling,’ she says, ‘but there’s obviously more to it?’

  ‘As I say, nothing’s changed.’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ she says, ‘I haven’t got anything much at the moment but I’ll keep you in mind.’

  ‘What about the new Dellasandro?’

  ‘I sent that out yesterday — to Tania, as a matter of fact. She put up her hand weeks ago.’

  Lunch is with a couple of female friends. It’s all above board: their husbands are old buddies of mine and while I’ve done many silly and reprehensible things involving women in my time, I wouldn’t seriously contemplate being silly and reprehensible with Sally Hampton or Brigit Cole. It has some appeal but no percentage. Although there’s something to be said for the two-decade age difference between me and Tania, the late thirties/early forties is the demographic where I really feel at home. Which is where Sally and Brigit come in. They are, to all intents and purposes, ladies of leisure: they can stay in shape and steer clear of the str
ess that ravages the faces of overstretched mothers and working stiffs in hock to the bank. Sally’s a cute little handful; at parties, men queue up to talk to her or eye her covetously from across the room. Brigit could make a bundle doing TV ads. She has the teeth for toothpaste, the skin for anti-ageing cosmetics, the healthy sheen for cereals and mineral water and the aura of suburban prosperity for European stationwagons and high-end investment products.

  Every now and again they take me out to lunch. This is not because I’m a breath of fresh air or a source of enlightenment — they’ve known me too long to take me seriously and their husbands are more plugged into the Zeitgeist than I am. Their husbands work in advertising and direct marketing: they always wear black, they never wear ties, they listen to Eminem. No, Sally and Brigit pick up the tab because they can afford to. They subsidise me in other little ways as well; you could say I’m their pet charity.

  Today is not quite a free lunch: they want the inside story on Tania. They’ve both read Submission; it was their coffee-cum-reading group’s book of the month and it seems the ladies didn’t quite know what to make of it. But as Sally and Brigit waded through one swampy episode after another they had the comfort of knowing that, wearing my writer’s hat, I could tell them whether there was merit that they, being mere wives and mothers, had failed to discern and, wearing my lover’s hat, whether Submission’s ravening protagonist was a self-portrait.

  We lunch at the Viaduct Basin, which is not where I would choose. You can eat well enough here, and if you’re into escapism, the sight of a billionaire’s mini-liner complete with helicopter and uniformed servants will soon have you imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes. But this is a boom village where everyone is on the make. There’s no ethic here, only blunt ambition. Be rich, be cool, be envied.

  The waiter’s pre-programmed familiarity doesn’t seem to bother my companions. They order a $75 bottle of chardonnay; I ask for a German beer with the proviso that it’s served ice-cold; if not, I don’t want it. The waiter seems to think this is eccentricity on a dysfunctional scale but Sally sends him on his way with a burst of frothy charm. The interrogation begins. I report that Tania is twenty-nine, lives alone in Point Chevalier, doesn’t drive, works at least ten hours a day and is well into her second novel, which promises to be more of the same. My beer arrives; it’s acceptable.