Kill Your Darlings

by Terence Blacker

  Home felt dangerous, too. Returning from the imaginary world to domestic life, I found that everything was changed. Doug’s vacated room had undergone a transformation. The more intimate or extraneous items – ancient, yellowing, encrusted handkerchiefs, empty cigarette packets crammed with ash and butt-ends, hard, grey pellets of ancient chewing-gum – had been removed, while other memorabilia had been arranged in a sensitive designer version of adolescent disorder, porn mags stacked carefully below a marginally less repulsive men’s style magazine, anonymous items – a single rollerblade wheel, a cigarette roll-up machine, an ancient invitation to a rave – laid out side by side on the bedside table. On the bed itself, the sheets had been cleaned and the Garfield duvet folded back in heart-breaking invitation.

  For the first time in two years, the door was left open. Sometimes, alone in the house, I gazed into the room, trying to remember my son’s voice as a child, happy family moments from the early years, but the sights and sounds of the past seemed distant and fuzzy, incomparably less authentic than any fiction. Douglas, Dougie, and Doug were all gone. In their absence, there stood this odd shrine to adolescence, a sort of design exhibit from a lifestyle exhibition, ‘Male teenage life at the end of the twentieth century’.

  Marigold and I had taken to living parallel lives. At the very moment when my telephone had stirred into life, hers was so silent that I assumed that her calls had been redirected. When she appeared at the house during the daytime, it was to collect something, to change or to consume a quick meal before she disappeared again. Sometimes she would return late at night, closing the bedroom door behind her and leaving for work the next day before I had emerged from my study.

  When we met unexpectedly outside the bathroom or in the kitchen, a ludicrously formal exchange would take place.

  ‘What news of the masterwork?

  I would tell her the latest deal.

  ‘Good. You must be very pleased.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘I simply couldn’t be more delighted.’

  Once, I asked her to accompany me to one of the fashionable parties to which I was now regularly invited. She rejected me with a curt laugh and a shake of her head as if any further response would be a waste of breath.

  She cancelled the monthly allowance she paid into our joint account for my living expenses and suggested that my influx of funds meant I could support myself for a while. When she closed our joint account, I was startled by how sad it made me that we were no longer even together on chequebooks, ‘G. and M. S. D. Keays’.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked once as she brushed past me in the hall.

  ‘I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re a successful modern couple. I see no problem here.’

  ‘So why has Doug moved out?’

  ‘It’s a phase. He needs to sort himself out in his own way.’

  ‘You know that?’

  ‘We talk most days. We have longer conversations than when he lived at home.’

  But we were not fine. Nothing was fine. It occurred to me that the reason why my wife was still formally married to me merely reflected a characteristic determination not to give the world outside the satisfaction of seeing Marigold Keays, one of modern life’s cool winners, in retreat, the victim-wife. She was not, nor ever would be, a cliché.

  As if articulating what Marigold was not prepared to say, the house seemed to give up its soul. Where once there had been an elegant vibrancy, there was now a collection of tasteful objects gathered in an imitation home. Miguela and Ned continued to attend to the house and garden, yet, for all their ministrations, a sense of dry neglect descended on the place. More than once, I found myself running a finger along a mantelpiece or examining the surface of a toaster, expecting to find dust.

  For the first time, I recognized the tiny changes my wife had made every day to keep the place alive, as the landscape is modified in endless subtle ways by the changing weather. Now, simply by withdrawing herself, she had taken its life. The house had become a neat and desolate prison.

  One morning, I noticed that the rice in Buddha’s bowl had become yellow, hard and dusty. I tried to be amused that Marigold’s much publicized faith could be shaken by such a trivial thing as marital conflict, but sadness defeated any sense of cheap triumph. I missed those absurd, reverent replenishings and took to visiting the fat boy in his bedroom shrine to place a spoonful of shiny, white rice between his upturned hands. Alone in the empty house, I listened out for the gentle ringing of harmony chimes, for the tapes my wife used to play (whale song, the menstruation chants of native American women) but they were never there.

  Now and then I would attend a fashionable party. No longer on the fringe with the liggers, spouses and personal assistants, I was propelled within moments of my arrival into the gathering’s hot social centre. Once, while conversing with a literary editor at the anniversary celebration of one of the smarter imprints, I glanced away to find myself staring into the dark, amused, unblinking eyes of an attractive woman. Yet the very openness of the invitation, the easy, unexpressed availability, which I had once found so irresistible, now alarmed me. I saw a trap: with intimacy, even the fake intimacy of a friendly, post-party fuck, comes a lowering of the guard. In an easy, post-coital moment, I might find myself talking about my novel, my new status as an acceptable figure, the speculation over my relationship with Peter Gibson. There was no telling where it would lead. Behind the wall which I had erected for myself, the erotic longing which had always seemed to be at the centre of my being curled up and sank into a deep, self-protective slumber.

  I wanted to talk to my wife. I needed to see my son. Yet they had absented themselves at the very moment when I was at last able to hold my head up in the family home as a successful, talked-about, financially secure husband, father and writer. Beside this void in my life, the various treats I had promised myself down the years – parties, celebrity, casual and emotion-free engagements with clever, hard-bodied young women – now seemed tawdry and trivial.

  I went south. A few weeks after terpsichore 4:2 had been accepted, I rang Brian McWilliam and suggested that we should start work on the project he had suggested. When he expressed surprise at my eagerness, I explained that I was creatively written out, that it was the ideal time to research. Besides, I had always liked to clear my debts as quickly as possible. He gave me the address of his house in Streatham.

  So I moved into a new routine. Doug-like, I would stay in bed late every morning. I would arrive at Brian’s smart yet anonymous terraced house in the suburbs soon after lunch where I would be ushered into the front room. At first I had thought that the place, with its patterned carpets, hanging brasses and Victorian prints must have belonged to Brian’s mother but it transpired that this self-conscious, spinsterish neatness was a reflection of his own taste. There, behind net curtains, on each side of gas log fire, we talked about rape, murder, blackmail and the abduction of minors. The link of criminality (murder) between us seemed to have encouraged Brian to be open with me and, apparently unmoved by the fact that he was spilling out the foul detritus of his libidinal past to a man who, whatever his weaknesses, was still (above all) a writer, he reminisced, eyes sparkling, about his past as ‘a bit of a Romeo’.

  On the few occasions when I attempted in my line of questioning to shape Brian’s clammy maunderings into some kind of fictional narrative, he would quickly grow impatient. ‘But Greg, that’s not how it happened,’ he would say, irritated by this interruption of his violently erotic reverie. In spite of the welcome escape the job provided from my own life, I began to feel contaminated, as if this collaboration had somehow slipped from the literary to the real.

  The novel’s working title had been Cutting Up Rough but soon it had become clear that mere violence was the least of my co-author’s preoccupations. He began to talk about girls. Soon the girls became teens. Eventually, and with a sort glazed and distant smile, the teens became even younger. Brian explained that in a certain area –
‘we’re talking erotologically here, Greg’ – he was a classic case of arrested development. He recalled the various activities he and the lads used to enjoy at his East End secondary modern, lingering nostalgically over the gangs, the parties, the iffy games they used to play on some of the tastier girls.

  ‘So you still like teenagers.’ I dared to inject a note of disapproval into the question.

  Brian shook his head with a sort of disgust. ‘Teens these days – they’re just slags. By the time they’re seventeen or eighteen, they’ve gone, Greg. They’ve lost that girly nervousness, that purity. They can’t be corrupted.’ He stared sadly at the fire. ‘I do like a spot of corruption, and that’s the God’s honest truth.’

  I waited, somehow knowing where we were heading.

  ‘Angels.’ He spoke dreamily. ‘Nymphs. Lovely little Lolitas.’

  ‘Nabokov would be honoured.’

  ‘Who the fuck’s he?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘They’re not kids, Greg.’ Brian seemed eager to convey his integrity. ‘Only a fucking pervert would do anything to a little twink or a pre. They’re different – on the turn, if you know what I mean. They’re curious about it all, but still smooth and pure and unsullied. A year or so and they’ll just be all sag and hair but now they’re still in their own little world.’

  I must have looked embarrassed because Brian shrugged defensively. ‘I’m just there to catch them before they fall.’

  It was a tricky moment. I was the author of a novel that, even before publication, was being widely discussed as one of the year’s likely prize-winners. In the small and inward-looking world of books, it was quite conceivable that my connection with McWilliam might come to light. A liberal in the political and social sense, I have always taken a strong line against the exploitation of children. Were I writing my own novel, a level of knowing irony might have provided a defence against misunderstandings on the part of the more literal-minded reader but it was clear that the nominal author did not intend Cutting Up Rough (or Lolitaville, as he took to calling it) to be that kind of book.

  ‘For legal reasons, it might be wise to add a couple of years to these … Lolitas.’

  ‘Fuck off. They wouldn’t be Lolitas then, would they. Who’s ever heard of a sixteen-year-old angel?’

  I thought of Doug, seventeen and still a lost child. ‘You’ll get slaughtered in the press, Brian.’

  ‘It’s a novel, isn’t it?’ He shook his head, lost in thought. ‘They’ve got that little twitch of adult naughtiness that can be teased into desire.’

  I elected not to point out that Brian’s Lolitas had invariably fallen into his hands as a result of some sleazy act of blackmail, bribery or coercion. ‘I’m uncomfortable with the work,’ I said quietly.

  Brian sighed. ‘Maybe it’s time we talked about your boy,’ he said.

  It turned out that he had been busy over the past week or so. He told me that the house where Doug was living was known throughout the area as the local crack den. As it happened, only the basement flat was used for this purpose, the first and second floors being occupied by a shifting population of squatters, illegal immigrants, dealers and teenagers on the run from children’s homes, parents or the police. There were two older men who had lived there for some time, one a dealer and small-time burglar, the other a veteran of what Brian described as ‘the adult entertainment industry’.

  ‘Do the police know about the place?’

  ‘They keep an eye on it. Now and then they pick up some idiot white boy living dangerously but otherwise they leave it alone. They don’t give a fuck about the various wasted rastas and teenies in there. Where’s the point in clogging up the court with losers?’

  ‘I need to get in there.’

  ‘Grow up. The law would have you down the station, a rock in your back pocket, before you reached the first floor.’

  ‘I’m a father. I could explain.’

  Brian smiled pityingly. ‘You’re not too familiar with White City life, are you?’

  I shook my head wearily.

  ‘It’s not a problem. I’ll get him out for you. Arrange a little family sojourn. How does that sound?’

  ‘How soon?’ I asked.

  ‘He’ll be home before we finish the first chapter of Lolitaville’

  I sighed and reached for my notepad. ‘Where were we?’

  * * *

  Five Great Authors with Physical Oddities

  1. Ben Jonson weighed nearly 20 stone.

  2. August Strindberg had healing hands, was psychic and contained so much electricity within himself that he claimed to be an accumulator who could charge others if they held on to him

  3. Thomas Wolfe was 6ft 9in.

  4. G. K. Chesterton weighed 22 stone and was unable to tie his own shoelaces

  5. Being made love to by Aldous Huxley was, according to Nancy Cunard, like ‘being crawled over by slugs’.

  * * *

  34

  Now and then, a novel is published which, well before it becomes available to the common reader, captures the collective imagination of the literary world. To have been sent an early proof by the publishers becomes a matter of pride. At the smarter dinner-parties, it is de rigueur to have some sort of strongly held, informed opinion about the book and the author of the moment.

  terpsichore 4:2 was such a book. Gregory Keays was that author.

  Although there were few overt references to the forthcoming publication of my novel in the press, it was clear that something was in the wind. Columnists began to talk of a ‘new dawn’ within British letters, of the arrival of a new school of ‘bleeding-edge fiction’, of an uncharacteristic spirit of fiscal optimism within the bookselling community. Behind these various coded announcements lay a sense of intense and undeniable anticipation. t42, as it became known among the cognoscenti, was on its way.

  At my suggestion, early book proofs had been sent to key members of the fiction aristocracy. It amused me to imagine the changing reactions of my writerly compadres (curiosity giving way to surprise making way to awe-struck, envious despair) as they read. Rushdie would fussily note the book’s literary antecedents. Updike would insist, in a lordly manner, that he should be allowed to review the British edition in the New York Review of Books. There would be an eloquent, deafening silence from Martin.

  Inevitably, a few of the more curmudgeonly critics would already be sharpening their quills. Responding to my triumphant conflations of style and psychology, head and heart, depth and narrative drive as if they were a personal affront, they would now be rehearsing their casual insults, preparing to express their ‘sincere bafflement’, their ‘reluctant reservations’, their ‘profound sense of disappointment’. As one who has, down the years, paid his dues to Simenon’s ‘vocation of unhappiness’, I felt genuine sympathy towards them. For many of these failed or would-be novelists, angrily living off the scraps of journalism, my triumph would be a brutal reminder of the futility of their ambition, the emptiness of their professional lives.

  Yet, at this moment of imminent triumph, I found myself alone. There was no one with whom to share, in an amused, proud yet modest manner, the daily ratcheting up of my reputation, apart from a psychopathic criminal pervert now too absorbed in memories of nymphs and Lolitas to consider weightier, more literary matters. ‘Good for you, Greg,’ he would mutter when I foolishly confided another triumph. ‘Fucking ace. My writer, the champion. Couldn’t be more pleased, mate.’

  That possessive noun, incidentally, I was by now beginning to find a trifle irksome. Once, arriving early in Streatham, I had encountered a wizened stable-lad type who, to judge by his shifty manner and eagerness to depart was no more pleased to be found in the company of Brian McWilliam than I was. Before this little eel – who went under the name of Jimmy or Joe – had slithered out of the house and back to the shadows, Brian had nodded proprietorially in my direction. ‘This is Greg, my writer,’ he had said. ‘You can trust him. We’re working on a proj
ect together.’

  I had clenched my teeth, not so much in anger as to prevent myself pointing out, self-effacingly yet firmly, that in the great community of authors, the concept of possession has no meaning. It happened that I was temporarily caught in a trap of obligation; yet I was no more beholden to Pussy McWilliam than Peter Gibson had once been beholden to me. As Maugham points out in Cakes and Ale, the writer is ‘the only free man’.

  If I was more than usually tolerant of my collaborator, it was because he had, true to his word, been busy on my behalf. Through the mysterious chain of communication which stretched from the derelict house where Doug was living to Brian McWilliam’s grannyish residence in south London, the word reached me that my son was prepared to see me, providing our rendezvous was on neutral territory.

  So, six weeks after I had first discovered where he was now living, we met in a brightly lit Tex-Mex bar in Notting Hill Gate. It was a desolate place, decked out in fake saloon-bar pine with lamentable artwork of buffalo, cacti, six-guns and Red Indian headdresses on the wall, and, even though it was early evening when I arrived, it was deserted, apart from one table where a raddled woman gazed blankly ahead of her and smoked a cigarette as her two pale children picked in silence at bowls of French fries in front of them.

  Doug lives by a different clock to the rest of the world and has never knowingly been punctual since he was about twelve but, on this occasion, he arrived a mere ten minutes late, entering through the slatted swing doors like some trainee cowboy. When he saw me at the back of the room, he nodded and made his way over to the table, not with his normal furtive scuttle, but with a swagger that was almost adult.

  ‘Owi?’ He stood hands on hips, as if considering whether to hit me or not.