Doctor Criminale

by Malcolm Bradbury

  So I made my way, the aspiring journo in the age of literary confusion. I did, I think, all the right things. I took a flat in Camden (Islington) in a basement so modest it was actually underneath another basement. I lived off fast-food outlets and bought myself a microwave oven and a mountain bike. I had girl-friends who wanted to take out joint mortgages on Docklands apartments with me; I explained I want to remain a person of temporariness not permanence, journey not arrival. I wrote, but not books (far too monumental). I wrote fragments, in fact I wrote everything: solemn pieces for the Times Literary Supplement, essays on South American fiction for the London Review of Books, lyrics for pop songs, scripts for radio com­mercials. I reviewed and I columnized, picking up titbits about authors that would make your ears crinkle. I interviewed, I opined. I freelanced, I free-styled, I free-loaded, I freebied. I also worked part-time in a winebar in Covent Garden, and sold gossip to New Musical Express. And so I made my way, till the night of the Booker, when my life quite seriously changed.

  By now, back in our mise-en-scène at the Guildhall, the room was full of folk and noise. An MC appeared, gaveiled for silence, and asked us all to proceed into the Banqueting Hall beyond. In a great restive flock the authors round me surged off, herded here and there by their various Fionas. I jostled my way through the elegant diners pushing for the trough to find the table plan, to see what good company had been picked for me in the prime part of the evening. I saw I had not been placed on the top table, where all the places had been assigned to people somewhat better known than myself: an ex-Prime Minister, the leader of the opposition, two Nobel prizewinners, a French new novelist, now very old, and the chairman of thejudges, a former Labour politician rumoured to read books. Nor, for that matter, was I on any of the other tables either. ‘I hope you don’t think they’ll let you eat with the big people,’ said someone at my side, taking the spare glass of champagne from my hand, ‘There’s a press-room at the back where you can eat your sandwiches. If you remembered to bring them.’ I turned, and there was the girl in the thong-tied dress again, cuddling her clipboard and very frankly looking me over.

  ‘Ah, it’s you,’ I said. ‘And it’s also you,’ she said. ‘You know who I am,’ I said, ‘I don’t know who . . .’ ‘I’m Ros,’ said the girl, ‘Short for Diana.’ ‘How did you like the interview?’ I asked. ‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘I was good?’ I asked. ‘You were terrible,’ she said, ‘Worse than Howard Jacobson.’ ‘Come on, nobody at the Booker’s ever been worse than Howard Jacobson,’ I said. ‘They have now,’ she said. ‘Okay, what was wrong with it?’ I asked. ‘You were mean, crappy and selfish,’ said Ros. ‘Well, I’m young,’ I said. ‘I’ll say,’ said Ros, ‘Do you want to come to the scanner and watch it go out?’ ‘Go out?’ I asked, ‘You mean it’s bad but you’re still going to use it?’ ‘I mean it’s so bad we’d be crazy not to use it,’ said Ros. ‘Now look,’ I said, ‘If it’s bad we ought to think about this.’ ‘We have,’ she said, ‘It’s right at the top of the programme. It’s so bad it’s brilliant. You’d love it, at least you would if it weren’t you. Are you coming or not? If so, grab one of those champagne bottles from the waitress, before she takes them away.’

  So Ros and I stepped out of the Guildhall, leaving behind the bright lights and the glitz of the great and the good, and started walking in wind and driving rain through the City of London, its great financial towers, the pride of the economic Eighties, rising high above. We walked through the land of fiscal wizardry, turned down a mean sidestreet, and entered an unmarked green van, parked in shadow at the end of a dirty alley. Above rose the great bank office blocks, where in vast galleries money-shufflers sat before computer screens, scanning the datasphere for those pulses that construct the mad fiction of economic reality. Meantime, in the scanner van down below, we did much the same, sitting before a bank of monitors selecting the images that construct the mad economic reality of fiction. And that was how, sitting in an old van in a dirty alley, I stared at a TV screen and watched the Booker Prize for Fiction, just as I might have done at home. Except at home I would not have had a thong-tied girl squeezed next to me one side, a sound engineer on the other, all of us trying to sit on one chair and drink from the same bottle of champagne.

  Nor would I have seen the pictures the viewers didn’t – glimpses of the gritty real life of your everyday Booker ban­quet. Distinguished diners sat beneath distinguished portraits, scoffing what looked like a distinguished dinner. A cabinet minister yawned in boredom as he listened to the advice of his lady companion. A loose hand slid under a tablecloth, then up a nearby velvet skirt. ‘I suppose you know the win­ner already,’ I said, taken by a sudden cunning journalistic thought. ‘We have to, to get the cameras to position,’ said Ros. ‘Fine, why not tell me, one journo to another,’ I said, ‘Then I can rush back and grab the first interview.’ ‘No way,’ said Ros, ‘Knowledge is power.’ ‘I thought journos liked to help each other,’ I said. ‘The way the countries in the Balkans like to help each other,’ said Ros, ‘You’re kid­ding. News isn’t a sweetheart business. Of course if you were really smart you could work it out from the camera set-up.’

  I looked along the bank of monitors. On one a scatter-haired writer, mouth open and full, stopped short as she stared into a camera that must have seemed to jump out of the beef Wellington. ‘That one,’ I said. ‘No,’ said Ros, as the cam­era panned away towards a waitress tripping over a cable, ‘Five more to go.’ There was a shot of a woman slipping a microphone down between her breasts; ‘Her,’ I said. ‘Germaine Greer getting ready for the studio discussion,’ said Ros, ‘You know your problem? You’re tele-dumb. Pass the bottle.’ ‘This interview,’ I said, ‘If it’s so bad, why not just drop it? Or let’s do it again.’ ‘Would you?’ she asked. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘One journo should always help another.’ ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Ros, ‘And don’t call me a journo, I’m a film-maker.’ ‘Isn’t it the same?’ ‘No,’ said Ros, ‘You write stories, I make art. And don’t think this stuff is my usual work, I’m just here helping a friend. I’m really an independent.’

  ‘I know all about independents,’ I said, ‘My Islington terrace is full of them. They set up little companies with five-pound bank loans and then work up series costing eight million. They send a treatment to Channel 4 and sod-all happens. You see them every night begging drinks down the local pub.’ ‘Those are the wankers,’ said Ros, ‘I prefer the real thing. When I want something to happen, it happens. Oh look, something’s happening.’ And so, onscreen, it was. At the instructions of the Booker chairman, the guests had all suddenly risen as one from their eating, and were heading full speed for the lavatories. ‘Must be five minutes to go,’ said Ros, ‘Are you comfortable?’ ‘Yes, not bad,’ I said. ‘Make the most of it,’ said Ros, ‘You won’t be.’ Soon the guests were resuming their seats, and putting on strange plastic expressions. The writers closed their mouths, the Fionas adjusted their vast hats, the agents hid the bottles of wine, the cabinet ministers sat upright. Suddenly the lighting changed, somewhere a wolf started howling, the screen credits rolled, and then the presenter smiled through the monitor and welcomed our presence at an historic occasion, which, given what odd things history proved it could do lately, was probably true.

  Ros nudged me in the upper thigh. ‘Ready, steady, here he is,’ she said. And there – right in the middle of the main monitor – I was, just like Mrs Dalloway at her party. Except somehow I seemed to be not quite I, but some terrible yet oddly accurate simulacrum. Thanks to modern technology I had become a long green banana, rocking on my heels and talking interminable tosh. My body was transformed, my thoughts rendered outrageous, my manner-gross; nothing was quite as I understood it to be in so-called real life. ‘Well, what did you think?’ asked Ros, when the vision had passed away. ‘It’s a stand-in,’ I said. ‘No, it’s you,’ said Ros. ‘You were right then,’ I said, ‘I was worse than Howard Jacobson.’ More interviews followed: John Mortimer, Ben Elton, Gore Vidal.
I was worse than all of them. Whatever came on over the next half-hour, I was worse than. ‘Why use it?’ I asked, ‘Why not leave it on the cutting-room floor?’ ‘Because tomorrow you’ll be the one thing people remember,’ said Ros, ‘Who was that little prick at the Booker?’ ‘I don’t want to go down in history as the little prick at the Booker,’ I said. ‘Then you shouldn’t have been such a little prick in the first place,’ said Ros kindly.

  Onscreen the greatest night in the life of modern literature continued. There were dramatized extracts from the six chosen novels, all shot in the same children’s sandpit off Shepherd’s Bush Green which, decked out with a beach umbrella or two, easily stood in for Deauville in belle époque 1913. There was a studio discussion with Germaine Greer and others, all of whom I was decidedly worse than. The Chairman of the Booker company rose and introduced the Chairman of the Booker judges. He took the microphone, briefly dismissed the state of the novel (though more effectively than I had), then went on to discuss the works of Tom Paine, the celebrated Thetford staymaker and political radical. This led him to some long reflections on the American War of Independence, on which he was plainly an expert. It was as I sat there, hoping that some crisis would occur that would drive my own contribution into insignificance, that I realized there was deep tension in the scanner. ‘Come on, for Christ’s sake,’ Ros was saying, ‘Only three seconds of this programme is worth anything, and we’re going to miss it.’ ‘Which three seconds?’ I asked. ‘The name of the winner,’ said Ros. ‘Fifty seconds left,’ said the engineer. ‘The silly twat, the silly twat, he’s not going to get it in,’ cried Ros. ‘Say it, say it, you great fat dickhead,’ shouted the crew in the scanner. ‘Somebody kick him in the Tom Paines, gag him, knock him over,’ said Ros feistily into the microphone.

  Suddenly, prodded violently from behind, the Chairman halted, midway through the Battle of Saratoga, and gulped the name of the winning author. The oldest, untidiest and baggiest of the bag ladies rose up bewildered, walked off in the wrong direction, was reprogrammed by her Fiona, and found her way to the platform. The Chairman kissed her rather cautiously and handed her a generous cheque. ‘Turn to camera and smile, dear,’ murmured Ros. The winner turned to camera, gushed copious tears, and thanked her publisher and her mother. ‘Her mother!’ cried Ros, ‘I suppose she’s sitting at home writing next year’s winner.’ ‘There we are,’ said the presenter breathlessly, ‘One more writer twenty thousand pounds the richer. What will she do with the money?’ ‘Buy a motorbike,’ said Ros sourly, ‘Go on, get over there and ask her.’ ‘Out of time,’ said the engineer. ‘And there we have it,’ said the presenter, realizing that the Nine O’Clock News was pressing at her back, ‘Another great day for contemporary fiction.’

  Credits rolled, and Ros banged her fist furiously on the console. ‘Oh God, no interview, and we didn’t even hear her name properly,’ she cried, ‘Did anyone hear her name? Or which book?’ ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, ‘I’m going.’ Ros looked up. ‘Thank you, darling,’ she said, ‘You were the best thing in the whole damned programme. And you were frigging terrible.’ No more television, I thought, as I hurried back to the bright Guildhall through pouring rain, I’ll stick to the real world of books and print. But when I reached the great Banqueting Hall, I discovered a curious sight. The dinner was not over; indeed the entire event had resumed again. Having made the simulacrum, the Booker people were now trying belatedly to create the reality. The meal had restarted, the chairman had risen once more, and was completing his ruminations on the Battle of Saratoga. The winner rose again and, having now perfected her art, reached the podium without difficulty. She accepted another cheque, or the same one a second time, made another speech, thanking yet more of her relatives, and sat down. And now the five losers, faces etched with the misery of a whimsical life which had brought them so near to the summit and then cast them back into the pit of oblivion again, came to the platform. Each was presented with a leatherbound copy of what proved to be their own books; they looked at them in dismay, having presumably read them already.

  Nobody cared; the fuss was all for the winner. I found her at last in a sideroom, being poked at by tape-recorders, and enjoy­ing all the pleasures of sudden fame. Someone asked her what she would do with the winnings; ‘Buy a place in the Seychelles,’ she said. I took out my notebook and pressed nearer, only to find myself blocked by her Fiona, now an arrogant queen. ‘Just a short interview,’ I said. ‘Never,’ said the Fiona, ‘Believe me, as long as there’s breath left in my lovely body you’ll never interview one of my authors again.’ ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘You know,’ said the Fiona darkly. Bewildered, I set off to look for the five losers, hunting a story there. I found them at last in the crypt below, where the after-dinner bar was, soaking their cares away with tumblers of Glenfiddich and Laphroaig. But when I approached them for their comments I got the same reception. No one would talk to me. Literary agents who hours earlier had been ringing me up with hot gossip, publishers who had solicited my ravenous appetite for lunch at Rule’s or Wheeler’s only days before, turned their backs on me.

  Finally the kindest, and smallest, Fiona explained. There was a monitor in the hall,’ she said, ‘We all watched you on TV. No one will speak to you ever again.’ ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘In fact you won’t have a single friend in the whole literary world,’ she said. ‘No one?’ I asked. ‘No one,’ said the Fiona. ‘Oh, well, maybe one,’ said someone beside me. I looked round, and there was Ros again. ‘You see what you did,’ I said to her furiously. ‘What I did?’ asked Ros, ‘What you did. Television doesn’t j create reality, it just reports it.’ ‘Don’t give me that,’ I said, ‘You set me up.’ ‘Not really,’ she said, ‘But there always has to be one shit at the Booker. Books are boring, Francis. You have to add a little drama. Anyway, never mind, they’ll all be round you like flies when they need you again, you’ll see. Come and sluice it away at the Groucho.’

  So that was how I found myself sitting in the back of a long low contract limo, squeezed between Ros and some of her media friends. My cares were heavy, my mountain bike was left forgotten against its lamppost, where I imagine it remains to this day. Of what happened in London’s glitziest, noisiest literary club that night I have no clear memory. There was little to eat but plenty to drink; I gather I drank most of it. Melvyn Bragg, Umberto Eco and Gore Vidal were all seen there, but not by me, or not in a clear way. I got, or so they tell me, into a bitter argument over my TV opinions with a group of feminist publishers who’d apparently been overdosing on assertiveness training. I believed I had acquitted myself well, but others later told me I did very badly. Later still, the moon up high over London town, I rode somewhere else, in another, smaller vehicle. Next I was somehow standing, nearly upright, in someone’s shower. Then I was towelled and dried, and a sensual, disorderly darkness fell over my life. Realities and unrealities strangely merged; as on TV, parts of my body seemed no longer mine but in other hands entirely.

  Then suddenly there was sharp morning light, and I was waking. This is not something I ever do lightly, but it seemed more difficult than usual on this occasion. I was, I found, in a small and ill-curtained bedroom, below the windows of which I could hear some people talking loudly in Bengali. While 1 tried to take this in, some men in metal helmets passed by the window swinging on a long steel girder and gave me a friendly wave. For a while, I hid my head below the duvet and tried to do some quick orientation. Kidnap, hostage-taking and sending young men into prostitution are uncommon in London, but not impossible. My throat was dehydrated. My stomach was knotted. I was buck-naked and my clothes had disappeared. Then the bedroom door opened, and I lifted the covers and peered out to find out who were my captors. There, dressed in an ‘Aloha!’ tee-shirt and cut-off jeans, stood Ros. The moment I saw her, I realized she had not been dressed like this all night.

  She came over, sat on the bed, felt my pulse. She carried a portaphone and a cup of coffee: now she spoke into the one while I drank fr
om the other. When the coffee had opened up my vocal chords, I asked for some bearings, temporal and geographical. It was late, said Ros, bloody late. And I was in her small but perfect terrace house, somewhere east of Bishopsgate, in the Bangladeshi garment district, and close to Liverpool Street station. The Bengali voices were discussing the going rate for distressed leather coats; it was Liverpool Street railway station that the men on the girder were reconstructing, or possibly deconstructing. My underwear and other clothing had been lost the night before in some friendly struggle, but Ros offered to go and find it. While she was away, I grabbed her portaphone and called my Serious Sunday to say that, due to an extraordinary chapter of accidents over which I had no control, I had no Booker copy. My editor explained that this mattered rather less than it might have, since they likewise had no newspaper left to put it in.

  *

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said to Ros when she came back with my knickers, ‘My bloody newspaper’s folded, down the chute, gone bust.’ ‘Brilliant,’ said Ros. ‘How can it be brilliant?’ I asked, ‘Here I am, twenty-six, overhung . . .’ ‘You’re boast­ing,’ she said. ‘I’m not,’ I said, ‘I’m finished. Twenty-six and redundant. You’re looking at a post-Thatcherite cripple.’ ‘So what’s new?’ asked Ros, ‘You knew you’d picked a high-risk profession.’ ‘Right, and how am I supposed to pay my rent?’ I asked, ‘They say I probably won’t even get last month’s paycheque.’ ‘Stay here if you like,’ said Ros, ‘It’s brilliant.’ ‘Do stop saying everything’s brilliant,’ I said, ‘Nothing’s brilliant. I’ve come to the end of a great career.’ ‘Of course it’s brilliant,’ said Ros, ‘Now you can come and work for me.’