by John Niven
The creative writing MA had convinced me I wanted to do something literary with myself, but I was thoroughly terrified by the idea of attempting a novel. Three or four hundred pages? Treading in the footsteps of Joyce, Nabokov and Proust? The screenplay, on the other hand, could be just a hundred or so pages long. With a lot of indented dialogue. And you were treading in the footsteps of, who exactly? Joe Eszterhas? Or the guy who wrote Earth Girls are Easy? This seemed less intimidating.
Like many fools before me, I was wrong, of course. Over the last five years, inspired by a stack of screenwriting manuals, I had attempted three scripts, all abandoned somewhere between the first and second drafts. There had been the sci-fi western: a reimagining of Rio Bravo set on the hostile moon of a remote planet. (‘Take the essential elements of a classic movie and recast it in a strikingly different setting.’) There was the ‘creature feature’, a horror about huge prehistoric bugs discovered in a deep, abandoned mineshaft. (‘Good low-budget horror ideas are always very marketable.’) Then there had been the road trip idea about two old college buddies trying to track down their former girlfriends. (‘Bromances’ seemed to be hot.) What I learned over the course of these disasters was that the screenplay was, in fact, very difficult to write. That the form depended on economy, compression and, most of all, like all forms of fiction, upon the vital throb of energy brought only by injecting the writer’s own experience onto the page.
I was a good student in many ways. For years I applied all of the stuff I learned in writing class. I set aside a specific writing time each day to work. (‘The muse is more likely to show up if she knows where you’re going to be every day,’ Stephen King said.) I understood the importance of William Goldman’s aphorism that ‘storytelling is structure’. I got Syd Field’s ‘Know Your Ending!’ maxim. Most of all I truly felt David Mamet’s observation that artists are driven to ‘lessen the burden of the unbearable disparity between their conscious and unconscious minds, and so achieve peace’. But this was where I came up short.
For I found only a void in the place where I needed to speak from. Well, not a void exactly, since it wasn’t empty. Rather it was a locked vault, my own basement scene.
I reread the page, deleted most of it, and decided to go in to town for lunch.
14
ALARBUS, SASKATCHEWAN – POP 12,000 – lay six miles south of us, towards Regina. A prosperous town, most of its main street, Quintus Avenue, was lined with bookshops and antique stores, designer boutiques, a Starbucks, a high-end deli where we’d shop for olives and prosciutto, Clarke’s the butcher’s and Hermann’s the stationer’s. There was a handful of impressive turn-of-the-century buildings like the bank (now the Grange, a luxury hotel with a steak and seafood restaurant), the old post office and the courthouse.
I went into Hermann’s and bought some printer paper and ink cartridges. I went into Starbucks, bought a latte and read the newspaper, the snow falling lightly but constantly now. Shoppers moved through the flakes, coming out of Clarke’s with parcels of meat wrapped in paper, browsing in the windows of the antique stores at cherrywood desks and Tiffany lamps. A young couple went by, laughing, the guy wearing a long scarf that was wrapped around both their necks. Cars reversed out and moved off carefully, almost as if they were trembling into motion, coltishly finding their legs in the slush and ice.
I thought about the evening meal. Duck breasts with wild rice and spinach. I could make a sauce by deglazing the pan with a little red wine. Maybe flambé it to finish off – Walt loved it when I did that stuff. Or should I pop into the butcher’s and get some bacon or pancetta to wrap the duck in? Thinking about cooking sharpened my appetite – it was after one and I hadn’t eaten since those pancakes. Across the street I could see the red-and-blue neon sign that said ‘DORIAN’S BAR&GRILL’ and, below it, in white, the words ‘Home Cooking’.
I hung my coat on the rack and stomped the snow off my boots, already smelling something good. Dorian’s was a long, low-ceilinged room with a circular mahogany bar, forty-odd feet in diameter, cutting the room in half. The front part was tables surrounded by fake red leather banquettes. Stained-glass mosaic lampshades hung down over the banquettes, casting greenish pools of light. The back part was a small dance floor with a little stage, a couple of pool tables on the dance floor now, but they moved them away when they had bands on at the weekend. ‘Hey, Donnie,’ Ben said from behind the brass pumps, pouring a beer as I approached. ‘Be right with you.’ He took the beer down the bar to a group of regulars who were watching the hockey. I recognised a couple and nodded hello. ‘What’ll it be?’ Ben said, coming back up the bar, wiping his hands on his apron. Ben was in his late sixties and he and his wife Kim had run this place for over thirty years now. ‘Since Hitler was a corporal,’ he liked to say. Ben had crinkly frost-white hair and wore wire-rimmed glasses. He gave off a kindly, professorial air.
‘What’s the special?’
‘Venison stew. Kim’s been simmering five pounds of it in red wine since breakfast.’
‘Sold. And, uh . . .’ I hesitated, looking at the sodas and juices racked in their chiller. Then back to the brass pumps. ‘A beer please, Ben.’
As he worked the tap, without looking up, Ben said, ‘We heard about your dog. Damn shame.’
‘Yeah. It’s been rough on Walt.’
‘I’ll bet. Wolves right?’
‘That’s what it looks like.’
‘Yeah, we had ’em in our trash cans a few times. Damn nuisance. Here you go . . .’ He handed me the cold, beaded glass. ‘Go grab a table if you like, Donnie. I’ll bring your food over.’
I rarely drank at lunchtime and just two guilty sips of the beer elevated my blood and had me looking out at snowy Quintus Avenue in a rosy, Christmas light. Maybe the basement Welles finds the laptop in has some sort of generator that’s kept running? Or maybe I don’t even need to explain it that thoroughly. Will the audience really question the scene? Maybe it’s what Jonathan Demme calls a ‘refrigerator moment’. The kind of thing that people watch and then, maybe, a few hours later, when they’re at home, opening the fridge to get a soda or something, they say to themselves: ‘Hang on a minute, how did . . . ?’ So the laptop just happens to have a tiny charge left in it. So what? I began to feel better about the scene, about the whole premise. Maybe it could work. His spirits soared, like a drunkard’s, I thought, remembering a line from Plato, or maybe Socrates, that I often thought of when a couple of drinks got me thinking like I imagined a writer thought.
Sammy, a Saskatchewan blueblood, a veteran of boards, charities and committees, had, to some degree, viewed me as a project. Something to nurture, develop and change. The smoking went first. Non-negotiable. Then the drinking was moderated. I came from a place where everyone drank to excess. Sammy came from a place where a third drink was often considered bad form. Drinks were sipped. A glass of wine, maybe two, would span the entire meal. I wasn’t, by my reckoning, a heavy drinker, but in the years I’d been on my own I’d developed a routine; the wine with cooking the evening meal, the bottle often finished by the time the meal was ready, opening the second and always finishing it before bed. It helped with the anxiety, the ever-creeping sense of dread around dusk. To Sammy, opening a second bottle of wine constituted a binge. Now I’d sip Diet Coke or sparkling spring water while I cooked, pouring the wine only when we sat down to eat, sometimes allowing myself a second glass. Very rarely, if Sammy was busy and I was clearing up and loading the dishwasher alone, I’d pour myself a third.
I didn’t think that I resented any of this. It felt like I succumbed willingly to her programme of improvement. But now and then, when that second glass of wine had worked its way down, setting off an empowering, reckless glow, I’d have the urge to drag the Scotch bottle out of the cupboard and sit drinking it right in front of her. When we blame our genes we are really blaming ourselves. But, sometimes, it really was as if I could feel my genes rearing up, feel the DNA flexing in coils inside me and saying ‘thi
s is what we want’.
There had been one or two flashpoints, moments of defiance over the ten years we’d been together. One night I went out with some of the guys from the paper, a few of the subs, some of the other writers, the idea being dinner and home at a reasonable hour. We’d ended up getting drunk in a bar in Regina. Someone had offered me a cigarette and I’d taken it. It had lit a trail of happiness so deep inside of me that I’d wound up smoking a whole pack, coming home in the early hours staggering and reeking of tobacco. Sammy’s mood had lasted three days. Three days of near-silent meals, of watching TV in separate rooms after Walt had gone to bed. Of Sammy sleeping as far over on her side of the bed as was possible without toppling onto the floor. On the third night I’d apologised and promised her it would never happen again and things gradually returned to normal.
Then there had been that time in the late spring one year. With the warm weather on the way I’d been down in the pool house and workshop one evening, straightening things out, preparing for the summer, digging out the croquet set. Sammy and Walt were out. I’d been rooting on a high shelf when, inside a toolbox belonging to Danny the gardener, I’d found a half-pint of Canadian Club and a pack of Lucky Strikes, a book of matches tucked into the cellophane of the pack. On a mad impulse I poured a big slug of the whisky into a plastic cup. I knocked half of it back, lit one of the Luckies and sat back on the pine bench in the changing room, feeling the warm, amber burn, the heavenly tang of the nicotine as I watched the dusk gathering over the garden. The smoke caught in brilliant skeins in the last shafts of light streaming through the dusty windows. I poured another, lit another, and lay there for a while until nerves overtook me and I aired the room out before running up the garden to the house, where I showered, changed, doused myself in aftershave and managed to brush my teeth three times before Sammy and Walt came home. ‘You smell nice, Daddy,’ Walt had said.
The perfect crime.
‘Here you go,’ Ben said suddenly, from nowhere, snapping me out of it. ‘Just like Momma used to make.’ He set the bowl in front of me, along with a little wire basket containing condiments and cutlery. ‘You need anything else?’
‘No, I’m good, thanks, Ben.’
‘Enjoy.’
The stew was thick, a deep reddish brown, with nubs of white potato and green peas floating in among the tender deer meat. Hot steam rising and warming my face. Like Momma used to make. I tried to picture my mother dicing carrot, celery, onion and bacon to make a mirepoix, pouring a bottle of red wine into five pounds of venison, tasting and seasoning the sauce as it simmered, reducing, and I nearly laughed out loud right there in the quiet bar. No. There was no Proustian rush here for me. The food of my childhood, of provincial Scotland in the 1970s and early 80s: Findus Crispy Pancakes and tinned spaghetti hoops. Mince and tatties and Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Birds Eye Potato Waffles – ‘they’re waffly versatile’ – and Super Noodles. Trying to picture my mother cooking something like this was ludicrous, beyond imagining. Like trying to picture a TV super-chef reverently working a can opener around the lid of a tinned steak pie.
I laughed.
15
BANNY’S HOME LIFE made mine look like the Waltons. He was one of the very few kids whose parents were divorced back then. He seemed to come and go between his mum’s and his dad’s, staying with one until they’d had enough, or it became inconvenient for them, and then he’d get punted back to the other, his brown Adidas bag with its black felt-tip graffiti (‘Mods’ ‘1690’) slung over his shoulder, walking his swaggering walk, spitting on the ground every ten steps. My home life was sterile and loveless – but there was usually a meal on the table at a regular time, a notional bedtime to be enforced. My clothes got washed. Banny lived on fish and pizza suppers and takeaways from the Chinky. Sometimes, he didn’t smell too good.
His parents’ divorce was never mentioned. One of the times I saw him go most mental, most berserk, was when Adam Adrian called him a ‘bastard’ in an argument. ‘Bastard’ wasn’t the worst thing any of us said to each other, but it was out of the ordinary. In our parlance, in our time and place, ‘bastard’ was something you said if you hurt yourself (‘Agh! Bastard!’) or if, say, you were aiming an airgun at a plump seagull, or a chattering starling, and missed. ‘Ya bastard, ye!’ might be what you said as you watched it flap away. ‘Bastard’ as a direct insult was rare. ‘Prick’, ‘fanny’, ‘bawbag’, ‘cunt’, ‘knob’, ‘tool’. These were the things we called each other. ‘Daft bastard’ was used when someone was being slow or thick. But it wasn’t ‘daft bastard’ Adam used that break time, round the back at the bins, passing the smouldering Regals back and forth. I can’t remember what the disagreement was about but Adam turned away from Banny and said, venomously, ‘Ya fucking bastard, ye.’
‘Whit did you fucking call me?’ Banny said as people took a step back. You could see it on Banny’s face; Adam was implying that Banny was a real bastard because his parents weren’t married. A few minutes later, his nose burst open, his front teeth loose, the just-visible imprint of a Doc Marten sole on his cheek, Adam took it back.
Banny’s parents were young. His mum ‘up the duff’ at fifteen, married just after her sixteenth birthday, the cheap wedding dress swollen with Banny. She’d have been twenty-eight when I met Banny in first year, his dad maybe a year older. Still being in their twenties they did things my parents never did: music blared loudly in their homes late into the night. There were fights and arguments with their neighbours. Parties every weekend. Especially at his dad’s flat, where a group of his dad’s mates pretty much lived from Friday night until the early hours of Monday morning.
His mum was worse in a way. She’d go off for the night, staying with friends, going to parties, leaving Banny in charge of his little sister, who was eleven. This meant me and Tommy could come and stay over. When you came in the front door you noticed the smell first; damp, like wet digestive biscuits. The carpet was worn down to the shiny underlay in three separate paths: one leading into the kitchen, one to the living room, and one up the stairs. The sheets and blankets on Banny’s bed (Tommy and I shared it, he slept in his mum’s) were tattered, thin and damp. The house was cold too, even in springtime. There was no central heating, the only warmth coming from three portable paraffin heaters: two downstairs and one in his mum’s bedroom. The first time I stayed the night Banny asked me if I wanted a hot-water bottle. He returned with an Alpine Red Kola bottle filled with boiling water, the glass so hot it couldn’t be held anywhere near your bare legs. Tommy and I acknowledged to each other that Banny’s house was quite ‘bugsy’, but, of course, this was never voiced in public.
Banny’s mum had a video recorder – one of the first people we knew to own such a thing – and a neighbour, a thin, frail woman called Auld Joan, who would buy your drink, your ‘cairry-oot’, from the off-licence: a half-bottle of Smirnoff and six green cans of Kestrel lager between the three of us. After a couple of the vodkas mixed with cola or lemonade and a can of the thin, bitter lager, the house seemed warmer and brighter as we settled in to watch I Spit on Your Grave, The Boogeyman, The Burning, or a porno borrowed from Banny’s dad, the three of us laughing and joking except for those moments during the porn films when it would get very quiet in the room. Intense. You’d be conscious of the sound of your own breathing, the pulse in your groin. (All these details – the unsupervised teenagers, the drink, the violent and pornographic videos – would be pored over later, at the trial.)
Unlike his mum, who would want rid of us when she was having a ‘night with the girls’, Banny’s dad didn’t seem to mind having us around. We called him ‘Jim’, not Mr Bannerman, the only one of our friends’ parents who allowed this. By the time we were thirteen, we were allowed to sit in on some of Jim’s parties, allowed to take a few cans from the crates on the kitchen floor, allowed to watch the pornos that played endlessly on the living-room TV. There would sometimes be girls at these parties too, but often it would just be a big gang of
lads, plus me, Banny and Tommy.
One night we added a half-bottle of Whyte & Mackay to the few cans we were allowed and got drunk. Steaming. I remember stumbling down the hallway looking for the toilet – looking to be sick, ‘Antmusic’ by Adam and the Ants coming from the living room, blaring over the roar of conversation, the laughter, the groans from the porno film – when I saw Banny coming out of a bedroom. His eyes were wet, sharp-ringed and fixed straight ahead, and he didn’t look at me. As I hurried into the bathroom, one hand clamped over my mouth, the Scotch twisting within me, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, two figures in the darkened bedroom Banny had emerged from. It was glimpsed very briefly as I lurched from the gloom of the hallway into the glaring bathroom, but I was sure one of them was Banny’s dad and that what they were doing was straightening up.
Tucking in shirts. Tightening belts.
I never mentioned it to anyone. I came close once, a few weeks later, when Tommy and I spent a rare afternoon alone together, walking down to the puggies. Banny had the flu. We were talking about how hard it was to pee when you had a hard-on.
‘Aye, man,’ Tommy said. ‘Me and Banny were trying tae do that once, up the woods. The mad bastard, he . . .’ Tommy trailed off.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. Ah cannae mind.’
A moment passed. A few steps. Tommy spat on the pavement.
‘Tommy, mind at that party at Banny’s dad’s a couple o’ weeks back? I –’ Before I could go on Tommy pointed excitedly to the back doorstep of a house.
‘Check it oot, man – there’s some ginger bottles lying there! Curries an aw! Two bob a pop!’
And he took off towards the glittering loot.
There was something else too. Something I never even attempted to bring up with Tommy. With anyone.
The camping trip.
The previous August, the last week of the summer holidays, four of us had gone camping. Me, Banny, Tommy and Alec Hardy. Me and Tommy and Alec had all told our parents we were sleeping over at each other’s houses. Banny didn’t tell his mum or dad anything. They didn’t give a fuck. Alec’s folks were into camping and he smuggled their two canvas two-man tents out of the garage, along with the wee gas stove, a couple of battered saucepans and a few chipped enamel plates and mugs. Everyone raided the backs of their mums’ cupboards for provisions: tins of beans, spaghetti hoops and a few heels of bread. Banny got his mum’s mate to buy the carry-out: eight cans of Bass Special and a half-bottle of vodka.
