by Mal Peet
He could not write volume two of what Minerva had taken to calling ‘The Murdstone Trilogy’. He hadn’t written volume one. Pocket Wellfair had. And of the Greme there had been no further sign. No message of any sort from the little bugger. Presumably because he, Philip, had not found the Amulet of Eneydos. How and where the hell could he have found the damn thing, not even knowing what it looked like? Nowhere in Dark Entropy was it actually described. Its powers were hinted at, obliquely, and Morl’s savage desire for it was repeatedly emphasized; but Pocket had withheld any information about it that might actually be useful. As a literary device, this was cunning. As something of any help to a desperate author, it was about as much use as tits on a fish.
Within a fortnight of getting back to London, Minerva had secured from Gorgon a million-pound advance for Murdstone Two. Philip had come back from a walk and the answerphone had been bleating.
‘Hi, genius. Where are you? Writing? Call me back this minute, OK? And make sure you’re in a sitting position when you do so.’
So he’d called her back and she’d told him. She mistook his cry of terror for one of elation.
‘And the buggers balked at it at first. On the grounds that there wasn’t even a synopsis or anything. A synopsis! Can you imagine?’
‘Yes,’ Philip had said. ‘I mean no.’
But Minerva had clinched the deal by lunching conspicuously at The Ivy with A. J. ‘Razor’ Merkin, the UK CEO of Hanser & Hawk, Gorgon’s main US competitor.
‘And guess what, darling? By the time I got back to the office Gorgon were on the phone, more or less offering to have the cheque couriered over.’
Since then Philip had made five fruitless pilgrimages to the Wringers; two of them at eleven thirty at night and three at four thirty in the afternoon.
On the last occasion he had taken great pains to replicate exactly his behaviour on the day of Pocket Wellfair’s first visitation. He’d dug out the old clothes and shoes that he’d worn and was at the bar of the Gelder’s Rest shortly before one o’clock. He’d eaten one of Denis’s Ploughman’s, as before, minus the pickled onion. Inevitably (but perhaps crucially) the guest beer was no longer Dark Entropy; it was something called Rector’s Old Chap. Philip managed to down several pints of it anyway, so that by a quarter to four he was able to read his Rolex only by closing one eye.
He’d made heavy weather of the hike to the Stones and was in poor shape when he got there. He’d urinated unsteadily, but copiously, on Long Betty, then taken up position slumped against Growly’s Thumb. He had thought that his anxiety might prevent him losing consciousness, but happily it had not. He’d passed out in less than two minutes.
He had been awakened just before six o’clock by a fierce squall of rain that had icy teeth in it. The moor was as bleak as his imagination. In an agony of grief he’d clambered onto the Altar Stone and howled Pocket’s name into the gathering dark. He’d desisted only when he noticed a party of elderly ramblers gazing at him monkishly from beneath their rainproof cowls.
Later, his hangover had turned into the heavy cold that restricted his diet to paracetamol and single malt.
Now the phone trilled again.
‘Hi, c’est moi.’
‘Hello, Binerva.’
‘Philip? Is that you?’
‘Yeth, I thing so.’
‘You sound a touch rough. What’s the matter?’
‘Bid of a cold,’ he said bravely.
‘Oh, poor you. Listen darling, have you Googled yourself this afternoon, by any chance?’
‘Whad? No, I … No.’
‘Good. This will be news then. I had a call just now from Jane Somethingorother. She’s the administrator of the Nutwell Prize. Ring a bell?’
‘Um, yeth. Disdandly. You said someding about it on the blane back.’
‘Indeed I did. Well remembered. Anyway, the shortlist was announced this morning. And you’re on it.’
‘Oh. Good. Thath nice.’
‘Indeed it is. But what Jane Thingy tells me, OK, is that the shortlist is bollocks. The winner has already been decided. And that winner is, ta-ra, Dark Entropy by Philip Murdstone. That’s you, darling, if you need reminding. Congratulations.’
‘Gosh. Well, I doan know whad to say.’
‘The money’s not huge. Thirty grand. Pays for half your new car, I suppose. Almost. But that’s not the point. The point is that the Nutwell is very posh. Prestigious. It’s for the year’s best work of Fantasy Literature. That’s Literature with the capital L, OK? The judging panel is heavies. Oxbridge profs, Newsnight presenters, that kind of thing. Last year, the snooty bastards didn’t award the prize at all, because there wasn’t anything they deemed worthy of it.’
‘Righd,’ Philip said. ‘Thath good, then.’
‘You’ve not lost your talent for understatement, I see. What it means, darling, OK, is that it gives us a broader base for marketing strategy. It’s not just another gold sticker on your covers. It means that the broadsheets will have to take you seriously now. Receptions at Number Ten. Possibly even Number Eleven, seeing as how our overseas sales must’ve wiped out the trade deficit. I’m seriously considering taking on extra staff.’
He had a brief vision of all being well. That this would be enough. Laurels to rest on. A little place on the Croatian coast. Money in a low-yield but safe investment account. A life without laptops. An older but somehow younger version of himself wearing a pale suit strolling down an Adriatic street for an aperitif. A long way from everyone. Enough money in his pocket.
Pocket.
And no Amulet.
A million quid.
And no book. Not so much as a germ or wind-blown spore of one. Not so much as a single brave blind sperm battling against the dark uterine tides towards the unseen egg of one.
Minerva was still talking into his ear, into his headache. ‘Not a word to anyone. OK? The Nutwell people are very strict on this. Jane Wotsit has told me to tell you because you’ll have to think up a nice little acceptance speech, which will have to sound kind of improvised because you didn’t know you’d won because the winner is only announced on the night because otherwise the losers and their people and so on wouldn’t bother to turn up. OK?’
‘When is dith?’
‘The award ceremony? Um, hang on. The twentieth of next month. It’s fancy dress, by the way.’
‘Whad?’
‘Monkey suit. Bow tie and shit. You know.’
‘Binerva …’
‘Fret not. I’ve been on the net, and the nearest proper tailor to you is in Exeter. I’ve made an appointment for you. I’ll email the details.’
A short silence.
‘Philip?’
‘Whad?’
‘How’s Two going? I know I’m not supposed to ask, OK, but …’
‘Well. You know. Sequels … You carnd just forge ahead like the first dime. You have to connect everyding backwards. Condinuity and so forth. I’ve had to make a sord of plan on a big sheed of baber.’
‘Darling, Gorgon will assemble a crack phalanx of editors for that sort of thing. Don’t worry your pretty head too much about it. Just hurl your inspired prose at the screen, sweetie, and we’ll iron out the goblins later.’
‘Gremlins,’ Philip said. ‘Nod goblins.’
‘Whatever. You’re the expert. Right, must dash. A million things to do.’
He flinched at the word.
When she’d gone he stood for a while holding the phone. Then he drank more whisky, which made him cough. He subsided into his armchair. The coughing gradually transmuted into sobbing. Later, he wiped his eyes on his sleeve, got to his feet and went to the window. Instantly, he recoiled from it. The Weird Sisters, Francine and Merilee, were out in the lane again. Merilee or Francine took her thumb out of her mouth and waved shyly.
2
The Nutwell Prize ceremony was a bloody rum do, in Minerva’s considered opinion. Sort of High Table meets Bottom-Feeders. During pre-dinner drinks, she’d experien
ced the utmost difficulty escaping from an Indian academic who had strangely assumed that she would be fascinated by his theories apropos the relationship between the Mahabharata and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. She’d mistaken him for that Asian chap who did stuff for Channel Four. Next, she’d almost made a fool of herself by mishearing the phrase ‘inter-genre discourse’. Then inadvertently she’d found herself in one of those Who’s Shagging Whom (carnally or commercially) seminars, this one chaired by Colin ‘Cruella’ Devine. It was peculiar that the life went out of it when she joined in. She was, after all, the font of all knowledge on that subject. Maybe that was why.
Or maybe it was because she had Philip in tow. ‘In tow’ was the right phrase, actually; she felt like the doughty little steam tug in that painting by Turner, hauling the hulk of a once-glorious man-of-war to the breaker’s yard. It was absolutely terrifying that he was so useless. He was the bloody winner, for Chrissake, and he … well, he was hardly bloody there. God!
She’d been appalled when he stumbled into the Dorchester. It had almost drained her arteries of sangfroid not to scream. He looked like someone on Schindler’s list, not a shortlist. As soon as she’d dragged him into the suite she forced him into a hot bath laced with aromatherapy Crisis Oil. Then she sorted him out a haircut and full facial. Helping him into his new clothes, she realized that he’d lost quite a bit of weight since he’d been measured for them. There was a good deal of slack in the trousers. But at least he now looked merely mad, rather than actually homeless. Which was OK, since at least half the people here were clearly nutters.
But where oh where was the Murdstone of yesteryear, the Murdstone of Late Review, of Hay-on-Wye, of New York, of Los Angeles? How had he been replaced by this person who looked like he was wearing someone else’s dentures?
She glanced sideways at him over her champagne. Watched him nodding vacantly in response to the intense babble issuing from the mouth of Perdita Holmes. She wanted to slap his face, scream at him, ‘This tedious bitch is the Head Buyer of MetroBooks, so show her some sodding respect!’
She drained her glass, then signalled for a boy in a black and gold waistcoat to bring her another.
She’d been in denial. Oh, yes. And it wouldn’t do. She took a deep breath (oh for a ciggie!) and let the words form, like a row of bloody tombstones, in her head:
Philip couldn’t write what everyone was calling Murdstone 2. (Let alone Murdstone 3.)
He couldn’t do it.
Dark Entropy had been a glorious flash in the pan.
He’d passed across the sky like that Bill Haley Bop comet or whatever it was called and disappeared.
A One-Hit Wonder.
A huge global Number One, and that was it.
All over.
Nothing wrong with that in itself, of course. Loads of people had retired on less. Much less. She knew professionally several people who’d lived for years on a Number Two.
It wasn’t his fault. It was hers. She should have read him. The person, not the wretched book. Should have said to Gorgon, ‘OK, you’ve got a huge bestseller, thirty-seven foreign language deals, the movie, the spin-off marketing, all of it, but that’s it. This writer is now a desiccated bloody locust, OK, and there’s nothing else to suck out of him. Go on to the next thing.’
But she hadn’t said that. Because, apart from anything else, Minerva Cinch didn’t represent flash-in-the-pan clients.
And she didn’t have the next thing.
The drink came. Another admirer had approached Philip. She clocked his swivel-eyed panic.
There were two alternatives, neither of them ideal.
She could take him away. Take his arm and lead him along Park Lane to the pedestrian subway, then into the darkness of Hyde Park. There, by the Joy of Life Fountain, she would kiss him – tongue in, if she could bear it – thank him for everything, pull a small pearl-handled revolver from her handbag and shoot his brains out of the back of his head. She had nothing, in principle, against mercy-killing and the sound of the traffic would drown the shot. The countervailing arguments were that she didn’t have a gun in her handbag, and that, given the weather and what she was wearing, she’d freeze her tits off before they were halfway there.
Or, when Philip was announced as the winner, help him to his feet, aim him at the stage (if this snootfest featured anything as vulgar as a stage), fake a period cramp and hasten unto the nearest exit. Home to Notting Hill for clothes, the EuroStar to Paris before midnight, the French cottage by dawn, rip the phone line out of the wall. A year later, come back and try to reconstruct her credibility.
Anything, really, rather than have to sit there watching Philip fail to make a speech, to watch him stand there in his droopy cummerbund like a wet firework and be displayed as the personification of Failed Second Novelist in a modern morality play. Not even a play. A mime. A sodding tableau.
There were – had to be – other possibilities; but before she could think of them a person wearing long white hair and a cloak appeared from somewhere and struck a gong. Almost simultaneously, the doors to the Banqueting Suite were opened inwards and she and her neurasthenic client were swept towards their ghastly destiny.
They found themselves seated at one of the six tables closest to – yes, there was one, with a lectern in front of blue curtains – the stage. Three of the other tables featured a doomed shortlisted writer. They all knew. She could tell at a glance. More than a glance, actually; she met and relished the bitter gaze of her arch-rival, Bronwyn Yronwode of Rawnsley and Yronwode, two of whose clients were here as losers.
The dinner was, considering the occasion, less than fantastic. Minerva drank recklessly, hopelessly. She and Philip shared their table with four others: a terribly anxious aristocratic girl called Jonnie from Gorgon PR; Gloria Rowsel from the BBC, who looked, and possibly was, pregnant; someone from Amazon, whom she should have schmoozed but couldn’t be arsed; and one of the judges, the Ikea Professor of Utopian Studies at the University of Gateshead, who spent most of the meal staring with pessimistic lust at Minerva’s bosom.
Had it not been for Jonnie, who suffered from logorrhoea, and Gloria, who held the world record for name-dropping (thirty-two in under four minutes), there would have been no conversation at all. The only intelligent thing Philip could manage was ‘Yes’, when the Utopian asked if he wanted the salt. He prodded and dismembered his Coq au Cidre like a clueless haruspex.
When, at the end of the meal, they were offered port or brandy Minerva demanded both and poured them into the same glass. She draped one arm over the back of her chair and gazed about her, but mostly at Bronwyn Yronwode, with a devil-may-care expression on her face. Then the stage was lit up, and she prepared herself for the worst.
In accordance with the tradition that governs these events, a great deal of time was taken up by people whose only function was to introduce the next person who would introduce the next. Eventually, the verbal torch was passed to the person who really mattered.
It was astonishing that this was, apparently, a female impersonator. Minerva studied him/her with one eye closed and then the other; either way, she beheld a lantern-jawed individual in a black wig and a voluminous evening gown. A muttered consultation with Jonnie rendered the information that this was, actually, the Chairperson of the Judging Panel. Whose name was Terri Paragus, Head of the Department of Enigmatical Hermeneutics at Cambridge, also the world’s leading authority on cabbalistic languages and the editor of RIM, a quarterly devoted to Religion, Imagination and Magic.
Doctor Paragus spoke for several minutes in a strangely modulating voice that resembled the upper register of an oboe. Other than the titles of the four shortlisted books and their authors, Minerva understood scarcely a word of what she said. Once or twice the Utopian professor responded to a phrase with a short snort of bitter appreciation. When the speech and its polite applause were over, four black-clad persons – three men and a woman – trooped onto the stage, each carrying a book. Minerva was sq
uiffily baffled; she thought for a moment or two that some sort of hideously sadistic joke had been played, and that these were the real shortlisted writers. But no; they were, it turned out, actors. Who now commenced to read extracts from the competing novels, beginning with Aaron Ashworth’s Blood Bankers. The extract from Dark Entropy was the third reading. The guy’s Pocket Wellfair voice was far superior to Philip’s (which she had always found a bit embarrassing, to be honest). It was breathy, light, fast; and the occasional coarseness of the vocabulary seemed entirely natural, with none of the nudge-nudge yokelism that the author himself too frequently indulged in.
When the fourth reading (from Melanie Zubranski’s Reflections in a Griffon’s Eye) was over there was protracted applause. The actors (all second-stringers from the RSC, so a bit of budget had been saved there) trooped off, and Doctor Paragus re-approached the rostrum.
Somewhat matter-of-factly she said, ‘It is now my great pleasure to announce that the winner of this year’s Nutwell Prize for Literary Fantasy is Philip Murdstone, for Dark Entropy.’
Cacophony ensued. Manual applause; vocal applause, led by Gorgon’s strategically placed whoopers and whistlers; one or two boos (Minerva sought to locate their sources, scowling); and a specially commissioned atonal fanfare that blared from hitherto unsuspected speakers. A spotlight played over the congregation and came to rest on their table.
‘Get up there, you bastard,’ smiling Minerva said into his ear.
He stood, to her surprise. She calculated the distance between her and the emergency exit.
Philip walked to the stage like someone in another person’s dream, and when he reached it he halted, apparently baffled, gazing at Doctor Paragus’s stout knees. After a moment or two she managed to draw his attention to the steps, which he mounted robotically. The applause, which had faltered, now swelled. Philip crossed the stage and, to Minerva’s relief, managed to place his hand in Paragus’s outstretched and outsized paw. A long scintillation of camera flash, and the applause died away.
