The Alternative Hero

by Tim Thornton

  Alan, my editor

  [From the Sunday Times Magazine, Sunday, 4 May 2025.]

  A Life in the Day of GAVIN SMITH

  Gavin Smith, 32, has been an inventor since the age of 4. In 2015 he became the youngest scientist selected by NASA to work on the Martian element Quartaneum, which led to the invention of the Universal Statistics Engine (USE) in 2017. He lives in Cambridgeshire with his dog, Ivan.

  Ivan wakes me up by licking my face at around 6 a.m. He’s been a lot happier since we moved out of London, as have I—the media attention was starting to get on our tits. I make some toast for Ivan (with butter and honey, spoilt son of a bitch, quite literally, ha ha) but just a coffee for me. I’ve normally got a raging hangover, so I can’t think about eating anything until I’ve had my oxygen hit. I might also plug in for some saline if I’m feeling extra rough. Then I check my emails: the usual boring crap, although there might be something from one of my collaborators in the States. I choose the people I work with extremely carefully—especially since the USE was stolen.

  I take Ivan for a quick walk and then it’s time to start working. I mainly work in a little back room, just as I’ve always done. It’s cheaper than renting a lab, and it means I don’t have to travel or talk to anyone, unless I really want to. Ivan’s all the company I need. I’ve had better conversations with him than with any human being.

  People ask me why I started to invent things, and the answer is simple: I wanted to perform a certain task, so I invented the tool I needed to do it. For some reason this came naturally to me. The first thing I invented was an intruder alarm for my bedroom when I was four years old. I made it out of a couple of shoelaces and my sister’s old mobile phone. I did it so that my mother would stop going in there and wrecking the bloody place with her so-called “tidying.”

  At around midday I stop and go to the pub to have something to eat. The Prince Albert round the corner, usually—Ivan’s allowed in, the landlord is bearable and the regulars leave me alone. I might read the paper if I’m bored, not because I want to know what’s going on in the world, but because I find it so hilarious how stupid people are. A newspaper to me is just like one big joke book.

  I have a few pints and then it’s back to my room. Sometimes I listen to music while I work, depending on how menial my current task is. I’m not really fond of modern music—I’m one of those people who reckon that nothing good’s been recorded since about 2007.

  I’ve been working on the same invention since I was 18. Everything I’ve invented in the meantime has been accidental—or because I needed the money. That’s why I invented the USE. I never had any personal interest in it, but I knew it would be lucrative. Which of course it has been—although not for me.

  I’ll probably crack open the first beer at about three, but I usually carry on working until at least six o’clock, when my mind starts to wander and Ivan begins to get restless. That’s when he gets his long walk—perhaps along the disused railway line and across one of the smaller fens, or sometimes just along the river. Ivan doesn’t care, there are always new pieces of shit to smell and birds to hassle. Then I grab a takeaway from somewhere and head home.

  Most of my evenings are spent drinking and flinging stuff around the house for Ivan to chase. Why do I drink so much? Because it helps me forget that I’m human, and that I exist in 2025. That’s why I’m trying to build a time machine. One day I’ll finish it and fuck off to another dimension, where I’ll stay. If those cunts hadn’t stolen the USE I’d have enough money to build it by now, but I don’t care—I’ll do it eventually.

  I pass out at around midnight. Hopefully I’ll have managed to get myself into bed by then, but it’s not unusual for me to wake up anywhere in the house—sometimes even the garden. It doesn’t matter, I sleep anywhere. I never dream.

  Alan does his best sceptical belch-scoff, casts the sheaf of papers aside and takes a sip of his organic coffee.

  “What do you think?” I ask.

  “What do I think?”

  “No,” I reply, rolling my eyes. “All the other people I’m currently talking to.”

  “I don’t know?” he shrugs.

  “Is that a question or a statement?”

  “Both, I guess. I mean, I’m not really sure what you want me to say, Clive. You know I never read, for a start.”

  “Sure, but that doesn’t matter. Did you enjoy it?”

  “Um … yeah?”

  “What did you think of the character?”

  “Um …”

  He looks frantically around the café, as if he’s going to see the word he’s looking for emblazoned on one of the posters. Then he gives up and takes a bite of his vegan brownie.

  “Did you like him?”

  “Er … he’s a bit … um … odd.”

  “Odd, yes.” I nod. Adjective. Houston, we have an adjective. I pop the last piece of free-range garlic-and-birdseed flapjack into my mouth and sit back, hoping for further commentary. Instead, he fiddles with his tie and looks at his watch.

  “Gotta go in a sec.”

  “Okay … but did anything else strike you? I mean, did you think it was … you know … funny?”

  “Yeah, it was funny.”

  Christ on a bike.

  “Okay—well, thanks for all of that, Alan. This is what I’m going to show him when he appears anyway. It should be enough, I guess.”

  “Enough … yeah, I s’pose.”

  Amazing how such a high-flying, overachieving entrepreneur can be so alarmingly useless sometimes. He stands to leave, then sighs.

  “Sorry I haven’t been much help, man. I’m finding it all a bit strange, really.”

  “Strange?”

  He frowns.

  “Clive, you’re about to meet our biggest teenage musical hero for coffee, pretend you don’t know who he really is while you show him highlights from a book you haven’t written, after being warned by his bodyguards about your stalking, which you’re also going to pretend hasn’t happened.”

  I can’t resist raising my eyes in mock astonishment.

  “And what, may I ask, is so strange about that?”

  “Nutter,” Alan concludes, striding off.

  “Vorsprung Durch Peanut,” I shout after him.

  “Up yours.”

  As he vanishes through the door I grab my handiwork for a final study. But half a minute later, he is back.

  “Hey, man, I’ve just thought of something.”

  “What?”

  “Are you gonna give him this stuff to keep?”

  “Might do. Dunno.”

  “There’s no copyright notice on there.”

  “Eh?”

  “You can’t give it to him unless it’s got a copyright notice. He might try to nick it.”

  “Oh, I don’t really think that he …”

  “Clive, at least follow this one piece of advice on a subject I do know something about,” he instructs, taking a pen from his bag. “Just write ‘copyright, two thousand and seven, Clive Beresford.’”

  “Okay, I will.”

  “Well, do it now,” he commands, pushing his Biro at me.

  “Uh, I’ll do it when you’ve gone.”

  “Why? He’ll be here any minute.”

  “Uh, I need the loo.”

  “Well, fuck it, don’t bother,” he gruffs, stomping off again. “If your stuff gets pinched I don’t give a toss.”

  I wait until he’s out of sight, fish my own pen out of my pocket and quickly scrawl “Copyright © 2007 Alan Potter” on each of the pages.

  Lance Webster—sorry, fuck—Geoff Webster slurps his apple-and-ginger herbal tea and carefully reads my paltry creation. I’m trying not to watch him, but it’s nigh-on impossible. Particularly because (by accident, he alleges) I have nothing of his to read. He’s had a haircut since we last met, and he’s wearing black-rimmed reading glasses and a dark grey polo-necked sweater. None of which helps to dispel the unsettling realisation that he looks slightly like Matthew Br
oderick. Claiming to have eaten nothing today (it’s about quarter past three), he’s ordered the vegetarian all-day breakfast (organic duck eggs, dolphin-friendly mushrooms, plywood and nutmeg sausage), which hasn’t yet arrived, and toast, which has. He clearly knows the place, not needing to look at the menu, addressing the female proprietor (perhaps of Dutch origin?) as “Marzy.”

  “This is seriously good stuff,” he frowns.

  “Thanks,” I mumble, assuming he’s talking about my writing and not his toast.

  “You immediately get a sense of the character.”

  “I’m glad about that.”

  He reads on. I sip my third coffee—which is starting to make me feel sick—and wait for him to finish, but once he does (he reads the “I never dream” bit out loud, with a laugh) he shuffles the papers and starts all over again. When he reaches the second page he adjusts his seating position and kicks his legs out so they rest heavily against mine. I freeze, then cough, and he looks up.

  “That line ‘A newspaper to me is just like one big joke book’ is awesome,” he comments, smiling. “Funny thing is, I actually know people like that.” Then his head goes back down and he continues reading. There’s nothing frivolous or ambiguous in the way he spoke, so I move my legs away from his and try to forget about it.

  Then his breakfast arrives. To my carnivorous eyes it looks as appetising as a plate of wooden clothes pegs, a load of fibre in search of a hefty percentage of obliging porker, but Webster is close to ecstasy. I have more empathy with the large splattering of ketchup he administers, and things really start to look more like Christmas when he generously covers his toast with butter and asks the waitress for a black coffee. Suddenly Lance is back again.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” he grins, tucking in. “Had a really late one last night. I’ve got a friend in New Zealand and we were Skype-ing ’til about four, then I had these remixes to finish off.”

  “Remixes?” I enquire, treading carefully.

  “Yeah, I’ve got a little studio in the flat. I do a bit of stuff for people, radio edits and so on.”

  Strange. I didn’t know that. I wonder what name he uses?

  “Never really lost that whole musician’s nocturnal-timetable thing … You an early riser?”

  I give him a brief but nonetheless uninteresting description of my sleeping habits while he continues to shovel nosh into his mouth, and then, astonishingly, his legs come careering back over to my side of the table again, booting mine out of the way. I pause midsentence and frown at him. His eyes rise above his glasses from a cruelty-free tomato.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “Um … yeah,” I murmur, shrug and continue. Amazing. I honestly don’t think he’s aware of it.

  We chatter on about this and that while he puts away his breakfast. The fact that he’s looking about as different as it’s possible to look from the long-haired alternative rock star I used to worship is helping me immensely to maintain my composure, but that doesn’t stop it from being pretty damn odd. In a way, we’re both pretending we know each other more than we do, while at the same time I’m pretending I know him less than I do. If you follow. Now I know what one of those double agents feels like. I’m also getting increasingly cross that he didn’t bring any of his writing with him, for it means the discussion is focused almost entirely on me, which is at best boring, at worst damn difficult.

  “Were you always good at writing, then?”

  “Um, well … English was my best subject at school.”

  “But did you try to get stuff published? Like short stories in magazines, or anything like that?”

  “Um … not exactly. I really kept stuff to myself.”

  He nods vigorously.

  “Confidence issues. Yeah, I had that. Never thought anyone would care about my silly little tales when there was other shit going on in the world.”

  “But … the um … with your music thing. I mean, you’d’ve had to …”

  He makes a face like he’s just sat on a drawing pin.

  “Yeah, but that’s different. So, did you carry on writing through your twenties?”

  And that’s how the afternoon proceeds. He’s delighted to hear about me, and relatively comfortable talking about himself in the strict context of writing these “funny stories” (one of a few excessively quaint phrases he employs), but all my tentative turns down the musical avenue end abruptly in a series of cul-de-sacs. After a while I stop bothering and just try to keep him talking about anything, in the hope some nuggets will drop out.

  “What made you think of having characters with superpowers?”

  “They’re not really superpowers,” he states. “It’s one particular power, telekinesis.”

  “Why that?”

  “It’s the most inconspicuous one. If you find one day you’re able to fly, everyone’s gonna see you and notice it—same with super-strength. With telekinesis, particularly this long-range one they’ve all got, they’re not necessarily gonna be found out. You could stand in a crowd and control, say, a flying car, but as everyone’s gonna be watching it, what’s to say you’re the one doing it? I reckon there’s more comic potential. Invisibility didn’t seem as much fun. Mind reading’s cool but a bit too eerie. I didn’t want it to be eerie, like some scary horror book or graphic novel.”

  “You don’t like graphic novels.”

  He shakes his head vigorously, munching his last mouthful of toast.

  “Me neither,” I concur, the spectre of Billy Flushing’s gurning mug momentarily appearing.

  “So why does your guy need to be such a pisshead?” he asks, scooping up and scanning my papers again.

  Ah. A nugget could be approaching. I take a large gulp of coffee and begin slowly.

  “Well … partly because I thought it’d be amusing to have an inventor who’s always drunk, and invents things that either don’t work or work differently to how they’re meant to. I once went to these brandy cellars in France. The spiders down there are actually drunk on the booze fumes so they build these crazy spiderwebs. Maybe he’d be the inventor equivalent of that … perhaps he builds a time machine that ends up being a nuclear vacuum cleaner or something, I dunno.”

  “Wouldn’t that be funnier if it was drugs?”

  “Yeah, but … drugs don’t really fit with him being a pissed old misanthropic bastard. I quite like him just hating the world and drinking himself into a void every night.”

  “Your kind of character?”

  “Um … yeah,” I reply, not too sure what he’s driving at.

  “Do you drink a lot?”

  Time for a strategic fib.

  “No. I used to, but then it started affecting my life too much … it almost messed things up for me at work.”

  “And then they sacked you anyway,” he laughs.

  “Yeah … but it used to be pretty bad. I’d come back from lunch drunk and so on. What, um … what about you?”

  “Nah,” he frowns. “I like a pint from time to time, but my hard-drinking days are long gone.”

  “You used to drink, um, hard?”

  Then his fucking mobile phone rings. Damn. Two more questions and we’d have been at the Aylesbury Festival, I’m sure of it. He chats for a minute (some dull talk about the remixes), then dashes off to the loo. Just to make sure I can’t repeat my question when he returns, he brings Marzy over to our table, smilingly introduces her as “my caterer” and me as “Alan, my editor.” Two minutes of mindless banter follow, during which I grin like a moron and marvel at how strange it is to be addressed by a name that isn’t my own. By the time we’re alone again my nugget has long since disappeared.

  “So, what exactly is this Universal Statistics Engine?” he beams, glugging the remnants of his coffee.

  And on it goes, me babbling more claptrap about stupid, nonexistent Gavin Smith and his stupid, nonexistent invention; Webster asking more and more but revealing less and less, then ordering some cake and another coffee (I settle for a gluten-
free lemonade, but in truth I’m having murderous thoughts about a beer), frequently parking his damn legs where mine are, and often agreeing so enthusiastically with all my useless, dreamed-up-on-the-spot philosophies about writing that organic cake crumbs come flying out of his mouth in my direction.

  Finally, when I’m really beginning to wish I hadn’t bothered and start to wonder what imaginary pressing engagement I could hurry off to, he sits back, smiles in a businesslike manner and exhales.

  “Well, okay,” he nods. “I really enjoyed that, Alan. How about another one of these next week? And I promise, I will not forget to bring my stuff this time.”

  It’s only then that it hits me. This has actually been an interview. No, an audition. For the role of Lord Highest Looker-at-Writing-Material to Grand Emperor Webster. And I appear to have got the part.

  Great.

  SUGGESTED LISTENING: Nick Drake, Five Leaves Left (Island, 1969)

  You can’t just wander

  around with a drunken

  grin on your face

  [From Geoff Webster’s writing ideas notebook.]

  SAINSBURY SID

  “Oh, drat it!”

  Sid the fly sighed and moved quietly around the milk bottles and yoghurt. Here he was, at ten o’clock, shut in Sainsbury’s. This was all he needed. He was just flying at full pelt towards the door when the manager closed and locked it. Sid was shut in, left for a whole night to ramble among the Fairy Liquid bottles and the oven-ready chickens. But hang on! This thought hadn’t yet occurred to him.

  “Food!” exclaimed Sid excitedly.

  He pulled himself together, took off from the yoghurt pot and flew up to the roof of the supermarket. There he could see the full scale of his lucky find. He looked at the signs. Biscuits. Crisps. Cakes. Fruit. Delicatessen. Fly swats. Fly swats? He had a sudden moment of panic, then he thought: Hang on! There was nobody there to use them. Suddenly, with a burst of excitement, he dived like a plane and soared into a packet of Dairylea.

  “Delicious!”

  He had a few huge bites and moved on to the finer taste of a packet of French Brie. This was the life! He flew back up to the ceiling and looked at more signs. Meat. Frozen vegetables. Bags of soup. Off-licence. Then he took a look behind him, across the sea of Persil Automatic. What a huge shop! As he looked at all the words, one of them hit him smack across the eyes and stayed there for five seconds before he could see normally again.