by Peter Wild
‘I don’t understand this whole book-signing business anyway,’ I say to William when I find him outside the shop. He’s looking in the window of the shop next door, but I don’t know what at. They do engraving, stiletto heels and key cutting, and the only thing they have in their window is a rack of Zippo lighters. ‘It’s like, Wow, she actually touched it…Is that it? Whatever happened to the Death of the Author? Does the book mean more because I touched it? No. Less? Possibly.’
‘Don’t be a wanker,’ he says.
‘What? How am I being a wanker now?’
It’s still raining and we haven’t got an umbrella, or waterproof clothes. Last year we took Rex to a family fun dog show in the local park and it rained. I kept saying in a loud voice, ‘Oh, no! We forgot our waterproofs,’ and William kept saying, also in a loud voice, ‘Why are you pretending we have waterproofs?’ People looked at us. I still have a picture of Rex from that day. He’s standing in a puddle doing his big dog-smile, having just won the Best in Show trophy. On the way home I promised him he wouldn’t have to go in a dog show ever again, since he’d won the trophy, but I don’t know why I promised him that, or why I thought he wouldn’t want to go in another one. The people from the dog show arranged for his name to be engraved on the trophy, and we always point it out to people when they come to our house.
We’re shopping for a tent for our holiday. But since we discovered that the local bookshops have copies of my novel already (it’s out in August, i.e. the cruellest bookselling month apart from January, according to William), this has turned into a mini book tour where, in every bookshop doorway, William coaches me in how to say, ‘Hi, I’m a local author, would you like me to sign your stock?’ I’m disturbed by the word ‘stock’. Also, I’d like it to be night, and I’d like to be wearing pale make-up and black clothes, and ideally a crazed fan or long-forgotten drug dealer would turn up and cause a scene outside, and there’d be so many fans waiting for me inside that when they all crowded to the window to look, their breath would steam it up and no one would be able to see anything.
The next shop is supposed to be an independent but it stocks the same books as Waterstone’s and has posters up advertising Richard and Judy’s book signing tomorrow.
‘I’m sick of this,’ I say to William.
‘Just get it done and we’ll go and find the tent,’ he says. ‘Just remember that if you sign them they can’t send them back. And maybe they’ll ask you to come and do a reading.’
‘I only want to do a reading if hundreds of people are going to show up.’
‘I know.’
‘That’s never going to happen, though, is it?’
‘No.’
This time I sit on a chair in front of a desk in the actual shop. However, they only have two copies of my book. They have five copies of another first novel I recognise, by one of my rivals; however, these lie in a small pile in front of the sales desk.
‘They waiting to be shelved?’ I say.
‘No. They’re waiting to be returned. To be honest,’ says the guy, ‘you’re looking at a month of shelf-life these days before we start sending them back.’
‘You can’t send these back, though,’ I say. ‘Not once I’ve signed them.’
‘No. Well, that’s a myth, actually.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh well,’ says William. ‘You might be sitting on the same chair Richard or Judy will be sitting on tomorrow.’
‘To be honest,’ says the guy again, ‘we’ll probably use the nice chairs for that.’
We explode out of the shop, and run around down a backstreet laughing. We used to work together before we gave it all up to be writers, and sometimes we’d sit in meetings and not be able to look at one another because of the giggling fits. There was one time when we were discussing the students’ action plans, and one of them had written ‘I want too be faymus’, or something like that, and we both had to leave the room. Apparently everyone heard us laughing outside. But it’s only when we stop running that I realise this time I am just making a noise like laughter and my stomach doesn’t hurt, and my eyes aren’t watering, and I’m still thinking about tinsel and fogged-up windows. William leans against a wooden door.
‘Ow,’ he says, touching his chest.
‘Yeah, I know. What a cunt.’
I light a cigarette with a match and then put the match out with my fingers.
‘What’s wrong?’ William asks.
‘Nothing. What’s this place?’
We’re not great shoppers, but I must have walked Rex past here a hundred times without noticing it.
‘A museum,’ says William, looking at the sign. ‘Is it new?’
I shrug. ‘Who knows?’
‘What’s it got inside it?’ William moves toward the glass front. ‘The Roman city blah blah blah…Hey, this is cool. You can go underground and look at the Roman city.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘No, really.’
‘It’ll just be another CD-ROM.’
There’s a newsagent next to this. It has a noticeboard.
‘What are you doing now?’ I ask William.
‘Looking at the noticeboard,’ he says.
‘We’ll buy a tent,’ I say.
‘Yeah, but there might be one for cheap, or even for free…’
I smoke, and I don’t look at the museum or the noticeboard.
‘Family fun dog show,’ he says. ‘We could take Rex. It’s tomorrow.’
‘He went last year,’ I say. ‘We promised him he wouldn’t have to do it again.’
‘Oh yeah.’ William touches his chest. ‘Ow. Don’t you think he’d enjoy it, though?’
‘No. He told me not to make him do it again.’
‘OK. Oh, what about the trophy?’
‘What trophy?’ I put out my cigarette. ‘Oh fuck.’
Do normal people polish trophies? We didn’t. When we take it off the TV it’s full of dust, and dead flies. It’s tarnished on the outside and on the inside and looks a hundred years old. We have to take it back tomorrow. I put it in a bowl of Ecover washing-up liquid, vinegar, salt and bleach and hope for the best.
William’s upstairs checking his email. Has anyone made an offer on his book? No, they have not. If they had, he’d have told me. I go upstairs anyway, and stand behind him, looking at all the spam in his inbox.
‘What can we say?’ I ask him.
‘What about?’
‘We’re both writers. Why haven’t we polished the trophy all year?’
‘We didn’t give a shit?’
‘Will…’
‘Our arms fell off?’
‘Yeah, whatever. Come on. We have to plot it so it’s believable.’
‘It’s a good job I look at noticeboards, otherwise we wouldn’t even have known.’ He coughs. ‘We could tell the truth.’
‘What is the truth, though?’
‘We couldn’t be bothered.’
‘I just didn’t know it would tarnish so much.’
‘Laurie?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t cry.’
‘I’m not.’
He looks around at me.
‘OK, I am. I want to sit in a cupboard and cry about the trophy. I don’t know why.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Work out what to say.’
‘I thought you didn’t care about what these people think?’ he calls after me. ‘I thought you were over this.’
By the time we get to the park, the dog show is almost over. William takes Rex to sniff around the edge of the river, and I go over to the marquee. I’m wearing torn jeans and I have no dog. The trophy is in a Waitrose carrier bag, not the Londis one William originally used. I feel like the kind of ghost they find on cable TV: She can’t leave this place…She feels she’s stuck here…She means you great harm…I do not mean harm, but I have no voice and only the ability to make everything feel so cold that children cry.
I take the trophy out of the bag.
‘I’ve come to return this,’ I say to a woman selling raffle tickets.
‘Sorry?’ she says.
‘The Best in Show trophy from last year. It’s a bit…My husband got a bit overzealous about cleaning it and I think it went a bit too far.’
‘Oh. Well, thanks.’
I hand her the trophy. I think of the clean patch it’s left on top of the TV, and I want to cry again. We had that trophy for a whole year, and we never touched it once. She looks at it and there’s nothing I can say to make any difference.
‘I think I’ve got a silver cloth somewhere,’ she says.
‘We’re both writers,’ I say. ‘We get a bit eccentric about cleaning.’
She says nothing.
Outside, William and Rex are both looking at the arena, which is full of small hurdles and other things I recognise from agility trials on Crufts.
‘My chest hurts,’ says William.
‘It’s stress,’ I say. ‘You’re very stressed.’
‘I know. I am, but.’ He coughs. ‘My breathing.’
‘It’s this book stuff,’ I say. ‘Hey, this looks fun.’
Rex is wagging his tail and straining towards the arena.
‘Is it too late to enter this?’ I ask a woman in a green jacket.
‘No, it’s not too late. It’s fifty pence, though.’
‘Cool.’ I give her fifty pence. ‘He won Best in Show last year.’
She gives me a little ticket.
‘I honestly don’t think I can do this right now,’ says William.
‘I’ll do it,’ I say. ‘I could do with some exercise.’
‘I think I might sit down.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘No. Yes. You’re right; it’s stress. I’ll be fine.’
At Casualty they ask for William’s occupation and I say ‘writer’. He’s not here. He’s been fast-tracked down the corridor, along a yellow line.
‘Writer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Date of birth?’
I give the rest of William’s details, which I know as well as my own. I do this while smiling without showing my teeth, with my hands out of my pockets, leaning against the counter to hide the rips in my jeans. I could have said ‘lecturer’. William still lectures part time at the university. Should I have said that?
William used to joke about the conversation he had every time someone asked him what he did and he said he was a writer. The person would say, A writer, eh? Got anything published? And he’d say, Yes. And they’d say, What? Just one book? And he’d say, Well, a couple, you know. And they’d say something like, Wow, a real published writer, as if he were the Loch Ness Monster. And he’d say something like, I just got lucky. And then, without fail, they’d say, So, is it mysteries you write, then, or what? Always mysteries. He predicted that when my turn came around people would assume I wrote romances.
I follow the yellow line to the Cardiac Room.
‘How are you feeling?’ I ask him.
‘It hurts,’ he says.
He’s wired up to one of those machines that flash your heart rate every second.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘I could kiss you and see what effect it has.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You could give me a heart attack. That would be hilarious.’
‘You’ll be OK,’ I say.
If he isn’t, I know what I’ll do. Once Rex has lived out his natural life, visiting his master’s grave (with me) three times a day, I will Google ‘Suicide Bombing’ and work out how to strap a bomb to my body, and then I will go to his publisher and detonate myself. I’m surprised more people don’t do things like this.
I can’t believe I just thought him dead.
‘Are you OK?’ William asks me.
‘Yeah. We never got our tent,’ I say.
‘We’ll get the best tent ever,’ he says.
Fuck. We’re in a film. This is the last scene. He’s going to die. He’s going to die…He’ll have his tent, all right, but in heaven. And St Peter will say ‘Occupation?’ and he’ll say Writer, and even St Peter will think that’s a little OTT (the hubris, the hubris…) and he’ll get sent to Purgatory, which will be like a slush pile in the sky, and told to drink himself to death like real writers, and…
‘What exactly is pericarditis again?’ William asks me on the way home.
‘It’s like all the symptoms of a heart attack, but without the actual heart attack,’ I say. ‘Like the fictional version. I don’t know. The muscle around your heart is inflamed, or something, but it’s not dangerous. Only you could have an inflamed heart that isn’t dangerous. I still think it’s stress.’
I’m driving around the ring road, with William. William is alive.
‘We can still go on holiday,’ he says.
‘Yeah. Next week. And we’ll stop worrying about our books, and I won’t cry any more because I think old women hate me, and everything’ll be fine.’
‘Poor Rex,’ he says.
‘I’ll take him for a long walk when we get in.’
We were in Casualty for eight hours. Rex chews stuff and raids the bin when he’s on his own for more than three.
‘He’ll still be pissed off, probably.’
‘Yeah.’
The last thing that happened at the dog show before someone called an ambulance was Rex trying to bite this woman who was trying to make him run through a plastic tunnel.
‘Fucking hell,’ William says. ‘Look.’
The traffic’s moving slowly. We can both see the flowers on either side of the road, all tied to similar grey railings. One lot by the school; the other lot by the pedestrian crossing. They look fresh. Obviously they haven’t been rained on yet, or bleached out by the sun. There’s a small toy duck wedged in between two bunches of flowers tied next to the pedestrian crossing. I imagine someone fixing it there. Did they use string? Sellotape? Nothing at all? Did it fall down, and did the person have to try again? It’s made of dark yellow fluffy fabric. It probably has a brand name on it somewhere, and care instructions.
‘Shit, do you think there were two accidents, or just one?’ I say.
Here’s William’s cue to say something stupid about bodies flying through the air and hitting both railings like something on America’s Worst Accidents.
Here’s my cue to say something about how tacky the flowers are.
Neither of us says anything until we are on the other side of the ring road.
‘I hope no one steals the little duck,’ I say.
Cemetry Gates
Mil Millington
I love the notion of ‘meeting at the cemetry gates’–which is a splendid image, but especially so, I feel, if the gates are figurative.
‘Sorry,’ he said, tilting his head up away from the ground that had been holding his full attention.
He’d shuffled round the corner into the path of a woman walking in the opposite direction. The near-collision wasn’t any more his fault than hers, but he felt that the burden of the apology lay on him: even if the wall hadn’t been there, he wasn’t looking where he was going. Though irrelevant in practical terms, the subtle and multifaceted points system of British manners dictated that he should obviously be the one to put up the first Sorry in this particular encounter.
The woman–a handbag clutched to her stomach and, it required only half a glance to see, Things On Her Mind–blinked with initial irritation, then lowered her eyes and quickly replied, ‘No–you’re all right, love.’ She arced around him, farther around than could be taken as meaningless, and scurried away.
He took a breath, and then began moving again–his eyes returning to his feet. He wondered whether he looked like someone who was learning to walk. The thought provoked a wry smile. As he watched each leg slide alternately forward his worry wasn’t that walking was something that he was struggling to learn, but rather that it was something that he was determinedly trying not to forget.
A dozen or so steps and, triumphant, he arrived
at his destination. He paused for a moment; pleased, but affecting casualness.
‘You’ve had a shave,’ Helen said, glancing up at David as he carefully lowered himself into the chair.
She heard the surprise in her own voice and examined it with curiosity–as one would pick out an odd sound among the familiar noises of one’s car; an unidentified rattle or an unexpected tick appearing amid the well-known hums and rumbles. Her mouth seemed to be suggesting, without consulting her, that she’d been confronted by the disappearance of stubble that she’d become accustomed to over many years. Yet that wasn’t the case. That wasn’t the case at all.
David, settling into his seat with a small, relieved sigh, wiped his hand over his cheeks. ‘Yeah,’ he replied, his voice woody but weightless–like a long exhalation. ‘I never intended to appear all rugged and outdoorsy. It was inertia.’
‘You look a bit weird clean shaven.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Well, not “weird”.’
‘What, then?’
‘OK–“weird”.’
‘Thanks, again.’
‘You backed me into a corner.’
David smiled and explored his face with his fingertips once more. If he stroked down towards his chin, his skin felt smooth (and a little loose too, but that was another matter). Yet, even though it had been only a few hours since he’d stood unsteadily before a steamy mirror, when he ran his nails upwards he could hear the crackle of bristles.
