by Charlie Hill
The voice continued.
‘We met in Corfu. Do you remember?’
Shit a brick did Richard remember.
‘Oh yes. The photographer?’ he asked, tossing a coffee-soaked Waxy: the Cultural History of the Wax Crayon into the bin.
‘Photography is just a hobby. I’m a Professor of Neurology at the university.’
‘I see. What can I do you for?’
‘I’ll get straight to the point. I need to ask you some questions about that afternoon.’
‘Blimey. Well, fire away. I’m all yours.’
‘I was rather hoping we could meet up,’ said Lauren, ‘if that’s OK? The situation is a little sensitive, you see.’
A bad afternoon
The promise of that evening’s meeting with Lauren twisted away from the jittery Richard all day. Just what did the woman want? Richard had fun speculating. Maybe she was going to tell him she’d spent the last few months struggling to grasp the depth of her feelings for him, or that she wanted to become a silent partner in Back Street Books. Such absurdity was a welcome diversion. Because from the moment his conversation with Lauren had ended, Richard’s day had otherwise been one long reminder of his ongoing unsuitability for the title of World’s Most Joyous Man.
That morning he’d shifted a total of six books. He’d had to rebuff – politely and then not so – two self-published fantasists looking for a face-out on his precious shelves. And then he’d been exposed to an ethical question, his second in a day.
It was an obvious dilemma, though no less intractable for that. A woman – not one of his ‘regulars’ – had approached him with an enquiry: ‘My boyfriend’s really into serial killers. What would you recommend?’ Richard knew what she was after. He’d seen the like, in Waterstones and discount bookstores. Badly written paperbacks packed with official police photographs that recorded in unnecessarily voyeuristic detail scarcely conceivable acts of violence. Porn, in other words, and not the excusable stuff either. Richard had laid a funny on the woman – ‘I’d start by getting myself a new boyfriend if I were you’ – before selling her a copy of The Executioner’s Song. Richard loved the book and there was a chance that the woman and her proto-dicer would too. But it was a slim one. More to the point, who was he to try to influence their reading habits? The whole thing smacked of paternalism. If people wanted to read shit, shouldn’t bookshops just sell them shit to read?
On this occasion, Richard was in no mood to address the subtleties of the question. Rather than try – and emboldened by a lunchtime dip into Lester Bangs – he’d decided to perk up his afternoon by writing a blog post.
Richard’s blog was called The Bilious Bibliophile. It was infrequently updated. Its tag line was ‘Informed, irreverent and arsey’; ‘Ill-judged, embittered and halfhearted’ would have been closer to the mark. He was working on a posting about the future of the book and the way that this was intimately bound up in the cultural jizz-fest that surrounded electronic publishing.
The previous year had seen Richard numbed daily by the drip drip drip of industry-wide equivocation about the latest technological developments in the biz. Panic had greeted the news that e-books had started to outsell hardback fiction. The book as ink on paper, a spine, the cover, looked finished. On the flipside, some were arguing that the torrent of downloadable lulus and vanity-published genre stuff and Kindle-friendly niche stuff would reinvigorate the word. Democratise the language, transform the industry. Some said the book itself as object of desire wouldn’t be missed: the future was simply about the most effective way for text to reach the reader. These were fascinating questions, questions that interrogated the bullshit spread by industry analysts, even as they provided them with more to spread.
In the last month, determined to ignore the speculations of others in favour of his own, Richard had begun to size up the competition. He read the top-selling self-published Kindle titles, those hawked by the market-leading Print on Demand outfits, the best of the subsidy presses. And notwithstanding the odd decent chapbook publisher, he’d discovered that all the innovations had actually delivered was a flood of fucking awful writing.
The book looked doomed, assailed on all sides by those who’d see it superseded by the synthetic-new and those who didn’t give two shiny ones. With the recession forging ahead with renewed vigour, bookselling too was going the way of papyrus, taking with it what was left of Richard’s self-esteem, his beer money and his comedic persona.
It was nearly enough to make you give up, on books and what they meant to people and on the book itself…
Richard witnesses the theft of a book
Antsy and glum, Richard left work and headed to the pub. He had a couple of hours to kill before he met up with Lauren and had decided to sharpen his wits with a couple of pints of real ale. On the way he popped into Sainsbury’s. They were doing a sluiceable drop of house red in a plastic bottle – it came out at £2.34 a litre – and he wanted to lay some down.
Richard was leaving the supermarket when he saw Muzz, a beggar. He’d known him for about a month. They’d met when Muzz had asked Richard for some change outside the shop and Richard had noticed a battered copy of The Lord of the Rings sticking out of his coat pocket. They’d started talking. Muzz slept on floors and in doorways on the street. Richard couldn’t be sure he was on hard drugs but the signs were there; every time he saw him he’d be clutching a tin of milk-based health drink.
On this occasion, Muzz was by the stands of books and magazines, looking as nonchalant as it is possible for a tramp to look. As Richard watched he reached up, grabbed a fat Tom Clancy from the top shelf, slipped it into his bag and was out of the doors, down the steps and away. Richard was shocked. He didn’t need this, not today. It was the broadest of daylight. Anyone might have seen. He hurried after his acquaintance, gobbets of indignation at the ready.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he said.
‘Oh. Hello, Richard,’ said Muzz. ‘You saw that, did you? I can explain…’
‘You’d better. You’re lucky I don’t drop you in it. What the hell do you think you’re doing? I thought you said you were over all that now?’
‘I am. I am. Honest I am.’
‘So what the hell was that, then?’
‘Look, it’s not what you think. I can explain.’
‘Go on then. And this had better be good.’
‘It’s like this. The security guard in Waterstones in the city centre, he clocks me every time I go in. I can’t hardly move without him following me. But they’ve got this thing where they don’t mind doing exchanges. You know, providing the book’s in good nick they’ll swap it, even without a receipt. So I go to Sainsbury’s, help myself, get it to Waterstones and upgrade. So far I’ve managed to swap Jeffrey Archer for Glenn Duncan, a Louise Bagshawe for a Beryl Bainbridge and Breaking Dawn for The Blind Assassin.’
‘Breaking Dawn?’
‘Twilight: Book 4.’
‘Really?’ said Richard. ‘Well. OK, then. But only if you’re sure. I don’t want to see you getting back into your bad old ways. What’s next?’
‘Think I’m going to go for those short stories you mentioned. You know, by that dead woman…’
‘Ah. The Katherine Mansfield. OK, then. Just so’s you do…’
‘I will. See you, Richard.’
‘See you, Muzz.’
Holding it together
Richard met Lauren that evening in a busy pub just off campus. He’d suggested the place with his delicate state in mind: he knew that keeping Lauren off balance would help him to maintain what passed for his equilibrium.
He’d used the place about five years ago, but it wasn’t how he remembered it. He hadn’t expected a Toby Carvery – that was the whole point – but he couldn’t help thinking he’d overplayed his hand somewhat. The bar was done out in bright yellow. The bar staff had name badges. There were promotions on blue and green bottled drinks. The music thumped. It was full of students drinking
, being silly and loud, all glassy-eyed wonder, white teeth and flashes of tit. Richard resented their uncomplicated drunken rowdiness – young people, what did they know about bad behaviour? – and then felt queasy at his resentment.
He ordered a brandy and pep and propped up the bar. Since leaving work he’d indulged his despondency; now he was in a satisfactorily foul mood. This was familiar ground and it could only help in his efforts to keep himself together during his encounter with his mystery woman.
Lauren walked into the pub. She stopped for a moment just inside the door and Richard caught his breath. Ever since she’d called, he’d been piecing together what few details he remembered of her from Corfu. The result had been tantalising enough but it was nothing like the woman in the flesh. Lauren ordered a lime and soda and they sat down at the only place that was free, next to a table of hockey players playing a drinking game called – by all accounts – Fuzzy Duck.
‘And so,’ said Richard, ‘we meet again.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘We meet again.’
To his right someone dropped a glass. Someone else started singing. The bass thudded. Lauren looked around and shook her head.
‘Why did you suggest we come here?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Why did we come here? It’s not very appropriate.’
‘I don’t know really. I suppose I thought it would be convenient.’
‘Thank you. I think.’
‘I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s not my type of place. I mean, I think it’s full of…’
Richard dismissed the bar staff, the drinks promotions and the principle of universal access to education with a wave of his hand, and stumbled for the right phrase. Behind him two girls argued over what tune to play next as the music stopped abruptly.
‘… arseholes,’ said Richard.
Lauren frowned. The music started up again and she moved her chair round to Richard’s side of the table.
‘That’s a charming sentiment. I did tell you I’m a professor at this university? Yes? Well then. Do you mind if we get down to business? I really don’t want to spend any more time in here than I have to.’
‘You’re the boss,’ said Richard.
Lauren frowned.
‘So. Anyway. I take it you remember the woman who died in the taverna on Corfu?’
She told him then about SNAPS and complained about the implications of people associating her name with the syndrome’s identification. She mentioned that SNAPS fulfilled most of the criteria of an idiopathic symptom and, when Richard’s mouth dropped open, she explained that this meant it had no known cause. She told him she needed him to help her establish a connection between the environment and whatever it was that had caused the condition.
‘Ri-ight,’ said Richard. ‘I think I understand. Are you saying that this is a process of elimination thing?’
Lauren nodded. Richard put a cigarette to his lips, took it out. He sat back, folded his arms and told Lauren that he needed a minute. An hour was more like it. He was a little bit drunk and a little bit disoriented, his understanding out-of-whack. Lauren’s request had been dispassionately put. Yet there was also something potty about the situation that didn’t quite tie in with her sombre attitude. He wondered whether she wasn’t a professor after all, but lived in an underpass and shouted at pigeons.
‘I’ll have to get back to you on this,’ he said.
Lauren watched as Richard wove his way out of the pub. She was glad that was over. It would have been uncomfortable enough without the inappropriate choice of venue. Then again, many things had unsettled her today and not all of them were connected to the pathology of SNAPS itself.
The problem was a simple one. However far she was going to go with her investigations into the syndrome, Lauren would have to deal with death. For years now, she had been practised at remaining detached from such complex emotional engagements. Her work helped, of course, and photography too. But she knew that if she was pulled close enough, the consolation she sought in the application of logic, the secure constraints of order, would not be enough. Nothing would be enough. Because death was always more. Death was the explanation that lay beyond, the reason that hid in the dark. The action out of shot.
Lauren shivered in the busy throb of the bar, suddenly aware she was on her own. In a conscious effort to manage her discomfort, she thought back to the bookseller and what he might be able to do for her.
He seemed enthusiastic enough, albeit in a manner she found a little confrontational. And of course, in commenting on the author the victim had been reading in Corfu, he’d already demonstrated his powers of observation. On a personal level, however, she was not convinced. The prospect of working closely with the man – of establishing the closeness that was a requirement of any successful working relationship – did not appeal. Not that this was entirely his fault. Lauren knew she could be uncomfortable around men; intimacy was not her thing, not any more.
Gosh.
There was no escaping it. Lauren was unwilling to engage with death and loath to consider intimacy for the simple reason that when she did she was taken back. To a lover and a state of mind that were long gone. To Will and the parts of her that he had taken with him when he’d gone.
Will.
Sweet Will.
Sweet Will.
Gosh.
After all this time, was this all it took?
A short story is rejected
Arriving home that night, Richard was still unsure what he had to offer Lauren. Fortunately, the answer made a present of itself. It came in the form of a self-addressed A4 envelope, inside which was a short story and a small printed slip of paper.
‘Dear Mr Angry, Thank you for giving us the opportunity to look at your work. Unfortunately we do not think it is quite suitable for Cutting Edge magazine and are returning it to you along with a subscription form for the magazine. We wish you luck with placing it elsewhere and thank you again for your interest.’
The rejection was unsigned. Richard poured himself a tot of his weekday whisky and read it again, his head awash with conflicting feelings of resignation and defiance.
The bastards. How dare they knock him back? Who did they think they were? He’d remember this when they came running to him in the future, begging him for a story or yet another mention on The Bilious Bibliophile – they’d not get a word out of him. Then again. He had wondered about that passage, the bit where the narrative voice came down quickly through the gears, switching from the third person to the second to the first in half a page. Then there was the stanza he had written when he was off his chump, slowing the tempo down, playing with the idea of abandoning the narrative thread. He’d taken it out of some drafts, worried that it was too oblique, too demanding. But no. It was just grown-up fiction for Christ’s sake, meant for grown-up readers.
And what about the rejection slip? Quite why that was so impersonal, Richard couldn’t fathom. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t sent them stuff in the past. Several times, come to think of it. A chapter of automatic writing, a series of epigrammatic haikus. Well, that was it. He wasn’t going to send them any more.
Richard was finished. In the febrile small hours he’d often entertained the idea that his writing would one day be discovered. That he’d sell half a dozen short stories that introduced and then discarded at least three idiomatic anti-conventions. That he would make himself an alternative career, which didn’t rely on the vagaries of the reading population at large but on those who knew what they were talking about.
It wasn’t going to happen.
There was nobody out there with the balls to publish him, no one who would take a punt on prose as incendiary as his. Cutting Edge was supposed to be dedicated to publishing challenging prose, ‘transgressive’ fiction. Some of the stuff he’d read in there, Christ, he’d had more transgressive pickled eggs of a Sunday lunchtime. More suited to Woman’s Own it was, or the myriad corporate pedlars of life-free, ambition-light w
riting that raised mediocrity to a whole new level and served less as stimulation for the intellect or senses than as a culturally cognitive… dimmer… switch…
My God.
Richard sat down on the edge of his bed. Could it be? The idea was batshit crazy, mad professor stuff. And yet it might prove to be a validation of all that he’d drunk and sweated this last six years.
He rang Lauren, left a message.
‘It’s the books,’ he said.
An author faces his public
The author caught the tube and went walkabout. He walked through the carriages like a mid-thirtysome-thing man looking for women in a nightclub, with passengers in the role of the potential victims of his chat-up lines. He was looking for something. Five years ago, he’d have been sure to have found it. This time, his first time in a long time, he hadn’t yet hit paydirt. But it was surely only a matter of time.
As part of the author’s new deal, his first three novels had been reissued as a single volume. ‘Reprinted, repackaged and re-presented to a whole new readership.’ It was a perfect storm of opportunity. He glanced at his expensive slimline watch. He saw then what he had come to see. It was a man sitting quietly in the corner of a carriage, reading a brightly covered book. It was that very same single volume.
The author paused, brushed himself down and, with a look of surprise playing at the corners of his mouth and a glint in his eye, he approached his quarry, metaphorically licking his lips.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Gary Sayles. The very same. I couldn’t help noticing you were reading one of my books. Would you like me to sign it for you? Only I’ve got another one coming out soon. Yes, yes, that’s right. I’m making a long-awaited comeback…’
And he was.
And how!
Male confessionals, dad and lad lit
