Books

by Charlie Hill

  ‘OK. So what are you going to do? With this whole T-shirt thing?’

  ‘Oh, all sorts. Big things. I’m working on things.’

  As Gary said this, he reached out and lightly touched the top of her head. Smoothed her hair. The contact was gentle. It was the first they’d had for some time. It was the old Gary. Amy felt his hand there again and then again. She flinched.

  ‘The point is, I can do anything. Don’t you see? I am the voice of hundreds of thousands of people. They come to me and I put their lives into words, make sense of their lives for them. Amy, I can do anything.’

  Gary’s voice was tight with a thrill that Amy had not heard before. He was breathing heavily. His pupils were dilated. In his profile there was something Amy hadn’t seen before. Something about the upward tilt of his chin.

  ‘I think we need to talk,’ said Amy. ‘I know you’ve got work to do but I think we need to talk. Come and sit down.’

  ‘Not just now, My Little Pretty One. Things to do. If you want me I’ll be upstairs in my study.’

  And with that he left the room. Amy frowned. She was used to being underestimated. It never really bothered her. Let other people think what they wanted. It was their mistake. But My Little Pretty One? Angel Cakes? Gary Sayles? Gary Sayles had just patted her on the head. And Gary Sayles should know better.

  Amy

  Amy had her own stories, of course. Stories about marriage and family. Everyday stories.

  Growing up, her family had been a mess. She was twelve when her mom left her dad. It was autumn. The wind was gusty and Amy arrived home late from school with leaves in her hair. Her dad sat in the kitchen, looking at where the tiles met the bare plaster on the wall. Her mom had just taken a bag of clothes and disappeared. She’d left one note for Amy and one for her dad. To Amy she wrote: ‘I’ll always be there for you’ and ‘there’s more to life than playing at happy families’.

  Even without the shepherd’s pie drying in the oven, it was a clichéd affair. Amy’s dad couldn’t understand it. He’d always been a good husband. Didn’t she remember the special trips he would make to the kitchenware shop for Christmas and her birthday? He’d been generous to a fault. Pans, serving bowls, place mats. One year a plastic pinny with a cow on the front. They’d had a routine. Her: cooking, washing up, hoovering and shopping. Him: grouting the bathroom, cutting the hedge, brewing his own beer. Sundays they’d sit down to eat together in front of the TV. Every two months they went out to their favourite restaurant. Each year there’d be the same holiday, to their caravan in Rhyl. They liked it there. These were the things that mattered. It didn’t bother them that there were sometimes rows. Or that the two of them didn’t always see eye to eye. Or even that his routine differed slightly from hers. He was a self-employed builder. She ran the house and worked part-time in a bakery. It was bound to happen. A lot of the time he was out doing business. Making contacts with friends and people in the trade, ‘putting the word around’. Amy and her mom were lucky that most of his contacts drank in his local and they saw as much of him as they did.

  They still had time together. Amy remembered, didn’t she? When he was home in the evenings he’d stay up late in front of the TV. Working on his paperwork, sampling his homebrew. She’d often stay up with him. He’d crack jokes. Did she remember the one about the flasher and the nun? He was funny and she loved him. Didn’t she? It wasn’t his fault her mom wasn’t always able to stay up. She was too tired a lot of the time. And she was often crabby in the evenings anyway. Now Amy must have remembered that?

  They had each other and they had their routine. And he’d never looked at another woman the whole time they’d been married. What else could he have done?

  It was obvious her mom was in denial, he said. She’d been on the phone. She’d told him she was happy in her new life. She’d started night school and dance classes. Her friends spoke of new men; a dough-maker, a teacher, possibly a Spaniard. She’d started going to different restaurants, some of which he knew she wouldn’t like. He just didn’t know what to make of it all.

  Amy did. When her mom had got back in touch with her, she had tried to act as peacemaker. But her dad was missing the point. It wasn’t just about him. His lack of imagination – before or after the split – affected them all. And even though she loved him, she pitied his wheeee!-ing slide into self-pity.

  He began to drink more and work less. When he was drunk he would complain about being depressed. He would spend hours in front of the television, just whomping, whomping between channels with an all-in-one TV and video remote.

  And then there were the books. Her dad had started reading, going through the paperbacks on the small shelf in the kitchen. Thrillers. Adventure stories. Comfort reads. But Amy knew this was the wrong sort of comfort. It was this sort of comfort that had got them to where they were now, that had left him sitting in his armchair, sliding heavy-lidded into a slough of Wilbur Smith-ed despond. Exasperated, Amy encouraged him to get up earlier in the morning. To get out of the house more, to look for work. To stop moping. She offered to pay him to leave the house whenever she had boys round; she thought she could tease him into change. It was no good. He wouldn’t be told.

  It was frustrating bringing up her dad. But Amy was an adaptable girl. She grew up very quickly. And she realised that there were more useful ways to spend her future than pitty-pattying around men until the story of her life had been written for her. She would use her imagination. She would take control.

  Unlike, it seemed, her peers. When she arrived at university, she had been disappointed to meet her fellow female students. They were mostly a clueless, soft-thinking bunch, happy to have their lives written for them, to follow the path of least resistance through the world.

  It was 2001 and the fashion was for ladettes or women who simpered. Sexual politics were passé: the multi-stranded narrative of men and women had been reduced once more to the story of Boy meets Girl. Most of those who simpered did so under the illusion they were simpering ironically, from a position of strength. But it was not an edifying sight. And whichever way you tried to skirt the issue, Ms was Miss once more. Now there was a lack of imagination. It was not for Amy. Her mom had taught her better than this.

  Her first lesson had been that you couldn’t put a price on financial independence. Amy had absorbed this. Two months into her first year, so skint that she was eating own-brand stuffing on toast, she had responded to an ad in the Warwick Student. It offered the opportunity to ‘Earn While U Learn’ and led her weekly to Birmingham; for two nights a week she was paid cash for a range of services from hand jobs to full sexual intercourse.

  Amy was pragmatic about the business. Although the men were pigs, the money was good. And the men would be pigs with or without her financial remuneration. It was as simple as that.

  Not that everyone saw it this way. There were some who thought that sex workers were making a statement. About attitudes to prostitution. About feminism. About post-feminism. Amy knew better. It was true that in the approach to the new millennium, under the muffling cover of generic cultural hysteria, a quiet shift had taken place. Strip clubs were now ‘respectable’, table dancing ‘acceptable’. Selling yourself was ‘empowering’. But although Amy was in a transparently honest and comparatively well-paid job, she didn’t feel ‘empowered’ by her work. And she didn’t know anyone else who did either.

  As the weeks scurried day by day into months it was unavoidable that Amy’s opinion of men would narrow. The clowns she came into contact with were even worse than her dad. They were such an undignified lot, all gesture, wife-love and grunt. Those that hadn’t the wit to take advantage of being men had the front to bleat about their lot. Insistently, as though they bore the troubles of the world.

  Then there were the haters and their angry fucking and their uninspired variations on the inevitable line about ‘loving women too much’. Again, it was the lack of imagination that Amy couldn’t fathom. Could they not open their eyes? Look
around and present the world with something a little different? Where was their pride?

  A couple of months into her third year, she quit the game. Stopping work was no more of an issue than starting it – she was just knackered. And her need to concentrate on her studies was now a more pressing concern than the content of her high-interest savings account. Shortly afterwards, she got a job at the Warwick Arts Centre. It wasn’t so bad. She had a presence behind the bar. Tips were good. She was asked out by lots of men. She said no to them all.

  Until she met Gary again. Gary was not like the other men she’d known. He was no dazzler but he was no arsehole either. He was honest. Dependable. Kind. Enthusiastic. Genuinely solicitous of her needs. And although he liked routine, he wasn’t the sort to stick in a rut. He was too driven for that, had always shown too much gumption. Amy could see him as a father.

  Three months after they met each other in the bar, Gary had presented Amy with an H Samuel ring. He talked of dreams come true. They were married a week after her graduation. Amy wore white. The reception was held in the function room of a functional hotel on the Bristol Road. It passed in a droll frenzy of volau-vents and taxis and bone-diseased aunts. In his speech, Gary called it a ‘seventeen-year whirlwind romance’. It was a line of Amy’s.

  Five conventionally happy years later, she gave birth to their son, Garfield. Amy had always wanted kids and she was especially happy when she had a son. Amy wanted Garfield to be different from other men. She wanted him to know more than other men about what it meant to be a man. She would share with him her stories and what she had learned from her life and she would show him how he could be different from the men she had known.

  A short story by Richard, a setback for Lauren

  Three days after they had met at her house, Lauren opened her email at work to find she had a message from Richard:

  Dear Lauren,

  So this is a thought that occurred to me at your house the other day. It may have been the Merlot that got me thinking – or the Cab Sauv or the Shiraz – but I decided to share it with you anyway, as – you never know – you might find it comes in handy at some point.

  I saw your books, you see. And all I saw was fol-de-ra and ra-dee-yay and nice little portraits of worlds decorated by the dead white scholars of Decorum Inc. The thing is, books should be more than this. It’s a writer’s job to stimulate. To provoke. To prod and poke people into wanting more, not to cop out. Not to paper over the cracks in the wall.

  And we should encourage them too. We should read the good stuff. Because let’s face it, wanting more is all there is. We should all want more than just existence, more than just our neurons sparking or reflexes reflexing. More than mediocrity. We should want to live life. And if we’re going to live life we have to grab it by the throat and throttle it up and out from inside, and whether or not we can – whether or not we do – is down to the books we read, the art we look at, the music we listen to. We’re all affected by all of this, all of the time. It matters.

  You might think that this is another one of my ‘abstract’ ideas, another little point in a ‘theoretical debate’. But it isn’t. In fact I’d go so far as to say that no one can begin to fully understand SNAPS without grasping this.

  Any road. I don’t think you’ve read any of my stuff yet. So I thought I’d send you this story, by way of illustration.

  Respectfully yours, lots of love, etc. etc.

  Mr Richard Anger Esq, ‘The Attic’, Harborne

  Lauren felt herself flush. She took a deep breath. At first she thought she might have missed something. It certainly seemed that way. Taken at face value, what the message lacked in presumption – and it did presume a great deal – it made up for with its condescending style. Yet although she found it easy to believe that Richard could be presumptuous he was certainly in no position to condescend to her. Perhaps he was making a point about Lauren working harder as a reader. Perhaps the mail was merely a satirical companion piece to his story; when she read the attachment, maybe it would become clear. She opened the file and began to read.

  It was called ‘Untitled’. It was the tale of an angry bookshop owner who drank himself out of business and into an underground society of murderous anarcho-booksellers. The story was gruesome. It was bathetic. It was polemical, uncoordinated, chaotic…

  Lowrie sat in the corner of the room, her limbs were bound in leather. Her mouth was shut fierce and her shirt gapped open, skin freckling to distant nipples. They could be a team. He saw that. They could work together. But first he had to slip her the words.

  The worlds within words.

  There were worlds within words and Rick was ready to slip them to Lowrie and then he was ready to twist the world on its axis, to show Lowrie more clearly the sun.

  Be

  words

  cause

  twist

  the world.

  He had them all. She would see. And then she would see that the world as it was, without his words, was cnuts.

  THE WORLD

  IS CNUTS.

  He’d words he’d picked up first-hand (or secondhand, barely thumbed). These he’d slip her and then when she was eye-scorched by the light, while she was away and musing on their worlds, he’d tell her, his muse, I’ve had it with gaping at your gapping, I want to play before we kill, then they’d get down to it and after 10 minutes of clock-watched crotch scraping Rick would have spurted, splurted (phlegmy, furtive)

  Christ I need a drink…

  Lauren knew what he meant. She had hoped that Richard’s understanding of books and of writing would advance their investigations into SNAPS. But although she wasn’t as widely read as he was, she was sure of one thing: writing was about reaching out to other people, whatever you wanted to say. Whether your intention was to move people or to move them along, you had first to connect, to make connections. She could see he had a point about reaching too far, about handing people things on a plate. But there was a difference between ‘copping out’ and ranting angrily in an underground of your imagination. Self-absorption wasn’t the answer. If anyone knew that, Lauren did. And Richard’s writing connected with nothing. Certainly not to her, as a reader or a person.

  Her annoyance was compounded by a sense of disappointment. True, she remained wary of Richard. In the short time she’d known him, he’d been infuriating, needy and almost permanently drunk and obnoxious. Lascivious too. She had pretended not to notice, but when they had met at her house he had proposed a tryst, an idea as perplexing as it was absurd. He clearly had myriad faults. Yet there was something about the chemicals in his brain and the patterns they formed, something about the neurological grammar and synaptic elisions of the language of his mind, that intrigued as much as it appalled. He was – in simple terms – making her life more interesting. It had been a long time since she had discussed with anyone matters that weren’t related to work or landscape photography, or any of the other hobbies she’d embraced in order to fill long holiday hours in places without Will. And despite the challenges he presented, Lauren had even begun to consider the possibility that a friendship might develop between them.

  Well, it wasn’t going to if he carried on like this. So far she had tolerated his provocations, maybe even subconsciously indulged them. After all, that was the point of her experiment. But this time he was asking too much. There was nothing she could take from this story. She couldn’t even tell what – if anything – he was trying to give. It read as a gesture of pure indulgence.

  In one respect, however, she was forced to concede that he had proved himself. By no stretch of the imagination was Untitled mediocre.

  It was bloody awful.

  Dear Richard,

  I read your story. I have to say I am unconvinced of its merits. Having said that, I fear your distinction between good and bad readers may apply in this instance. Certainly, if my reaction to it is one of the criteria by which you make the judgement, then I concede that I may fall into the latter camp.

/>   With regard to our evening, I’m pleased to hear that you took it upon yourself to undertake a critical appraisal of my reading habits, unencumbered as you were by any idea of what they may be. For your information I don’t read too much at the moment. I haven’t for a while. People say they like the order it brings to things. For some time now my work and my photography have taken care of that particular need. There has been much beyond this that I have had no need to make sense of.

  As for SNAPS, I will admit that the points you made about the relationship between reading and life were interesting, if not wholly original. I have recently been giving this very matter some careful thought. I have no doubt that ‘books can change you’. I also think there is something to be said for indulging yourself in the work of those who would imagine different ways of living; I wouldn’t be a scientist if I didn’t acknowledge this.

  However, I am equally unsure that this is ‘all there is’. Maybe you will be able to enlighten me on this matter one day. Maybe even without the benefit of alcohol. It would be nice to think so.

  Lauren

  Lauren advances

  After sending her reply, Lauren spent the rest of the afternoon trying to stop herself from brooding. She made cups of lemon and ginger tea, toyed with the bags until the water cooled to tepid. Browsed a journal, read a paper on the link between right-hemisphere trauma and borderline personality disorder. She even essayed a stab at a half-remembered t’ai chi exercise in an effort to ease the tension in her neck. It was no use. Whether he was demonstrating a neural anomaly or decrying the importance of deep breathing, Richard was there at the edge of her consciousness, provoking her.

  By the end of the afternoon she found herself looking out of the window of her office. Here, at least, was respite from the world in the view of the slowly changing season as it percolated across the quad. Today the canopy of the sycamore was resplendent in caterpillar green, doily-edged with ochre and lemon. The shadows on the brickwork opposite were fluid, the late summer light growing more brilliant and involved with every passing minute.