Books

by Charlie Hill

  ‘Got you,’ said Richard.

  And he began to make a list.

  In which Lauren takes charge and Richard continues his parlay with the mainstream

  At midday, Lauren, Richard and Hermione Bevan-Jones arrived at the offices of the Correspondent. Hermione knocked on her father’s door.

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Monie. Come in, please.’

  ‘Daddy, do you remember taking a phone call about a week ago? About that new Gary Sayles book, The Grass is Greener?’

  ‘Vaguely. Dreadful Scouse fellow, banging on about bad eggs in the commercial fiction barrel. Sounded like he’d been at the poteen. What of it?’

  ‘Well, have you seen any news today? There’s been a number of unexplained deaths, all over the city. And I think this might have something to do with it.’

  ‘Oh, Monie. Do you honestly believe…’

  ‘Mr Bevan,’ said Lauren, ‘we don’t have time for this,’ and Alistair Bevan recognised the third storey in her voice and kept quiet as she continued.

  ‘My name is Lauren Furrows. I’m a professor of neurology at the University of Birmingham. I need to tell you that we are facing a public health disaster, that we are in a position to limit its effects and that we need the help of a newspaper such as the Correspondent to do so. Firstly I would ask that you post the following statement on the news and books pages of your website. Secondly, I assume that someone on the paper has contacts within the Cabinet Office? Because we need to meet with someone in a position of power, and soon. Please be good enough to speak to whoever and arrange this meeting. Oh, and I forgot to mention. Accompanying me will be my colleague, Richard Anger. He’s something of an authority on the situation.’

  Blimey! It’s Bertolt Brecht!

  It is the afternoon. Zeke is dead. Pippa has not slept for thirty-six hours. Zeke is dead. Pippa has not grieved. There are some things she cannot face. She is consumed instead with thoughts of revenge. With the need to create an enduring work of art, a piece of work that illustrates that all paint and ink and film and music has an effect. That all art means something. Not just anything consumers want it to mean. But stuff.

  It has been a long day and a half. Pippa has been googling assiduously. She has memorised John Keats’ hymn to the written word, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. She has read up on Harriet Shaw Weaver, whose devotion to what she considered ‘important’ writing enabled the experimental modernism of James Joyce to reach a sceptical world. She has digested the Stuckist manifestos. They concern Art. Point 9 of ‘Remodernism’ says: ‘Spiritual art is not about fairyland. It is about taking hold of the rough texture of life. It is about addressing the shadow and making friends with wild dogs. Spirituality is the awareness that everything in life is for a higher purpose.’ Point 8 of ‘Anti-Anti-Art’ says: ‘Conceptualism is so called not because it generates a plethora of concepts, but because it never manages to progress beyond one single concept, namely Duchamp’s original thought.’

  Now she is ready.

  She begins her work of art. It is a high-concept piece. Even witty. Pippa is pre-post-ironic. As she considers the details, she is wearing a flat cap, a pair of dungarees and a pair of clogs.

  She perfects an invisible ink solution out of Mackeson stout and borax. She uses this solution to write slogans on two blank business cards. One says: ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality. Art is a hammer with which to shape the world.’ The other says: ‘Boy meets girl. So what.’ They are from the politically charged playwright Bertolt Brecht. They will form part of her work.

  Pippa draws (crude) diagrams of pulleys and weights. She calculates the velocity of swinging objects, weighs suitable books. Guesses the height of Gary Sayles, tests the strength of fishing line. Looks at the physiology of the skull, reads up about knots and catches and hooks. It is a process that takes pains. Pippa has been meticulous with her calculations. But she has worked quickly.

  On the streets outside there is terror. Inside her head is madness. The hours of last night passed naked and screaming. In the early morning she rang the author and left a message on his mobile. By now he will be on his way to the Comfort Inn for another rendezvous with his besotted fan. She will go to his house. And set up her work of art.

  A woman scorned

  Later that morning Amy found the book on the bed in the spare room. Gary had recently taken to sleeping in there. The book was A3, bound in red leather. He had left it out for her to see. He needed his stories to be seen.

  On the title page Gary had written ‘My Diary’ and then he’d crossed out the ‘My’ and put ‘A’ and then he’d crossed out the ‘Diary’ and written ‘Journal’.

  On the next page Amy read:

  ‘Susan, oh Susan, oh Susan. Oh Susan Susan Susan. Susan oh Susan Susan Susan Susan Susan, Suzie Suze Susan Sue.

  ‘Today is the first day of the rest of my life. Today I have taken a mistress and a muse and, like a simple man who has tasted the finest caviar or dark turkey meat at the family Christmas meal for the first time, I have been given a taste of the way I shall live.’

  Amy didn’t turn to the next page. She had shed her tears. Last night and in the nights before that. Tears of frustration and anger. Amy knew that she and Garfield – ‘the firstborn’ – had not been a part of Gary’s fiction for some time. Now it was time to use her imagination, to take control. To write her husband out of her life. To begin a new story with her son.

  Who had made the phone call the previous night? Amy didn’t know or care. The whole situation was bitter with hypocrisy. It reminded her of what she knew lay behind most everyday tales of Man and Woman. But whatever else he had said, the man’s information had been accurate. Amy had been Nikki, seven years and several narratives ago, at the Pussy Palace Sauna and Grill. And the call had given her an idea.

  So the caller was going to ‘expose’ her as a former sex worker? Fine. She would use this farcical state of affairs to her advantage. To show Gary what happened when he tried to write her out of his life.

  Not that she would allow the man on the end of the phone to fuck her husband up. That was something she would do herself.

  An imaginative hypothesis

  Amy packed a suitcase, bought herself and Garfield train tickets. She upturned furniture and opened drawers in her kitchen, sent an email to the local police station. Disguised herself in dark glasses and took her boy with her to catch a train to somewhere far away…

  Artist at work

  Fifteen minutes later, Pippa breaks in round the back of the Sayles house and begins to install her artwork.

  Consciousness and the Novel

  For all of his omnipotence and power as a greater mortal, Gary Sayles was never aware of his role in the death that swept across the UK. Similarly, he would have no idea that in the afternoon of that murderous day his wife had sent an email to Notting Hill police station, expressing concern over his potentially violent reaction to forthcoming revelations about her past – ‘He has a vicious temper. I fear for my life.’ Nor that the same station had then received an anonymous phone call – again from Amy but supposedly from concerned passers-by – about a screaming argument between the author and his wife, that could be heard from the street outside his house. Nor that he would – under less extraordinary circumstances – be a suspect in an assault on Amy and implicated in the subsequent disappearance of his wife and child…

  For Pippa had worked well. Early that evening Gary returned from his would-be get-together with Susan. When she had called him overnight and suggested they meet again, she’d told him she might be late and to wait for her. She had sounded distant and although he hadn’t seen her there, Gary knew that she would have been overwhelmed by the launch of The Grass is Greener. But Susan had not arrived.

  Gary stayed at the Comfort Inn from two until three o’clock and then set off home. After he had been forced to wait an inordinate length of time for a cab, he realised that dark and alien forces were at play in his city.
He quickly forgot his disappointment in his tardy muse and, stopping only to buy a velvet waistcoat on the way, he hurried back to Notting Hill on foot. He had work to do. Writing. In this uncertain time, people would need reassurance that everything was right with the world. That there was nothing to worry about. People would need Gary Sayles.

  He arrived home at around five o’clock. He opened his front door and stepped into his porch. Flicked a light switch. Checked for another key in his waistcoat pocket. Opened the inside door.

  As he moved into the wide hallway of his home he just had time to blink before he walked into Pippa’s work of art and his head was caught between two hardback books – suspended from the ceiling and connected to the inside front door by a series of catches and loops – that swung in deadly arcs, a copy of The History of Roget’s Thesaurus and Consciousness and the Novel by David Lodge, two heavy hardback books which split and crushed his skull, which squashed his head and squeezed his pureed brains up and out through splintering bone and flecked and splashed them bloody and grey on to the walls and the ceiling and the covers of the books as they hung there swinging and his body fell to the floor.

  Books

  Early the following morning it rained books. The previous evening there had been announcements from all broadcast media outlets. Anyone who’d read any of The Grass is Greener – or had spoken to someone who had – was to go home and sit in a darkened room until the books landed. They were then to make their way to the emergency drop sites, in silence, pick up a novel and start reading. Sleep was recommended while they were waiting for the arrival of the RAF and at the end of the announcement all radio, television and internet signals were blocked. Just to be on the safe side…

  And so it was that Jim Crace fell from the sky. Alison Moore and Henry Sutton and Hilary Mantel fell from the sky, Ali Smith and Marcus Mills too. Their books fell from the sky in their thousands, parachuted into parks and on to roundabouts in towns and cities across the barren and would-be suburban land. The heavens opened and the sky streamed ink; it poured with hope and despair, speculation and horror, it pissed down passion, intelligence and love. Wisdom fell from the sky, acuity fell from the sky, generosity and experimentation fell from the sky, in voices as clear as life-giving water – now satiric, now declarative, now saint-like, now sick – voices that were no longer muffled by the darkness of commercial neglect or drowned out by a babble of low-level discourse and the lackaday observations of insensate cultural goons; lives fell from the sky, in whole lives or fragments, half-lives and double lives, hidden lives made tangible by plain speaking and made-up words, by prose that was spare or fantastic, rambunctious, filthy, alien, poetic or untrue; these were lives brought to life by the curiosity and hard work of magicians and scientists for whom the world and its infinities was to be monkeyed with or pored over, fissured for the wonder of the process, spat on, believed in or merely rewired for kicks.

  And brains absorbed the books and drank them thirstily in as they got back to work, becoming fertile again, and nourished by the ideas and emotions, the voices and creations, the quiet purpose and hollered violence of the striven-for art, by the words that ran into words and then on, in drops and droplets and torrents that re-fizzed connections and washed energy and sentience into matter with their vital precision or the life-giving force of their flow.

  And books did what they were supposed to do.

  Lauren and Richard

  It was a month later. They sat on a bench in the park. The sky was grey and brown. It was November and they sat close to each other in the cold. They looked at the trees away across the park. There were short trees, thick trunked and menacing. There were trees that were tall and thin against the city sky. They were elegant, the foliage tapered like buds. The two of them sat for some time without speaking.

  ‘It’s nice this,’ said Lauren, ‘isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ said Richard, ‘it is.’

  The past six months had been good to Lauren. She had felt the breath of passion in her life and she had welcomed it, even though it had sometimes been from the morning after the night before. She had wrestled with her past and subdued it and taken it with her into the dark; only occasionally had it bitten her on the arse. She had been introduced to a friendship that had been confusing and imperfect and true. And, of course, she had taken a lover.

  And for Richard? A peace, of sorts, at last? Well, what do you think?