Paperboy

by Christopher Fowler

  It was horrible advice, as nearly all the people I knew were demented or damaged in incomprehensible yet mundane ways. Not one of them behaved in the fashion I was led to believe was correct and laudable. I preferred the safety of scientists. They only had killer plants and space viruses and evil mutants to deal with, not decade-long arguments, mammoth sulks, buried resentments and secret struggles for control. You always knew where you were with scientists because they gripped pipes between clenched teeth and strutted about thinking aloud with one hand in the pocket of their lab coats. I liked them because they were just like robots, not real at all. Oh …

  Her point began to dawn on me.

  ‘Will you write me a story about us?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think you’d like it very much.’

  ‘Then write about your favourite singer. Do you like …’ She searched for some form of modern music with which she was familiar. ‘Cliff Richard?’

  ‘No, I like Noël Coward.’2

  ‘Oh.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?’

  ‘A film critic.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘A lyricist.’

  ‘Why not become a proper writer?’

  ‘They’re poor and have no friends, and have to live in a garret. A writer spends years perfecting his first novel, which is usually a failure, and then spends more years trying to recapture the magic of his first novel because the critics now all say he’s not as good as he used to be, or else he kills himself because he can’t find a publisher for his first novel, and dies a lonely miserable death, upon which his first novel becomes a great success, partly because the public knows he killed himself. Whereas a sizeable number of lyricists own yachts.’

  ‘I can see you’ve thought this through.’ She rubbed her eyes wearily, trying to imagine what should be done. ‘It’s probably best not to tell your father about your career plans. And I think your opinion of writers is not entirely accurate. I think we should start with what’s actually on the page, don’t you? Perhaps you need to find some new heroes.’

  I could have told her I wanted to become a shepherd and she would have sought a positive solution. Drawing out a pen, she balanced the diary on her knee and made a new list on the last page. ‘Go back to the old library in Greenwich and try taking out a few of these.’

  I looked at the list. ‘What are they?’

  ‘Things I read and loved. I never owned them, although I wish I had.’

  I returned to East Greenwich Public Library, but when I got there I found its shelves emptier, its parquet floor dustier than I remembered. Its rooms were almost devoid of life.

  The seat where my old friend the librarian always sat had now been taken by a young woman with elaborately arranged blonde hair. She was eating a Mars Bar and reading a copy of NME. ‘Oh, the Council retired Mrs Clarke, and she died a few weeks later,’ she told me casually when I asked. She took my mother’s list from me and studied it. ‘We don’t have many of these. We had a bit of a clear-out, gone more modern an’ that. Spy thrillers, hospital romances. There’s no call for the highbrow stuff any more. You wanna try a bookshop.’

  Highbrow? I had never thought of my mother like that. I looked back at the list:

  Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

  Orlando by Virginia Woolf

  The Best of Saki by H. H. Munro

  Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

  Howard’s End by E. M. Forster

  The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

  Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

  Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton

  The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford

  Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola

  Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

  Elizabeth and Essex by Lytton Strachey

  The Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham

  Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield

  Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote

  Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

  Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

  Were these highbrow? Some thrillers, some dramas, some comedies, some true stories, a lot of exciting plots, most written in easily comprehensible English. Were these books that people honestly found too daunting to read now?

  There were perhaps another thirty novels and collections on the list, many of which I had not heard of and could not find in suburban Greenwich, although I managed to turn up more in the sleazy Popular Book Centre than in the library. My favourite purchase was a paperback that sported a racy cover showing a pair of swaggering, melon-breasted strumpets with their hands on their hips. Above the title was a strapline that read: ‘He knew the truth about the city’s sauciest sexpots!’ It was a 1950s copy of Boswell’s Journals.

  Over my teenage years I located the rest of them, one volume at a time, and stacked them carefully beneath my bed. As each book I read provided me with illumination, it also withered and destroyed any hope of ever achieving an easy familiarity with words. Such grace and erudition was so far beyond my scope that it was pointless to try creating even the palest imitation.

  Shortly after reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, I dragged out a pile of my exercise books, filled with their witless, derivative stories, and burned them at the end of the garden, just as my father had burned my books in Westerdale Road.

  As I watched the smoke curl in a thin blue trail over the treeline of the grey-green woods behind the house, I decided that my mother had done me a favour in revealing the gap between my own abilities and those of a real writer.

  In that moment, my future was decided. The answer was so obvious that I wondered why on earth I had been struggling against it for so long. I would get a job in an office, where I at least stood a chance of being successful in a mediocre world. I would keep my head down, work hard, fade into comfortable invisibility and be content with that, like any other normal human being.

  1 The archetypal music-hall-comic-turned film star, he now comes over as deeply annoying and rather sinister.

  2 Coward once said, ‘Television is for appearing on, not for looking at.’ You’ve got to love him for that.

  30

  Being Normal

  HAVING DECIDED THAT I would live like the robotically predictable scientists I had written about, with none of the emotional upheaval experienced by my parents, the first thing I needed to do was stop hanging around with Simon, whom the rest of the school considered to be a cross between Peter Fonda and the Antichrist. Clearly, he was a bad influence and was preventing my rehabilitation. It was Simon’s fault that I committed my only crime. Without him, I would never have stolen the gun.

  Well, it wasn’t a real one, but it was made of heavy black metal and was very realistic. We had gone into London’s West End, to Berman & Nathan, the theatrical costumiers, and had presented them with a forged letter purporting to be from our headmaster, saying that the school was staging a musical version of Bonnie and Clyde for Parents’ Day and we needed a gun. Incredibly they had given it to us, in a brown leather holster that fitted under a school jacket. I had no idea what we were expected to do with it. I assumed – rightly, as it transpired – that Simon was less intent on holding up a post office than swanning about in his bedroom and striking poses in front of his mirror.

  The argument over the gun made it easier for me to stop seeing him. I concentrated on being as normal as possible, so normal that I began to creep people out. Instead of sticking to my throwback short-back-and-sides haircut, I grew my hair over my ears like everyone else of my age and tried a gormless centre parting. I bought flared jeans like everyone else (I had been living in black flannel trousers). I experimented with bead necklaces. I even tried watching television, because everyone seemed to like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In1 and quoted the catchphrases to each other at school, but the only way we could get BBC2 reception, albeit in a snowstormy, shimmering fashion, was still by holding the aerial in the corner of th
e attic ceiling, and staring so hard at the screen while standing on tiptoe made me feel as if I was experiencing some form of brain damage.

  I went to the local pub with schoolfriends and tried drinking cider, but got so drunk that the dog didn’t recognize my walk when I came home and bit me on the face when I tried to crawl upstairs.

  I bought a Rolling Stones album, but hated it so much that I quickly reverted to secretly taking Die Fledermaus out of Plumstead Public Library.

  I stopped trying to build all the characters and sets from Barbarella in plasticine, and bought a stamp album instead, only I never got beyond the triangular one from Fiji.

  I made an Airfix aircraft carrier with my father, and a balsa-wood glider, but got into trouble for cutting out stencils on the dining-room table that left imprints of the wings in the still-sticky varnish, like the ghosts of lost pilots.

  I bought some aftershave, even though I was clearly years from growing a whisker. It was called Aqua Manda and smelled of rotten oranges. I got through a whole bottle in a single week before someone explained you were only supposed to use it on your chin.

  I went to a club with some disreputable boys from the local comprehensive, but it was before the days of disco, and the music was Blind Faith and Colin Blunstone. After drinking lots of cough syrup, everyone just sat on the floor with their eyes half closed, nodding and pretending to be stoned.

  I tried to show an interest in the local girls, but they were going through a feminist phase that involved patchouli oil and joss sticks and wearing wooden sandals with floor-length maroon-and-yellow tie-dye dresses, and not washing their long frizzy hair, so they all looked like Cornish lady tramps. Plus, they tended to shout ‘Stop objectifying me!’ if you tried to talk to them.

  I solemnly smoked a joint purchased from Frank Knight, whose older brother was a customs officer who brought home tons of drugs. I managed to get through half of it before falling face-down into a bonfire, losing my credibility, my sideburns and one eyebrow in the process. When I came home that night, the dog bit me again because it could only smell smoke.

  I tried to remember what made my schoolfriends laugh and go ‘Phwoar!’, and laughed more loudly than anyone else, which just made me weird and to be avoided. On one occasion I laughed so loudly that the conductor threw me off a number 75 bus because I was frightening the passengers.

  Being ‘normal’ was supposed to make you popular, but it had the opposite effect. The only friend it attracted was a small troll-like boy in my class who kept asking me if I could come round to his house while his parents were out and wrestle with him naked.

  I started writing again, tentatively, carefully. This time I would not do it just for myself, as I had with the densely narrated comics and volumes of film criticism, but would search out a proper audience.

  As my parents had never given me much pocket-money, I needed to find a way of making some cash. Instead of taking a route as a paperboy, I studied the letters pages of local newspapers and noted that each week’s star letter could earn its writer five pounds. It was a simple matter of studying the form of each paper and understanding what they were looking for.

  I had always been a good mimic, and could finally put the skill to use. I wrote dozens of letters to magazines up and down the country, from Knitwear Monthly to Yachts and Yachting. Soon I was earning myself a schoolboy salary, while learning about everything from needlepoint to spinnakers. I did it guiltily, worrying that I might be robbing an old lady of the coveted position of star letter, but it was enough to give me renewed confidence. I wrote in masquerade as a college professor, a district nurse, a retired colonel, a dinner lady, a Chelsea Pensioner, a juvenile delinquent, a prisoner, a naval officer. I realized that I had spent so many years being quiet and watching people that I had picked up all kinds of useless information. It was time to wring out the sponge.

  I began to quantify my personal feelings by making a list of all the things that made me happy, and when this proved far too bland and embarrassing (it included things like sunlight on wet streets and the smell of cut lemons) I made another list of all the things that made me fearful.

  As this list threatened to run to several dozen pages, I began to understand the nature of my problem. I was scared of being alive, just like my father.

  It was odd that, despite having read hundreds of examples of what could be considered blueprints for good writing, when I sat down at a table to write I could not recall any of the lessons I had absorbed. I wondered if it was because my life bore so little relationship to Captain Ahab’s or those of the five aristocratic families in War and Peace. After all, I was never likely to set to sea (unless you counted crossing the Thames on the Woolwich Ferry) or become embroiled in another Napoleonic invasion of Russia.

  The answer lay in the idea that you planted little seeds of yourself and the people you knew in different plots. I did not know how my family would react to news that the world was about to end, for example, but I could take a pretty good guess. My mother would lay down stocks of tinned peaches and make sure that the house was tidy, as if preparing for guests. My father would attempt to build a bomb-proof bunker at the bottom of the garden, but would only get as far as finishing two plywood walls and an undercoated door before the apocalypse struck. Mrs Fowler, were she back from the grave, would blame Kath for being the underlying cause of the apocalypse. My brother would come up with the only practical and useful arrangements for the cataclysm. And me, I would probably pick up my notebook and start passively recording details without ever quite grasping the true importance of the event, just as I always did.

  But what was the alternative? You didn’t need to fight a bull in order to write about fighting a bull. I had read enough of Ernest Hemingway’s prose to decide that writing was not the ideal tool for proving one’s manhood. English authors were never daunted by the invention of passive heroes. Dickens’s characters had plenty of strong personality traits but were pulled from shore to shore by the tidal forces of their turbulent times.

  What about locations? If you wanted to set a story in Paris, did you have to go there? The furthest we had ever ventured was Broadstairs. We hadn’t even been to Cornwall because, as my father was fond of pointing out, ‘It’s further away than France, for God’s sake.’ What about a story set on Mars? Where did you even begin to start with other planets? What would an alien look like if it lived on a planet with a million times more gravity than that of the Earth? How would he pick things up if his arms bent the other way?

  And what about drama? If nothing more dramatic than a small bin fire had ever occurred in your life, could you still describe the collapse of empires? Were there perhaps laws against doing so, like the list of strange nouns governing language rules that I had discovered in the East Greenwich Public Library?

  ‘This obsession with plots, well, it’s not a bad thing,’ said my mother, reading over my shoulder. She had lately begun making regular checks on me. ‘But at some point you have to start using them to understand people. People shape the events of a story, not the other way round.’

  ‘That’s not true. Wars change people.’

  ‘Yes, but whether they are brave or weak in terrible circumstances is decided by their character. And people’s characters are very complicated and contradictory – far more so than you’d ever imagine.’

  ‘Are you saying the stories aren’t important?’

  ‘No, I’m saying they’re the part you can make up. But you can’t make up emotions. They have to be real.’

  ‘Then what do you do about stories?’

  ‘Oh, those can come out of your head. If you’re convincing in what you make up, it will feel real to the reader. You always liked Hancock’s Half-Hour, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ The Hancock radio shows drew vast audiences. The streets had always been emptier when he was on the air. Hancock was effectively playing himself, an embittered former vaudeville artist on the downslide from fame, yet he could barely improvise a single word. H
e relied on two scriptwriters whom he would eventually come to resent, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, but without whom he was doomed. The pair had changed the face of radio comedy by making it sound naturalistic, even when the shows were absurd flights of fancy. There were pauses and coughs, sighs and – most feared of all on radio – passages of total silence. One episode, A Sunday Afternoon at Home, nailed the absolute deadliness of the English post-lunch Sunday: ‘Nowhere to go, nothing to do, just sitting here waiting for the next lot of grub to come up.’2 Galton and Simpson even acknowledged their debt to Harold Pinter in one of the show’s episodes. ‘This isn’t a Pinter play,’ they made Hancock announce, ‘where you can say whatever you like so long as you put enough gaps in it.’

  ‘When you listen to those shows,’ said my mother, ‘do they tell you what Tony Hancock is like?’

  ‘Of course. He’s rude and pompous and insecure, and everything annoys him.’

  ‘So if the writers decide to put him in hospital or let him win the pools, you already know how he will react. And you think about how you would react in the same situation. And the gap between the two makes the comedy. To me, that’s what being a writer is really about. Words can inspire a sense of recognition, but how much more exciting to provide a revelation!’

  ‘I haven’t had any revelations.’

  ‘Never confuse the writer with what he writes – they’re two different things. Make up the circumstances, pour out the emotions and don’t care what anyone else thinks of you.’ She dried her hands absently on her apron. ‘I grew up in a time that disapproved of anyone doing anything that might mark them out as different. No wonder writers and artists were always looked upon as outsiders by people of my generation.’

  ‘I am a bit of an outsider,’ I admitted. ‘I’m always the last one to get picked in games except Griffiths, and he doesn’t have all his toes.’

  ‘Good can come out of not being included. Well, that’s all I have to say. You’ll have to work the rest out for yourself. Now come and help me lay the table.’