The Body Lies

by Jo Baker

  “I don’t even know if it is a novel. It really depends on what you mean by ‘novel.’ And as for ‘about,’ I think that’s a bit limiting, don’t you? I mean, as a question.”

  “Oh-kay.” I was so conscious of Meryl’s assessing gaze, the way she drank everything in. “So, how about this. Tell me three things about what you’re writing.”

  “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Okay. So. I’m interested in experimentation…”

  “Are we talking GCSE Chemistry here, or are we talking Hadron Collider?”

  “Definitely Collider,” he said. “I’m interested in pushing the form, pushing my writing as far as it will go. People rehash Beckett or Joyce every day, and that’s…” He shook his head.

  “That’s not your thing?”

  “No. Because I’m not a fucking impressionist. What I’m doing here hasn’t been done before.”

  The swearword made Meryl flinch. I found it quite charming, though, this innocent arrogance; he was shooting for immortal transcendence, with no idea of how difficult it is to achieve even mediocrity.

  “So what is your thing?” I asked. “It’s not a novel. It’s experimental. It’s not like Beckett or Joyce. So what is it?”

  “It’s…” He shrugged. “Well. I guess it’s Art.” And then he grinned: “That’s your three things right there now.”

  I laughed outright. “I look forward to reading it.”

  “I look forward to you reading it too.”

  Meryl opened her mouth to add her enthusiasm to the chorus, but Nicholas spoke across her:

  “I’ve read yours,” he said.

  I kept my poker face. I stared him out. “Oh yes.”

  “It’s quite a read.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Based on your own experiences, I imagine? It has that feel about it.”

  “Not really. It’s fiction.”

  “Come on. You can’t write it unless you’ve lived it. You can’t write it well, anyway.”

  I took the compliment with a tilt of the head; I’d had few enough, God knows. “Maybe. But there are different ways of knowing, aren’t there?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You can know something emotionally, without having practical experience; you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Otherwise how would anybody write sci-fi, or historical novels?”

  “Yours wasn’t sci-fi.”

  “It’s more or less historical by now.”

  I wished I’d had the sense, all those years ago, to lift my head out of the total absorption of its writing, and consider what the book might have been saying about me. It didn’t occur to me, literally didn’t once cross my mind until that excruciating phone conversation with Mum, to whom I’d proudly sent one of my comps, and who’d taken the whole thing so very literally, and couldn’t forgive me my own darkness, or the blame on her that she felt it implied. She hadn’t yet got over it. I’d lost my (touchy, stubborn and sharp-as-lemon) Mum to two lukewarm reviews, pathetic sales and near-complete loss of confidence in my own writing.

  “It had the ring of truth about it.”

  I leaned in close, as if to tell a secret: “That’s the trick, you see.” He leaned in too, to hear me. “To make the whole thing up, and still to tell the truth.”

  “That’s not my deal,” he said.

  “What is your deal?”

  “Wait and see.”

  He raised his glass, to show us its emptiness, then headed off towards the drinks table. I turned to Meryl, eyebrows up: a “What about him, then!” expression. Her face, though, had gone all compressed and difficult.

  “That guy is so…” she said, and she hesitated and wafted her hand around, and we left the sentence hanging unfinished between us. We watched Nicholas over at the drinks table, where Lisa refilled his proffered glass.

  “What he’s doing, the scale of that,” she said, “kinda puts my little werewolf story in the shade.”

  Bless her. “Don’t worry, Meryl,” I said. “There’s space for all of it. Whatever he’s up to, it doesn’t diminish what you’re doing; it doesn’t have any impact on you whatsoever.” I leaned in and whispered to her: “Thing is: we don’t even know yet if he’s any good.”

  Chemistry

  By Nicholas Palmer

  A flame licks at the lump of hash. Alex’s tongue slicks out over his lip like there’s something living in his face. The game flickers over the three of them; the music turns over and over. This, this is what Nick wanted all along not the jostling and the drinking but the softening at the end of things, when they all just quit lying to each other for a while.

  But Gideon drags out a baggie, and drops it down on the glass-topped table. He is tapping out the coke, starts to chop it into lines. Coke is all lies but the hand flicks and taps and Nick knows Gideon is trying to be nice is lobbing more and more into that evening filling it up till it is so full that it has to spill over till they have to smile have to laugh at the excess because Gideon is trying to make his little brother happy or at least make him forget. Nick doesn’t do happy and he doesn’t do forget, not this day of all days.

  It was supposed to be just a quiet one, Gid, he says.

  Gideon grins his big white grin. Nick snorts a line of coke to be nice back.

  The soundtrack of the game loops and roars and the lights flicker and Alex smokes his spliff and splats zombies and Nick grinds his teeth and watches the spittle stick and catch on his brother’s lips as Gideon just keeps on talking talking talking. Nick should come down to London yeah and come out with him in London and yeah go clubbing yeah, this girl just last week, in the toilets, her mates laughing outside, and because London he’ll never see her again, doesn’t have to, not like round here where everything you’ve ever done follows you round like cans tied to a car. But fucksake not a word to Hannah cos she’d have his balls. Nick nods as though Gid is right and an easy fuck would solve everything, while he’s thinking Just fuck off Gideon. Fuck off back to London why don’t you, and leave me here alone.

  He’s done with it. He gets up and his head swerves and yaws. He flaps a hand to stop Gid following. He goes down the back stairs into the kitchen. There’s a mess of crumbs and open packets and the fridge stands open, spilling light and cold, humming. He heads out, into the February cold and leaves the back door wide behind him.

  He climbs the lane out of the village, disturbing the rooks, sending a few flapping up into the sky. Farmyard dung and a dirty tractor and the dog staring from the darkness. Tarmac crumbles to grit and grass splits the track. He climbs the blue heath to where the limestone scabs over the hill and the few trees are twisted little dancers and the moss drips in the grykes. There on the cold stone he hunkers down. From there he watches the motorway’s red and white river, watches the streams of streetlamps blink out in the town beside the bay. The sea beyond goes silver. It’s morning. And he is through it, through that night and out the other side.

  He rolls a joint, sinks back, lies on the rock. He smokes, and lets the smoke fall up into the air. Rocks of dope crumble and flare and he brushes them away. The cold is hard against the back of his head, against his shoulder-blades. The fresh new blue is dizzying. He rubs the roach out against the rock. He stares into the pit of the sky. He misses her he aches with missing her his lost girl he feels untethered with her gone. He feels that any moment he might fall headlong up into the sky

  Don’t get me wrong: I liked it. I didn’t see how it was smashing subatomic literary particles, but I liked it. I figured that either its radical nature would emerge as the work went on, or it wouldn’t, and that it didn’t really matter. It could be good without being revolutionary.

  Tim nodded and pouted along like he was listening to jazz. Karen clacked a sliver ring against her teeth and twisted a curl around her finger, thinking. She said it wasn’t what she looked for in a
novel these days, grit; she found she encountered plenty of grit in real life, but she thought it worked well here; he did a good job with his grit. Meryl was fulsome in her praise of the mise en scène; Steven wondered if the non-standard syntax might be off-putting, and where it was going; it seemed to be looking backward rather than moving forward: Was Nicholas coming into his story arc in the right place? Richard sat back with his arms folded over his plaid belly and didn’t contribute anything, apart from the faint whistle his nose made as he breathed.

  “Where do you want me to start?” Nicholas asked.

  “Well, the beginning is traditional.”

  “Or,” I said, “you could decide not to think in arcs and lines. You might think of it as a pool in which narrative pebbles are dropped and we watch the ripples roll outwards. Or a spiral, where a key event is returned to, and seen differently each time.”

  Nicholas fixed his gaze on me; I noticed Steven and Richard exchange a quizzical glance; I felt hot.

  Meryl said, “Is that more female though? A more female way of writing?”

  “Does it have to be about gender?” Richard.

  “All I’m suggesting is that we can think in other shapes. And that it might be particularly helpful for Nicholas, who’s already set out his stall as an innovator, to think in other shapes. Not lines and arcs, maybe, but circles, or spirals, or anything he wants.”

  Nicholas still looked at me, long, considering: those silvery eyes. And then he slowly nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “Good. We’d better move on then. Lots to get through.”

  I shuffled pages around to find new work, and my cheeks burned. We had a piece from Richard’s “romantic novel with a twist.” Our protagonist was a spurned husband who had taken to spying on his estranged wife. He’d positioned himself at a pub window so that he could observe her at work in the estate agents across the street, eat pies, drink pints of bitter and ruminate. A meat pie got a good deal of descriptive attention, as did the wife’s despicably hipster lover, as did the very attractive barperson, who provided, along with beer and pies, a sympathetic ear, and who would, I was pretty certain, turn out to be transvestite.

  Nicholas said: “I expect we’ll be hearing more about that pie.”

  Richard craned round to him, eyebrows up.

  “You know what they say,” Nicholas explained. “If there’s a pie on the table in the first act, it’s going to have to go off in the second.”

  I snorted. I probably shouldn’t have. It wasn’t kind.

  “Actually that’s ‘gun,’ ” Richard pointed out unnecessarily. “Chekov.”

  Nicholas nodded his thanks.

  We moved on briskly to an extract from Meryl’s werewolf story, Halfway. A house in the birch woods, a yellow school bus, the casual cruelties of the schoolyard; a promising friendship and the dawn-breaking glimmer of a world that offered more than our protagonist could yet grasp. It already worked; you could feel it working. It was clear what the character wanted, needed—to belong—and we watched how she struggled to make that happen, and how the bullies, poverty, how her own gaucheness got in her way. I thought, simply, This kid is a writer. Nicholas didn’t join in with the discussion that followed. I noticed Meryl’s gaze drifting back to him from time to time, at first hopefully, and then anxiously, and still he didn’t say a thing.

  “Nicholas, you’re very quiet,” I said eventually. “Don’t you have anything to add?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not a dicky bird?”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “Literally nothing?”

  “Well no, because you know, it works. It does what it needs to do. It’s good. So there’s nothing more to add.”

  Her eyes went huge. “Thank you.”

  He shrugged. “It’s true.”

  “Well, when you think that,” I said, “say so, out loud please, because it helps.”

  Meryl was speaking, her voice lowered, privately to him. I caught the phrase: it means so much to me. She was still talking to him, sotto voce, her shoulder pressing against his shoulder, while I wrapped up the class.

  “Tim,” I said, “next week, can we have some stuff from you?”

  Tim nodded. “Yep, no worries. No worries at all. I’ll get that to you soonest.”

  The room emptied. The door fell shut.

  I slumped in my seat. First day of teaching over. It had gone okay, hadn’t it? I locked up and dropped off the key with the porter. And then I had to run and pick up Sam.

  * * *

  —

  Dr. Peters had titled his lecture series How Writing Works, which was helpfully vague. For today’s first wild stab at the topic, I’d written ten pages of lecture notes, I’d prepared a shower of PowerPoint slides, and I was dressed like a grown-up in black jacket and trousers—not quite a suit, since I didn’t own a suit, but it could pass for one at a distance. I’d run the lecture through in full, twice, in front of the wardrobe mirror. I muttered passages of it as I went about my day; I’d included instructions to self as to where to click the PowerPoint slides along, and where to smile, and here and there I’d even scrawled a handwritten reminder to breathe. I was as prepared as I could be, but even so, as I clumped down those hollow-sounding steps to the front of the lecture theatre, my heart banged in my chest like it wanted out, and I wanted out too. The lecture theatre had a capacity of a hundred and fifty people, and it was pretty much full. The kids were chatting in clusters and/or staring at their smartphones; a few watched me coming down the staircase towards the black drapes at the front. The data-projection screen glowed and a NO SIGNAL message bounced around. As I reached the desk, the room grew quiet. I rummaged out my reading glasses, scrubbed my hand through my hair. The room was properly silent now. I smiled up at the ranks of faces, my specs making everything soft and indistinguishable. I began to talk; some of the students began to make notes. This seemed at once alarming and encouraging.

  I got into my stride, set my notes aside and took off my reading glasses. My distance vision sharpened, and I spotted Nicholas and Meryl, sitting together in the third row from the front. She was tiny beside him, hunched over her notes, scribbling; he was sitting back, hands clasped on the writing ledge, looking at me with that half-smile. And then up towards the top, near the projector, were Richard and Steven, shoulder to shoulder, the former in a plaid shirt, the latter in his suit jacket. They looked like they’d come straight from work, had probably taken time off specifically to be there. From their expressions I wasn’t sure they considered it time well spent.

  MA students were allowed, but not obliged, not even expected to attend. This was a first-year lecture, after all. I faltered, put my glasses back on, went back to my notes. I read out my thoughts about finding one’s own unique voice, and it sounded lame. I talked about everyone’s individual perspective. I talked about the use of one’s own senses, to see (and touch and hear and smell and taste) what you see, not just recycle what others have already seen (and touched and heard and smelled and tasted) and already written down. That this was a first step in experiencing the world anew, and communicating that newness, and making something that nobody else could make. And I felt like I had exposed myself somehow for saying it.

  I concluded the presentation with a picture of Marcel Duchamp’s La Source. At the sight of a glossy ceramic urinal blown up on the huge screen for their consideration, some of the audience sniggered. I said we’d talk about this more next week, about exactly that uneasy laugh, and the act of defamiliarization that it was a response to, and its implications for us as writers…though I hadn’t written a word of next week’s lecture yet and wasn’t sure myself what the implications were, though I was pretty sure there must be some.

  And that was it. Fifty minutes done.

  I logged out and gathered up my things, letting the students clear the hall before I follo
wed. I didn’t want to risk overhearing any informal feedback on the way.

  Someone was still lingering by the door, though, as I clumped up the stairs towards it. I peered over the top of my specs: Patrick Maloney. He held the door open for me and we walked together back towards the department, rain like a bead curtain either side of the covered walkway. He hoped I didn’t mind him coming along; he made a point of attending the Creative Writing lectures; Mike and Simon were always so insightful and entertaining that it was a joy to listen to them. He didn’t say whether I had been insightful or entertaining, or if it had been a joy to listen to me. We turned out of the quad and joined the main route down the length of the campus. The covered walkway was packed solid with staff and students; Mina dodged past in the opposite direction, notes clamped fluttering to her chest; she was dressed in a beautiful peacock-blue dress and an orange jacket, an exception that proved the rule of her usual gothic blacks. She said hello and was past us.

  “Gorgeous dress,” I called after her, and she waved and mouthed thanks. “Mina’s a lot more colourful than usual,” I said to Patrick. I imagined a shared wardrobe, him in the shower while she’s picking out her clothes.

  “Yeah, she must be giving a lecture.”

  I didn’t follow: “Is that a luck thing?”

  “Hey?”

  “All that colour, is that for luck somehow?”

  “Well no, it’s just if you wear black against those black curtains you just kind of…disappear.”

  I stopped in my tracks. Someone stumbled behind me, tutted, slid past.

  “Oh God,” I said. I glanced down at my own serviceable black.

  “No, really it was fine.” He gestured me on: people were ducking out into the rain to get past us, swearing.

  “How could it be fine?” I said.

  “Well, I could see your face and hands. And you did wave your hands around a lot, so that helped.”

  “Oh God.” We swung in through the doors into our building, climbed the stairs towards our floor.