Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.
While we were having sex, when the condom broke, Poppy was coming, and she gasped out, “Marco, this is better than sex.” I just remembered.
I headed down to Primrose Hill. I’ll walk to Tim Cavendish’s via Regent’s Park and Oxford Street. I love walking past London Zoo, and peering in. My childhood’s in there. My adoptive parents used to take me on my birthday. Today even the sound of the aviary makes me taste clammy fish-paste sandwiches.
I’m pretty sure that being a single kid–single mother is enough for Poppy. But I’ve known women who’ve believed one thing about abortion, only for those beliefs to swing around when the crunch came. If Poppy’s pregnant, what will I want? Would I want? For her to accept me as a father, I’d have to swear monogamy, and mean it. Many of my friends have got married and done the baby thing, and I can see how completely it changes your life. Taking plunges is no fun when the well-being of two other people depends on how you land. Weird. When I was younger, I thought that kids were an inevitable part of getting old. I thought you’d wake up one morning and there they’d be, nappies bulging. But no, you actually have to make up your mind to do them, like making up your mind to buy a house, cut a CD, or stage a coup d’état. What if I never make my mind up? What if?
Ah, worry, worry, worry.
The top of the hill. Breathe in, look at that view, and breathe out! Quite a picture, isn’t it! Old Man London, out for the day … Italians give their cities sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London’s middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay. I know its overlapping towns like I know my own body. The red brick parts around Chelsea and Pimlico, Battersea Power Station like an upturned coffee table … the grimy estates down Vauxhall way. Green Park. I map the city by trigonometrical shag points. Highbury is already Katy Forbes. Putney is Poppy, and India of course, not that I shag India, she’s only five. Camden is Baggins the Tarantula. I try to pinpoint the places in Alfred’s nutty story.… How am I supposed to put a story like that into a serious autobiography? I’m going to have to do something pretty drastic, or I’ll end up ghostwriting Diary of a Madman.
It’s too beautiful a day to worry about that. The light is too golden, the shadows too soft.
There are a lot of things in London that weren’t here when Alfred went round his big loop chasing Alfred. All those aeroplanes flying into Heathrow and Gatwick. The Thames Barrier. The Millennium Dome. Centerpoint, that sixties pedestal ashtray, bloody hell I wish someone would come along and bomb that. Canada Tower over in Docklands, gleaming in the sunlight now, and I think of that art deco mirror in the corner of Shelley’s room. Shelley of Shepherd’s Bush. She moved in with, what’s-his-name, ah, Jesus, what was his name? The British Oxygen man. Her flatmate Natalie had become a born-again Christian and moved in with Jesus. Shelley, Natalie, and I had formed a Holy Trinity one rainy afternoon under Shelley’s duvet. At the time I had filed Natalie under “Dangerously Vulnerable.”
A city is a sea that you lose things in. You only find things that other people have lost.
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” I say to a man walking his red setter.
“Fackin’ shithole innit?”
Londoners slag off London because, deep down, we know we are living in the greatest city in the world.
Oxford Street was heaving when I got off the bus. Oxford Street is one of those sold-out-past-its-best things, like Glastonbury Rock Festival or Harrison Ford. You can taste the metallic tang of pollution here. The Doctor Martens boot shops depress me. The gargantuan CD shops preclude any surprise discoveries. The department stores are full of things for people who never have to lift anything when they move house: Neroesque bathtubs with gold-plated handles and life-size porcelain collie dogs. The fast-food restaurants towards Marble Arch leave you hungrier than you were when you went in. The only good thing about Oxford Street are the Spanish girls who pay for their English lessons by handing out leaflets for cut-price language schools around Tottenham Court Road. Gibreel got his rocks off with one once, by pretending to spik no Eenglish and be just off the boat from Lebanon. I bought a T-shirt from a stall near Oxford Circus with a pig on it to cheer Poppy up, big enough for her to use as a night-shirt. Then I walked past a poster in a travel agent’s, or rather I was crushed against it by a sudden surge of bodies, and I felt small and older than my years and losing sight of the strip of sky far above, and—
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
You know the real drag about being a ghostwriter? You never get to write anything that beautiful. And even if you did, nobody would ever believe it was you.
I had to wait eight minutes to use my bank machine, and in that time I counted eleven different languages walking past. I think they were different, I get fuzzy around the Middle East. I blew my nose. Gravelly London mucus showed up on my snot analysis. Mmm. Lovely. Next to the bank was a shop that only sold televisions. Wide ones, cuboid ones, spherical ones, ones that let you see what crap you were missing on thirty other channels while you were watching the crap on this one. I watched the All-Blacks score three tries against England, and formulated the Marco Chance versus Fate Videoed Sports Match Analogy. It goes like this: when the players are out there the game is a sealed arena of interbombarding chance. But when the game is on video then every tiniest action already exists. The past, present, and future exist at the same time: all the tape is there, in your hand. There can be no chance, for every human decision and random fall of the ball is already fated. Therefore, does chance or fate control our lives? Well, the answer is as relative as time. If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.
Now I don’t know about you, but my life is a well and I’m right down there in it. Neck deep, and I still can’t touch the bottom.
I had a strong desire to jump in a taxi, tell him to take me to Heathrow, and get on a plane to somewhere empty and far away. Mongolia would suit me fine. But I can’t even afford the tube fare to Heathrow.
I inserted my bank card, and prayed to the Fickle God of Autobanking for twenty-five quid, the minimum amount necessary to get drunk with Gibreel. The bloody machine swallowed my card and told me to contact my branch. I said something like “Gah!” and punched the screen. What’s the point of Yeats if you can’t buy a few rounds?
A round Indian lady behind me with a magenta dot on her forehead growled in a Brooklyn accent, “Real bummer, huh kid?”
Before I could answer a pigeon from the ledge above crapped on me.
“Better go back to bed … Here’s a tissue.…”
The Tim Cavendish Literary Agency is down a murky side street near Haymarket. It’s on the third floor. From the outside, the building is quite swanky. There’s a revolving door, and a flagpole jutting out from above the lobby roof. It should house a wing of the Admiralty, or some other silly club that bars female members. But no, it houses Tim Cavendish.
“Marco! Wonderful you could drop in!”
Too much enthusiasm is much more offputting than not enough. “Afternoon, Tim. I’ve brought you the last three chapters.”
“Top hole.”
Glance at Tim’s desk and you’ll see everything you need to know. The desk itself was owned by Charles Dickens. Well, that’s what Tim says and I have no reason to disbelieve h
im. Terminally overpopulated by piles of files and manuscripts, a glass of Glenfiddich that you could mistake for a goldfish bowl of Glenfiddich, three pairs of glasses, a word processor I’ve never seen him use, an overflowing ashtray, and a copy of A–Z Guide to Nineveh and Ur and The Racing Post. “Come in and have a glass, why don’t you? I showed the first three chapters to Lavenda Vilnius on Monday. She’s very excited. I haven’t seen Lavenda so fluttery about a work in progress since Rodney’s biography of Princess Margarine.”
I chose the least piled-up-on chair and started unloading its cargo of shiny hardbacks. They still smelled of print.
“Dump those dratted things on the floor, Marco. In fact, fly to Japan and dump them on the bastard they’re about.”
I looked at the cover. The Sacred Revelations of His Serendipity—A New Vision, A New Peace, A New Earth. Translated by Beryl Brain. There was a picture of an Oriental Jesus gazing into the center of a buttercup with a golden-haired kid gazing up at him. “Didn’t know this was your usual line, Tim.”
“It isn’t. I was handling it for an old Eton chum who runs a flaky New Age imprint on the side. Warning bells went off, Marco. Warning bells. But I didn’t listen to them. My Eton man thought the market was ripe for a bit of Oriental wisdom in the new millennium. Beryl Brain is his part-time girlfriend. ‘Beryl’ is just about right, but ‘Brain’ she is not. Anyway. We’d just got the first consignment back from the printers when His Serendipity decided to hurry his vision along and gas the Tokyo underground with a lethal chemical. I’m sure you saw it on the news earlier this year. ’Twas ’im.”
“How … horrific!”
“You’re telling me it was horrific. We only got a fraction of the costs off the bleeders before they had their assets frozen! I ask you, Marco, I ask you. We’re stuck with a print run of fifteen hundred hardbacks. We’ve sold a handful as curios to True Crime Freaks, but those apart we’re up Shit Creek without a spatula. Can you believe those cultists? As if the end of the world needs to be hurried along …” Tim handed me the biggest glass of whisky I’d ever seen or heard of.
“What’s the book itself like?”
“Well, some of it’s twaddle, but mostly it’s just piffle. Cheers! Down the hatch.”
We clinked goldfish bowls.
“So tell me, Marco, how are our friends up in Hampstead?”
“Fine, fine …” I returned the book to its brothers and sisters. “We’re up to 1947.”
“Oh, really … What happened in 1947?”
“Not much. Alfred saw a ghost.”
Tim Cavendish tilted back and his chair squeaked. “A ghost? I’m happy to hear it.”
I didn’t want to broach this topic, but … “Tim, I’m not sure to what degree Alfred is altogether …”
“Altogether altogether?”
“You could say.”
“He’s as nutty as a vegan T-bone. And Roy has definitely been to Disney World once too often. What of it?”
“Well, doesn’t it present some problems?”
“What problems? Roy has enough dosh to personally underwrite the whole print run.”
“No, I don’t mean that.” Now wasn’t the time to broach the other topic of Roy and the House of Lords. “I mean, well, autobiographies are supposed to be factual, aren’t they?”
Tim chuckled and took off his glasses. Both pairs. He leaned back on his squeaky chair and placed his fingertips together as though in prayer. “Are autobiographies supposed to be factual? Would you like the straight answer or the convoluted one?”
“Straight.”
“Then, from the publishing point of view, the answer is ‘God forfend.’ ”
“I’ll try the convoluted answer.”
“The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.”
Very Tim Cavendish. Profundity on the hoof. Or has he said it a hundred times before?
“Look at it this way. Alfred is the ingredients, the book is the meal, but you, Marco, you are the cook! Squeeze out the juice! I’m glad to hear there’s still some left in the old boy. Ghosts are welcome. And for God’s sake, play up the Jarman-Bacon connection when you get to that. Encourage him to name-drop. Stroke his udders. Alfred’s not famous in his own right, at least, outside Old Compton Street he isn’t, so we’re going to have to Boswellize him. The ear of postwar-twentieth-century London. That kind of thing. He knew Edward Heath, too, didn’t he? And he was a pal of Albert Schweitzer.”
“It doesn’t seem very honest. I’m not writing what really happened.”
“Honest! God bless you, Marco! This is not the world of Peter Rabbit and his woodland friends. Pepys, Boswell, Johnson, Swift, all freeloading frauds to a man.”
“At least they were their own freeloading frauds. Ghostwriters do the freeloading for other frauds.”
Tim chuckled up to the ceiling. “We’re all ghostwriters, my boy. And it’s not just our memories. Our actions, too. We all think we’re in control of our own lives, but really they’re preghostwritten by forces around us.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“How well does the thing read?” A classic Cavendish answer in a question’s clothing. The intercom on Tim’s desk crackled. “It’s your brother on the line, Mr. Cavendish.” Mrs. Whelan, Tim’s secretary, is the most indifferent woman in London. Her indifference is as dent-proof as fog. “Are you here or are you still in Bermuda?”
“Which one, Mrs. Whelan? Nipper Cavendish or Denholme Cavendish?”
“I daresay it’s your elder brother, Mr. Cavendish.”
Tim sighed. “Sorry, Marco. This is going to be protracted sibling stuff. Why don’t you drop in next week after I’ve had a chance to read this lot? Oh, and I know this is Herod calling Thatcher a bit insensitive but you really need to change your shirt. And there’s something white stuck in your hair. And a last word of advice—I tell this to anyone who’s trying to get a book finished—steer clear of Nabokov. Nabokov makes anyone feel like a clodhopper.”
I downed the rest of the whisky and slunk off, closing the door quietly behind me on Tim’s “Hello, Denny, how marvelous to hear from you, I was going to get in touch this very afternoon about your kind little loan.…”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Whelan.” To Caesar that which is Caesar’s, to God that which is God’s, and to the secretary that which is the secretary’s.
Mrs. Whelan’s sigh would drain a fresh salad of all color.
“Marco!”
I’d wandered into Leicester Square, drawn by the knapsacked European girls, the lights and colors, and a vague plan to see if there were any new remainders to be found in the mazes under Henry Pourdes Bookshop in Charing Cross Road. Warm, late afternoon. Leicester Square is the center of the maze. Nothing to do but put off getting out again. Teenagers in baseball caps and knee-length shorts swerved by on skateboards. I thought of the word “centrifugal,” and decided it was one of my favorite words. Youths from the Far East, Europe, North America, wherever, drifting around hoping to find Cool London. Ah, that Cockney leprechaun is forever beyond the launderette on the corner. I watched the merry-go-round for a few revolutions. A sprog was smiling every time he bobbed past his gran and somehow it made my heart ache so much that I felt like crying or smashing something. I wanted Poppy and India to be here, now, right now. I’d buy us ice creams, and if India’s fell off, she could have mine. Then I heard my name and looked up. Iannos was waving a falafel at me from his Greek Snack Bar between the Swiss Center and the Prince Charles Cinema, where you can see nine-month-old movies for £2.50, by the way. Katy’s scrambled eggs had long since vacated my stomach, and a falafel would be perfect.
“Iannos!”
“Marco, my son! How’s The Music of Chance?”
“Fine, mate. Everything as it should be. Petty arguments about nothing, bitching, still porking one another’s girlfriends when we’re not porking one another. Did you buy the new synth from Roger?”
“Dodgy Rodgy? Yep. I play it in my uncle’s restaurant every night. Only
problem is that I have to pretend I’m Turkish.”
“Since when can you speak Turkish?”
“That’s the problem. I have to pretend I’m an autistic Turkish keyboard-playing prodigy. Gets you down, man. Like being in Tommy and The King and I on the same stage. When’s The Music of Chance playing again?”
“When is it not playing?”
“Bollocks, man. How’s Poppy?”
“Ah, Poppy’s fine, thanks.”
“And her beautiful little daughter?”
“India. India’s fine.…”
Iannos looked at me thoughtfully.
“What’s that look supposed to mean then?”
“Ah, nothing … I can’t chat, but why don’t you come in and sit down? I think there’s a seat at the back. Cup o’tea?”
“I’d love one. Thanks, Iannos. Thanks a lot.”
Iannos’s little snack bar was full of bodies and loud bits of sentences. The only free seat in the cramped place was opposite a woman slightly older than me. She was reading a book called The Infinite Tether—You and Out-of-Body Experiences, by Dwight Silver-wind. I asked if I could take the seat, and she nodded without looking up. I tried not to stare but there was nothing else to look at. Her auburn hair—dyed—was in gypsy ringlets, and between her fingers, eyebrows, and earlobes she was wearing at least a dozen rings. Her clothes were tie-dyed. Probably purchased when she’d gone trekking in Nepal. Landslid breast. She burns incense, does aromatherapy and describes herself as not exactly telepathic, but definitely empathic. She’s into pre-Raphaelite art, and works part-time in a commercial picture library. I’m not knocking these things, and I know I come over as arrogant. But I do know my Londoners.
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