By the time it came, finally, to the climax of the evening I knew what I had to do. I had to go on stage and not get a prize. I didn’t know what the not-prize would be until the man who didn’t make cake-mix announced a ‘Cross Pen’. This is a ball-point pen in a box. It is retractable. He put the box on the lectern and asked my old English teacher to say a few words about the shortlist. She cleared her throat and gathered her notes. I thought she would take this opportunity to say that I was very, deeply special but just, lamentably, not suitable for the prize this year. She didn’t really. And then she called me up on stage to collect the ball-point pen. After which I turned to the audience and gave a little bow. Then we all stood there and got our picture taken.
‘Left a bit,’ said photographer. ‘No, left a bit.’
After it was over, I went to the cash machine outside and came back in and hit the bar. I didn’t know anybody. Besides there was a sort of smell off me of the woman who didn’t get the award – people didn’t quite know what I was for. I didn’t know what I was for. A guy accosted me. He said I had a sadness in my life, he could see it. He said I drank too much, he should know, he used to be an alcoholic. Then he ordered three vodkas in a half-pint glass with some water on the side – no ice. I escaped over to a man I half knew, or knew of, a much-remaindered journalist in a bow tie who had been watching me across the room with a small smile. I told him an amusing story. I said how he knew my sister a little, then I griped a bit about the long drive, the no lunch, the fucking Cross Pen.
‘Sorry?’ he said, as though uncomprehending. Then he chortled (actually, really, chortled). ‘Oh I see,’ he said. ‘You thought you had won.’
To which there was no answer really. In the morning, I went home.
‘If only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate.’ Diogenes the Cynic, 4th century BC
Niall Griffiths
My first novel had been published only a few months earlier and this was to be my first reading in the town where I lived then and still in fact do. Many friends descended; people who had moved away over the years, they all returned for the night, off buses and trains and out of cars, all bearing gifts in the form of small folded wraps or bottles. Afternoon lines and cold vodka shots around the kitchen table at what was my flat and then to the pub until dark and then to the reading, which was rammed and went well, although I should have recognized the portent of embarrassment that throbbed in the air when I, being interviewed by a beautiful woman from local TV, went to tap her in a friendly way on the upper arm and accidentally caught her left breast instead. All captured on camera. But by that time my senses had been skewed somewhat and I apologized and she laughed and all my returned friends and I went back to the pub. I remember, some hours later, being hunched over a toilet cistern with Ronnie, rolled-up tenners in our nostrils, whatever powder he had chopped out for us salty and grainy and glistening candy-floss pink on the porcelain a few inches below my face. We snorted simultaneously, and then until the world turned black a few more hours later it turned deep blue all through; a rich and resonant, thrumming blue.
I woke up in my bed. Or I was woken up by an odd sensation of being drained as all blood gushed south. Through the hangover tangle, thorny snarl in my skull and skinprickle I could feel it, down there, a hot steel surging, straining so hard as if it was seeking to rip itself away from my own body and dart frantic around the room like a trapped bat. So tight, so stuffed, it seemed like it would explode were I to touch it. Why stimulants have this effect mystifies me; it makes no biological, evolutionary, or even spiritual sense (if indeed that contains any sense at all). That your polluted blood should urge procreation. That your harrowed heart should yearn to beat yet faster. But there it was, as always and again, making a marquee of the duvet, the deep snores of my girlfriend sounding somewhere down there and I couldn’t wake her, couldn’t put my puffed and crusted face all leering in hers and at least not expect her to do anything more than laugh and go back to sleep. Besides which, I could hear other snoring, further sleepy breathing from the adjoining front room; I clambered out of the bed and opened the door a crack and peeked in – four, maybe five slumbering humps on couches and the floor beneath blankets and overcoats and spare sheets. Four, maybe five separate and distinct snorings, a symphony of apnoea wheezing behind a wall of whiff – all that sweated booze and sweated chemicals and sweated sweat. I closed the door quietly, put some jeans on and was led by the bulge in them towards the bathroom, passing through the kitchen on the way where, amongst the empty bottles and full ashtrays on the table, lay a copy of my first novel and I regarded it as I passed. Ey, look at that; I wrote that, I did. That’s me, my achievement. Aren’t I clever? Aren’t I good?
I still wonder why I didn’t lock the bathroom door. The key was in the lock, I clearly remember looking at it and shrugging and not turning or even touching it at all. I think I probably reasoned that, to reach the bathroom from the front room, you would have to pass through the bedroom, and whoever did that would surely notice that I wasn’t in the bed and deduce that I would be in the bathroom and so knock before entering. But it would’ve taken two seconds to lock the door. It would’ve been one small and simple twist of the wrist, some tiny, insignificant physical action. So why didn’t I do it?
Maybe the urgency was too great. I remember feeling on the verge of snapping, a millisecond away from detonation; it was there, at centre, burning, bulging, just about to burst. Relief was an utter imperative; there had to be relief, and even if it meant a delay of a mere two seconds there was at that overheated moment a better thing to do with my right hand than rum a key.
But of course it’s not, or not always, simple friction. Sometimes there must be stimulus, tactile or pictorial, and although I would’ve preferred tactile it was right then unattainable and I was hungover, my mind was flattened, all the drugs and drink had scraped the surface layer off my brain and to think, to fantasize or even remember, would have hurt it so I rummaged through the pile of damp-swollen magazines by the toilet, the old editions of Viz and FourFourTwo and Fortean Times. For anything, anything; any glimpse of smooth female flesh. Any muscular curve or arc. Any taut tendon or tanned skin. The need for relief was Snowdonia-sized; it choked the entire landscape.
This was a time of celebration. A time to be with my mates and drink and talk and laugh. We’d planned to take a few crates of beer down to the beach that day, build a fire, swim if it was warm enough, cook some fish and spuds in the embers and get drunk again. So if I got this small and necessary obscenity over with I could go and wake them all up with a big pot of tea and some toast. Have a quick shower and a cheeky line before going out. Start all over again.
In the pile there was a copy of some woman’s magazine. There was a tagline: You Too Can Have A Bum Like Kylie’s. Kylie’s arse was only just becoming a big (little) thing at that time, and there it was on page twenty-four in tiny gold shorts. And there it was on page twenty-five, double-smiling from under the hem of a tiny white dress. And there it was on page twenty-six in oh my God a thong; a thong for fuck’s sake, Kylie’s arse, the curvature and tautness of it, the dimples in the muscles at either side and the way the light gleams off its brown roundness as she bends and the creamy sheen on the tanned tight skin of it oh my God there was Kylie’s arse there* was one flash and a tremendous groaning relief there was Ronnie’s face over the top of the magazine. I was on my back and holding the mag upright on my chest with my left hand and there was Ron in the doorway, his face visible over the top of the page looking like the bloke in ‘The Scream’. And just for a moment the two merged in my wetly swirling vision; Ronnie’s howling face and Kylie’s arse became part of the same person, a horrible hybrid. A Rolie, a Kylan; as if that arse was actually topped by that face. That shocked and horrored face all purple adjoining that perfect bum. Oh, the sickness.
And that was supposedly a time of celebration, and that’s why I can’t stand Kylie’s arse; because it’s always t
here, somewhere under the sun, it exists out there in the real world and whenever it appears on the telly or a tabloid it throws up that moment, repeatedly, that instant when relief became humiliation. I can never get away from it, never flee from its jeering; my face so hot you could warm your hands on a frosty morning. The goosepimpling skin. The contracting heart cowering, cringing. I mean, me and Ronnie, it was all grand with us, we got drunk by the sea that day and had a laugh about the whole thing, but I lost touch with him about a year ago yet I still see Kylie, two or three times a week, but I never look above her shoulders because I know whose face I’ll see and it won’t be hers, I don’t even know what she looks like anymore, so I tend to focus on her arse instead as indeed the entire culture does, and base-fixated as we are on these things to ease the anguish of being alive among the emptinesses means and results in only nerves shredded, demolished, only life dying and drying to scale on the belly, only this neverstopping shame until death.
Biographies
Simon Armitage was born in 1963 and lives in Yorkshire. He has won numerous prizes for his nine collections of poetry which include Selected Poems and The Universal Home Doctor (Faber & Faber). His latest novel, The White Stuff, is published by Penguin in 2004. He is also a broadcaster and has written extensively for radio, television and film, and in 2003 received the Ivor Novello award for songwriting. He teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939, and has become Canada’s most eminent novelist and poet. She has published over thirty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye and Alias Grace, all of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Blind Assassin, which won the 2000 Booker Prize. Her books have been translated into thirty-three languages. She lives in Toronto.
Paul Bailey is the author of At the Jerusalem (1967) which won the Somerset Maugham Award, Trespasses (1970), A Distant Likeness (1973), Peter Smart’s Confessions (1977), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Old Soldiers (1980), Sugar Cane (1993) and Uncle Rudolf (2002). He was the first recipient of the E. M. Forster award and won a George Orwell Prize for his essay ‘The Limitations of Despair’.
John Banville’s latest book is Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (Bloomsbury, September 2003). He lives in Dublin, and tries to avoid doing public readings.
Nicola Barker was born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, in 1966. Her work includes Love Your Enemies (David Higham Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Fiction), Reversed Forecast, Small Holdings, Heading Inland (1997 John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize), Five Miles From Outer Hope, Wide Open (winner of the 2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) and Behindlings. She was recently named as one of the 20 Best Young British Novelists by Granta.
Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels. His collection of stories, The Lemon Tree, will appear in March 2004.
William Boyd is the author of eight novels, the most recent being Any Human Heart.
Michael Bracewell is the author of six novels, including Saint Rachel and Perfect Tense. He has also published two works of non-fiction: a study of Englishness in popular culture, entitled England Is Mine, and a selection of journalism, The Nineties. He contributes to Frieze magazine and The Los Angeles Times, and is currently researching a biography of the art rock group, Roxy Music.
André Brink was born in South Africa in 1935. He is the author of fourteen novels in English, including An Instant in the Wind, A Dry White Season, A Chain of Voices, and The Rights of Desire. He has won South Africa’s most important literary prize, the CNA Award, three times, and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into thirty languages.
John Burnside has published eight books of poetry, including Feast Days, winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and The Asylum Dance, which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. His prose work includes four novels and a collection of stories. He lives in East Fife, with his wife and son.
Ciaran Carson is the author of eight collections of poems and four works of prose. His novel, Shamrock Tea, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and he has won several literary awards, including the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His translation of Dante’s Inferno was published by Granta Books in 2002, and a book of new poems, Breaking News, by Gallery Press and Wake Forest University Press in 2003. He lives in Belfast.
Jonathan Coe has written the novels What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep and The Rotters’ Club, among others.
Billy Collins’ most recent collection is Nine Horses (Picador, 2002). He was appointed United States Poet Laureate for 2001–2003. He lives in Westchester County, New York.
Louis de Bernières’ first three novels are The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (both of which won Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes) and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. He was selected as one of the 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 1993, and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin won the 1995 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book.
Poet Michael Donaghy was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1954. His most recent collections are Dances Learned Last Night (Poems 1975–1995) (Picador, 2000) and Conjure (Picador, 2000). He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
Mark Doty’s six books of poems include My Alexandria, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize in the UK and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in the USA. He is also the author of three books of non-fiction, among them Heaven’s Coast, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for memoir. He lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Houston in Texas.
Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1959. His first novel, The Commitments, was published to great critical acclaim in 1987 and was made into a very successful film by Alan Parker. The Snapper, published in 1990, was also made into a film. The Van was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a film. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the Booker Prize in 1993, is the largest-selling winner in the history of the prize.
Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. After a brief career as an actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company she became a full-time writer, and has published fifteen novels. The most recent is The Seven Sisters. She also edited the fifth edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985) of which a fully revised version (sixth edition) appeared in 2000. She is married to Michael Holroyd.
Geoff Dyer’s books include But Beautiful (winner of a Somerset Maugham Prize), Paris Trance, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist, in America, for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award) and, most recently, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be. Bothered to Do It. He is a recipient of a 2003 Lannan Literary Fellowship.
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta and the Paris Review. Her collection, The Portable Virgin, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Novels include The Wig My Father Wore and What Are You Like? which won the Encore Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread prize. Her new novel, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2002.
Paul Farley has published two collections of poetry with Picador: 1998′s The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You won a Forward Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award; The Ice Age received the 2002 Whitbread Prize for Poetry. A former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, he lives in Lancashire.
Vicki Feaver was born in Nottingham in 1943. She has published two collections of poetry. Close Relatives (Seeker, 1981) and The Handless Maiden (Cape, 1994) which was awarded a Heinemann Prize and shortlisted for the Forward Prize. A selection of her work is also included in the Penguin Modern Poets series. She lives on the edge of the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh.
Janice Galloway’s highly acclaimed first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, was published in 1990, since when she has won a number of prestigious literary awards, including the McVitie’s Prize (for Foreign Parts) a
nd the E. M. Forster Award. She has also written drama, short stories, opera and poems and has been published in seven languages. A major commission with Anne Bevan, Rosengarden, will appear in 2004. She has one son and lives in Glasgow.
Carlo Gébler was born in Dublin in 1954, brought up in London and now lives outside the town of Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. He occasionally makes films – Put to the Test won the Royal Television Society documentary award in 1999 – and otherwise he writes. His play 10 Rounds was performed in London in 2002 and his novel August ‘44 will be published in the autumn of 2003. He is married and has five children.
Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966, and now lives in Wales. He is the author of Grits, Sheepshagger, Kelly + Victor and Stump, all published by Jonathan Cape. He is currently at work on a new novel Wreckage and is completing a collection of stories. Further Education.
Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame Page 22