‘So what are we going to do with you?’ she called me into her office to ask.
The emphasis carried the distinct implication that she’d known exactly what to do with everybody else.
‘Market the balls off me,’ I suggested.
Risky, that. But I’d been determined not to go down in Flo’s presence without laying my virility on the table.
‘Believe me, Guy . . .’ she said, laughing and letting her office chair take her a long way back, as though she didn’t mind my seeing what a strong jawline she still had for a woman her age.
She was a walker and a mountaineer, small and wiry with good calf muscles which she showed off by wearing hiking shorts to work in all weathers. Hiking boots, too, with which she was rumoured to have kicked a number of her male authors who’d expressed dissatisfaction with the manner in which she hadn’t marketed them.
Me, she didn’t kick. Unless you call it kicking to suggest I find at least three young women writers to endorse the novel it was her bad luck to have to find a way of bringing to the attention of a book-bored public in paperback.
I suggested E. E. Freville. Eric the Endorser. He used to be a fan of mine, I told her.
‘Darling, he used to be a fan of everybody’s. But he’s not a woman and he’s not young, and anyway he’s A-list now and will only endorse a book if we can guarantee him a print of fifty thousand and a window in Smith’s.’
‘So guarantee it.’
She made a fist around a paperweight and snorted. ‘Let’s get back to these girls,’ she said. ‘Ideally under twenty.’
‘Flo, I don’t know any girls under twenty. I don’t know anybody under twenty.’
‘I wouldn’t boast about that.’
‘Besides,’ I said, ‘a writer under twenty would barely have been walking when my first novel came out.’
‘That sounds a positive recommendation to me,’ she said, raising herself on the arms of the chair, once, twice, three times, and taking deep breaths as she did so.
There’s a pinnacle of naked insult which is so breathtaking that you must admire the view, no matter that it’s you who’s being thrown from it. I wondered if I ought to applaud her. ‘Bravo, Flo!’ Instead I asked if she could recommend any young women of the age she suggested.
She pretended to think about it, using a couple of paperweights to exercise her biceps. ‘Well, here’s the whole problem,’ she said after she had pumped herself up sufficiently, blue veins starting out of her forearms, ‘would any of them like you?’
‘Do they have to like me?’
‘Your work, darling. Would any of them get it?’
‘Identify with it, you mean?’
I wondered if ‘identify’ was an exclusively female concept, like hormonal or moody, so angry did my use of it make her.
‘Try “empathise”, darling,’ she said.
You always knew when an interview with Flora McBeth was finished. She would make small rapping movements on her chest with her fist, and her voice – though always becomingly hoarse, like syrup passing through muslin – would start to sound as though sand had somehow got into a hairdryer.
Two weeks later she rang to say she’d found a bright young thing called Heidi Corrigan who was prepared to say I was one of her favourite farceurs over forty.
I skipped the ‘prepared to’. ‘I’m not a farceur, Flo,’ I said.
‘Doesn’t matter in the least. No one knows what the word means anyway.’
‘There’s another problem with Heidi Corrigan,’ I said. ‘Her mother was the publicity director here when S&C published my first novel. She sometimes brought Heidi into the office. Pretty little girl. I sat her on my knee while I discussed strategy with her mother.’
‘Which shows no affection is ever wasted in this business, darling. But don’t worry – I won’t tell.’
‘I’m not worrying. I just want to know how it helps to have a quote from Heidi Corrigan?’
‘Helps the Pound Shop.’
I don’t recall exactly, but this could have been the conversation that caused me to begin pulling the skin away from my cuticles. ‘The Pound Shop!’
‘Well, I’m not making any promises. They might not go for it.’
‘But a quote from an adolescent on the back of a book jacket could persuade them – is that what you’re telling me?’
‘Who said anything about the back? We’re talking front. Wider, younger audience, darling.’
‘She’s only published two short stories.’
‘C’est la vie literaire.’
‘Flora, I’d rather drown myself.’
Whereupon, like everything else, the line went dead.
But she responded to my wishes. The book went out without a word from Heidi Corrigan on the front or back, but where it went out to was anybody’s guess. Certainly not the Pound Shop.
That’s not quite the end of the story. I did find out where one copy landed. It landed on the desk of Bruce Elseley, a novelist some twenty years my senior – and therefore even deader meat than me – who on two previous occasions had written to my publishers accusing me of plagiarism. Nothing had come of these accusations, perhaps because he’d asked my publishers for action to be taken against at least a dozen more of their writers, each of whom he accused of stealing from him. That he’d have had more chance of receiving satisfaction had he chosen only one novelist per publishing house to accuse, I could have advised him were I in the business of advising him anything other than to keep up the erotic self-asphyxiation – an exquisite but dangerous form of auto-pleasuring which I mention only because Elseley was widely known to be a solo fetishist who’d already had to be cut down from a hook on the inside of a hotel door in Wales where he’d been attending a literary festival.
This event, to digress, had serious repercussions not just for this literary festival but for literary festivals in general. Most of them relied on local goodwill and sponsorship to survive. At the level of the rotary club and mayoral committees there had always been a mistrust of a festival devoted to books – it felt a contradiction in terms to them: how could one be festive about a book? – so when one of the invited writers was found half choked to death in his hotel bedroom, wearing ladies’ fishnet stockings and with an orange from the Co-op in his mouth, their deepest suspicions were confirmed. The question had now to be asked whether the community wanted to go on being associated with literature.
‘One more trial year,’ was the concession the festival organisers were able to wring from the town, which meant that no further chances could be taken with the likes of Bruce Elseley.
This also led to hooks being screwed off the doors of every hotel and bed and breakfast in Cheltenham and Hay-on-Wye whenever writers were known to be in town.
Whether Elseley’s belief that he was being stolen from intensified as a consequence of this exclusion from the festival circuit I cannot say, but it doesn’t take much imagination to suppose it must have. It wasn’t long afterwards, anyway, that he managed to get hold of my address and began writing to me directly. The Silent Shriek, he claimed, was a direct steal from his novel Darkness Visible, whose title he had himself stolen from William Styron who had taken the phrase from Milton. Unlike Styron’s Darkness Visible which was an elegantly written memoir of madness, Elseley’s was a slapdash chronicle, written in present-tense diary form, of the three-year period in the sixth century when an erupting volcano blackened the entire face of the earth, destroying crops and domestic animals, poisoning water, causing women to miscarry and men to lose their wits and hang themselves. Since my novel was a satire set in Shepherd’s Bush about a failed feral writer working in a pet shop that was staving off bankruptcy by selling lemurs smuggled in from Madagascar, I didn’t see he had a case. But once every six or seven months another letter arrived, each more rancorous and menacing than the last. And then, shortly after Merton died, I received a postcard of a Goya beheading, on the back of which was painted, in what looked like a mix of green ink, sperm
and faeces, the words
HA! THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE
WHO SHELTER THIEVES.
I showed it to Vanessa.
‘I know how he feels,’ she said.
9
Same Old Same Old
Had it not been stolen twice already, the one thing I would have nicked from Elseley was his title.
Milton was describing Hell when he coined the phrase ‘darkness visible’. ‘Region of sorrow’, ‘torture without end’. I knew the very place he had in mind – Chipping Norton.
But every writer had his own Chipping Norton to endure. Day by day the darkness thickened around us.
So was my mother-in-law a symptom or a solace?
Was she the proof that without the ballast of an honourable profession to steady me, I was sinking morally? Or was she just there to make it all feel better until the darkness finally descended?
Maybe I didn’t have to decide. Francis’s bold warning – ‘Don’t do it, Guy’ – turned her at once into a solution. Fiction was fucked but that didn’t mean there was no more fun to be had making it. Stay away, Francis had counselled me. If not in life, then at least in art. They would hate me for it. Why? Search me. Masculinism, Francis said. By which I took him to mean braggadocio. No one wanted to read about a man filling his boots any more. Once upon a time it had been all the rage – Henry Miller, Frank Harris, J. P. Donleavy – men having it away in sentences as ponderous as they were priapic. Finished, Francis had pronounced. The swordsman hero flashing his prose around, writing with a pen dipped in hot semen, was dead in the water.
Well, we’d see about that.
Art is renunciation, someone once said. Here was another view. Art is indulgence. I wasn’t the first to think that. Decadence went back a long way. But these weren’t decadent times. Defeat is not decadence; death is not decadence; even Richard and Judy were not decadence. We were too inert to be decadent. Fiction had been fucked by too little, not too much; by caution, not wickedness. Could I put a bit of evil back? Did I have what it took to unbuckle against the forces of the great god Nice and let it all hang out?
As for the ethical question of whether it was right for a man to feel up his wife’s mother, that was dissolved in the prospect of there being a book in it. The calculation wasn’t cynical. I wasn’t after Poppy to write a book. I had always been after Poppy. But if I could have Poppy and write a book –!
The odd part was that there was any desire left in me to write a sentence, never mind a book. Yet there was. An intense desire – akin to lust or hunger – which all the militant women’s book groups in Chipping Norton couldn’t expunge. Explain that! I couldn’t. But I wasn’t alone. The more a book of one sort or another was identified as surplus to cultural requirement, the more of them were written. Books that no one wanted to read were running at plague proportions. If there was a book to be made you made it – and wondered who the hell would read it later.
It was like lighting a candle in the dark. You knew it was no match for Hell’s own ‘ever-burning sulphur’, you knew the darkness would snuff your little light of hope out in the end, but at least for the hour it burned, you didn’t.
I even had a title. It’s a big moment when you hit on a title and know it’s the one. I can still remember when I first thought of Who Gives a Monkey’s? and announced it to Vanessa. She was in the bath, with her feet in the air, sanding her heels with Sicilian pumice. ‘That’s one shit title,’ she said, though when the book did well she claimed she’d thought of it. She could even tell me where she was when it came to her – in the bath with her feet in the air, rubbing Sicilian pumice into her heels.
Like a monkey. Hence . . .
This time, for an assortment of reasons, I didn’t convey my excitement to her. Instead, I rang Merton with the news and got his secretary. ‘Merton’s gone,’ she reminded me.
‘Gone?’
‘Passed away.’
‘Oh God, Margaret,’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so used to his being there I forget he no longer is.’ We’d actually talked at the funeral. She’d cried on my shoulder. We’d hugged each other. I even remembered the belted raincoat she’d worn. She’d creaked in my arms. I’d sniffled in hers. In a strange way – Lust und Tod, I suppose – it had been arousing. She was a good-looking woman with a narrow waist, reliable but with a suggestion of being willing to go out on a limb for you, like a secretary in a fifties Hollywood movie. We looked deep into each other’s affliction. There’d never be another Merton, we agreed. It was a miracle we hadn’t kissed. Unless we had and were both in denial about it.
I could hear her tears welling again down the phone line. I hoped it wasn’t guilt.
‘Are you all right, Margaret?’ I asked.
‘Yes, yes, fine. Are you?’
‘Yes, I am. But I’m shocked to have forgotten that Merton has gone.’
‘It’s understandable,’ she said, ‘you’re not alone. It’s nice that people can’t think of him as dead. I can’t.’
Unless they couldn’t think of him as dead because it was so long since they’d thought of him as alive.
Until a replacement could be found, Margaret explained, Flora McBeth was looking after his authors. Did I want to speak to Flora? She laughed a wild laugh, as though she knew the effect Flora’s name would have on me. It was an exciting laugh. Full of irresponsibility, which is an enticing promise in a normally responsible woman. It was as if – though customarily covered up – she were showing me her legs. I was sorry we hadn’t kissed. If indeed we hadn’t.
A few moments must have passed in ruminative silence.
‘Well?’
‘Well what, Margaret?’
‘Do you want me to put you through to Flora?’
I did not.
There was a rumour that high among the explanations of why Merton had taken his life was Flora.
Because he was fucking her?
Because he was afraid of her?
Because he was fucking her and afraid of her?
No one knew. And if anyone did, he stroke she was afraid to say.
Something made me think about Margaret.
I emailed the title to Francis. The Mother-in-Law Joke.
‘The joke being,’ I wrote, ‘that it isn’t.’
‘Isn’t what?’ he emailed back.
‘A joke!’
‘I never thought it was,’ came his reply.
‘My aim,’ I emailed in return, ‘is to write a transgressive novel that explores the limits of the morally permissible in our times. Who are the great blasphemers of our age? Not poets and writers any more. Stand-up comedians. My hero is a stand-up comedian. First line of novel, he walks on to the stage, says Take my mother-in-law – I just have. Audience gets up and leaves in disgust. What do you think?’
I received no answer, not even an out-of-office reply. A day, two days went by. I was bound to be concerned. The way things were, if you didn’t hear from anybody for a couple of days you assumed they were lying face down on their office floors with their brains dotted around them.
On the third day Francis got back to me. It seemed he’d been chewing the idea over.
‘I beg you!’ he wrote. ‘And anyway . . .’
‘And anyway what?’ I wrote back.
‘And anyway you’re culturally up the shoot,’ he replied. ‘You’re behind the times. The audience wouldn’t leave in disgust. Might not laugh, but wouldn’t walk out. Material not offensive enough.’
‘Not offensive enough! What does he have to do – take his dick out?’
Good job I didn’t try that line on Vanessa; she’d have said I’d been taking my dick out in public for years.
And no, that wasn’t funny either.
Francis was cooler. ‘Taking dick out just same old same old. You’re barking up wrong tree. No reason you should listen to me, you’re the writer. But if you have to go in this direction – and don’t expect me to find you a publisher if you do – but if you must, if you really must,
then here’s how I see it. First of all drop “explore”. Exploration fine when you’re exploring Antarctica, otherwise suicide. Cut to chase. Make hero climate scientist, not comedian – funny not selling. As for the sex – wish you wouldn’t, but anal is still big. Non-procreative. There’s a school of thought that sees anal, so long as it’s consensual, as non-sexual. Can you have anal sex and still be called a virgin, etc? Have it happen on global warming trip to Afghanistan. Wife suspects, employs depressed detective, ex-SAS, depressed detective confirms and tries to fuck her, she goes berserk, has history of going berserk, knifes him.’
‘The detective?’
‘The husband.’
‘What about knifing the mother?’
Our emails were running hot now.
‘Like it, like it. Mother had abused her. Knifes both. Knifes all three if you like. But you’ll need redemption. Afterlife big. Limbo and purgatory all rage. Explore that if you must explore something. You’ll enjoy this if you let yourself. Always thought there was an other-dimensional thriller writer in you, trying to break out. Have fun with your researches, lucky bastard. Poppy Eisenhower – phwah! Still say you shouldn’t, but my best if you must. f.’
‘Hear you, but where did you get idea I ever wanted to write thrillers of any dimension? I abhor that crap. You know I abhor that crap.’
The next I heard was by text via his BlackBerry. ‘Methinks the novelist doth protest too much.’
‘A middle-aged tart said that,’ I texted back.
His reply was instant. ‘Thought middle-aged tarts your forte. Just don’t forget Afghanistan and Afterlife. 19th-century Afghanistan be best. Can’t go wrong with history. But written in present tense. f.’
I skipped the 19th-century suggestion and had a better idea than anal. I’d do love. I didn’t care what Francis thought. Loving your mother-in-law was as disruptive of society as an anal fuck any time. Everyone was anal fucking. I’d had them anal fucking in the zoo, and anal fucking again in Sandbach. Anal was the new vaginal. But how many people were head over heels in love with their wives’ mothers?
Zoo Time Page 7