The House of Writers

by M. J. Nicholls

  A Blast of Kirsty

  IAM known around the department for being a face-chewing Medusa who crushes dreams in a vice until the last few hopeful crumbs fall in hopeless heaps on the floor and their dreamers vow never again to dream of something I never fucking sanctioned. This isn’t even half the truth. I am the best team leader in ScotCall and in under a decade I will have ascended to the upper echelons among the caviar-munching conquerors pouring Romanée-Conti down the spines of lubricated vassals and laughing into the tear-encrusted lids of peasants. This is who I am.

  A little preKirstery, if you please (and I do). In 2020, several years after ScotLand (then called) achieved political independence, a referendum was called to determine whether the country should be converted into the world’s largest call centre, fielding the customer queries of over two hundred multinationals to prevent the nation from sliding into third-world status as the national debt racked up to over two squillion zillion. (The natural resources of the nation had been stolen by Denmark and Holland after several cunning midnight thefts, leaving ScotLand bereft). After a unanimous Yes vote, ScotLand was rebranded ScotCall and each citizen was put to work in the call centres that usurped all functioning businesses in the country, taking only one fucking heroic week to transform the bankrupted hotels and shops of cities and counties into ScotCall offices. Until the 2039 meltdown, schools and universities remained open while the citizens adjusted to this change.

  The technological meltdown, labelled prosaically by the Daily Telegraph “technogeddon,” occurred globally. On May 2nd 2039, every piece of electrical equipment went fuckadoodlebang at the exact same moment, causing an immediate reversion to the Dark Ages (only with battery-powered torches and not quite so many candles or pagan sacrifices). There are various accounts of what happened depending on which attention-seeking broadsheet hack desperate to make a name for himself with the most original stream of spurious bullshit you listen to. Some people believe that the world’s technology manufacturers designed their equipment to spontaneously explode on May 2nd 2039, claiming over nine trillion in insurance money, with each conspirator pocketing a portion of the insurance profits, fleeing the developed world to eke out a simple life oiling the bronze bums of hookers in tropical countries. This theory is hard to swallow—without access to technology, life in hot climes would not be as exclusive and easy for an embezzler manqué. Some twits believe an enterprising squirrel forged its way into the master computer at Microsoft and had cable salad for lunch, causing the mass destruction of every piece of electrical equipment in the world with a few naughty chomps. Twits. Other crackpots believe that aliens beamed their destruct-o-ray over the planet; that a drunk and bitter Bill Gates pressed the “fuck-’em-all” button; that coders had accidentally omitted May 2nd 2039 from their scripts. The truth is impossible to discern. Most likely the insurance story is true— commonplace greed is usually at the heart of most global fuckups.

  After the meltdown, The Great Repair (first capitalised by the Daily Express) began and ScotCall entered the first phase of its worldwide omnipotence. ScotCall’s computer system had gone bangadoodlefuck along with the rest, but their phones had emerged intact thanks to the existing prewar lines still active in ScotLand. This allowed ScotCall to storm ahead providing its top-flight customer service, dealing first with all manner of queries on how to fix the two billion or so devices that had exploded. Computers were beyond repair, by and large, and those deemed “responsible” for manufacturing computers had been rounded up in a mass public execution by President George Bush Jr. Jr. and copycat butcherings around the world followed to deal with the last of the technospazzes and internitwits. This meant the number of people alive who could repair or manufacture computers was zero, so older technologies had to be reverted to: hence the re-rise of the phones and the triumph of ScotCall. Education was abolished throughout the world to help economies recover from the crash. It made sense in times of crisis for people to work en masse in factories, to keep the poorest people at a certain level of intellectual inferiority, and to reserve education for the upper classes until the economies returned to a productive bustle.

  Those born leaders with no tolerance for overly smug and smart people, phenomenally dim and plodding people, or super-humanly average and boring people, were recruited to manage the phone monkeys at ScotCall. I was hired in the winter of 2039 and within a week people cowered at my approach and lived in fear of being caught on my verbal skewer. In those early days, arrogant self-entitlement had to be stamped out—high-ranking businesspeople working alongside their employees were prime shitterbuggers. Tough managers like me specialised in pricking the pompousness of pompous pricks and putting everyone in their place. Those working in low-level occupations such as cleaners were able to retain their prior positions in ScotCall, whereas blue-collar workers or anyone with an inoffensive accent able to speak in a semi-coherent manner on the telephone was set to monkeying.

  As the world reverted back to a sub-hominid mental state, Scot-Call switchboards were abuzz with operatives taking on nonsensical and Cro-Magnon queries—behind these the dominant question: “Can you help me live?” Over 98% of inbound queries we deal with are pointless, and since real enlightenment is a danger to the Scot-Call profit margins, we encourage operatives to devise baffling and unhelpful answers to keep people calling. For example, Joe B calls asking: “What doesn’t upset a tuba?” Operative X replies: “Isn’t a tuba always in motion?” Thank you for calling. There are carpers who carp about the ethics behind our modus. The fact is ScotCall provides a raison d’etre for billions of callers—their lives are so riddled with confusion and fear that the tiniest shove towards pretend understanding is better than a realistic push into confronting the existential chasm that their lives have become. However, it is still ScotCall policy to answer semi-coherent queries with the occasional accuracy, otherwise we risk reducing our customers to a state of homo habilis imbecility, and thus being unable to pick up the phone!

  At present, ScotCall is the most powerful organisation in the universe and multiverse, and probably all surrounding parallel universes and multiverses. Our profits are dispensed to the 128 multinational CEOs and leaders: rich and brilliant bastards whose lives were never altered by the meltdown thanks to their secret bank vaults and whatnot—I hate these money-grubbing fucks in principle, but in the battle for survival on a pitiless planet, in a species genetically coded to swindle and fuck itself over in perpetuity, these devils have all the best tunes. I am not motivated by money, more the power trip that comes with having money when so many needy losers desperately want money, and the exploitation and misery at one’s disposal when one has exorbitant amounts to fling around. Having said that, I prefer my torment localised. I look forward to many years torturing workers with the prospect of bonuses, raising their hopes for months on end, sacking them the day before their bonuses are due. That’s the sort of buzz I crave as I work my way to the upper echelons of this magnificently evil empire.

  Writer Portraits

  The Great(est) Opaquist

  IAM the unfortunate founder and final sensate member of the unfortunate (and insensate) movement known to no one any longer as The Great Opaquists. The movement began through sheer ophthalmic fluke in the repugnant town of Coatbridge. I was raised in a housing scheme, in the corner house of a long strip, in the yard of which was a large birch tree that obscured the view from my window, erasing 89% of the daylight. As a consequence, I developed a form of blindness for language, and began omitting certain words from my texts. This caused me embarrassment at school, and many hours staying behind filling in the missing words, until one teacher mistook my incorrectly written text for a “beautiful prose-poem.” I wrote: “Yes said sometimes, I could find the extravagance. The oversize apple appears and almost riddled down with darkness cried out.” Thus the Opaque movement was born.

  At first, editors criticised the “poems” as mere nonsense, so efforts were made to bestow the lines with a form of logic through
the nonsense, usually an intuitive emotional logic, like in the long flowing prose of indulgent writers such as a Margeurite Young or her ilk, where sense soon departs and the emotional reader is kept tethered to a long outpouring of lyrical prose, sucked into the illusion of beauty and power and whatnot, so we kept things on that level, mingling with a form of surrealism. Per: “I emptied the chamber. Strong runnels of tears emerged like the mucal ducts of a peregrine unloading. I ate a fevered wish and climbed up into the space of belonging.” That sort of rubbish.

  The Great Opaquists appealed to those who sought to read challenging prose with strong images and descriptions without having to think about the content in much detail, allowing the words to wash over them—words to be forgotten after reading—a mere afterglow the art’s effect. I had created a movement that allowed for the intimation of meaning without the presence of meaning. A small school of writers formed with Bernard Blick, Candice Yellow, Tim Varmus and myself at the forefront, producing novels with titles like Burnt Cartography, Singing Banshees, 12:24 (mine), and Blister Window. These books helped bring the movement to a wider audience by situating the fictions in blue-collar America and putting dysfunctional families and relationships into the incidental storylines. I drifted out this group for several decades, but I would always have Bernard Blick on the phone wanting to discuss metaphors and symbolism (I had never knowingly used or understood these devices), or publish interviews with me in his online magazine E-terminus.

  Our novels were frustrating. Riddled with banal dialogue, our interminable “scenes” would work opaque language around sections designed to help the reader to find a footing. From Burnt Cartography:

  “So you believe in the tangible?” Yolande asked. She had crisply assuaged the sorry-ever-after.

  “Only in the lowest sense. I mean I like certain things.”

  “You can’t smash the ceiling, Tristan.” He rolled a cigarette and opened a liminal vein.

  “You think not?”

  “I have never knowingly exploded a perception.”

  The door buzzed. Yolande stared at the void and wondered if the hand that reaches through the door is a gesture of the visible. Tristan exhaled halos of smoke and tried to force a union between the bald and the brave. “We haven’t cleaved a notion today,” he said. “But that is in itself a cleaved notion,” she said. “Only in a periphrastic sense,” he said. “I suffer from periphrasis,” she said. “You’re not the only one,” he said. “Perhaps in the future we might feel something tangible,” he said. “I hope,” she said.

  I returned to the Opaque movement several decades later, when there was a brief rekindling of interest in the national media, and I wrote a final novel that outsold all the others. I was known as the Godfather of the Opaquists, and lied about the movement’s formation—poaching explanations from several of the volumes of theory on the Opaquists I had read—and used the profits earned to correct my language blindness through laser surgery. The world of literary possibility open to me at last, I found myself unable to adapt to the pressures of having to place words in a logical order to make meaning. I had spent three decades of my life writing incoherently; changing this habit in my fifties seemed impossible. I took a post writing the information booklets for insurance companies. Further work writing restaurant menus, terms and conditions, and advertising slogans followed before I forged a path into the ordered sentence in the final stage of my career—the finest and most fertile stage.

  I entered The House as a hack thriller writer, taking to the form with delight. The ordered motion of the plots, sentences, and character motives was a liberation for me, and I became a prolific writer of the Charles Atmond series, moving the hero through nine books (and counting) of formulaic scrapes, revelling in the clichéd descriptions, the unoriginal themes and settings, the woodenness of the dialogue. This was perfect order for me: machine-made fiction safe in its well-trimmed orderliness. People complain that The House signals the death of literature and that workhouse-made fiction is somehow the finish of several millennia of artistic achievement dating back to Homer. I disagree. The House is a place for literature to achieve the perfection to which it has aspired at a consistent level. . . imagine a world free from imperfect novels, swimming in masterpieces being produced one after the other in an unstoppable flow. Sounds like paradise to this writer!

  Cal’s Tour

  Scottish Interest Books

  DISPLACED from Second by a temporary ScotCall invasion (they occasionally blitz The House to commandeer offices), I meandered upstairs. Guarding the fire exit on the third floor is a naked man painted as a Pictish warrior. He holds firm a spear and shield, his arty pecs and muscles at full and impressive bulge, and stares into the middle distance like a beefeater with the capacity to disembowel. This is Pelf. A network of tattoos cover his body from dragon heads to sunflowers to lions with curly moustaches. His blue-hued penis is partially obscured by the lion’s beard but still draws the eye, being a penis. He said to me: “Manna hepkins?” Followed by: “Forneil yoman intrimp gulander? Gravure simpo larbis querval? Baaloom? Wanta mugghoom formpals? Pimpla numkaa ladoofalla? Sampo sampa? Sampo sampa simpkin appo? Gushval?”1 These are authentic Pictish expressions he has memorised to welcome all contractors to the dept.

  As you enter the corridor, six fans mounted on the upper walls hit you with chilly winter winds. A watercolour rendering of an extremely steep Scottish incline (nowhere in particular—somewhere nonspecific and hilly in the Highlands) is on the left, and a mural of lines from Robert Burns and Ricky Wilson, the two most celebrated Scottish writers of the last five hundred years, on the right. Robert Burns is famous for his macabre poem “Tam O’Shanter” and his popular ballads and songs, and Ricky Wilson is the author of Wee Billy Hummus Frae Largs, a bestseller in 2013 that sold worldwide and helped usher in a Golden Age of Scottish fiction about superheroes from small towns who speak in dialect and settle down with sexy friends to work in chip shops. Sprinklers secreted in the carpets spray your feet as you “ascend” the hill towards the only room on the floor, a large conference space where external contractors (mainly in suits—consider suiting up if you have a proposal) come to pitch their ideas to CHAD. A no-nonsense man in Gucci leathers and tailored Cforgzia trousers, CHAD lives up to his capitalised name with his plain talking and head for marketing.

  Among the ideas pitched: Sean Connery’s Shortbread: The Original James Bond & His World of Shortbread, Scrumptiously Scottish: A Crumbly History of Celtic Cookies, Brought Shed: A Novel of Shortbread, Shortbread and the Third Reich, Hoots Mon!: A Celebration of Hogmanay Shortbread, Gregor Fisher’s Shortbread: Rab C Nesbitt & His World of Shortbread, The Role of Shortbread in the Aegean Civilization, Like Oor Granny Used Tae Muck It: Forty Classic Shortbread Recipes, Accept Nae Imitations: Scotland’s Triumph in the Shortbread Wars, Wee Tam’s Shortbreid: A Nuvvel ae Shortbreid, Do Salamanders Eat Shortbread?, Simply Shortbread: A Miscellany, Walter Scott’s Shortbread: Scotland’s First Novelist & His World of Shortbread, Reeks, Breeks, and Shortbreid!!!, Did William Wallace Invent Shortbread?, Wee Timorous Beastie Eating Oor Shortbreid: Doughy Verse Tributes to Rabbie Burns, Yeast in the East: Shortbread in the Lothians, Tallbread: The Arch Nemesis, Kirkincrankie: A Village of Shortbread, “Yum, we Polish immigrants love Scots shortbread!”: An Outsider’s Take on Yeasty Goods, Ewan McGregor’s Shortbread: Obi-Wan Kenobi & His World of Shortbread, Rockin’ & Rollin’ in the Dough!: 268 Rock & Roll Classix About Shortbread, How Much Shortbread Can YOU Fit in Your Mouth?: A Book of Challenges!, Can Bonobos Make Shortbread?, Can You Dip Shortbread in Irn-Bru, Highland Crofters Eat Shortbread in Kilts, Hot Grannies & Their Grandkids Eat Shortbread. My pitch was a novel set in the Outer Hebrides, approved by CHAD “as long as you set it in 1920s Hebrides, among crofters and such folk, nothing contemporary. And make shortbread or the making of or the consumption of integral to the plot.” Here’s a sneaky excerpt:

  Alex stood facing the Hebridean sun. He was standing atop a hill abloom with heather,
ablooming with beautiful purple heather, looking across the sea at the steamers coming back with their nets full of cod. Alex turned his glance west across the hills towards the stone-brick cottages of the crofters, spotting Old Jim tilling a field and his wife Old Jane milking the cows in the shed. He walked back to his house to return to work on his new shortbread recipe. He was inspired by the sea and the air and the pleasant country folk, and began experimenting with new yeast-beating techniques, such as stringing and flinging it at the walls of his own cottage, and rolling it with multiple rolling pins on the floor. He asked his dog McClusky to sit on the dough. He cut it up into rectangular shapes and placed it in the oven at gas mark six. He whacked the dough into shape with two rolling pins, sprinkling the dew from a thorny Highland thistle into the mixture, and asked Maybelle, the bonny lass from the cottage next door, to kiss the dough for luck, and rolled the dough flat using the wheels of his granny’s motorised scooter. He cut it up into rectangles and punched holes in the pastry with the end of the rolling pin. Opening the oven, he placed the shortbread into a pre-greased tray (pipetted with Irn-Bru) and let it rise at a special temperature, where it swelled to a beautiful Highland plumpness—a Cairngorm of yeasty biscuit pleasure.