The House of Writers

by M. J. Nicholls

  A Better Life

  7

  AFTER a month I refurbished a motorbike and set about spreading the wire-nibbling destruction across a vaster catchment. ScotCall had been unable to react to the problem with speed— three thousand coffee confabs and latte chattes had to take place before opting on a course of misaction—however, one afternoon I was embroiled in the first of their hard-hitting retaliation manoeuvres. Several dozen operatives shouldering bazookas came zooming along in their landcruisers and proceeded blowing the sheep to floccules. I took refuge behind a plastic tree as the thugs roared past, leaving streaks of flame in their wake and mere remnants of the several hundred sheep I had strenuously bred. The air was rank with gasoline, peat, and sheep semen. I cursed the band of hellacious devils (immaculate crew cuts in top-buttoned white business shirts) as I made my escape, unscathed except for a few scratches, and retreated back to The House. The phone lines had been disturbed to such an extent that the roads were populated with aimless protesters—confused “customers” had migrated up from England and were seeking a solution to their current problems.

  Furious banner-wavers camped on the roads making incoherent chants in noncommittal mumbles, blocking the buses that arrived bearing an extra spew of arms-wide appeasers. The unanswered vox populi in their muddled huddles hurled questions at each Scot-Call operative who approached them with throatfuls of warm indigestible appeasement. The operatives abandoned their spiel to bark quick-fire replies at their fuming customer base. “How does my VCR work?” “Turn it on!” “What is the point of the sky?” “To store the clouds!” “Can I use my toothbrush as a suppository?” “Depends!” “Green shoes or brown slippers?” “Green slippers!” “Can absinthe be used as an antidepressant?” “Yes!” “Is it possible to transfer debit to credit by switching banks?” “No chance!” “Why is Greenland so icy?” “False advertising!” “How do I review a dreadful book online without hurting the author’s feelings?” “Rate five stars and the opinion is irrelevant!” “Is a shepherd allergic?” “Never!” “Does a swan mind if you insult its beak?” “Swans are sensitive to all complaints!” “Does it matter?” “It does to me!”

  Pockets of satisfied customers migrated back home, but most of their queries led to further queries and the ratio of operatives to customers meant a mass-resolution (even with megaphones) was impossible. Forty-seven operatives had fatal heart attacks as the crowds shuffled towards the ScotCall HQ. Half-cocked attempts were made to keep the crowds outside the gate (operatives asking the crowds to please remain outside the gate) and helicopters whirred overhead with loudspeakers blasting stock responses to the most common questions. As the crowd spilled into the ScotCall HQ building pandemonium ensued across the nation. Operatives were being disrupted from their phone duties to attend to the invaders and this caused millions of unanswered customers and en masse migrations from England, Wales, and Northern Ireland to seek responses. Hundreds of directionally challenged stragglers arrived at The House, where they were recruited into the new campaign as run by a faction of experimental novelists, helmed by Alan the Experimentalist, and given a basic education with a view to reforming the country using intelligence and books to govern the hoi polloi in place of fear and ignorance.

  The House was the only place to escape the march of mayhem. ScotCall enacted various tactics to clear their buildings and roads. Helicopters went skywards so operatives could scatter the ten most common solutions written on millions of strips of paper onto their customers’ heads. The top ten queries were: 1) How do I turn toast back into bread? 2) Is Monaco a country? 3) Can I use 1½ AA batteries instead of an AAA? 4) What shape is a square? 5) Who is Tim Pritchards? 6) Is it legal to sing a pop song in public without seeking public performing permissions? 7) Does a radioactive duck have green poo? 8) How many numbers are there in the alphabet? 9) Where is the toilet? 10) Can I put a fridge on my cat when she’s asleep? In addition to this, covert operatives were smuggled into the crowds to whisper solutions into passing ears—a technique that backfired as the customers lashed out at having other (assumed) customers giving them false solutions when the definitive ScotCall answers were all that was sought. Loudspeakers blasting out advice were raised alongside two enormous cinema screens broadcasting subliminal messages (“Please bugger off home!”). The last and most effective option was to hurl canisters of fainting gas into the crowds from the helicopters. The unconscious bodies were removed to special tents where upon waking the solutions were offered in orderly ways. This technique also backfired, as on their way back to their houses, the bemused customers would have a brand new query: what the hell happened to us? Did you bastards just gas us? It was certainly not an excellent PR move. Needless to say, I was happy in my safe haven.

  The Farewell, Author! Conference

  7

  THE event organisers had witnessed many writer brawls, in particular the little-known fistfight between Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer back in 2007, where Gore emerged the victor after a vicious blow to the belly, ending Mailer’s life (a press release lied that he had been undergoing lung surgery), and the bizarre bout between E.L. Doctorow and William H. Gass in 2015, resulting in a fractured tibia for Doctorow, and a 1000-page treatise On the Vicissitudes of Violence from Gass (never published). The safest option was to clear the area—the organisers knew that writers were the most cowardly, traitorous fighters out there, never averse to an attack from behind, or punching someone in their sleep, or shaking hands and calling a truce and stabbing through the navel with an icicle. In that vein, Muriel Barbery clobbered Paul Murray with a bag of frozen beefsteaks; Ben Marcus shoved Geoff Dyer towards an open freezer and, having failed to move him an inch, crouched down and begged “Don’t punch me!”; Jáchym Topol kicked Claudia Rankine in the shins, and received a stunning slap in return; Warren Motte attempted a headbutt on Mark Haddon but ended up hurling himself at Lydia Lunch, who rolled him up like a carpet and fired him out the window. The scene of violence that followed does not bear rendering in another list form—to reduce these shameful acts to mere rote would be in itself a shameful act. I leapt up later to take the microphone and shouted: “YOU HAVE COME HERE TO DIE, NOT TO BRAWL!” This created the desired silence, and I followed this up with: “Did not Nabokov once say, ‘Beauty is mysterious as well as terrorful. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of a man’?” This caused an eruption of laughter.

  “That wasn’t Nabokov, you buffoon!” Jonathan Coe mocked.

  “It’s terrible, not terrorful. Terrorful isn’t even a word!” Jhumpa Lahiri mocked.

  “It’s God and devil, not God and the devil. Did you memorise that from Wikipedia?” Agnès Desarthe ditto.

  “That was Dostoevsky, you moron!” Toby Litt ditto.

  “It is heart of man, not heart of a man. I can’t believe you didn’t know that!” Steven Poole “ ”.

  “I fail to see the relevance of that line, are you saying you find us beating the shit out of each other beautiful?” Cynthia Rogerson “ ”.

  “You are trying in some bungling manner to make us ponder a concept no longer applicable in the modern world,” Georgi Gospodinov “ ”.

  “You have proven to us all that you have no handle whatsoever on basic symbolic metaphor,” David David Katzman “ ”.

  “You stand proud on that stage, maintaining your ground, while inside that body beats the heart of a simple village dolt,” Silvia Barlaam “ ”.

  “I hate your words and the mouth responsible,” Ever Dundas

  “How about this, then?” I tried again. “Did not Aeschylus once say, ‘Be nice, for everyone you see is waging a hard fight’?”

  “JESUS CHRIST!!!” Dan Rhodes “ ”.

  “You are the largest fool I have ever permitted to speak before me on a picnic table,” Geoff Nicholson “ ”.

  “That was Jewish Egyptian philosopher Philo, not Ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus!!!” Jim Dodge “ ”.

  “There is a 500-year difference
between the people you have confused and misquoted!” David Mazzucchelli “ ”.

  “Your mere cardiorespiratory existence is a source of persistent bafflement!” Miranda July “ ”.

  “Be kind, not be nice. As if an Egyptian philosopher circa the birth of Christ would say ‘nice,’ like some mum talking to her kids!” Daniel Handler “ ”.

  “Everyone you meet, not see. How can one be kind to strangers on the street? Shoot them kind looks, or stop and ask them if there’s anything they need? You, sir, are an inflated buffoon about to burst,” Carol Ann Sima “ ”.

  “It’s fighting a hard battle, not waging a good fight. This laughable misquotation proves your IQ is several digits below an earwig,” Frédéric Beigbeder “ ”.

  “You are a boil on the neck of literacy,” J.T. LeRoy “ ”.

  “I have eaten bagels with more insight than you,” Steven Hall

  “A few centuries ago, you would have been shot for such brain-buggery,” Vanessa Gebbie “ ”.

  “Your utterances transcend my otherwise prodigious capacity for empathy,” David Shields “

  ”. “Scum,” Scarlett Thomas “ ”.

  “There are no words to describe you, although if pushed I would use ‘pant-wetting fuckbudgie from hell’,” Mary Roach “ ”.

  “I could have quoted that correctly,” T.C. Boyle “ ”.

  And so, through my sheer idiocy, I had stopped the brawling. My intention had been to make them reflect on the meaning of the quotes, but the fun at baiting a writer for his mistakes had proven the stronger impulse.

  Mhairi

  8

  AS mentioned earlier, before my shouse was constructed, I had to share a sleeping bag with Marilyn Volt. This was one of the strangest experiences of my life, stranger even than sharing a glue bag with a ventriloquist (who offered his dummy some shit before inhaling). Marilyn is, in addition to a nutcase who takes far too many runs under false pretences, a delusional philanthropist, and a spandexed-up nincompoop, a sexual predator of the weirdest variety (and I have encountered a rich tapestry of weird and dangerous pervs in my time). Arriving in winter, where the ground floor is freezing at nights, and with no other sleeping quarters available (or so she lied to me), I was forced to squeeze into her tight sleeping bag, bumping uglies with her and enduring the unpleasant friction. “It can get very sticky under there, so I would advise sleeping in your underwear,” she said beforehand. “I’m fine in these pyjamas, thanks,” I said. She inserted her bronzed veiny physique into the sleeping bag and made a sliver of room for me, and I inserted my pale crack-ravaged physique into the sliver. I entered with my back to her, and she auto-spooned herself around me (there was no room to do otherwise), and I closed my eyes. Apart from the nervy, heavy breathing and the hand snaking along my right thigh, I knew something was amiss when her tongue worked its slimy way along my helix, down to my lobule, of which she took a horny bite and, meeting no resistance (I was in shock), she risked a squeeze of my left tit. At that point my shock ended. “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked. “Come on, relax and have fun with Mommy Volt,” she said. That sent my psycho-radars into overdrive, and I struggled out the sleeping bag. In the end, I had to threaten her with the prospect of me finding somewhere else to sleep, and slightly pimp myself by offering the warm elixir of my body close to hers provided she kept her exploratory fingers and tongue to herself. Over the next fortnight, I had to chastise her for the following manoeuvres: wrapping her arm around me after protests of loss of circulation and probing a pinkie into my navel; breathing and drooling on the back of my neck; removing her bra with complaints of pain and squishing her breasts into my back (with erect nipples); pretending that her arms had fallen asleep and accidentally landed on my front or back bottom; muttering supposedly seductive endearments into my ears, such as “Come to me, honey-child” or “Let me feel you, darling babe”; deliberately wearing warm clothes, forcing me to strip to my underthings and have her touch my skin; and frequently stroking my legs with hers and claiming restless leg syndrome. One evening, I was so tired that I let her have a roam around my body, and in the morning I chastised her so viciously, she cried and promised to “have a long hard think about my foul ways.” And she did, she had a long hard think about more ways she could be foul with me in that sleeping bag.

  Writing into the future

  IWAS hired by Ms. Volt to spearhead the ill-fated Writing Into the Future scheme.1 I had completed a marketing degree at a nondescript college2 five months before under coercion of the paterfamilias and, after a stint in the ScotCall Talent Pool, decided to swim into less shark-infested waters. The options for marketing graduates not being vast (nor the options for graduates from other schools), I was fortunate to chance upon the one non-ScotCall position in the ScotCall Examiner. Thanks to the last three decades of public paranoia and smear campaigning from politicians,3 I was raised to view writers and books with suspicion. I suspected these supposedly criminal and dangerous “truth-fudgers”4 of producing unpractical propaganda against the ethos of unlimited consumption that ScotCall promoted as vital to a pleasurable existence, and of attempting to dissuade consumers from turning to ScotCall to help shape and give their lives meaning. The sheer outrageous nerve! One month spent in the ScotCall impound cured me of this notion.5

  I met Marilyn Volt who, after five minutes discussing her latest 20K marathon to raise awareness for puppies with cancer or doctors with the shakes or whatever,6 sat down to brief me as to the post.

  “The problem is Carol is this,” she said, suckling a spout. She consumed about ten sports drinks per day.7 “We’re keen to keep The House going into the next generation. We need our writers to take an interest in procreation and propagating the writer species. No one has time to take an interest in this and consequently we have been unable to make inroads here. We can’t afford to offer our writers childcare or time off for pregnancies. So I am looking to recruit a person who will be able to solve the issue for us.”

  “Uh ... ”

  “Would you like the position?”

  “Yes.”8

  “Good. Get to work!”

  I was offered a cubicle inside Volt’s maze of filing cabinets on the ground floor. Each cabinet contained receipts, accounts, manuscripts, medical records, and pictures of writers’ teeth.9 I had thought the complex maze between desks might allow me some privacy from Volt’s panting progress checks, however I had underestimated her freakish skill (none of the cabinets were labelled and she knew the location of every file), and abandoned all attempts to obfuscate the maze in case I lost myself.10 The first scheme I devised to solve the problem was to devise a HoW dating website. I naïvely believed that all the writers needed was a platform to express their repressed lusts and desires, so set up a free-to-use and basic website so writers could make love happen in their “breaks.”

  This was wrong. The site received no hits because creating a profile would have taken too long and eaten into writing time. Plus no writers wanted to waste words on something that couldn’t be sold. Working in The House required an enforced celibacy. Becoming a writer required the eradication of desire, or the supplanting of one’s desire into the manuscripts. I learned this when I asked a newish writer in the Westerns department for a date and spoke to him with frankness about having sex after.

  “There’s nothing we can do about this issue. Having a child means career suicide. It’s not like at ScotCall where the pregnant people can answer calls in their beds or offer advice on the phone right up to the first contraction and two hours after having the child. Writing takes immense concentration and we have to deliver tens of thousands of words every week. Children don’t fit into our set-up here,” he said. I tried to override his stubborn practicality using seduction techniques. He was unresponsive. Even childless relationships were too time-consuming and even random sexual encounters were frowned on for draining too much energy, or for constricting the imagination when it came to writing romantic scenes. The act of doing narrow
ed the potential for dreaming.

  So I had to find other things to do. I would meander from floor to floor conducting pointless surveys:

  Q:How often do you think about sex? (A: Never.)

  Q:How many children do you want to have? (A: None.)

  Q:Who is your ideal partner? (A: No one.)

  Q:What is your strongest goal in life? (A: To finish my (present) manuscript.)

  Q:Do you think you would make a good parent? (A: No.)

  and place them into shredders. I tried to interest the writers in parenthood with subliminal tactics—leaving pictures of adorable tots on their desks, scenting the air with talcum powder, mother’s milk and fresh placenta, piping in lullabies and nursery rhymes to the offices, and in one case, borrowing a friend’s baby to show around the building. The responses were predictable: rage at having their desks disturbed, their concentration broken, their nostrils diverted, the presence of an irritant in their offices. The act of writing for men had snuffed out their swimmers, locked their libidos; and for women, ostracised their ovaries and murdered their mothering instinct.11 I tried to contrive romance between writers by leaving love-notes on desks. Failure. The writers merely sneered and hurled them binwards. At one point, I cornered a male in the lift and tongued his neck and seized his penis. He stood there blinking as I rubbed and said: “Have you finished? I have manuscript to go and write.”

  I feared being sacked. Volt would slither up and down the building in her soundless sneakers and catch me loafing. I was given an ultimatum—printed up on blue card reading Ultimatum. Pull your socks up or I’ll have to let you go. Love, Marilyn—so I searched the building for places to lurk and hide. In the backstairs between the ninth and tenth floors I found a surplus cleaning cupboard. Behind the unused mops and dustpans was a small room where a group of dropout writers met to hide from their department heads. There were five when I found them on a settee, lying around staring at the ceiling. The room had a strong graphite odour. I soon spotted the pile of discarded pencils behind the settee, and that the walls had been covered in desperate scribbles. These were the Blocked Writers.