The House of Writers

by M. J. Nicholls

  The Trauma Rooms

  10

  WELL, here we are at last!” the doctor said, cupping Erin’s shoulder for the final time, nudging her into a vacant room.

  “Whose room is this?”

  “Yours.”

  “Repeat that?”

  “Your room. Do you not remember? You went on a mad rampage throughout the building, braining writers with staplers, stapling their anuses and lips shut.”

  “Erm, no ... I was looking for a stapler on the sixteenth floor.”

  “Take a seat, Erin.”

  Erin sat on her mattress, scanning its items: sugared apple scented candle; 32” x 48” canvas art print of Terence Stamp in The Limey; a nine-cassette VHS boxset of Dawson’s Creek; a photo of Auntie Loretta Grahams in a pearl-studded fame; a plasticine rendering of the Sistine Chapel; various receipts on a kebab skewer sellotaped to an urn lid; a necklace monogrammed “Ayran” from her prankster ex-boyfriend; a thoroughly dog-eared copy of Joel Norst’s Mississippi Burning; a signed poster of ’90s one-hit-wonder Shanice; a cheap replica of a Turkish seccade Islamic prayer rug; a spanner in a plastic box marked “spatula”; the northwest corner of a ticket stub from a Republica concert with noticeable lipstick smear from Saffron; a bronze statuette of Olympic pole vaulter Renaud Lavillenie; an uneaten packet of fig rolls; and a wall-spanning series of photos showing a Sudanese tribe quizzically confronting a Volvo S70.

  “Yes, these things remind me of me,” she said.

  “Let me remind you. Two months ago, you worked on the fourteenth floor, where periodically people would pinch your staplers when you needed them to bind your manuscripts for prospective readers. Your manuscripts were sent to readers unbound, causing rage and cancellation of commissions. On one occasion you wrote a whole novel for a reader, and your stapler was filched, so you sent the chapters loose. The reader called you a flaming disgrace, accused you of slovenly presentation and withdrew her $50 cheque. You were unable to sell the novel to another reader. A week’s work, wasted. This regrettable cycle continued, with entire novels being refused and re-ƒ used. You were struggling to afford a pack of microwave noodles. You opted to spend your nights prowling the office to reconnect with your missing staplers. Some writers placed forcefields around their staplers, harnessing the power of magnetic particles to prevent a midnight attack; others set up laser beams, causing powerful skin-flaming damage to invading hands; others chained malnourished guard dogs to their desks; some slept with their staplers in intimate places; some hid their staplers in secret compartments in their desks, and so on. You chose the path of direct physical attack. You raided the stock-dump fields for a weapon to use against the thieves. Finding an old panini sandwich press that heated and fired flaming rocks at targets, you launched an assault on your fellow writers, braining them with rocks and stones at temperatures over 200°C, hoarding the staplers in your desk. You placed a barbed wire fence around your desk and attached mini-missiles to staplers and rigged up hole punches to squirt acid. When the office mounted a collective attack on your defences, you fled with your staplers on that aforementioned rampage, killing over seventy writers from the Sports Thriller department.”

  “No great loss.”

  “Ha! Quite. You managed to escape your room through an air vent that has now been stuffed with asbestos.”

  “I thought I was looking for a stapler.”

  “Yes, you have moments where you regress back to your earlier trauma. Sometimes, I will let you hold a stapler if you require consolation.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well. I will see you later.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And that concludes the tour!” He smiled.

  “Ha.” She frowned and lay back on her mattress. She stared into the intense peepers of Terence Stamp. She opened the uneaten packet of fig rolls and popped a fig roll into her mouth. She ate the fig roll. From under the bed she heard the words: “Hello again.” A man rolled out. The man was the maniac who hated bios.

  “Oh no.”

  “Yes. I know about your bio. Let me remind you: ‘Erin Grahams writes soap operas featuring the occasional cannibal nurse. She has a fondness for escalators and have-a-go heroes. Her two kittens think she smells.’ ”

  “I can explain.”

  Erin had no time explain because Gerald had already begun to do his murdering.

  Writer Portraits

  The Beekeeper

  I RESIDED in Lavelle in Southern France—a serene hamlet responsible for two hundred eclogues and thousands of middling watercolours. Having retired from four decades teaching nippers the alphabet and basic sums, I chose to settle there for the famous stillness (no falling leaf exceeded 0.002dB). I had endured hardships as a school teacher: the unwanted milk siphoned into pockets, blazers soaked in snot and tears, and shoes gummed up with play dough; in addition, I came to the realisation that I would forever be remembered for my occasional stuttering blow-outs, when I would leap from the chair to shout at troublemakers, waving my arms around madly, failing in anger to pronounce words while the kids laughed and taunted me. To teach for four decades is to open oneself up to the insatiable cruelty of the pre-tween mindset and endure persistent humiliations that no other professionals have to suffer. This is why I felt equipped to become a creative writer. I had no problem with being mocked or humiliated on the road to success. However, one incident forced me to retire from the peace I had cultivated.

  In Lavelle, I bought a cottage with a small plot overlooking an orchard. I made the room overlooking the orchard my library and study, where I would retreat each morning to write fiction. I began writing childhood reflections about my upbringing in Norway, my relocation to Ruislip, and my time at school and so forth ... nothing of particular interest to the common reader, but material I might be able to reshape into a novel. I wrote by hand as the twitter of birds and rustle of branches provided the backing track for these deep excavations of my childhood recall. Once, when composing a passage on my first kiss, a bee buzzed in through the window and landed on my middle finger. Before I could flick the bee clear, the blighter stung me and fell insensate on my notepad.

  I went to the bathroom to cool the sting and upon returning noticed no bee. I scoped the room for rogue bees then resumed. Where was I? Ah yes, “I placed my wet lips ...” Two bees landed on my notepad. One flew into my face and the other sat on the paper, alternating this process four times. I leapt out the chair to swipe the newspaper, chasing them out the window in a huff. I returned. “I placed my . . .” Where had my wet lips gone? Bemused, I headed out to inspect the garden, observing a busy beehive in a tree in the orchard belonging to a local farmer, and returned to the study, curious as to why the bees had ventured into my window when there were no flowers nearby. I kept my window open until more bees arrived and the hassle continued. I returned again to my notepad to notice the preceding sentence was missing. These bees were harvesting my words!

  Over the next two days, I had to fend off dozens of ambushing bees at a time, sucking up with violence the words I had written on my notepad, and taking them back to their hive. I tried closing the window, but the summer heat was unbearable, so I hung a light curtain to prevent their incoming. Next, I inspected the beehive. I am not the sort of man who surprises a beehive unprepared ... I wore my old fencing outfit, and pondered how to penetrate the hive. A loud English voice boomed: “Hoi! Hold on there!” The Englishman was a bronzed creature with several planets orbiting his hips. His face was not a kind one. “You messing with my beehive, are you?” I retreated. I looked absurd in the fencing equipment. “Hello there. No, I wasn’t. I’ve been having a problem with bees, you see ... flying in my window,” I said. I could not explain the next section without sounding mad. I trailed off. “Keep your hands off my bees. Get back on your own property. First warning, OK?”

  I returned in poor spirits. I had hoped for a retirement free from the unpleasant sorts I had encountered in bygone days, and to make some new friends in the region. Th
is bellicose Englishman was the closest person to me in a two-mile radius, reminiscent of the one teacher in the block I shared in the 1990s: never a pleasant hello exchanged. I returned to my notepad the next morning alarmed to see the whole page I had written the previous day was missing and that someone had torn a hole in the curtain. I contrived useless solutions. I left books open to see if the bees might feast on preprinted words—a sticky glaze was left on these pages in protest. I wrote nonsense on second notebook—only the sensible sentences were harvested. Panic ensued. What was I supposed to do in this situation? I wanted to write in my study, not the kitchen or my bedroom. I had the right.

  I spied on my neighbour and, one morning when I saw him drive away in his Land Cruiser, sneaked back towards the beehive. I had never dismantled a beehive before, but found out on the internet that to “smoke” the bees beforehand to make the bees gorge on honey was the best approach. I had ordered a handheld smoke machine, which I took towards the hive. I pumped smoke into the hive first, and broke a small part with a chisel to inspect. Once the smoke cleared, the bees launched themselves at my face, trying to obscure the view of their hive. Batting the pests aside, I peered inside and observed that each hexagon of their hive housed a different one of my words. I noticed “I placed my wet lips on her peachy lips” along the back of the hive and, scattered, other sentences from the novel-in-progress that had been eaten. I returned to the cottage to ruminate over my actions. I simply had to have this out with my next door neighbour, now there was evidence to show him.

  I needn’t have worried, for an hour later, the raging Englishman next door barrelled towards me in his huge clodhoppers. “You’ve been at my beehive again!” I faced up to the brute and his clodhoppers. “These bees have been menacing me, buzzing in my window, upsetting my writing time.” The man smiled, revealing two browned molars. “You’re a nutbag. This is the French countryside, if you don’t like bees, buzz off back to Jockland.” I retreated. Returned to composing the novel. Fought the bees. All the while, I kept a camera trained on the beehive. One morning I caught the farmer raiding the beehive, returning inside with its contents in a sealed box. A month later, I read a story in The New Yorker where each of my words had been used in a different order—the author Simon Tremaine, who “spends his time in the South of France with his two dogs tending his orchard.”

  I searched Tremaine on the internet, discovering that he had been sued amid rumours of plagiarism. During his time in London, writers living in the same tenement had accused Tremaine of “hiving off” their creativity, and reassembling their words in his own formations to produce his works. His weapon of attack became clear to me. He had been training his bees to steal the words, and these super-intelligent insects had rearranged them into successful pieces of original and marketable fiction.

  I considered my options. I could sit in the house attempting to write fiction while the bees stole my every word, helping Tremaine’s career; I could move house to another part of France ... or, since I knew Tremaine’s secret, I could steal his beehive and flee the country, making a name for myself using his brilliant bees. This was my only real shot at literary success in my late sixties. I waited one night when Tremaine was active with one of his random lovers, and sealed up the beehive, chiselled free from the tree. I made a swift hotfoot from Lavelle, having put my cottage up for sale, and sped towards the Channel Tunnel. I made sure the bees survived by punching a few airholes in their hive, where I poked a few pollinated roses for them to lap at during the long drive back home.

  I arrived at The House of Writers and signed up to write memoirs, keeping my beehive in a briefcase. Once installed in The House, I set up the beehive in my room and waited until the writers had retired to bed, releasing the bees into the office, where they scavenged for words from open notepads, or for those using computers, print-outs. The words were rearranged in the hive and published by me as original work. I kept the bees going like this until I had completed three books. Unfortunately, I had failed to be as attentive to the bees as I should have been, and the insects, having had no time to lay their eggs, died without having produced enough offspring to keep my career going. As I write this, I have no means of writing my fourth book, a room full of dead bees, and Simon Tremaine said he knows I stole his bees, and is coming for me. This is not a happy time in my life.

  A Better Life

  10

  MY final attempt to drop the scurrilous duo Pete and Rob, and escape The House forever, took place one winter morning upon completing my final paid commission—a psychosexual thriller set in the Balkans—and pocketing my last few pounds. It was the coldest winter in decades, and The House had contracted chronic pneumonia—raindrops froze on contact with the window-panes, breath clotted into clouds to form scalp-stabbing icicles in mid-air, pipes required a thorough blowtorch to produce water. The building itself was wrapped from bottom to top in a glacial coat, resembling the tip of an iceberg rising from a vast Arctic ocean. The heating had malfunctioned, so the writers were expected to deliver their manuscripts at subzero temperatures while lapsing into the incoherent chattering death-rattle of hypothermia. This was, even to the dimmest observer, the end. I had arranged for a pack of huskies and a sled to be delivered to the front door with my final earnings, and hoped to make my escape into the sprawl of neck-deep snow that smothered the periphery like some blank page rising from a writer’s nightmare.

  Pete and Rob had been stalking me for weeks, relying upon my survivor’s cunning to help keep them warm. Their one notable characteristic—brattish disrespect (mostly for me)—turned to panicked servitude as their noses ran and their blood cooled, and to humour them into thinking a full life existed the other side of winter, I helped them staple extra layers of carpet to their bodies and milk the plug sockets for electric shocks. On the morning of my departure, I dawdled around the ground floor. Mhairi and Marilyn were wrapped inside a blanket, “hibernating” until the winter ended, subsiding on licks of frozen water and a hidden stash of pickled onion crisps. This Great Freeze was to be the end of my colleagues, to be the end of the writing industry—Marilyn and Mhairi would survive with icy saliva and a lifetime’s stale oniony breath.

  The huskies and sled arrived as ordered from Tuktoyaktuk Imports Affiliated, signal-barking as per the agreement as I walked to the first floor, where I had to exit via the window due to the snow’s volume. I wasted no time in shattering an ice-glazed window with the Man-Blaster I had constructed in my spare time, and coldfooted it to the sled. People attempted to raise their eyebrows as I fired a toaster at the window, terrified at the extra bite of coldness and hoping to utilise some of the created energy. I hopped on the sled and mushed the huskies onward into the Crarsix wilds. The Scot-Call compound, having been built on a flat plane, had been buried in snow, and the temporarily impressive Microhumans and Micro-heavies had all frozen, leaving nothing alive in an undetermined radius, and I powered on despite the frostbite, until I alighted upon a hotel. Inside, warm cups of coffee were being served, and a warm fire stoked. No one says a word, and everyone basks in the comfort of the fire. There you can stay as long you like, and everything is free.

  Or, at least that’s what I hope might happen as I sit here and wait for the huskies to arrive. They are several hours late, and I’m starting to wonder if I ever placed the order, or I merely thought I had since I wrote about it happening . . .

  The Farewell, Author! Conference

  10

  THE sun shone, having no alternative, on the writers who could produce nothing new. It was time to abscond. The diggers had arrived, their wrecking balls poised, eager to demolish the Fossilfoods and open the first ScotCall compound in Cumbernauld. The writers, their literal and metaphorical hungers still unappeased, began the short trudge to oblivion, having failed to commit suicide en masse and reach their final Full Stops. Their collective hope that out there, somewhere, nestled a sentence that might sum up this sinking world, taking them to that place of pleasurable transcendence—t
he perfect phrase—kept them trudging on. Andrea Kneeland, speaking in tongues about Beckett’s Second Coming and the Rapture, stumbled along the B8054 towards an active golf course, where she inserted herself into the fifteenth hole and cosied down to her eventual starvation; Sunjeev Sahota boarded a train at Greenfaulds, derailing into Bog Stank, where the survivors formed a primitive cult around the worship of mangled locomotives, ending his days dancing around a rusted engine and an effigy of Richard Trevithick; David Szalay was hunted by a ScotCall recruiter and smoothtalked into signing up for twelve hours per day on the phones, the perpetual ring-ring and prattle of the yokels soon erasing his history as a writer; Zach Dodson took a wife in the borough of Kildrum and sired three Scottish kids—Anchor, Albatross, and Deadweight—reminding them hourly that their existences had stripped him of his freedom as an artist, and the best he could hope for them in life was a permanent kick in the nuts; Angel Ivov ate the mushrooms in the Ravenswood forest and ascended to the heavens on a prism of light, arriving at nirvana to be met by St. Peter Cook, who led him to a room where wit zinged from corner to corner, and the Purpose of Life was revealed as Vonnegut had predicted—To Fart Around—and was found by the police licking a tree in his pants before exploding with happiness in a controlled environment; Tahmima Anam sheared as many sheep as she could in nine hours to amuse herself, and entered the world Sheep Shearing Championships, where she came twelfth; A.L. Kennedy opened a vein with a disposable razor and noticing she bled pound coins not blood, went to homeless shelters where she offered a sample to everyone, until she collapsed from a pound shortage and had to have pounds inserted into her body, and since no one was kind enough to donate their pounds to her, she died in her sleep; Christina Kloess repopularised asparagus as a vegetable after several decades in the wilderness of neglect; and R.M. Berry kept rubbing his chin in contemplation and wore the skin away, waking up one morning to an ant colony sucking on his bleeding chin, and after months of resistance and frustration, came to accept his chin ants and their thriving colony, before collapsing from no blood soon. I, meanwhile, ambled around Croy, the Barhill Wood, thinking on the future, surviving on acorns, before making the resigned trek to The House of Writers, where I reside at present, writing Star Trek fan fiction. To cut this story short, I wish I had killed myself that night. My future lies in a coffin.