‘Useless cunt. I know we got some good reviews and that but all the best bits in Sorted were straight off the tape I gave him. Couldn’t stand the bastard. Sitting there with a snooty look on his fucking face. No, I want someone who understands where I’m coming from, someone who’s lived on the edge.’
‘I had never thought of myself as –’
‘A novelist, preferably.’
‘You want to move into fiction.’
‘You creative guys – you just sort of see things, don’t you?’ McWilliam shook his head nastily. ‘Why else would I want a fucking novelist? Thing is, a lot of the spicier stuff – stuff from my past that’s a bit on the naughty side – I wasn’t able to use in the memoirs. It might be misunderstood, if you take my meaning. So, I was thinking that fiction’s the job for me.’ He sat back in his chair, and glanced around the room, gazing for a few seconds at a group of three youngish men in big suits and sharply styled yobby haircuts – footballers or hoods or A & R men – who were standing at the bar. As he watched, a girl in a short lycra skirt joined them, one of the men laid a hand on her left buttock and fondled it thoughtfully.
‘Well?’ Brian turned back to me. He looked older now, and tetchy, as if he had used up what small reserves of goodwill he had. ‘Are you up for it?’
Even then, I could see it was not so much a question as an order. I was up for it or I was in trouble, up for it or right in it. I looked away from the unblinking eyes, regretting to the depths of my soul that I had ever become involved with this man, that he had interpreted my vague instructions with such lethal results.
Unwisely, I tried to play for time. ‘Norman Mailer says that he writes fiction only to make reality more believable to himself –’
‘Greg.’
‘But I don’t agree with that. Fiction’s fiction. It’s not some key to the real world – a sort of reality with value added.’
‘Greg.’
‘Of course, what we would need to do is to go through a few basic lessons in composition, talk about structure, lend you a few of the key manuals – Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer is an excellent starting point. Then I could read over your material, make suggestions, act as an editor, give you the name of a competent agent maybe.’
‘Greg, you are boring me fucking rigid here. I’ve told you I can hardly write my own fucking moniker. So … Are? You? Up? For? It?’
‘You want me to write a novel under your name,’ I said, a note of despair entering my voice.
‘I’m not a writer, Greg. When I say I want to write my book, it’s like saying I want to service my car. It means I want to get it done. By a professional.’
‘Listen, Brian, I’m very honoured,’ I said weakly. ‘But this has come at a very difficult time for me. Novel being sold – rewrites, dealing with the publisher. Tell the truth, I’ll be pretty flat to the boards over the next few months.’
‘For someone who works with his imagination, you can be very fucking unimaginative.’ Brian drained his glass and stood up. With a brisk, authoritative jerk of the head, he made for the door. I followed, watched by the barman.
In the alley outside, he half-turned. ‘Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London,’ he said softly.
‘Brian, it’s been a long day.’
He set off towards White City. It was one a.m., we were on Murder Mile, and I was in the company of a professional terminator: somehow, I sensed that turning on my heel and walking smartly towards the lights and relative safety of the Uxbridge Road was not an option. Brian had a quick, surprisingly athletic stride and, even after I had caught up with him, I found that I was almost running as I kept pace with him, like a child trailing in the wake of an adult.
He took a right, then turned up a smaller street towards the big housing estate, looking neither to the right nor the left.
Soon we were walking between two long redbrick blocks of flats, the sound of reggae and jungle music from behind the walls of different flats on each side of us mingling in the night. Round here, it seemed, no one worried too much about the sleep pattern of neighbours.
On and on they went, each block identical, each emanating an air of grimy, menacing defeat. Ahead I could see the neon lights of the Westway. We had been walking for fifteen minutes when we reached waste-ground, a part of west London ignored by even the most optimistic property developer. In the gloom I could see some skeletal timbers, which might have been an abandoned shed or evidence of some misguided attempt by the council to erect an adventure playground for children whose only adventure was destruction.
Brian stopped in front of a row of derelict houses, boarded up, abandoned except for one uncertain light – some kind of gas lamp, perhaps – on the top floor. Music screamed from the open window, shadows flickered back and forth.
‘Party time at the crack-house.’ Brian looked up at the windows.
For a moment, I was afraid that he was going to take me into this dark, vibrating shipwreck of a building, put me to some arcane, gangland test of endurance. ‘You want reality, writerman?’ he said. ‘Take a fucking peek.’
‘Doesn’t look like quite my kind of party,’ I said.
‘These are the kids that time forgot. They’re in their own squalid little capsule. They think they are beyond the rest of us, but they’re underneath, bottom of the fucking pile. They think they’re users but they’re used. The whole world uses them for something or other. They’re outsiders – even people on the estate think they’re scum. You don’t get further out than that.’
‘Squatters, are they?’ My voice sounded harsher than I intended. I was tired, irritated by Brian’s tone of fake concern. It was hardly the moment for the musings of a murderous hoodlum on the moral decline of modern youth.
‘Squatters, junkies, kids who peddle their arse down the Dilly or give middle-aged businessmen blow-jobs in the company saloon round the back of King’s Cross, who’ll do anything, nick anything for the old needle, the old pipe, the chance to kill off a few more brain cells. Lost kids who talk their own language with their own sad, scraggy names. Boz. Mole Shagbag. Bollock.’
‘Runaways, I suppose.’
Brian glanced across at me. ‘Not all of them,’ he said. ‘Some are just pulled into the scene for a lark – for the crack, as it were.’
‘Crazy.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing, Greg.’ McWilliam gripped my arm, the thumb of a muscular hand digging into the flesh above my elbow. ‘I wouldn’t want a son of mine up there.’
I looked at him, then up at the light from the window flickering in the night. In that instant, I knew why he had brought me here.
‘Seen enough?’ said Brian.
* * *
The Writer Speaks of … Good Citizenship
There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture.
Oscar Wilde
You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writer. God save me from being nice.
D. H. Lawrence
The decision to try to be a writer emanates from similar impulses in which you have a go at various kinds of disorders. You just don’t kill anybody at the end.
Richard Ford
Fiction writers may easily begin as persons of character … but the likelihood is that in the long run fiction bruises character. Novelists invent, deceive, exaggerate, and impersonate for several hours every day, and frequently on the weekend. Through the creation of bad souls they enter the demonic as a matter of course.
Cynthia Ozick
The good writer is rarely a good man – and only the vagaries of literary humanism once taught in universities would lead anyone to believe that ‘moral values’ are to be found in literature.
Peter Ackroyd
Being called a ‘bad citizen’ is a compliment to a novelist … If we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.
Don DeLillo
* * *
32
The next morning, Fay Duckworth left a message on m
y machine.
She told me that I had written a masterpiece, a work that transcended banal divisions between the literary and the popular, that, while my novel was gloriously and essentially English in its sensibility, its sheer quality demanded and would reach an international audience, that its synthesis of maturity and surprising youthfulness would, without a shadow of a doubt, appeal both to the callow, lightweight story-hound and to the most sophisticated reader, that frankly – and I quote directly – ‘we could be talking fucking telephone numbers here, darling’. In fact, she planned to cancel her lunch in order to finish reading it.
My reaction to this torrent of congratulation was of mild but unmistakable disappointment. A masterpiece? Well, all right – but had it actually changed Fay’s life? Did she wake this morning and, as a result of my vision, see the world with new eyes? In fact, come to think of it, how had she slept at all having started it? Was there a single reference in the message to any of the major literary prizes? My agent had signed off with a request for me to call her to discuss tactics and money, but right now I was not in the mood.
Instead, I rang Brian McWilliam. I was leaving a message when he picked up.
‘Yeah?’ As if to compensate for the absurd smoothness of his message, his tone was more gruff and hostile than usual.
‘I’ve been thinking about our discussion last night.’
‘Hm.’ There was a wheezy, unpleasant chuckle from the other end of the telephone as if he were impersonating a nastier version of himself for the benefit of a third party. I imagined the elfin figure of Ku, cowering in some corner of the bed. ‘I’m listening,’ he said.
‘Could you turn the tape off?’
‘Fucking drama queen,’ he grumbled. ‘Hang on.’ There was a click on the line.
‘I’m happy to help you with your work as we discussed. I have a gap in my schedule, as it happens, and I’ve always fancied the thriller form.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘And I sense we have a good creative understanding.’
‘Spare me the bullshit, Greg. So you want to make a few bob – nothing wrong with that in my book.’
‘As it happens, the money’s not that important. I was hoping for something in the nature of practical advice – maybe a bit of hands-on assistance.’
‘Hands-on?’ The sound of a smack, hand on flesh, echoed down the receiver. ‘I’m your man.’ He paused. ‘It’s your boy, I suppose.’
‘Yes, it’s my boy.’
* * *
Affirmation
Today I shall remember that it is in the nature of a writer to live beyond the conventional rules of social behaviour. Actions which might, for anyone else, be ‘bad’, ‘hurtful’ or ‘immoral’ have their own creative integrity. I shall contemplate reality with the pure, unblinking innocence of a child.
* * *
33
Soon the telephone began to ring. Fay had shipped the manuscript to the five large buildings in London in which all significant publishing business is conducted. She had asked editors to sign a confidentiality agreement, thereby ensuring that photocopied manuscripts, steaming with forbidden promise, found their way within hours to film producers, scouts for foreign publishers, features editors. Telling a publisher a secret has always been a good way to build up publicity.
I smiled to think of how the tiny village where those who earn their living from books reside would soon be on fire with rumours about a triumphant new fiction which was not yet another gimmicky, over-publicized first novel but a return to the literary fray of one who was almost, but not quite, forgotten. Doubtless, my very character and background would catch the imagination. To think that, all that time, he was working on this! He was one of us all the time! At lunches all over London, editors would suddenly find themselves agreeing that, ever since I had appeared on the Granta list, they had been expecting something rather special from me. Several of the women whose beds I had shared in my undiscriminating youth would dust off their fading erotic memories and let it be known that it was not that long ago when they had been ‘seeing’ me. Friends, some of whom I had never heard of, would solemnly confirm that they had been aware that I had been working on this major project for many years but had been sworn to secrecy. Before a single deal had been signed, my novel seemed certain to become a choice item of gossip and speculation.
Amusingly, one of the fortunate publishers considering my novel even attempted to pre-empt the auction with an offer which, not so long ago, would have made me weep with gratitude and astonishment. Fay was outraged. terpsichore 4:2 was a work of literature, not some kind of get-rich-quick futures bond; this vulgar, fiscal bartering would never deflect her from her essential duty as an agent: to find a suitable, serious publisher who would work upon the project in a suitable, serious manner in return for a suitable, serious monetary consideration. She would, out of politeness, make a note of this early offer (she assumed it was firm and unconditional), but she would make no commitment even to discuss it with Gregory Keays. He was a writer, for Christ’s sake; he had higher concerns.
At times, when Fay rang me with the day’s good news, I wondered whether she was entirely in control of the stampede she seemed to have unleashed but at precisely the right moment, she cracked the whip, corralled the foaming steeds of the media prairie, and accepted the highest offer.
So business was done, on an encouragingly significant scale. A contract, bubbling with zeros, issued from auctions for volume rights in London and New York. Doubtless, within a couple of months, translation deals would follow, including several for languages I never knew existed. A begging letter from at least one leading Hollywood producer was said to have reached Fay’s office. Forever Young was reissued, causing, according to some reports, a new spasm of public interest in the 1960s.* I was asked to appear as a guest critic on a respected nationwide radio books programme.
Most of this you will know. Within a month, the news of my astonishing return to form elevated the name of Gregory Keays from the occasional ‘Where are they now?’ column to lead item in more than one arts diary. As a columnist for the Professional Writer, I knew better than most the potency of a literary fairy-tale. The struggling author, talented yet alone in his belief that he had a story to tell, the big strike, the moment when the agent calls (‘Are you sitting down?), the wild, runaway success. It is a bookish version of the priceless Rubens found in the dusty attic. Everyone, after all, believes that he has an undiscovered literary masterpiece upstairs.
Of course, I was always going to be a good story – better than the kiss-and-tell actress with her memoir or the brilliant, floppy-haired undergraduate with his precociously brilliant novel. My wife was London’s most fashionable feng shui designer. For years, I had been but a humble teacher, a jobbing journo (in my view, these aspects of my life received an unnecessary amount of attention); now, it seemed, I was about to become a literary superstar. Then there was the whiff of enigma, of sin and controversy, about my recent past.
Pundits of every shade and school analysed my affair with Peter Gibson and meditated upon the connection between my late-flowering bisexuality and the release of my inner talent. The name of John Cheever was frequently evoked. Sniffing scandal, one reporter attempted to present Peter Gibson as a victim of my brutal ambition. Others tried to reach Marigold Keays, hoping to goad her into some appropriately enraged or heartbroken response. For the first time in many years, she ignored the opportunity for self-promotion. To impertinent questions, her agency responded with a brief, cool statement to the effect that no one could be more delighted than Marigold by her husband’s much-deserved success, that she was sharing these happy moments with Gregory in a marriage that, after recent problems, was stronger than ever. Neither she nor our son Douglas would be commenting further.
I, too, remained silent. After one small, unwise move (an over-emphatic rejection of an interview for Gay Times’s ‘Coming Out for Air’ column), I let it be known that I would not be available for interviews until
the weeks immediately preceding publication of my novel.
If all these things seemed to pass in a distant haze, as if they were happening to another, alien version of myself, it was because, having finished my novel, I was experiencing difficulties of acclimatization.
Once, when I had first become a writer, I had feared that the parameters of my small study would become a prison. Then one day, a few years later, I realized that it was the real, outside world that had become dislocated and threatening, that the longer I spent in my imaginary kingdom, the more fearsome reality became. Taking my daily walks, east or west, I would ensure that the route I took was familiar. Whereas once I would take lunch, attend clubs, move easily among the city’s shoppers, commuters and tourists, I was now daunted by the slightest exposure to urban life. Writing novels, as Martin once said, is all about not getting out of the house. As terpsichore 4:2 strengthened its grip, I had hidden away in the study, as timid as a little old woman living alone with her cat.
Now there was no avoiding it. I had finished writing the novel; it was time to get out of the house. Making my way to unavoidable meetings with those who were buying my talent with significant sums of money, I blinked, like Rip van Winkle at the brightness and noise all around me. Contemporary life seemed to have accelerated since my last visit; it had become harder and louder. Entire streets had changed. New shops, selling unrecognizable electrical objects in absurd, garish, nursery colours, had sprung up. The last time I had looked, this had been a sleepy place, a country in grumpy, helpless decline; now I saw women and men, confident, aggressive, hurried, solitary yet forever in urgent communication. They talked to themselves as they walked down the streets, negotiated with themselves in doorways, sometimes stood on traffic islands declaiming as the cars swirled around them. It was if the compulsion for crazed soliloquy of the nutters and tramps I used to see on my walks had spread to the rest of the world. There was something exclusive and threatening about the new dependence on contact; even when people met face to face in restaurants, they would leave their mobile telephones close at hand on the table beside them, like gunslingers with their Colt .45s at the ready.
Kill Your Darlings Page 25