I looked up and smiled in a welcoming, fatherly way. His clothes were as torn and dirt-encrusted as ever, but there was something unavoidably different about him. He seemed less rat-like, more muscular, taller. His skin had cleared and his face revealed the dark beginnings of a beard. For the first time since he was about eight, it occurred to me that he might grow up to be a good-looking, possibly even a handsome, man.
‘Doug.’ I extended a hand which he shook awkwardly. ‘How have you been?’
‘Not so terrible, as it happens,’ he said, almost amiably. He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Tell you what, let’s sit by the window, yeah?’ Without waiting for my reply, he made his way to a table at the front of the restaurant. I followed and, as I sat down opposite him, I saw why we needed to be seated in view of the street outside. Across the road, parked casually on a double yellow line, was an ancient saloon car. Two men, one black, one white, sat, smoking on the front seats. They glanced occasionally in our direction.
‘Have you been accompanied?’ I asked.
‘Maybe.’
‘They don’t trust you? Are you being held against your will?’
My son gave an irritated little laugh. ‘Fuck off,’ he said.
A waitress ambled up to the table. I ordered a beer for my son, a spritzer for myself. Doug took a battered packet of twenty out of his jeans pocket and lit up.
‘Given up the old roll-ups then?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’ He sat back in his chair and exhaled showily. ‘So?’ he said.
Small talk, a brief paddle in the shallows before plunging into more treacherous waters, did not seem to be an option. ‘Look, Doug.’ I lowered my voice, as if the two men across the road were somehow able to catch my words. ‘I know that I haven’t been the greatest of fathers but –’
‘You’re a writer yeah yeah, blahdy-blah.’
‘No. I was going to ask you to put what has happened in the past behind you. I’m not interested in talking about exams or getting a job or keeping your room tidy or smoking or speaking to me or now and then turning up for meals. We’re beyond that stage.’
He muttered something and looked across at the sad little family group across the room.
‘I want you to come home, Doug. You’ve made your point. We can work this out together. Things are easier now that I’ve finished my novel. I’ve got back my career. I have my own money. I’m me again – your father.’
‘Finished your novel?’ He looked away. ‘Congratulations.’
I smiled. ‘It’s going to be quite successful, I think. Well, actually, I know.’
Doug gazed out of the window, bored once more.
‘I don’t like your keeping this company. We don’t like it.’
That parental first person plural seemed mildly to bring my son to life. ‘We.’ He mimicked his father with a skittish contempt. ‘So you and Mum got over the old problem about you turning out to be a bit of a bender, then.’
I paused, swallowing back my rage. ‘I am not a bender, as you call it. What happened was an aberration. Since all that, and its … aftermath, your mother and I have talked about the situation. A lot of it was career pressure. We’re better now.’
For the first time for a while, he looked me straight in the eye. ‘That’s not what she says.’
The waitress returned with our drinks. Doug swigged back his beer and smacked his lips vulgarly.
‘And what does Marigold say?’ I asked.
‘Words to the effect that you’re a selfish wanker, basically.’
‘Doug.’ I felt defeated. It seemed pointless to suggest that Marigold, of all people would never use those words.
‘Well, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not here to talk about me. I’m not the one hiding out in a crack house.’
He smiled and looked away.
‘You can talk big and act big,’ I said. ‘You think you’re in control but you can get sucked under. I may not know much, I may appear not to be very good at life, but I know this. Bad company can destroy you. These people are not your friends. They may seem to understand you but they’ll just use you for their own purposes.’
‘Yeah?’ he spoke so loudly that the two children across the way looked up from their plates, their eyes wide with undisguised curiosity. ‘So that’ll be why you’ve taken to hanging out with good old Pussy McWilliam, will it?’
Trying not to show my surprise, I started to explain that Brian McWilliam and I had a professional writing arrangement, that in my work, research of the darker aspects of human behaviour sometimes involved personal contacts one might not normally choose for oneself, but, as I spoke, Doug shook his head slowly. ‘You have absolutely no fucking notion,’ he said eventually.
‘I know McWilliam,’ I said. ‘I’ve probably heard more about his murky past than most people.’
‘Murky past. Shit, man, you talk like he was some sort of joke baddie from an Agatha Christie film. You think that just because he’s done a book and talked at a few of your lame festivals that he’s straight up, no problem. Oh yeah, like there’s been a bit of dodginess in the past, he’s a bit rough round the edges, a bit fuckin’ murky maybe, but he lives in a nice house now, don’t he – basically, he’s an all right sort of bloke.’
‘I’m not quite as naïve as you may think.’
‘I tell you there’s people round here, right, who shit themselves when they hear his name.’ My son lowered his voice. ‘Straight up, he’s a psycho, man, one mad fuck. If he’s got anything on you – anything at all – you are just so – well, you’re fucked basically.’
By Doug’s standards, it had been quite a speech. While it may have lacked a certain linguistic polish, and told me rather more than I wanted to know about the attitudes and turn of phrase of those among whom he was now moving, it conveyed genuine emotion and a concern which, at the time, I found rather touching. Disconcertingly, this gruff son of mine, with his snarling voice and gutter language, was making me feel as if I were the innocent abroad in need of worldly advice, as if I were the one who was lost, vulnerable and in danger.
‘Just tell me Pussy’s got nothing on you,’ he said wearily.
‘Brian McWilliam and I have a working arrangement –’
‘Oh, shit. You are such a fucking idiot, Dad.’
In spite of myself, I smiled. It had been a long time since I had heard him call me by that name. ‘Come back, Doug,’ I said. ‘We can help each other out of trouble. It’ll be good, father and son. We’ll rediscover what we’ve lost.’
‘Sucked under, you said. It’s not me that’s being sucked under. I’m not the one with the big secret and with an evil bastard holding a gun to my head.’
I looked at my son more closely. ‘I haven’t had a big secret for a while.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yes, Doug.’
He looked across the road to his minders. Then, sighing, he reached into his back pocket and took out a scuffed sheet of paper. Carefully, he unfolded and smoothed it out on the table. It was a sheet of lined A4 paper, filled with the neat handwriting which I now knew better than my own.
‘Tell me about this, then,’ he said.
* * *
Top Five Methods for Overcoming Writer’s Block
1. Leo Tolstoy, when blocked, would play a game of cards, usually Patience, sometimes deciding the fate of his characters on the outcome.
2. Franz Kafka would walk out of his study, play with his hair in the mirror, wash his hands three times and return to work.
3. H. G. Wells believed you should take the novel by surprise by writing at odd times of the day or night.
4. Annie Dillard quotes a Washington writer who became frozen with fear as soon as he became self-conscious in his writing. During a story, he would regularly leave his desk to go for a walk. On his return, he would copy out every word he had written in the hope that the momentum would carry him forward to create two or three new sentences. Then the self-consciousness would afflict him again and he would
repeat the process.
5. Kingsley Amis suggested that a writer should compose the day’s first few sentences in his head before he reached his desk (in the shower, while shaving etc.).
* * *
35
They say that, when E. M. Forster reached his terminal, definitive writer’s block, he gathered the characters in the novel he was trying to write at a station, put them on a train, and never saw them again. They disappeared over the horizon, leaving only a trail of smoke drifting upwards into an empty blue sky over the deserted landscape of his imagination. Shortly afterwards, the former novelist dolefully made his way to King’s College, Cambridge where he lived out his days, writing books of criticism, dreaming of choristers and, very occasionally, giving half-regretful interviews in which he tried to explain how exactly he had, as he put it, ‘gone smash’. It was not that the emotions themselves had dried up, he said, merely that the expression of them was no longer at his disposal.
Only a true writer will understand the pathos of this remark. The fact is that, for us, a life without expression (and publication and readers) is no life at all. It was Martin who articulated his great pity for non-novelists, asking, ‘How are you going to live in a denuded world, when you’re just living in it, no longer giving it some shape?’ Philip Larkin made a similar point when he confessed: ‘My trouble is that I simply can’t understand anybody doing anything but write, paint, compose music – I can understand their doing things as a means to those ends, but I can’t see what a man is up to who is satisfied to follow a profession in the normal way.’ For any truly creative spirit, life without art is hardly life at all.
I can perhaps confess at this point that there have been moments in my life when it has seemed disquietingly possible that Gregory Keays might become that pitiable creature, the non-writer; I had ‘gone smash’ over the past fifteen years as frequently as a demolition-Derby veteran. Now, energized by the assured success of my new novel, I realized that the vast majority of my half-completed novels were not dead, but sleeping. During the few moments when I was not at work on Lolitaville, or making preliminary notes for this guide, I found myself returning to the abandoned novels of my past and was pleasantly surprised. A few, it was true, were trapped in the time when they were written – Adultery in Hampstead reflected a jaunty, light-hearted attitude to sex which I no longer felt, Glitter’s perspective on eighties consumerism was witty but outdated, Gang Hoot Yer Heeb, Auchtermuchty’s perspective on the vicious, pie-eyed Glasgow underclass was frankly over-sentimental – but most contained the kernel of emotional and intellectual truth that is the mark of true literature.
Rereading my work with the clear eyes of the successful novelist, I found much that was good and fresh: indeed, I now saw that several of my novels-in-progress had grown in stature during their years in my literary pending tray. Mind the Gap presented a vision of the metropolis every bit as witty and acerbic as that achieved by Martin in his London novel, but with a depth of feeling of which he could only dream. My comedy of contemporary male lifestyle Giving It Large offered proof of my lighter side after the relative austerity of terpsichore 4:2. Several of the stories in Tell Me the Truth About Love, About Love retained the powerful resonance which the more vulgar journalists like to describe as ‘zeitgeisty’. I looked forward to completing these projects in double-quick order, firing them at a joyful, appreciative market and bludgeoning my formerly smug, would-be literary peers with the sheer heft and fecundity of my work.
These plans were for the future; my main project during these months was Lolitaville and it was taking shape well beyond my expectations. For about a month, McWilliam had talked around his subject, providing background, incident, roughly drawn characterization and the beginnings of a plot, and frequently lapsing into a sort of stream-of-consciousness erotic trance which, while somewhat unnerving at the time, provided some powerful raw material. When I judged that he had contributed all he could, I began to transform my notes and tapes into the real world of fiction.
Utterly different from terpsichore, which in its turn belonged to a separate imaginative universe to Forever Young (when Martin said a writer needed no more than two or three subjects, he was not speaking for Gregory Keays) Lolitaville already contained, in its opening chapters, what one of my recent reviewers has described as ‘the indelible water-mark of a natural story-teller.’
Meanwhile my other characters (the characters of my life), last seen chuffing sadly over a Forsterian horizon, were now returning to the station. By a strange paradox, the secret that Doug and I shared concerning Peter Gibson’s unacknowledged contribution to my novel provided a bridge across the gulf of mistrust between us. I had suggested, shortly after our meeting in Notting Hill Gate, that, having made sacrifices to my career, my son should share in its rewards, receiving a monthly transfer into a bank account I would open for him in return for which he would come home. Graciously, Doug accepted the offer.
My son, it transpired, had not been a prisoner in the squat but a promising trainee. I was obliged to make a reasonable four-figure contribution to the unofficial landlords on the ground floor of his house as compensation, a sort of transfer fee. It was all somewhat squalid and hole-in-corner but, at the end of it all, Doug was home.
It would be an exaggeration to say that this carefully negotiated return to the fold (the financial details of which we had decided to keep from Marigold) heralded a new dawn of energy and communication on Doug’s part. The door to his room remained closed. Many daytime hours were spent in slumber. He had become rather fond of baths and spent much of the day lolling in bubbles, staring ahead of him, stirring only occasionally to reach for the hot water tap. Once, and with the cautious banter which now marked our relationship, I commented upon this new enthusiasm for cleanliness and suggested that he might combine his ablutions with reading a book.
He laughed, a hard, barking, unamused honk, reminding me of something Martin once said about laughter being second only to behaviour ‘in the sack’ as an indicator of personality. He didn’t do books, he said.
Oddly, he didn’t seem to do music either these days. I had assumed that, with his new-found wealth, my son would invest in records but now the machine-gun rhythms, the thump of bass and the strangled screams that were once so much part of life at 23 Brandon Gardens were no longer heard. To my surprise, I found that I missed it. I looked back on the days when I could knock on his door in a caringly authoritative manner and ask him to turn the bloody noise down. Doug without vinyl was somehow less the Doug that I knew.
One day, as I descended from the loft for a mid-morning coffee, I detected the unmistakable squeaks and tinny fanfares of a computer game. Through the half-open door of his room, I saw my son perched on the side of his bed, zapping and powing, his eyes fixed on the screen of a monitor perched on his bedside table. My son had invested in a new hobby. Like many parents, I tried to find benefits in the hours spent in thrall to cybernetic mindlessness – his powers of deduction would be honed, his sharpened speed of reaction would be useful in later life – but unavoidably I remembered that Doug’s first discovery of hand-held Gameboys and Action Men had coincided with the first signs of social withdrawal. ‘How are you going to explain that to Mum?’ I asked.
My son’s eyes remained transfixed to the screen. ‘Gave it to me, didn’t you?’
‘I did?’
‘Surely you remember. Reward for coming home. Thanks, Dad, cheers.’
‘You don’t think that including me in your little lie is rather taking me for granted.’
‘You what? Oh fuck.’ He banged the keyboard and groaned. ‘I was on Level Four and all.’
While the old-fashioned parent within me was dismayed at the lack of respect, amounting at times to open distaste, which my son accorded me, I told myself that it was a positive sign that we had moved beyond the stage of silence and mutual incomprehension. We had both walked on the darker side of life’s highway. For the first time, Doug had a certain authority in hi
s dealings with the adult world. A new ease was evident; companionship would doubtless follow at a later date. My initial fears that he might abuse his position of power over me, drop hints of his secret knowledge, make oafish and insensitive remarks about it, had receded.
He told me that he had discovered the sheet of Peter Gibson’s manuscript during a trawl through my office, an activity which, for reasons Doug was unable to explain, had become something of a routine for him. When, with a certain amount of awkward humour, we had burnt the page on his return to the house, he swore that no further evidence of my collaboration was in his possession, and I believed him. The matter was closed.
A few weeks later, I became aware of another development in my son’s life, more surprising than his revived interest in computer games. One morning, I was startled to encounter a small, plump, female figure with cropped dark hair emerging form the bathroom. Eyes down, she scurried past me without a word and entered Doug’s room. Moments later, I heard giggling.
A girlfriend. It was a surprise, I admit. The idea that anyone, no matter how homely and unformed, could engage in intimate activity with my skinny, callow progeny was difficult to comprehend. Yet this bouncy little thing in jeans that were too tight and a T-shirt which cruelly mocked her lack of womanliness became something of a regular visitor, announcing her arrival with a brief trill on the front doorbell. Often, when I passed Doug’s door, I would hear their two voices, hers chattering and gay, his gruff and monosyllabic. What on earth did she find to say to him? What brilliant aperçu had my son unleashed which had caused her to collapse into peels of high-pitched and, I must confess, not unattractive laughter? She became less timid in my presence, never actually speaking but darting a brief glance and a half-smile in my direction.
After a few days, I asked Doug about her, taking care to sound neither disapproving nor leeringly over-curious. Her name was Zoe. She did have a second name, something Scottish, but my son was unable to recall what it was. She was sixteen.
Kill Your Darlings Page 27