by David Belbin
The Pretender
by David Belbin
e-book edition published in 2011 by Five Leaves Publications, PO Box 8786, Nottingham NG1 9AW
ISBN: 978-1-907869-33-4
www.fiveleaves.co.uk
© David Belbin, 2008
Five Leaves acknowledges financial support from Arts Council England
Cover design: Darius Hinks
About the Author
David Belbin is the author of more than thirty novels for young adults, including Denial and Festival. His short stories for adults have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He edits the Crime Express series for Five Leaves and works part time at Nottingham Trent University, where he runs the MA in Creative Writing. Born in Sheffield, he now lives in Nottingham.
for John and Pauline Lucas
One
The first thing you need to hear about happened when I was fourteen. In English, we were reading David Copperfield. The rest of the class complained that it was too long. I joined in, but, secretly, I was enjoying myself, especially when Mr Moss told us about Victorian London, a place bursting with invention and energy yet, at the same time, squalid, even depraved. I had already decided that I would live in London one day.
We’d got to the end of chapter twelve when Mr Moss gave us a different kind of assignment.
‘I’d like you,’ he said, ‘to pretend you are Dickens. Write the beginning of the next chapter. Read it first, if you like.Yours must be different.You have carte blanche to do what you like, plot-wise, but it must be in the style of Dickens.’ Then he went on about Style for a while. I only half listened. Yes, I thought. I’d like to have a go at that.
In my bedroom, I scribbled away, losing track of time. When I’d written enough, I typed it up, using the Amstrad word processor my mother had bought for me, second hand, from an ad in the evening paper. As a computer, it was an embarrassment. You couldn’t play games. I used it for typing out essays and writing fiction, though my efforts so far had been pitiful, deleted the next day. After two or three drafts, the Dickens imitation was done. I printed it off, pleased with myself, yet sure Mr Moss — one of those sarcastic, nit-picking teachers — would find plenty of flaws in my work.
A week later, when he was returning the assignment, Moss did something I’d never seen a teacher do before. He gave back everybody’s homework but mine. Moss was a mild looking man, with a narrow nose, a small, wiry body and dark, greasy hair that he didn’t have cut often enough. He returned to his desk, opened a drawer and lifted out my Dickens piece. The teacher raised it like a flustered referee holding up a red card.
‘Trace,’ he said,‘produced quite the most memorable piece of coursework that I have come across in my brief career as a teacher. So memorable, in fact, that I’d like to read it out to you.’
The other boys stared at me with contempt: smart arse Trace again, they were thinking. Then the teacher began to declaim my mock Dickens, using exactly the same tone and slightly exaggerated manner he used when reading bits of David Copperfield to us. I listened carefully, trying to pick up what I’d done wrong. Had I put in a modern word by mistake, or mixed up one of the character’s names? Not that I could tell. When Moss stopped, I was half expecting to be congratulated.
‘What did you think?’ he asked the class.
There was the usual silence that greeted a question we hadn’t already been told the answer to. This was a top set, but, even so, it didn’t do to show off, or express an opinion that might be ridiculed by the teacher. So my classmates were silent.
‘Didn’t you find it convincing?’ Moss asked, stressing each syllable in the final word in a way that might or might not be sarcastic. ‘Don’t you feel that Dickens would have been proud to write such prose at the tender age of — what is it now, Trace — fourteen?’
My youth regularly humiliated me. Some of the other boys in the class were already sixteen, but I had been put forward a year and my birthday wasn’t until March. I stared furiously at the lid of my desk, oblivious to the teacher’s footsteps. Mr Moss grabbed me from behind, yanked me up by the collar of my shirt and turned me to face the whole class.
‘Wouldn’t you say that the piece was too convincing?’ he barked, choking me. ‘All right,Trace, I want the truth. Where does it come from?’
‘I made it up, Sir,’ I pleaded.
‘I made it up, Sir,’ he repeated, mimicking my voice. ‘You’re a devious sod, Trace. You dug around until you found a description that might have fitted, changed a couple of names then copied it out. Do you take me for a fool, boy?’
‘No, Sir.’
‘Then tell me where it came from.’
‘Honest, Sir, I made it up.’
Moss’s small, beady eyes began to bulge. ‘If that’s your attitude, we’ll see how you feel about it after a headteacher’s detention.’
He got out one of the yellow forms and began to fill it in. When he got to the space marked reason for detention, he wrote one word: cheating.
‘But I didn’t cheat, Sir. I...’
I thought he was going to hit me. I was, perhaps because I had no father, terrified of male violence. On the rare occasions when I got into fights, I never hit back, only shielded myself from the worst blows. Now the teacher saw the fear in my eyes and took a deep breath.
‘If you tell me where you took the piece from,’ he told me, more temperately, ‘I’ll tear this up.’
I thought for a moment, desperately trying to recall the name of a Dickens book that wasn’t in the school library.
‘The American Notes’, I muttered, shamefaced.
Moss smiled, vindicated.Then, as the bell rang, he took the yellow form and my coursework and methodically tore them into tiny pieces. These he let fall through his fingers into the bin, like a bird shitting.The class began to pack up, but, with a wave of his referee’s arm, Moss halted them. He gave us a sermon about plagiarism in coursework, saying that, if we were caught cheating, even in such a seemingly minor manner as this, it would put all of our exam results at risk.
We were late out for lunch and the whole class blamed me.
Two
My mother and I lived in a terraced house at one end of a semicircle that bordered a small green. These houses were originally alms cottages for the poor. A housing association bought most of them as accommodation for the elderly. Kids at school used to tease me about living in an old folk’s home. It was, I suppose, an odd place for a child to grow up. There were no other children, but I was doted on by the elderly residents. Mum, on the rare occasions she went out, had no shortage of baby-sitters.
She did have a shortage of boyfriends. My father was never spoken of. He had deserted Mum before I was born, giving her, I came to think, a deep distrust of men. Her own mother was a single parent. Gran died when I was five, so I barely remembered her. Mum was my entire family.
The house was full of books and Mum read to me every night until I was old enough to read fluently on my own. If I wanted more choice, I only had to go to the library where Mum worked. When I was young, she was strict about the times I could go to the library. It had to be once a week, when she was on duty. She said she didn’t want me showing her up by behaving badly in her absence. But I wasn’t a very naughty child.
Mum’s library rule was like the trick she played with ‘lights out’. By setting an early bedtime, Mum ensured that I sneaked a torch under the bedclothes so that I could keep reading. Fiction became a forbidden pleasure. By rationing library visits, Mum made me addicted to the places, so that, later in life, wherever I lived, the local library became my second home.
After the Dickens incident, it was a long time before I copied another writer’s style. I read all the time, and couldn’t help but write books in my head.
I would tell myself the story of my imaginary life, the one where I got the girl and won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in the style of the author who I was reading at the time. Sometimes, in the night, I dreamt whole chapters of books, the words forming on the page as I read.
All that was a form of day dreaming. I started writing seriously in the Sixth form, after the school took us on a weekend visit to Paris. This was my first trip abroad. Paris in the spring was like stepping into a movie (we didn’t have a TV at home, but Mum and I often went to the cinema). On returning, I immersed myself in French authors and American writers who had lived in Paris and began my own tentative jottings.
When university applications came up, I’d had enough of always being younger than everybody else on my course and deferred for a year. Mum wanted me to apply for Cambridge, but I refused. Cambridge would be full of rich, public school people. No matter how good I was, I’d always be an outsider, without the breeding, brilliance or money to fit it. I applied to London University instead, to study Eng Lit with French subsid. At the interview, I was asked why I wanted to be in London. Did I have friends there?
‘No. I applied because I want to live here. I want to be a writer, and successful writers have to live in London.’
The interviewer asked who my favourite writers were. This was difficult. I didn’t mention Dickens because he was too obvious. Ditto Shakespeare. Chandler and Collins were out because they wrote mystery fiction. Kurt Vonnegut was risky because he wrote sci-fi. So I brought up Hemingway, whose short stories I’d been reading on the train. Then I mentioned Joyce, because he was difficult (so far, I’d only read Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners). ‘Playwrights?’ he said. ‘Beckett, of course.’ He raised an eyebrow and I thought that he was about to catch me out with a difficult question. I’d never seen a Beckett play, though I’d once tried to read Waiting for Godot. It was his prose I knew.
‘Perhaps you ought to study in Paris rather than London,’ the tutor said, his voice becoming kindly. ‘Those three all made their names there.’
‘Actually,’ I replied, a decision forming only as the words spilled out of my mouth. ‘That’s where I intend to spend my year out.’
Three
Mum was reluctant to let me go. At the time, I thought she was being over-protective, because I was only seventeen. Later I realised she knew something I didn’t. I argued that I needed to become a fluent French speaker to do well at university. Mum knew this wasn’t strictly true, but could see that I was itching to leave. In the end, she didn’t put up a fight.
That summer, while waiting for my A level results, I worked in a warehouse packing clothes from a mail order catalogue. After seven weeks, I had enough money to set me up while I found a job in Paris. I passed my exams with top grades and deferred my university place. At the end of August, I filled a rucksack with clothes and books, promised to send regular postcards home, and bought an open return ticket to France.
Paris in September was unlike the place I’d visited the spring before. It seemed even bigger, more complicated and much more foreign. I wanted to think of myself as a resident and was disappointed to find large parts of the city entirely populated by tourists. Yet the place still impressed me more than London. There were the wide, grand streets, suitable for a capital city. The buildings were majestic, never merely ornate. Everything seemed to take place on an appropriate scale, whereas the London I knew was a cramped, crowded place. In time I would come to know and love its haunted, peculiar powers, but Paris was my first love.
I’d meant to take a room on the Left Bank. I wanted to live in the Seventh Arrondissement, as Hemingway and Fitzgerald had in the twenties, but the only places I found were asking as much for a night as I was prepared to spend for a week. I stayed in a Youth Hostel, sharing a dormitory with an endless array of strangers, snoring and farting and sometimes screaming in the night.
Getting a job wasn’t like in the books, either. I’d read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. I was prepared, if necessary, to work as a dishwasher, as he had, but most places used machines. My French was good, but when I went to bars with jobs on offer, I was spoken to in a rapid fire barrage that I could barely follow. I came across no English workers I could go to for advice. Paris was awash with immigrants, mainly blacks from the country’s former colonies. These were the people I was competing with for work. I found myself shocked by the casual cruelty with which they were treated.
After a week, I was on the verge of going home, but it was too soon to give up. I spent my savings visiting tourist spots, posted a second, resolutely cheerful postcard to my mother, and got over my shyness enough to say je cherche du boulot at any spot where I might find work.The American and British churches had notice boards advertising temporary jobs for ex-pats. Those for teaching English as a foreign language required a qualification beyond my three A levels. Nevertheless I pushed myself into going along to a couple that didn’t mention a TEFL certificate, only to be told I was too young even to be considered.
My confidence (and savings) ebbed by the day. I’d spent my whole life as the only male in the house. At the hostel, I was part of a herd, and didn’t like it. The turnover was huge. After a week, I was a long term resident, yet remained as anonymous as when I’d arrived. The most depressing thing was that, after lights out at eleven, you couldn’t read. I bought a torch and resorted to shining it under the bedclothes, as I had when a child. But most of my reading had to be done in parks or, when it was too cold, in the least expensive cafés I could find.
That was how I finally came upon a job. I was having an espresso in a quiet bar on Mo. St. Michel, reading Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir of Paris, A Movable Feast, when a middle-aged American tourist sat down next to me.
‘I’ll bet you can tell me where to find Shakespeare and Co,.’ he said.
I was about to make a joke about Stratford-upon-Avon when I realised he meant the bookshop, which used to be on the Left Bank and featured in the book I was reading. Its owner, Sylvia Beach, was the first to publish Joyce’s Ulysses.
‘I think it’s closed down,’ I told him,‘years ago.’
‘No,’ he told me, ‘it’s in my guide book. I just can’t find the street.’
He handed me the book, and, sure enough, there was a listing for the shop, at 37 rue de la Bucherie, which, according to the pocket map I carried, was just round the corner. This version of Shakespeare and Co. had been open since the 1950s, the book said. I volunteered to help the American locate it and, after two false starts, we found a bustling place overlooking the Seine. There was an antiquarian store on the left and a store selling new books on the right. The latter was piled high with works in English. I pounced upon a paperback of Jeffrey Meyer’s Hemingway biography and asked, as I was paying, whether there were any jobs going.
‘Are you a writer?’ the young Australian at the till asked. It was the first time anyone had put this question to me, so I answered it honestly.
‘I’d like to be.’
‘If you say you’re a writer, and George likes you, he’ll let you stay here. You have to help out and he expects you to read a book a day.’
‘And all I have to do is pretend to be a writer?’
‘If you want to be a writer, you wouldn’t be pretending, would you?’
I didn’t answer this. Lots of people thought they would be great writers if they could only be bothered to sit down and write. I’d written enough rubbish to know that writing wasn’t easy. But I remained curious about the bookshop.
‘How many people stay here?’ I asked.
‘At the moment? I think it’s fourteen. There are less in the winter.’
‘Where?’
‘Everywhere. Look upstairs.’
After I’d paid for my book, I found the staircase hidden away at the back of the shop. A sign said that none of the books upstairs were for sale, but customers were welcome to use the library. The first floor was full of nooks and crannies. One was dec
orated entirely with letters and postcards from people who used to live in the shop. A room on the right had a table with two typewriters and, around a corner, a single bed. A youth my age was asleep on it. Every wall was piled high with bookshelves.
The room at the front was a formal, old fashioned library, with easy chairs, a table in the middle and a window overlooking the Seine. To the right was a door that had a substantial lock, but was ajar. I pushed it open. Across the stairwell, above the antiquarian store, was a room full of cardboard boxes. Standing over a table in the middle, looking through one of the boxes, was a grey-haired man in a checked shirt.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked, in an American accent. I knew at once that he was in charge. If he liked me, I could solve my work and accommodation problems in an instant. But I also knew that, much as I hated the hostel where I was staying, I was far too young and shy to cope with a dozen or more well travelled want-to-be-writers at close proximity. I was, for better or worse, a loner.
‘I was looking for a job,’ I said, ‘but I gather the people who work here are all volunteers.’
The American laughed. ‘Volunteers, that’s one word for them. They’re hiring at WH Smith’s on Rue de Rivoli. You could try there.’
Next day I found myself working, thirty hours a week, at the Paris branch of Britain’s biggest bookseller. My job was to unpack boxes. My co-workers and boss were French. They hardly spoke to me, so I wasn’t improving my language skills and remained friendless, but I was used to being self sufficient. What mattered was I had a reason to stay in Paris.
The pay was only enough to live on if I found cheaper accommodation. A guy at work directed me to a dowdy house on the edge of Clichy, not far from the Sacre-Coeur. My room was on the top floor of a tall, off-white tenement in between an estate agent’s and an artist’s studio on Rue Joseph de Maitre, overlooking Montmartre cemetery. There was a cheap Indian restaurant at one end of the street and a taxi rank at the other, though I never once used a taxi. For transport I made the five minute walk to the Metro at the Place de Clichy, crossing the road bridge that bisected the cemetery. A good location, though the room itself wasn’t much. I still had to share a tiny kitchen and bathroom, but I could read as late as I wanted and at last had an address to give my mother.