‘Not a good one,’ Nicola insisted. ‘What if some plain middle-aged female writer had used a good-looking young model to pose as her in order to sell more books. What would you say then?’
‘I’d say it was the same joke.’
‘You wouldn’t say it was pandering to rather fascistic notions of worth, based on physical beauty?’
‘No, I don’t think I’d say that,’ I admitted.
‘What if you ever want to write a book of your own?’
‘I promise you, Nicola, I absolutely swear to you I’ll never write a book.’
And then she started to thumb through the book. Her reaction was more extreme than I could ever have imagined.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Shit and derision. I know this book. I’ve read this book. I read it in manuscript. It was in my slush pile. I tossed it straight back. I thought it was the most unutterable crap.’
‘Well, maybe it is,’ I said. I wasn’t going to debate Gregory’s literary genius.
‘Yes, but at least it’s publishable crap. And if I’m supposed to be a publisher I have to be able to tell publishable crap from unpublishable crap. And apparently I can’t.’
This realisation made her despondent, and I could see why. It soured the evening. We agreed that neither of us would ever again refer to Gregory Collins and his works. That didn’t strike me as much of a hardship.
Nicola and I were continuing with our rather frustrating lives and rather insipid relationship. It wasn’t what either of us wanted, and although we could easily conceive of better things, we weren’t quite prepared to take the uncertain and uncomfortable steps required to obtain them. We both knew we were settling for second-or third-best, but it was much, much better than nothing.
Then came the phone call from Gregory. He called me at work and when he said, ‘Hello, Michael, how’s it going?’ I really had no idea who he was. He wasn’t in my thoughts at all. I assumed it must be some customer being overly familiar. But we cleared that up and I asked him how his book was doing.
‘They tell me sales are moderate,’ he said grumpily.
‘Well, if having my photograph on the back has in some small way contributed to that moderateness then I’m delighted.’
‘There are plenty of precedents, you know,’ he said, with what I thought was quite unnecessary defensiveness. ‘Thomas Pynchon sent a stand-up comedian to collect a literary prize he’d won, and Andy Warhol sent an Andy Warhol impersonator out on a lecture tour pretending to be him.’
I sensed he was trying to justify or explain himself to me, but I thought no justification or explanation was required.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘it’s no problem,’ but I could also sense that he was leading up to something he considered to be important and ominous.
‘Yes, it is a problem, Michael, and I’d really appreciate your advice and help.’
That was even more ominous. Gregory Collins had managed perfectly well without my advice till now.
‘I’ve been invited to do a reading,’ he said. ‘In Brighton. A reading and a signing. You can see my problem.’
‘Sounds like it’s time to come clean. Or you could just turn down the invitation.’
‘I don’t want to turn it down. You can’t turn down publicity.’
‘Then you’d better come clean.’
‘I don’t want to come clean.’
‘What then?’
‘You could do it for me.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Wait on. It’s not as silly as it sounds,’ he said gravely. ‘All you’d have to do is read from the book for a bit, then maybe answer one or two daft questions and sign a few books. You could do that. It’s money for old rope.’
‘Money?’ I said.
‘Well no, there’s no money, but they’ll pay your train fare and the woman who runs the bookshop’s offered a bed for the night if you need it. And let’s face it, I know you fancy yourself as a performer.’
‘Do I?’ And the moment I voiced the question I saw the pointlessness of denying it. Perhaps Gregory knew me better than I knew myself. Although I had no urge to do any proper acting, in the form of plays or amateur dramatics, the desire to perform, to show off, to say, ‘Look at me,’ was still there, was perhaps there more than ever now that I was stuck in a job that required me to be so undemonstrative.
‘I’d be right grateful,’ Gregory said.
‘Yes, I should think you would.’
I knew I ought to be saying no. For one thing, I knew Nicola would be furious with me, but I was finding the idea very appealing, and perhaps making Nicola furious was part of the appeal.
‘So how exactly would this work?’ I asked, but I knew it wouldn’t really matter how it worked. Whatever the arrangement, paid or unpaid, with or without overnight accommodation, I wanted to do it. I knew that wasn’t necessarily very healthy. I could perhaps have pretended I’d be doing it as an act of subversion, as a slap in the face to the literary establishment (whatever that was), but the truth was I’d be doing it because I was so bored with my life. Boredom seemed like the real enemy. It could drive you crazy, drive you to drink or drugs, to acts of self-destruction or crime, to simple insanity. But it was driving me to pretend to be a promising first novelist.
However, I saw that this matter of pretence wasn’t absolutely straightforward. Yes, I would in one sense be pretending to be Gregory Collins, but I wouldn’t be trying to impersonate him. I wouldn’t be trying to act the part of a dour northern history teacher. I’d simply be myself but by another name, although a self who was pretending to have written a novel. Still, I thought I was up to it. I thought I could do as good a job of reading from the book as most authors ever do, certainly as well as Gregory would have done; and I’d read and heard more than enough literary twitterings to be able to bluff my way through the question and answer session. I would surely be able to come up with a few witty or amusing replies, far wittier and more amusing than Gregory. I was game. I was raring to go.
I sensed that Gregory was surprised by my immediate enthusiasm, that he’d imagined he’d have to do some arm-twisting, and I think he felt cheated, as though he’d wanted to revel in exerting his own powers of persuasion. We said we’d talk nearer the time in more detail, but, as far as I was concerned, by the time I put the phone down I’d made a firm and irrevocable commitment.
Sometimes it’s surprising just how little it takes to make a person happy. The knowledge that I would be doing my little performance as Gregory Collins in a few weeks’ time made my immediate life immeasurably more tolerable. My job seemed far less constricting, my bedsit less claustrophobic. Perhaps I should have taken that happiness as a warning sign. The fact that something so small could seem like such a highlight was no doubt an indicator of just how miserable I really was, but I was glad of any bright spot, and I didn’t psychoanalyse it too much.
Even my relationship with Nicola seemed easier. Naturally, I knew it wouldn’t remain that way once I’d told her I was going to do the reading. I knew she’d be furious, so I was saving it up, waiting for the right moment, the last possible moment, the day before I was due to do the reading, and then, when she reacted with anger or contempt or whatever, I thought that would be all right too. It wouldn’t matter. It would be water off a duck’s back. I had an exaggerated sense of my own well-being.
When I eventually told her, she said, ‘This is terrible. This is the worst thing you’ve ever done to me.’
We were standing in a cinema queue in Leicester Square, in line to see A Star is Born, and I was baffled by her remark. I wasn’t aware that I’d ever done anything terrible to her in the past, I didn’t think I was doing anything very terrible now and, in any case, I didn’t see in what sense I was doing it ‘to her’.
‘Don’t think you can charm your way out of this one,’ she said. ‘I find it very hard to respect someone who’s capable of deception.’
‘But I’m not deceiving you. I’m being perfectly hone
st with you.’
‘So you say. But if you’re capable of deceiving the world about something like this, then who knows what you’re deceiving me about?’
‘What?’
‘Who knows what you get up to on the nights when you don’t see me?’
‘I hang around my bedsit and read books.’
‘That’s what you tell me, but as we now know, you’re quite capable of anything.’
I couldn’t believe she was taking this so seriously, that it mattered so much to her. At best I thought she was being melodramatic, at worst I thought she was being crazy.
‘This really isn’t very important, you know,’ I said. ‘It’s just a laugh.’
‘Then don’t do it. Tell Gregory Collins you won’t do the reading.’
‘I’ve no reason to tell him that.’
‘The reason is because I’m asking you to. It’s important to me, but not to you, so what does it matter?’
She’d got me. She could tell that this event was in fact all too important to me. I didn’t want to cancel, and if she wanted to raise the stakes I was prepared to raise them too.
‘Are we really going to fall out over this?’ I asked.
‘That’s up to you.’
‘No, it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s up to both of us.’
‘If you go to Brighton and do this absurd reading, then yes, we might very well fall out.’
‘But we might not?’
Until that moment I hadn’t wanted to fall out with Nicola, but now the prospect seemed surprisingly attractive. ‘I’ll let you know,’ she said. ‘Goodbye, Michael.’ She walked away, and I wasn’t sure whether or not she was walking out of my life for ever, and I wasn’t sure whether that was going to make me miserable or actually quite happy. I was tempted to go chasing after her, but I knew it would only be prolonging a disagreement that couldn’t be settled there and then. I stayed in the queue and went to see the film alone. It was rotten. I walked out halfway through.
4
I was nervous on the train down to Brighton but I wasn’t afraid. I had the feeling I was going to be good. I’d selected some passages for the reading, rehearsed them quietly in the cramped privacy of my horrible room, and I felt I could do a good job with them. That first part of the evening, the actual reading, I saw as being really quite simple. The question and answer session, I thought, would be more difficult, and would require a certain amount of improvisation. I’d prepared a few answers about working methods, sources of inspiration, favourite authors and so on, and I felt I was in good shape. I hadn’t made this stuff up out of nothing; I’d gone back to the source, talked to Gregory Collins and asked him to supply me with his views. Some of these, however, were a little stilted and dour so I’d been working on ways to make them pithier and more entertaining without falsifying them completely.
The hardest part of the performance, it seemed to me, would be the time spent, as it were, off stage, the time spent chatting with the owner of the shop, speaking informally to the fans, going out for a drink afterwards. This would require a much freer, more long-form improvisation. This mightn’t be too easy, yet I had no great fears about it. I felt confident and in control, and I was certain I’d be able to cope. I would do my best to be a convincing Gregory Collins, but if the worst came to the worst I’d just be me.
The woman running the event, Ruth Harris, sole proprietor of Ruth Harris Books, was meeting me at the station. This was unnecessarily good of her. I’d have been happy to make my own way to her bookshop, but I was pleased to be treated so well. Obviously I didn’t know what she looked like, but as soon as I got through the barrier at Brighton station I heard a perky woman’s voice behind me say, ‘I see the author photograph wasn’t flattering at all. The flesh is even more engaging.’ And then she slapped me on the bum.
I turned to see a woman of a certain age, say fifty; a woman who must once have been rather glamorous in a Bohemian sort of way. Her hair was still blonde, though obviously dyed, her lips and eyes were darkly painted, and she was showing a lot of crêpy cleavage. She smoked a thin, waxy cigar.
I was of an age when I couldn’t imagine anyone over forty even having a sex life, much less being sexually attractive, yet in retrospect I know Ruth Harris was a sexy, good-looking woman, and I’m equally sure that many men would have been happy to have her slap them on the bum. I, however, found myself a little terrified.
‘I’m Ruth Harris,’ she said. ‘Pleased you could make it.’
‘Gregory Collins,’ I said, and jutted out a hand to be shaken. I tried to appear firm, forthright, professional. I was aware this was the first time I’d ever lied about my name.
‘I hope you won’t mind me saying this, but I don’t think you look much like a writer.’
I did mind. I felt as though my impersonation might be coming unstuck already, but in fact she was flattering me again.
‘No, you’re far too good-looking to be a writer,’ she said. ‘In my experience writers are a paunchy, bearded, dandruffy, halitosis-ridden bunch.’
‘Are they?’ I asked. ‘I thought they were supposed to be romantic and wild-haired and wearing capes.’
‘Only in my fantasies,’ she said mistily.
She led me through the station car-park and we got into a crippled old Volvo estate car full of cardboard boxes and books. The windscreen was cracked, the tailgate was tied shut with washing line, and in order to sit in the passenger seat I had to rearrange carrierbags full of old magazines and papers, and I held a grubby bundle of National Geographics on my knee for the length of the journey.
‘I’m expecting a good turn-out,’ Ruth Harris said. ‘I’ve issued a three-line whip to all my friends and regular customers, and I’m sure you’re the kind of writer who brings out the fans.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ I said.
‘No? How far would you go?’
She was being flirtatious, even coquettish. I didn’t know what to do with that at all. I smiled uncomfortably and she appeared to find my discomfort rather endearing. That was even worse.
The bookshop wasn’t far from the station, and we soon stopped outside a narrow shop-front, a single window with a dark, chaotic interior. The door was locked and the shop was shut. Ruth Harris Books was evidently an entirely one-woman operation, and she’d had to close up in order to come and collect me.
She let me into the most overstocked bookshop I’d ever seen. We had to limbo and rumba our way in. The shelves were not just full, but so tightly crammed that books would need to be prised out. Wobbly stacks of paperbacks rose up from the floor and blocked the aisles. A couple of tables were piled high with miscellaneous, tatty old volumes. Most of the stock was second-hand, if not umpteenth-hand, though I did see a few new bestsellers, and there was a small mound of The Wax Man. My eye ran along the titles, observed the sort of books that were on sale, and I could see that most of them were worthless old rubbish: war stories, romances, condensed books, out-of-date travel guides and technical manuals, bound partworks. My assessment of their worthlessness wasn’t just literary snobbery; they didn’t appear to have any monetary value either. Someone could have come in and bought the whole lot at the asking price and it still wouldn’t have made Ruth Harris a rich woman.
‘I can’t be doing with any of that high falutin’, pretentious, first edition, literary nonsense,’ she said. ‘My customers want a good read and they want it cheap.’
Then why, I asked myself, though not her, had she invited Gregory Collins to do a reading? It seemed to me that whatever else might be said about The Wax Man, nobody in their right mind could possibly describe it as a good read. If Ruth Harris’s stock said anything about her customers I had a feeling that Gregory’s book, and my reading from it, might be a serious disappointment to them.
I looked around, wondering where exactly I was supposed to do the reading. There was scarcely enough room to stand up, much less accommodate an audience. However, seeing my confusion, Ruth Harris took me through t
he narrowest of book-lined corridors to a back room, in fact a rickety lean-to shed tacked on to the rear of the shop. The roof was corrugated iron, and the walls were constructed out of tongue and groove planks that didn’t quite interlock. Cold air seeped in from all angles, and caused the single bare bulb to sway from the ceiling. Crowded together in the space were twenty or so splintery chairs, stools and packing cases that had been arranged in rows as seating, although they were pushed so tightly together that nobody would have any leg-room. Piled in the corners and on bookshelves were heaps of even less valuable stock, copies of People’s Friend and Titbits, mauled football programmes, cookery books crusted with batter.
‘I know it’s not the London Palladium,’ Ruth Harris said, ‘but we’ve had some spectacularly successful literary evenings in here. A night when we presented some readings from John Fowles stands out particularly clearly.’
We returned to the main body of the shop to await arrivals. I was already sensing disaster, but I assumed it could only be a small one. The setting was too mean and parochial to threaten anything on the grand scale. And, as the scheduled time of the reading approached, I took some comfort from seeing that nobody had yet arrived. It occurred to me that perhaps nobody would turn up at all, in which case I could get the next train back to London. That would be a dull end to the adventure, but as Ruth Harris became ever more attentive, trying to foist herbal tea and fig rolls on to me and discussing where we might go after the reading for a little light supper and a tête-à-tête, it was starting to seem like a very desirable option.
Then suddenly the front door of the shop was thrown open and a young, intense-looking woman in a flapping red greatcoat came sweeping in, oblivious to the piles of books and magazines she was knocking over, a woman who was about to change my life in a rather dramatic way. If we’d been in a movie there’d have been a gush of appropriate music: a series of rising chords suggestive of transformation and infinite possibility. As it was I had absolutely no idea. I just thought she was strikingly beautiful.
Bedlam Burning Page 4