by Charlie Hill
‘Stewart who?’
‘Not your core demographic, Gary, not your core demographic. Anyway, we don’t want to frighten the horses, do we?’
‘Whatever,’ said Gary, suddenly tiring of playing second fiddle to Katie’s conductor. ‘Look, do what you have to. I trust you. OK? Now I want to tell you about my idea.’
And so then Gary outlined his plan. Throughout, he kept an eye on the responses of his audience. Katie looked confused, like a lady who’d long since given up trying to understand the offside rule. Norwenna was her usual sphinx-like self. Gary was never sure what Norwenna was thinking. Sometimes he would catch her staring out of the window, as if she was imagining which colour of Spangles she was going to choose.
When he had finished explaining, he waited for the ladies’ responses.
‘I can see it. I think. Yes, yes, I can,’ said Katie. For the first time in her life, she looked nervous.
‘I think it’s a great idea, Gary,’ agreed Norwenna, reminding Gary of what she brought to the table. ‘It’s brave, yes, but I think you’ll be able to carry it off.’
‘I knew you’d see it my way,’ he said. It was just as well that Barker Follinge were being so welcoming. He had no need to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. There weren’t many who could match his record of three bestselling books in five years. He was one of the few writers capable of tapping into what people wanted and giving it to them. In that respect he was like Mel Gibson in the classic noughties comedy What Women Want, only for both sexes. More to the point, he’d done it all the hard way. Not by retiring to an ivory tower and studying English Literature or any of that ridiculous Creative Writing but by working in the real world, struggling along with a Media Studies course and the harsh realities of working on a top twenty magazine.
As far as Gary was concerned, that was the end of the meeting. A journey which had begun ten long years ago with the delivery of his firstborn – conceived in ink and swaddled in a brightly coloured cover – was about to enter another chapter. He was itching to get out into the real world. His wasn’t a big idea but now he’d practically demanded the approval of his publisher, he would take it elsewhere, to where it belonged, to the people who bought his books.
And how.
Pippa and Zeke
Pippa and Zeke share a flat that is part Marylebone, part Fitzrovia. They are exhibitionists. Pippa and Zeke have had sex in the Warwick Castle, on the Portobello Road, London Zoo, St Paul’s Cathedral, the British Museum and on the 3.15 from Shadwell to Tottenham Court Road (change at Bank). Their penchant for threesomes, foursomes and public displays of masturbation has been noted.
They are in love but their love is not the love of others. They come at it from a different angle. Their love is strapped on. It has attachments.
Pippa and Zeke have no friends. They have acolytes. They socialise with rich kids and posh dealers, porn freaks, adeviants, club whores, fish-fuckers, po-mo bohos, faux homos and snobs. Pippa and Zeke are known by these people for their lifestyle. They dress down and dress sideways to dress up. It is charity-shop chic, once removed. Pippa wears nylon shirts, Crimplene dresses and terry towelling adult Babygros. She often sports a bowler hat that she picked up for a song down the market. Zeke dresses in skirts and fluorescent shirts. To the corner shop for a pint of milk? A two-foot afro wig will suit.
Pippa and Zeke like to party. Their tastes are catholic, exclusive. They smoke imported American organic cigarettes. They take MDMA as powder and liquid GHB. Also pharmaceutically pure acid, the occasional puff of poppy, Special K, hash oil and Cava Cava tea. They drink Veuve Cliquot, Pimm’s Cup, Budvar, Cooper’s Sparkling Ale, Stolichnaya, Hill’s Absinthe and Manhattans. Breakfast is often Bloody Marys made with Marie Sharp’s Habanero Sauce, all the way from Belize.
Pippa and Zeke are conceptual artists. They are postmoderns. They draw inspiration from a number of sources. They are a little bit garage, a little bit punk, a little bit trash. Urban, def, vanilla, street. Ideologies, fetishes, traditions, racial insecurities and cultural prejudices are diluted and thickened and then mixed and matched, cut and pasted, applied with post-ironic lack of precision and slapped about with squealish gay abandon. To Pippa and Zeke the world is one secondhand goodie-market of this-and-that and bits-and-bobs, to be cadged or taxed, blown apart, stuck together, pinned up or taken down. It is empty of anything of interest except that which is grist to their hi-tech lo-fi multi-media retro-mill. It is full – absolutely chockablocka full – of meh.
But then they are postmoderns. Truth is an untruth and beauty untruth too. Art is a commodity. It has no significance beyond the sales pitch, no consequence beyond the cash. It performs no function. There is nothing beneath the surface. There is space beneath the surface. Should the buyer or critic desire, this space may be filled. You want art to be about stuff? Recession, poverty, riots, anarchism, religion, war, death, sex, happiness, consumerism? Go ahead. Knock yourself out. Cram it in, it’s up to you. It’s not there, though, not really. Any of it. Because art don’t mean shit. The world is full of meh and meaning is a busted flush.
If this doesn’t reflect well on Pippa and Zeke, it’s worth remembering that they neither make nor break the rules. They are salespeople, that is all. They are good at it too. No one is forcing the punters to buy. Yet Pippa and Zeke make money. People do buy. And people do cram stuff in.
They once exhibited a six-inch model of an Allis-Chalmers Model U Tractor. Writing in the programme, the curator Olivia Verne-Laverne wrote: ‘Looking at this piece, you are reminded that the countryside is what it is because of, and not despite, the hand of man.’
Another time, Pippa and Zeke showed a photomontage in a small gallery that had some pocket behind it and was rumoured to be taxiing for take-off. In the image a doleful fat white woman with a rustic pockholed boat-race is framed against a backdrop of razor-bewired tower blocks. She is wearing a tam and a white smock. She is chewing on a erb stalk. Next to her is a staring black man. He is standing in a picturesque village. Behind him are thatched cottages, Chiltern Hills. He is wearing green wellington boots and the hat of a country bumpkin. He is chewing on a piece of straw. Writing in Skirtingboard ArtStyleMagazine, Tom Smyth said of the piece: ‘We can only truly say that black and white are nice and tight when we can see works like “Untitled” and are not stopped in our tracks by their primal power.’
Later, Pippa and Zeke lived for a month on diets. For the first week they chose Chapter One of The Adam and Eve Diet, for the second Chapter Two of The Little Black Dress Diet. To follow they chose Chapter Seven of The Waterfall Diet and to finish they tackled Chapter Five of The Carbohydrates Diet. This project earned Pippa and Zeke a ten-minute slot after the news on Channel Four during which they declared that they had lost no weight and were no more nor less happy within themselves than they had been before they had started. An oppo on the Metro wrote the listing: ‘Short piece which exposes the diet industry for the fat-headed fraud it really is.’
Pippa and Zeke also do the funnies. One time, back in the day, they filmed themselves in oversized skater gear, stopping old people in the street and asking them questions about Christ Grinds and 540 Disasters. Some of them bandy coots don’t hear so good. They blogged a series of one-hundred-word fictions about hippopotamuses called Eric or five-year-old girls called Mabel who have qualified as bus drivers and are precociously conversant with the profane argot of the street.
Three of Pippa and Zeke’s projects are ongoing. The first is an oblique trolling of an online gardening forum. ‘Blackfly? I swear by a liberal coating of Danish Oil. Works every time!’
The second is a contract to compose a selection of a hundred suggested verses for people using the Evening Post’s In Memoriam column. To date they have sixty-two. They have snuck some in under the radar. One reads:
‘Her life was full of worthy deeds,
Always there for those in need,
True and pure in heart and mind,
A loving memory lef
t behind.’
Another reads:
‘In God’s garden there is no pain,
And only sometimes a little rain,
It is full of flowers, in the main.’
Pippa and Zeke are walking home after a party. They are passing through Fitzroy Square, discussing their art. Pippa is wearing a clown outfit and Zeke is dressed as a hippy chick. The city is half asleep. It is late summer and the air is high and thin. It goes all the way up to the fumes and smells sweet and earthy and full of the endless cycles of the day.
Pippa and Zeke pass people walking small dogs, a bench-sitter, someone sitting on the grass. Zeke and Pippa wave cheerily, say, ‘GOOD MORNING!’
‘Some party,’ says Pippa.
‘The party to end all parties,’ says Zeke.
‘And I mean that most sincerely, folks,’ says Pippa.
They start to sing.
‘Our little lamb, so sweet and pure
Upon this earth did roam.
But that was fifty years ago
And now our lamb is loam.
‘He’s a corpse I tell you
A stiff in a grave
They plucked out his nostrils
And gave him a shave.’
‘Coming along nicely,’ says Pippa.
‘It is, it is,’ says Zeke.
‘This is our time,’ says Pippa.
‘It is, it is,’ says Zeke.
But they are a project light at the moment and Pippa has an idea. ‘Religion’s all the rage at the moment. Blasphemy, that sort of thing. We should do something that people think is about religion.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Skip Allah, tho’, eh? Bit close to the bone, that.’
‘The wily Pathans?’
‘The wily Pathans. How about something potentially Jew-baiting instead? That’s always a safe bet. We could turn into Jews and wear skullcaps and clown masks. Or turn into Hindus and then go begging. And not wash. And eat burgers. The atheists’ll love that.’
‘How do you turn into a Hindu?’ says Zeke.
‘Don’t know. I’ll look into it. There has to be a way. Maybe we could go to the Ganges and do it properly…’
‘Maybe,’ says Zeke.
‘… or else head to Nottingham and take a dip in the river there. The Avon as the Ganges of the north. I like it. It’s got potential. There are Hindus in Nottingham, aren’t there? Or is that Sikhs? Or Leicester. Is there a river runs through Leicester?’
‘Maybe,’ says Zeke.
‘Maybe?’ says Pippa. ‘Yes maybe, baby, maybe, baby. Maybe sex. We could do sex. Sex and dwarves. “Does Size Matter?” We could find a friendly dwarf and dress it up as Charlotte Charles.’
Charlotte Charles is Pippa and Zeke’s favourite vibrator. It is a three-way Rampant Rabbit. It has five rotating patterns and a crude sense of humour. Zeke is happy with the suggestion. But Pippa is not convinced. She is thinking of something with a bit more snark.
They continue on their way.
Richard chats up Lauren
A week after they had met in the pub, Richard arranged to see Lauren at her home. She lived about a mile from his shop, on one of Harborne’s more tree-filled streets. The two of them were to discuss his theory and where books might fit into SNAPS.
For Richard, this was a potentially tricky encounter. This part of the suburb – all mossy waist-high walls, over-neat hedging, wide roads and refined, polite, dependable Victorian houses – was off his stomping ground. And sure enough, as he crunched up Lauren’s thickly gravelled drive, he was reminded of the knack she seemed to have of nudging him out of the carefully constructed spikiness of his comfort zone.
This time, however, Richard was determined to ignore any distractions that might come his way. It was his fancy for the Prof that mattered tonight, nothing else. It had to be. The last time Richard checked, libertines like him were enjoying sex on an almost daily basis. And it had been a long time since he had managed to get a slice of that particular amorality pie.
So long, in fact, that a more traditionally realistic man might have developed a complex about his lack of sexual success. But in this, if nothing else, Richard was an optimist. Besides, when it came to Lauren the signs were good. During their meeting in the pub he’d noticed the strained formality of her speech, the defensiveness of her body language. In his experience this was the behaviour of a sexual naif and sexual naifs were invariably more susceptible to his chat than those who had heard it all before.
Not to mention her choice of photography as a hobby. It was such a painfully solitary pursuit. What was all that about, unless it was the world’s most carefully presented cry for help? The woman clearly needed saving from herself, and he was the man to do it…
To this end, Richard had made a plan. In his experience, his chance of meaningful interference with a woman was directly related to the quantity of alcohol consumed by each party. Notwithstanding the fact that most women would have to get drunk before they’d contemplate braving his rugged masculinity (which sometimes doubled as an Antipodean attention to personal hygiene), he would need it to produce the chat that would seal the deal. Now Richard knew his optimum wit level to be two bottles of wine. But he was no fool. Among those of mediocre intake – and he had Lauren down as one such novice – he knew that two bottles would be considered excessive.
This was where the plan came in. It was a simple plan. Richard was taking two bottles of wine with him to their meeting. After they had drunk the first between them he knew that Lauren would do the done thing and open one of her own. Between them they would therefore have drunk one each. At this point, rather than appear a lush-bum and offer to crack open his second bottle (and the third between them), he would instead offer it up as a gift. A gesture that would simultaneously show his generosity and throw the woman into a handy spin. And to make up the shortfall in the intake required for him to reach his optimum wit level? Why, fuck me if he wouldn’t simply polish off a bottle before leaving for their ren-dez-vous.
This he’d duly done, and with his plums replete on his thigh and his head pleasantly abuzz, he rang Lauren’s doorbell, blushed Slovenian Cab Sauv at the sight of her and was ushered through a Berber-rugged entrance hall into a living room of dark wood cabinets, tasselled rugs and sofas in mint and jade.
‘Before we start,’ said Richard, on a roll before he’d begun, ‘shall I open this? It’s a decent drop of French. None of that New World nonsense that the peasants sink. I thought it would, how you say, get the juices flowing? We could drink to the successful conclusion of our endeavours…’
‘Thank you but I won’t,’ said Lauren.
‘Oh,’ said Richard. ‘Oh, ah, oh.’
‘Are you OK?’ said Lauren. ‘Would you like a glass of water?’
‘Yes. I mean no. Are you sure?’ said Richard.
‘Yes. Thank you. But feel free…’
Richard had to think quickly. Of the relationship between sex and literature and wit and spontaneity and wine.
‘OK. Just the one.’
Lauren left the room and returned with a goblet the size of a toilet bowl. ‘So,’ she said, ‘what did you want to tell me about?’ Half an hour and two goblets later, Richard was opening his second bottle of the meeting and third of the night and had begun a denunciation of a ‘putrid aesthetic fashioned by the barely breathing morality of fools’. It was at this point that Lauren, who until then had seen no alternative to listening politely, cut in.
‘I’m sorry, but can I stop you there for a moment? As fascinating as this is, I didn’t ask you here for an abstract or theoretical debate about good or bad books. I asked you here because you’ve advanced an interesting theory about what might be the cause of the syndrome known as SNAPS. Now. When we were in Corfu, you commented on the manuscript the woman was reading when she collapsed. And the book her partner had with him. So. What, specifically, can you tell me about them?’
‘Well, the manuscript the woman was reading was a n
ew novel by a bloke called Gary Sayles. The book the man was reading was an omnibus edition of his first three. They must have brought it out to tie in with his new one. Either that or it’s the International Year of the Moron.’
‘Hmm. And why do you think these novels have something to do with SNAPS? Are you familiar with the author?’
‘Do me a favour. I wouldn’t touch him with yours. He writes what is known in the trade as “male confessionals”. They’re books for people can’t read.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Reading isn’t just about forming words in your brain and linking them until they make the first sort of sense. That’s what children do. There’s more to it than that. It’s like writing; there’re bad readers and good readers. Male confessionals are for bad readers. Except, I suppose they are so obviously part of a broader cultural consensus you could allow yourself to be swept away with generosity and suggest they’re aimed at the merely mediocre.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Put it like this. I believe fiction should make people smart and dribble and blether and snort and gibber and hustle and ogle and fart. It should confront the terrible truths of the world. These books don’t. They’re all about young men afraid of commitment, middle-aged men having midlife crises. Not that there’s anything wrong with writing about marriage or suburban relationships or middle management types per se. But Jeez, it’s got to be done well. These aren’t. They rely on “recognition”, of “the sky was blue” variety. If I’m reading a book, I don’t want to be sitting there nodding like a dashboard dog, I want to be gazing in wild surmise. I want to be moved. And by that I don’t mean just emotionally manipulated, moved as in chasing my tail. I mean moved as in having my perceptions altered, my perspectives shifted. I want to be made to feel or think differently about life.’