by Charlie Hill
At first she’d tried to cope in the traditional way. His parents were absolute bricks, of course, and she’d stayed in touch with them. At one point she took to writing things down in a notebook – her recollection of the events of the day, some of the things she thought he’d said to her about their future. Later, in her third year, in an attempt to find a belief system and an individual to assuage the hurt and guilt, she had turned to the East. His name was Melvin and he was a t’ai chi instructor from just outside Norwich. They were together for six months. It seemed to be working out. She could feel herself making progress, beginning to appreciate her feelings from an objective distance. Then Melvin met someone who knew as much t’ai chi as he did. She showed him some moves, he showed her some moves, and Lauren sat at home in the lotus position, centred and alone.
After that Lauren had simply given up. She cut herself off from people. More to the point, she tried to cut herself off from how she felt and had felt about Will. In place of these feelings she kept only the snapshots she had taken and the books his parents had given to her when he’d died. Heirlooms, old books she hadn’t read and had no time to read. His life in a filing system in chronological order, sitting unloved on bookcases, the paper turning from cream to yellow, the lines of text growing less bold, like wraiths draining of energy. That was all she had left of Will and all that she needed. She would stick to what made sense, to an existence of emotional stasis. The rest was simply too much to bear. There was just one concession: ‘First Love’, transcribed for her by him and kept in an inlaid rosewood chest of drawers beside her cotton-sheeted and wistfully king-sized bed…
It was easy for Lauren to withdraw into herself. Her social life at the university was restricted to drinks in the pub with other members of the photographic society, and the odd attempt at matchmaking from imaginative fellow students who clung to a belief that beneath her stand-offish exterior there beat the heart of a drama undergraduate. One spring she rekindled a childhood interest in botany – and there had always been birds – but in place of forming genuine friendships and attachments Lauren channelled all of her energies into her studies. She did well. Her emotional atrophy was mistaken by all of her acquaintances for a peculiarly durable levelheadedness. And so, detached from the distraction of the mess people were and the mess they made of things, afraid and secure in her ordered and understandable world, Lauren quickly became a success in her field, a field that was substantial enough to provide an adequate diversion from the ‘why’ that ate away at her heart.
Until this.
Quite without warning, she had found herself sucked into a process that compromised the consolation she found in her work. Her involvement with SNAPS had only just started, yet already her work on the syndrome had exposed her to an environment to which she would not otherwise have been exposed, to fiction, to infuriating people and to behaviours defined by desperation and frantic need. And, of course, to death.
More particularly SNAPS had brought death to Lauren through words and the energy they provided or could take away. And so she found herself drawn again to ‘First Love’. She had returned to the poem on many occasions since Will had gone away. First it had been every week, then every month, then whenever she was feeling a little off kilter, either cold in summer or warm in winter, invigorated by autumn or made reflective by spring. The words righted her, gave her comfort and solace. And they were vital. Even as they spoke to her of death they seemed to keep her lover alive. Now, through her exposure to SNAPS and to lives that might have been ended by more quantifiably powerful words, it suddenly seemed to Lauren that the opposite was true. The words had ossified Will, petrified him. And in addition to helping keep her pain at a distance, the poem had also set it in stone.
The memory of Will deserved more than this. And so it was that, as she sat there, in her too-big front room, Lauren came to a decision. It was time for her heart to return to its dwelling place. It was time to let go, to move on, to set Will free and to free herself.
Lauren would grasp the opportunity that SNAPS presented. She would conduct an experiment that would run alongside her professional investigation into the condition. An experiment in which she would engage once again with that which she did not understand and could not order, however unsettling this might at first prove to be. An experiment in which she would expose her cortical network to an environment of such extremes that its very nature could change. An experiment in which she would subject her debilitating emotional atrophy to a sustained and profound interrogation.
An experiment in which Professor Lauren Furrows would leave herself at the mercy of the dark and emotionally complex world of books.
Sacrilege
Richard began reading the single-volume edition of Gary Sayles’ first three novels. He read quickly but carefully too, as he was wary of the words. He drank strong coffee to keep himself awake and the finest Waterloo Brandy to help him sleep. Whenever he felt his head becoming too clear, he took brisk walks around the block. He read on the bus, the volume hidden inside copies of Razzle or The Watchtower, and he read at home, under the covers of his man-crusty duvet. He read at the till point at work and whenever the strong coffee and Waterloo Brandy got the upper hand in the daily battle for control of his anarchic and gippy guts.
As he read, Richard looked for a pattern. He compared chapters, looked at structure, explored shifts in what he presumed was the paradigm. He made a note of frequently occurring words or phrases (these included The One, singleton, twentysomething, thirty-something, one-night stand (meaningless), one-night stand (significant), significant other (ironic), significant other (non-ironic), record collection, beer, football and small child).
He isolated several factors that could conceivably contribute to a degradation of the brain. There was, for instance, an unquestioning narrative reliance on the acceptance of a peculiarly conservative value system. Accounts of supposed angst that did not compute. The recurrent ‘male-in-crisis’ theme seemed exaggerated, given what Richard knew of the economics of the gender divide. There also seemed to be an overuse of domestic situations that were of little dramatic interest and consisted instead of observational asides about waiting for plumbers, arguing over the remote control, visiting the dentist, being pasted by a kid on Xbox’s CounterStrike and the like. Technically, there was the way that Sayles conveyed information in the form of lists, as a way of avoiding stringing sentences together. The way he frequently used Capital Letters merely to emphasise Crucial Moments. Furthermore, on closer examination, each novel could be broken down into a series of only vaguely related lifestyle magazine pieces. And this was not to mention the number of times the author name-checked Star Wars.
Of further possible interest to Lauren was the fact that the three of them were essentially the same book, rewritten. On the surface this wasn’t so. Our Legendary Twenties was about a single twenty-something professional Londoner looking for love. Cutting the Cake concerned itself with a late twenty-something professional Londoner unsure whether or not to move in with his girlfriend. Man, Woman, Baby took as its central thrust the dilemma faced by a thirty-something professional Londoner whose wife was expecting a baby that was missing a big toe. Crucially, though, they were all stories about uninteresting people with uninteresting lives uninterestingly told.
Despite this, there was little in the reams of increasingly vitriolic margin notes that Richard jotted that could implicate the books in SNAPS, nothing that Lauren could use to convince anyone that their theory needed to be acted upon. This was not going to be easy. Yet the more Richard read, the more determined he was to become a part of the process. Because this was books. And books really mattered.
Richard loved books. (Given the nature of independent bookselling – a vocation best suited to a minted eccentric or a congenital idiot – this was just as well.) True, for a spell, his head had been turned. For a year or so after he’d opened Back Street Books, happy in his relationship with Julie and determined to make a go of what he joking
ly referred to as his career, he’d played the game. It had been a struggle – his eye for commercial fiction was somewhat jaundiced – but he’d tried to make sure that his esoteric fancies were balanced with a smattering of more commercially promising titles. He reasoned that if his customers wanted nothing more than the mundane, well, they could pay their money and they could take their choice.
But then Julie had left him.
From that moment, he’d done whatever was necessary to attack what they could have been to each other, what they might have meant had they stayed together. He’d breathed life into the future they would never know and he had given it a name. He had called it mediocrity.
There wasn’t much he could do about Julie’s relationship with the suburban norm. But his own? Well, that would change, goddammit. He would start with the obvious, and the books he sold. Then he would change the books he read. He would go back to the sort of stuff that had gripped him from the moment he could read, words that had left him tripping and shocked, teased and immersed in the banned, the dangerous, the blasphemous and transcendent, the grown-up and the plain and simply good. If mediocrity was standing still, the books he’d plug himself into would keep him on the move, jolt him into a new way of thinking and feeling and seeing, and every experiment, every formal twist or double-edged retrenchment, would underline for him the importance of spiking the mainstream, of rejecting convention, of subverting the mundane and doing things differently. And so he went back to William Faulkner and J.G. Ballard and Richard Brautigan. He reread Kerouac and Alasdair Gray, Samuel Beckett and Irvine Welsh, Virginia Woolf and Raymond Carver. He discovered Denis Cooper, Ron Butlin, Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson and Stewart Home. And as he read he was reminded that nothing had got his neurons sparking, nothing had made him come more thrillingly alive in the world, nothing had made him more attuned to the infinite shimmer of sentience or aghast at the heartlessness of understanding, nothing had made him feel more human than the words of writers like these.
And so. As Richard skimmed Gary Sayles, he felt himself grow full with renewed purpose. He knew there was mediocrity in all things, of course. In music and art and television and ideas and politics and love. But this was different. This was books. And when it came to books, you simply couldn’t throw your hands up and allow yourself to accept the drift into the stew, the slide into the gloop. It was sacrilegious, wrong-headed, bottleless.
Because books mattered.
Books really mattered.
Late night phone call
Lauren mattered too. One night, after talking with him about his latest findings, she rang him again. It was an accident. Richard was sitting in front of his computer when he heard the phone go. He had been having trouble with his internet connection. He picked up and heard a click, some bleeps then another click. It was Lauren. She said, ‘Oh, dammit…’ and the line went quiet. Richard nearly blurted something calculatedly inappropriate, but he didn’t. He stopped and listened, imagined her looking at her phone, deciding what to do. Considering her options. She pushed a button. There was another bleep but she had made a mistake, they were still connected. He pressed his handset to his ear. Listened harder. Heard unsilence. The sounds of the evening. His hard drive humming, a car in the street outside, someone banging the gate in the alley. A scratching from Lauren’s house, the sound of a door closing. Footsteps, the rustle of paper.
He heard Lauren’s body too. He heard her tut and sigh. He heard her move. He was sure he could hear her breathing. He sat like that for ten minutes. Just sat there. Listening to Lauren in the stillness. In the space between noises. Could almost feel her breathing, in time with his own… Finally, he hung up. Jesus, he thought, that was the world’s strangest ever dirty phone call. Hot though. Very, very hot…
A new impetus for Pippa and Zeke
Pippa and Zeke are buying mannequins from shops that are closing down. A new project is at the point of conception. But Pippa’s focus is not total. She is thinking about books. This doesn’t happen very often. Books are like paint. They don’t concern her much. But the third of their ongoing projects is book related. And it is sputtering into life.
Pippa and Zeke have discovered Gary Sayles. Posing as fans, they have set up and have maintained a Gary Sayles Facebook page, several Gary Sayles threads on various Kindle forums and an I Love Gary Sayles website. The website consists of extracts from his novels, snippets from interviews, made-up fan messages and a regularly updated list of 10 Things You Didn’t Know about Gary Sayles, five of which are invented. There are photographs, profiles of his fictional creations and a monthly quiz, the whole djinn bang.
Until two days ago, Pippa was unsure where the project would lead. Then two days ago Gary Sayles tweeted: ‘wanted: my two biggest fans. drop me a line. together we can change the wolrd’. This seemed like an opportunity. Pippa responded.
‘Remind me what the plan is?’ says Zeke as they manhandle a dummy.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Pippa. ‘Something headless? Something with cocks?’
‘Cocks and mannequins? Didn’t someone do that in the nineties?’
‘And? Cocks never go out of fashion, my dear. Speaking of, Gary Sayles got in touch. He’d like to meet us. To discuss an idea.’
‘No. Really? How quaint! And I thought books were so oh-vah. Has he seen our work?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘The ten things?’
‘Looks that way.’
‘So spaghetti bolognese must be his favourite meal.’
‘Must be.’
‘And he must really like The Vicar of Dibley?’
‘I reckon.’
‘And his favourite film must be A Wonderful Life?’
‘Didn’t mention otherwise.’
‘And his lifelong devotion to football must have started in 2002?’
‘Darn tootin.’
‘Strewth, that’s some guesswork, right there, sister. A meeting, you say?’
‘Yep.’
‘When?’
‘Next week.’
‘Did he say what this idea was?’
‘No. He was a little reticent.’
‘But it will kick-start the project?’
‘We’ll see.’
‘And what is the project again?’
‘Oh, the usual,’ says Pippa. ‘Us. The world. A little detachment, some punter projection. Who we fuck and how we fuck ‘em. Is there anything else?’
‘Biffo. Should we get dressed up?’
‘Better had.’
‘Can we film?’
‘I should coco. After all. It’s a multi-multi-meejah—’ ‘Extrav—’
‘Or—’
‘Ganza!’
‘It is! It is! Zeke?’
‘Pippa?’
‘Shall we screw?’
‘Churlish not to.’
Pippa and Zeke arrive home. Their flat is a carefully tended shambles, full of odds-and-sods and bits-and-bobs in which to stick the pins of inspiration. Pippa and Zeke raid their dressing-up drawer for next week’s outfits, have sex. They lie on their bed, as they often do, pleased with themselves.
Later that day they choose their weapon. It is a VDR-D400 DVD video camera. They cut a hole in an Adidas holdall bag. They put the camera in the bag and test it. The camera films through the hole.
Truly these are exciting times for their art.
A wife is wary
‘Mommy,’ said Garfield Sayles one day, ‘does Daddy write books?’
‘Yes, love,’ said Amy, ‘Daddy writes books.’
‘Does Daddy make up stories?’
‘Sometimes, yes.’
‘When Daddy makes up stories is he telling lies? Daddy said to me that making up stories was telling lies.’
‘Yes, sometimes, sometimes it is.’
‘But Daddy said that telling lies is bad. Mommy, is telling lies bad?’
‘Most of the time,’ said Amy. ‘Most of the time telling lies is bad.’
Amy loved the conversat
ions she had with her son. His curiosity glinted and shone. Whenever she talked with her husband they spoke about what they were going to watch on TV or what they had just eaten. Or how irony was like being knocked down by an ambulance. Or how the Internet Movie Database was much underrated as a tool of his trade. Or what they were going to do with the spare room. Or how the value of the house had fallen or risen. Sometimes he’d frown. His forehead would lower. Then the emphasis would change. He’d ask her how she felt about something. About what they had just eaten or what they were going to do with the spare room. Amy didn’t resent this. It was necessary. It was part of the contract, part of being Man and Wife. She knew what she was involved in. It involved compromises. But although Amy told herself she was mostly content, she didn’t draw much from these encounters.
With Garfield it was different. Each new reality was a star point of wonder, each conversation was an innocent interrogation of what she had come to rely on or turned to for release. Because of Garfield, she was looking closer at the story of her happy marriage.
The plot was just beginning to take on an unfamiliar aspect. The signs were there in the detail. Lately, Gary had been distant (although when she’d raised it with him, he’d suggested ‘enigmatic’). Last week they hadn’t made time to make love as he’d ‘something on my mind’. Wednesday, she’d had to remind him to phone his mom. Just today, she’d been to their newsagent to find that he’d taken out a subscription to Rural Property News.
Amy was interested to see where Gary was going with this. She tolerated the life they shared. It had been what she was expecting. What she was ready for. It was an acceptable life for her, a good one for her son. But she wouldn’t allow herself to become complacent. She was determined to keep on top of any sudden changes of direction in her family’s story.