by Charlie Hill
She found her eyes drawn to a couple of students, a boy and a girl. They looked very young. Lauren supposed they were a particular type of young, but she had no idea which it might be. They were sitting close together on the grass, under the tree. They were looking at each other intently, the soles of their feet touching. The scene played out in unreal primary colours, the yellows and reds of their clothes heightened in the sunlight against the verdant depth of the grass. The boy leaned forward and muttered something into the girl’s ear. At first Lauren thought this might have been a joke, or an imaginative hypothesis. But then the girl recoiled exaggeratedly and Lauren saw the indignation on her face.
A moment later she was standing up, squashing her feet into her pumps and stomping away like a Mediterranean child, pausing only to turn to her rising companion and offer him her middle finger, theatrically and without compunction. The hapless boy sat still, his palms facing the sky as she walked away.
Lauren thought again of the cause of her disquiet. Richard’s story had been crass and casual to the point of unfeeling. Yet maybe she had been too hasty in taking offence. Her decision to let go of Will and all that he had come to mean hadn’t been taken lightly, and she intended to honour the seriousness of its intent. It was all very well exposing herself to the possibilities of a new way of living but she had to be able to relax into them. Richard had whispered obscenities in her ear. But that was Richard, that was what Richard did. Lauren didn’t have to react in the way she had, she didn’t need to retreat into herself. There was another way.
The girl’s gesture in the quad was both vulgar and antisocial. But there was something liberating about the attitude it represented. It was careless, unrestrained. It looked like fun. Lauren remembered fun. She used to eat at country pubs, she’d once spent an afternoon at the cinema watching – now what was his name again? – Jacques Tati. That had been fun. Well, sort of, anyway. There’d been lots of non-Will-related things too. She’d been on a barge one summer, a long time ago, just after her A levels; as a child she’d played hide-and-seek with the daughter of her cello teacher, giggling behind a yellow bush in their back garden near Sutton Park, while her mother discussed gradings and chords…
Lauren sat back down at her desk and rested her arm on its elbow. She clenched and unclenched her fist, looked at the veins, the joints, the tendons moving beneath the skin. Then she practised extending the middle finger and offering it, slowly and deliberately, to the door and to the walls of her office, to the world outside her window, and to the annoyingly significant Richard too.
In which Lauren accepts the value of Richard’s way of working
One evening, Richard emailed Lauren a story from that day’s Bookseller:
Barker Follinge are sad to announce the death of Katie Roberts. Katie, 39, who recently moved to the editorial team following five years in the marketing department, died suddenly at her home on Tuesday. An inquest will be held into her death.
The tragedy is the second to befall the BF editorial team in the run-up to the publication of the imprint’s lead autumn title. In May, Elizabeth Menzies, a BF editor, died of a brain condition.
Lauren was appalled but excited too. This was a significant development. She rang Richard.
‘I think we should change our approach,’ she told him. ‘I had hoped to have discovered some evidence for the connection between SNAPS and these books by now, but I haven’t. And too many people are dying for us to wait any longer. So, although all that we have to work with is anecdotal, I suggest we proceed on the assumption that there is a causal link. What is important now is that we get the message out: these books kill.’
‘Blimey,’ said Richard. ‘You’ve changed your tune, haven’t you?’
‘It’s just something about this story. It’s made me reconsider what we saw in Corfu. When Elizabeth Menzies died, she was reading the manuscript of Gary Sayles’ new novel—’
‘Yeah. The poor cu—’
‘And there was nothing to suggest she’d just read any of his earlier work. Similarly, there’s no good reason for his present editor – this Katie Roberts – to be going over his first three novels. Just as there is no evidence that the consular official who died had read more than one of his books. Which means that although we once thought SNAPS may have been caused by sustained exposure to Sayles’ novels, it may well be that just one will kill. Maybe… maybe even part of one.’
‘Blimey.’
‘Indeed. I mean, is there a chance, could it be possible, that his books are actually getting worse?’
‘Having read the first three I have to say it’s very unlikely,’ said Richard. ‘But either way, I see what you mean about getting on with it. Because if you’re right, in about six weeks’ time more people are going to die.’
An artist prepares to clinch the deal
That afternoon, Pippa and Zeke are sitting up on their bed smoking pipes. Zeke is fully clothed. Pippa is naked. She is playing a game called Whatever Happens with Mary Jane where she smokes Manali until she is full and then masturbates with Wet Original Classic Gel.
Zeke rubs his eyes. He is trying to clear his mind. Pippa’s brain is crazy-paved. They have been talking about their art. Pippa has grown tired of the Evening Post obituary verse project. It is taking too long. It is difficult to see who will buy into it and how. Now she is looking for replacement revenue streams. Last week she placed an ad in the smalls of Time Out and the listing mags of Chester, Birmingham, Grimsby and Bath. It said: ‘Artists for Hire. Nothing Considered. Flash Mobs and Spectacles for the Non-Discerning Punter.’
‘What the fuck?’ asked Zeke.
‘Nothing Considered? It’s an encapsulation of our modus operandi,’ Pippa explained. ‘And the rest? Catchy, huh?’
‘Hmm,’ said Zeke.
Now Pippa is obsessing about Gary Sayles. The project’s potential, she says, is unlimited. Zeke is not convinced.
‘Isn’t it, you know, a bit out there?’
‘C’mon, Zeke, break a leg. You’re forgetting. All we are is who we fuck and how we fuck ‘em. There ain’t nothing else. This is us, this is our art. You know that.’
‘Yeah, but can’t you just slow down a bit?’ says Zeke. ‘I’m not feeling at the top of my game at the moment. I don’t want to waste my energy.’
‘I didn’t notice you had any energy to waste,’ says Pippa.
Zeke and Pippa have not had sex in three days. Pippa wants sex. Without sex, Zeke knows that Pippa is fractious, bolshy.
She sings, ‘Verily mine knickers doth smoulder and oh, how I long for your hose.’
Clearly she is spoiling for a fight. When they fight, Pippa and Zeke fight like family. Like lovers on the high street of a market town. But Zeke is not in the mood for a fight tonight. Zeke is tired. Zeke has been tired for three days. It is the books making him tired. He has been reading a volume of Gary Sayles’ first three books at night, so he will know how to play Mike when he is up on stage as part of the People’s Literature Tour. The books are alien to him. It is as though he is reading science fiction. Surely no one actually lives like this? Still, they exert a strange pull. Still, he turns the pages.
Zeke is unsure where the Sayles Project might lead. But Pippa knows. That is why she is overexcited. Throughout their career, their art has meant nothing. It has been empty of meaning. Throughout their career, punters have paid to make of it what they will. They have crammed it full of their own stuff. Pippa and Zeke have been called post-Duchamp, post-Warhol, post-Ono. They have been claimed by the disciples of Dada, Surrealism, Situationism, Fluxus. But they have believed in none of these things.
Now it is time to fess up. To spill the jumping beans, to produce the great reveal. To demonstrate to punters and critics alike that Pippa and Zeke have played them like kazoos. To show them that Art Means Nothing, or even less than that.
For what is the point of taking the piss if no one sees the piss is being taken? Of being clever if no one can see how clever you are?
Pippa has the opening shots of the film in her head:
Gary Sayles in the café.
Soundtrack: ‘I want you – the people – to take it to the people.’
Cut to Mike looking gormless, Mike-like, at a copy of Cutting the Cake.
Cut to Zeke. Zeke frowns.
Soundtrack: ‘Who is your god?’
Cut to Zeke a month before.
Zeke wears a blond pig-tailed wig. It bounces. He is scrawny and diabolical-looking. He is fucking that simpering big-titted student to some tune from Don Giovanni and chugging from a bottle of peachy schnapps.
Cut to Sayles: ‘ordinary people with ordinary problems’.
Repeat to fade.
The resulting masterpiece will be the ultimate anti-art statement. It will destroy the idea of meaning in art. It will destroy the idea of art itself.
Pippa knows and Pippa believes. All she needs is to arrange one more piece of footage to complete the film. Something to illustrate the po-mo credo. Something to show what Zeke and Pippa have done to art. Who we fuck and how we fuck ‘em. Indeed. It will be shown as the closing credits roll.
She rolls over, exhales deeply, picks up a pen from the side of the bed. Writes the note on a piece of writing paper. The paper has flowers in the top right corner. It is cerise. She bought it from Clintons. She sprays it with White Musk and puts it in an envelope.
As he lies on his back next to Pippa, Zeke closes his eyes and feels himself sweat. The room is hot and full of smoke. Zeke is feeling the pressure, unsure of his role in the Sayles Project. He does not have long to get himself prepared. This evening he and Pippa are going round to the author’s house for a meeting about the launch of the People’s Literature Tour. Gary has told them that the first reading is in just four weeks’ time.
Next to him, on the bed, Zeke hears a familiar click followed by a hum. Then Pippa humming. It is Charlotte Charles. Now Pippa is just being bloody-minded. Wilful. It is not Zeke’s fault he has been unable to perform. All the reading has given him aches in his head.
In which Richard is running out of ideas…
Richard was struggling. The more he tried to put a boot up the arse of his relationship with Lauren, the tighter she seemed to clench. She just didn’t seem prepared to take a chance on a life-changing liaison with a bloke as challenging as he was.
This reticence didn’t just wind Richard up, it worried him too. He couldn’t expect everyone to embrace the deviant with quite the elan that he did, but neither was it healthy to remain so uptight. Even though Lauren wasn’t by any stretch of the most delirious imagination a devotee of the mediocre, the poor woman was in danger of only living half a life.
He’d thought his story might help. Untitled was thickly rich, daringly personal and – to the right sort of reader – deeply rewarding. He’d spent a whole week on rewriting and revision, a long time for Richard to work on a story. He had written it specifically for Lauren, to show her the potential in transgressive fiction and a life less 9–5. With the accompanying email he’d even introduced an element of playful abuse into the exchange. (This had been bold. As he was writing, he’d made a severe dent in a bottle of Count Orloff vodka, an inexpensive and not entirely authentic brew that had its origins in a factory centre just outside Rowley Regis. And the combination of the Count and playful abuse had been under-appreciated before.)
At the very least he’d expected the correspondence to have shocked Lauren into an emotional outburst. So how had she reacted? She’d bunted him. Jesus, she’d bunted him. He’d written some put-downs in his time – to editors who’d rejected his innovative prose and didn’t see themselves for the industry whores they were – but none had been more off-handedly devastating than Lauren’s.
Had his maverick tendencies and incorrigible wit simply been too much for her? For a moment he almost convinced himself they might have been. But no. The truth was less exotic than that. The difficulty was that this kind of thing alone was not going to be enough to woo a woman like the Prof.
Richard knew he had to tailor his approach, to find a more Lauren-friendly way of attracting her attention. Something that would show her another side to his personality, introduce her to the boiling cauldron of contradictions that was Richard Anger.
He began by looking for ideas in the half-remembered snippets of their last proper conversation. Lauren had claimed his knowledge was ‘abstract’, she’d mentioned the need for ‘objective analysis’. She’d questioned whether he was ‘adequately informed’. It was obvious what she wanted there: a methodical, reasoned approach, softly softly bores the monkey. Irksome though this was, it was doable. All he had to do was wind his neck in, cut down on the expletives, deaden his chat with a few facts and figures. But while this was a necessary expediency, it was also a bit pissy, less boiling cauldron than simmering milk pan. If he was going to go all number-cruncher on the woman, he needed something else, something that would make an equally effective impression on her without compromising his devotion to the extreme.
He thought on. ‘Why do you drink so much?’ Lauren had asked and then, her lips pursed like a kitten’s arse, ‘I see.’ In her email she had also made a sniffy reference to his alcohol consumption. Maybe there was something there? Richard mulled, projected and mulled some more. And then it came to him, like the smash of an own-brand supermarket whisky: for his next trick, Richard was going to be sober.
The idea was perfect. Lauren might have reserve to spare but not even she could fail to be moved by the audacity of a gesture like that. Richard Anger? Sober? Why, it would knock the woman bandy!
Sure, it was a controversial step. Richard liked drinking too much. It was the behaviour of the outcast and the rebel, the writer’s vice. There was a tradition of noble sots and visionary lushes, romantics, expressionists, Beats, experimenters all. Yet Lauren, infuriatingly, had a point. There was another side to being a drunk. Richard was uncomfortably aware that his habit was sometimes less about provoking a response than being stuck in a rut of sloshing liquor. And that way, he knew, lay mediocrity; that way lay atrophy and a social SNAPS.
Whichever way you cut it, the idea was on the bingo. He would embrace sobriety, demonstrate to her his flair for the contrary, and finally – finally – convince her of his credentials as an anti-heroic lover…
That was the theory anyway. In practice, Richard was struggling. The three days he’d been alcohol free had shown him how convincing he could hope to be as an abstainer. Not very. In daylight hours he had been given a taste of what to expect if he was regularly exposed to the obscene clarity that accompanied his sober state. Several times he’d nearly gone under and reached for the bottle of medicinal hooch he kept behind the till.
Once he’d had an exchange with a student who’d wandered in out of the rain.
‘Have you got a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to South East Asia on a Shoestring?’
‘No, I don’t sell guidebooks. There’s an Oxfam bookshop at the top of the hill. You could try them.’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you? I’m not going all the way up there.’
On a more thirst-making occasion still, he’d dismantled a display of dissident Chinese fiction to discover that he’d sold not a single copy, not of Gao Xingjian nor Yiyun Li nor Liao Yiwu nor Ma Jian. It was almost as if nobody cared.
And then there were the nights. At night he’d lain in bed, sweating fear. Whereas SNAPS had once seemed to offer him a shot at salva
tion – professionally at least – now the resonance of bodies hitting stone floors and lives abruptly interrupted began to torment him. He’d felt the drumming insistence of sleeplessness and dreamed hallucinatory and wakeful dreams. He’d seen stars and looked at far-flung lights and feared the shadows in the corners of his room. And he’d found himself asking the question, over and over again. What would he leave behind if he were to be struck down the very next day by a brain disorder? A virtual sheaf of unpublished masterworks? Or of transgressive embarrassment?
Richard knew that he couldn’t go on like this. He was crazed through lack of sleep. He needed to see Lauren and soon, to share with her this latest manifestation of his nonconformist creed. He needed to show her that he was ready to confront a terrible personal truth and move on.
Then he could have another drink…
Richard is sober, Lauren has some fun
Richard and Lauren caught up next in the Shakespeare in Birmingham city centre. Meeting in a pub wasn’t the temporarily sober Richard’s idea of a genius plan – he’d suggested Lauren’s place – but Lauren seemed unaccountably keen.
Richard arrived early and bagged a table in the corner furthest away from the bar. He covered it with visual aids: a ring-bound notepad, a couple of glossy trade mags and pages of figures and pie charts. None of them was relevant to SNAPS, but that didn’t matter. Lauren wouldn’t be getting closer to them than he needed her to.
So:
Impressive-looking paperwork?
Check.
Head full of restraint?
Check.
Lime and soda?