by Charlie Hill
It was obviously too late. The bromidic deluge had clearly been too much to withstand, too relentless. They were too far gone, not drowning in a sea of mediocrity but splashing contentedly about, wasting that little bit more of evolution with the passing of every non-discerning day, rejoicing by default in flat lives that led only to dull affairs and more of the same…
And yet. And yet. If the demonstration hadn’t provoked the necessary response, if it hadn’t stimulated a desire for something different or a need for something more, this wasn’t necessarily the fault of either the artist or the people in the queue. Not for the first time that summer, a more devastating conclusion was possible: it was Richard himself who had failed.
He sighed, an exhalation that ended in a roar, tossed the last copy of The Grass is Greener into the flames. Then he saw him. Stepping out of a white stretch limo as it pulled up behind a cordon of baton-wielding Old Bill. Gary Sayles. The man himself, in all his obscene glory, not ten short metres away. As the author stood there, with his hands on his hips, Richard could see his brain chugging. A flunkey passed him a flyer. He read it, raised his chin. Looked confused, then vexed.
At the sight of his would-be nemesis, Richard was newly invigorated, newly enraged. This was his moment. He would make an impression here tonight if he had to punch a bestselling idiot to do it. He began to fight his way through the crowd. Progress was slow. Someone got in his face, speaking in tongues, and he told them to fuck off. He slipped on a smear of monkey shit, nearly went down. ‘Get out of my way!’ he bellowed, as he drop-kicked a transvestite dwarf. ‘Do you hear me? I’m warning you!’ He was closer now, saw Sayles duck a low-flying mini pork pie. ‘I’ll give you a contentious trip to IKEA!’ he continued. ‘Up yer authorly arse!’ and then he was suddenly within reach, close enough to the author to hear him ambushed by a journalist and to hear his consternation – ‘mediocrity? What do they know of mediocrity? Have they sold words? HAVE THEY SOLD WORLDS?’ – close enough to hurl a futile ‘Oi!’ before the shitsucker was wrapped up by security men and led away in the direction of the church.
It was then that Richard was hit by the first blast of water from the firefighter’s hose.
The People’s Literature Tour
Pippa edges her way along the queue of people still filing into the church. The people are dusted with ash. She sees Richard blasted by a hose, fall back into a camera crew, his woman emerge from the crowd. As if on cue a siren sounds and then Pippa is past the doormen and inside the church.
Inside, the crowd is anxious for the main event. Pippa films twitching heads, fidgeting eyes. The church is full. The lights are up. The decor is really bad. The place is decked out with jejune, schoolboy iconography.
Pippa asks a couple, ‘What do you think about what’s going on out there?’ and the man replies, ‘What’s it all about? Who are those people?’ and the woman says, ‘We’ve only come along to buy the book,’ and the man says, ‘That’s right. It’s so true to life, what he writes. He could be writing about us.’
Then the church is hushed and the lights dim and the din from outside has quieted and Pippa turns to film Gary Sayles, who has appeared on stage.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ says Gary, ‘my name is Gary Sayles and I’d like to thank you all for coming here tonight. I’ll keep it short. Tonight is not about the pathetic animals outside, whoever they are, whatever they’re trying to prove. It is not about their ridiculous claims about my work. It is not about their antisocial violence and vandalism. It is about my writing and what it means to you and the hundreds of thousands of people like you up and down the country who read my books every day.
‘It’s a way of saying “come with me and I will show you the way”, a way of saying “together we can achieve” and a way of saying “watch this space”.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Grass is Greener.
‘I give you the people and the literature, the literature for the people.
‘I give you the People’s Literature Tour!’
There is much applause. The clapping is an infectious release. People are clapping because people next to them are clapping. They are on safe ground again. Then Gary disappears and Zeke is up on stage. He looks dedicated. Pippa is running out of film, but Zeke has started and Pippa knows it is all over bar the reading, there is only the reading to go.
Lauren gets on with it
Richard stood outside the church and shivered in the flashing lights of the emergency services. The ground was covered in soggy strings of flyer and ash. Juggling balls were sudsy in pools of spume. The PUSSY banner had come free from one of its moorings and on the other side of the road a flag of St George was wrapped around a lamp-post, desultory and pointless. There were condoms. Of course there were condoms.
A posse of flash mobbers stood around sending each other photos, but nearly everyone else had left the scene. Most of the protesters had made off or been kettled in the car park; only UK Uncut remained, angered at Gary Sayles’ apparent offshore investments, sitting proudly defiant in a circle.
Richard was wet through. His suit hung off him like a badly fitting personality. He thought back to ‘The Author at Home with Wife Amy and Son Garfield’.
So this was how his great crusade ended. The noble anti-hero reduced to a shoddy gesture of bitter resignation, to flicking peanuts at the suit at the end of the bar. Grinding his molars, he reached for his phone. Tomorrow he would resort to his last resort. Manufacture a ‘scandal’ where none existed. And if he was going to piss on the poor woman’s cornflakes, the least he could do was give her a heads-up.
He made the call. Stared at his shoes. Then he felt a hand in the small of his back. It was Lauren. Blimey. He’d almost forgotten about Lauren…
‘Richard?’
‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘Watching. It’s a good turn-out, isn’t it? What about you?’
‘Getting wet. Getting really wet.’
‘I saw that!’
‘And distraught. Really wet and really distraught.’
‘Oh. Why?’
‘Didn’t you see their reaction? We’ve been wasting our time. They’re the walking dead.’
‘Not necessarily. Don’t forget, these are his diehard fans. And I’ve spoken to a lot of the press tonight. There’s still a chance that word will get out before the epidemic takes hold.’
‘Perhaps. But there’s something else. The other day, you asked me if I’d changed. Well, of course I have. You’ve changed me. But tonight I needed to show I still had it in me, that I could still get to people, antagonise them, wind them up. That I could still provoke them, still be bad. Well, I can’t. I don’t know if I ever could. I’m not actually that good at being bad, you see, just as I’m not that bad at being good. And you know what that means, don’t you?’
‘I do. It means you’re just like the rest of us. Reduced to moving ourselves forward, incrementally, day by day. Well, poor you.’
Lauren shook her head. She’d seen enough. They’d talked enough. She felt enough. Her experiment was drawing to a close, and at least one of its conclusions was already apparent. She was ready.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘this is no time for self-indulgence. It might interest you to know that while you’ve been wallowing, I’ve had another idea. About what we can do about SNAPS. We’re not finished yet, not by a long way.’
‘Really? What do you have in mind?’
‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. We can sort the details out over breakfast.’
‘Tomorrow? Over breakfast?’
‘Yes. You didn’t think we were going home, did you?’
‘Oh. What? You mean… you don’t mean… do you?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake Richard, you’re not making this easy. Do I have to spell it out?’
And as she headed into the church, Lauren felt a great and liberating rush of what she could only describe as relief.
‘Yes,’ she called over her shoulder, ‘yes, I do m
ean…’
A new life begins
Gary Sayles left the church by the side entrance. He raised his hand presidentially to a riot policeman. He had seen enough. The little people had turned out in force and were putty in his hands and, like putty, he could mould them into anything he wanted, like statues or models of Jabba the Hutt from Part Three of the original Star Wars trilogy. There was no alternative, no escape for any of them. And Gary Sayles?
Gary Sayles was on Cloud Ten. His life was building to a climax. Tonight, he was leaving these people behind. To their old certainties. He would continue to produce books for them, of course, one way or another, but he himself was changing horses in midstream, moving through the gears to a new set of conventions. From now on, he was going to live his life by a different set of rules.
He had started by cutting the apron strings. It had been a brave move leaving his audience in the church to their own devices, while they still wanted more of his presence. It felt funny too: Gary used to revel in mingling with his public. But he’d realised that the People’s Literature Tour wasn’t just about giving his readers a fair crack of the promotional whip, it was also about managing their expectations. He’d made the introductions tonight because it was the first night of the tour, but there came a point in every successful writer’s life when it made commercial sense to distance yourself from your readers. The farther removed you were, the greater the air of mystery – and hence anticipation – that surrounded your actions. Did New York Times bestselling author James Patterson still press the flesh of his fans? Gary thought it unlikely.
Gary reached Euston Square station. He had planned to take the tube home, one last time, for old times’ sake. He’d a new book out, after all.
But something was telling him not to. Something was telling him to make a clean break.
Gary listened to the voice. He dialled a cab on his phone. When it arrived he sat in the back and felt he was looking down on the city once more, as if from the sky.
A few streets from his home, he asked the driver whether he could be dropped off. He was. He walked unhurriedly, his hands in his bespoke trouser pockets. As he crossed Notting Hill Gate, Gary saw his image on a billboard, the first of many that would appear over the next few weeks. Gary was part of the landscape of this city. There were a thousand billboards in the city and each of them told a thousand stories. But none of them was quite as unique as his.
He was everywhere. This was his world. Everyone else was just visiting.
And how!
SNAPS
Pippa’s camera is still rolling. The crowd are polite. Zeke is coming to the end of his reading. He is stumbling over the odd word now. The odd list. ‘Ten reasons not to have a one-night stand’ takes two minutes. He looks tired. He has done well. It has been an effort.
Pippa does one last sweep around the church. Sweet JellyBaby-Jeebus she has some material here. The tracking shot pans back to the stage just in time to catch Zeke crumpling to the ground, and as she sees the life leave his body, the camera records her scream, a terrible sound, timeless and unknowing…
At the back of the church, Lauren shuddered as the crowd noise rose in yelps and whimpers. She stood her ground as the mass of people eddied and flowed in distressed confusion, saw the woman she’d come to find.
‘Hermione Bevan-Jones? I’m Lauren Furrows.’
‘What’s happening? What’s going on?’ asked Hermione.
And Lauren said:
‘It’s started…’
The Pussy Palace Sauna and Grill
Later that evening, Amy listened to Richard’s message. It was difficult to hear, but it demanded her full attention.
‘Hello? Hello? This is a message for Nikki. Or Amy Sayles, whichever you like. I’m just phoning to tell you that I know who you are. I mean who you were. What you were. At the Pussy Palace. Now you have to know that this doesn’t bother me, not in the slightest, I mean, I’m really not being judgemental here. But your husband, well, he’s a bad man and he needs to be stopped. And it looks like the only way I can get to him is through you. So. All I can say is it might be an idea if you stayed away from the papers for a while. I’m going to have to tell them what you used to do, you see. To get at him. It’s the only way. The last resort. Believe me, if there was another way, I’d… Shit. I’m running out of cred…’
SNAPS
The next day The Grass is Greener began its terrible work. In all major cities and towns across the UK people died suddenly and seemingly without reason. Lives ended on streets, on buses, in offices and trains and homes.
Large gatherings of people reported multiple deaths. By midday several halls of the NEC in Birmingham were cordoned off following an incident in which four delegates to the 5th Annual Symposium on Travel and Tourism failed to emerge after a break for soft drinks and assorted cream-filled biscuits. Visitors to a Financial Services Exhibition in Harrogate were decimated. Other concentrations of loss of life included Windsor, Sutton Coldfield and Luton, while at book distribution centres in Norwich, Colchester and Eastbourne, the toll was two dozen before the morning was out.
By the end of lunchtime, London was hot with fear and feverish with news and speculation. Radio and television carried coverage of the sudden deaths. There was panic and talk of panic. Sirens sounded, people ran. At Number Ten, a war room was set up, a session of COBRA convened. NBC suits were issued to armed police and then recalled. Six deaths in the offices of the Highways Agency, Buckingham Palace Road, resulted in the royal residence being sealed off with tanks and armoured vehicles. The infrastructure of the city buckled in the violence of the alarm. Traffic stopped, cars were abandoned. On the 12.05 from Bank to St Paul’s, a man read over another’s shoulder and paid the ultimate price; within an hour, the number of deaths on the underground led to the closure of the entire network. At Heathrow airport, flights were grounded after several minutes of carnage amongst browsers in Terminals One, Two and Four, where The Grass is Greener was being promoted as part of a Buy One Get One Free campaign in WH Smith.
At one o’clock in the afternoon the prime minister, Home Secretary and Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Force appeared at a news conference at Number Ten and appealed for calm. They were close to identifying the cause of the deaths, they said, and steps were being taken to prevent more. Their words were not reassuring. No one knew which way to turn, at whom or what to point the finger or where to direct the relevant authorities. By then the nationwide death toll stood at more than four hundred. Two hundred and fifty had died in the capital alone. And still there was no definitive connection between the books and the dead; no one knew what was striking the people down.
Later, human interest tales emerged from under the pale sheets of death, thick-blooded with poignancy. In the Piccadilly branch of the largest retail book chain three goods-in staff, the fiction buyer and a publishing rep dropped dead before the title even hit the sales floor. Particularly resonant was the loss of life on the Tottenham Court Road, in the canteen of a satellite office of the accountants to Barker Follinge. There, a carelessly discarded copy of The Grass is Greener killed seven inquisitive employees, one after the other, the bodies lying where they fell.
In which Lauren backs a hunch and Richard is prepared to compromise
Earlier that morning, Lauren and Richard had finished their breakfast and gone back up to their room. They had allowed themselves some downtime, but now it was time to get to work. They switched on the news channel, propped themselves up on the bed and opened Lauren’s iPad.
‘Right,’ said Lauren. ‘So there’s a few mentions here and there, but I think we should accept the fact that the coverage of last night isn’t on the scale – or of the tone – that we had hoped for. So we need to settle on a more immediate course of action. Do you have any suggestions?’
Richard thought about ‘Nikki’, said, ‘No.’
‘OK. Well, I’ve been working on an alternative hypothesis that may indicate a way forward. It goes back
to the pathology of the syndrome. In the case of the first death – the editor Elizabeth Menzies, in the taverna on Corfu – although she was technically “reading” a Sayles book when she collapsed, there was no evidence that she was actually turning the pages at the precise time of her death. This means that, despite its acronym, SNAPS may not always occur spontaneously. In some cases it will; but in some it might actually be a delayed reaction. Are you with me?’
‘Yes, of course I am. It’s not rocket science, is it? And I mean that literally. It’s neurology and cultural criticism and a little bit of guesswork and…’
‘Richard? I know you’re excited. But we need to get this right. Can you concentrate? So. Bringing us back to today, this opens up the possibility that we may have time to alter the neural networking of people who will have encountered the book, but are still alive. In theory, allowing us the opportunity to introduce a factor that will recharge the electrical impulses in their brain cells, thus preventing the atrophy from reaching a fatal level. Now logically speaking, anything could perform this function: a TV programme, a film, a piece of music, a conversation. But as you keep telling me, books are different. And as it is only books that are powerful enough to trigger the onset of the syndrome, we have to work on the assumption that it is only books that can arrest and reverse it. Do you see?’
‘I do.’
‘Good. Because I’ve had an idea. It’s a big one too, and daft, almost big and daft enough to be one of yours. And if it’s going to work I need your help. I need you to think carefully, to select a number of authors, maybe half a dozen. Writers who hit people over the head, but not too hard. They must be intelligent but not too obviously highbrow, literary but not too dense. And they must make you… what was it you said? Dribble and ogle and snort? Hmm. Maybe not quite that. We can’t afford to put people off, they can’t be too “out there”. How about if we just say they have to alter your perceptions, shift your perspective. Make you feel or think differently about life? Or even better, as it’s mediocrity that’s got us here, how about if they’re just good? You know. Verifiably good? Do you understand?’