by Glen Duncan
I’ve got fourteen scenes to write, I know, but how, may I ask, do you handle dreams?
To start with: sleep. How did I ever do without it? Actually not sleep itself, but falling asleep. How did I ever survive without this business of falling asleep? There are – Day Twelve (Heavens how time flies when you’re having fun) – all sorts of things I’m wondering how I ever got along without. Israeli vine tomatoes. Campo Viejo Rioja. Heroin. Burping. Bollinger. Cigarettes. The sting of aftershave. Cocaine. Orgasm. Lucifer Risings. The aroma of coffee. (Coffee justifies the existence of the word ‘aroma’.) There are, naturally, plenty of things I don’t know how you put up with – disc jockeys, hangnails, trapped wind, All Bran – but then I knew it was going to be a mixed bag.
Anyway sleep. Granted, the first time it took me I was caught off-guard: one minute it was evening and I was lying on Gunn’s bunk with crossed ankles and a warm feeling in my feet and shoulders – the next brilliant sunshine with yours truly truck-horned awake with pants-shitting suddenness and a miniature identity crisis bringing on the first-morning-in-a-foreign-hotel-reconstruct-your-own-history routine. I was so startled (another first) I shot out of Gunn’s bones and back, bodilessly, into the ether. That turned out (wearing, this business of things turning out) not to be a good idea. Pain – the pain – returned, instantly, bright and clamorous. (When I quit Gunn’s carcass at the end of the month, you know, that pain’s going to hurt like . . . You wouldn’t think, would you, it being only twelve days and all? I mean still no sweat or anything, but . . . well . . . damn, man. Ow, you know?) But sleep – falling asleep – I’ve got used to it. Easy to see why you lot go for it in such a big way, though why you choose to do it at night, the best part of the day, is a mystery to me.
But this dreaming – whoa. It was one of Gunn’s. (Yes, I’m afraid so: on top of the drab threads and tiny todge I’m saddled with a good deal of the subconscious fluff, too.) Now as you all know, other people’s dreams are superlatively boring unless you yourself are in them, so I won’t burden you with the details. (‘I had the most amazing dream last night,’ says Peter. ‘Was I in it?’ asks Jane? ‘No,’ says Peter. ‘Me and Skip were in this forest, you see, and . . .’ etc. Jane’s not listening – and who can blame her? Pretended interest in your partner’s dreams is one of the half-dozen glues holding the pitiful airfix of monogamy together.) It’s a dream Gunn’s only had once or twice before. An older, bearded man comes to take his mother to the pictures. It’s not a lover. (For the record, it’s a queen whose partner cancer’s recently chomped its way through, on whom Angela’s taken pity.) Wee Gunn knows it’s not a lover – but he can’t or won’t trust this old fruit. ‘I’m just your mother’s friend,’ the bewhiskered lips keep telling him. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m not taking her away from you. You can trust me. You know you can trust me.’ (But tight-shouldered Gunn’s a compact little thunderstorm. His face is piping hot and his chest is busy with naked feelings still waiting for their language hats and coats. His mother’s friend is sitting on the couch, Gunn standing in front of him holding in his left hand the new matchbox Mini Cooper in electric green with opening boot, bonnet and doors – the price of his mother’s company, he assumes. The babysitter is heating spaghetti hoops in the kitchen. Gunn hears the bhup then steady exhalation of the gas ring. With all his ineffectual might (when his mother’s back is turned for a final mirror check: beige mack, mauve chiffon scarf, coppery curls, green eyeshadow) he balls his sweaty fist and clocks Mr Harmless a wild hook in the bearded chops. He thinks, little Gunn, all ablaze with pride and shame, that something big, some paradigm shift must follow. But the man on the couch just grins, without lifting his palms from their rest on his kneecaps. ‘No need for that, my friend,’ he whispers, rising, ruffling Gunn’s warm hair. Then to Angela: ‘Your carriage awaits.’ Angela kisses our cheek and leaves a lipstick print. It’s a thing between them. He’s allowed to go to bed without washing it off. Her lips are warm and sticky. At the doorway she turns and blows him another kiss. The bearded man waves and winks. Gunn waves back as the corridor stretches and the doorway recedes, slowly. He waves, and smiles, and thinks: I hate you, I hate you, I hate you . . .
I was mumbling some untranslated version of this when I woke. Terribly hot and bothered. Had the Ritz’s costly linens all tangled around my legs. Struggled up into consciousness with a lot of undignified lurching and warbling. Then sat up puffing and blowing, astonished at the simple endurance of the waking world: the room, the braying traffic, the weather. Called down for a pot of Columbian full roast and a half-dozen wee snifters with a tender – I’m tempted to say humble – thankfulness that it was all still here. Incredible. And you lot have to deal with this sort of thing night after night. Must take some getting used to . . .
Out of mischief, really, I went to see Gunn’s agent, Betsy Galvez. Do you know, I’ve found it so difficult to stick to my fourteen scenes. This writing malarkey should come with a health warning: MAY CAUSE INCESSANT DEVIATION FROM ORIGINAL INTENTION. AND DROWSINESS. Obviously I’ve got a lot of the script down – the big scenes, so to speak, and Trent already thinks I’m God – but do you think I can stick to the task in hand? I turn on Gunn’s PC, I sit through the tedious powering-up, the brief arrival of Penelope’s gently smiling mug as his desktop wallpaper, and am forced to acknowledge the presence of an untitled file alongside ‘Lucifer Screenplay’ that’s been variously titled Some, Anyway, Last Words, Wherefore I Know Not, and Paradise Fucked, and which has thus far proven a terrible distraction from my contractual obligations. You know what’s in it, don’t you? You’ve been reading it, haven’t you? I wouldn’t mind if it was just the narrative version of the blockbusting movie – the ‘novelization’ as such things are barbarously called – but as you know, it’s worse than that. I seem to be continuously struggling against the temptation to write about Declan Gunn.
I was just going to post it to Betsy, anonymously (I’m tempted to deprive Gunn of credit for this bit of graft; I’m tempted – oh I know I’m silly – to keep this as something I’ve done for me, you know?) but then it occurred to me (it’s becoming annoying, this business of things occurring to me, this habit I’ve developed in Gunn’s skin of not knowing everything ahead of time) that there was a good chance it would end up on a slush pile, or in the secretary’s Deal With it Later file, or worse, ignominiously in the bin. So I went to see her. Gunn generally rings and makes an appointment. I didn’t.
This weather . . . Humans, how do you avoid spending all your time just experiencing the weather? I walked from Clerkenwell to Covent Garden in very mild, very slightly moving air that touched the exposed bits of me like the petals of cool roses. The sky (even I’ve got to take my hat off to Himself when it comes to summer skies) was high and beaten thin, the low sun softly exploding pale oranges and watery greens into the upper margins of lilac and blue. The whole thing had a distant, bleached quality to it that made me in Gunn’s body feel small and lonesome, not unlike the way he himself used to feel as a child, when his mother would treat him to an extortionately priced helium balloon which would invariably slip from his wet grasp and go sailing up into the vast and lonely distance, until Gunn, nauseated by his relationship to something now so remote, would begin to feel dizzy and afraid. (I’ve resigned myself, as you can see, to bits of Gunn’s life intruding. Manifestly, the longer I’m here the more susceptible I am. Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels’ recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche’s ghostly script?)
The good old world smelled good and old and worldly: fruity drains, diesel, caramelized nuts, fried onions, heatrotted litter, tyres, minty and decidedly unminty breath. A suddenly opened pub door let a scent-bubble of beerflavoured carpet and fagsmoke out into the fresh air. I inhaled (burped booze and bar snacks in there, too) as I passed through, smiling. Women had touched themselves up – cosmetically, thank you �
� and their features glowed and gleamed: mouths like scimitars in claret, plum, sienna, mimosa, pearl, burgundy and puce, smokily shadowed eyes with diamond hints and sapphire glints, flecks of emerald and fragments of jade. Easy there, Luce, easy. This is what they see every day. Doesn’t mean anything to them. I know. I can’t help it. Like your man Rumi, I find myself ‘drenched in being here, rambling drunk . . .’ You don’t know what it is to me, this leisure (no priest in the taxi, no rabbi on the stairs), Gunn’s sensory quintet working overtime. One after another: the wind’s sudden swerve; someone’s cinnamonish aftershave; the flooded gutter’s ribbon of sky; teen bodyheat on a rammed Tube; marmalade breath and perfumed wrists. Wears man’s smudge and share’s man’s smell, as dear old Hopkins lamented. You don’t find me lamenting it, do you? Eh? I say, Missus, you don’t find me lamenting it.
It used to give Gunn tremendous pleasure to visit Betsy, in her Covent Garden office. It was the sort of office he’d always imagined a literary agent would have: gargantuan oak desk, wafer-thin Persian rug in sky-blue and gold, fat oxblood leather couch, books everywhere – simply everywhere – and, of course, manuscripts. Betsy, who, at fifty-six has a well-lined face and sunken cheeks, chain-smoked Dunhills and had shorthand or private language conversations on the phone that always made Gunn feel like part of the select world of Literature, even though he hadn’t a clue what she was on about. (It was of course the select world of Publishing, but Gunn was a hopeless romantic.) Over the years our Betsy’s perfected a very slightly sexually flirtatious persona for her young male writers, one that’s based on her knowing that she’s not physically attractive but that she is socially and professionally powerful. Her eyes are a pellucid blue, and are occasionally to be observed lingering a fraction longer than necessary on the lineaments of her ‘boys’. (She doesn’t have young women writers because she doesn’t like young women.) She’s had three long lunches with Gunn at the end of which he’s had the feeling – the odd double entendre, nothing disgusting – she might be about to offer him money to fuck her – and he can’t say the thought doesn’t stimulate him. He imagines broad, deflated breasts with wine gum nipples, old-woman flesh in the armpits, an arsehole with a history . . . Since becoming ‘a writer’ Gunn believes such warped or distended liaisons are within his scope (he’s going to love Harriet), are part of his duty, in fact, along with bowling around the West End drunk at four in the morning and wearing overcoats that reek of Oxfam.
Then, God help him, A Grace of Storms.
‘I think you’re making it awfully hard for yourself with a book this long,’ she said to him, at their last protracted but emphatically unerotic lunch after she’d read the monstrous tome.
‘Yeah,’ Gunn said, ‘but when a book’s good you want it to go on forever, don’t you?’
This left Betsy in such an appalling position that she surreptitiously dug her belt buckle’s prong into her palm to distract herself. She knew exactly the sort of reviews Gunn thought the book would get. She knew exactly (light another Dunhill) the sort of reviews the book would get.
‘Have you spoken to Sylvia?’ Gunn asked. Sylvia Brawne, the editor of Gunn’s last novel. ‘Have you told her anything about it?’
Weary Betsy blew a Gandalfian smoke-ring. How much she wanted to say: ‘Declan, you’re a good writer who does what he does well – but you’re not Anthony Burgess or Lawrence Durrell. You’ve got a nice line in understated poetic observation but virtually no intellectual rigour. You’ve bitten off more than you can chew and as a result this manuscript is a titanic failure.’
Instead, she said: ‘We’ll go to Sylvia first and then see.’
They did see. A Grace of Storms was turned down. By everyone.
The inner sanctum of Betsy’s office is antechambered by a smaller room with a varnished wooden floor, dark blue walls and one very new-looking Ikea desk, behind which sits Betsy’s small and moody assistant, Elspeth.
‘She’s with somebody,’ Elspeth said to me. ‘Did you have an appointment?’
I ignored her and strode across to the door. Unheard of, to breach the adytum unmediated or unannounced. Elspeth’s bottom jaw went rapidly through a sequence of little adjustments. Then she pushed the wheelie chair away from her desk and swivelled on it to face me. ‘She’s with someone, Declan,’ she repeated.
One of the downsides of being me is that I’m occasionally rendered mute by the sheer number of acerbic ripostes teeming on my tongue. I glared at Elspeth and opened the door.
‘. . . developing a much more . . . muscular language,’ was the tail end of Betsy’s compliment to the young man seated with a confrontational expansiveness of body in the middle of the oxblood couch. Tony Lamb. Gunn hates this person. Secondarily for his chubby face, buzz-cut and habit of dressing all in black, but primarily for his ubiquity and the success of his novels. Betsy despises Tony Lamb, too, certainly for his commitment to black clothes, but mostly for the blandness and flippancy of his language, the absence of ideas, the absence of reading, and the presence of a raging desire to get into Hollywood (which he will, within the year) and snort coke and fuck aspiring starlets and throw-up in the bathrooms of very exclusive places. The very life ‘Declan’ (bless) is living right now. She knows that for Tony Lamb writing is a tool which, if used cannily, will mean he’ll never have to write again.
Neither will Declan after the script I’m going to deliver.
I myself have no feelings about this Lamb cocksucker, one way or another. I approve of him, obviously, since he’s (a) perpetually distracting himself from God, and (b) heading for Hollywood, where his dedication to making money and inflating his own ego will see him contributing productively to an industry that distracts whole populations from God. Other than that he’s of no interest to me. There’s no murder in him, and only a very predictable dribble of lust. His soul, and billions like it, provide the cosmos with its muzak.
Betsy and Tony looked up as Elspeth crashed into my heels then squeezed past me into the office.
‘Declan,’ Betsy said.
‘I told him you were with someone, Betsy.’
‘Declan, I’m . . . ah . . .’ Betsy said – but I was already bored. Besides, this wasn’t something Gunn wouldn’t have done himself, on a good day. So I moved fast. Over to the couch, where I smiled, brightly, at Tony Lamb before grabbing him by his black lapels and yanking him to his feet.
‘What the fuck –’
I looked at him. I looked at him, through Gunn. (Which is just as well, since Gunn’s frightening look wouldn’t frighten a callipered octogenarian.) I thought, briefly, about lifting him off his feet, but Gunn’s equipment – the work-shy radials and biceps, the dole-hardened triceps and scrounging quads – really wasn’t up to it. Amazing what I can put into a look, even through human eyes. Amazing how I can make you see all the time I’ve lived and you haven’t.
‘Your books are dogshit, Tony,’ I said, very quietly, then waited just a moment before spinning and shoving him (I’m thinking: don’t fuck it up, Luce; don’t trip) violently towards the door. Elspeth, arms folded, hooked her midriff to one side as he went stumbling past to collide with the wheelie chair. Protracted clattering. He didn’t utter a sound. I walked over to Elspeth, put my hand around the base of her neck and steered her to the door.
‘Betsy I –’
‘Shshsh,’ I said. ‘Go and help Tony pick himself up, there’s a good girl. Do as you’re told now, darling, or I’ll break your moody little spine.’
She opened and closed her mouth a few times, staring straight ahead, but I got her through the door and closed it softly behind her. ‘There,’ I said to Betsy Galvez. ‘That’s better. Now we can talk.’
You’ve got to hand it to Betsy: grace under pressure. She sat back in her chair (already mentally composing the stunned and apologetic call to Tony Lamb: He’s been under a lot of stress . . . Truth is, I think the medication . . .) and crossed her blue stockinged legs in a whisper of electrified nylon. The mannish hands (liver spot
s coming soon; already a phthisic look) came to rest together on the plump yam of her belly, and her head rested back so that she could regard me as if from a position of unruffled superiority. She’s very good at pretending to be unruffled, is Betsy. She lets her mouth, that wry old orifice so charmingly radialled with its hundred fine lines, perform little smirky manoeuvres to show you she’s well aware that this is all tremendously meaningless fun and that she’s going along with it like an indulgent auntie. For all that, I knew she wasn’t quite unruffled. A part of her saw this whole spectacle as confirmation that the business with A Grace of Storms had, as she’d suspected it might, sent Gunn completely off his rocker.
I rushed across the room, knelt before her and put my hands on her knees. The knees were the size of babies’ skulls.
‘You need to get one hand up to my chin, darling, if this is a Classically inspired entreaty,’ she said. ‘What on earth do you think you’re playing at?’
I pushed my face into her lap and held it there for a moment. Delicious aroma: laundered wool, Opium, the noon tuna-salad, Laphroaig single malt, fagsmoke and ah, yes, surely a trace of Betsy’s sly and seasoned vadge. I leaped to my feet, crossed the Persian rug and threw myself into the leather couch so lately and ingloriously vacated by Tony Lamb. Betsy – with more amdram suppression of girlish collusion – took a Dunhills from her silver case and lit up from a hideous malachite and gold desk lighter. I followed suit with a Silk Cut and a Swan Vesta.
‘It’s very simple, Betsy,’ I said. ‘It’s really unbelievably simple. I wanted to see you, so here I am.’
Dunhill smoke exhaled nasally in twin plumes. Slowblinking heavy-lidded eyes. ‘Ah,’ she said – gravelly monosyllable – ‘A newly discovered allergy to the telephone?’