Bright Young Things

by Scarlett Thomas

  Scarlett Thomas was born in London in 1972. Her other novels include PopCo, The End of Mr. Y, which was longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007, and Our Tragic Universe. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kent.

  Also by Scarlett Thomas

  Going Out

  The End of Mr Y

  PopCo

  Our Tragic Universe

  Monkeys with Typewriters

  This paperback edition published in 2012 by Canongate Books,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

  Copyright © 2001 by Scarlett Thomas

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Scarlett Thomas

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Hodder and Stoughton

  A division of Hodder Headline

  www.canongate.tv

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 380 5

  Export ISBN 978 0 85786 392 8

  eISBN 978 0 85786 381 2

  Typeset in Centaur MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books

  In memory of Dreamer

  1999-2011

  Thanks . . .

  Francesca Ashurst, Sam Ashurst, Hari Ashurst-Venn, Couze Venn, Tom Fraser, Jason Kennedy, Alyss Thomas, Matt Thorne, Nicholas Blincoe, Rebbecca Ray, Simon Trewin, Sarah Ballard, Kirsty Fowkes.

  Preface

  When I wrote Bright Young Things, people still played tapes on Walkmans, and the most interesting thing you could do with a mobile phone was to play Snake on it. People still rang each other on landlines. People watched videos. There was email, just about, but SMS messaging had yet to take off. There was no Wikipedia and Google was not a verb.

  It was 1999 and everything had gone a bit millennial. Tins were beginning to appear in shops with use-by dates beginning with the number 2, and for a while it was pretty exciting trying to spot them. At least the people who produced canned goods thought the year 2000 was actually going to happen. Looking forward to (and being terrified at the thought of) the world ending on 1 January was one of the few exciting things left in my life. I ’d ended up in Torquay with a huge overdraft and a lack of enthusiasm for the three mystery novels I ’d published. I was twenty-seven years old and still wondering what to do with my life. I was a writer, yes, but not yet a very good one. I hadn’t developed any real style of my own, and although there were some good lines in my crime novels, characters still did things like smile cynically and sniff the air tentatively. Where was the emotional truth? If people weren’t killing each other in horrible ways they were doing things like inwardly berating themselves. Everyone else I knew seemed to be writing cool books about people doing nothing, or taking drugs and doing nothing. In my books, if people took drugs they died. Looking back now, I guess I’m pleased that Lily Pascale, my heroine, smokes all the time, forgets to eat and wears too much lipstick. That was me, once upon a time. But once upon a time I ’d also taken drugs and not died. I’d done quite a lot of nothing.

  There I was in Torquay as autumn set in; using my old lacrosse sticks as window locks, unable to have a bath because the electric boiler never got the water hot enough. Luckily I had a gas oven, which made things a little cosier. (It was that Torquay kitchen that ended up being the basis for the one in The End of Mr. Y, several years later.) I didn’t have my dog Dreamer yet; but somewhere in the slums of Plymouth her mother must have been pregnant with her. The following year she would find me, and although she loved sleeping as much as I did – maybe just slightly more – she taught me to go outside and look at natural things. She also taught me responsibility. But in 1999 I still spent most of my time trying to come up with money-making ideas, playing videogames or wasting hours in internet chatrooms. I smoked, ate junk food and wondered why I felt so crap all the time. I’d done what I’d always dreamed of and become a published writer. But it hadn’t stopped me feeling lonely. It hadn’t helped me with relationships. It hadn’t made me feel like a success. It was as if I was still waiting to be discovered. I wanted a miracle job advertisement. I wanted someone to come along and say, ‘Just do what you’re good at and we’ll give you enough money for your rent, bills, cigarettes and some nice food and clothes.’ I guess I also wanted the satisfaction of being recognised for doing something well.

  I decided that I wanted to write something authentic about this feeling of wasted ambition that I knew many of my generation shared. (I realise now that it must be much worse for the generation that is just now graduating from university with even less hope than we had.) In 1995 I’d left university with a First. I went to London to seek my fortune but ended up working in a nightclub, taking speed to stay up all night. During the day I played Super Mario games. I looked at the job ads in the Media Guardian every week and even applied for some of them. The only interview I ever got was with MTV Europe, which was pretty exciting at the time. In the end I was runner-up for what must be the most meaningless job in the world: creating the MTV-logo inserts that appear between the music videos. All of this came back to me as I sat in my fat in Torquay in 1999. Why hadn’t I tried harder? I could have been part of an internet start-up, or gone into advertising, or made documentaries. OK, so my car was always breaking down and I didn’t have the right clothes. But those were surely just excuses. What was stopping me? And where were all the cool friends I was supposed to have? At one point my closest friends were characters in video games. I had conversations in my head with the sort of people I never met but wished I did. People a bit like the characters in Bright Young Things.

  In 1999 I was reading a lot of Raymond Carver, and discovering that real literature could be about things like broken fridges and could be written in quite simple sentences. I realised that I didn’t like adverbs although I ’d been using them all the time because I thought that’s what writing was. I was also a big fan of Douglas Coupland, the first person I’d ever read who wrote about something that resembled my life. At the time I was writing Bright Young Things there was a real buzz about Magnus Mills’s first novel, The Restraint of Beasts. This was an authentic story about fencing (the working-class kind) told in a deadpan, minimalist style, full of conversations that went nowhere. I loved conversations that went nowhere; I’d fallen in love with both Beckett and Albee as a teenager. Thinking about it now, I’m pretty sure I read Mills long after I ’d finished Bright Young Things, which probably means I can’t cite it as an influence. But for some reason I still think of The Restraint of Beasts as being important to me when I wrote my novel. Maybe I read an extract in the paper. Or maybe I just heard somewhere that it was now acceptable to write a book like that in the UK: gritty, raw, authentic, funny and minimalist. And not about posh people.

  In Britain in the 1990s, postmodernism was in full swing. As Fredric Jameson said, this was a culture that was depthless, meaningless and driven by pastiche and nostalgia. It was all surface. It wantonly mixed high and low culture. Everything referenced everything else. Quentin Tarantino had become a famous film director not by going out into the world and experiencing things, but by learning about films by working in a video shop! I’d spent most of my time as a Cultural Studies undergraduate writing passionate love–hate essays about postmodernism. And while postmodernism is everything Jameson says it is and worse, it probably also enabled me, a cultural misfit who’d grown up on a council estate in East London, to think I could probably write a proper novel. Would it be a great novel? No. But that didn’t matter (yet). In a world where someone like Chris Evans could present
a live TV programme full of mistakes, self-referentiality and, well, complete bollocks, it seemed that anything was possible. This was a time where dead air on the radio could be ‘read’ as ironic, and people stopped pretending they didn’t use auto-cues on the TV. So I ditched the murder, adverbs and predictability. Then I wrote a novel full of the literary equivalent of dead air. This is the book you’re holding now.

  The characters in Bright Young Things don’t know they are in a book, but they do know that they are in a story. Thanks to Scream and similar films, metafiction was all the rage in the 1990s, and it was very common to have characters comment on the genre in which they found themselves. To me, this refected an increasing anxiety about hyperreality. After all, when the world is covered in billboards and people talk to each other using rhythms and expressions from TV, and when, for a while, a whole culture seemed obsessed with saying ‘Whassup?’ in the style of a Budweiser commercial, what’s the difference between being in real life and being in a story? With this in mind, I wanted to take some characters out of the culture through which they defined themselves, put them somewhere else and see what happened. My theory was that they would bring their culture with them, as settlers have throughout history, and continue to use it to define themselves and each other. In other words, this was going to be a book in which young people, deprived of TV, music and video games, sit around talking about TV, music and video games. My original draft of Bright Young Things didn’t even have the dead man in it. My characters just sat around and talked. My publisher at the time asked for something sinister to happen, and so I created the dead man. Looking at the book again, I think it works. Perhaps it’s not the most plausible thing I’ve ever written, but it adds some drama and tension in a place where it’s probably needed.

  My original idea must have popped straight out of the zeitgeist, because I was already well underway with my novel when the first mainstream reality TV shows Castaway and Big Brother were announced in the UK. By the time they both aired in 2000, Bright Young Things had been delivered to the publisher. But, publishing schedules being what they are, it didn’t actually come out until February 2001. I lost count of the reviews that declared confidently that my book was a satire on reality TV, a term that didn’t even exist at the time I was writing it. Of course I was annoyed that people didn’t realise that I’d independently come up with this idea of young people sitting around having half-meaningful, half-meaningless conversations in a house cut off from society. But, to be honest, I was thrilled to be reviewed at all.

  When The Face (now sadly defunct) reviewed Bright Young Things, it was broadly positive, but the reviewer did point out that the novel was so full of current pop-culture references that it would date easily. It’s true that many expressions are now extinct, twelve years on. No one talks about ‘city-girl’ novels any more, although perhaps it was a better term than chick lit. Even I don’t remember who or what ‘Another Level’ was. I think maybe a boy band. But a lot of pop-cultural space-junk has survived. Emily, we learn at one point, has all the episodes of Friends on videotape. Anne hums a Britney Spears song. Perhaps the book needs to be left to marinate for a bit longer to feel truly dated. Or perhaps it doesn’t feel that dated to me because it’s full of all the stuff that I remember.

  Something about living at the end of a millennium seems to make people nostalgic, or at least pre-nostalgic. When I was writing Bright Young Things you could buy time-capsule kits (or make your own, as demonstrated on Blue Peter) in order to bury some of your community’s material culture: to tell future archaeologists, historians or aliens how you lived in 1999. I wanted to do something similar with my novel. I wanted it to be a kind of time capsule that you could open ten years, twenty years, fifty years later and be surprised both by the things in it that still exist and by the things that are only faint memories. In a sense, every good novel is a time capsule. And while novels sprinkled with pop-culture and material-culture references can become tiresome quickly, I still believe in an unembarrassed and authentic representation of the detail of everyday life. Jane Austen presumably didn’t worry that in 300 years people wouldn’t know what a barouche was, and so in this spirit I threw in every current thing that interested me, whether it was likely to ‘date’ or not. Every cultural reference in my novel is real. Of course, while this is (I hope) interesting, and serves some historical as well as future-nostalgic purpose, the main focus of any novel has to be more sophisticated than that. Bright Young Things is also a novel about postmodern culture: a world in which grand narratives have been replaced with cheap narrative. It asks whether it is possible or even desirable to disrupt this. It asks whether it is possible to find meaning in a world overflowing with it.

  Bright Young Things is my own favourite of my early novels. Like The End of Mr. Y, it came out of a definite, passionate feeling that I had to express or otherwise go mad. I am often asked to what extent my writing is autobiographical. Every writer knows how hard this question is to answer honestly, and how difficult it can be to differentiate between authenticity on the one hand and autobiography on the other. I have never written people I know into my books, except very slightly. But my books are full of me: my feelings, experiences, memories. Almost every ‘true story’ narrated by the characters in Bright Young Things is something that really happened to me. Reading it again now, twelve years on, I am astonished by the details of my own life that I remembered in 1999 that I do not remember now. Or are those the bits I made up? I have no idea.

  Scarlett Thomas

  Deal, Autumn 2012

  Contents

  Part One

  Bright Young Things

  Anne

  Jamie

  Thea

  Bryn

  Emily

  Paul

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Part One

  Bright Young Things

  Bright Young Things wanted for big project.

  SAE to PO Box 2300 Edinburgh.

  The room contains a desk, a woman and two large stacks of paper.

  On the right-hand side of the desk, in a uniform pile, are the blank application forms, ready to be sent out. On the other are the stamped addressed envelopes, a haphazard stack, sent in by people wanting further information about the Bright Young Things job. The woman, Jackie, doesn’t look at the handwriting on each envelope, except to note the colour. She has been instructed to put application forms only into those envelopes addressed in blue or black. The ones with the small red capitals, the big green swirls, they go in the corner of the room: Discard Pile A. The colour thing doesn’t strike her as odd. All her jobs have some weird aspect to them. She just does what she’s told.

  Jackie is a professional envelope-filler. Occasionally she works from home, but with the kids screaming and chewing up all the envelopes, it isn’t ideal. Mo
re often she takes jobs like this, in a small room in a damp, empty block. All she has to do is put the forms in the envelopes and note how many she has done. Everything is provided for her; she just has to turn up and do what a machine can’t do. You need a brain for this, and eyes, and hands. Some of the envelopes have no stamps; some are already stuck down. These must be discarded.

  She’s up to number 105, and in a good rhythm now. Like a robot, her left hand pulls an envelope from the stack, scans the colour and either retains or throws it. A discarded envelope is dealt with in two seconds – look and discard, no need to waste time on those. The ones with blue or black writing are opened and filled with a form from the pile. A right-handed movement – into the envelope, tear off the strip and seal. This takes a total of five seconds. The envelopes without strips – the licking ones – Jackie throws on to a pile she’s invented: Discard Pile B. For three-sixty an hour she’s not going to lick anything. People should think about that when they send SAEs.

  In a minute she averages forty-five envelopes. In an hour she can do 2,700. By the end of the day she’ll have processed over fifteen thousand.

  When the envelopes are stuffed, she will go home and forget about them. Almost thirty per cent of the people who sent off their SAEs will send back the application form, to a different address this time. A man will sit in his office and read them all. And from the two thousand or so he reads, he will select six.

  Anne

  The 747 lurches in the sky. One more time, and Anne’s going to be sick.

  ‘Is it supposed to do this?’ she asks the man next to her.

  ‘This is nothing,’ he says. ‘One time I was on a flight and the plane just dropped two thousand feet.’

  ‘Two thousand?’ Anne tries to remain composed.