They were remarkably similar, these emails, as if the writers had bought a template from a subscription service or done a module on a creative writing MA about how to charm overworked editors. Mainly they’d had an agent, who had taken them on, raving about their novel, then submitted it to all the major houses, where it had been knocked back, and the writers had then suggested they send it to one of the smaller places, but the agents had said they didn’t deal with those places. Of course not; there was nothing in it for them. So, the agents were fired and were probably delighted to be fired and the writers could submit to people like me, only to find we weren’t open to submissions, but we’d make an exception, wouldn’t we? For them? Even though none of them seemed to have gone to the trouble to assess my taste by checking out the books I had actually acquired.
Ian’s approach, via direct messages on Twitter, was different. He was serious, but it was like he didn’t really care. I guessed it was a front and he cared a great deal. But the thing was, when he told me a bit about the novel, it was like it had been written just for me. It was about London, he said. That was the first and most important thing. It was also about despair. And it was about holes in the fabric of reality that may or may not exist. And maps, he said. And spies. Spies? Yes, spies, but they weren’t that important. OK, I said. I was hooked. The question, for me, then, was could he write? There was only one way to find out. So I said he could email it to me and I’d have a quick look.
A quick look turned into me reading the whole thing in two days. Be suspicious of those people who claim to read entire novels, even short novels, in a single sitting. That’s not reading; that’s turning the pages. Just as writing a novel in a month isn’t writing; it’s typing. A couple of chapters in, I started making notes – corrections, editorial suggestions. That was how confident I was I would be telling him I wanted to publish it. It was so good, he was going to have to fuck it up quite badly for me to change my mind. He didn’t fuck it up.
Having decided I wanted to publish it, I found myself on edge, not sure if I should publish it. I walked around Jane’s flat, weighing up the pros and cons. In one corner of her bedroom a glass-eyed mannequin with a red wig balanced on a stand. I called her Jane.
‘What do you think, Jane?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve never met Ian. His novel is extremely bleak. It’s claustrophobic with existential despair and the narrator is deeply unsympathetic.’
I paused.
‘No, you’re right,’ I said. ‘I do always insist that characters don’t have to be likable, just believable.’
I straightened the mannequin’s wig, studying her glassy-eyed stare. She was wearing a summer dress of Jane’s, blue, which matched her eyes, unlike Jane’s, which were green.
I wasn’t questioning my view about the likability or otherwise of characters, but I was concerned about what I might be getting into. A widely held opinion is that it is a mistake to conflate narrator and author, yet a convergence of Ian and his narrator was precisely what I feared.
What if Ian was like his narrator? Did it even matter? Well, yes, I tended to believe it did. Not in general, but in this particular case. I kept a Wankers Shelf – a section of my library reserved for authors so narcissistic they asked their publisher to stick their author photo on the front cover of their book, or they wrote a piece for publication constructed around extracts from their fan mail; for authors so convinced of their own greatness they refused to ‘get out of bed for less than a grand’ when invited to contribute to an anthology; for authors who were just wankers – wankers to their editors, wankers to their publicists, wankers to booksellers, wankers to their readers. Just wankers.
Was Ian’s narrator a wanker? I wasn’t sure, but he was the kind of guy who would fuck someone over without a second’s thought. He was amoral, but was he immoral? He was almost certainly bipolar or perhaps suffering from a personality disorder, which maybe explained some of his behaviour, but did it excuse it? Was I being a dick by worrying that Ian might be a wanker? That he might be writing about himself? Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I do it all the time.
I wandered into Jane’s kitchen and stood at the sink for a minute looking across into her neighbours’ kitchen. I removed the half-full compostable bag from the waste food caddy and took it outside. On my way back in I picked up the post, dropping the fliers for prayer meetings and club nights and cards for taxi firms straight in the recycling box in the hall. I carried the rest back up to the kitchen and dropped it on the table. I flicked through the letters while the kettle was boiling. Nothing for me, nothing for Jane. Where were these people now, I wondered. Would HMRC and the banks, power companies and credit card companies who sent this stuff carry on doing so, to these people at this address, until someone told them to stop? I poured the tea, but left it cooling on the worktop. I stood at the window in what I called the front room, watching mothers walk past with their children, having collected them from the primary school at the end of the road. I went into the second bedroom, where Jane had encouraged me to set up a work station – the little table that had become my desk and a typing chair rescued from a skip. I came out again. On the chest of drawers on the landing (Jane had cleared the bottom drawer for my use) was an asymmetrical red glass vase about a foot high that happened, right then, to be catching the light from the window. I took my phone out to take a picture of it. While the light continued to favour the vase, I moved it around to find its best position, taking numerous photographs as I did so.
I drifted back to my desk and thought about Ian. When I thought of him now I tended to picture him, because of the link with the Belgian stamps, as looking like King Baudouin. Severe side parting, glasses. Pastel colouring.
I created a new email.
Hi Ian…
I backspaced over that.
Dear Ian…
I deleted that too.
Ian…
I leaned back in my typing chair and took my phone out of my pocket. I opened my photos. The screen filled with thumbnails of the red vase. I touched one to expand it and then navigated through the series, deleting some, keeping others. When I had chosen the one I liked best I emailed it to myself and opened the email on my laptop, then saved the picture to a memory stick. I ejected the memory stick, closed the laptop and removed it from the desk. I had a hiding place for it in Jane’s bedroom.
As I knelt down to slide the laptop between the wardrobe and the wall, I looked at Jane in her red wig and blue dress and put my finger to my lips – Shhh.
I walked up to the main road and turned right. In among the Turkish restaurants – the artists Gilbert and George ate at a particular one at the same time every night – and the cafés and bars where ownership of a MacBook Pro earned you a seat in the window, I eventually found a print shop and went in. It would take an hour, they said, so I left it with them and walked on down Stoke Newington Road. When I had last frequented the area as a student in the 1980s making repeat visits to the Rio cinema, it had felt like the edge of nowhere, half deserted, forgotten; in the last few years young men with RAF moustaches and full beards, dressed in plus fours and waistcoats, had started to appear. Just as they had in the 1980s, many of the women wore boilersuits, but now they were made of cotton drill, not polyester, and they were paint-spattered. You were as likely to hear French as Turkish or Jamaican-accented English. Late in the evening, young people from all over London stood in long lines outside anonymous doorways leading down to basement clubs.
An hour later I was back in Jane’s kitchen unpacking beer from Dalston Wines and vegetables from the market. I also had a ten-by-eight colour print of the red vase and a cheap clip frame from the print shop. I located Jane’s hammer and a nail and I hung the framed photograph on the wall above the chest of drawers on the landing, in other words behind the red vase itself. I don’t know if you can picture that: a picture of a thing, in situ, behind the thing itself. Not right behind it, so it couldn’t be seen, but up on the wall above and behind it.
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nbsp; I didn’t tell Jane about it, preferring to wait and see how long it would take her to notice it. She came home that night and didn’t immediately spot it. I poured her a glass of wine and suggested she relax in the front room while I served up dinner.
‘If you mean the sitting room…’ she said.
As I was coming through with the food, I saw that Jane had got up from the sofa and was looking at herself in the mirror over the fireplace with rapt attention. I waited in the doorway, partly concealed, and watched her pull and prod at the skin under her chin, which she habitually described to me as her ‘turkey neck’. I always told her I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I didn’t. She had beautiful skin, unlined, just like that of the mannequin, but she worried disproportionately about the appearance of signs of ageing.
I didn’t care about looking my age. I cared instead, not about getting older as such, but about its ultimate consequence. Death was not so far away and getting closer. It wasn’t so much the inevitability of it, at some point in the future, as the possibility of an early death, especially a preventable one, so I maintained a constant vigil for danger signs. I couldn’t bear the thought that death might make a fool of me, creeping up on me when I had my back turned.
So that Jane wouldn’t think I was doing exactly that to her, I cleared my throat to announce my presence. I looked down at the bowls I was carrying, but not before I noticed her fingers move quickly up to her face to brush away some imaginary crumb of mascara.
Who in their early fifties hasn’t known loss? I had lost my father, Jane her mother, who had died very young from a progressive disease when Jane had been barely out of her teens. I sometimes wondered if Jane’s preoccupation with ageing was part of a specific worry about the same or a similar progressive, incurable condition. She had watched her mother deteriorate, at first slowly, over several years, then rapidly. What worried me was what she might do if she actually found the evidence she was looking for.
‘This looks delicious, darling,’ she said as I handed her one of the bowls.
We ate in comfortable silence.
More alarming perhaps was the loss of friends. Breast cancer had taken one of Jane’s oldest friends. A brain tumour had curtailed the life of a friend of mine, but she had already been terminally ill when I had made her acquaintance, which had somehow, in retrospect at least, made it easier to bear, as a loss, as if it had been written into the T&Cs of the friendship from the start.
Jane took the dirty bowls through to the kitchen and returned with dessert, twice passing the chest of drawers on the landing. If hanging the picture of the red vase behind the red vase was an experiment, it was not one concerned with measuring Jane’s powers of observation, but one more to do with the phenomenon of doubling, of repetition. I wondered if there might be circumstances in which we fail to notice a picture within a picture, or a story within a story.
‘What shall we cook for Joe?’ Jane asked me.
As I gazed blankly into the deep-sea green of Jane’s eyes, I experienced a sickening sensation as if I was falling into some kind of abyss. I pressed my hand on the arm of the sofa as if to steady myself.
‘What’s the matter, darling?’ I heard Jane’s voice asking me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’d forgotten Joe was coming.’
‘That’s all right, isn’t it? You must have asked him.’
Joe Cross and I had been friends for twenty years. We met after I wrote to him about his stories, which were always the same but different, by which I mean they were always recognisably his and they were always not only set in London but very much about London, although each one told a different story with different characters. Well, characters with different names, but a lot of them were a lot like Joe. And the stories tended to feature similarly weird stuff that happened to characters like him. He was my kind of writer, using a lot of real experience, then twisting his material so you didn’t really know where his story ended and his narrator’s began.
When a small press had offered to publish Joe’s first novel, I said we needed to get him an author photograph sorted out. We went for long walks around the East End and in Docklands and along the river, touring his locations, trying to get a decent picture. The trouble was he always looked like he was being shot by firing squad rather than by me, with a camera. He stood as straight as a post, hands by his sides.
‘I don’t know what we should cook for him,’ I said to Jane. ‘It’s funny I’ve never had him round to eat wherever I’ve been living – or staying.’
I glanced at Jane and she smiled at me. She asked what Joe and I tended to have when we ate out, which we didn’t do that often, and I said curry, down Brick Lane and around there, so that was that.
Later that night I emailed Ian to tell him I wanted to publish his novel.
* * *
When Joe arrived, I was in the kitchen at a crucial stage. I heard Jane let him in and take him straight into the front room. I turned down the heat, grabbed drinks and glasses and made my way through.
‘You two have met, haven’t you?’ I said, once I’d said hello to Joe.
‘Several times,’ Jane said, rolling her eyes, ‘and you say that every time.’
‘I know,’ I said, smiling at Joe, who chuckled obligingly.
I glanced at the mannequin, which had been moved into the front room and was standing in the corner, still wearing the blue dress and the red wig.
After we’d been chatting for a few minutes, I said the food would be about ready and Joe asked for the bathroom. Jane told him where it was and I watched as he left the room, his body briefly framed in the doorway. His head was as distinctive from the back as from any other angle. He’d worn a short back and sides since the eighties, the kind of short you can only get with clippers, either your own or the barber’s, and his skull stuck out above the neck, creating a somewhat pronounced overhang.
When he returned, he looked at each of us in turn and I noticed that his hairline – he’d always kept his hair longer at the front, not quite Stray Cats style but getting there – had perhaps receded a little since I had last seen him. ‘Love the vase,’ he said.
Jane looked momentarily puzzled, then smiled. ‘Thank you! It’s just an old thing I got… I can’t remember where I got it.’
Joe turned to me, frowning. I looked between him and Jane.
‘He means…’ I started to say, but tailed off.
‘I mean what you’ve done with it. Classic mise en abîme.’
Jane wore an air of bafflement.
‘Thanks,’ I said, beginning to regret my initiative.
‘I’m so sorry, Joe,’ Jane said, accessing another level of politeness as she tended to do if she felt herself backed into a corner. ‘I’m not quite following. I wonder if it might be because of some clever thing Nick has done, maybe?’ This with a little pointed look at me.
‘I’d better go and serve up,’ I said.
As I left, I heard Joe start to explain the term mise en abîme and Jane step out on to the landing to take a look at the vase.
‘How could I have missed that?’ she said, then, louder and with a slight edge: ‘I wonder why Nick didn’t tell me?’
We ate around the coffee table, scooping up chicken chana and Bombay aloo with poppadoms and naan bread.
‘So, how long has that picture been there?’ Jane asked.
‘Only since yesterday.’
‘I don’t know how I could have missed it. You should have told me!’ she said, digging me playfully in the ribs. Well, playfully enough to give Joe the impression it was playful.
‘So,’ Joe said, looking up at me from his clean plate and clearly keen to change the subject, ‘how’re things with you?’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’ve just taken on this really great novel. It’s a first novel but the author doesn’t want me to describe it as a debut. He’s from the north, but doesn’t want to be categorised as a northern writer. Keeps changing his mind about his date of birth.�
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‘Sounds like hard work,’ said Jane.
‘It should be worth it,’ I said.
‘What’s it about?’ Joe asked.
‘London. Holes in the fabric of reality. A crisis. A personal crisis. Also espionage, but that’s kind of in the background. And maps. Lots of stuff about maps.’
‘Another one for the Richard and Judy Book Club,’ Jane said, straight-faced.
I reached over and wiped her plate with my last bit of naan.
‘Hey!’
‘More drinks?’ I suggested, standing up.
I returned with two more beers and the rest of the bottle of wine. They were talking about Joe’s high blood pressure.
‘I suppose I could cut down,’ he was saying, ‘but it’s not like I drink that much anyway.’
‘Shall I take this away again?’ I said, withdrawing the beer I had been about to offer him.
‘Ha ha, no. Give it here.’
‘Good health,’ I said and we clinked bottles.
* * *
When Joe had left, we carried the dirty pots through to the kitchen.
‘I’ll do this. You relax,’ I said.
‘It’s my place. I should clean up,’ Jane said.
We worked together in silence for a few minutes. Jane washed a pan and stood it upside down on the draining board. I picked it up to dry it.
‘You can leave things to drain,’ she said.
‘Actually…’ I began, reaching for a piece of kitchen towel and wiping some dirt from the inside of the pan. I was aware of both wanting Jane to know she had left the pan dirty and not wanting her to know at the same time.
Dead Letters Anthology Page 25