Hawthorn and Child (27 page)

– Money, I said.

– Money.

– Is there any?

He didn’t think so, but he would check, he told me, whether there was something due from Italy, which it was possible that there might be, or Spain, about which he was less sure. It would be nothing very much in any case.
Bits and bobs.
Dribs and drabs
. I wanted to get drunk.

– It’s difficult for everyone, Clive. You know that. Literary fiction is not doing well. It’s big inconsequential trash, memoirs … you know … celebrity shit.

– I need …

I trailed off and poked my crumbling burger with a fork.

– What? You need what?

I had been about to say that I needed some way of making my rent. Mr Malik had collected for June in advance, and I had enough for July and August, and September, perhaps, if I ate only rice. But I would be flat broke, and after that the only option would be a humiliating request to Rosemary. Or an aggressive one – the house was jointly owned.

– I need to feel that I’m not wasting my time.

– You’re not. It’ll come back to us. The important thing though, is this.

Stanley has a habit of announcing that he’s about to say something important, and then pausing for an age while he thinks of something important to say. I played with my food and noticed that I was drinking the wine faster than he was. He wasn’t keeping up. I wondered if that was a signal that there would not be a second bottle. I thought about getting a new agent.

– Great writing, he announced suddenly, spitting a particle of chicken at my chin. Great writing wises. Rises. It rises. It comes to the surface.

He closed his eyes briefly, regretting the image.

– They’re going to forget about celebrities eventually. They’re going to forget about the brand name. They’re going to stop thinking that those peripherals have anything to do with them, with their role, and they’ll put them back in their place. They’re going to remember great writing. Because they’ll want to be great publishers again. Because that’s what it’s actually about, and readers will remind them. This is temporary. You’re a great writer. Of
literature
. You just have to keep going. Your time is coming. I know you don’t care about money.

– What?

– I know that’s not what’s important to you.

– Who told you that?

– Let me finish.

– I care about money.

– I know you do. Through me. I am your carer. Of money. I’m not your carer. God.

He guffawed unpleasantly.

– I care about the money
for
you. But my point is that great literature has been a staple of our culture for six hundred years, nine hundred, whatever. It’s not going to disappear because some arsehole has worked out how to turn a fat profit on the autobiographies of other arseholes. Who can barely manage to write their name with their own shit.

He took a gulp of his wine. Stanley’s grip on metaphor is all wrong, like a boxer handed a tennis racket.

– The market’s top heavy, ridiculous. Either you’re a hit or you’re nowhere.

– I’m nowhere.

– You are building a back list of quality, Clive. Reviews, translations, respect. All you need is for the climate to change – even a little. And … or … to have a bit of luck with the next one. Or the one after that. Something that catches the bastards’ attention. That’s all it takes. A spark. Then you’re in the window. You’re on the shelves in numbers. You’ve got your public.

He nodded, pleased with his reasoning, and waved his cutlery at me.

– Then your career will catch up with your talent. You’re too good a writer to be doing well now. You can’t write badly – that’s your problem.

I looked at him incredulously.

– Of course I can write badly.

– There isn’t a paragraph of bad writing in any of the four novels for which I am your humble agent and representative.

– Don’t talk crap Stanley.

– You’re too hard on yourself.

– And anyway, I resent the suggestion that I can’t write badly. It sounds like a deficiency.

He laughed, but I didn’t. I should be able to write anything I want, at will. In any way I want. A writer who can’t write badly is not really a writer at all. Writing is a performance. A actor who cannot affect a limp or an American accent is not much of an actor. I tried to explain this to Clive, but it distracted him into film talk. There was once a option sold on one of my books. It expired. I asked him had he ever heard back from them. He had not.

I filled our glasses, restoring ostensible parity. But I had drunk much more. Through the window the street was dry and busy. The threat of rain was empty and people walked normally in all directions, in great numbers. No one seemed to care about anything very much at all.

– Would you get a job? Stanley said.

– What?

– Something to tide you over.

– Tide?

– Tide you over. See you through.

– Until when?

– Until you finish the new thing.

– I don’t know how to get a job. I haven’t had a proper job in ten years. I’m a writer. What are you talking about? What kind of job?

– Don’t panic, he said. Teach? Creative writing.

– I couldn’t do that.

– Yes you could. It’s such a lot of bollocks. Fewer commas, more full stops is what it amounts to Clive. God help us. As if we didn’t have enough shit awful writers. You could join the industry that creates shit awful writers of shorter sentences.

– I can’t, Stanley. You’ve … it’s … Anyway, I’m not a fucking teacher I’m a writer. And too talented to make a living, apparently.

Stanley stared a me seriously.

– You’re depressed, he announced. Tell me about Rosemary.

I told him about Rosemary. We got a second bottle.

I had no money.

I was a writer.

Lunch with Stanley left me depressed but proud. Stubbornly determined that there should be a way to write my way out of trouble. Despair and hubris are close on the ratchet. They blend, somewhere, in the little black murmurs of the mind.

It’s honest, isn’t it? This is what my despair declared to me. It is honest and admirable. I have one skill, and one skill only, so that skill is what I will use. A writer writes. If I find myself on a desert island, lost to civilization, just give me a sharp stone and a flat rock, and I will write civilization into
existence
for I am a writer and there is nothing that I cannot create. Nothing. The world is a written thing, humanity a story, life a plot. There you have it. Life is a plot.

I decided to write a bestseller.

Why not? Why not apply my skill to writing badly? Or if not
badly
then at least simply, easily, clearly and quickly – making up for in mechanics what I neglected in character, style, depth, thought? Entertain the fuckers. Popularity is not a mark of poor quality for god’s sake. Not at all.

I would write under a pseudonym.

It was a grim sort of business at first, as if I had
undertaken
something unpleasant. A tax return. I looked at the current bestsellers. I examined the bestseller lists. I went to my local chain bookshop and noted what was taking up space in the windows and on the display tables. Which titles were so heavily stocked and discounted that buying one of them felt casual – something you should give no more thought to than buying a ready meal. In my notebook I wrote down the sorts of books they were. Memoirs. Thrillers. Fantasies. I wrote down some titles and some plot details. There seemed to be so many. Titles I mean. Not plots.

It was out of despair that it started. But I became,
gradually
, as I applied myself to the task, more positive. Even, at times, enthusiastic. This was a project I could proceed with methodically. It was practical, measurable. I could use index cards and cork boards and diagrams. I could structure my plot like an architect designs a house. A small, functional, unlovely house, but a house nonetheless. My enthusiasm excited me.

But it started in despair. Why should anyone be surprised about where it ends?

I steeled myself. I adopted cynicism. I did my best to dampen the excitement. Stay cynical, stay in control.

Not a children’s book, and not fantasy. I could not be that cynical. I have no feeling for either genre, and no aptitude for the brazen sort of manipulation it would take to fake it. Which is too bad.

Memoir, perhaps. My own name, my Staffordshire
childhood
, Cambridge, the years in Mexico and Peru, the accident, the affair, my disastrous marriage. But I knew that it didn’t amount to very much. And so it would turn to fiction, and I would be back where I had already been, forging pointless middle-class dramas out of self-importance and idleness.

A thriller, then. A thriller. Death in the best sense. I would take my depressive tendency and use it as a weapon. A dark foreboding thriller in which death comes and tickles us, and sets us a puzzle and lets us escape. It would need to be sharp, succinct; an irresistible one page pitch – and perhaps two or three sample chapters – and I would need to get it to Stanley as quickly as I could. Then he could do his thing. Sell it. To the highest bidder. Sell the film rights. Sell the serial rights. Sell. Sell. Sell.

The poplar tree swayed and shattered the setting sun, and the black clouds marched westwards, and the air was brittle, ready for anything. From below there was music, a compressed ticking and click, like a cartoon bomb in a matchbox, while over my head footsteps sounded in short inscrutable patterns, like chess moves, expressions of thought, punctuation, a code.

I made notes. I thought about death. I thought about deception and hiding and method. But I was distracted by the end result. I wrote out lists of potential pseudonyms for myself. Lists of possible names for my hero. I thought about Rosemary. She has a friend – Mandy or Melinda or something – whose partner is a Metropolitan police officer called Child. The name had stayed with me, though I’d never met him. It could be arranged, I supposed. At some stage I would need access to the lexicon and procedures of the murder squad. Or whatever they’re called.

But I was treading water, fog bound, unsure what it was I should do. The way ahead did not seem, now that I was looking for it, as obvious as I had hoped. But then Will McArdle spoke to me. And he blew a gust of wind in my
direction
and the mists cleared, and I not only knew which way to go but I was certain too of my destination and of what I needed to do to get there and of the reward that awaited me. Cynicism was replaced by conviction, and I believed with the certainty of a true believer, and I doubted not my place in paradise.

Will McArdle is an Irishman who lives near me in Crouch End. Almost Crouch End. I am on the Archway side, he is on the Turnpike Lane side. He, like me, rents a flat. He, like me, is recently separated. In his case, there are children. He writes for television. We met years ago at some sort of publisher’s party, and formed a casual, maudlin sort of friendship. We used to meet, not very often, in odd little bars to drink and to complain about our respective partners. Rosemary followed me once, convinced I was meeting a woman. I didn’t notice. She told me about it later. By that time of course, the fact that I
hadn’t
been meeting another woman, and had, exactly as I’d told her, gone out for a drink with a friend, was a cause for derision. It was
pathetic. Juvenile
. Hanging around getting drunk with my
low-life Irish writing buddy
. She supposed we had talked about
books
.

Since first Will, and then I, had left our partners, and had, without knowing it, rented small flats in the same
neighbourhood
, we had become slightly embarrassed about the coincidences, and had seen less of each other. But one day I simply bumped into him, in Crouch End proper, as he was coming out of Prospero’s Books with a study of Brecht. He asked me to go for a pint. And as I had been stalled all day, trying to decide whether I could start with the serial killer instead of the detective, and wondering then whether women or children would make better victims, I decided to join him. We went to The King’s Head. When we thought we should eat something we got sandwiches from Budgen’s and ate them at a bench on the green while big rain clouds rushed by towards engagements elsewhere. Then we went to The Harringay Arms. We got very drunk.

At closing time we stumbled back to Will’s place, where he had a bottle of Highland Park. We talked mostly about women, generally and specifically. We talked as well about books, about writing, about work. He explained what was wrong with television, and I explained what was wrong with publishing. He confided that he was finally going to do
something
worthwhile
. That he was sick of the shit he wrote, that he was going to write the plays he’d always wanted to write, that the theatre was all he cared about. That it was time for
pure art
. I resisted the temptation to tell him what I was doing. I said only, I think, that there was a new project, and that I was hooked by it. But I did ask him about Ireland. I think I was, in drink, conducting research. What, I suddenly wanted to know, had Will seen of The Troubles? What could he tell me about horrible murders? Abductions. Torture. Random sectarian killings. The horrible ones. The details. I wanted to know the physical details. I was sure that out of thirty years of carnage there was bound to be something I could salvage.

But Will was really only interested in politics.

– Don’t get me started! he shouted, long after he had started.
Killers
, he kept on saying.
Killers, the lot of them
. He seemed to be speaking about public figures. There were some names I recognized, but I am not … my knowledge of Northern Irish politics is somewhat sketchy. And I was very drunk. Had he known any of these men? I wanted to know. Had he known any
killers
?

– I knew some men. Serious fuckers, some of them. RUC men, mostly. And other letters too, sometimes. Tough bastards. Tough fucking bastards Clive, I grant you. I grant you that. But they were up against something Clive. Up against something that you’ll never … that
no one
here will ever understand. Dark. Insidious. Organized. Amoral. Intelligent. Evil.