Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (22 page)

‘Shoot,’ I tell him. I mean it literally, but unfortunately he seems to be unarmed.

‘One: will you be offended if I leave in three minutes? Two: are you married? Three: is it all right if I write to you?’

‘Um,’ I say. ‘One: no. Two: um. Three: well, OK.’

‘Thank you,’ he says in a meaningful way, like an anchorman signing off for the night, and he gets up and leaves two and a half full minutes before his deadline, and doesn’t ask for an address, leaving me to assume he will contact me by astral projection.

I answer a few more questions wearily, and then sit down next to a pile of more books than there are people in the room, and offer to sign books.

‘You hate me!’ says Grandma, who of course is first in line. She is clutching her copy of my short stories to the spot of her plastic brace that would shield her heart, if she had one. I want to snatch my book away from her and dandle it on my knee and stroke its pages in a comforting way; I certainly do not write my name on the title page and give it back. ‘You
hate
me!’ she repeats.

‘I don’t
hate
you,’ I say. I could break her wrist with a handshake, if I wanted, and I do, but she doesn’t offer.

‘No, you
hate
me,’ she says ecstatically. ‘But you know, I read your last book, too, and actually I enjoyed it. Although the second chapter –’

‘Shut the fuck up, lady,’ I say, or words to that effect.

I sign a few more books, and then everyone has gone, except Ed and his wife. They look beautiful to me now. They have not read my books and therefore have no opinions. They believe I have fans.

‘You’re funny,’ says the wife mournfully.

‘Thank you,’ I answer.

‘You know what you should write?’ she says. She stands at the podium and looks out over the now empty folding chairs of the auditorium. ‘A book about the lighter side of losing a child.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ I ask. Surely I’ve misunderstood the question.

‘You know. Finding the humour in a child’s death. Like a jokebook.’

‘There’s humour in it?’ I ask.

‘Oh, yes,’ she says, in a voice that suggests there is not a lighter side of a single moment on this earth. ‘Oh, of course. My son died.’

I nod.

She still, isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at the long-gone audience.

‘And you know, one day, Ed and I were standing on the beach. Ed was eating a Subway sub. You know? And this seagull came down, and he stole it out of Ed’s hand. We knew it was my son. He’d taken the form of a seagull. My son loved ham and cheese. And Ed was jumping up and down and yelling at the seagull. And
it was funny,
’ she says, the way small children say
The End
when they finish telling a made-up nonsensical story, because there’s no other way to tell.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘A book like that,’ she says flatly. ‘It would be a big hit. You could go on Rosie O’Donnell. It’s
needed
.’

‘All right,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll think about it.’

And so I left without even being able to feel sorry for myself.

On the bright side, Patchett felt a hell of a lot better.

‘Their tricks and craft hae put me daft,
They’ve ta’en me in and a’ that,
But clear your decks, and Here’s the sex!
I like the jads for a’ that.’
Robert Burns, “The Jolly Beggars’

A few years ago I went to Perth, Western Australia, to participate in the literature festival, and for the most part had a wonderful time, especially as part of the deal was to go to Karratha and Broome to do literary events. In Broome, a tropical paradise, I went fishing in an alligator swamp, and had the misfortune to run over a wallaby. In Karratha, a mining town set in a landscape from Mars, I had to do the first-ever literary event. It was co-hosted by the Rotarians and the Soroptimists, and we had to approve their minutes before my reading could actually begin. I later discovered that the latter were locally referred to as the Soropticows. Driving around the countryside the next day, I came across the bronze monument to Red Dog that would eventually lead to my eponymous small book.

In Perth, one of my duties was to appear on panels. I don’t often do this any more, as I am fed up with hearing myself and other writers bullshitting fluently and speciously about whatever topics the audiences care to raise. In France the cult of the literary intellectual is farcically out of control, and I would hate to be part of any such tendency in the Anglophone world. There is, after all, no reason for a writer’s opinions to be thought superior to anyone else’s, and you might as well have a panel of my dad, the vet, the tobacconist, and the two fat people from the St John Ambulance Brigade who usually sit at the back of the audience.

I was still fresh in the wake of Captain Gorilla’s Mandarin, and so was the natural choice for a panel about love. I never claimed to be brilliant at it, or particularly knowledgeable about it; it was enough that I had created characters who could do it. Out in the sparkling sunshine, seated at a long table overlooking a crowd of expectant Australians, I found myself improvising opinions that sounded worryingly like those of my mother.

I can no longer recall who the other members of the panel were, but one of them was a bright young Aussie, whose gimmick for the day was to bring along an S&M prostitute. This formidable lady was nearly young, and was built like the proverbial brick shithouse. She was adorned with much colourful warpaint, and she wore the standard-issue stiletto boots, black fishnet stockings, and that odd scarlet garment which is half frilly swimming-costume and half corset. One look confirmed that in the unlikely event of there ever being a sexual encounter between us, it would have to be she who coughed up the wherewithal.

She took over the entire event. Cracking her whip, she commanded the audience to stand up, sit down, stand up, bow down. The respectable, mainly middle-aged and elderly Aussie audience meekly obeyed, and I suddenly realized why it had been so easy to get the Anzacs to commit suicide at Gallipoli.

These antics naturally made our panel ridiculous. My irritation caused me to suffer a fit of pedantry, because the panel was supposed to be about love, and I couldn’t see what S&M prostitution had to do with it. Sounding ever more like my mother I tried to make the distinction between love and sex, and found the audience agreeing with me vigorously. Everyone knows, after all, that the best sex arises out of emotional connection. Even so, for a long time afterwards I felt embarrassed by the whole thing. The event, however spurious, had been sabotaged, the audience had been humiliated, and I came out of it feeling that I had exposed myself as pompous and puritanical.

‘There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect, compared with which, reproach, hatred and opposition are names of happiness.’ Samuel Johnson

It was a cold March in North America, and I was on a publicity tour: ten cities in eleven days: the usual. I was midway through the trip when my publishers suggested I might like to make a detour to Florida, to read at a book festival there. Why not? Another day, another city.

I arrived in Miami on an afternoon such as I thought might only be experienced in Araby, everything in burnous white and limitless gradations of soft ochre and pale blue. Seen from the airport road, the city shimmered in a violet haze, its silver-and-glass towers trembling. My hotel, on South Beach, faced a purplish sea. On the sand a rout of sun-bronzed gods and honeyed maenads mellowly romped, all of them naked except for the odd strip of candy-bright cloth applied here and there to their perfect persons. The hotel itself seemed to date from the 1930s – big wooden ceiling-fans lazily turning, jalousie shutters on the windows, a walnut-panelled bar – but later I learned that the place had been distressed to make it look old. ‘Distressed’ in this usage was new to me; so were roller-blades. Between the beach and the road there was a palm-lined pedestrian way, where more glistening, chocolate-skinned giants swirled and spun as if on air. I stood at the window and looked down upon this bright scene of prelapsarian play and thought I might have landed on another, infinitely finer planet, than the one, off on the other side of the galaxy, upon which the world as I know it was hamfistedly modelled.

I went for a walk. That was a mistake. All the clothes I had brought with me were fit only for winter weather. The spectacle of a tweed-clad, pale, perspiring dwarf staggering amongst them must have amused the South Beachers, those lordly inhabitants of the planet Miami. I fled to the safe distress of my hotel room, where I lay on the bed through the rest of the long afternoon. The fan circled above me. The sun fell slowly down the sky. The liquid hissing of the air conditioner seemed the sound of time itself trying not to pass.

The reading took place next day in a large, glass-walled auditorium with the acoustics of an echo-chamber. On the stage along with me was a chap who the previous day had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. There was a large audience, all of whom, I felt sure, had come to hear him, and for that thrill were sullenly willing to put up with me. After the reading, of which I remember nothing, there was the book signing. This took place in a wide, sunny plaza that made me think of an execution yard in some South American republic of drugs and banditry. Against one wall – there could have been bullet marks, there could have been bloodstains – two small tables stood, piled with books, the Pulitzer laureate’s, and mine. He had a queue of excited autograph hunters that stretched halfway up the spine of Florida; I had three customers, or so I thought, one of them an academic who had written on my work, the second of whom looked decidedly unhinged, and the third a kindly fellow who stepped up first and leaned forward confidentially and, with a smile that was nothing but tender, whispered to me a sentence I often hear, even yet, in my dreams. ‘I’m not going to buy a book,’ he confided, ‘but you looked so lonely there, I thought I’d come and talk to you.’

‘Other people’s eggs have two yolks.’ Bulgarian proverb

After some unspeakable business at Goole Arts Centre, we head for what the promoter proudly introduces as ‘the best restaurant in Goole’. I default to the chicken bhuna, which turns out to be a kind of artificial mycelium woven into a chicken effect and drowned in luminous chemicals. Throughout the meal the promoter recites his own poems from memory. I return to the digs. In the hotel bar the wall-eyed landlord carefully inscribes a perfect arse in the foam of my Guinness, which promptly evaporates before my eyes. I retire to a tiny bare room built around an irregular nonagon, or rather accidentally formed by the unequal pressure of several other rooms; through one of the many walls a couple, possibly human, are making love, though it sounds more like someone is killing them with alternate blows. I attempt to make a cup of tea. The two tiny UHT individual milk-pots are both sour. I hear a low and long intestinal gurgle, the sort of sound that heralds the onset of tropical giardia. I assume it is coming from me, but then the plug pops out of the little washhand basin and raw sewage foams up to form a little pulsing brown wellhead, and the room quickly fills with the smell of hydrogen sulphide and death.

A recurring dream. Hours of inaccurate Pali chanting and 150cc of Macallan concealed in a Volvic bottle finally sees one of the hell-planes’ of my nightmares (the DC 10 with its bolt-on engines; the lopsided Fokker 50) dump me unceremoniously on the ground again. The heat or the cold slams into me like a door, and I stagger down the steps onto the melting or icebound tarmac. I pass through customs as through the lower bardos, and am led to the waiting car by the gentle psychopomps of the British Council, as a man to his doom, which always takes the image of himself,
of his own book
.

Exeter. After a tolerable meal of egg and broccoli quiche and beansprout salad in the cafe – there being no meat alternative – my friend Michael Donaghy and I do the reading. We also throw in a little music. Mildly euphoric after an evening which contained no major disasters, we retire to the dressing room. Michael produces two bodhrans, an instrument for which I have no gift, but an obscure and persistent enthusiasm. Iron John was heavy in the air that year, and we drum and sweat a whole bunch in our vests. We lose track of the time. We walk to the digs. The building is in darkness. We have no key. No amount of ringing and banging will raise the landlady. We return to the venue, which is now also in darkness. We resign ourselves to a night in the car. It is now bitterly cold, and ice is forming on the windows. We find one tiny tartan blanket in the boot. We try to sleep, but the beansprouts are starting to talk – for me, at least, the promotion of raw vegetables beyond their decorative role is something of a novelty. At least, MD philosophically observes, these eruptions have the effect of raising the temperature briefly; but since opening the window is not an option, the trade-off eventually proves too difficult to stomach. Heartily sick of each other, we separate at 5 a.m. I leave for the station to wait two hours for the nine-hour journey home, while MD heads off, I vividly recall, for no reason – to Redcar. I sit on the freezing platform and watch the dawn spread in the east, like blood beneath a shirt.

I have been booked to address the Penang Poetry Society on Open Mic Night. I am playing music elsewhere in the country (a tour that will culminate in a concert in the Bornean rainforest, where we will be met with a silence beyond mere human indifference: the
whole Earth
fell silent, as it did for Orpheus. As our last number died away I heard only the cry of a rabid monkey fifty miles upriver, the dead thump of a falling breadfruit.) A Malaysian lady, spotting the bodhran – the bodhran, the last refuge of the charlatan, the instrument which should always stay at home – insists that I accompany her reading. She clicks her fingers to give me the tempo. I lay down an acceptable 4/4 shuffle with a hint of a backstick. She looks at me with a kind of blank contempt. Then she closes her eyes, composes herself, and begins to shout. ‘
Fred’s dead/in his bed/hit his head/in the shed/then he bled/got all red/in the shed/Fred’s dead …
’