Paperboy (33 page)

A few days later, I rented a minuscule room above a shoe shop in Belsize Park, and moved out. I felt uncomfortable leaving my mother and brother behind, but as I seemed to be the cause of so much ill feeling, it was the only solution.

I found myself saddled with a pair of flatmates in the rooms on either side of mine. Kevin was a red-eyed corduroy-clad spectre who read Sartre aloud by night and sold advertising space by day, and was torn apart by the compromises he had to make in order to earn a wage. Sarah was a plum-voiced county girl who wore cheesecloth smocks, and passed her mornings sitting on the stairs in tears, refusing to go to her office because she felt too fat. They were messy and messed up, but I loved them because they were in a different kind of mess than the ones I was used to. None of us knew each other’s pasts, nor did we need to know. We accepted, and were accepted in turn, for the help and comfort we could give each other, without sulks, strops, threats or year-long silences.

I continued to read voraciously, drifting into literature’s byways – although to even class many such books as ‘literature’ would have turned critics apoplectic at the
time.
Amongst the modern authors, playwrights and lyricists who became alternative gods were B. S. Johnson, Hunter S. Thompson, Stephen Sondheim, David Nobbs, Kander and Ebb, Peter Tinniswood, J. G. Ballard, Alan Sillitoe, Charles Wood, Keith Waterhouse, Michael Moorcock, Peter Nichols and a million others. Best of all, I could discuss them with my new flatmates, who were also – whisper the word – readers.

I left school on a wet Thursday afternoon, and started my first job on the following Monday as a courier for an advertising agency. I spent my evenings in the smoky sepia-walled Railway Tavern in Belsize Park, writing short stories, killing the ones that rang false. When I was less than entirely dissatisfied with something I had written, I would post it home to my mother for criticism. Kath found herself adopting my former role as a reviewer, the difference being that she was clear-eyed and merciless. Still, nothing I wrote really seemed to work. I started to think about stopping, and then one day I simply stopped.

Instead, I concentrated on doing my job well, and tried not to think about what might have been.

32

White Paper

I WOULD NEVER
have tried again if it hadn’t been for the golfball.

The Selectric golfball typewriter
¹
had been thrown out of the room laughingly referred to as my ‘office’ when a department updated its equipment. I repaired it, scavenged a desk that had last had its drawers emptied before the Festival of Britain, and borrowed a kitchen chair. The extra furniture meant that it was impossible to shut the door of my rented room.

I wasn’t due at work for two hours yet – time for one last try. I seated myself, threaded a fresh white page beneath the bar of the typewriter and waited, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. I lined up a bottle of Snopake whitening fluid and a packet of Tippex sheets on top of the ream of paper that I hoped I might be inspired to use up.

There was nothing, in theory, to stop me from producing a masterpiece.

The clock in the hall ticked. I stared at the page. The seat wasn’t very comfortable. I waited and stared. My throat was dry, so I rose and made a cup of tea. I drank it, returned to my seat. The bare page was making me snowblind. I tried to think of an opening sentence, like those tortured artists in movies who furrow their brows for thirty seconds before being hit with the inspiration to write something like ‘The 1812 Overture’.

The white page drew me in. White, white. As white as a lab coat.

The scientist, grizzled, defeated, far into his middle years, had almost lost hope of ever finding a cure for the ageing process.

He raised his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed at his tired eyes. Nine days without sleep or food was too much for anyone, even a Nobel-prize-winning genius with a loving, devoted, busty wife who had given up her career as a former Miss Sweden for her brainy husband. Pacing the length of the laboratory, he returned to his test charts and the electronic machine that showed a squiggly green line measuring something … don’t know what, work that bit out later … and hoped against hope that this one last test would prove successful. He checked his – what do you call them? – Petri dishes, and saw that the culture in Experiment 857B had changed colour in the last few minutes. Placing the test tube in a centrifuge, he spun it until – what did cultures do, separate like bad milk? And what would that show? It was no good, I couldn’t do this, I had failed science at O level. With a shrug of disappointment at not becoming a household name, the scientist dissolved into random atoms.

Back to the page. White, white. As white as snow.

Lance Quest, the renowned explorer, was ploughing
knee-deep
through an arctic blizzard, his beard smothered in stalactites of ice. His toes were frostbitten; two of them were loose inside his right boot, the one that had been gnawed by the enraged polar bear. Lance could not find his tent. Had it been ripped away in the storm, or could it have fallen into the crevasse caused by the landing jets of the alien space ship? No, that was
The Thing
… Desperately the explorer searched the hostile landscape … he searched … the explorer was lost in a haze of snow … lost … but there was the red nylon tent just ahead of him, in fluttering, battered tatters. His supplies had all been blown away across the inhospitable tundra. He would have to eat the last of the dogs. What, raw? Or was he seriously going to stumble across a lighter and some kindling sticks, maybe a rotisserie? Sod it. Snow covered everything completely until the white page came back.

White, white. As white as stardust.

Stella Thrust was the kind of Space welder you’d surrender your last tank of oxygen for. In the velvet cosmos, she clung to the hull of the ship just as her silver spacesuit clung to the curves of her voluptuous body. She was repairing the airlocks as if she had been born to ride the unmanned intergalactic big-rig to Riga. The company had been lucky to get her; no one else wanted to work on such a volatile load, especially as their journey would take them within the gravitational pull of the sun – check to see if the sun has a gravitational pull – but then Stella – too obvious a name? – Stella was determined to take the assignment, because the only man she had ever loved was chained up in the ship’s freezing loading bay, and only she could save him from certain death. Wait a minute – unmanned? Who was flying the damned thing? Autopilot, that was it. Then what was her lover doing chained in the hold? Too complicated, I was getting
painted
into a corner … Stella was tapping her gloved fingers on the hull, waiting. She had work to do and I was holding her up. Go on then, I dared, do it without me. Stella waved two fingers at me and shattered into a smattering of sparkling stardust, against the flaring of the sun.

Desert Sun.

The fierce white desert sun … was hammering down on another figure, Lavinia Buncle, a beautiful, sexy red-haired heiress whose jeep had broken down in the Australian desert. She had driven here to escape the … er … Australian Constabulary, or whatever the local police force was called, after the daring robbery she had conducted just to annoy her father in Melbourne. Or Perth. If either of them was near a desert. Sweat trickled down Lavinia’s tanned cleavage. Red earth clung to her khaki boots, as if the ground itself was trying to keep her here, dragging her back into the parched, dead aboriginal land. Her lips were cracked and peeling. She needed to find water soon. And moisturizer. If she could just find a – some kind of cactus, wasn’t it, and you stuck a knife in the side and could drink the sap or something? And it had Aloe Vera in it as well? I probably had its name in a book somewhere.

Clambering over the bed, I began pulling out old travel manuals I had been collecting, but could not find one on Australia. The books I had removed created a gap in my bookcase that I noticed was filled with dust and bits of fluff. It couldn’t have been vacuumed in ages.

I went and borrowed the Hoover, and spent the next hour cleaning the room, before realizing that I was late for work.

The whole grisly, tortured process went on like this for days, then weeks, then months. Finally I grew tired of dusting the Selectric, drew the plastic cover over it and
returned
it to the top of the wardrobe, where it sat with all the half-formed arctic explorers, sexy bank robbers, frustrated scientists and thwarted lovers, until they faded and greyed with dust, crumbling away to nothing.

At first I was disappointed that I would probably never achieve my dream, but the feeling faded to a dull, distant ache, something only felt on cold, wet mornings. Then it even became difficult to recall what the dream had been. When I tried to summon up my ambitions, there was only a blank stillness where the obsessive enthusiasms had once lived. I guessed I had become an adult, because adults always shielded their feelings, and rarely showed what they really felt. It was a system that protected you while simultaneously robbing you of something essential, but I had seen what could happen to adults without it; they exposed themselves too much and got damaged, like plants left in fierce sunshine. Perhaps that was why such people were often described as ‘burned out’.

I buckled down to my office job, made new friends, moved flats, went out.
²
I wrote copy for adverts. Kenning Car Hire had taken an ad in a charity sailing brochure: ‘
YACHTS OF LUCK FROM KENNING
!’ Potterton Boilers had brought out a model with a new flue: ‘
DON’T GET STEAMED UP ABOUT YOUR BOILER
!’ A rather dim monkey could have produced work with more originality.

One day towards the end of the summer, when the corners out of sunlight were growing noticeably colder and scarves had started reappearing on the streets, my mother called me to explain that Bill was having some tests in Canterbury Hospital, and it might be a good idea
to
look in on him. So I borrowed a friend’s car and went to visit my father.

Illness had knocked some of the fight from him. Propped up in an enormous white bed, he seemed smaller and more jaundiced. The lines on his cheeks were deeper than ever, and his hair had thinned into wisps of grey. I thought,
This isn’t a few tests, there’s something very wrong with him
. Naturally, he pretended that everything was fine, as usual. We discussed the new lane system on the M2 motorway, digital watches and Potterton central-heating systems.

I had parked the car underneath the hospital, in a vast low-ceilinged concrete cavern with faulty, buzzing neon panels. I stayed for an hour in the hospital ward, but when I returned to the car and tried to leave I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, for although the exit arrows continued to point around to the left, I kept spiralling downwards instead of driving back up towards the surface.

As I went deeper, keeping the wheel at a steady angle, the surrounding cars grew dustier and older; some of them looked as if they had not been moved in years. I realized that I had not been concentrating because I had been worrying about my dad and whether he might be dying, and suddenly I was lost. I had simply ventured into the long-term parking area, but it felt like a descent into hell.

I tried to find a place to turn around, but was now in a series of tunnels too narrow to manoeuvre my car. I passed a sign reading ‘Car park closes at 8 p.m.’ and realized that it would shut in less than five minutes. When I scraped the nearside rear bumper against the wall, my oldest fears surfaced and I began to panic. Forced to travel on in one direction, my sense of claustrophobia grew. My breathing became laboured. I had suffered several serious bouts of
pneumonia
and pleurisy as a child, and had been left with damaged lungs. I opened a window and was sure I could smell leaking petrol.

It was getting more difficult to catch my breath. I imagined the car becoming wedged in the ever-narrowing tunnels, imprisoning me inside it as petrol dripped and pooled underneath the wheels, the fumes rising to fill the dark interior.

I finally found a place to turn, of course, and corrected the simple mistake I had made, returning easily to the surface. I was crying and felt ridiculous, ashamed of not dealing well with something my father would not have thought twice about. Bill had once burst a tyre on a motorway one night during a terrible storm, and had hopped out with his jack to fix it in a jiffy. He had replaced the tyre in howling rain and darkness while facing three lanes of oncoming traffic, and the idea of being nervous about doing so had not even crossed his mind.

When I returned to my room, I climbed on the bed and heaved the Selectric from its hiding place. Threading in a new sheet of paper, I began to type up the story of my panic attack, expanding and exaggerating it, colouring it with heightened emotions. I created a protagonist who had come to the building above the car park in order to serve a writ. The man was cocky and confident, but as the peculiarity of the car park’s layout made itself known he found himself trapped, his arrogance stripped away by something as simple as a ‘Keep Left’ sign.