The Pretender

The Pretender

by David Belbin

e-book edition published in 2011 by Five Leaves Publications, PO Box 8786, Nottingham NG1 9AW

ISBN: 978-1-907869-33-4

www.fiveleaves.co.uk

© David Belbin, 2008

Five Leaves acknowledges financial support from Arts Council England

Cover design: Darius Hinks

David Belbin is the author of more than thirty novels for young adults, including
Denial
 and
Festival
. His short stories for adults have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He edits the Crime Express series for Five Leaves and works part time at Nottingham Trent University, where he runs the MA in Creative Writing. Born in Sheffield, he now lives in Nottingham.

The first thing you need to hear about happened when I was fourteen. In English, we were reading
David Copperfield
. The rest of the class complained that it was too long. I joined in, but, secretly, I was enjoying myself, especially when Mr Moss told us about Victorian London, a place bursting with invention and energy yet, at the same time, squalid, even depraved. I had already decided that I would live in London one day.

We’d got to the end of chapter twelve when Mr Moss gave us a different kind of assignment.

‘I’d like you,’ he said, ‘to pretend you
are
Dickens. Write the beginning of the next chapter. Read it first, if you like.Yours must be different.You have carte blanche to do what you like, plot-wise, but it must be in the style of Dickens.’ Then he went on about Style for a while. I only half listened. Yes, I thought. I’d like to have a go at that.

In my bedroom, I scribbled away, losing track of time. When I’d written enough, I typed it up, using the Amstrad word processor my mother had bought for me, second hand, from an ad in the evening paper. As a computer, it was an embarrassment. You couldn’t play games. I used it for typing out essays and writing fiction, though my efforts so far had been pitiful, deleted the next day. After two or three drafts, the Dickens imitation was done. I printed it off, pleased with myself, yet sure Mr Moss — one of those sarcastic, nit-picking teachers — would find plenty of flaws in my work.

A week later, when he was returning the assignment, Moss did something I’d never seen a teacher do before. He gave back everybody’s homework but mine. Moss was a mild looking man, with a narrow nose, a small, wiry body and dark, greasy hair that he didn’t have cut often enough. He returned to his desk, opened a drawer and lifted out my Dickens piece. The teacher raised it like a flustered referee holding up a red card.

‘Trace,’ he said,‘produced quite the most memorable piece of coursework that I have come across in my brief career as a teacher. So memorable, in fact, that I’d like to read it out to you.’

The other boys stared at me with contempt: smart arse Trace again, they were thinking. Then the teacher began to declaim my mock Dickens, using exactly the same tone and slightly exaggerated manner he used when reading bits of
David Copperfield
to us. I listened carefully, trying to pick up what I’d done wrong. Had I put in a modern word by mistake, or mixed up one of the character’s names? Not that I could tell. When Moss stopped, I was half expecting to be congratulated.

‘What did you think?’ he asked the class.

There was the usual silence that greeted a question we hadn’t already been told the answer to. This was a top set, but, even so, it didn’t do to show off, or express an opinion that might be ridiculed by the teacher. So my classmates were silent.

‘Didn’t you find it convincing?’ Moss asked, stressing each syllable in the final word in a way that might or might not be sarcastic. ‘Don’t you feel that Dickens would have been proud to write such prose at the tender age of — what is it now, Trace — fourteen?’

My youth regularly humiliated me. Some of the other boys in the class were already sixteen, but I had been put forward a year and my birthday wasn’t until March. I stared furiously at the lid of my desk, oblivious to the teacher’s footsteps. Mr Moss grabbed me from behind, yanked me up by the collar of my shirt and turned me to face the whole class.

‘Wouldn’t you say that the piece was too convincing?’ he barked, choking me. ‘All right,Trace, I want the truth. Where does it come from?’

‘I made it up, Sir,’ I pleaded.

‘I made it up, Sir,’ he repeated, mimicking my voice. ‘You’re a devious sod, Trace. You dug around until you found a description that might have fitted, changed a couple of names then copied it out. Do you take me for a fool, boy?’

‘No, Sir.’

‘Then tell me where it came from.’

‘Honest, Sir, I made it up.’

Moss’s small, beady eyes began to bulge. ‘If that’s your attitude, we’ll see how you feel about it after a headteacher’s detention.’

He got out one of the yellow forms and began to fill it in. When he got to the space marked reason for detention, he wrote one word: cheating.

‘But I didn’t cheat, Sir. I...’

I thought he was going to hit me. I was, perhaps because I had no father, terrified of male violence. On the rare occasions when I got into fights, I never hit back, only shielded myself from the worst blows. Now the teacher saw the fear in my eyes and took a deep breath.

‘If you tell me where you took the piece from,’ he told me, more temperately, ‘I’ll tear this up.’

I thought for a moment, desperately trying to recall the name of a Dickens book that wasn’t in the school library.

‘
The American Notes
’, I muttered, shamefaced.

Moss smiled, vindicated.Then, as the bell rang, he took the yellow form and my coursework and methodically tore them into tiny pieces. These he let fall through his fingers into the bin, like a bird shitting.The class began to pack up, but, with a wave of his referee’s arm, Moss halted them. He gave us a sermon about plagiarism in coursework, saying that, if we were caught cheating, even in such a seemingly minor manner as this, it would put all of our exam results at risk.

We were late out for lunch and the whole class blamed me.

My mother and I lived in a terraced house at one end of a semicircle that bordered a small green. These houses were originally alms cottages for the poor. A housing association bought most of them as accommodation for the elderly. Kids at school used to tease me about living in an old folk’s home. It was, I suppose, an odd place for a child to grow up. There were no other children, but I was doted on by the elderly residents. Mum, on the rare occasions she went out, had no shortage of baby-sitters.

She did have a shortage of boyfriends. My father was never spoken of. He had deserted Mum before I was born, giving her, I came to think, a deep distrust of men. Her own mother was a single parent. Gran died when I was five, so I barely remembered her. Mum was my entire family.

The house was full of books and Mum read to me every night until I was old enough to read fluently on my own. If I wanted more choice, I only had to go to the library where Mum worked. When I was young, she was strict about the times I could go to the library. It had to be once a week, when she was on duty. She said she didn’t want me showing her up by behaving badly in her absence. But I wasn’t a very naughty child.

Mum’s library rule was like the trick she played with ‘lights out’. By setting an early bedtime, Mum ensured that I sneaked a torch under the bedclothes so that I could keep reading. Fiction became a forbidden pleasure. By rationing library visits, Mum made me addicted to the places, so that, later in life, wherever I lived, the local library became my second home.

After the Dickens incident, it was a long time before I copied another writer’s style. I read all the time, and couldn’t help but write books in my head. I would tell myself the story of my imaginary life, the one where I got the girl and won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in the style of the author who I was reading at the time. Sometimes, in the night, I dreamt whole chapters of books, the words forming on the page as I read.

All that was a form of day dreaming. I started writing seriously in the Sixth form, after the school took us on a weekend visit to Paris. This was my first trip abroad. Paris in the spring was like stepping into a movie (we didn’t have a TV at home, but Mum and I often went to the cinema). On returning, I immersed myself in French authors and American writers who had lived in Paris and began my own tentative jottings.

When university applications came up, I’d had enough of always being younger than everybody else on my course and deferred for a year. Mum wanted me to apply for Cambridge, but I refused. Cambridge would be full of rich, public school people. No matter how good I was, I’d always be an outsider, without the breeding, brilliance or money to fit it. I applied to London University instead, to study Eng Lit with French subsid. At the interview, I was asked why I wanted to be in London. Did I have friends there?

‘No. I applied because I want to live here. I want to be a writer, and successful writers have to live in London.’

The interviewer asked who my favourite writers were. This was difficult. I didn’t mention Dickens because he was too obvious. Ditto Shakespeare. Chandler and Collins were out because they wrote mystery fiction. Kurt Vonnegut was risky because he wrote sci-fi. So I brought up Hemingway, whose short stories I’d been reading on the train. Then I mentioned Joyce, because he was difficult (so far, I’d only read
Portrait of the Artist
and
Dubliners
). ‘Playwrights?’ he said. ‘Beckett, of course.’ He raised an eyebrow and I thought that he was about to catch me out with a difficult question. I’d never seen a Beckett play, though I’d once tried to read
Waiting for Godot
. It was his prose I knew.

‘Perhaps you ought to study in Paris rather than London,’ the tutor said, his voice becoming kindly. ‘Those three all made their names there.’

‘Actually,’ I replied, a decision forming only as the words spilled out of my mouth. ‘That’s where I intend to spend my year out.’

Mum was reluctant to let me go. At the time, I thought she was being over-protective, because I was only seventeen. Later I realised she knew something I didn’t. I argued that I needed to become a fluent French speaker to do well at university. Mum knew this wasn’t strictly true, but could see that I was itching to leave. In the end, she didn’t put up a fight.

That summer, while waiting for my A level results, I worked in a warehouse packing clothes from a mail order catalogue. After seven weeks, I had enough money to set me up while I found a job in Paris. I passed my exams with top grades and deferred my university place. At the end of August, I filled a rucksack with clothes and books, promised to send regular postcards home, and bought an open return ticket to France.

Paris in September was unlike the place I’d visited the spring before. It seemed even bigger, more complicated and much more foreign. I wanted to think of myself as a resident and was disappointed to find large parts of the city entirely populated by tourists. Yet the place still impressed me more than London. There were the wide, grand streets, suitable for a capital city. The buildings were majestic, never merely ornate. Everything seemed to take place on an appropriate scale, whereas the London I knew was a cramped, crowded place. In time I would come to know and love its haunted, peculiar powers, but Paris was my first love.

I’d meant to take a room on the Left Bank. I wanted to live in the Seventh Arrondissement, as Hemingway and Fitzgerald had in the twenties, but the only places I found were asking as much for a night as I was prepared to spend for a week. I stayed in a Youth Hostel, sharing a dormitory with an endless array of strangers, snoring and farting and sometimes screaming in the night.

Getting a job wasn’t like in the books, either. I’d read George Orwell’s
Down and Out in Paris and London
. I was prepared, if necessary, to work as a dishwasher, as he had, but most places used machines. My French was good, but when I went to bars with jobs on offer, I was spoken to in a rapid fire barrage that I could barely follow. I came across no English workers I could go to for advice. Paris was awash with immigrants, mainly blacks from the country’s former colonies. These were the people I was competing with for work. I found myself shocked by the casual cruelty with which they were treated.

After a week, I was on the verge of going home, but it was too soon to give up. I spent my savings visiting tourist spots, posted a second, resolutely cheerful postcard to my mother, and got over my shyness enough to say je cherche du boulot at any spot where I might find work.The American and British churches had notice boards advertising temporary jobs for ex-pats. Those for teaching English as a foreign language required a qualification beyond my three A levels. Nevertheless I pushed myself into going along to a couple that didn’t mention a TEFL certificate, only to be told I was too young even to be considered.

My confidence (and savings) ebbed by the day. I’d spent my whole life as the only male in the house. At the hostel, I was part of a herd, and didn’t like it. The turnover was huge. After a week, I was a long term resident, yet remained as anonymous as when I’d arrived. The most depressing thing was that, after lights out at eleven, you couldn’t read. I bought a torch and resorted to shining it under the bedclothes, as I had when a child. But most of my reading had to be done in parks or, when it was too cold, in the least expensive cafés I could find.