Bedlam Burning (6 page)

The bookshop wasn't far from the station, and we soon stopped outside a narrow shop-front, a single window with a dark, chaotic interior. The door was locked and the shop was shut. Ruth Harris Books was evidently an entirely one-woman operation, and she'd had to close up in order to come and collect me.

She let me into the most overstocked bookshop I'd ever seen. We had to limbo and rumba our way in. The shelves were not just full, but so tightly crammed that books would need to be prised out. Wobbly stacks of paperbacks rose up from the floor and blocked the aisles. A couple of tables were piled high with miscellaneous, tatty old volumes. Most of the stock was second-hand, if not umpteenth-hand, though I did see a few new bestsellers, and there was a small mound of
The Wax Man
. My eye ran along the titles, observed the sort of books that were on sale, and I could see that most of them were worthless old rubbish: war stories, romances, condensed books, out-of-date travel guides and technical manuals, bound partworks. My assessment of their worthlessness wasn't just literary snobbery; they didn't appear to have any monetary value either. Someone could have come in and bought the whole lot at the asking price and it still wouldn't have made Ruth Harris a rich woman.

‘I can't be doing with any of that high falutin', pretentious, first edition, literary nonsense,' she said. ‘My customers want a good read and they want it cheap.'

Then why, I asked myself, though not her, had she invited Gregory Collins to do a reading? It seemed to me that whatever else might be said about
The Wax Man
, nobody in their right mind could possibly describe it as a good read. If Ruth Harris's stock said anything about her customers I had a feeling that Gregory's book, and my reading from it, might be a serious disappointment to them.

I looked around, wondering where exactly I was supposed to do the reading. There was scarcely enough room to stand up, much less accommodate an audience. However, seeing my confusion, Ruth Harris took me through the narrowest of book-lined corridors to a back room, in fact a rickety lean-to shed tacked on to the rear of the shop. The roof was corrugated iron, and the walls were constructed out of tongue and groove planks that didn't quite interlock. Cold air seeped in from all angles, and caused the single bare bulb to sway
from the ceiling. Crowded together in the space were twenty or so splintery chairs, stools and packing cases that had been arranged in rows as seating, although they were pushed so tightly together that nobody would have any leg-room. Piled in the corners and on bookshelves were heaps of even less valuable stock, copies of
People's Friend
and
Titbits
, mauled football programmes, cookery books crusted with batter.

‘I know it's not the London Palladium,' Ruth Harris said, ‘but we've had some spectacularly successful literary evenings in here. A night when we presented some readings from John Fowles stands out particularly clearly.'

We returned to the main body of the shop to await arrivals. I was already sensing disaster, but I assumed it could only be a small one. The setting was too mean and parochial to threaten anything on the grand scale. And, as the scheduled time of the reading approached, I took some comfort from seeing that nobody had yet arrived. It occurred to me that perhaps nobody would turn up at all, in which case I could get the next train back to London. That would be a dull end to the adventure, but as Ruth Harris became ever more attentive, trying to foist herbal tea and fig rolls on to me and discussing where we might go after the reading for a little light supper and a tête-à-tête, it was starting to seem like a very desirable option.

Then suddenly the front door of the shop was thrown open and a young, intense-looking woman in a flapping red greatcoat came sweeping in, oblivious to the piles of books and magazines she was knocking over, a woman who was about to change my life in a rather dramatic way. If we'd been in a movie there'd have been a gush of appropriate music: a series of rising chords suggestive of transformation and infinite possibility. As it was I had absolutely no idea. I just thought she was strikingly beautiful.

I suspect it's always hardest to describe those people you like the most. You want others to feel the same way about them as you do, and that's undoubtedly asking too much. You find a woman very attractive and so you begin to describe her: the mass of red hair, the brown eyes, the long, lean body (all of these the new arrival possessed). But perhaps the reader isn't partial to red hair or brown eyes or long, lean bodies, so for him or her you're describing someone who by definition isn't that attractive at all.

So maybe you use more generalised words, like saying she had fine
features, an elegant body, a warm presence, since surely nobody could dislike fineness, elegance and warmth; but the problem is it sounds as if you're describing an idea of a woman rather than the woman herself.

So maybe you get a bit poetic, say her eyes were like stars or limpid pools, or whatever. I'm not entirely sure how star-like eyes actually look, but they sound unobjectionable. Limpid I have no idea about at all, but I know it's an acceptable way for eyes to look. But some people don't like poetry, and star-like, limpid eyes sound like clichés anyway.

So maybe you can do it by giving the person's features moral qualities. You say she had proud breasts, a noble chin, wise eyes. Again, nobody can object to pride, nobility and wisdom, can they? And maybe the simple word beautiful comes into this category. Perhaps I should just say she was very beautiful and leave it at that, let the reader fill in the outline, colour in his or her own ideas of what constitutes beauty, of what a beautiful woman looks like. But that seems pretty feeble.

Possibly the telling detail is the way to go. The first thing I noticed, after the flapping red greatcoat and the red hair and so on, were the glasses. She wore a pair of formidably ugly hornrims, the kind that beg to be removed so that someone could say, ‘Gosh, now that I see you without your glasses, why, you're quite, quite beautiful.' But the removal of the glasses would have been superfluous. She was obviously quite beautiful even with them, at least to me. The glasses emphasised her seriousness, made her appear substantial. I, who spent so much of my time feeling unserious and insubstantial, found this very appealing indeed. There was nothing bland about her, nothing half-hearted. She looked strong in every sense: a strong presence, a strong personality.

Ruth Harris and I stared at her, but she wasn't the kind of woman who was intimidated by being stared at. ‘I haven't missed the start, have I?' she asked loudly of nobody in particular and then she saw me, obviously recognised me from the author photograph, and said, ‘Oh my, this is really mingling with the stars, isn't it?'

I smiled at her as beguilingly as I knew how. She was someone I'd have been very pleased to beguile. I decided that even if nobody else arrived I would still be happy to go ahead with the reading. This woman's presence would make it all worthwhile. I looked at my
watch. We were already well past the scheduled starting time, but Ruth Harris said we should wait a few more minutes. Then the rest of the audience arrived; two more people: Gregory Collins and Nicola.

‘Sorry I'm late,' Nicola said briskly, as though her presence was the most natural thing in the world. ‘I got lost. Then I met up with this nice man. I asked for directions. He was coming here too and he was lost as well but, anyway, we're here now.'

Gregory and I looked at each other and tried to think of something to say.

‘I'm Gregory Collins,' I managed at last, as I shook his hand.

‘I'm Bob,' said Gregory shamelessly. ‘Bob Burns.'

What kind of name was that?

‘Nice to meet you, Bob,' I said.

‘Not
Robbie
Burns?' Ruth Harris said with a trilling little laugh.

‘No. Robbie Burns was an eighteenth-century Scottish poet who died in seventeen ninety-six. So obviously not,' said Gregory, and nobody could tell whether they were supposed to laugh at that.

I could only guess at Gregory and Nicola's separate motives for coming to the event. Gregory, I thought, might have come hoping to share in some reflected, not to say refracted, glory. Perhaps he had wanted to see how popular he was and who his fans were. Tough luck, Gregory. But perhaps he was also there to keep an eye on me, to see that I didn't misrepresent him. That seemed a little untrusting.

Nicola's game was harder to understand. She knew that at the very least her presence was bound to make me feel uncomfortable, and no doubt that suited her; but she'd come a long way if that was all she wanted. It occurred to me she might be there to denounce me publicly and, if so, I wondered whether she'd do it during or after the reading. I didn't give her the chance to do it before. The moment she and Gregory arrived we all trooped into the back room and I began to read.

I'd decided it was best to start with some of the more salacious parts of the book. I had calculated that even if these passages caused offence, at least they'd be hard to ignore. I'd made this calculation when I assumed I'd be reading to a room full of strangers, but given the actual composition of my audience, who was I likely to offend, and who was likely to ignore me? Then I intended to read a long, philosophical passage about language and silence, derivative no doubt, but nevertheless signalling the high seriousness of the author.

Why did I care about signalling Gregory Collins' high seriousness? Why did I want him to look good? Why didn't I, for instance, read some of the book's worst, dreariest, most badly written sections? The simple answer is that I just wasn't that sort of person. Although I harboured some resentment and petty jealousy of Gregory, I had no reason to want the world to think he was an absolute prat. I wasn't a motiveless malignity. More importantly, it was me on the stage not him; I didn't want anyone to think the flesh and blood character they saw before them was an absolute prat.

The reading went as well as it could have, given the circumstances. It was certainly not a difficult audience, although they weren't very warm or responsive either. Ruth Harris stood at the back of the room, fidgety and fluttery, and yet with an enormous beam on her face. In her mind, if nowhere else, she was presiding over another resounding literary triumph, one that I feared might result in her trying to seduce the visiting author. Gregory Collins was enjoying himself almost as much. He was hanging on my every word, sometimes mouthing them along with me. It occurred to me that this was probably the first time he'd ever heard his novel read aloud, and if he'd never struck me as a man who liked the sound of his own voice, he certainly liked the sound of his own words.

Nicola was not enjoying herself nearly as much as these other two, but she looked as though she was deriving some sort of pleasure from the evening, perhaps a perverse one. I didn't for a moment think it was anything as straightforward as watching her boyfriend, or possibly ex-boyfriend, give a good performance. I still suspected it had more to do with some act of revenge she had in mind for later.

In the face of these obviously vested interests I found myself directing the reading increasingly towards the single bona fide member of the public, the woman in the hornrims. At first she wrapped her big coat around her, turned up the collar, closed her eyes, and listened with rapt attention to the smut I was reading out. Then, when I got on to the philosophical part, she unfurled herself, got out a writing pad and started taking notes. That seemed very strange, but then I clicked, oh right, she must be from the local paper, sent to review the event, not a bona fide member of the public after all, but at least Gregory was getting some media attention. I couldn't begrudge him that.

I read for a little over forty minutes. It seemed a long session, but
when it was over I was satisfied with my performance. I could have wished for a better and bigger audience but I thought I'd done a good job on behalf of Gregory and myself. Then it was time for questions from the floor. I didn't see there could be many of these.

Ruth Harris pitched in immediately. ‘What I'd like to know is how far the novel is autobiographical.'

‘Well,' I said, smiling suavely, ‘the truth is, I've never actually been embedded in a block of wax.'

She wasn't amused. ‘No, of course not,' she snapped. ‘I meant the sexual material: the bisexual orgies, the Turkish bath scene, the group sex with the older women.'

These had seemed to me the book's least convincing episodes. I knew very little about Gregory Collins' private life but I was as sure as I could be that he hadn't experienced any of these things first hand. Ruth Harris's mention of sex with older women now seemed to take on a special relevance that I thought it best to quash.

I said, ‘You know, there's always a distance between an author's experience and his art; and I think it's good if the exact distance remains mysterious.'

I glanced towards Gregory and saw him nodding in agreement. He liked my answer. Ruth Harris didn't. She asked several more questions designed to plumb the extent of the author's apparent polymorphous perversity. I did my very best to disappoint her.

Then Gregory himself pitched in with a few questions; well, they weren't really questions at all, more self-congratulatory ruminations. ‘I'd like to say what a bloody excellent book I think you've written,' he said. ‘It's timely and contemporary without being disposable or faddish. And I reckon you've been right clever in setting up an opposition between the clean cold world of the spirit, a world both of knowing and unknowing, on the one hand, versus a world of sensory overload and sexual phantasmagoria on the other.'

He delivered several more ‘questions' along these lines, and fortunately they didn't require much response from me. I was briefly tempted to disagree with him for the sheer hell of it, to insist that he'd completely misunderstood the book, but I knew that would be going too far. I simply thanked him for his kind words, as though my natural modesty prevented me from agreeing with his assessment of my genius. I noticed that the woman in the hornrims even made notes of what Gregory was saying, which seemed a bit excessive. I was
hoping she'd ask me a question so I could turn my charm yet more fiercely in her direction; another way of irritating Nicola. And I kept expecting Nicola herself to say something, to ask some snotty, lacerating question designed to have me floundering, but she remained silent and self-possessed, her disapproval obvious to me, but to no one else. Perhaps she wasn't there for revenge after all.