The House of Writers (18 page)

The point of implosion arrived a decade into the “movement” when critics, at this point fed up of the repeated styles and themes in “new” writers’ books, pounced upon a five-time “new” novelist, reading from his child-abuse novel
Shrieks from the Cellar.
The critic Will Bentley recognised a familiar passage from an earlier “new” novel, searched the passage on his Kindle, and noticed a verbatim sentence from
Mewlings in the Basement.
He kept his ears open that night and discovered nine other repeats, standing up towards the end of the reading to shout: “This material has been plagiarised! This writer is a plagiarist!” The shock of this interruption caused the writer’s false moustache to fall, his false lenses to pop out their frames, and his badly applied wig to slide off, revealing Iain Strung, author of
Sorry We Are Closed,
about childhood beatings in his father’s shop. “That is Iain Strung! This man is an impostor!” the critic shouted. Iain ran off the stage to loud boos.

Iain’s agent and publisher attempted to play dumb, feigning deception, but there was too much heat (another incident occurred a month later with Kitsy Bluepill, formerly Anne Winters), so the “new” writer “movement” was dropped. The writers had signed hush contracts, so no squealing happened for years, until a long article in
The Guardian
was run describing the entire operation (an intern at Faber & Faber had been bribed) and a long list of repeat “new” writers was outed (including me), and our book sales took a haemorrhaging and the publishers and agents received slaps on the wrist before returning to the old system of grooming “new” writers and spitting them out once they had served the balance sheet. None of this mattered much in the long run, as soon the audience for “new” writers became obsolete, and the “movement” of unpublished writers posing as established ones began.

S
OME
books obfuscate their intentions, drowning their meanings in multiple layers of ambiguities, subtleties, and intellectual mazes for the reader to unfurl. This is not one of those books. I am the author and I am about to tell you exactly the meaning and purpose of this novel, and you, the reader (if you ever materialise out of the dreamy centre of my skull), are going to swallow and digest this meaning as the only one, unless, of course, you insist on autonomy of mind, and demand to make your own, which I will politely advise you against as being foolish and unnecessary. Then again, I may decide to dupe you with an entirely false “definitive” meaning as is my wont as author, and you will be clueless as to its falsehood (even after having warned you, how will you know what is true or false?) and you will have no choice but to open up and swallow. Of course, having admitted to the possibility of duplicity in my approach opens up layers of ambiguities (if not subtleties or intellectual mazes), so my opening statement has already been undermined and exposed as a lie. If I were to outline the meaning and purpose of the novel at this point, you would not believe anything I wrote, so to do so right now would be disadvantageous. It would be easier for me to spoon the meaning and purpose of this novel into your minds later on, when you are not so eager to skeptically rebuff whatever explanation I offer based on the lie that I told you (or was it a lie?) about choosing to dupe you with an entirely false meaning and purpose. Perhaps you don’t care about a “definitive” meaning and purpose of the novels you read (whoever “you” are), and simply like reading for the scenery and amusement, in which case you are reading the wrong novel. This one has a definitive meaning and purpose, maybe, if I’m not lying, and you will not escape reading this novel without learning exactly what the author (me) intended exactly, unless I decide to lie to you, in which case, you won’t. Either way, you’re taking a risk, and I am having ridiculous amounts of fun tickling your disinterest. I’ll tell you the meaning and purpose of this novel later, if I choose to.

N
EXT
up: Syd Lopmound. You may find his manner rather distracted, or distracting.”

“Or both?”

“Or both.”

Erin entered a room where skeins of shredded paper, attached to strings and sellotaped to the ceiling, dangled into her face while Syd Lopmound manically and starryeyedly flitted between them, hoping to chance upon some pearlescent sentence that had magicked itself onto the blank skeins when he wasn’t looking that he might add to his non-existent fictional début. His spiked hair made him resemble an indie drummer trying too hard to divert the viewer’s gaze from the lead singer.

“These are what Syd calls his Ideacatchers. Hello, Syd Lop-mound! This is Erin. She’d like to say howdy-doodle-you-do.”

“Or hello.”

“Or howdy—doodle, do you?”

“Enough.”

“Hang five! I have one here,” Syd said, peering at a wordless strip of paper in wonder. “Damn! Nothing there. I thought I spied a story about a walrus there, something about a walrus eating a mushroom.”

“Yes. Syd, Erin would like to know about your condition.”

“Hang! I see a plot over there! DON’T MOVE!”

No one moved. Syd examined the blank paper with three-parts wonder, bafflement, and disappointment.

“Syd, we’ve discussed this. These words, stories, and plots are hallucinations. Nothing will appear on the paper unless you write it yourself.”

“I swear ... it was something about a mobster taking t’ai chi lessons.”

“That was a recent Danny Dyer vehicle, Syd. Now, if you’d like to tell Erin here what happened to you?”

“Yes. I had recently moved to Brooklyn to become a writer. I had read about Brooklyn’s reputation as a cultural hive, with writers like Jonathan Lethem eulogising its charms in countless books with Brooklyn in the title. I came from Aberdour, you see, so Brooklyn was the Holy Land to me. Anyway, I rented my room from a fleabag on 879
^th
St. and sat down to write. Realising I had neglected to buy a pen, I headed to the stationery store. Upon returning, someone had stolen my notepad. Disheartened, I put the writing on hold to pursue working in a bookstore, because Jonathan Lethem had worked in one before becoming big. On the subway, taking my CV to various bookstores, I would have these tremendous ideas for plots, but always seemed to be lacking a pen or notepad, and so forgot the ideas by the time I reached my destination. I had purchased new stationery and a secure lock for my room, but whenever I sat down to write, I could never latch on to my earlier ideas, no lock pun intended. So I made my rounds of the bookstores, citing Jonathan Lethem as an inspiration, but my accent and overeagerness repelled most of the owners. I took to carrying a pen and notepad at all times, but ideas only emerged when I was powerless to write them down. I tried speaking aloud my ideas to strangers, or asking them to write things down for me, but they predictably shied away from my conversation, thinking me unhinged. I was stuck with these brilliant ideas—and I can assure you, they were fucking amazing—and no means of putting them on paper. This continued for months until I cracked up and returned to Aberdour in a state of shock, having failed to secure a position of idealised employment in a bookstore like my idol Jonathan Lethem.”

“Tell Erin about your Ideacatchers.”

“These are like Dreamcatchers, only for catching my errant ideas. Sometimes I see—or think I see—these ideas—oh wait, is that something about a disco sausage?—written on the paper, but when I pluck the strips, there are no ideas there. The doctor insists I am hallucinating—oh, look, a cargo truck crashes into a primary school!”

“Interesting case,” Erin said, once again seeing no stapler and impatiently indulging the doctor’s explanation.

“The patient is convinced that these ‘ideas’ of his have value. My suspicion is that these ‘ideas’ on the subway were also hallucinations and that his brain, finding itself unable to achieve the desired level of creativity needed to become an artist, went into shock, offering this delusion of creativity in place of actual.”

“But what if he is secretly nursing brilliant ideas, and merely needs the coaching to make them manifest?”

“Come, Erin, you have heard the indigested wiffle he had been coming out with. Do you really believe a genius lurks underneath?”

“No. They are dreadful ideas.”

“Precisely. I need to convince him that he is wasting his time with these runny nuggets and to move on with his life. And with that cue, let us move on to the next patient!”

W
E
achieved a workable solution using a Salamol CFC-free inhaler attached to a mini-pendulum. It functioned not as a five-minute timer—we couldn’t prevent the pendulum from hitting the new-caller button on the switchboard with each natural swing—but as a fill-in finger clicking customers into oblivion in idle strokes. This left callers with 1.6 seconds to fling their complaints into unpresent ears and created a high turnover of calls (37.5 per minute). Since the number of callers was unlimited this left us free to concentrate on other things such as killing the remaining ten old people and usurping their properties, most of which emanated a strong funk of cardigans, insect repellent, and moths decomposing in jars of Marmite. I made the mistake of eating a Werther’s Original from a sweetie tin. It tasted like a lump of earwax. (There was a lump of earwax in the sweet tin—perhaps I had mixed them up).

Once we had taken their homes and set up our switchboardduper in all ten, we founded our base in the least offensive place (Mrs Horritt’s—bleached pristine thanks to her OCD) and deliberated on our next move.

“Clearly,” Pete said, “we have two options. We can remain in these cottages lounging on the sofas, eating a decade’s worth of frozen chicken nuggets and broccoli, taking the air occasionally along the concrete promenade, or we can devise some way to bring about the complete destruction of the ScotCall empire and return the world to how it was some fifty years ago, minus the threat of universal technogeddon.”

“How d’we do that?” Rob asked. He realised the stole he had been stroking was a dead cat.

“We’ll have to cogitate on the matter. In the meantime, go fire us up some oven chips.” Pete was talking to me.

Our time cohabiting the cottages proved testing. Unlike his experimental fiction-writing forebears, the magnificent Gilbert and Christopher Sorrentino, Pete was a graceless boor and upfront arsehole, sprawled on the couch sans socks, teasing Rob and me with his Man-Blaster and unfunny X-rated puns. I was forced to do the cooking and cleaning. Rob had a sharp sense of humour and to the delight of Pete nicknamed me
The Hausfrau.
This caused much chuckling at my expense. Pete didn’t want to clean up the corpses, so I had to drag the dead towards the sea, where they merely bobbed back to shore to be pecked at by gulls. I had to light a bonfire and incinerate the bodies, which caused an unholy stench and attracted rats (from where, I wasn’t sure). Once the corpses were charred to completion we hung around the bungalow discussing solutions for toppling the Evil Empire without reverting to blowing holes in everyone with the Man-Blaster.

After two idealess hours, Pete suggested we go in shooting. ScotCall used persuasion and bland brainwashing techniques to propagate its evil—psychological, rarely physical, violence. Despite that, ScotCall could mobilise an army of killers in two minutes if their profits were imperilled, so I proposed a stealthier tactic such as interfering with the phone lines. Rob had no ideas to contribute and twirled his bowtie (he had taken one of the dead thing’s bowties and was testing its effectiveness in his ensemble). The simplest answer was most often correct. I remembered reading that in a book long ago. To amuse ourselves in between arguing and having no new ideas we answered ScotCall queries.

“I need help. I cannot decide the difference between a prawn and a portaloo.”

“You piss on one and eat the other.”

“What is the difference between up and left?”

“Left is down and right is up.”

“Can you furnish me with a witty quote to include in my essay on the doughnut industry?”