About the Author

Christopher Fowler was the multiple-award-winning author of almost fifty novels and short-story collections, including the celebrated Bryant & May mysteries. His other novels include Roofworld, Spanky and Hot Water. He also wrote two acclaimed memoirs, Paperboy (winner of the Green Carnation Prize) and Film Freak, plus The Book of Forgotten Authors and Peculiar London, Bryant and May’s singular and eccentric guide to the city. In 2015 Chris won the CWA’s coveted Dagger in the Library for his body of work. He lived in London and Barcelona. Diagnosed with cancer just as the UK went into lockdown in 2020, Chris died on 2 March 2023. Word Monkey – his third volume of memoirs – was published posthumously. As will be his last novel, The Foot on the Crown.

Also by Christopher Fowler, featuring Bryant & May

FULL DARK HOUSE

THE WATER ROOM

SEVENTY-SEVEN CLOCKS

TEN-SECOND STAIRCASE

WHITE CORRIDOR

THE VICTORIA VANISHES

BRYANT & MAY ON THE LOOSE

BRYANT & MAY OFF THE RAILS

BRYANT & MAY AND THE MEMORY OF BLOOD

BRYANT & MAY AND THE INVISIBLE CODE

BRYANT & MAY – THE BLEEDING HEART

BRYANT & MAY – THE BURNING MAN

BRYANT & MAY – STRANGE TIDE

BRYANT & MAY – WILD CHAMBER

BRYANT & MAY – HALL OF MIRRORS

BRYANT & MAY – THE LONELY HOUR

BRYANT & MAY – ORANGES AND LEMONS

BRYANT & MAY – LONDON BRIDGE IS FALLING DOWN

Non-fiction

BRYANT & MAY’S PECULIAR LONDON

Short Stories

BRYANT & MAY – LONDON’S GLORY

BRYANT & MAY – ENGLAND’S FINEST

Memoir

PAPERBOY

FILM FREAK

WORD MONKEY

Acclaim for Christopher Fowler’s Word Monkey:

‘Clever, wise, heartbreaking and yet also life-affirmingly funny: his literary comic lightness of touch is on a par with Wodehouse.’

Joanne Harris

‘A delight to read – a glorious, witty and life-affirming ragbag of autobiography, cultural commentary and hard-won wisdom about the strange and miraculous craft of writing. It’s the sort of book that makes you want to underline every other sentence. Beautifully written, of course – one would expect no less from Chris – and characterised by its complete lack of self-pity. I hope it sells by the truckload.’

Andrew Taylor

‘A delight: perceptive, wise and illuminating on the act of reading (no genre held terrors for him) and, equally, the act of writing. All of this in a book full of disarmingly sardonic gallows humour about his own impending death. An unmissable farewell from the much-missed author.’

Financial Times

‘A remarkable book by a remarkable writer: amazingly entertaining and informative and also, for obvious reasons, one of the most moving.’

Simon Mason

‘Not a hint of Pollyanna here, just the most hilarious, life-affirming book you’ll read this year.’

Saga

‘Funny and poignant, Word Monkey is full of fascinating insights and is more than just a first-rate memoir … a fitting memorial to a terrific writer.’

Martin Edwards

‘Wonderful … there is no bitterness here, but a hearty celebration of how art defines a life, with dark humour on the right occasions and the deliberate aim to leave a positive message, from the adoration of Dickens to the guilty pleasures of terrible horror movies … he was a man with a deeply-felt love for the arts, both minor and major, and his enthusiasm is infectious and sobering.’

Crime Time

‘Funny and moving.’

Guardian

‘Peppered throughout with a wit and wisdom that makes every page turn … seek him out and discover what a fine talent the world has lost.’

Starburst

Christopher Fowler

WORD MONKEY

Contents

Cover

About the Author

By the Same Author

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

1: Worst-Case Scenario

2: What’s It About?

3: Unhealthy

4: Oldsters

5: Death Sentence

6: Your Basic Idiot

7: A Little Writing Advice

8: Grommets

9: The History of Tea

10: Hub of the Universe

11: Big Bovril

12: Nobody Likes a Good All-Rounder

13: Reading for Pleasure

14: Eating with Your Fingers

15: In the Library with a Candlestick

16: So Much for Moisturizer

17: A Rubbish CV

18: The King of Sweden

19: Lingo

20: Homebodies

21: All of Them Witches

22: Paradoxical

23: Lost Language

24: Lying for a Living

25: Nothing

26: Received Pronunciation

27: Not England

28: Beeps

29: Flayed

30: No One’s Anybody

31: Big Words

32: Schrödinger’s Virus

33: A Little Guide to Writing Short Stories

34: Pride & Extreme Prejudice

35: Binning Books

36: Clots

37: Die

38: Funny Words

39: A Hole in My Bucket

40: Serafina

41: A Little Guide to Writing Crime Fiction

42: Opposites

43: The Chicken Factory

44: Encounters with Dracula

45: Keys

46: In Denial

47: Mildew

48: Back in the Chair

49: Q&A

50: How to Survive

51: Undisturbed Treasures

52: Alternative Fiction

53: Ghost Shoes

54: Swings and Roundabouts

55: Peculiar

56: Circles

57: The Writer’s Curse

58: Off the Roundabouts, on to the Waterslide

59: All Packed: A Short Story (2005)

Credits

Acknowledgements

Copyright

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1. Cover

2. Frontmatter

3. Contents

4. Begin Reading

For Pete –

There are no words.

Depend upon it, Sir when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Samuel Johnson

No more fairy stories at nanny’s knee it is all aboard the fairy bus for the dungeons.

Geoffrey Willans

Preface

In 2008 I wrote a memoir of my childhood entitled Paperboy. It was about a bookworm growing up in a house where there was nothing to read but knitting pamphlets and motorcycle manuals. The theme was gradually crowded out by the exploits of my improbable family.

Five years later I wrote another volume, entitled Film Freak. It was about trying to start a career in the film industry at the worst period in British cinema history. My account of cheating producers and dreadful B-movies was pushed to one side – this time by the exploits of my improbable friends.

I had always planned to produce a book about writing and how to manage a career in popular fiction without going mad. By now I was wary of what might happen if I attempted to do this, so I made a promise to myself that there would be absolutely no outside distractions to divert me from my path.

You can see disastrously how that worked out. I hadn’t realized that this book would be subject to interference on an altogether different scale.

1

Worst-Case Scenario

The man who just told me I haven’t got long to live smokes.

He’s skulking under the rain-dappled glass canopy that curls around the hospital’s back entrance, having a fag with the porters. How does he reconcile that with being an oncologist? I guess it’s a stress reliever. After all, he has one of the most difficult jobs in the world, letting distraught, fearful people know whether they’re going to live or die at fifteen-minute intervals, always running a couple of hours late and being constantly interrupted by a nurse popping her head around the door to say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were with someone.’ It’s enough to send most people into a whimpering ball of raw nerve endings on the floor. Yet he looks so calm and unharried. How is that possible?

Doctors are a separate species. They’re scientists. They have an entirely different mindset to civilians. What did Dr Imran Ramalan see when he looked at me? He was clearly sympathetic and caring and I could not take in a single word he said.

A few minutes ago I had been sitting in the crowded waiting room, guiltily perched on the last remaining chair, waiting for my name to come up on the screen. Two receptionists were seated behind plexiglas with only the tops of their heads showing. It didn’t feel like a normal British NHS hospital; no one was shouting or even moving about. It was as calm as a funeral parlour. My thoughts were like everyone else’s, drifting through all the usual stages.

What if it’s good news?

What if it’s bad?

What if it’s very bad indeed?

Nothing I could say or do would influence the outcome. Should I try to read again, or would that result in another forty-five minutes of me staring at a very long paragraph of Tristram Shandy?

I would have played a game on my phone except I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I decided I should try to come up with a fresh set of questions for the doctor. Yes, I’d do that. I should have done it ages ago. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.

Too late, my name just came up on the board.

You wait for ages, slipping into a state of mental aphasia, then you’re suddenly accelerated into an info-dump of life-changing proportions before being spat back out. No wonder debriefed patients always looked so shell-shocked.

I made my way along the corridor to Dr Ramalan’s bare, chalk-white office. His prognosis was being delivered at the height of the global pandemic. The portly medic turned to greet me. He clearly thought about shaking my hand for a moment, then decided not to, even though he was wearing plastic gloves, a blue paper mask, thick plastic goggles and a huge wrap-around visor that made his face leak and his spectacles slide down his nose. It was as much as he could do to keep everything on.

‘Mr Farrell, take a seat.’

‘Fowler.’

‘Ah yes.’ From behind his protective layers, his voice sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of a well. It didn’t help that he had a deep gravelly voice. ‘Well, I’m afraid it’s not good news.’

He said something I didn’t understand. I looked at him stupidly and said, ‘What?’

‘I said I’m afraid you are terminal.’

‘I’m Gemini?’

‘No, terminal.’ He pushed at his glasses. ‘You are terminal. Your cancer is terminal!’

By this time he had to raise his voice so much that they must have heard him in the next room. The doctor there probably had to turn to his patient and say, ‘No, not you.’

‘Well, that’s …’ I tried to think of an appropriate word and came up with nothing.

The door opened and a nurse popped her head around. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were with someone.’ She swiftly exited.

The oncologist turned back to me. His goggles were now completely steamed over. He stuck a finger inside them and tried to straighten everything. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. ‘So, there’s nothing to be done. You can finally go to sleep.’

What was he talking about? Did he mean, like, Dignitas? He must have caught the look of confusion on my face because he said slowly and clearly, ‘You can go home and put your feet up.’

‘I can’t, I’m working,’ I snapped.

‘Ah, you are the book writer, yes?’ He was like a news presenter segueing from a story about an Ethiopian famine to one about a cat playing the piano. I wanted to yell, I don’t want to tell you about my book, I want you to explain why I’m going to die! But I didn’t. I’m English.

He placed his hands on his crossed knee. ‘So, what do you write about?’

I was annoyed now. ‘Mostly, situations in which characters find themselves in worst-case scenarios.’

‘And what do these scenarios involve?’

‘Paranoia, terror and the fear of imminent death.’

‘Hm. Perhaps you should write something more cheerful.’

I had to stop and think for a moment. ‘I’m working on a new book.’

He fished around for a reply. ‘Ah, oh, good. And this book, tell me, would it be a long book?’

After I finished being aghast it dawned on me that he hadn’t realized what he’d said. I think he thought he was lightening the mood.

‘I don’t know yet,’ I replied, shaking my head. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going next. I may go home and throw some stuff in a bag and go to Africa, but I am not going to put my feet up.’

I’ll come back to this moment in August 2021 because it’s quite important. I put it at the front because this is where I thought we’d start, close to the end.

2

What’s It About?

I am a writer of popular fiction.

Although I chose this career at the age of six, I did not come from a literary household. With the exception of my mother, nobody else in the family regularly read books. There was a vague, unexpressed idea that wanting to be a writer was injurious to the health. The only writer who could be readily named by my parents was Robert Louis Stevenson, and he died of a cerebral haemorrhage at forty-four, thus proving their point. I read a lot of Stevenson as a child, even Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, which by anyone’s yardstick is a real eyelid-drooper.

I chose to write popular fiction because I was more interested in creating stories than exploring states of mind. I did not want to be a storyteller, something I still associate with shamanistic ladies at yoga retreats and men who turn up at parties with acoustic guitars. I wanted to be a writer of printed books, but first I needed to know how to do it.

There are certain rules to be aware of.

In both literary and popular fiction the idea for a novel usually involves the fulfilment or denial of a wish. Literary fiction emphasizes character and prose style over plot. It asks readers to draw their own conclusions. Popular fiction offers up more information and a definite conclusion. If you leave the ending of a popular novel open you will get complaints.

Even though they’re not mutually exclusive, there’s a whiff of snobbery that separates literature and popular fiction. Some readers harbour a suspicion that those who enjoy the latter are less refined. The placing of the tongue between the teeth is all it takes to differentiate the classes. Yet the authors of many touchstone popular works were highly educated and sometimes of aristocratic stock. ‘The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds,’ said the English barrister Philip Guedalla.

The writers of literary sagas believe in the importance of the examined life, while the authors of popular works have little time for self-doubt. This definition has lately become smudged by the idea – a happy one, in my view – that the two forms can work together harmoniously.

An idea is not the writer’s exclusive intellectual property unless it’s quite specific. Joseph Conrad influenced both Apocalypse Now and Alien (whose ship is named Nostromo) but that doesn’t mean he was plagiarized. The ideas of others can be extruded and developed into exciting new forms. ‘There is no such thing as originality anyway,’ said the young plagiarist-author Helene Hegemann, ‘there is just authenticity,’ a semantically challenging remark that didn’t hurt her book’s sales, even though its pages were lifted from the works of others.

Truly original stories are rare because we’re all influenced by others, no matter how hard we try not to be. For years my ultimate goal was to construct a mystery so organic that at the end no explanation would be needed. There would come to the reader a moment of revelation that was natural and obvious. I think I managed it once, but I tried a thousand times.

Readers lose interest in a murder mystery as soon as the solution is discernible. Our job is to make the prose so enjoyable that you keep on reading.

Novelists can be mapmakers or gardeners. We either create complex grids for plots or throw our seeds out anywhere and harvest whatever comes up. Both have disadvantages; mapmakers get trapped by their own adherence to structure, while gardeners can come over as messy and disorganized.

At the start it’s all planning without actually planning. Absorbing books, talking to old friends, going on walks to unfamiliar places, refreshing the brain, doing things that don’t feel like research. Perhaps you don’t even realize it’s research; I find myself studying a specialized subject like medieval medicine and subconsciously filing facts away for future use. It can make you incredibly boring at dinner parties but it’s as crucial a part of the writing process as the writing itself.

The question will come up with dispiriting regularity: where do you get your ideas from? Every author’s answer is different. It’s not a spark, an image or a snippet of dialogue that sets me off on the trail. It’s a twist of thread with enough colour in it to be woven into something interesting.

This became literally true of a novel set in the Dark Agesfn1 I’d been working on when I viewed an ancient tapestry that had become unthreaded in one section. It occurred to me that a tapestry could depict the kind of decorative, fanciful history we would like to imagine was true. London’s history is a mass of threads rewoven over old, worn-out sections until it becomes a patchwork of truth and fiction.

When I discussed the novel with a fellow author, he was horrified that I wasn’t going to provide details of conflicting religions, treaties and alliances. The thought of all those scenes featuring the intrigues of the court made me shudder. History is passed down to us by the literate, the clergy and the monarchy, and that would have imposed a rigid hierarchy that didn’t interest me. The point was to unfurl a tapestry even though it was outrageously untruthful, and not stick to the more accurate, prosaic facts.

Why? To make it fun. Sometimes you have to break people’s imaginations open with a chisel.

Most of the writers I know are far cleverer than their writings. Quantum physicists create SF potboilers and polymaths script romcoms. They reveal the tips of their talents on the page and sacrifice the rest so that people can understand what they’re on about.

In his science-fiction dramas Nigel Kneale was always careful to include the thoughts of ordinary men and women on the street, but this was never the only strand, merely a baseline on which to construct fantastical events. Everyone found something to relate to in his writing because he never forgot who might be watching. We’ve swung the other way now, with perfunctory sex scenes and irrelevant chases dotted through stories like punctuation.

Every story has its thread, to be located by the writer and turned into its own tapestry. It’s up to the writer to choose fact or fantasy, and where to pitch base at any point in between. I like my stories accurate but a little bit fanciful; life writ large.

The writer/director Taika Waititi suggests that writers don’t allow themselves enough time to ‘sit and stare at the ceiling and just daydream for five hours’. Ideas are born in such lacunae. Blaise Pascal said, ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ The figures back him up; while 95 per cent of adults say they found time for a leisure activity in the previous twenty-four hours, 83 per cent said they’d spent no time at all just thinking.

We need to encourage the young to do this. After all, they’re not currently enjoying much peer interaction. Direct phone calls are in decline, with texts and emails preferred. On one work call I had recently, the caller explained that she would be more comfortable talking if the topics under discussion could be approved in advance.

Surely this is why readers enjoy popular fiction; it replaces confusion with order. Even shocking twists of fate can calm us when we live them vicariously through the pages of a book.

So, what is this book about?

It’s about four hundred pages long, for a start.

3

Unhealthy

Hearing about other people’s childhoods is boring unless they had a really horrible time, so I’ll keep this short. Besides, I’ve already written one memoir about my childhood and I don’t think I can wring another out of it.

In 1960 I was seven years old.

My childhood home reeked of cigarette smoke. The curtains, the cushions, the wall-to-wall carpets, the dog, the baby. I grew up to the sound of coughing. Kath, my mother, was very feminine, loved heels and wore novelty-print skirts, but beneath the chemical odour of her tight-fitting permanent-wave treatment she still smelled like an ashtray.

Seventies domestic design featured a lot of crocheted wool, the better to trap the smell of chip fryers and cigarettes. It was the era of the Glade air freshener, a white plastic box containing a slab of chemical goo that gradually withered and turned yellow.

To save money Kath switched to Golden Virginia, rolling tobacco at home. Embarrassed by this economy, she never smoked in the street, telling her children that ladies who did so were common. My father, Bill, preferred to stay with his Woodbines, and took to tearing the filter tips off to get a better hit of nicotine.

I could not name all the kings and queens of England, but I could recall the brand of every cigarette on the tobacconist’s shelf. After all, I’d been buying them for Bill since I was six. My brother Steven and I enjoyed treats of sweet cigarettes and candy tobacco. We had our favourite sugar cereals for breakfast every weekday and bacon and sausages and eggs every weekend, interspersed with Sunblest processed white sandwiches filled with sugar or beef dripping. We got through a lot of lard.

My parents had surrendered their teenaged years to the Second World War; they were twelve and thirteen when hostilities broke out. Force-grown into adulthood, their educations were curtailed, their lives altered, their indentured working lives prematurely jump-started. They took on responsibility without a chance to discover who they were. The skills usually taught by parents to children were entirely absent. They learned through trial and error.

My mother used aerosol sprays on everything. Room deodorizer. Furniture polish. Surface cleaner. Glass polish. We breathed it all in. On the plus side, the Clean Air Act had been implemented so there was no longer thick black soot over all the washing and hardly any street traffic. Birds filled the trees of the suburban London backstreets; starlings and jackdaws, magpies, wrens, greenfinches, thrushes, crows and sparrows. And in hedges and ponds were stag beetles, green frogs, sticklebacks, grass snakes, moles and hedgehogs. So, swings and roundabouts.

Bill looked like an undertaker on his day off. His dress sense could best be described as ‘post-mortem neat’. His sense of humour was ‘graveyard’. His favourite expression was ‘Roll on, Death’, which he affixed to the end of most conversations with my mother.

We had an aged non-relative staying with us, my grandmother’s paid companion, who randomly turned gas taps on. I would enter a room and listen for telltale hissing. Sometimes there would be a huge bang as my mother ignited a gas poker. I was born in the 1950s but might as well have been born in the Edwardian era.

Bill was obsessed with the idea of us all being poisoned. He was particularly worried about lead poisoning. He scraped all the lead-based paint off the bannisters but never got around to repainting them, so we tended to get infected splinters. My grandmother gave me a full set of Crimean War soldiers, inherited from her Victorian mother. They carried flags and rifles, drums and swords, and were incredibly detailed. Their uniforms blazed in the light as they marched bravely off to a doomed, pointless war.

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to take those,’ said Bill.

Borrowing my mother’s frying pan and turning the gas high, he proceeded to melt down the entire regiment. I watched as each brave dragoon bubbled and sank into a dull silvery pool. The kitchen was full of boiling lead fumes. He ended up with several enormous deformed grey discs which he buried in the garden. Afterwards, nothing ever grew on that spot. Even the cat walked around it.

‘I’m afraid you won’t be able to use that frying pan any more,’ he told his mystified wife, taking it from her. ‘Not unless you want us all to turn green and die.’

My father drove a series of unstable, overpowered motorcycles which veered off roads by themselves, nearly killing him. By the age of seven I was his pillion rider, without a crash helmet and nothing to protect my bare legs from a searing exhaust pipe, and he professed a grudging admiration for the enthusiastic way I leaned into the bends.

We switched to a series of lethally faulty cars, including a Mini-Minor designed, according to Bill, to become a protective steel cage in the event of a collision, but which we now know had a habit of catapulting its engine into its surprised passengers’ laps if hit front-on.

In his spare time my father, an inveterate tinkerer, was experimenting with new materials. He spent many evenings pulling iron filaments and slivers of glass from under his fingernails.

‘That stuff can’t be good for you,’ said my mother, watching as Bill detached burnt polystyrene from the back of his hand. ‘Couldn’t you use something healthier? You know, what with the children.’ She looked over at my baby brother, who was playing with a box of floorboard nails.

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wanting to try something new anyway.’

Something new turned out to be asbestos. He sawed up sheets of it on the dining table after dinner each night, filling the air with tiny fibres. My mother had to open a window so that we could see each other.

‘Try not to rub your eyes,’ my father suggested.

Kath’s favourite word was ‘morbid’. She used it out of context all the time. ‘Christopher, come in, your dinner’s getting positively morbid.’ Although death was invisible it was all around us. The last cat and two tortoises were buried in the garden, although one of the tortoises had been dug up by next door’s poodle and its desiccated shell left on our back step like a votive offering. Our hamsters always died, along with an awful lot of neighbours and members of the family.

My mother, intelligent and frustrated, joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, but never overcame the feeling that she had been passed by in life. My father became a living portrait of thwarted ambition. Although they were both natural laughers, a disfiguring darkness remained within them.

We lived in a typically British terraced Edwardian house in South London, which you could reach via a shortcut that led over the mainline railway tracks. It wasn’t a crossing so you had to keep your wits about you, although only a handful of schoolchildren was maimed.

It was a time when people tried not to open doors or windows because it would let the air in. In the early 1950s, not long before I was born, that would have been an unwise thing to do. On 5 December 1952, the thickest fog London had ever seen rolled across the city and lasted for four days. Acrid and dense and the colour of sick, its probing feelers tentatively found their way through windows and under closed doors. It was a smog – smoke plus fog – and caused more than twelve thousand fatalities. It added to the sticky soot that had stained London’s buildings during the war. The youthful and the elderly died from respiratory problems. Their lungs filled with black pus and they choked to death.

No wonder I got frightened in forests and developed a weird form of agoraphobia when placed in fields. To this day I’ve never spent more than a few hours in the open air before going back inside and breathing a grateful sigh of relief.

Plagues are great. They clear out the dead wood: the sickly, frail, useless, unproductive non-functioning members of society, antiseptically wiped away in a single stroke. Politicians secretly love them. By 1352 the Black Death had managed to polish off 60 per cent of densely packed Europe. Naturally, the Catholic Church made sure that Jewish people were blamed.

Here’s the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr’s take on it: ‘In such epidemics the best were invariably carried off and the survivors deteriorated morally. Times of plague are always those in which the bestial and diabolical side of human nature gains the upper hand.’

The Church’s position was always that Man brought calamities upon himself by surrendering to the sensual. Many of those who remained alive felt that humanity had been unjustly blamed, and lost faith in the Church.

Altogether around twenty-five million people surrendered their lives to the Black Death between 1347 and 1352. An acceptable loss, our leaders would no doubt tell us, like the calculations made by General Haig in his war of attrition at the Somme. The donkey-general sent some 620,000 British, French and Commonwealth lions to early graves. There were great labour shortages after the 1914–18 war; the first cases of the 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ epidemic were in Kansas, USA, and soon infected a third of the planet. When the outbreak reached neutral Spain the news was not censored, so everyone assumed it began there. It perversely targeted those with strong immune systems.

The pandemic of 2020 killed a more convenient demographic.

As a child I was fascinated by all history between the Black Death and the Second World War, and the more accounts I read of warfare and the upper-class kleptocratic agendas behind them, the more horrified I became. It’s probably what caused me to become the North London gay liberal fucking nightmare I am today.

My business partner, with whom I spent around twelve hours a day for twenty years, sealed in a room with the windows painted shut, was unhealthier than both of my parents combined. He chain-smoked untipped Marlboros and told me the nicotine repeatedly woke him up for an oily ragfn1 throughout the night. For Christmas he sometimes gave people ashtrays and they bought him ashtrays back. My first gift to my father had been an ashtray. Later, in my teens, we were taught how to make ashtrays in metalwork.

My father repaired his motorcycle in the hall and continually tried out the engine so that he could listen to it. On certain days the house filled with a darker, oilier smoke as my mother set fire to fat-filled saucepans with such frequency that we took the local fireman in as a lodger.

My mother died of emphysema. My father died of emphysema. My grandfather died of lung cancer. My business partner died of lung cancer, emphysema and strokes. My cousin died from inhaling motorcycle fumes.

But it wasn’t all bad. The cause of my mother’s death may have been cigarettes, but she lived until ninety-one and died peacefully after a short illness. My father died at eighty. My business partner died at sixty-three. I had my first bout of radiotherapy to destroy a rare tumour at the age of thirty-nine.

I’m not suggesting that there was any cause and effect in operation, but it struck me that I had inhaled a fair number of phantom fags throughout my childhood. Tar spreaders, coal dust and rattling exhaust pipes also featured heavily in our daily life. Now I just want to keep breathing.

Having decided very early on in my life that I was going to be a writer, I never considered another trade. I’d heard that this tunnel vision was common among creatives. A friend of a friend had starting writing novels at sixteen and killed himself at twenty-one after he failed to get published. I imagined this lonely, socially awkward kid sitting on the end of his bed, trying to get the stories out of his head so that he could live normally, but I also knew that ‘living normally’ meant having to fake your waking life.

Salvador Dalí would leap out of bed and immediately continue at his easel from the moment he awoke. When he had no materials, Picasso once made a picture from a burnt paper napkin. I could think of nothing more exciting than to be like them, frantically scribbling on fag packets and beer mats. Other kids were worshipping cricketers. I fantasized about being Luis Buñuel. I admired him after finding out that he kept a pocketful of stones to pelt hecklers during screenings of Un Chien Andalou.

Writing turned out to be less an art than a craft, and I found myself chained to a desk producing adverts for cigarette companies until I refused to work on them and the wheels fell off the job. It was while sleepwalking through this overpaid sinecure as a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson that I was released from my duties. Probably my big mistake was describing our clients as ‘human blowflies’ in a meeting.

‘Remember,’ said my old boss as I left, ‘you think you’re an artist but you’re just a word monkey.’

For lunch every day we went to Bar Bruno next door, which served heavy carb-laden Italian meals all day.fn2 Their sandwiches were not wrapped in plastic but were freshly made on white bread and stacked between layers of greaseproof paper halfway up the wall behind the counter. The most popular fillings were sardine and tomato, liver sausage, plain beef. People still smoked in cafés then. The air around the sandwiches was blue. When you lit a ciggie, the diners on the next table didn’t make little cat-coughs and move away, they offered you an ashtray.

The majority of our staff members went to the pub at lunchtime and drank around four pints of bitter interspersed with pickled eggs and packets of crisps. On most days they arrived at work heavily hungover. My boss kept vitamin C tablets and little bottles of Fernet-Brancafn3 in his desk for his staff. The account executives nipped out for a ‘livener’ when the pub doors opened at 11.00 a.m. and went to strip clubs after work. Their hands shook. The veins on their noses stood out like tram lines. They sweated a lot.

There were no female copywriters, and only one or two female account executives, whose souls had developed thick enough calluses to withstand daily unfunny jokes from their bosses about ‘lady-tantrums in the office’. The perpetual blokey banter would have reduced most millennials to tears. Poof jokes were only occasionally avoided around me, and although there was little racist humour in evidence there were not many Black employees. Gym culture had yet to be invented. There was a single vegetarian restaurant in Soho that everyone had a good laugh about. This was in a so-called liberal creative industry; I could not imagine what it would be like working in the Dagenham Ford plant.

After my mercifully brief flirtation with advertising I moved to California, and my physical health improved in inverse proportion to my mental wellbeing.

4

Oldsters

I’m writing this at the age of sixty-nine. A hundred and fifty years ago I would have been like one of those back-clutching, bow-legged whiskery dukes with an ear trumpet who turn up in Gilbert and Sullivan operas. In the 1930s I would have been wearing neatly pressed trousers belted far above the navel, a gabardine raincoat and a trilby. In 2022 I have a zero fade haircut and am wearing black Reiss jeans, Satorisan trainers and a dark grey Hugo Boss roll-neck. What a dick.

Thinking back.

I had told my husband, Pete, that I wanted to go to the hospital by myself, although I had no choice but to attend alone; the pandemic prevented patients from taking anyone with them to appointments. I had to be screened and masked before I was allowed in the building. If Pete had been able to attend he would have asked all the awkward lateral questions that would never have occurred to me. His lack of reaction to bad news can be quite a shock to the uninitiated. If he was being cross-examined in the dock for murder you would feel the room going against him.

Walking home from the hospital along the Euston Road after the meeting, nothing felt different. The world had not changed. Cars and buses jockeyed past; pedestrians danced through traffic as if shaving a fifth of a second off their journeys would make a difference to their lives. Homeless people still asked me for cash, which nobody carried any more since the pandemic pushed us all into remote purchasing, with the consequence that everyone apologized for not having any money, only this time they really didn’t.

There’s a plane tree halfway along the Euston Road that has a semicircular bench built around it. It is probably the least picturesque spot in London. I imagine they put the bench there so that asthmatics could catch their breath while watching lines of stalled vehicles.

I sat down and studied one of the brochures I’d picked up in the hospital. It depicted a happy family taking a stroll: mother, father, boy, girl, obviously not related. They were walking through the sunny countryside, at least I presumed that’s what it was because there were trees and no railings.fn1 They clearly weren’t expecting rain as the father was in a pastel cardigan and no one was wearing walking boots. Above them it said, ‘Let’s put the can in cancer!’

Apart from the ambiguity of the statement, the problem started with that word. It felt as if it should be printed in a typeface that had crimson icicles dripping from it.fn2 Once that word was uttered, preferably with a shuddery bottom-of-a-well echo, a frisson rippled around the room and everyone looked slightly away before changing the subject. I remembered this well. My grandmother, my aunts and my mother mouthing the word behind the children’s backs, and me asking, ‘What are you saying? Is this something to do with Grandad?’

I wasn’t allowed to see the grey old man lying sunken into pillows in the next room. He wasn’t even old, younger than me now, but his face had lines from cheekbone to jaw as if a tailor had put darts in it. His life had been hard and had given him nothing and this was the end, lying there while the women in the next room whispered among themselves.

You can’t teach people to be unafraid of a stupid noun. To reduce its sinister power you first need to disrespect it. But how could you do that when it made the people you loved sink into the bedding and vanish?

As I watched a line of double-decker buses trundle past nose to tail like red elephants, I tried to understand why nothing felt different. My world had not been tilted on its axis and drained of colour. It was not my first badly received prognosis but at least the fourth. I was an old hand at dealing with worst-case scenarios.

Plastic surgeons have a special name for the little squiggles of flesh that appear above the bridge of some people’s noses. They’re called glabellar lines and they’re linked to strokes and heart attacks because the nip/tuckers say they denote a life filled with too much stress. Sometimes the glabella is known as the Triangle of Sadness. I already had a pretty spectacular one, and found myself searching them out in other faces. Whenever I saw a particularly severe wrinkle I wanted to go up and put my arms around the person. This sort of behaviour can get you arrested.

After my first worst-case scenario, nearly thirty years ago, I had emerged from an Intensive Care Unit battered but alive and found that everything looked fresher and brighter than normal, as if I was wearing magical contact lenses or a retoucher had upgraded the imagery surrounding me. The sky was turquoise; the clouds were sheets-flapping-on-a-line white. I needed to tell my family and friends that I had been unexpectedly released back into this colourful world, but it was harder making calls then and I couldn’t find a working telephone box.fn3

The ICU nurses had been told that I would probably not last until morning, but one sat with me holding my hand all through the night. My lungs were filling with fluid faster than they could be drained. The nurse was shaken that I survived, as if there had been a disturbance in the Force. ‘I thought we’d lost you just after three a.m.,’ she told me later with a soft smile, ‘but no, there you were.’

I remember her profile, defined by a night-light, her head bowed, a curl of auburn hair falling forward over her cheek, either deep in concentration or asleep. She looked after me for another two weeks and stayed in touch for two years. To my shame, I can no longer remember her name.

I creaked up from the bench and looked around before crossing a side street, avoiding the creeping silence of electric Ubers. Despite the pandemic everything appeared normal, but there were seagulls somewhere above, clawing at the sky. Storm birds, my father had always said, because they moved inland when rain came into the Thames. I couldn’t see them but I knew they were there.

I think some folk are healthier for being in the city. Not in terms of polluted lungs, obviously, but in their mental health. They’re forced to deal with sudden changes at a constant rate and to talk to people they would never normally encounter. Change toughens you. Country folk might be tanned and able to operate farm machinery, but much of the time they stare out of windows at rain-blasted trees. If I lived in a town where everyone knew everyone else, their explicit caricatures would start turning up in my books as murder victims, bludgeoned to death with teapots or strangled with their own dog leads.

In London my illness was invisible. Being over sixty, I was invisible. I was no longer being sold anything except marketing agencies’ patronizing misrepresentations of my senior self, mowing lawns, pottering about with quilted placemats or golfing in Portugal. I could see nothing of me in anything they came up with. Who has a lawn? What is an electric blanket for? Why would anyone want to press their trousers? What exactly are slacks? I had seen what raising children in the suburbs could do to people and it involved recriminatory divorces, not barbecues.

The only advertisement of which I was even vaguely aware was on the King’s Cross Piccadilly Line southbound platform and featured a young man with sculpted eyebrows encouraging oldsters to release their inner pension potential via bitcoin investment opportunities. I preferred it when we had ads for toffees.

I also received through my letter box a brochure featuring a model dressed as a ship’s captain, suggesting that now I was surplus to requirements I might want to board the SS Superspreader, a floating petri dish bound for Miami, a rare example of the destination being worse than the journey.

Oldsters aren’t worth selling to. They blow all their income on slippers, hot-water bottles, scarves, ceramic bunnies and heating bills and come out with rubbish like, ‘I’m still twenty-one inside!’ You’re a twenty-one-year-old with lower back pain who can’t find Safari Preferences, love. I did not want to be part of a convenient demographic, the Beige Brigade, but you try finding attractive clothing when you’re slowly rolling towards seventy. You end up at Gant.

Besides, old was what I had always wanted to be. As a child I had imagined myself as a scarf-wrapped chap sitting on a green-painted bench beneath a sycamore tree in a sunlit park feeding the squirrels. It was an image which made me much happier than, say, the idea of an exotic dancer shaking cocaine up my nose Salt Bae-stylefn4 in a Monte Carlo beach club.

I thought that sitting in golden urban woodlands with a book would be something simple, natural and pure, an Enid Blyton recreation of early childhood. That was before I sat in the wintrily denuded Bunhill Fields Burial Ground and watched a squirrel sitting on top of a can of Tennent’s lager eating a KFC chicken leg. It eyed me in an uninterested fashion and continued chewing, then drank from the can.

I imagined a bestselling children’s book in which I trained it to be a tough familiar named Squizzer, alcoholic and vaguely cannibalistic maybe, but scrappy and adorable.fn5

London felt like Pleasure Island, the fairground in Pinocchio. The city offered myriad delights but could easily turn an innocent into a donkey. In the 1960s there were a million and a half fewer people in the capital. There were no fast-food outlets, no shops open past 6.00 p.m., nowhere even to get a coffee because nobody outside Soho knew how to make anything but instant. The flat white hadn’t been invented yet. You could always find somewhere to get a cup of tea, though, if you looked hard enough. In the 1950s there were cafés on the Thames Embankment that chained their teaspoons to the counters. The London streets were largely deserted. Pubs were still shut in the afternoons. McDonald’s didn’t open its first takeaway in Britain until 1974, when litter was invented.

At the first available opportunity I had run wild in Oxford Street, Piccadilly and Leicester Square, not discouraged by my distracted parents. I sneaked into theatres and pubs and museums and cinemas just to see what they were like. I went to a film store renting props and costumes, falsified some ID and borrowed a gun.fn6 It’s safe to say that it would not be possible to do this now.

London was more trusting then. You could stroll into virtually any building in the city and question the lift man about its history. I had such an enquiring mind that lift men soon began avoiding me. I haunted bookshops and filled notebooks with so many questions that I could hear the staff whispering, ‘No, it’s your turn.’

I made my way home from the hospital that afternoon thinking about what I was going to say to Pete, but when I got there nothing came to mind except the words themselves. Words were always my salvation.

5

Death Sentence

Writing doesn’t exist until it’s on the page.

Once it’s laid down there, glaring out at you every day, the real work begins. The fundamental question is not ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ but ‘How do you turn your ideas into books?’ Everyone has the odd good idea; it’s what separates us from seahorses or the House of Lords. Base material must be hammered into something pure.

In films about creative geniuses there’s a moment when the director tries to visualize inspiration. A musical solution arrives fully formed, played out on to the keyboard complete. Artists dab dementedly at a canvas and there it is: the masterpiece. The writer of popular fiction finishes his commission and goes to the pub.

Whether they’re geniuses or hacks, the work does not end there. It begins. Playwrights get a reality check at the read-through when they realize the script will have to be different to allow for the actors’ breath control. Stage blocking has to prioritize the cast’s physical movements so that the writer finds herself adding an extra line of dialogue because it takes Count Orlofsky nine seconds to get out of the armchair and across to the fireplace, and the letter revealing his wife’s infidelity has to be out of its envelope because removing and unfolding it is dead time and the actor playing Orlofsky has a bad knee and is slow off his mark, and he can’t set off early because it would suggest that he has ESP.

Being a writer is rarely collaborative unless you’re in television. Novelists are not team players. Quite the reverse – we were always the last to be picked for jumper-goalpost football. We work alone and look back upon our work in shame. First drafts are horrible to reread. We write them to get them out from under our skin, that’s all – like lancing a boil. But they’re the building blocks: beginning, middle, end, roughly hewn characters, rickety plot. Then the fun can begin. The shaping, the reordering, the patching, the finessing. That’s where the writing is. Ideas are just there, innate, hard-wired like the motherboard of your fridge.

The truth is that most would-be writers don’t even get off the starting blocks.

A friend told me he was going to begin his career with a worlds-and-ages-spanning cycle of seven six-hundred-page fantasy novels. He’d never written longform before and showed no inclination to do so, but how hard could it be? He was smart, he knew his Ovid and Homer, and fantasy books were a licence to print money. He was just waiting for the right time to start. After he’d moved house, when he finally had his own writer’s study, he’d begin then.

I’m still waiting for him to move house. It’s been ten years.

A teacher told me that one of her students refused to accept any revisions to the first draft of her writing assignment because it implied that her first draft was wrong, and no one had the right to judge her wrong, therefore the teacher was disrespecting her abilities and she planned to lodge a formal complaint that would get her moved out of the class. She never lodged the complaint, but she stopped attending class. Shortly after, she married a property developer.

An acquaintance decided to write a self-help book. I gave her some tips about how to tackle it. She dismissed my thoughts and explained that what she needed most was a high marketing budget. She kept changing the book’s theme but said the publisher was excited by the cover artwork she’d commissioned from an artist in Mexico and was happy to wait, and besides, she decided, having a theme wasn’t all that important. She had already sketched out plans for the launch party at a celebrity restaurant. One thing she wasn’t prepared to deal with was typing. She didn’t want to do any, and found a company which would take your recordings and turn them into documents for you. She hadn’t noticed there was software to do that.

This idea that writing is a leisure pursuit for the entitled reminded me of a friend who taught at an exclusive South Coast girls’ school. She asked her pupils to design Christmas cards and caught them outsourcing the work to China.

The American writer Toni Morrison never found long quiet periods of time in which to write, and never applied to go on an artist’s retreat. What she needed was someone to look after the children so that she could get some time to herself and think.

Writers find the time to write. Busy mothers on punishing work shifts still manage to fill notebooks. Morrison wrote in the hours around the edges of her days. I don’t trust anyone who describes the book they’re planning to write when they’ve got the time. You can write anywhere, in any situation, but you have to find a calm place in your mind first.

I’ve written on paper bags, shopping lists, old Christmas cards, the backs of business envelopes. When you put something down on paper it doesn’t go away, and you can start tinkering with it. Once the idea is on the page it’s often helpful to talk to a sympathetic friend about it, as if you’re describing the plot of a film you’ve just seen. It’s easy to overlook something that’s staring you in the face, and an outside viewpoint is useful.

This year I faced a new challenge. Writing without a dedicated place to sit. The pandemic had brought my husband home to work, and suddenly two separate locations were needed in our open-plan flat,fn1 especially when both occupants were on Zoom calls. I had been working from home for nearly fifteen years and was used to having the run of the place.

There was no point in lying around worrying about the prognosis. I would fill some pages, talk to my agent, fix a deadline, build doctors’ appointments into my schedule and maintain a structure to my days just as I had before.

Pete took my beautiful glass-legged desk because he needed more space. I thought: Why do I need a dedicated space? I can turn the armchair into my corporate headquarters. I can be, in P. J. O’Rourke’s memorable phrase, ‘the CEO of the sofa’. I don’t open spreadsheets. I’m not entirely sure I know what a spreadsheet is. I barely use paper or notes. What did I need to write? Why, hardly anything at all. A pencil behind the ear, nothing more. Although in reality I had:

A laptop: my MacBook Air, small, light, manoeuvrable. My single biggest expense.

A case: because it had to sit on the dining table and was liable to get spaghetti vongole in it otherwise.

Cables: obviously, just HDMIs and international plugs and stuff, and adaptors, and peripherals like external hard drives.

A plug socket: I once managed to catapult a laptop out of a window because my cat jumped on to the cable stretched between the laptop and the sill. The man in the shop didn’t believe me. Mind you, I had once taken a typewriter to him to be steam-cleaned after a pigeon got trapped inside it for a weekend. He didn’t believe me then, either.

A flight bag: it must contain earpods, phone charger, portable devices, something that I thought might be the charger for my razor but turned out to be for a long-gone desk lamp, and my eye drops, which were in an identical-shaped bottle to the superglue so it was important to keep them apart. The mental packing-and-unpacking of a flight bag proved to be a pleasurable displacement exercise, especially in a world where all international flight was banned. It ranked beside recataloguing my DVDs.fn2

A tea mug: XXL.

A biscuit tray: because I can’t be dealing with crumbs.

A cushion: because the eye-to-screen height ratio had to be exactly right.

A blanket: sometimes I sit still for so many hours that our heating system thinks I’ve gone out and shuts everything off.

A box to put everything in: this had to be of specific dimensions to incorporate my key tools as well as needing to double as a laptop stand. I finally found one made of brushed steel in Denmark. Why did I import such a costly item? Because nobody in the UK had managed to come up with such a beautifully simple device. Or if they had, they would have outsourced the work.

I concede that it might be possible to manage with fewer items. It’s important to remove the distractions that stop you from getting lost in the words. Luckily, you can do that without moving house or sending recordings to China.

The least portable item in the writer’s arsenal is research material. The damp-smelling books that were not likely to be reprinted by Project Gutenberg’s digital librarians had accumulated on my shelves over decades, so that I no longer remembered why I kept them, usually only remembering after I’d thrown them out.

The evening I returned from my meeting with the oncologist I settled into my armchair-desk and reopened a file. My vaguely fantastical Dark Ages novel was going to be called The Foot on the Throne until Game of Thrones came out, when I changed the title to The Foot on the Crown only to have The Crown TV series launch. I took this to be a bad sign.

It was not going terribly well. I had written over four hundred pages and the book’s atmosphere was fluctuating all over the place, plus I had managed to create one of the least proactive main characters since Evelyn Waugh came up with Guy Crouchback for the Sword of Honour trilogy. Each time I opened the file my heart sank. The characters were unbelievable, the location was indeterminate and the tone was downright peculiar.

Worst of all, there was one fatal flaw that took me ages to uncover. I had been unable to identify what the book was actually about.

It would come to me, I was sure. I was determined to push on and not let my rogue cells get in the way. I didn’t have to see the doctor for a while so I could work without thinking about anything else, although most of the evening I just sat at my desk staring out of the window with my mouth hanging open.

I once gave a talk about writing to a group of smart, tough-minded young women in Leeds. One of them raised her hand at the end of the session and asked, ‘Have you ever had a proper job?’

I thought for a moment. ‘What do you mean by a proper job?’

‘You know,’ she said. ‘Lifting.’

No, I conceded, I had never had a proper job. My grandfather had been the last member of the family to have calluses on his hands, although I had once spent a few weeks hand-delivering promotional samples of moisturizer to upmarket neighbourhoods.

I tried to push all thoughts of health from my mind, but when I looked out of the kitchen window I could hardly miss the tall white building with the sloping roof. It was so close that I could see into the rooms. The cancer hospital was a twenty-minute walk away, its angled geometries directly in line with the sunset, so it wasn’t possible to stop thinking about that bloody word. It was as if they’d built a giant neon sign on the roof.

Another thing about writing.

The most successful children’s book of all time, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was bought by 120 million people. Zach King’s twenty-second Harry Potter magic trick on TikTok was watched 2.2 billion times.

Reading is a lot harder than watching. It’s not a passive leisure activity; you can’t lie back and let it wash over you. You have to pay attention and lean into it, like seeing subtitled arthouse films.

Longform writing will, I suspect, go the way of marquetry or stencilling. It will become an artisanal craft enjoyed by the few. As children we studied penmanship. There are few pleasures as singular as finding order in the flow of a nib, and something very satisfying in correctly spacing your letters and making them the same height.fn3 You can even turn the form of the letters themselves into part of their meaning. You become the literary equivalent of an anchorsmith.fn4

By now you’re probably getting fidgety, wondering where this story really starts. It’s just over the page. I can never begin until I have a title. My biggest failure was a book that passed through more than twenty titles, finally being christened by the editor on its way to publication, so like most writers I am superstitious. Death Sentence would have been appropriate for this volume but I couldn’t imagine it selling well in any of the senior-citizen counties, like Somerset.

Besides, it would probably have been fixated on grammatical errors and ended up in the ‘Literary Criticism’ section of bookshops,fn5 where the only foot traffic is from customers looking for a toilet, especially in Somerset. That’s what happened to me with The Book of Forgotten Authors, which was lobbed on to the ‘How to Write’ shelf.

Whatever you set out to create, you have to know that your original plans will at some point become derailed. That’s the thing with writing. It’s like being held in a hostage situation. You don’t know how bad things are going to get or what will be left of you at the end. So let’s go to the beginning.

6

Your Basic Idiot

On the night before Christmas Eve, December 2019, twenty old friends went to a raucous dinner-and-dancing party held in a pretty North London gastropub, its garden filled with cedar, laurel, birch and laburnum, strung about with coloured lights.

Every year for over two decades we had held a Carers’ Christmas, a special dinner for friends who found themselves looking after someone on Christmas Day. When it finally became too cumbersome to continue we kept up the tradition of meeting in the festive season.

One of the regular guests was Maggie Armitage, an octogenarian flame-haired model and former Playboy bunny who appears in some of my books. She arrived wearing a huge blue plastic boot because she had broken her ankle, not that this kept her from the dancefloor. What’s more, she had a string of young suitors lined up who fancied the novelty of dancing with someone who’d last had a date when Winston Churchill was still alive.

It was a long, lively night, with much gossip, laughter and even a few tears.

The next day nineteen of us came down with a virulent flu strain, despite many being vaccinated for the winter season. My flu seemed worse than theirs and rumbled on for over a month.fn1

Maggie proved immune, of course, and remained so for the next two years. I went to the doctor. My answers to his questions were enough to concern him, and he arranged for me to have a scan.

I was finally diagnosed, not with flu but with colon cancer. If I hadn’t gone to the doctor worried about being ill I could have stayed happy. I remember thinking that if it did turn out to be something serious it would be really inconvenient because I was about to start a new draft of the Dark Ages epic.

The British pandemic lockdown began on 23 March 2020, the day I finally began treatment.

If you weren’t dealing with the health system around that time you’d be forgiven for failing to spot that anything was wrong. But there was something strange in the air. Earlier that month, after a consultation with a visibly unnerved GP, my follow-up scan was cancelled. Then all my appointments vanished. No one could tell me what was happening.

In the course of a single day, hospitals shut down their departments and patients were sent home as wards were transformed into Covid centres. We were soon starting to hear about bats and pangolins and Chinese tourists infecting the residents of an Italian ski resort, but it all seemed rather remote and implausible, a new scare story exacerbated by the tabloids. I expected to see a Daily Mail headline: ‘Rabid foreign bats infect English people; mortgage rates adversely affected’.

The NHS is better than a private clinic for the treatment of serious illnesses – any doctor will tell you so – but suddenly everyone in the medical profession was in an urgent meeting. Nobody could get through to anyone. Hospital phone lines were permanently busy, then had hastily recorded messages. I found myself propelled into a situation more serious than facing a virus – overnight I managed to hit the ‘extreme-risk’ register on several counts just as the national lockdown began.

Various NHS medics tried to get me admitted. My local GP tracked me down to warn that there was a real danger of being stranded outside the system. I had been diagnosed with a rare cancer requiring urgent treatment. Seemingly overnight, the UK was on its way to becoming the centre of the epidemic in Europe, and London the centre of that centre, and King’s Cross – the busiest crossing point in the entire country – was the centre of that centre, precisely where I lived. To be diagnosed in the bullseye of an epidemic was a touch unnerving.

Getting into the system for treatment proved all but impossible as London’s hospitals were daily forced to alter their structures. The NHS had to rethink its protocols from scratch. Everyone will tell you that the service is brilliant at triage, but on that day triage was admitting no one. It was a time of astonishing upheaval, which manifested itself not in panic but in the matt black silence of dead phone lines.

My GP – young, proactive, energetic – said, ‘We have to get your name put on a treatment list right now.’

From online articles and brochures you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s a guardian angel of cancer (a ‘navigator’, apparently) who is supposed to organize your regime, treatments, prescriptions, physical and mental wellbeing. At this point no such person existed. The angel of care had fallen under a bus.

Pete and I raced around from one clinic to the next. I had some private medical insurance I’d never really used, a leftover from my days of running a company, so I invoked it now and headed across London for a last-minute appointment. The doctor shrugged and turned out his desk lamp. ‘It’s all shutting down. We can’t help you. Your best bet is to try the NHS again.’

Three days later, my GP told me I’d been added to an emergency-treatment list. I would be starting immunity-destroying sessions at an overworked North London hospital which was being readied for a huge influx of Covid patients. I was one of the lucky ones.

The press was treating Covid much as it had AIDS in the early days: like the Black Death crossed with an atom bomb. I was also concerned that the Three-Day Rulefn2 would kick in and I wouldn’t be able to write, an indication of how muddle-headed I’d become. Yet within days there were hospital protection systems that worked, with closed areas, ID checks, sanitizers, gloves and masks all in place. It was rare that a nurse wouldn’t pull a spare mask from a pocket and say, ‘Have one of mine.’

I tuned into the other patients’ conversations. One well-dressed woman said, ‘I’m not at all happy with my operation date. It’s too near Easter. I think I’ll have it in early June.’ As if she was arranging a restaurant booking.

The treatment process felt improvised and chaotic but improved with every lesson learned. Overnight a fully fledged system appeared. Instead of receptionists, bar codes. Instead of crowded waiting rooms, spaced areas. Scrub-downs, drop-off zones, shields, screens, barriers, one-way systems. It felt as if a disaster scenario had been implemented from a plan designed decades earlier.

After the First World War a number of Whitehall officials were concerned that if hostilities broke out again the nation’s most valuable art treasures could be destroyed. With the collusion of museums, galleries and archives, they created a plan to simultaneously move every painting, statue, vase and jewellery collection underground. Nearly two decades later the plan was actioned and worked perfectly. It made me wonder what else the government had up its sleeve. ‘Monkeypox? That’s right, sir, follow the line around to the bleaching pools and wait until you’re called.’

I prepared to start an intensive course of radiotherapy. Getting to the hospital became a challenge because I no longer owned a car. Luckily the tube system was still functioning, but so deserted that you could have filmed the post-apocalyptic 28 Days Later down there.

By my third trip I no longer had any fears about entering the building as an extreme-risk patient, even though the place reminded me of the field hospital in M*A*S*H. Adding to the frenetic atmosphere, a television crew was attempting to film a fly-on-the-wall documentary in the overcrowded corridors.

The NHS does not prescribe medication excessively; it’ll suggest simple over-the-counter remedies rather than throw antibiotics at you. I couldn’t be given painkillers because they masked coronavirus symptoms. No punches were pulled; one consulting nurse told me, ‘By week three we’ll be your worst enemy. You’ll be in incredible pain and will want to kill us. When you feel this way, please don’t phone. Use these.’ She handed me a plastic bag containing a litre of salt water and a box of paracetamols.

I suddenly remembered what it had felt like at the age of thirty-nine, when I’d first undergone radiotherapy for a tumour. This course was longer: five days a week for five weeks. I bathed the bloody splits in my skin nightly with the salt water they gave me, and crunched the paracetamols. If you follow the instructions you’re given, the treatment actually works. Very few friends of mine can follow instructions of any kind, no matter how simple they are.

I suspect that in any regimented system most people behave with utter confusion. I talked to Maggie. When you’re sick you catch yourself talking too much about your own health, so I asked her how her week had been.

‘Well, I finally spoke to the doctor and he told me I needed a blood test,’ she said.

‘Did you get one?’

‘I’m still waiting for him to come back.’

‘What with, an embossed invitation? You walk into your clinic and ask for one.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that unannounced.’ I had an image of some powdered footman reading from a card as she stood in the doorway.

‘So what did you do?’ I asked.

She smiled brightly. ‘I arranged for a prayer to be said for him at church.’

This is the thing with Maggie. Everything makes sense until it suddenly takes a left turn. She’s like one of those medieval midwives who realized that washing their hands stopped pregnant women from dying, only to decide that soap was the devil’s invention.

By day I tried to keep any weight off the damaged parts of my body so that I could continue to write in short bursts. Look, I’m not Salman Rushdie, I’m not even (God help me) Will Self, just a genre writer nobody would miss, but I feel the same impulse to produce prose. This was where the mental boxes came in useful. Put the pain (intense, incessant) in that box over there, open the lid of another box and take out fictional characters (unruly, joyful).

When I first met Pete I was amused by the way everything in his home fitted neatly into physical boxes: cardboard, walnut, polished ones with lids and chamfered edges. His cupboards and drawers were filled with containers of all shapes and sizes. This arrangement extended to his mental processes. Past and present, family and friends, business and pleasure, everything was catalogued and neatly put away.

It took me a while to realize that this was not tidiness but a complex defence mechanism. Painful memories went in one drawer, annoying work problems in another. It was a practical system that allowed him to remain implacable in an increasingly confused world. He was an Easter Island statue, direct almost to the point of rudeness.

‘You think everyone’s being rude,’ he said. ‘It’s because you’re English. I’m not.’

I was his opposite, your basic idiot, a barely functioning basket case of emotional loose wiring. Mercifully, Pete decided he could go out with me when he saw that my work desk was entirely cable-free.

I couldn’t get a treatment schedule from the hospital as their computer system was down again, something that happened several times a month. Instead I was handed a DIY pills-and-injections regime involving many photocopied pages of pasted-together type, handwritten instructions and lots of tablets in a pedal-bin bag.

My first instinct was to have a panic attack, but then I saw that everything was there. It just needed deciphering. I feared for first-time patients, ill and tired, navigating a dated, labyrinthine NHS structure filled with anomalies. One of the first terms I learned was ‘cross-resistance’, making sure that no two drugs cancel each other out or cause adverse effects. They can be missed by doctors and are often picked up by pharmacies.

The system was still evolving, a bit ramshackle and cobbled together, like Emmett’s railwayfn3 or a Heath Robinson design,fn4 but working. I watched in awe as a doctor and several nurses moved furniture themselves and reconfigured their ward without awaiting instructions from some office-bound manager. It amazed me that the NHS staff could still be so efficient and caring, yet were mostly from countries hated and feared by elderly Brexiters.

One morning I had to take a French nurse to the hospital pharmacy, as nobody had told her where it was. When I asked how long she’d been at the hospital she replied, ‘Four hours. Earlier today I was in Paris.’

For a service that still serves five types of post-war biscuit in every ward,fn5 the NHS was suddenly moving faster than it had in decades. It was ungainly but did the job. A hippie friend told me he had once had his man-bag stolen in Covent Garden and ran over cobbles after the thief while wearing clogs, but still caught him. Same approach.

I was due to be taught how to use a syringe at home, but the doctor broke the needle because the injection design had changed overnight. I was not thrilled about making daily visits without an immune system to a hospital battling Covid, but one of my nurses explained that to get to the hospital she had to traverse the entire length of London on public transport every morning and night, which was humbling.

I sprayed, gloved up and masked, answered questions, filled in forms and entered the hospital every day at 9.30 a.m. The gloves usually stayed on for the first fifteen minutes.

I was always surprised by how traumatized many of the patients were. Some had never been inside a hospital in their lives. For decades the NHS had needed a radical overhaul. Instead, in had come a hierarchy of middle managers and outsourced private units, and an unworkable and now abandoned NHS patient-record system that had so far cost taxpayers nearly £10 billion, with the final bill likely to be several hundreds of millions higher.

The resulting Frankenstein’s monster of a health service became a parody of itself, a Kafkaesque system of endless meetings, projections, targets and holistic refinements that could not work for the simple reason that illness cannot be so easily quantified, labelled and graded by data crunchers. The service had to think on its feet; no one ever plans to get sick. As the population aged, new departments had been added which were no longer organic to the original structure.

It seemed to me that the pandemic had punched a reset button that might end up being welcomed by every hand-tied, frustrated employee in healthcare. At least things were moving.

‘This could all work out for the best,’ I told Pete. ‘I’ll finish the treatment and smash through the novel while I’m recovering. Sorted.’

As I said, your basic idiot.

At three o’clock in the morning my phone pinged. Panicked into assuming that someone had suddenly died, I opened it and found a text message from Maggie.

It rained today my flowers lapped it up. Gail squashed a snail in my garden she was upset & I was a bit too because I had been talking to him earlier. They are I think so beautifully designed. Sorry to hear you are ‘sick’. Unfettered love xxM

7

A Little Writing Advice

I can see what happened. I set off on the right track to deliver but a huge rock crashed down and buckled the line. I’m pretty sure I was going to write straightforwardly and directly about writing. I’m easily distracted. Let’s fix that and get to safer ground.

The benefits of choosing a career in writing

1. Eternal life.

2. The eerie power to cloud minds.

3. Incredible sexual magnetism.

4. The thrill of seeing your book title in print.

All right, I’ll be a bit more honest.

The disappointments of choosing a career in writing

1. Shorter shelf life than a lettuce.

2. The eerie power to make people forget you exist.

3. Mention you’re a writer, watch face of potential partner fall as they realize they’ll be supporting you.

4. Note from your agent is just to tell you to stop phoning.

They say it’s always too late to jump on a bandwagon; by the time you see it coming it’s already passed. But for the writer, originality comes with its own problems. If your book presents something too fresh you’ll frighten readers. The film director Billy Wilder once said, ‘Make the subtleties obvious.’

I wonder how many readers set aside J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe or Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, finding their form and content too strange and unnerving? Would it have helped them to know that Ballard always found time to play with his kids, that Evaristo came from a rough part of South London where her father was a welder or that Iain Banks was a geeky gentle giant? Possibly, now that we insist on attaching head shots to authors instead of simply trusting their prose.

There are thousands of books about writing which promise to turn you into a debut author with an exciting new voice. There are almost no books about what you do when writing is your career and you’re ten years down the line with nothing left in your head except the ghosts of old ideas. We all love the fresh-faced Beauty, but what happens after she marries the Beast?

Publishers generally value consistency more than originality, but it’s impossible to be consistently original. For most writers the effort required is too damaging to the development of personal style.

My brain was always full of strange ideas that could not be slotted neatly into categories or summed up in a strapline like Metamorphosis meets Murder on the Orient Express. Fiction always reveals something about the author. You can write about people you’ve never met and places you’ve never been, but you can’t write against your own nature. Some part of it will be identifiably you. My agent once told me, ‘I knew that piece was by you, it had your style.’ To which I indignantly replied, ‘But I don’t have a style!’

Of course we do. Everyone does. We can’t help but have one, even if we seek to avoid revealing it. When I first read Hugh Wheeler’s 1940s crime novels, starting with Puzzle for Puppets, it was immediately obvious that his writing had pushed him out of the closet; two lines were spent describing the detective’s wife and half a page was reserved for the muscular marines in a San Francisco bathhouse.

It’s not easy disguising your nature. In 1933 some writers got together for a round-robin-style crime thriller. These were very popular for a while, a crime version of the game of consequences, in which each author writes a sequential chapter and someone gets stuck with tying it all together. The 1933 publication was Ask a Policeman. In it, writers like Dorothy L. Sayers, Helen Simpson and Gladys Mitchell each wrote a section of the story, with a twist. They took each other’s detectives and wrote in their competitors’ styles.

The result was a disaster. The writers had overreached themselves. Their efforts were disjointed and wooden. In a way, this only proves how good these authors are; they wrote from the heart and couldn’t disguise the skull beneath the skin. Like artists, writers come back to the themes that haunt them again and again. A career in writing is like the ‘Goldberg Variations’, a series of repetitions in search of perfection.

In his lifetime Salvador Dalí was often reviled for being so nakedly money-conscious. (Had he lived into the time of Damien Hirst he’d have seen just how crassly materialistic an artist could be.) But if you visit the amber landscapes of Dalí’s home near Figueres you quickly see something that has been staring you in the face. Dalí’s paintings are a reflection of his childhood. He’s not copying a style, being fashionable or showing off his technique. His colours and forms, the skies, the textures, the shadows, the people, are all from his childhood.

I can think of no writer who has so changed their identity that their work cannot be recognized.fn1 Idea creation can be encouraged but not taught in a universal system. All those boxes of flashcards can be thrown out of the window. There’s no single teachable system that can be guaranteed to solve all writing dilemmas.

The problem with ‘How to Write’ books is that for all their instruction about heroes’ journeys, three-act breakdowns and bell curves, no writer I’ve ever met thinks this way, so rules are very hard to apply.

However, there are a number of volumes that bring fresh insights into the creative process by tackling the underlying issues behind storytelling, and they’re more useful than draconian courses that force you to follow a teacher’s prescribed layout. Let’s grab a few from the shelf.

Christopher Booker’s narrative breakdown, The Seven Basic Plots, looks at the history of storytelling in considerable detail. At the centre of the volume is an explanation of something I’ve long puzzled over: how and why storytelling was led into a dead end in the twentieth century.

John Yorke’s refreshingly astringent writing guide Into the Woods is terrific on structure, subtext and a whole panoply of writing techniques, but he also dares to equate soap operas with Hamlet, and, like Booker, he points out that it’s not what you’ve got but what you do with it that counts. A phrase can pack in an entire world of ideas.

Richard Skinner’s Writing a Novel is adapted from the Faber Academy writing course and includes the thirty-one basic functions of the story, which can’t exist without drama, just as drama can’t exist without conflict. It’s packed with great advice: ‘speed up for the essential, slow down for the superfluous’. I ended up underlining whole paragraphs at a time.

Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling looks at why we write from a neurological point of view. If we understand what’s going on in our brains, and the tribal and experiential habits we’ve inherited, we may better understand how to write. It could be described as the first post-Brexit writing guide because it explains how we find allies and make enemies, and why we root for the most unlikely characters. His breakdown of what makes Lawrence of Arabia so memorable ensures that you’ll never look at the film in the same way.

Few books dive deep into a single story, which is why Raymond Durgnat’s A Long Hard Look At ‘Psycho’ is so extraordinary. His range of references is thrillingly diverse, and he forces you into the mind of the viewer to question every storytelling element, looking at forty-three key speeches in the film. You come away with a head full of questions about gender, style, narrative and psychoanalysis.

I would also recommend Stephen Sondheim’s two volumes, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat. They explore the musicality of language and show the depth of emotional intelligence that goes into his astonishingly careful choice of words. He’ll go to great lengths explaining why one phrase works over another and – refreshingly – the author occasionally falls into the same traps that have always been laid for writers. He’ll also teach you about the danger of being too clever.

Now that you’re set up with some reading material, let’s invite some accomplished authors to tea.

Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps you would be willing to share a little writing advice with our readers?

RAYMOND CARVER:

Get in. Get out. Don’t linger.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU:

How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live.

MERVYN PEAKE:

Each day I live in a glass room Unless I break it with the thrusting Of my senses and pass through The splintered walls to the great landscape.

JEAN RHYS:

When I was excited about life I didn’t want to write at all.

P. G. WODEHOUSE:

I have to know exactly where I’m going before I start a novel.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON:

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

J. G. BALLARD:

All through my career I’ve written a thousand words a day, even if I’ve got a hangover. You’ve got to discipline yourself if you’re a professional. There is no other way.

JAMES JOYCE:

A book, in my opinion, should not be planned out beforehand.

GEORGE ORWELL:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

JODI PICOULT:

Whether it’s garbage, or it’s good … you just DO it, and you fix it later.

E. M. FORSTER:

Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is there not a convention which allows the novelist to stop as soon as he feels muddled or bored?

TONI MORRISON:

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half-sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings [are] more thrilling than understanding can ever be.

BERNARDINE EVARISTO:

For me, there’s always a level of experimentation – I’m not happy writing what we might call traditional novels.

ALICE MUNRO:

Often, in about three-quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think I’m going to abandon this story.

CHARLES DICKENS:

Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out of the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up …

SAMUEL BECKETT:

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

OSCAR WILDE:

You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

MURIEL SPARK:

Culture cannot compensate for lack of hard knowledge.

WILBUR SMITH:

I don’t know how many lions and leopards I’ve shot.

ALL:

[…]

C. S. LEWIS:

(Breaking the awkward silence.) You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

VOLTAIRE:

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read!

BERYL BAINBRIDGE:

I am of the firm belief that everyone could write books and I never understand why they don’t. After all, everybody speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM:

Art is edited truth. Edited to give it shape, rhythm, speed and punch … Narrative art must be clear, but it must also be mysterious. Something should remain unsaid, something just beyond our understanding, a secret.

MONICA ALI:

The thought of writing was always pleasant, but the process was painful.

ALAN BENNETT:

What nobody ever says about writing is that one can spend a whole morning … just trying to think up a name.

PETER CAREY:

My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.

ME:

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. There’s tea on the sideboard. Help yourself to ginger nuts, Bourbons, custard creams, shortbread and digestives. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a group photo?

Ah, I thought not.

8

Grommets

Nosocomephobia is an intense fear of hospitals, and it’s very common. Richard Nixon suffered from it. A patient with a serious illness, admitted into hospital for the first time, enters a physical and mental maze. They are taking part in a comprehension test they haven’t revised for, being dropped into a grid of obscure rules with only one way of doing things, the details to which they are not privy.

I quickly discovered there was a hospital hierarchy:

Specialist:

appears with increasing frequency when things turn shittingly awful.

Doctor:

not always mentally present in the room.

Consultant nurse:

there to prime you for bad news.

Nurse:

there to make you comfortable, can sometimes be encouraged to tell you things she’s not supposed to.

Dinner lady:

‘Liver’s off, no desserts left. Like a biscuit?’

Bloke with a mop:

often asked for diagnoses by confused patients.

You can talk to your GP but specialists hate the interference of GPs and will happily have massive arguments with them in front of you, which is quite entertaining. At least nobody makes you try to pay up front – or pay at all. When I tried to have one of my tests handled privately I was told by the doctor, ‘You’re much better off going to the NHS. Frankly, they have more expertise in this sort of thing than us.’

Something else I learned at an early age: getting sick is a triple shock.

1. You feel terrible!

2. You’re sitting in a corridor full of really sick people and have no idea what’s going on!

3. There’s a nurse talking about cakes with another nurse when she should be feeling sorry for you!

Once you’re over your feelings of fear and inchoate outrage you can start to reassess the situation and see that it’s less scary than it first appeared.

Because suddenly you’re being seen. The longest wait times usually occur when you’re outside the system trying to get in. The pandemic upended everything overnight. The NHS has a long history of lateral thinking to get around government cuts, so it can sometimes turn on a penny.

Triage has become a crucial factor. Admittance counters are computerized so everyone on your case instantly knows who and where you are. The most useful thing you can do is memorize your hospital number. You’ll be asked for it a thousand times. On every trip I watched someone fish about in a handbag or scroll through a phone looking for their number while the nurse not only waited patiently but said, ‘Take your time.’ Whereas I would probably have snatched their bag from them and shouted, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, give it to me!’

I asked members of the frontline staff why they had chosen this career, and many had joined for what seemed to me extraordinarily arbitrary reasons.

‘I did it to get out of Doncaster.’

‘I did it to be with my best friend from school.’

‘I did it because I didn’t like being a vicar.’

‘I wanted to leave my abusive husband in Manila.’

Most nurses I’ve talked to do the job because they enjoy it. My niece is an NHS nurse and particularly chooses night shifts in A&E on New Year’s Eve because she ‘likes the buzz of the place’. She works between a football stadium and a rugby ground, so when they’re both playing at home A&E becomes Mayhem Central. What do they get most?

‘Head injuries. Drunk men tend to fall down flights of concrete steps on their faces.’

While she’s enjoying herself, her patients get skittish because they haven’t chosen to be there.

I’m not especially brave but I can see that fear is four-fifths of the problem. Illness, like the details of other people’s dreams and photos of their dogs, is intrinsically boring. It mostly consists of waiting around, interspersed with explosions of panicked activity. Worse, it can come to define you to the point where people dread asking how you are, afraid that you’re going to give them some long-winded explanation about your spleen. That’s the point where I get out my novel and bury my nose in its pages.

Books! They turned up like charity biros or wire coat hangers. Before I loaded most of them on to an e-reader I was forever fishing them out of the pockets of jeans, jackets, satchels, shopping bags, finding them under sofas and behind cupboards or hidden somewhere because I didn’t want to throw them out but wasn’t quite ready to read them yet.

I had long known that books would come to my rescue in hospitals. When I need to take my mind off the clock and not think about how many hours I’m wasting sitting around with a ticket number burning in one sweaty hand, I reach into my bag for a paperback.

In waiting rooms hardly anyone reads books. Most sit staring into space, lost in thought or not thinking at all, or phoning their children to arrange collection, during which they end up lengthily describing how the nurse said she had never seen such terribly collapsed veins in her life.

There’s not much medical advice in this book but here’s something for you to remember. Doctors and nurses have no time to mess about; be concise and clear and do not make jokes. Listen carefully, obey and read all instructions properly. I found myself with a problem after discovering I had been given twenty ampoules of salt water, a long tube and some rubber grommets. I didn’t know what to do with them so I threw them away, and two weeks later I needed them desperately.

One nurse told me, ‘You’re supposed to have a cancer care umbrella. At the present time you have no umbrella.’

The ‘care umbrella’ was meant to marshal me through the traumatic parts of the treatment, but in the pandemic it was chimerical. That’s not to say that the NHS simply bung you full of meds and kick you out of the door. The staff assiduously follow up but they do not cosset; that’s what your loved ones are for. The NHS provides the tools but it’s your job to apply them. There’s no longer any money for holistic care. The NHS is not ‘the envy of the world’ any more. Ask patients in Japan or the Nordic countries.

Here’s the weird thing: I would spend months choosing a sound system or a summer holiday destination, so why did I only talk to my doctor for five minutes? I was aware that his time was more precious than mine and I didn’t want to waste it. But it was my life, damnit. The doctor’s office is the birthplace of l’esprit d’escalier; you walk out and remember what you’d meant to say just as you reach the street.

So I needed to listen more carefully now. My tumour was being blasted to bits. If any rogue cells spread to another part of the body the cancer would still be identified by its point of origin. Bad news was usually laid out clearly in plain speech, but was wisely revealed in stages. Serious side effects were downplayed but not avoided.

When my treatment ended the hardest part began. Over the next two or three weeks everything got much worse. When doctors tell you it’s ‘challenging’ and that some people ‘decide not to continue’ (what with, living?) you start to pay more attention. Medics see the exact same pattern repeated hundreds of times every month but it’s completely new to most patients. A doctor’s knowledge is born of probability and predictability. They already know, statistically speaking, exactly what will happen next. Who else’s advice are you going to take? Medics are not prepared to make predictions, but after a while one starts to notice the gaps in what to expect.

DR RAMALAN:

So, continue on this regime and you’ll be fine for six weeks.

ME:

And what happens after that?

DR RAMALAN:

(Cagily.) Well … let’s get through the six weeks first.

9

The History of Tea

I was just a patient looking in from the outside, but it seemed as if everyone was delighted that normal procedures had been tossed on the bonfire. Everything was suddenly paced up. Pete hired a car to get me to the hospital appointments because by now public transport was virtually non-existent. The roads were as empty and silent as though air-raid sirens had gone off or Triffids had taken over.

The radiology department was housed in a concrete bomb shelter around the side of the hospital; you couldn’t take anything metal with you and there was no phone signal. I needed to keep a full bladder so that the technicians could see every crevice where bad cells might be lurking. There’s an art to drinking six pints of water and then holding it in when your appointment is delayed.

Radiology and chemo are the big weapons in the cancer arsenal: the blowtorch and the bomb. They’re more refined and targeted than the same two Victorian-style treatments my grandfather was given, but only because you don’t have to bite on a stick these days. If you’ve got a surface lump it can easily be burnt out, but in the process you get fried. Forget all the fancy drugs; you just need all that salt water and those paracetamols. Even so, you find yourself moaning through your teeth a lot.

The hardest part to get my head around was the idea that cancer as a single entity did not exist.

Cancer is a generic term for over two hundred distinct diseases grouped together with a common trait – these diseases altered the genetic structure of cells so that they rebelled against their normal functions. Now I understood that, what I had, when I developed it and why it grew in the first place all affected my future. It was no use talking to a fellow sufferer because what happened to them was utterly different from what was happening to me. However, there were certain common events: an initial diagnosis, treatment to reduce or destroy the growth of rogue cells and, if that failed, metastasis, the colonization of the host.

It’s not all bad news, though; fear of cancer comes mainly from two sources: your own family experience and the media, which swings between horror stories (‘Doctor Leaves Piece of Lawn Chair inside Patient’) and articles on instant miracle cures ending with a proviso that the drug is expected to be approved within six years. You may recall the death of a grandparent with great sadness but you may not realize that treatments have moved forward at supersonic speed since then. It’s not until you’re faced with the problem yourself that you even hear about advancements in the field.

Before I first went into the hospital I fantasized that it would look like a cross between 2001 and Gattaca. It turned out to be more of a cross between an Alan Bennett play, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and where the dogs are taken to be put down in Lady and the Tramp.

My radiotherapy room had no external windows. The two suites were called Cedar and Sycamore. In order to differentiate them, both had identical pictures of a cherry tree. The lighting was low and watery, making the place look like an aquarium, and flickered just enough to make an eye tic. The name Cedar unfortunately conjured the name of the Cedars-Sinai Jewish hospital in Los Angeles, voted eighth best in the world. Try the lox, apparently it’s fabulous. This dungeon was not fabulous. In these mournful, depressing rooms the word ‘cedar’ conjured images of coffins.

Every time I went in I needed a blood test first to make sure I wasn’t infected. My waiting room, thoughtfully kitted out with wipe-clean chairs, had a small television permanently playing Good Morning Britain. I had no idea presenter Lorraine Kelly was still alive. Her concerned, kindly, caring, thoroughly decent voice eventually made me want to take a cricket bat to the set.

Occasionally an elderly patient with dry Simpsons-yellow skin shuffled in and waited placidly until called. Sometimes someone confronted the unfazed receptionist in a state of panic that prevented logical conversation.

One was about forty-five, nicely kitted out in a blue woollen overcoat and a black leather clutch bag. She complained about being unable to leave her car anywhere while the receptionist calmly listed the ways in which patients could apply for parking permits. The woman wasn’t listening. She escalated the argument by abandoning logic. Perhaps she thought that by speaking more loudly and urgently she would get a better response.

The receptionist was large, Black and implacable. Usually she laughed and joked with the patients but now she switched to her ‘wall of steel’ setting.

The white lady in blue wool continued to semi-shout in that furious way the British do when their eyes turn into angry marbles. She pulled in other factors to support her case but by this time she had stopped making sense at all.

As I listened I realized how absolutely terrified she was. Her husband had lung cancer, her son wouldn’t leave his bedroom and she was here for the treatment of a breast tumour. She had to do everything herself. She did not know what she would do without help. She could not go on like this.

The receptionist waited for her panic to burn out and said, ‘Let me see what I can do.’ She made a phone call and gave her a form to fill in.

As the lady in blue left with the form, she checked herself in the mirror, in case any signs of anguish still showed on her face.

Why was it so important to appear as if none of this touched us? I wondered if I looked like any of these patients yet but couldn’t see it. It seemed likely that I would soon start to smell of chemicals. Perhaps I would end up like Orwell’s Winston Smith, a burnt-out shell of a man whose rotten teeth could be twisted out of their sockets by his tormentor.fn1

I decided to keep up standards and dress a little more smartly for appointments.fn2 I considered wearing Tom Ford aftershave to the treatments. Don’t judge me, I just don’t suit cheap scent.

I got to know the nurses. Many of them lived within walking distance in provided accommodation, so they saw the inside of one small room by day and another small room by night. They had great patience but you wouldn’t mess with them. They knew how to deal with time-wasters. System improvements were made daily; groups of five or six people gathered to discuss them while on the move, implementing changes right then and there. It had to be how military hospitals worked.

In this exhausted, run-down NHS hospital I felt paradoxically safe, just as I would have felt safe in the chaotic human warmth of the wartime London Underground. All the patients had now been told to attend hospital alone during the pandemic, clearly another paradox in the making. At least nobody spoke in the waiting rooms, which was quite a blessing as I was trying to read.fn3

When I came home I rubbed arnica on to my bruised arms, which made absolutely no difference at all, then had coffee and cake on the terrace. Then I tried to work. Nights were difficult, an eternal darkness spent waiting for the hurt to stop, refusing to take anything stronger than paracetamol because I didn’t like the side effects of painkillers. With blurred vision and a warm fuzz in your head it’s too easy to overdose, drop boiling drinks over yourself, walk into bedroom doors, fall down stairs or accidentally read Richard Osman novels. To stay alert I drank Yorkshire Tea (Hard Water edition), which seemed to provide the synaptic link between my keyboard and my cancer, and kept me working. Tea, the eternal panacea, sat on my desk and on my hospital tray beside the retro-biscuits and a book, an innocent-seeming swirl of brown water that changed the world.

The eighteenth century. The British East India Company buys tea, silk and porcelain from China but offers the Chinese piles of laughable British shit in return, so they only accept silver. Soon we’re losing too much silver so we secretly flood China with illegal Indian opium, turning everyone into addicts, and get the silver back in payment, which we use to buy tea in a poisonous full circle.

Tea literally becomes the opiate of the masses, so there are two wars the Chinese have no hope of winning because we have better technology, and we feverishly destroy their Summer Palace in Beijing in reprisal for the torture and murder of twenty English, French and Indian envoys and journalists. Three hundred eunuchs and palace maidens lock themselves inside and are burnt to death. Some of the destroyed treasures were nearly four thousand years old.

Drinking a beverage whose trade was used to build a workforce of drug addicts didn’t bother us. Tea was a lifeblood. Teabags, my mother told me, were inherently common and insipid. I used to take a teapot with me to America, where tea is still made by pouring lukewarm water into a tumbler and handing you a teabag still in its packet.

Tea is a fantastic device for setting up scenes in books now that people no longer tap out cigarettes, wave them about or skulk furtively alone with them on street corners. I asked a police officer what she hated most about the job and she said, ‘Everyone you visit offers you a cup of fucking tea.’ They used to say that somewhere in the British Empire it was always teatime. Even though you had to steal and murder for it.

Fictional American characters are far more proactive and driven than British ones. They’re compelled by money, not class. They endure terrible hardship before redemption, reminding us of Sam Raimi’s horror rules: the innocent must suffer, the guilty must be punished and you must taste blood to be a man. The British equivalent is to suffer, be mildly annoyed and make another cup of tea.

As I was becoming overly introspective, it seemed like common sense to head bad thoughts off at the pass by working through the night. Actually, parts of it were fun; I felt like Dashiell Hammett bashing away at a manual typewriter, a cigarette behind my ear and a slug of bourbon in my glass, although tea and a bowl of Shreddies seemed like poor substitutes. It was dark and quiet outside. Never that much of a twenty-four-hour town, London felt as if it had taken a Horlicks and a Robert Harris to bed.

At half past three in the morning my phone beeped. Maggie was texting me:

Hello darling the milkman did not come again. I opened a tin of condensed milk, absolutely the wrong milk to add to vegetable soup. I should have got evaporated. I’m not sure what day it is. It seems to be dark all the time. I watched a talk by donald trump in a church telling the congregation he is determined to make america great again. How on earth did I get that programme then I watched a very forthright woman instructing trainees in a dementia home. I thought it might be insightful. Basically youre ducked and even if the helpers can connect with you and find your hidden you which is really there in your long time memory they will have left because it probably took such a long time. Hang on there is somebody at the door

A yellow clad man in a mask was waving a fairy liquid bottle I told him to try next door. I actually forgot what trumps name was. I am reading your journal and laughed so much I choked which was good for clearing out my phelm. I love the funny people who you described taking pictures of drains. Anyway I have changed my knickers and am going to read the rest. I think your writing should be given to women who have incontinence problems never mind monitoring them with catheters just let them read your journal. I am going to read it again cos I have emptied my bladder and am good to go xxxMaggie

10

Hub of the Universe

I began writing a new draft of the Dark Ages book in earnest, trying to ensure that I remained on schedule. In between bursts of prose I took a stroll around my neighbourhood searching for inspiration. There were plenty of people about who looked as if they had just stepped out of a Pieter Bruegel painting. Faces and feelings are timeless.

We live in the kind of neighbourhood where at any moment of the day there seems to be someone banging on a sheet of steel with a hammer. I like where I live, even though it tests the limits of everyone’s patience. Before its reinvention as an almost attractive neighbourhood, King’s Cross was grotesque. A lawless border town, the home of mad old hippies, drunks and an awful lot of prostitutes, a former royal spa that had somehow ended up having a big dipper built on its station forecourt.

Left behind by a confluence of railway lines, dead ends and derelict warehouses, it existed as a handful of run-down streets full of transients. But it had its useful side; it was once the only place in North London where you could buy the next day’s papers just before midnight (they were being dropped off for the trains). The penny arcade on its busiest junction provided warmth and succour for a fleet of nylon-clad, acne-ridden rent boys and their Hogarthian clients. Around the back of the station the local ladies of the night operated out of a darkened vacant lot. And there was the Scala, a repertory cinema like no other.

Their films appeared to have been selected with the aid of a blindfold and a handful of darts, but I could tell someone was trying to shine lights into the corners of the cinematic universe that most people wouldn’t venture into without attack dogs.

One of the worst things you could do in the eighties was take a date to the Scala, especially if it was a Frank Henenlotter double bill or Taxi zum Klo, a film in which a jilted lover comes home to find his other half having sex with a stranger and responds in a way that was relatively unfamiliar in Hollywood films, i.e. he watches them and has a top-quality wank.

It wasn’t just the films that caused issues for prudish newbies; it was the audience. I recall walking into the notorious circle with the film critic Mark Kermode, who sniffed the air and said, ‘It smells like fucking in here.’ Actually, I think it was just the creeping damp, but I knew what he meant. In a time when much of the sex going on in London could best be described as ‘furtive’, the Scala was openly and thrillingly hedonistic in a check-the-seat-before-you-sit-down way.

Around the corner we raised money for the striking miners at the Bell Tavern alongside Derek Jarman and Tilda Swinton, so it made sense to dive into the Scala afterwards and sit through a banned East German film or Montenegro, Dušan Makavejev’s delirious feminist fable which featured a woman sitting on a remote-controlled toy tank fitted with a dildo instead of a gun turret.

I had always been spiritually attached to the area, and now I lived there, although I knew many people who would not think it was something to be proud of. Standing at the crossroads beneath the iconic Lighthouse, I watched the world go by in a haze of diesel fumes.

Every Monday morning two men in blue hazmat suits arrived outside a municipal building carrying large plastic canisters. They unscrewed the caps and poured a blue liquid all along the edges of the building, a pungent combination of disinfectant and soap. The former council property housed a nightclub, and for some reason I couldn’t fathom the clubbers decided not to micturate in the club itself but to unburden themselves thirty seconds after they’d left against its rear wall. The uric acid was eating away the building’s foundations. I thought this was a downside of city living until I saw exactly the same thing happen in a rural town, where they could at least piss into the scenery.

King’s Cross is one of London’s pinch points. A nexus of travel, with passengers bouncing like photons between stations, it is chaos personified. It’s entertaining even when it’s raining, from the man who bellows about JAY-zusfn1 and the young woman who cries whenever someone passes and then immediately goes back to chatting on her phone, to the market-stall lads, posh boys up from the country to sell the produce of their farms, sounding like characters in nineteenth-century novels. ‘Thank you for the purchase of our leavened loaf, kind sir, that will be six pounds fifty, cards only.’

During the lockdowns they all vanished and closed up with the exception of the Turkish kebab shop, which, like the Windmill in Soho, never closed. The owner said everyone else had gone because they were bloody cowards and let the bloody council try to close him down, they couldn’t because he knew exactly who was on the bloody graft, innit. He immediately entered my league of local heroes.

Just around the corner was the local cobbler, George, a Greek guy who shouted all the time. The rumour was that he used to go clubbing a lot and fell asleep with his head against a gigantic bass speaker. He had a shop called ‘Achilles Heels’ and wouldn’t let me pay for small repairs. I passed him on the way home from the hospital and he always waved. A hundred thousand people use King’s Cross station on a Sunday alone, and gentleman George remembers names and says hello.

A few doors up was Super Mario, who had the Gran Sasso café. For years I went there for breakfast and sat in the window seat making notes for my next book. On my birthday Super Mario brought me a breakfast baguette with lit candles in the crust. One of his customers saw the screensaver on my laptop and was so taken with it that he upped sticks and relocated.fn2 People would come over. ‘Are you the writer?’ ‘Is that your writing notebook? Can I see?’ Always polite and rather timid, as if I was going to shout at them.

Further along the road was a girl who opened a cute little vegetarian sandwich shop which she should have named ‘A Gift from Daddy’ but was instead called ‘Meadows’. When I went in there she told me she couldn’t make me a sandwich because she’d forgotten to buy any bread again, Angus had borrowed her purse and he hadn’t come back from the party last night, what could you do? The shop’s gone now.

Each house in this row had a little garden at the back which once formed the bank of a tributary flowing to a Roman encampment called the Brill. After two millennia nothing was left of it. At the foot of this urban village a great sea of international travellers arrived and departed from seven stations. They were as oblivious to us as we were to them.

Opposite the railway station once stood a wooden roller coaster surrounded by funfair booths, but before that there was a sixty-foot-high monument to King George IV with a camera obscura in its apex. And before that, according to Tacitus, the woad-covered, six-foot-tall Boadicea (or Boudicca) led her Iceni tribe into battle against the Romans.fn3

George says you can’t change London because everyone fits into the city, not the other way around. The language and behaviour is passed down to the residents from a collective pool of knowledge that you pick up.

Usually it’s the people who shape the land. Not in this case.

I’m nine years old and catching the tube from King’s Cross to Piccadilly Circus. At the other end I alight and stand on the corner where Shaftesbury Avenue meets Eros. I keep a notebook in my blazer and write about everything I see. The notebooks are long gone and I have no photographic memory but my head is filled with the sights and smells of that time.

What strikes me most are the lights – I have never seen so many coloured lights, turning passers-by into extras on a stage. The cars look like children’s drawings, glossy chromium trims reflecting neon. So much neon, figures in stuttering flicker-book poses. Light bulbs, now a forgotten commodity, thousands of them encased in rows, pulsing up and down in seaside bingo colours, advertising pipe tobacco and beer.

Snout smoke and cheap perfume. Milk stout, popcorn, hotdogs, fried onions, car exhausts. The thought of buying a cheap camera never crosses my mind (I couldn’t have afforded the cheapest one anyway). My pencil flies across the page until I am forced to close the book and let the sensations wash over me. I’m perfectly safe here, jostled by passers-by, blinded by bulbs, surrounded by hooting traffic. I am home.

I had no idea back then that outside of this tiny triangle London was dark: Holborn penumbral; Fitzrovia dead; Hampstead a sleeping village; Dalston, Shoreditch and Islington all no-go areas; the East End and South London still pitted with bomb sites. The buildings were blackened, the streets empty. The South Bank was a wasteland, the brutalist complex of the National Theatre still fourteen years away from being realized. Only the dazzling palace of the Festival Hall, Londoners’ favourite building, shone out across the Thames. Greenwich, where I grew up, had as much night life as the surface of the moon.

Piccadilly Circus, the hub of the universe. Everything I had ever dreamed of, all the things that had no place in our house: laughter, learning, music, energy, sin, luxury, life. My parents were too exhausted to do anything other than prepare food, clean and sleep.

I did not feel like a penniless outsider looking in; I felt entirely comfortable. Pubs and cafés and cinemas and shops offered entry routes and I had a head start; I was technically born within the sound of Bow bells, which made me a Cockney. Surely that was worth as much as a master’s degree?

I try to recapture that goggle-eyed feeling of newness now, of seeing everything in colour for the first time, like Cliff Richard’s red bus driving out of grey England into the technicolour of Europe,fn4 but it’s almost impossible to recall Camden Town when it was full of antique shops and bookstalls and hippies, to remember Leicester Square filled with traffic and starlings and tap dancers in fezzes.

I recently met a young woman from Los Angeles who had just arrived in the real world. She had left her homeland for the first time and suddenly found herself in the seething neon-lit madhouse of Soho.

Her first question caught me by surprise. ‘Why is everyone so smartly dressed?’ And I thought, It’s a Friday night, winter in Soho, you wouldn’t wear casual. Her second question: ‘Why does everyone talk so much?’ Answer: Because you’re in a pub and that’s what we do.

Right then I would have loved to have seen the city reborn through her eyes. It enthralled me as a child and every once in a while it still does. But, like everybody else who lives here, part of me always wants to escape. Far away, though – never to the countryside of the South Coast.

In the summer of 2020 European countries were slamming their borders shut, so I went to stay with friends on the South Coast for a weekend.

One of the currently fashionable seaside towns was Deal, nestled in the wrong part of Kent, in the district of Dover, which is a wonderful place to live if you’re a socially inverted serial killer. Londoners flooded down to Deal during the pandemic because the properties seemed cheap after Notting Hill, and owing to a sensible architectural plan many coastal houses had sunny courtyards rather than windswept gardens.

As a result, Deal was now stuffed with escaped DFLsfn5 who spent their days trying to lure friends down for a few days. Within minutes of alighting from the train I bumped into three people I knew, all of whom made that thumb-and-little finger gesture meaning ‘We must keep in touch!’ as they walked away.

Fat chance.

Deal was not like one of those Kent or Essex towns where there’s so little to do that the townsfolk feel the need to don fancy dress every weekend (‘This Saturday: Blitz Spirit!’). It had an attractive high street filled with artisanal cheese stores and bijou knick-knackeries and hilariously overpriced restaurants. It had a fresh-looking pebble beach and a brutalist concrete pier. It had a millpond sea patrolled to stop migrant boats. On a Sunday morning its sea frets settled a milky caul of calm over the town.

There were no amusement arcades, no helter-skelters, no miniature railway, no shops selling false teeth made out of seaside rock. The only shop on the promenade was an antiquarian book store (‘By appointment only’).

Everyone in Deal owned at least one dog.fn6 They walked their dogs hourly and stopped to chat to everyone else who had a dog. You took your dog for a turf-out on the promenade, waiting to feel something warm and soft in your hand through a little plastic bag, and bumped into the Fotherington-Thomases, who said isn’t it funny seeing you here and oh you’ve got your little dog, they’re lovely the miniatures, aren’t they, so friendly, look, she knows we’re talking about her, she’s a lovely little dog, isn’t she? Darling, look at the lovely little dog, what’s her name? Gigi? That’s lovely, and look, she’s doing doggy things, the sort of things doggies do, lovely, and when you got back to the greengrocer’s some gimlet-eyed gossip said with a knowing smile, ‘I hear you bumped into the Fotherington-Thomases on the promenade. They thought you were looking rather tired after that party you went to last night.’ And suddenly you longed for the sacred anonymity of the big city.

Somewhere peaceful. Somewhere safe. Somewhere – actually I didn’t care where I was so long as I could write.

11

Big Bovril

The 1960s. As a bespectacled, gawky child who could end up in A&E after tripping off a kerb with a comic in one hand, I sensed I would enjoy a lifetime peppered with exciting doctors’ visits. I had already been rushed to A&E several times before.

Tore open a vein on a rose bush.

Contused by wasp stings.

Broke nose on cricket ball.

Fell through floorboards in bombed-out house.

Nasty accident with scalpel blade while cutting balsa wood.

Broke nose again on tree by running into it.

Tried to release fragile bayonet light bulb from its socket by pushing down hard.

Glued eyelid shut while making model of HMS Ark Royal.

Broke nose again playing water polo.

There were plenty of ordinary childhood diseases you didn’t get rushed to A&E for, like measles, mumps, chickenpox and whooping cough. Kids caught them and you didn’t find out until they came back to school looking thin.

Illness was invisible in my childhood. People who coughed a lot were mysteriously spirited away. Mothers vanished for a week and returned home without a word, to be cared for by a grandmother before silently reappearing at the kitchen stove. After such a stay in hospital, my mother returned and sometimes stopped cooking to stand at the window rubbing her knuckles, lost in melancholy thoughts.

Some young women weren’t allowed to answer the door for about three months, then briefly vanished and weren’t to be spoken to when they returned. Nor were some young men, for more unspeakable conditions.

Tuberculosis. Polio. Tetanus. Diphtheria. Bronchitis. Down’s Syndrome. Venereal Disease. Alcoholism. Unplanned pregnancy. Mental illness. Nervous breakdowns. War tremors. Hide them all away.

But the names of those diseases! Diphtheria. If you’re going to get sick from something that has four syllables you’d expect it to be special. And don’t you just want to roll ‘polio’ around in your mouth? They could all have been obliterated with vaccines, of course, but we’re not sharing types, not team players. My mother said, ‘Don’t bother your aunt, darling. She’s had lady troubles. She just needs to be left alone for a while.’

Mental problems were bundled under euphemisms. ‘She’s had to go away for a month or two, boys. She’s been living on her nerves.’ It took me years to work out that my mother had suffered a nervous breakdown. My father was too embarrassed to broach the subject with his sons, so he simply pretended it never happened.

None of this fazed us as children. We liked the round-faced kid who sat on some steps at the end of the street and was always willing to play funny games with us until my mother stopped us from going there. ‘He has Down’s Syndrome,’ she said. ‘He’s twenty-two.’

And so we went our own ways, parents and children, as we always had, shielded from truths by the simple arrangement of them not being available, in the same way that the wartime papers had failed to report any news of defeats. Inconvenient babies were whisked away to be raised by foster mothers. Sickly children were hustled off on fresh-air cures along bleak sections of coastline. Frightened pregnant girls were blackmailed and manipulated into giving up their infants. Confirmed bachelors married uninterested women or became fruity old uncles living lives of discreet solitude in Earl’s Court basement flats.

The new enlightenment had not yet arrived. The rainbow children were not yet born. They didn’t know about those fruity uncles, whose quiet stoicism won them rights they would never live to enjoy. Soon their descendants would start dying from a mysterious wasting disease that only affected gay men, haemophiliacs and needle-sharers. Life partners found they had no legal rights over their property or inheritance, so that when one died the other was thrown on to the street. While the medical profession struggled to understand what was happening, the relatives of the unwell arranged to seize everything they owned the moment they were safely declared dead. Centuries of passion, creativity and loyalty were dismissed and denied. Men with strange cancers that blistered their skin and blinded them died alone in bare bleach-scrubbed rooms. I watched those closest to me wither away, as shunned and hidden as anyone in the 1950s.

In 1987 the British government’s response to this latest plague was to screen mystifyingly oblique commercials, one about a tombstone falling over, the other about an iceberg. Far from helping, they merely scared and puzzled everyone. Luckily it was a pandemic that only affected ‘them’ and could be safely ignored until Princess Diana held a dying man’s hand and force-fed some compassion into the nation.

It got easier for us after that. Pete and I had a civil ceremony as soon as we were able. I think some guests attended the ceremony and reception just so that they could say they’d been to a same-sex service. When I mentioned it to a woman at a party she said, ‘So, it’s not like an actual real marriage.’

My mother chose not to attend the event. As a child she had been required to worship at church three times on a Sunday, and religion had returned to comfort her in later life, despite being told by a vindictive vicar that she would go to hell after she accidentally dinged his car. She turned down the offer to join our secular celebration with quiet grace.

When the same-sex marriage bill replaced civil ceremonies in 2014 we immediately returned to the registrar and were married without telling anyone. Owing to the fact that Pete is a New Zealander, the interrogation we faced was lengthy and extremely thorough. We stood on the steps of Islington Town Hall contemplating our next move as a large Bridezilla of a wedding swept down the stairs above us, all confetti and streamers, the bride dressed in what appeared to be Deborah Kerr’s ballgown from The King and I, the photographer yelling to us to get out of the way.

‘We just got married as well,’ I told him.

He stopped in his tracks. ‘But where’s your photographer?’

‘We haven’t got one,’ said Pete.

‘Then I’ll take your pictures for free,’ he said, and proceeded to do so.

For me the journey between coming out and getting married was smooth because there had been no emergence as such; without advice or guidance I had simply drifted away from dating girls, making terrible mistakes and decisions along the way that I imagine happen a little less often in today’s more self-aware times. My parents weren’t too fussed about what I did so long as I was happy. This was less to do with hands-off parenting than their need to work hard enough to keep their own heads above water.

Being openly gay is a bit like being openly vegetarian. The subject rarely comes up unless you’re with a group of aggressive meat-eaters. Although once, while I was on a date in a smart restaurant, the man seated opposite us stormed over and upturned our table. As he burst out of the place in disgust his wife came over and apologized profusely. She had been left to eat alone and pay for the mess, a situation it turned out she had been in many times before. We should have asked her to join us for dinner. Our crime, it seemed, had been the way my date and I had glanced at each other.

I was not one of those people who could proudly say I’d never been sick a single day of my life. I was born with pneumonia and spent my first days in an oxygen tent that left a permanent weakness in my lungs. I had pleurisy and pneumonia again before leaving school. I became familiar with the hospital system at the earliest opportunity, as if conducting reconnaissance for a film to be shot in later life.

At the age of thirty-nine I found a lump. I was scared to go to a doctor and scared not to. After being informed that it was malignant I went for a second opinion and was told by an incredibly unpleasant elderly doctor to ‘go home and prepare for death’. I remember sitting on a pebble beach wrapped in a blanket and feeling utterly, desolately alone.

My treatment was successful. I should have gone back and thrown a rock through his window. Unfortunately the stress reintroduced an old enemy into my lungs and they filled with fluid. When my condition worsened and I was put in the ICU, my father came to visit me carrying the world’s largest jar of Bovril. A distant memory inherited from his own father had surfaced, some Victorian advertisement saying that Bovril kept people healthy, and it was all he could think of to do.

I couldn’t imagine where he had managed to find such a gigantic object. It took years to finish. We had a good laugh about that.

12

Nobody Likes a Good All-Rounder

Hello luv I am back from fire alert at the hospital which took 35min the queue was nearly a hundred. Four lovely firemen. Saw attractive Dr M very gorgeous. Finally got results of my scan it looked like Jackson pollock artwork. I often feel like crap when I have had the radioactive dye, once bursting a vein, I actually exploded. I should be attacking my hundreds of mundane jobs but instead I am reading your book and underlining new words I thought I saw a supermoon but it was a lamp post. You must not be downhearted you will always have your friends xxxMaggie

Maggie was from Yorkshire and had a habit of saying the unsayable. I was from London and couched everything in euphemism. English writers always have to contend with the stumbling block of class. There are still almost no working-class writers, and relatively few who did not attend university. Literature was produced by those with independent means and higher education. Writers of popular fiction came from advertising, journalism and any institution so familiar with the daily throwing around of words that it treated them with a wonderful disrespect.

I once worked with a film producer who asked me to watch his latest feature and tell him what I thought of it. After the screening I began, ‘It’s too—’

He stopped me. ‘My films aren’t too anything. They’re popular.’

The key to popular success, it seemed, was not to be too much of any one thing.

It’s easy to become carried away and forget the reader. Less wit, more action, fewer adjectives, more verbs, simpler characters, less topicality, a metronomic output and a certain distance from the subject matter all help.

In a world where everyone carries a phone the mere act of carrying a book singles you out as different. People think you’re being unsociable, proofing yourself against the risk of boredom. Few see it for what it is: protective armour. No one ever asks me what I’m reading. Non-readers treat books as if they’re bombs. They carefully examine the covers, seeking a clue as to what’s inside.

Books frighten many people. They feel unable to have a discussion about them, and apologize for what they read when they should be proud of themselves for reading at all.

Books are more egalitarian than non-readers realize. Who cares whether you read Harry Potter or Proust, you’re reading and getting something out of it, and it’s all that matters. I suppose it’s like following the Essex Senior League in football: you’re just there to enjoy the game.

At the age of fifteen I was hopelessly disorganized, a dreamer, a mess. I haunted libraries and cinemas. I preferred films that eschewed realism in favour of a happy coincidence of image, emotion and odd dialogue. The more unreal a story was, the more I loved it. For a while I wanted to be a writer-animator because the nation was obviously crying out for them. The world is full of dreamers; I have a friend who majored in Catalan and drumming.

I had no idea who I was. Charles Dickens published his first story at the age of twenty-one. William Hogarth was an engraver in his own right by the age of twenty-three. Billie Eilish had a hit song at fourteen. I was already washed up.

The day before a major exam, my English teacher took me to one side.

‘I’m going to tell you a teachers’ secret,’ he said. ‘We don’t care what happens to you. Oh, we do for a short while, but once we see your disappointing exam papers you never enter our minds again. There’s another influx of students coming up right behind you and we’re concentrating on them now. All those pupils who try to be above average at so many things just to please us are wasting their time because nobody likes a good all-rounder.’

My mother had once told me the same thing.

He grabbed me by a lapel.fn1 ‘Tonight I want you to go home and throw out all the books you have on subjects that don’t interest you. Get rid of geography, physics, chemistry, maths and biology. Concentrate on English, history and art. None of us will be disappointed. Most of us won’t even notice. You have to take charge. Specialize or be nothing. When you go into your maths exam just write your name on the top of the paper and sit back with your arms folded above a blank white page. Don’t be embarrassed. No one will mind.’

I followed his advice and threw away every textbook I hated before sitting silently through the exams. My marks in the subjects I loved were enough to take me where I wanted to go.

Fifty years later, with the memory still new-paint fresh, I applied the same discipline to a different problem. In the absence of a care umbrella it was essential to take charge of my health. I listed all the things I needed to look at. Pain management. Infection. Movement. Sleep. Mental state. Emergency contacts. A panoply of physical issues. Plus the thing we never, ever talked about – the odds of survival. The medical profession doesn’t like to discuss what might happen to you, I guess because if they’re wrong you might try to sue them from beyond the grave.

Each morning I took my seat to be weighed and measured and bled, and watched in awe as the great machinery of the system started up: the grinding of slow gears, the turning of spindles as everything reached its speed and treatments and medications magically appeared. I felt sure it would only take one loose cog to bring about a full system failure.

In the summer of 2020 London was hotter than Ibiza; for nearly three months there was blazing sunshine, a crystalline sky, birdsong and emerald fecundity. The 5.00 a.m. susurration of street traffic did not arrive. The great engine of London failed to turn over. Instead, the dawn sounds continued throughout the day.

The city was used to many things but not lassitude. We were a becalmed tropical state, the governor having endless afternoon naps at his desk while the kingdom drifted in the lazy heat. The fans of industry turned ever more slowly, as if the Grand Wazir had toddled off to play with his concubines.

The grubby centre of the capital was now a flower-filled bird sanctuary where you could actually hear the breeze in the street and smell something other than the kebab shop. I blew my nose and nothing black came out. Since the local McDonald’s burger-cum-drug-drop closed down, litter had disappeared from the streets. Even the local junkies looked healthier. I longed to see a toucan land on the bench beside me. As far as I was concerned the lockdown could stay for years.

Writers have traditionally had strong attachments to tropical climes. After reading J. G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip and Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil back to back, I was struck by the school of writing that explored other lands from perspectives previously clouded by colonial interference.

As a child my tropical reading began with Treasure Island, The Coral Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. As an adult I enjoyed Norman Collins’s Flames Coming Out of the Top and The Governor’s Lady, Malcolm Lowry’s cruel and tragic Under the Volcano, the early African novels of William Boyd, David Pownall, Jean Rhys and Evelyn Waugh.fn2

Rural Britain remained the very antithesis of the tropics, but the dual images frequently blurred in novels; A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh’s most quintessentially English book, starts in the Home Counties but concludes horrifically in the jungle with an image that juxtaposes the two environments. Religious and moral hypocrisy find a perfect metaphor in the lush, decadent fecundity of tropical life.

These twin landscapes emerge from our history of colonization and ‘going troppo’, with tales of cruelty, decadence and madness set in India, Africa and the West Indies. Jean Rhys’s colonial prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, dealt with the themes of racial inequality and the pain of displacement. Life in the tropics appeared more brutal and polarized than in our own culture, which was too suffused with complex semiotics.

When British East India Company families moved to India they tried to recreate English gardens. Their transplanted flowers died and when the wives dressed for strolling in Hyde Park they found themselves passing out in the heat instead.

Less account for climate was made than for the perceived harm caused by changes in morality, leading to theories of rape in the fictional Marabar Caves of A Passage to India. But Forster’s game was bigger; the caves represent an ancient unknown, the more terrifying aspect of the universal oneness embraced by Hinduism, where Christianity cannot have a place.

Just as writers like Willa Cather and Cormac McCarthy used the pioneer West to expose the brutality of life, we used the tropics to explore themes which polite society had hidden from us.

In the 1956 novel Zama by the Argentinian author Antonio di Benedetto, an eighteenth-century administrator in the service of imperial Spain waits endlessly for news of the better posting which he assumes will reunite him with his wife and children, left behind in Buenos Aires. But in the morally supine world through which he drifts nothing useful can be achieved and resentment against him grows until it becomes an openly contemptuous power shift. Di Benedetto was later inexplicably arrested and subjected to tortures and four mock executions. Now his eerily beautiful, mysterious and horrific masterwork has been accepted as one of the twentieth century’s greatest novels.

Tropical characters cast adrift are often subconsciously accepting of their fate. Some, like those in the novels of Paul Bowles, even embrace it as inevitable. When you consider that colonialists with minimal experience were dropped off in jungles and told to build functioning, productive factories by the time the ship returned in four years, it’s hardly surprising the kettle wasn’t on when the captain came back.

It was so quiet that I could look at distant Westminster from my terrace and almost hear Boris ‘Spaffer’ Johnson panicking. The noise of building sites had been replaced by church bells in carillon. I lounged on the terrace like one of the heftier Roman emperorsfn3 and drank fine white wine until my damaged tubes ached.

Ideally, we would have had a different socially awkward libertarian late-capitalist prime minister in power when the pandemic hit, someone whose speciality was following scientific protocol rather than talking about ‘piccaninnies’ and making jokes in Latin. Perhaps, I thought, Johnson had hidden shallows. The Prime Minister needed to balance the desires of his squabbling party members against the number of vulnerable people he would allow to die. Attrition was back on the agenda. Hurrah for General Haig.

Throughout that glorious summer I remained supine on the terrace. It hurt to move. You soon start gathering everything you need within arm’s reach.

The radiotherapy worked. I was sitting outside with an icy Estrella when the oncologist called to say that my tests were clear, the tumour had been destroyed and I could go back to having fun. Seeing that the country was locked down, I wondered what his definition of fun might be, but to say that I was thankful was an understatement.

I was supposed to be given regular scans but the pandemic had pushed the health service to breaking point and they were serially cancelled. Whenever I had enough energy I worked on the Dark Ages project. It was outlined, researched, half finished but not, you know, actually there.fn4

The book made me so uncomfortable that I shied away from working on it. I’d failed to follow my teacher’s advice; I had become a good all-rounder and this latest effort, set in a time I knew nothing about, felt as if I had strayed into territory which required a specialist.

Writers of popular and literary fiction rarely cross each other’s paths. There have been switchovers in the past; Dostoevsky and Per Wahlöö elevated the crime story to literature, and even Gore Vidal wrote (not very good) detective novels, but usually the two are separate fields.

Writers of literary fiction can jump from subject to subject, while writers of popular fiction tend to cultivate a particular area. J. K. Rowling made the leap to crime from children’s fantasy, but she stayed firmly on the side of popular fiction.

There are authors for whom writing is a natural ability seeking an outlet, and others who know how to market a limited skill. For the former, writing is a form of solitary confinement, little different from Hilary Mantel locking herself in the world of her subject and only surfacing when the book is done. For the latter it’s appearing at ceremonies and publishing parties, glad-handing the right names, creating brand recognition, and this is certainly a valid approach in a landscape where the writer is also expected to be a multimedia star.

If you’re planning to be more than just a debut author and writing is not simply a leisure activity for you, it would be a good idea to earn from it. The Hungarian-born British novelist Baroness Emma Orczy de Orci wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel and a dozen successful sequels, and bought an estate in Monte Carlo from the proceeds. However, it can be an imprisoning career choice. We find ourselves in a niche field that has more in common with thatch repair than any regular job. We bore our families and friends to tears, have minimal organizational and social skills, and rely on agents to protect us from penury. I am secretly powered by my editor’s dicey selection of retro-biscuit fare with our coffee.

The dosh does eventually come in; royalties arrive. Until very recently I was still receiving cheques (cheques!) from America for such tiny amounts that it cost more to cash them. One payment was for a terrible short story published two decades ago; another came from a tale translated into Italian that I don’t remember writing.

I started taking a page from Pete’s book and compartmentalized my thinking into neat little boxes. When interviewers ask if your characters live with you, you know they’ve never written fiction. Characters live in my laptop. Hospital appointments and medication go into that box over there, family and friends belong in those boxes there, fiction goes into this box here and there’s a special box for all of life’s necessities like fixing taps and paying final demands and clearing overdrafts and buying groceries, only I couldn’t remember what I’d done with it.

I had a follow-up appointment with the hospital and bounced along to see Dr Ramalan. He was dressed as a Chernobyl technician. Pointing vaguely in the direction of a seat, he continued to peer at his computer, visor and goggles almost touching the screen.

‘Mr Farrell, tell me, how is your bladder?’

‘My brother?’

‘Bladder, bladder. You were having trouble with it.’

‘It’s fine, it’s settled down now.’

‘Good, good, because I have some bad news for you. Your cancer.’

‘Don’t tell me it’s back.’

‘Very well, but it is not in your back, now it is growing along your colon.’

A nurse popped her head around the door. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were with someone.’ She swiftly disappeared.

‘My colon? When did this happen?’

‘What?’

‘When did it come back?’

‘You remember when you were supposed to be screened and weren’t? Probably around then. Although one can never say for sure. Please don’t hurt me.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I am only the messenger.’ His goggles slid off. He stuck his gloves under his visor and attempted to haul them up. ‘So we will start treatment immediately, agreed?’

‘Er …’

‘Chemotherapy. Eight weeks. It will be good for you.’

My mind boggled. ‘How will it be good for me?’

‘I mean to get rid of the problem. You have the right kind of cancer.’

‘For what?’

‘For getting rid of. The nurse will call you.’

And that was that. I returned home and explained the situation to Pete, who agreed without a moment’s hesitation that I’d better do as suggested.

I spoke to another doctor who had taken care of me in the past. ‘There’s no guarantee that it would have been caught earlier,’ she said. ‘This is an extraordinary time.’

I felt as if I had joined the ranks of patients who had failed to be screened during the pandemic and now had to pay the price. Emotionally, it felt no different, almost as if I had been expecting this to happen.

I remained planted on the terrace between appointments, stuck between lives, and instead of doing something useful like learning Cantonese or studying Babylonian cuneiform I watched The Undoing, a Nicole Kidman murder-mystery series for the new world order, where feelings and emotions and beliefs carried more weight than boring old truth or data or facts, and characters were more likely to ask ‘But how do you feel about what happened?’ instead of ‘Why has the murderer left his DNA plastered everywhere?’

This fake-feeling technique was a mannerism that could be learned, as Priti Patel, our then Home Secretary, knew when she told the public that she was ‘sorry if people feel that there have been failings’, rather than actually apologizing like any decent human being.

During that summer there was a brief period when garden centres and the exteriors of public houses reopened. This doesn’t sound like a big thing, but it lent an air of normality to the days. The restrictions were fluctuating and abstruse; bars could serve alcoholic drinks outside if food was also served, so at one point my local publican bought pizza slices for his patrons and continued pulling pints. Walking past St Pancras International every day I was surprised to see wealthy young couples arriving from long-haul trips. There were clearly two sets of rules in operation – as we later came to discover.

Our best local chefs kept their restaurants going by posting daily takeaway menus on Instagram that you could go and collect, thus providing a useful service and securing future goodwill. We threw a Zoom dinner party, the neighbours on each floor cooking a course and using the lift as a dumb waiter. Never underestimate human ingenuity, I thought, although I wasn’t sure we were worth saving as a civilization when we hadn’t even learned to open a banana from the right end.

I visited my consulting nurse, who told me that if I’d thought radiotherapy was painful wait until this baby kicked in. ‘Now you’re really going to hate us,’ she warned.

Oh come on, I joshed her, how much worse could it possibly be?

13

Reading for Pleasure

I often find that I most enjoy the part near the beginning of a book, film or play where nothing much happens. In these placid moments the characters still have room to breathe before the tightening constrictions of the plot entrap them. A good writer will make these potentially dull sections memorable. Galton and Simpson excelled at allowing their star Harry H. Corbett to waste time lost in dreams at the start of Steptoe and Son. Their masterpiece is a half-hour-long radio episode entitled Sunday Afternoon at Home, which they wrote for Tony Hancock. It is about boredom but is never boring. Absolutely nothing happens, so each non sequitur drops into the aether freshly formed. It is a small miracle of economy and timing. The transcript is longer, but everything removed for broadcast was done so for the right reason, making the listener realize that this seemingly improvised piece is nothing of the kind.

The extraordinary thing is that it doesn’t work in print, having been written with specific voices in mind. I always wanted to write a novel in a similarly minimalist style.

The UK’s modern master is, I suppose, Magnus Mills, in whose books virtually nothing is achieved. But underneath the surface are ideas about the impossibility of controlling human behaviour; nobody ever does what is expected or demanded of them. Charles Dickens was the busiest of all writers and it’s occasionally to his detriment. One longs for a breathing space in all the teeming action. Elizabeth Jane Howard took the art of stillness to some kind of ne plus ultra in ‘Three Miles Up’, a story which gradually becomes so calm and motionless that it terrifies by echoing the stasis of death.

A disturbed emotional state can be more intriguing than a physical dilemma. For most of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square nothing happens – we’re caught in a cycle of drinking and borrowing money until George Bone, who suffers from a dissociative disorder, finally rebels against the manipulative Netta and attacks her. The book is a masterclass in tightly ratcheted menace. Sometimes a novel can benefit from a little less action.

Good books have an inner life; you can’t see all the way in. The pages become windows that throw light on to landscapes and into rooms, but keep some topography hidden from view, allowing the reader to imagine more.

We certainly don’t need to know everything, and like to feel that there’s more to discover. But some novels actively defy understanding. Frank Baker’s The Birds never explains the cause of the drama.fn1 Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock famously had its final chapter excised to create more mystery. Sometimes we like to try to work out the answer for ourselves. Great characters may be unknowable. Part of Anna Karenina’s character stays forever hidden.

In literature you need never explain why two people fall in love, although it helps to know why they hate each other. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is one of literature’s longest at approximately 1,500 pages, but a full quarter of this consists of digressions and mini-essays. Hugo describes the novel as:

A progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. The starting point: matter, destination: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.

Yeah, a bit long-winded. Not that any explanation entirely deals with Javert’s dogged pursuit of Valjean. It’s clear to us that he recognizes the law is immoral – Valjean’s treatment at its hands has revealed this to him – but he can’t reconcile the truth with his own missionary zeal. Absolving Valjean would have been the right thing to do, but where would the story have gone? How many books force the reader to wonder: What would have happened if?

How much should the reader see? Enough to understand the plot, but not enough to fully understand everything about the main character. Recent darker-toned Agatha Christie TV series have managed to make the material fresh because Christie barely put any flesh on her characters’ bones, leaving them open to reinterpretation. It’s harder to ring changes on the great historical novels because they are so precisely written.

When everything is explained away for us, we have nothing to contribute as readers – and the reader should always be allowed to provide a personal take on events. A spinning moral compass will keep altering your views on the characters you read about.

The writer John Sutherland is fascinated by what we’re not told in literature. He delves into stories to spot the textual lacunae that throw up unanswered questions. Among his books are Is Heathcliff a Murderer?, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? and Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?

Carefully analysing every word of the text, Mr Sutherland alights on inconsistencies and oversights, although he is careful to note that sometimes authors simply forget details. But it’s intriguing to consider why there are missing or misplaced moments in novels. Perhaps there’s something going on below the surface of a book that’s not described, such as his explanation for why Sherlock Holmes misaddresses Miss Stoner as Miss Roylott in ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’. To me it’s clearly an editorial slip, but isn’t it fun to speculate?

At some point you probably found you had too many books to fit tidily into your home. You looked around and discovered them by the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, on the floor. You need a library.

First, define your space. Force yourself to make choices and you can develop a living library with working rules. Make it finite, as there will be two types of books: the ones you’ll return to again and again, and the ones which are passing through you on their way to a new owner. With the ‘one in, one out’ rule you create a permanent collection of excellence. I arrange mine loosely by author, theme and, for practicality, size. Not all of the books are in one place – there are special smaller paperback shelves, hidden shelves and a set with doors to protect the rarest volumes from sunlight. They are curated and updated because I have never met a middle-aged man who did not secretly enjoy cataloguing, even if it’s only nails in a drawer.

You may learn a lot about yourself when you look back at what you’ve chosen to keep. For example, I have far too many books on London. To write about the metropolis you have to read its history, but it’s a daunting task as a library devoted to the subject would be as sprawling as the city itself. The answer is to be as idiosyncratic as you like and follow the path of your own pleasures.

My London shelves hold Samuel Johnson for his language, Pepys for his exhausting social life, Besant’s dull but useful Early London and Medieval London, six volumes of Walford’s Old and New London, which break the city into districts and are packed with as much gossip and scandal as history. There’s Peter Ackroyd’s brilliant palimpsest London: The Biography and Mayhew’s London Characters & Crooks, which features everyone from street conjurers to rat-killers. Old Punch annuals and bi-annuals of the Illustrated London News from the late nineteenth century pep up the deeper shelves and provide odd insights into city life.

Gillian Tindall’s The Fields Beneath takes you through time in one London village, although it’s depressing to realize that in 1864 you could have bought a grand Islington house in forty acres for thirty quid.fn2 There are books on writers’ London, decadent London, its pleasure gardens and music halls, its transport and architecture, but also its dissidents, its heroines and heroes.

At this point, the collection branches into peculiar byways that include Hessenberg’s London in Detail, featuring photographs of doorknobs, clocks, statues, railings and other examples of barely noticed street furniture, and Lion Hunting in London by Frank J. Manheim, which reveals the city’s obsession with carved wildcats. London As It Might Have Been, by Barker and Hyde, depicts many of the heartbreakingly fabulous, mad and elegant designs nobbled at the planning stage by councillors.

Yet my favourite London book is Peter Jackson’sfn3 flimsy London Is Stranger Than Fiction, which collects arcane facts from the old Evening News. Sadly, most of the wonderful anomalies depicted within have now been wiped away by developers. ‘To hail a bus or tram, shine a torch on your hand’ suggests a wartime London poster in The Moving Metropolis. Abandoned Stations on London’s Underground and The Cinemas of Camden are somewhat esoteric, but they all get picked over when I’m researching.

Meanwhile, over in the shelves reserved for classic fiction, Dickens remains the pack leader, to remind me how long it took to learn that characterization is the most essential element of fiction writing. My favourite Chucks are Our Mutual Friend, which adds vivid river descriptions, brilliant society set pieces and a plot involving recycled waste, and Bleak House, with its crushing criticism of the legal process and a climactic chase led by Inspector Bucket.

There’s room for a few of his rivals, too; Wilkie Collins, a contemporary whose concerns (crime, social commentary) often intersected with Dickens, but only two novels, The Moonstone and The Woman in White, are easily recalled, and they’re a bit of a plod. The zippier Robert Louis Stevenson, just forty-four when he died, was still developing his talents. Stodgy, mean-spirited William Makepeace Thackeray, Dickens’s greatest rival, was satirical, sharper-tongued and more appealing to the burgeoning middle classes, but most of his novels have disappeared from bookshelves. Elizabeth Gaskell, sympathetically depicting the plight of working-class women and prostitutes, can still be easily found.

Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx is my favourite Dickens pastiche, even if its plot takes such explaining that later editions answer readers’ questions in an afterword, and I allow a little shelf-room for Sherlock Holmes – the short stories, not the novels – plus all the books of Holmes’s rivals.

It gets a bit random after this: Stefan Zweig, Margaret Millar, Beryl Bainbridge, John Collier, Norman Collins, free-form experimental fiction from Charles Wood, Joe Orton, Ronald Firbank, Ann Quin, Brigid Brophy, B. S. Johnson and Ned Beauman. There are pleasures comic (The Ascent of Rum Doodle) and disturbing (Ballard, Condon, St Aubyn); trivial guilty joys, including The Man Who Was Private Widdle (a biography of drunken fantasist and deeply peculiar Charles Hawtrey), Viz magazine’s Roger’s Profanisaurus and All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook, a disturbing study of characters from the Medway Towns; and books I love because no one else possibly could.

At the edges are shelves reserved for graphic novels, many of which are by minor artists and writers, but prove more fertile for sparking the imagination. Giraffes on Horseback Salad is, like many of the books I hang on to, an interesting failure, a graphic-novel version of the movie script planned by Salvador Dalí and the Marx Brothers, but gets points for trying to recreate the unimaginable.

There are too many books on the theatre, including Murder, Mayhem and Music Hall, a look at the links between the Victorian underworld and the stage, which was considered a profession barely above prostitution; Too Naked for the Nazis, the bizarre story of the variety act Wilson, Kepple and Betty; and the hilarious Exit Through the Fireplace, about the last days of repertory theatre. Too many books on grammar and language, compendia of odd stories and unlikely characters. One of my favourites is Room Two More Guns by Stephen Winkworth, which explores the coded history of the personal columns of The Times. Much of the rest is taken up with the complete works of writers with whom I’ve become obsessed, and this means tracking down everything they ever wrote.

I’ve a cupboard set aside for copies of my own books, including novels I have no recollection of writing. There’s a vague sense of where everything is, which is useful when you’re researching and suddenly need to lay your hands on a book about French building regulations in the 1970s. In short, there’s something here for everyone.fn4

Sometimes I have a house guest who fails to look at or, God forbid, remove a volume from any of the shelves, even just to glance at it out of curiosity. Perhaps they hate books or feel complete uninterest, or they’re intimidated (not an uncommon sensation) or overwhelmed, or are dyslexic, or simply have no connection to the printed word.

In my thirties I bought a house in North London’s Kentish Town, in a cobbled backstreet filled with Irish families, where the properties were still council-owned. Opposite me was the Beanofn5 depot, from which my childhood comics were delivered. There was a corner pub used by the police and informants, and all the roads were named after battles and generals in the Crimean War.

As I moved in, my new neighbour, a brassy blonde radio-cab controller with a voice like a foghorn, was sitting on the front steps (a major pastime in that part of town) with her five children squeezed around her. She watched the movers lugging in book cartons, and stopped me.

‘What’s in all them boxes?’

‘Books.’

‘What, all of ’em?’

‘Yes.’

‘You gonna keep them all in the house?’

‘Yes, why?’

She gave me a sour look. ‘You wouldn’t catch me keeping books inside the house.’ For a moment I wondered where she would keep them, then realized that she wouldn’t. Yet she had mysterious boxes delivered regularly, usually around midnight.

I caused her great consternation because at the time I was dating a British Airways cabin purser who would come straight from work in his uniform, and, thinking he was some kind of police officer, the family would rush to hide the boxes they kept by the front window.

I filled my entire house with built-in bookcases. On hot nights I would climb up on to the roof and read under a booklight, sitting in a valley of slates. I remember watching Halley’s Comet pass by like a great single headlamp in the night sky. I stayed up there until morning. In the middle of the night I heard movement in the street below and, peering over the edge of the roof, saw more boxes being delivered next door. They were filled with video recorders.

One day I gave one of her little girls a Moomin book because she asked about it. My neighbour was around like a shot.

‘’Ere, did you give Bunny a book?’

‘Yes, I did. She wanted to look at it.’

‘She don’t wanna book, we got enough shit in here already.’ She handed the book back to me.

Over the years I watched the children grow, wary of any interaction that would get me or them into trouble. Eventually they fell afoul of the law and went into the prison system, one by one. Detention, probation, home arrest, jail sentences. The corner pub was turned into flats, and the Irish families, most of whom had their parents living a few doors down where they could keep an eye on them, moved out as property value spiralled. The old neighbourhood vanished in less than five years.

Most of the books from that house are still with me. They formed the basis of the library I now have. To this day I wish I had given Bunny back the Moomin book.

14

Eating with Your Fingers

My phone pinged at midnight. I needed to have a word with Maggie about texting me after her pills had kicked in.

My youngest daughter is on a diet I suggested a tape worm would help. Roger came over and took me up the arsenal.fn1 It is not an attractive pub but their crisps are sumptuous. I wish I could have a boyfriend, something which will I have no doubt make certain critical humans not understand. I am also like you must be under the burden of feeling like not being me. Yours in a quadry xxM

Throughout the lockdown I wrote with the stoic determination of an old lady heading for the post office in a snowstorm. Meanwhile, my incarcerated friends started to fall apart. Loving couples split up and went to court against each other. A friend had a nervous breakdown, a fellow writer went quite mad and several others refused to be vaccinated. Like a woodcutter whittling ducks and failing to stop long after his wooden duck business had collapsed, I carried on knocking words together without a plan.

Readers know that in the pages of books there are joys the real world cannot supply. This was truer than ever for me now that my diary had nothing but chemo appointments in it.

The newspapers were filling with eerie tales designed to alarm readers: diagrams of pangolin-to-pig-to-human transmission, articles on leaky laboratories, vindictive little pieces on panic buying, overwhelmed services, vaccine delays and stalled supplies. Soon they would fill with more hysteria-tinged tales of supermarket riots, ignorant politicians, missed cancer appointments, lonely deaths, self-isolated funerals, anti-mask street battles, tearful dying anti-vaxxers, mass graves. The phrase ‘virus sovereignty’ was batted about.fn2

Many of the journalists who wrote clickbait articles should have been ashamed of themselves, but hacks are scorpions on the backs of frogs and will always sting. My friend Suzi is an excellent feature journalist who has stepped in at short notice on every national broadsheet. Once she was late meeting me for dinner and bustled in. ‘Sorry to hold you up. I was the last one left in the office so I had to write the horoscopes.’

Having worked for newspapers I tend to read them differently. I never trust copy full of conditional verbs. If it’s talking about something that could or should happen, I dump it and read only the articles based on real data.fn3 Lying for a living is no longer the sole province of the novelist. Who would have thought that the defining issue of the decade would be truth versus lies? In times ahead, lying will become more refined. We’re already far past the ‘omission of truth’ and Kellyanne Conway’s ‘alternative facts’ stages.

During the pandemic, the Spanish government announced Covid testing for the Canary Islands. As this was virtually the sole remaining flight route for escaping Britons the story was picked up by the national press. A little digging found a single government source in Madrid, and tucked into that press release was a rider the press omitted, stating that the action would take at least two weeks to legally come into effect. But who wants a story about a minor travel change happening in an orderly fashion? Instead the spin was ‘Your holiday in ruins’. The churning of the mundane into the sensational creates its own falsity.

The manufacture of social panics in novels and the press isn’t new, of course. The one leading up to Brexit was merely the latest iteration. Invasion literature had begun in 1871 with The Battle of Dorking by George Tomkyns Chesney, and was followed by many more alarmist works, peaking with H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. This was by far the best written and most successful in the genre, because its enemy was not drawn from the roots of European political unrest but from a more unknowable origin.

In the months before war broke out in 1914, people started imagining that British towns and villages were hotbeds of German spies. At that time our relationship with Germany was pretty affable; a great many Germans studied at British universities and worked in the UK. But fiction always needs a villain, and books were filled with the sinister Hun invading the shires and sending back coded secrets to Berlin.

One such novel, The Invasion of 1910, became a smash bestseller. It was by William Le Queux, one of the country’s highest-paid pulp writers. He had written fiction about Britain’s lack of preparation should there be a war, and his book touched a nerve. It was translated into twenty-seven languages.

Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, serialized it, and persuaded Le Queux to have his fictional German villains pass through every major town where Daily Mail sales were high.

He sent out sandwich-men to advertise the Daily Mail and dressed them as German soldiers, parading them through urban areas. Many were war veterans, now shamefully dressed in enemy uniforms, so people became irate and upset. The Mail’s admitted remit has always been to create disquiet and disgust, and Le Queux stoked the fires of suspicion by writing about a civilian army of German spies disguised as everyday members of the public. He insisted that they recognized each other by a peculiar-shaped pin in their lapel.

Fantasy and the truth became blurred together; MPs started campaigns to hunt down traitors, and a new Official Secrets Act was rushed through parliament when hardly anyone was sitting. A register of aliens was created, and other books and newspapers now threw petrol on the flames, searching for hotbeds of enemy agents in quiet country towns.

The fervour that had been whipped up out of nothing took on a life of its own. By 1914 it became the subject on everyone’s lips and politicians feared it had damaged Anglo-German relations. Of course, the starting gun for the war was ‘the shot heard round the world’, fired by assassin Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, and the fear became real, so that the press could say, ‘We told you so.’

When the pandemic first broke out, I couldn’t have been the only one who thought, ‘This is great! I’m English, I may never have to go outside again!’ That was before Waitrose ran out of pasta and I got tired of losing every game of cards we played.

Finally the day came when I could venture outside again, and the first thing I wanted to do between chemo sessions was walk through the West End with a friend. I called up my pal Martin and we set off.

I think even Martin would agree that he is an eccentric. One of my oldest friends, he and I had been working together for what felt like centuries. He’s an art director, an ideas man, and we usually had a couple of projects simmering along. In the mid-years of our friendship he had been working for a magazine in New York, and went through a pretty tough time. His partner, Glen, a person of colour who had faced enough prejudice in his short life, had been diagnosed with AIDS and lay in a hospital Martin could only reach from the hellish Port Authority Bus Terminal. Glen’s mother was a nurse at the same hospital and would lose two more sons to the same pernicious disease. Martin was holding down two jobs to survive in NYC. It didn’t help that his roommate turned out to be certifiably deranged. New York City is not a place where sanity stays for long. When Glen died, I went over with a spare suitcase and returned Martin to London.

Our walk through the shuttered West End that day was a sober experience. It was like being in The Omega Man, and not in a good last-man-in-the-world-gets-to-steal-sports-cars-and-vintage-wines way.fn4 Theatres, cinemas and restaurants were dark, no coffee shops were open, footfall in one of the world’s most crowded spots was non-existent.

Martin understands what makes the average member of the public pay attention, so we decided to view London afresh. Without hordes of tourists waving raised phones the city’s vistas were now wide open. Buckingham Palace stood in lonely grandeur. Westminster Abbey was just another closed church. An imperious heron stood in the middle of the road beside a deserted Marble Arch.

We headed to Leicester Square. Rain was falling lightly across the paving stones, turning the square into a mezzotint. I thought we might see rats there, as we had in the seventies.

Glossy bronze statues of film characters had lately been placed all around the square. Batman glared down from the roof of the Odeon. Mr Bean was sitting on a park bench in the downpour. Someone had put an NHS mask on him. He looked creepy and forlorn, like the lonely tenant of a basement bedsit contemplating abductions.

Soon we were soaked to the skin. My socks and underpants were sodden. Martin pointed out that contrary to popular belief, when there is no way of getting out of it, London rain is not atmospheric and charming. It is horrible.

I recalled an anomaly: supermarkets were allowed to remain open and there was a hidden one in the West End that sold hot food. We headed for the Japan Centre, housed under the pavements of Panton Street, and there it was, down a narrow staircase and glowing with orange warmth at the end of the aisles; chefs were preparing hot katsu cutlets and chicken curry, noodles and steaming pork dumplings.

But the law forbade indoor dining. We bought enough food for three. We’d figure out where to eat it. The important thing was to get our hands on it first.

A few minutes later I looked at Martin and we had the same thought, viz. that once we were dining on lobster pasta on the terrace of the Hôtel Martinez in Cannes. Now I was standing in a litter-filled shop doorway in a monsoon, eating rice from a foil container with a spork. How could we have sunk this low?fn5

British Covid cases rose, fell, rose again. Kids were bored, illegal raves were busted, everyone was fractious. While we suffered calibrated reductions of freedom the press did what it did best and made its readers feel bad by covetously explaining how New Zealand beat the virus. Of course, their entire population would have comfortably fitted inside the London of 1880, but Britain’s weakness had been exposed. Our leaders wavered, havered and shilly-shallied between the scientists and the economists while government servants went on day trips to get eye tests and threw illegal parties for which there would be no reprisals.

I continued my treatment but something was going wrong with my work. Each morning I opened the laptop and stared at the blank screen for hours. For the first time ever I had writer’s block – and it wasn’t something I even believed existed. I started to realize that I was suffering from a chemical reaction to my treatment.

A neighbour gave me a stack of old detective novels to read. Hoping to jump-start some kind of creative revelation, I ploughed doggedly through all of them.

15

In the Library with a Candlestick

In the late nineteenth century, writing was not a career chosen by the young, who were still learning from experience, but for gentlewomen it was a respectable pastime. Its rewards were strictly long term, its debut authors already heading for middle age. And apart from the odd intellectual sensation, most people read crime novels.

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction in the UK ran from 1918 to 1945.

You could go further back than that, and plot a course between Dostoyevsky and Conan Doyle, Poe, Chandler, Cain, Boileau-Narcejac, Leroux, Simenon, Allingham and Highsmith, but ‘Golden Age’ has become a bit of a petroglyph now, in the same way that ‘Silver Age’ DC comics run only through the 1960s.

Almost any novel with an element of wrongdoing can be described as a crime novel, but there are many subdivisions. Murder mysteries might not have detectives and detective fiction might not have murderers. When you’ve finished some basic reading and decide to write something in the genre, you must first stumble over the deathless corpse of Agatha Christie.

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE, 1890–1976, known for sixty-six detective novels and fourteen short-story collections. Born wealthy and upper-middle-class in Torquay, Devon, back when it was still the genteel home of maiden aunts and retired colonels. You can surf in Torquay, and as a young woman she was photographed with a surfboard in Hawaii, which is not the way we imagine her at all.

She’s still the world’s biggest-selling author, tying with Shakespeare, and the most translated. She’s also the most successful female playwright of all time. She was not, however, the only Queen of Crime. Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers were up there with her, and Margery Allingham remains a more intriguing and complex writer.

There were no Kings of Crime, although according to the world’s leading Golden Age crime expert, Martin Edwards, there were a number of overshadowed candidates. The contenders fell away because Christie provided some sort of unbeatable baseline. She was uniquely consistent. Her spy thrillers, all-night trains and French hotels, are not memorable but her main body of work has survived every changing fashion.

Christie’s novels are diagrammatic frameworks as rigid as mathematics puzzles, which deliver diverting amusement topped with a surprise. Her characters are two-dimensional and rarely have more than two or three characteristics. Her international success was helped by simple sentence constructions that allowed her books be taught as EFL texts to children overseas. Her meteoric rise was also aided by the fact that the paperback vendor WHSmith had concessions across the entire rail network, usually on the platforms themselves, and Boots had lending libraries.

But.

Behind it all was her unerring ability to get to the heart of a story. In the dark at the top of the stairs a sense of original sin lurked, a desperate urge to atone for lust and envy and seek a redemption that could never be granted. And those flat characters allowed readers to embellish and personalize them. She might have been creating dressing-up-doll books, albeit ones with a murder at the centre.

Christie approached her narratives without digression or linguistic tricksiness – there’s very little fat on the bones of her plots – and she delivered satisfying solutions. If you take them a little more seriously, you find crimes of positively biblical proportions: Eden is disturbed by rumours of a snake, and when retribution descends to destroy the innocent a detective must play God.

Who would want to be a member of the county set? Christie clearly knew an awful lot about cold-blooded hatred. The baroque horrors of her duplicitous world all come from within. The worm in the bud, the serpent coiled in the heart of the family, is always going to awaken and surface. Her entire canon is filled with foreboding.

With a handful of exceptions, Who and Why are never as important as How. Christie nails the Why with brilliant natural instinct, and it doesn’t really matter Who. The roots of criminality don’t change from one generation to the next, although she avoids the biggest cause of crime: poverty. If her killers were impoverished and uneducated no one would still be reading her.

But the How is crucial because it contains much of the surprise. Opportunity is as important as motive. Christie makes sure that you’re so wrapped up trying to decide whether the mother, the daughter or the son-in-law murdered the victim, you never consider that one of them might be in drag (you’ll find that one in The Labours of Hercules).

When you look at stacks of second-hand books you’ll find that all of the Agatha Christies have been thoroughly read. You always find biro ticks against her list of books. We still enjoy her because her stories have no time or place. There is no real sense of location in them; they are as otherworldly as fantasy novels and much easier to read. Christie ushers us into a lost upper-class world of colonels, housemaids, vicars, family lawyers, wastrels on their uppers, flighty debutantes, porcine captains of industry and dowager duchesses. Nobody could have found these characters realistic even when they were written; most are merely pasteboard place markers. And her B-team detectives Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are so grating that you could spiralize courgettes on them.

Christie’s murder victims receive dozens of visitors in the moments before they die. Her killers avoid firearms in favour of doctored porridge, peculiar drowning incidents and poisoned trifles. She’ll happily dispatch a victim with hydrochloride of morphia or a sandbag (both, in The Seven Dials Mystery). In constructing her methods of death she was not far off from the vaulting implausibilities of John Dickson Carr, but her knowledge of poisons was sound; she had worked as a nurse and in a pharmacy. Chemists stand out disproportionately in her village high streets.

Christie’s detectives inhabit a world where people act imperatively. They go, run, do, accuse, die. This continuous forward motion leaves very little room for self-doubt or introspection. The books are like acrostics or crossword puzzles, comfort reading that’s perfect for purchasing from railway platforms and ameliorating a dull journey. One unexpected thing I learned from Agatha Christie novels was the lengths to which county people would go to show how much they hated each other.

There’s a deep sense of menacing premonition in her books. House guests endlessly warn each other that it feels as though something awful is about to happen. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple both have sixth senses that tell them something wicked this way comes. Characters fire murderous looks at one another, or have fierce arguments to which we are only partially privy. Information is parted with sparingly.

There’s an incredible single-mindedness to the stories. Sub-plots are virtually non-existent and everything directly connects to the motives for crime or the crime itself. Mental states are neglected in favour of arguments about whether someone could have visited the chemist’s at 4.05 p.m. and been back at the murder site by 4.15 p.m. While Poirot and the hopeless Hastings are fussing about the dregs of coffee pots the entire cast could be going insane.

There’s a deep-rooted snootiness about reading Christie. She is frowned upon by the literati, but just because you enjoy a whodunnit doesn’t mean you haven’t read Moby Dick. The books are not entirely without psychological depth, but their author is more interested in the circumstantial fretwork of the plot. And really, her readers were too. She and writers like her reflected the English nature. When my father visited me in hospital once, he described his journey via arterial roads from the coast in intricate detail, but never asked me how I was feeling. He loved Christie’s novels.

Over the decades there’s been a steady industry in volumes looking for meanings in her writing, the best of which are Colin Watson’s Snobbery With Violence, crime novelist Robert Barnard’s A Talent to Deceive, chemist Kathryn Harkup’s A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie, the philosophical Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? by Pierre Bayard and a phenomenal labour of love, Agatha Christie’s Golden Age, Volumes I and II, by John Goddard.

For someone who could knock out three books a year, Christie’s plots had a distinctive quality. There is something brilliant about being able to construct a mystery so organically that you can reread it and still be fooled all over again.

By bridging the gap between ephemera and literature, popular writers like Christie inspired new generations to write and take the genre further. Not all of her output was good and there were a few outright failures, but she teaches us not to be precious about writing, but to try it and risk damnation.

The casual colonial arrogance of the books is unmissable now, but to be expected in the complacency of the interwar period. Poirot might have been Belgian in name at least, but the only vaguely Belgian thing about him was his vanity and the odd French phrase, although he might have been more interesting if Christie had forced him to speak Walloon. He seems entirely constructed from physical attributes, but we never get inside his egg-shaped head, even though Kenneth Branagh attempted to do so in his dramatically moribund film version of Death on the Nile.

When it comes to Christie’s success, timing was everything. The outcry around The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the biggest talking point of the mid-1920s because readers were outraged. The author had not played fair with them, she had broken the rules and paved the way for a new kind of crime novel where nothing and no one could be relied upon. She was warning readers that all bets were off and now anything could happen.

‘In the end everyone decided that it was all right, that if Agatha had played foul she had invented a new kind of foul the rule book hadn’t thought of,’ said Robert Barnard.

However, the book’s twist wasn’t her idea. It was Lord Louis Mountbatten’s. He sent it to her and she used it.

I was probably around twelve when I started reading Christie’s novels. It seemed to me that they were mainly puzzle boxes which appealed to the adolescent mind – find the key, open the box, get the reward. Their simplicity works in their favour; you can reinvent them so long as you keep the infrastructure. Miss Marple has marginally more depth of character than Hercule Poirot, and her most complicated plots lead exactly where you’d expect them to – until the reveal brilliantly wrong-foots you.

Not all of these feats come off. While I love the scene-setting of the critics’ favourite, Murder on the Orient Express, I’ve never believed the denouement, and it’s even harder to swallow in screen versions. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far. The set-up is an authorial conceit – wouldn’t it be clever to kill someone on a train, a boat, a plane? (She did all three.)

The better books for me are the quieter, more insidious ones. Christie had a clear, no-nonsense approach which allowed her to remain unsentimental and sometimes downright disturbing. For example, in the short story ‘The Witness for the Prosecution’ there’s a powerful sense of the noose tightening around its protagonist’s neck, and the plot gains power from the fact that hanging was still in force at the time of its writing.

Colin Watson points out that Christie maintained from her earliest books ‘an air of slightly sardonic detachment’. This aerial view makes it easier for the reader to set all the pieces in their rightful places.

Christie also has obsessions. Any space she describes will include its egress. ‘It was a fine old library with a pair of French windows leading to the closed courtyard and a second door opening directly into the servants’ punishment room.’

She has a disconcerting way of judging character. Capitalists are lascivious, young ladies are ‘fast’ or have the common look of shopgirls about them, and swarthy men all look sweaty, duplicitous and possibly Italian. Often one character gossips about another before we’ve met them. ‘He became quite bitter after he lost his fortune in the war …’ And she seems to have single-handedly invented the stereotype of the rural lesbian. ‘Miss Howard shook hands with a hearty, almost painful grip … with a deep voice, almost manly in its stentorian tones, and had a large, sensible square body with feet to match, these last encased in good thick boots.’

At a time when so many authors had been educated at Eton and Oxford, Christie received no formal education. She was cosmopolitan, rich and well travelled. She clearly did not feel uncomfortable in alien surroundings. In her books, however, foreigners are tanned and suspect. It was common to add such details in a time when Black and Jewish people had their facial features forcibly measured, and Christie is at least a lesser echo of the times. On the other hand she was positively obsessed with servants. They’re weepy or stupid or clumsy or sinister or amiably half-witted, and there are so many of them. George, Poirot’s valet, is a little more rounded, but not much. However, in fairness Christie also came out with this: ‘Servants must be treated with the utmost courtesy. They are doing skilled work which you could not possibly do yourself without long training.’ How are writers to judge her, then? The short answer is that we probably shouldn’t. Like George Mallory’s Everest, she is simply there.

Suggested Christie reading

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

The novel in which Christie violated the pact between reader and author by breaking a prime rule of detective fiction is nearly a century old. In Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, his forensic analysis of the novel, Pierre Bayard argues that the book defies every theory of narrative through the method of lying by omission. Yet the truth is not entirely concealed, just given less importance in a series of magician’s prestiges.

And Then There Were None (1939)

It’s hard to discuss this who-will-survive plot without giving the game away, but to me it’s the peak of Christie’s dark career. Guests are invited to what is clearly meant to be Burgh Island in Devon for a weekend, only to be metronomically bumped off – but there’s a genuinely cruel tone to the tale and a sense of deepening shadow that drags the reader despairingly down with the victims. It’s also unique among the Christies for being – well, if you’ve read it you’ll know.

Endless Night (1967)

I think this darkest of Christie novels is a dazzling three-card trick; I’ve read it twice and it wrong-footed me a second time – how is that even possible? The plot has a measured pace, unfolding its cheesy, almost Ruritanian tale of love and property at a patience-punishing crawl (Christie was seventy-six when she wrote it in record time), but when the plot mechanics kick in you are jolted harder. I wonder if Christie had come to be cynical about humanity by this time, because it’s a sombre, unsettling tale that refuses to let in daylight. An incredibly gaudy film version was advertised with the tag line: ‘Only 3 people in 100 guess the answer …’

The ABC Murders (1936)

Deranged psychopaths rarely stalk the pages of British murder mysteries. We like our killings to have logic and motivation, to hinge on railway timetables and the switching of coffee cups. So here’s an oddity – a race to stop a lunatic serial killer that cleverly hides a more calculated (and therefore more satisfying) solution.

Sleeping Murder (1976)

The ages-old plot of the house with a past crime hidden in it gets a fresh twist here, and an unusual one for Christie. Nothing is quite as clear-cut as normal – has there even been a crime? Imagination plays as much a part as factual evidence for a younger and more sprightly Miss Marple. Many readers dismiss this one for not being in her usual style, but that’s what makes it interesting. Christie’s fascination with misremembered pasts stands her in good stead.

Curtain (1975)

Although the book was published in the 1970s it was written in the early years of World War Two. Christie had planned her Belgian detective’s last case in advance for a special reason; the whodunnit harks back to the first Poirot novel, not just in setting but approach. The story takes him and his one-time sidekick Hastings to Styles Court, where their first case took place and where Hastings had rather creepily blurted out ‘Marry me!’ to a pretty young suspect. Poirot is now aged and wheelchair-bound, crippled with arthritis, but soon talk of Broadmoor Asylum and morphine puts a little ginger in his wheels. The plot is as mechanical as a train set and as artificial as a bouquet of paper flowers, but it’s filled with the pleasures of fan service,fn1 a graceful bow and a farewell thank you from Christie after a lifetime of reliable productivity.

Modern crime novels are valued more for their aberrant psychology than their booby-trapped rooms, but the world was once a more trusting place, and all those hidden passages, secret doors and doctored cakes never quite made up for the fact that there was a fundamental flaw with the locked-room mystery, mainly: Why bother?

Why kill someone with a concealed blowpipe when you can crack them over the head with a lead one? Why bother sucking sticky paper over cracks with a vacuum cleaner to seal a room when you just need to disguise who did it?

Which raises some other questions:

Why are local busybodies allowed anywhere near crime scenes?

Why are grisly murder sites only attended by one officer when the entire constabulary would want a piece of the action?

Why would a murder take place at the very moment when there’s a highly successful detective on the premises?

Why do the victims know at least five people who wish them dead?

Why would murders continue to be committed while the investigation of the first victim is still unfolding?

Why are officers directly related to the deceased allowed anywhere near the investigation?

Why are murderers portrayed as being intelligent? Why are they never simply, you know, stupid psychopaths?

Why would a detective gather everyone he suspects in one room when it’s only asking for trouble?

Crime fiction is a construct that requires you to sign an agreement as you open the cover. If either the author or the reader violates the contract, the fiction is rendered void and the book goes to the charity shop.

Agatha Christie knew her poisons. John Dickson Carr knew his physics. P. D. James knew her bureaucracies. Ruth Rendell knew her psychologies. It seems to me that for any writer to sustain a career in popular fiction they should follow my English teacher’s advice and specialize.

The traditional crime novel now has a lower profile than it had in the past, largely due to the ascent of screen media, but in the modern world of portfolio careers, multiple disciplines are needed to survive, and it becomes harder to believe that the detective-flâneur, surviving on recommendations from minor members of royalty, could ever exist.

I was pondering this when my phone beeped.

Hullo it is your exasperating friend. Because I use my teeth to bite tight bottle caps off I broke an upper molar. Dave who comes in to do the front garden has about six teeth left and talks a lot about his Duke of Edinburgh award. I got out purple-pink paint and touched up the gate. Lovely man talked to me while I was painting he has a grey hound called Beam. He is single at the moment but sadly plays for the other team. I gave Beam toast. Andrea has not turned up as she ate a mcdonalds and now has diarreagh. I have just finished reading Travels With My Ant. luv you xxxM

I should have made Maggie my fictional detective. She wouldn’t have got much detecting done, but it would have been fun watching her accuse all the wrong suspects.

16

So Much for Moisturizer

I gave up staring at my laptop’s blank Word document. It was time for my chemo. The treatment required me to daily pass through many different hospital departments; getting white-cell injections and MRI scans, having blood taken and queuing in pharmacies. A system had evolved that kept Covid patients in a hidden side of the hospital that I’d started to think of as Bluebeard’s Castle, filled with mysterious locked doors.

On the Monday after I entered the system I’d found myself in a ward that was being dismantled around me. The staff didn’t know where the unit would be after 5.00 p.m. that day. There was a rumour that it might move somewhere further out of London. There was talk of it being set up inside a North London crematorium.

Hygiene security was being ramped up. I was told to be careful about hand sanitizing and not touching my face. At one point during treatment I lost an earbud and had to scrabble around for it under a Covid patient’s bed before unthinkingly reinserting it into my ear. Deciding I should wash it, I used the public hospital toilet and managed to empty the entire contents of my bag on to the flooded, loo-roll-covered floor. After this, I lost my squeamishness about germs.

Most government booklets designed to inform patients about services had been rendered hilariously impractical and out of date by the virus. ‘Why not take a few minutes to chat to one of our therapists about your feelings?’ Therapists? Where were these fabled creatures? I couldn’t even get the attention of a nurse.

‘You’re back again.’ The registrar merely acknowledged the fact. She saw returning patients every day. ‘Chemo this time. Let’s get you started.’

I was amazed that a tube could be inserted into a vein and left in there for several hours, then removed without leaving a scar. After a day I would search for the spot where it had entered and find nothing.

Generally, the injections and cannulations were manageable. I had not thought about the emotional effect all this was having on me because I was naïve enough to imagine that I was psychologically immune. My scientist father had been fond of reminding me that failures within the human body were just basic engineering problems and could be sorted out with the right tools if you kept your wits about you. When trying to describe medical conditions, my brother still falls back on aeronautical analogies.

As the weeks of treatment passed, side effects kicked in. I quickly developed the most common one: peripheral neuropathy. You can no longer feel your hands and feet because your nerve endings have been burnt away. All neurological problems, like tinnitus, were exacerbated.

I started falling over a lot in public. Each time I landed on my elbows, damaging them further. If I couldn’t get my nerves and muscles to respond, I thought I should at least visit a stuntman who would show me how to land gracefully in a hedge or stunt-roll across a busy main road.

Something in my new medication caused mood swings. Our arguments at home had always been low-level and mainly comprised the kind of bickering that goes on in every household.fn1 The difference between gay men and straight men is minimal. Straight men say they’ll never leave you and vanish. Gay men say they’ll leave you all the time and never go. One evening I smashed a tea mug in anger. I have never done anything like that in my life. As soon as I had separated the chemistry from my natural impulses I was able to remove certain drugs from my regime and calm the fuck down. Steroids were the problem. I had heard about ’roid rage. Now I knew it was real.

I became solipsistic and selfish, wrapped up in a back-and-forth schedule of pain and self-medication. Pete spent his life at home with me, which meant being trapped in an open-plan flat with someone who spent the whole time droning on about illness. I wondered what effect it was having on him but he insisted that everything was fine, although he had lately started smoking again and would introspectively stare at flowerpots while noisily dragging on a gasper.

Before chemo I always started my daily exercise regime with one hundred push-ups. Now I could manage just one. Before, I could stand on my hands. After, I couldn’t stand on one leg. I was as exhausted as a hundred-year-old. My head felt as if it was filled with cotton wool and barbed wire. I stopped eating because everything tasted of rusty metal. Limbs went numb, muscles seized up.

It was as if I had suddenly been propelled ten years forward, so that the golden boy everyone said was young for his age was now a querulous pensioner who had trouble making it up a short flight of stairs. I had to remain still for two minutes before venturing forward because it was like crossing the deck of a ship. When I went in a shop I was liable to knock everything over. Walking in a straight unwavering line took enormous concentration. I was like a drunk attempting to leave a bar.

Instant ageing produced other side effects. I now had the skin tone of an elderly rocker who’d never had a glass of water in his life. Worse still, people started talking to each other over my head, as if I’d lost my mind and could now safely be ignored. I thought this must be how many older people felt most of the time.

When hospital appointments ran on time (i.e. no more than two hours late) a trip to the chemo ward was not entirely unpleasant. One woman I met said it was the highlight of her week. Mind you, she lived in Thanet, so it probably was.fn2

However, the hospital was audibly creaking at the seams. It felt as if any day now the walls would explode outwards and we’d all land in the street. One day I spent several hours sitting on the floor of the overcrowded waiting room. After that I left and went to a different hospital. I didn’t know you could, but you can. I moved to a specialized centre where the cancer patients weren’t shoehorned into a Victorian building no longer fit for purpose.

My old medical team took it quite personally. It felt like a divorce that had been brought about because I’d cheated on them. I left the old building like a cheap slut abandoning a kindly, fair-minded spouse. I half expected to turn around and see them at the windows, looking forlornly down at me.

My new NHS hospital was a shining citadel of glass and light. If the old one was Margaret Rutherford, this one was Taylor Swift. Patients came from Scotland, the Isle of Wight, Northern Ireland. I just had to stroll down the Euston Road from our flat. The Euston Road is the most polluted thoroughfare in the UK but you never see a dead bird. Presumably they just disintegrate upon hitting the pavement or get eaten by rats. Anyway, it was a twenty-five-minute walk and fine so long as I didn’t breathe in.

I entered a calm white palace with a glass atrium built just for us cancer patients. It felt like being a member of a cool private club. One day the power failed on our treatment floor and I had to be cannulated on the private patients’ floor at the top of the building. I expected to find peacocks preening beside champagne fountains while a string quartet played. Instead I was reassured to find everything exactly the same as the floor below.

Cannulated patients are not inclined to make small talk. They’ll read or rest with clear plastic tubes extending from their arms and speak to no one. A vague sense of shame seems to linger in the air. I longed to break the ice with them but did not wish to become the annoying chirpy one everybody hates. In Peter Nichols’s 1969 play The National Health one of the patients is unbearably chipper and is later exposed as a paedophile. ‘No smoke without fire’, ‘Always thought he was too cheerful’, etc.

Cancer ages you. They say you lose five years for every year of treatment, but I’m not sure who did the maths on that one. Your nails crack, your hair falls out, your bones ache, your muscles de-elasticate, your skin becomes papery, your breath gets weird, you wheeze and grunt. Ladies can wear a freezing cap during chemo treatment that’s supposed to reduce hair loss. The nurses told me it doesn’t, much.

Vanity. We all like to think we’re looking good, but imagine you own a mirror that makes you look bad. My mirror showed me how I might have looked in the past, how my grandfather used to look, like a manual labourer on a smaller, simpler food intake, not how I looked after decades of rich food, moisturizer, microdermabrasion and pore cleansers. I felt even older than when I filled in an online form and had to go all the way to the bottom to find my year of birth.

Sometimes you come across amazing time juxtapositions that don’t seem entirely feasible, like the idea of Oscar Wilde being able to go to work on the tube, or that Jack the Ripper struck three years before the first electric kettle. It doesn’t seem possible. So it came as a shock to flick through a copy of Sight and Sound magazine and discover that the first British colour feature film was made just sixteen years before I was born. Wings of the Morning was lensed by Jack Cardiff, one of the greatest cinematographers of all time, but that doesn’t let him off the hook for making me feel ancient. What next? Will I discover I was born before the invention of the teapot?

Perhaps there was some big governing authority that made decisions about its citizens and they were looking over my file. ‘He got away with that boyish look for far too long, let’s turn him into Old Man Steptoe.’

In our infantilized culture, where a middle-aged man might acceptably wear a Batman T-shirt to dinner, the ageing process was harder to accept. I never liked shopping and didn’t possess the smart fashion gene, but a glimpse in the mirror startled me. I looked like a special effect from the end of a Dracula film. I knew I wouldn’t even be able to scrub up for black-tie events any more, and everyone can do that. Happily I was married to someone who only bought clothes once a year, at gunpoint.

Nobody in their late sixties expects to look that great, unless they’re Joan Collins, who probably costs more to run than Venezuela, but I didn’t expect to turn into Ayesha from She after she goes into the blue flame again. Does anyone still read H. Rider Haggard? Wasn’t Ursula Andress in the Hammer film adaptation? There was a terrible sequel called, somewhat ungrammatically, The Vengeance of She so it must have been a hit. I wanted to ask the other patients if they remembered Ursula Andress but I feared they would look at me as if I was mad. Why shouldn’t we talk to each other, not about illness, which is deathly, or politics, which is divisive, but about the litter of life, the trivial matters that stitch our days together? Those coloured threads were woven through our routines and provided for our survival.

Most patients can’t relax enough to enjoy a little banter, something that might make us forget that immense rock in the room for a few minutes and just be ourselves. Cancer creates a new normal that needs to be worked around so that we can still speak and behave a little foolishly, as we used to. You can release yourself to death; the eternally optimistic Anne Frank did so after being told that her sister had died. I wondered: Can you will yourself to live, just a little bit?

My phone pinged. Maggie had sent me another text.

Let me explain something about Maggie. Somebody once said, ‘She’s like a Victorian Christmas tree, very sparkly but liable to burn your house down if left unattended.’

She moved to London from Yorkshire as a young woman and married a devilishly handsome man who let her down. She has three daughters, funny Carol, elegant Poppy and joyful Amber. I have known Maggie for most of my life. I don’t remember the bit where she was a bunny girl or when she was on Doctor Who and in bad science-fiction films, but I once made the mistake of hiring her as a secretary. She was terrible, but at least she once let me paint her green and dress her as the Statue of Liberty.

When I put her in my novels I have to tone down her behaviour because she strikes readers as too outlandish. This is a woman who once referred to her father as ‘my never-to-be-known sperm implanter’. Maggie trails calamity in her wake, a benign, generous, endlessly forgiving Typhoid Mary who only ever means well and somehow always manages to set things on fire.

This typhoon of chaos surrounds her and moves with her. Recently she arrived with a shopping trolley full of random gift items including evaporated milk, tinned pears, a scarf, some peas and past-their-sell-by-date chocolates. When she wanted to take a photo with us she couldn’t find her phone, so Pete rang it and a man answered.

‘I can’t understand a word he’s saying.’ He handed me the phone. ‘Can you try?’

The call’s recipient had a geezerish cockney accent. His Rottweiler had found her phone down the back of a park bench, but when I suggested coming there to pick it up he told me to call another number. It seemed he’d already made an arrangement to sell the phone on and someone was on his way round right now to collect it, so I had to call this other person and put him off or he would not be best pleased. When I rang the second number I got no answer, so I headed sharpishly to the finder’s address.

A few minutes later I was walking down a badly lit corridor in a council block looking for a door number, hoping I didn’t bump into the other geezer, and wondering how I’d got into this situation.

The answer, of course, was Maggie, calmly surviving in a permanent state of befuddled drama. When I returned I found her sitting on the steps outside our flat. I handed her the phone.

She looked at it in amazement. ‘Isn’t life wonderful?’ she said. ‘Things go away and then come back.’

Once she was nearly arrested at the airport for forgery. She was going abroad on a catalogue modelling job with her daughter, and had not mentioned to anyone that she’d changed her passport with the aid of a scalpel blade and a black biro.

I had I thought cunningly in my best ink and writing altered my birth date. I knew when I saw this really plain well ugly woman who asked me if I had altered anything. I flushed and spluttered no I don’t think so. Poppy in the queue with her catalogue boss scarily staring at me as we were about to board plane. I commenced crying oh it is because I have to lie to get the jobs you know what it is like for us women when we get older. Bottom-faced passport woman said no she didn’t and I would have to surrender my passport. Eventually after collapsing and boss shouting at me and other models spitting at me bottom-faced passport woman let me go warning when I returned passport would be impounded.

17

A Rubbish CV

I was at a desk in the hospital thinking about my obituary. I studied my CV and realized, with a sinking feeling, that it didn’t amount to much.fn1 The post-war biographies of authors usually said something like:

Rick Francisco is the pen name of Wing Commander ‘Blaster’ Howard Jenkins, who bombed the Ruhr dams and was shot down seven times during the war. As a young man he scaled the fabled ‘Fourth Peak’ of Kilimanjaro, which was to feature in his most famous painting, finished at the age of 87 and displayed at the Royal Academy. He was a key figure in the creation of the state of Palestine. In Paris he befriended Picasso and Salvador Dalí, recruiting them as spies to work as peacekeepers in British Malaya. He married Countess Maria von Dorsenberg in 1959 and they had eleven children, seven of whom formed an award-winning choir. He was knighted in 1979. The new Panama Bridge was renamed the Howard Jenkins Causeway in his honour. He composes his bestsellers with a quill pen (a grateful gift to his grandmother from Oscar Wilde) in his Victorian conservatory, which was built with stained glass salvaged from the Great Exhibition. Although now 95 he is still a keen parachutist.

I wrote down my achievements:

Appeared in a Batman comic. As the villain, which was pretty cool. Hey.

Opened a nightclub in Soho. Was shut down by police for under-bribing them.

Released an appalling Christmas pop single. Managed to buy up most of the copies.

Worked as a male model for a travel company. Sat frying beside five hundred swimming pools with a rum cocktail I was not allowed to drink (waistline), lovingly gazing at my young lady. I created a backstory for the two of us, how we met and fell in love, defying her Italian Mafia stepfather to get married. I needn’t have bothered. She was a model from Wembley and only ever talked about shoes.

Let’s see, what else?

Wrote additional B-movie dialogue scenes in Hollywood to push producers’ cheesy footage over the eighty-minute mark.

Appeared in the Pan Books of Horror just after they stopped being any good.

Once stood in for James Bond during the Pierce Brosnan years. He told me, ‘If I’d known you were an author I’d have been a lot nicer to you.’ Which I sort of adored him for.fn2

So, I didn’t liberate a country from the yoke of dictatorship or work as a spy for the Rome–Berlin axis but I got to wear a bow-tie and wave a gun about.

The page was looking a bit sparse so I added my literary achievements.

My brilliant ‘literary’ career in 26 easy bullet points

1. Filled notebooks with stories at school. Never showed them to anyone.

2. Wrote appallingly bad novel at sixteen. Read bits of it to friends. Nobody interested. Some incredulous laughter. Got called Poof and Book-Boy.

3. Wrote difficult second book. Read passages to friends after removing their means of escape. Visible and audible boredom. Verdict: Too many words, nothing to say.

4. Wrote comedy show for BBC with five other writers after hearing about it through a bloke in a pub. Finished work was altered out of all recognition. Paid thirty-six pounds.

5. Sent comedy script about women fighting for equal pay to BBC. Admittedly it wasn’t very funny but I didn’t even get a note back.

6. Sent various publishers an unsolicited manuscript about two idiots trying to run a nightclub. Utter silence. Forgot to keep copy for myself. Novel now mercifully lost. It wasn’t on my hard drive because they hadn’t been invented yet.

7. Sent out another unsolicited book, Letters from Home, about mislaid correspondence from Home Counties found in WWI trench. Good reaction; agents actually answered. Said no.

8. Section of book Letters from Home recorded for BBC radio. Producers loved it and were ‘very excited’. Not enough to broadcast it, apparently. No explanation, no cheque.

9. Wrote two embarrassing comedy books that now belong in a time capsule set to an opening date sometime after the ants have reclaimed the Earth.fn3

10. Introduced to my first agent. Gave her a manuscript. Instructed to ditch portable typewriter and get a computer, and cut out all the jokes about the royal family as she was offended by them.

11. Agent got book published. Book got more attention than I was ready for. Unprepared for fame. Blew it live on national television. Moved to Hollywood.

12. Sold first short story, ‘Left Hand Drive’. Story got made into short film. Actor wrote off film’s most expensive prop: a new BMW. Film won major award. Short appeared in cinemas attached to a rubbish horror film nobody saw.

13. Told agent that I had lots of other workable ideas. Agents and publishers are always on the lookout for steady earners. Pitched endlessly to studios. Thought I was having a great time in Hollywood, although it turned out I was having a nervous breakdown. Moved home to London, was instantly restored to normality and hacking chest problems.

14. Wrote uncategorizable novel called Roofworld. Reviews proclaimed ‘major new talent’. Booksellers didn’t know which shelf to put it on. Film version never got made.

15. Published difficult second novel, largely about crowd movement, runic symbology and murders. Crickets, tumbleweed, owl hooting.

16. Half-heartedly rethought game plan, pushed on. Roofworld republished. Now had double-digit readership. Book got optioned by Hollywood again. And dumped again.

17. Wrote fourteen volumes of short stories tapping into paranoia and the need to lay blame and take revenge, 180 stories in all. Proud of six of them.fn4

18. Became known for writing ‘stories of urban paranoia’, which is not as appealing an introduction at parties as being an avant-garde sculptor, excellent rumba dancer, etc. More on a level of appeal with, ‘This is a friend of mine. He gasses cuddly pets.’

19. Wrote a number of genre-defying novels, all hugely different from one another, that received what could be politely termed ‘a mixed reception’. Garnering bad reviews is not the worst thing that can happen to a book. The worst thing that can happen is nothing. Silence. No coverage at all. You start slapping yourself to make sure you still exist.

20. Ate too many salmon salads at niche literary festivals. Weirdest one took place in a damp motel outside Salford in thick fog with the wrong delegates.

21. Refused to take commissions, create a brand or do anything that would make me successful because I wanted to write according to the dictates of my heart. Quickly forced back to day job.

22. Wrote a Young Adult novel mixing North London children with Greek mythology. The only time I’ve ever fought with an editor about excised scenes. I lost. She won. The book was ruined. It didn’t help that two Hollywood films came out on the same theme and both flopped.

23. Had success with satirical Faustian novel, mostly because of its outrageous cover photography. Readers said, ‘I loved that book – what a cover!’ meaning they never read it.

24. Wrote a bleak, strange graphic novel about a mental asylum, which the editors liked so much that they asked me for another along the same lines, except, ‘We were thinking this one could be on the subject of faeries.’

25. Wrote four subversive genre novels: the Ballardian one, the supernatural one, the suspense one and the ghost-story one.

The SF one angered SF geeks. It was critical of Dubai for the way it treated its workers, who were dying from kidney failure because they could not drink enough water while they were on the skyscrapers.fn5 The Gulf Times asked to review the book, read it and never spoke to me again.

The supernatural one worked on multiple levels and required an in-depth meta-knowledge of horror film tropes. This is known as ‘being too clever’. A handful of readers worshipped it. The rest thought I’d gone mad.

The suspense one was so packed with witty references that I probably lost most readers by page five. I started to wonder if I was suffering from ADHD, so I wrote something calmer and more measured.

The ghost-story one was melancholy and tragic (as ghost stories should be). It got great notices but nobody noticed. Some writers develop an aura that preserves their reader loyalty whatever they do. Others develop a stain.

26. Created a pair of elderly detectives named after a matchbox. They also became a graphic novel and a crossword. Not exactly Harry Potter on the merch front. Made them elderly to ensure that no one would read book. Didn’t work as well as I had intended.

There was some other stuff along the way. Writing non-fiction made me realize that rifling through old newspapers in the library on rainy days was a lot more fun than trying to think up new ways of murdering people.

My first two volumes of memoirs managed to upset my only surviving relatives. The Daily Mail serialized the first book after first sexing up the prose and embarrassing everyone. Moral: Never go near the tabloids. I wrote a book about forgotten authors, some plays, a video game and a six-part BBC TV script, a process that resulted in me being replaced with the producer’s spouse, which I came to suspect had been part of the plan all along.

I suppose I can add to that pile by throwing in several thousand articles and columns, speeches, talks and lectures, none of them paid work. I toured around the country appearing on panels, holding Q&As, travelling with my PR or sitting alone on deserted railway station platforms with an M&S sandwich. On one occasion I found myself squeezed into the back of a tiny taxi covered in pink sparkles advertising the local Cinderella pantomime with a disgruntled Michael Portillo.fn6

Sometimes you get stuck in a green room with Cherie Blair and have nothing to say other than ‘Is there any tea?’ If the event is in a theatre you’ll usually find a framed, signed photograph of Steps somewhere, hidden like a sinister runic symbol. And there’s always a danger that you’ll end up waiting underneath the stage with Christopher Biggins and Su Pollard, who remain eerily ageless and potter about at play openings hanging on to each other like a pair of confused Victorian ghosts.

Let’s see, what else? I wrote a thriller called There’s Something I Haven’t Told You. I thought it was a great title because it’s the kind of thing you say when you’re scared and about to reveal a terrible lifelong secret to a friend. The plot: a missing child’s two fathers are in the middle of divorcing when they’re hit with hate mail and press prejudice. I wanted to modernize the traditional family suspense drama but the book bothered my editor. I should have taken it elsewhere. Instead I was persuaded to publish it under a pen name. The title was changed, the editor vanished from the building and the book was lost in some kind of mysterious accounting arrangement that suited the publisher. I worked on that manuscript for three years. I tell you in case you’re still thinking of becoming a writer.

For decades would-be scribes were in thrall to film lecturers like Robert McKee selling them courses on the ‘writer’s journey’, Joseph Campbell and three-act structures.fn7 Writing can be reduced to a certain kind of formula but it is rarely inspired.

Sarah Phelps, who has written over one hundred episodes of EastEnders, has also been responsible for some excellent TV adaptations of novels. Here she is on the subject:

Someone once said to me, ‘What’s the inciting incident?’ I was like, ‘Don’t ever say that to me again.’ … I sometimes go and talk to people who are doing writing courses and they talk like that, and I just think, ‘This is horrible … The story tells you what the structure is.’fn8

Ms Phelps had to deal with a BBC executive who thought that her adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None should be shot like Big Brother. I’ve had executives who thought that my Bryant & May novels should be cast with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie ‘to capitalize on their fame as a double act’.

Looking for a successful adaptation of a nigh-impossible-to-adapt book, I rewatched Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, scripted from Susanna Clarke’s massive annotated doorstop by Peter Harness. In paring back the story, the central conflicting relationship between warring government magicians incorporated all the wonderment of the book’s set pieces. I especially liked the way in which an impatient Duke of Wellington treated Strange as a military asset to be exploited or abandoned. It worked because the story formed such a strong and believable spine that held fast in both media.

Adapting your work as a screenplay is a substantially different skill set, according to dramatist Andrew Davies, and it’s not one many novelists get to grips with. Screenwriters understand the spaces between the characters. I suspect they are attuned to seeing a barely visible network of relationships that novelists are blind to because they’re too busy concentrating on the plot.

I wrote a great many film scripts that never even got read, let alone made. Either my visions failed to accord with what the producers had in mind or the scripts were shit. The latter, probably.

Did this pile of hits, misses, misfires, mistakes and stationary projects amount to a life’s work? It was a lot but it didn’t exactly make me the Alexandre Dumas of productivity. For years I’d thought of writing books as a secondary career because it wasn’t how I brought home the coal. My day job was remunerative but a misnomer; working in film means late nights and cut into any writing time that was left.fn9

I got a shelter cat for company. It bit me so badly, hanging on to the flesh between thumb and forefinger, that I ended up in hospital again. I paid for it to live on a feral-cat farm in Wales. They sent me a photo of it romping happily in a field, which only made me feel more of a failure. I liked to imagine that the snap was a Photoshopped fake, and in fact they had drowned the bitey bastard in a canal and kept the quarterly payments.

While I was lost inside my career everything else fell away. Work assumed an absurd priority over love, family, friendships, obligations. I treated the ludicrous whims of barely sentient clients with thoughtfulness and gravitas. Deadlines were as sacred as catechisms. No tombstone ever read, ‘He delivered his work on time.’

Being a full-time writer is as lonely as being a lighthouse keeper. You are Prometheus chained to a rock, destined to have your pages torn out each day.

I looked at the text lying before me on the hospital tray. The best part of the job was getting letters from readers. When someone wrote to say that a particular book got them through a rough patch I was devastated anew by the power of words, but then I realized the same thing had happened to me when I was ill and feeling low. I’d read Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd and it had turned my mood around.

Any artistic act has three components: the work, the maker and the user. Remove any one of these three and the construct collapses. To forget the reader is to write purely for yourself.

I don’t plan much. I come up with themes, characters and moments, and work out the rest as I go along. What you write forms itself through the emotional promptings of your character. Spontaneity suits me. Once I had to go on stage and give a speech in front of about two hundred people at very short notice, without a script or a clue as to what to say. It could have gone wrong but it didn’t and I loved it. Plans of any kind make me uncomfortable.

So I was in it for the long run. The career had hooked me, as I’d always known it would. Each next book would be the book, not the one to make the most money but the most satisfying one to write.

After the opening premise is laid out too many crime novels become formulaic. ‘Dolores has amnesia. Each day she wakes up and is menaced by a serial killer. A lot of things happen, somebody turns out to be somebody else and then it ends.’

Writing is like trimming a tree. As you start plotting, your choices of where to take your characters are lopped off. The process is cyclical: write excitedly, get disappointed, make changes, renew your passion. Repeat.

By now I had evolved a different system: work back from a great ending. It turned out this was a dumb idea.

The early part of your new novel was a bit boring but then a friend of mine explained that you were tricking us all and working towards this absolutely terrific climax. If only you’d given me some indication of what you were about to do I wouldn’t have given up halfway through and donated my copy to Help the Aged. – Reader comment

18

The King of Sweden

For a while in my thirties I travelled so much that I started submitting pieces to the travel section of the Sunday Times. The editor was horrified. Their readers wanted to know when the silver Dior workout water bottle would become available – a snip at £620.fn1 So my investigation into the somewhat fraudulent ecology of the Maldives and human-rights violations in Mali didn’t go down well. I see now that I was aiming at the wrong readership. They wanted aspirational; I gave them investigative.

I’d saved my biggest plans for a time when Pete and I were both free of work commitments and could go away, but like the rest of the country we’d been forced to abandon the dream.

My experiences in the British countryside had been universally unwelcoming and disastrous. I had no intention of trying to explore my own rainswept nation again because a trip to Cornwall was at least four times the cost of going to Barcelona and St Ives was harder to reach than Thailand. Besides, who wants to holiday in places where the locals are bitter and resentful towards city dwellers?

What I disliked most was the very thing so many artists loved: the low light that softened shadows and drained the colours from every scene. I liked my countryside like the landscape of Dalí’s youth: hard bright angles, amber rock, olive trees, clear skies, black shadows, sharp lines.

Failing to learn by earlier mistakes, I submitted another travel piece to The Times based on a trip I had made before the pandemic. I thought of it as a bread-and-butter job that might appeal to the luxury holiday set, wrongly as it turned out. It was never published. I include part of it here to illustrate the perception gap between a writer’s interests and a publisher’s agenda. You can skip it if you want.

I hate the King of Sweden. In the last few days he has played havoc with my holiday plans. It began on the flight.

‘The King would like you to join him in first class,’ whispered the steward, bending close to my ear before realizing his mistake, dashing my hopes and sliding away to the distinguished Swedish gentleman seated immediately behind me.

As we coasted into Muscat Airport I watched a crimson-suited band assemble, and waited while the King took a leisurely stroll up the red carpet to be greeted by the Sultan of Oman. The rest of us waited on the tarmac, sweltering.

It was a glamorous beginning. But as the King began to tour the country in the Sultan’s company, I realized his travel schedule was pretty much the same as mine. The difference was that he had better accommodation and could get whole areas closed wherever he went. First the two largest forts in Nizwa, a town south-east from the capital, Muscat, were shut to the public so that he could visit them. I crossed them off my itinerary with a shrug.

Then the King took over the luxurious Thousand Nights Desert Hotel, where I was actually supposed to be staying, with the result that I was bumped to a venue without electricity.

I wouldn’t have minded if his trip had been providing an important contribution to the world banking crisis, or was essential to Middle Eastern discussions concerning global warming. But no, as the head of the World Scout Foundation he was in Oman on dib-dib-dib business.

Everywhere he ventured, smartly turned out Omani boy scouts stood at the roadside sporting giant pink and mauve flags, nervously awaiting the King’s arrival. It was clearly a big event in the scouting world, on a par with, say, ‘Belgian Finance Minister Pays Tribute to Lord Baden-Powell’.

Killing time outside the souk in Nizwa, waiting for the royal procession to pass, I spoke to a merchant selling rifles, knives and canes. What would Sweden, a pacifist country, make of these?

‘Our love of rifles is misunderstood,’ he explained. ‘They hold an important ceremonial purpose, together with the curved knives. Guns are fired into the air to celebrate weddings and circumcisions.’ I hoped they weren’t fired during the latter. ‘We do not hunt with them. Every Friday there is a weapons market, a tradition dating back over four centuries.’

It was easy to see how news footage of celebrating Arabs could be misinterpreted. ‘What about the canes?’ I asked, pointing at three distinct varieties of long, decorated whippy sticks. ‘Those are for beating children,’ he replied.

Human settlement in Oman dates back to the Stone Age. Its name probably originates in the Arab tribes that migrated from the Uman territory of Yemen, which it borders. Now it’s a country that exists in distinct Muslim faiths and tribal zones, roughly matching city, desert and woodland.

After a civil war that ended in the mid-seventies Oman had embraced tourism, but my delight in finding the country so unspoiled was mitigated by the fear that all this might soon change. Already some beaches were suffering from shipping-lane pollution, plastic water bottles marred landscapes and around fifteen rare animals and birds faced extinction. The Sultan brought in social housing, cheap healthcare, good roads and low taxes, at least for as long as the oil held out. Unfortunately, Oman had also been a human-rights nightmare, with torture and forced disappearances taking care of anyone who expressed an opposing viewpoint.

Determined now to avoid all things Swedish I headed into the desert to stay with Bedouins, who were slowly abandoning their camels for jeeps. Still technically polygamous, my host explained that it was simply too expensive to keep three wives. ‘You need a state-of-the-art TV, a four-four, a bigger house, a pool. Before, you could have bought another wife with a good camel.’

Bedouins were replacing their palm-husk roofs with green plastic sheeting. When I asked a tribesman how he got such a perfect crease in his white thobe, he explained, ‘I send it to the dry cleaners.’

Dates still provided incomes, but the ancient mud villages where they had been harvested were now overgrown. They followed the lines of the wadis, the emerald pools that formed as rivers made their way from the mountains to the sea. Tracing the pathways of palms through dried-up beds, we came to the shells of ghost towns where only the ornately carved wooden doors and window frames of crumbling houses remained in dusty alleys. Soon after these towns had been abandoned, French rogue traders arrived to feed from the remnants and the carved panels started turning up in Parisian designer homeware stores converted into coffee tables.

Omani archaeologists faced a familiar dilemma – do you restore old buildings or leave the past to return to dust? We passed a forgotten graveyard with odd headstones – two for a man, three for a woman. ‘An extra one to make sure your wife does not come back,’ my guide had joked.

Would Sunday Times readers really have clutched their pearls as they scanned the article? ‘You have to ask yourself if you’d want to go on holiday there after reading that,’ said a journalist friend, returning the piece to me.

‘So it’s just about selling the country as a destination?’ I asked, and received what my mother would have termed an old-fashioned look in reply.

‘You do understand that’s what travel sections are for?’ she asked.

I thought back to my days at Time Out magazine. ‘They should inform and enlighten.’

‘You’re flogging package holidays, restaurants and hot-air-balloon experiences. Newspapers are dying. Advertorials are their life support. You’re meant to reinforce their preconceptions, not dismantle them. Your job is not to remove the line between art and commerce, it’s to ditch the art completely. Bin this.’

The article, and dozens more like it, went into the file marked ‘Unsold’.fn2

19

Lingo

When I was a boy I lost an entire summer to Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. As soon as I got sick they all climbed down from the bookshelves, along with novels that long ago fell from fashion, like Two Years Before the Mast, Lord Jim and A High Wind in Jamaica. Back then we were still considered to be a maritime nation, so half of the few books in our house involved the sea, sailing across it, falling into it, walking along the floor of it and, of course, drowning in it.

Rereading T. H. White’s The Once and Future King conjured other memories of illness, lying in bed on a hot day when everyone else was outside playing. I got lost in the Arthurian world, seeing life through the eyes of birds and animals, suffering the boy-king’s fall from innocence as the noble tragedy of Lancelot and Guinevere unfolded. White’s writing was strange and unexpected, a distorted window into the past.

Some prose felt as if it might burn your tongue if read aloud. Over the years I read Ray Bradbury avidly, trying to fathom how he slipped so effortlessly into a child’s subconscious mind. Bradbury’s words could be more narcotic than any of the beat poets. I’m not interested in how people feel on drugs, I’m interested in how they feel when all of their senses are aware.

Now I was back in the sick bay again. Feeling lousy on beautiful sunny days turned my mind to loss. Writers seem susceptible to early demise; I missed vanished friends, acquaintances and correspondents, whereas many successful and popular writers are, tragically, still alive.

I’d been meaning to check the dead ones’ websites to see if they’d been posthumously updated. It would at least mean that their estates were on the ball. You don’t stop selling just because the curtain has dropped. Publishing moves at such a glacial pace that editors must be forgiven for failing to spot that you’re brown bread.fn1

The summer of 2020 felt as long and hot as the great British heatwave of 1976, and life under a kind of double-lockdown plunged us both into a parallel world. The sky was endlessly cerulean, the green streets were silent but for birdsong and rustling leaves.

The city resembled the one of my childhood once more. The chimes of St Paul’s Cathedral rang clearly in the air, reaching our windows from two miles away. Someone was playing scales on a piano. On a wooden post in the canal, a heron beat its blue-black wings like a pair of umbrellas to dry them, its head-ruff stretched out, being stroked by the sun.

Everything slowed. The clouds formed ripples like sand on a wide flat beach at low tide. No contrails disturbed them. It was a childhood summer of unending heat and light and lassitude, two whole months of crystal skies and warm bricks and windows that had to be shaded between noon and four. When we entered the first lockdown the trees were black and skeletal. Now they formed great green walls between the streets. I could smell their leaves.

On some days I was clear-headed enough to see everything. The huge, rowdy family next door laid a fake-turf lawn and then placed the entire contents of their home in their garden: chairs and tables, trampoline and roundabout, grill and paddling pool, day bed, toys and a drinks trolley, plus lots of plastic children’s toys that were destined to end up broken-backed in their front garden at the end of the weekend.

Everyone was suddenly living inside out, shifting their sofas into their gardens, the exception being the Indian family who glanced at the rampant buddleia all over their yard and simply decided to sit down in the middle of it. This being London, the fashionable glass boxes of time-poor business folk were butted against the brick houses of low-income families. We said hello but didn’t socialize, the awkwardness being mostly on our side.

I did meet one neighbour. When the heavy steel lid of our barbecue was storm-tossed down into their garden from six floors up with the velocity of Oddjob’s hat, the amiable dad returned it, saying, ‘If you’d been a couple of feet further over you’d have taken my old woman’s head off and done us all a favour, har har.’ Had the situation been reversed, someone in our building would probably have launched a lawsuit.

While the working classes laugh, the middle classes fret. The English middle class has a historical sense of superiority which is fundamentally nonsensical, being based on nothing more than being able to take out a mortgage and live on a wet island. We never had to fight for our borders. Anyone intent on attacking us had to come by boat and could be seen from miles away, hence our outrage when they turned up looking for a better life. Our isolated development led to peculiar ways of thinking, yet our nation is so close to France that when I’m at the coast my phone switches to a French provider. A country that is twenty-one miles from France is European.fn2

I thought about what I’d seen this year.

Our formerly insular neighbours had turned common parts into play areas for children, setting out chairs and tables, holding meetings and picnics, fetching food, offering help, checking on each other. In short, being the opposite of those Republican extremists in apocalypse films who hide behind barbed wire with rifles. Health workers, carers and people in essential services had, for the first time, been accorded some respect. Perhaps the dazzling weather helped to lend a Passport to Pimlicofn3 air to the proceedings, but our preconceptions about each other vanished. Although there was one neighbour we all hated, obviously.

The single most searched-for furnishing item became the home desk. Writers found it hard to adapt as publishers started operating alternating three-week furloughs. Even with months of financial hardship ahead nobody wanted things go back to how they were. The benefits of reduced noise, air and light pollution were obvious. A huge number of home farmers became overenthusiastic about rhubarb. Meanwhile Boris Johnson was being pressured into accepting EU-banned chlorinated chicken and hormone-stuffed beef from the USA, where one in six gets food poisoning annually compared with one in sixty-six in the UK.

Life under lockdown affected our two neighbourhood groups differently. The large families living beside us worked long hours and watched TV or drank beer in the garden as night fell. Their laughter was contagious.

Meanwhile, the designer-flat owners were suffering awfully. Without interior lives they didn’t know what to do with themselves. They were used to late nights, keeping cabs waiting, heading off somewhere before going on somewhere else. Now they were busy blacklisting farmers’ markets that failed to deliver, fighting for Ocado slots, being unable to get refunds on theatre tickets, struggling to find work as freelance media email-shufflers. People were really missing their top-up breaks in Ibiza. It was ghastly for them. No one was sure what would happen when the money ran out and the nation folded its arms against graduates, deciding that it needed a hospital cleaner more than it wanted someone who did PR for an in-house magazine owned by a fashion conglomerate.

We watched old films for scenes set in pubs and restaurants with a sense of loss and nostalgia. We turned to each other and sighed, ‘Remember how we used to do that?’

Some movies took on a disturbing new air. Scenes of shared meals in crowded restaurants sent a shiver down the spine. In an Italian gangster film everyone dived into one huge bowl of spaghetti and I recoiled in horror. I watched the food fight in Animal House and only saw the failure of social distancing. Dialogue lines about being alone took on sinister new meanings. Dystopian films started looking like documentaries. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road became a parable about supply-chain shortages and the failures of self-isolation.

We found ourselves talking to each other more, but our rat-run only extended from the flat to the hospital at the other end of road, so there wasn’t much to talk about. All the plans about using the time to learn Spanish, play poker and dance the tango got as far as running supermarket errands for neighbours. My attempts at yoga were cut short by the realization that once I got down on the floor I couldn’t get up again.

Still, the pandemic didn’t affect lighthouse keepers or writers, so I was pretty happy.

The clear skies and loss of traffic meant that you could suddenly hear street conversations with perfect clarity. While there have been dozens of books on the peculiarities of the English language, including fanciful volumes of outdated rhyming slang and even a history of the gay theatrical Polari (which was still in common use in London until the 1990s), few noticed the everyday oddities because we took them for granted. Now I heard delivery men on the pavement six floors below: ‘Heard from her lately?’ ‘Not a dicky bird.’ Rhyming slang, forgotten but not gone.

Wonga, notes and dosh were all still synonyms for cash in our street, it turned out, with dosh also used as a verb (‘I’ll dosh you up later’). Someone accused his mate of ‘having a Turkish’. Everywhere people were ‘going arse over tit’ and keen to ‘spend a penny’. Someone actually used ‘Aris’ in a casual sentence, which delighted me. ‘The old Aris was going sixpence/half-crown’ meaning ‘I was scared’. ‘Aris’ = ‘Aristotle’ = ‘bottle’ = ‘bottle and glass’ = ‘arse’. Some mornings I just sat outside listening. Being behind a screen was obviously insulating me from real life.

My PA proved a repository of lost language, mostly learned from her parents. ‘I haven’t heard from him since the old king died,’ she’d say unthinkingly; or ‘Oh, do give over.’ It was all divided by age and class. Older people were now a national archive for odd phrases, especially in less populated regions where the edges had not been rubbed off.

You could still hear ‘Neither use nor ornament’ used occasionally, and the Yorkshire negative ‘They’re not doing that, are they?’ is still common. A friend from Sheffield can’t say ‘I was sitting’ but always uses ‘I was sat sitting’ – a survival of his upbringing.

Snippets of Monty Python had long ago entered the language. Nobody could say the word ‘wafer’ without pronouncing it French thanks to John Cleese’s oleaginous waiter, and ‘What did the Romans ever do for us?’ was now adapted to everyday use with a single-word substitution.

The young have the fastest evolving set of phrasings, with fam, bruv and bey and the ubiquitous innit tacked on to sentences. Notably, the ubiquitous mate has jumped barriers from a working class call-out (‘Oi, mate!’) to a middle-class term of endearment (‘Hey, mate!’)

Second- and third-generation Europeans living in the UK had claimed common ground in a form of polyglot English that existed wherever people from different linguistic backgrounds met socially. Much as when I attempted to speak Spanish, the words were bolted together, so that while they were technically the right nouns and adjectives, the resulting sentences were Frankenstein-like and stilted.fn4

None of which could explain Maggie’s idiosyncratic post-midnight texts, which now arrived regularly. Her daughters did not live close by and, like a needy cat, she was lonely. Two came on consecutive nights:

Why haven’t these clever clog hearing aid inventors worked out to give deaf people some form of super glue to go into my ears instead of using it to stupidly stick oneself to the road? I am going to experiment with a minuscule amount cos I really do not want my fellow Playboy bunnies to discover my secret at the Final Bunny Reunion. It will be interesting to see which of us is not dead. I am going to wear a frock. I wonder if anyone will be wearing a push up bra? Where did my breasts go? To the middle of nowhere I’m afraid.

Well I went to the Final Bunny Reunion with Beth at the Hippodrome. I felt like a species under dissection. We are all so ancient now. We all got up on stage with several comp proseccos. Lots of gossip with my old bunny girls who have had such interesting lives. We left after Beth fell off the stage.

20

Homebodies

You get wary about oversharing chemo stories and boring friends to death. To my mind Vivienne Haigh-Wood could have just listened to her husband’s poems and gone to bed with a hot-water bottle.fn1

To lower the paywall of the inner mind and admit something serious to a friend is to impose upon them, however slightly. If I share a personal matter it elicits a response of commiseration and upsets others. This is what the documentarian Adam Curtis called ‘Oh Dearism’ – the only possible response to bad news one cannot do anything about. Job’s comforters are banished to Sheol and replaced by hand-wringing Oh Dearists.

Illness is a disrupter. Virginia Woolf, the literary heroine of Bloomsbury, thought that it is ‘strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to tooth-ache.’

The pandemic gave us a shavasana, the only yogic position everyone likes, the corpse-pose, a lacuna, a breath in and a breath out. As the traffic died away London’s air quality improved and doubtless hundreds of lives were saved. We began to think that the reduction of diesel would clear rivers, clean streets, restore trees, bring back an ecosystem.

Of course it was a dream. After the pandemic carbon emissions rose more steeply than ever. In 2020 there were over 403,000 spills of sewage into England’s rivers and seas. Our Prime Minister voted to remove an amendment to the Environment Bill that would have made water companies responsible for sewage discharges. I was living in a country that actively voted to throw shit into its own water supply.

Depressed, I went for a walk in Regent’s Park.

SQUIZZER:

Is it your meds? You know they can cause depression.

ME:

Jesus, who – what – the hell are you?

SQUIZZER:

You don’t remember me? I showed up in Chapter Four. You said you wanted a sidekick.

ME:

I most certainly did not. You’re a bloody talking squirrel.

SQUIZZER:

I’m a red squirrel. There ain’t too many of us left. Fucking American greys came over here and wiped us all out. (Belches.) Excusez-moi.

ME:

What are you eating?

SQUIZZER:

Burger King. Bacon Double XL. You should try one. I think you’re probably depressed. Your body composition has changed. Dogs will back away from you now. They can smell cancer. You have to think about what’s chemicals and what’s still you.

ME:

I don’t want to stop taking my medication.

SQUIZZER:

So you just do what they tell you?

ME:

Yes. They’re doctors. I suppose you’re an anti-vaxxer.

SQUIZZER:

No, I’m a squirrel. Have the meds started to affect your writing yet?

ME:

I’m having some memory issues. Words drop out. I lose names, places.

SQUIZZER:

Can you remember what you had for lunch yesterday? Know why? It’s the chemo. Or possibly senility. You’ll get a lot more of that soon. What did you do on Tuesday?

ME:

Isn’t today Tuesday?

SQUIZZER:

There you go. Soon you’ll be putting your underpants on over your trousers and texting like that crazy old lady.

ME:

How about some good news for a change? ‘By the way, they just found a cure for cancer, turns out it’s passionfruit sorbet.’ Something like that?

SQUIZZER:

I wish I could cheer you up a bit but I don’t have anything.

ME:

A sidekick is supposed to make the central character look good.

SQUIZZER:

I didn’t say I wanted to be one. It didn’t do Robin much good, did it? Having to undress under a towel because Bruce Wayne had cameras hidden everywhere.

ME:

I don’t remember that in the comics.

SQUIZZER:

That’s because you don’t see things which are right there in front of you. Listen, I’d love to stick around and chat but I have others to see.

ME:

Wait, what about the memory thing?

SQUIZZER:

You’ll figure it out. Or maybe you’ll just forget I was here. Whatever. Not my problem.

He scampered off up a tree. Bushy-tailed ponce. He’d be a bloody sight more endangered if I saw him again.

Our post-hospital pastry run soon took on epic proportions. The North London neighbourhood of Tufnell Park has a scruffy little high street filled with independent shops. We returned loaded with fresh cinnamon buns, lemony ‘volcanoes’, buttery mini bread puddings, rhubarb and lime sponges. The plan was for me to pile on weight prior to losing it in the war with my rogue cells.

For decades the idea of adding any poundage was a source of much hilarity. I come from a family of scarecrows. My father spent his entire life trying to put on weight and nothing worked. He used to feed my brother and me Guinness to fatten us up. When I started having to subcutaneously inject myself daily I had to stick the needle in at an angle to find any fat. A few months of chemo fixed that. I no longer fitted my clothes. It was a dangerous equation. Chemo + inactivity + lockdown = dwarf-star-like weight gain. My cheeks filled out; my eyes almost vanished. I looked like Vladimir Putin.

We continued to deliver baked goods to our neighbours. I took a plate of carrot cake and cardamon buns to Becky, my downstairs neighbour, who opened the door in a tiger-skin catsuit and matching eye mask, looking as if she’d been up since Tuesday.

She cast a bleary eye at the cakes. ‘What?’

‘I thought you’d like these. They’re freshly baked.’

‘Can’t you see I have a fucking hangover?’ She took the cakes and slammed the door shut.

I liked Becky. She was what my mother would have called a flibbertigibbet. Hitting fifty, she had a job that required her to be in China or Dubai or Australia every few days while keeping a dog and a busy social schedule. She seemed not so much to throw herself into her work as leap from a parapet into life.

She understood my situation and treated it as an everyday pain in the arse that did not require any special consideration, which suited me fine. She didn’t know much about getting her sink unblocked but she knew how to mix cocktails and call a plumber. She once went shopping for a vibrator that looked like those machines you use to shave bobbles off a jumper, and left it on the restaurant table throughout our meal.

Armed with a plate of pastries any dieter would die for, I made my way over to my library – eight bookcases curated to the point of derangement. After reading about the library cleaner who spent the lockdown rearranging all of her clients’ books according to size, I tried to understand how I’d sorted mine.

I had no idea what A. P. Herbert was doing between Gore Vidal and Margery Allingham. I had the major works of Harlan Ellison in a single volume with a note from him warning me in a vaguely sinister fashion that he was watching my every move. Next to this was a Dennis Wheatley whodunnit containing cigarette ends and other physical pieces of evidence in little bags (a bit of a thing in the 1930s) and er, Viz magazine’s Roger’s Profanisaurus. I did not know a lot about Kandinsky, the periodic table or Euclidean geometry but I knew what I liked.

Books were cheap and plentiful. The pandemic revealed just how wasteful we all were, with our weekend flights and fancy restaurants and orders for things we didn’t need like air-fryers and exerbicycles. What about doing what we really wanted for a change? If it turned out that I was dying, would I want my final meal to be stone bass confit with Cantabrian anchovies and a seaweed doughnut in a hip new restaurant some gouty restaurant reviewer had discovered, or, like a prisoner on death row, would I prefer to be in my cosy cell with some fried chicken and an awful lot of books?

I talked with another neighbour, Hiromi, who seemed perfectly placid within the pandemic. She had become an unofficial member of our household bubble and had dyed her hair purple, although these facts were probably not related.

‘I’ve discovered my inner homebody,’ she explained. ‘I may never go out again. I never enjoyed it much in the first place.’

‘But what about fresh perspectives, new influences?’

‘I don’t need them any more. Maybe I’m not as deep as I thought I was.’

I thought it took a lot of balls to say that out loud. But she had a point, why not stay home more? We grew up on Mike Leigh films, where everything interesting happened ‘indoors’. In his film Life Is Sweet, Alison Steadman cheerfully announces that she has never been for a walk in her life.

‘Won’t you miss going into town?’ I asked.

Hiromi shook her purple locks emphatically. ‘I used to belong to societies. Now I plan to spend whole weeks on my sofa. I have sixty-four hours of basketball anime lined up to watch.’

Hiromi was also a competition weightlifter, so she knew how to keep the pounds off. For a while she had made spicy Japanese nuts at home until the building was invaded by peculiar little moths. Her husband Dan loved single malt whiskies and the blues. He collected bits of neighbourhood ephemera, including old pub signs left behind prior to demolition, and had recently purchased a cave in Wisconsin. He was heading there soon to honour a deceased friend in it. Between them they were quirky enough to compensate for anything you could find in the outside world.

For years our building, an old warehouse consisting of five apartments, had housed a veritable variety bill of disordered personalities, photographers, musicians, artists and chancers. Back then our locale had been labelled ‘undesirable’, if that was the correct term for a street that had its own crack house and a piece of waste ground where hookers took their punters. The neighbourhood was now gentrified beyond all recognition, and the artists and musicians had sold their lofts to suits for fortunes. A handful of artistic types insisted on staying on, if only to prevent the area from losing its dilettante charm.

I had fallen in love with the building’s rooftop apartment. It was just like the one in the final scene of Hoppity Goes to Town, the film by Dave Fleischer, who had animated Superman and Popeye. It had obsessed me as a child. When I was in my teens, my father Bill and I had a beer together in a pub called the Waterside Inn, an absurdly bucolic name for an ugly redbrick building with a leprechaunish wishing well in the middle of the bar floor. Seated on benches outside, watching the rats slip into the rancid trash-filled canal that the council wanted to fill in and turn into a car park, Bill pointed to the scruffy warehouse on the other side of the water. ‘I bet that’ll be a nice place to live one day.’

He was right. The wishing well turned out to be real.fn2 When the pub was torn down and a building called King’s Place, which now houses concert halls and the Guardian newspaper, was built on it, the developers realized that the well provided ancient access to an underground river and capped it off. We had an identical one in our basement. The rooftop flat had a garden that spared my sanity in the lockdown.

Like most other London residents, Pete and I realized that we could do without 95 per cent of all shopping trips. Walking was tougher for me now, but I could manage short journeys. I didn’t need clothes shops, most of which were aimed at taste-blind twenty-year-olds or black-and-taupe Eurasian millennials, although sometimes I went inside stores to Shazam their music.

Bookshops remained impossible to abandon. Londoners are astonishingly flexible about reinvention, but only lateral-thinking independent stores were able to reinvent in the pandemic; the big chains with their rigid one-size-fits-all design templates failed to cope, and many signed their death warrants because of it.

With so much enforced downtime I turned my attention to books I had bought and still not read or finished. Here are the first half dozen I spotted on my shelves.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Laurence Sterne

Reason for reading: The first stream-of-consciousness novel.

What put me off: It’s meant to be a joke but it’s not very funny. Read two chapters, wasn’t getting much back, not prepared to throw it out in case I decide to have another go.

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Reason for reading: The mysterious, impenetrable omphalos of American literature.

What put me off: Its language is exhausting and there’s an awful lot about whale sperm. But Ishmael gets to marry a bloke, which is pretty cool for the time.fn3

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

Reason for reading: Pioneering moral realism, planning train trip to Yorkshire.

What put me off: Sometimes you become so familiar with a book you haven’t read that it puts you off reading it.fn4 Plus, tortured hand-wringing romantic melodramas attract too many members of Yorkshire’s literary maniac community.

The Man on a Donkey – H. F. M. Prescott

Reason for reading: Immense Tudor novel about the Pilgrimage of Grace, Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries that proves richer and more immersive than Hilary Mantel’s towering Wolf Hall trilogy.

What put me off: Knowing I had to set aside about a month to properly do it justice. With so many stressful situations unfolding in my life, I can’t imagine a time when I’d be settled enough to read it without distraction.

Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

Reason for reading: Can’t believe I skipped it just because I saw the musical as a child.

What put me off: Knowing the book is usually filleted to remove the second half’s subplots involving Monks and Rose Maylie.

The Mirror and the Light – Hilary Mantel

Reason for reading: Read the first two and loved them.

What put me off: If I read this I’ll have to make time for The Man on a Donkey, and you don’t start reading such lengthy books if you can’t guarantee you’ll be around to finish them.

‘We’re switching you to the super-strong morphine now, Mr Fowler.’

‘But Sir Thomas More is about to be executed!’

I knew I owned many novels I had not read but had somehow convinced myself I had. ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ I remembered that bit but nothing of what came after, although I think a house burned down and there was a madwoman, or maybe that was Jane Eyre. I could recall the opening salvos of dozens of books but not what came after.

I tried blindly grabbing a paperback from the shelves and taking it to the sofa without checking the cover, then reading a page. It’s a good way to rediscover the sheer exuberance with which some writers juxtapose their words. Crumbs, I thought, Muriel Spark really knows what she’s doing. Why hadn’t I read all of them sequentially?

With no lockdown end in sight for anyone, and the PM urging caution as he frantically tried to locate all the seasoned professionals he’d fired from the cabinet and replaced with sycophants, we remained patient, on hold like the rest of the world. Getting sick in lockdown certainly reduced my FOMO.fn5

I was polishing off the last of the cakes when I got another text from Maggie at half past one in the morning. It wasn’t as if she was in Australia – she was two miles up the road in Highbury, FFS.

Poppy put me up for a commercial for cancer research. Strangely I got the job oh how the mighty have fallen. My bossy daughter says I have not to undergo any cosmetic help so no poly fillers, just take a walking stick. I shall take some incontinent knickers just in case. It has to be better than fondling fruit and looking at potatoes expectantly in EastEnders for hours on end. My toaster suddenly exploded yesterday and now does not work kisses xxxm

21

All of Them Witches

You have to be proactive through the process of treatment for any illness, ready to adapt and be on the lookout for system failures. It helps to familiarize yourself with the physical layout of your hospital because you get to see many different parts of it. Virtually every family I know has someone who works or has worked in the NHS and has advice like:

The Saturday Rule

Arrange your hospital appointments for the weekend.

Upside: Fewer patients want to attend at weekends so your appointment will be a lot faster.

Downside: At the weekend you may end up with the wrong leg taken off because a trainee rearranged the Magic Markers.

Even this isn’t something to get too exercised about. The human body is extraordinary: punctures heal overnight without leaving a sign that they were ever there; missing legs quickly grow back.

Hospitals are confusing. Take a stroll through one. Familiarize yourself. Go all the way to the rear of the building, where visitors don’t go and the scary stuff happens. But try to avoid having anything invasive done on a Sunday. Sunday is intern day in hospitals. I had a cannula fitted by a kid who tore open my vein and then ran off in a panic, to be smoothly replaced by a professional who pretended that nothing had happened as she swiftly bandaged my arm. I still have the scar. I hope he fails medical school. And veterinary college. I hope he ends up selling handmade puppets at craft fairs in order to buy food.

The government’s panicked start on PPE continued, with hundreds of thousands of faulty gowns sitting at a Turkish airport because they were ordered without anyone checking safety standards. Along with much of Europe the UK failed to foresee a care-homes crisis. The citizens of every European country accused their government of abject failures. And of course the French went on strike for a shorter working week.

I spent months trying to get a code by which I could have food delivered. The private delivery companies had closed their lists.

After a lengthy day of treatment I walked in the rich green woodlands next to the hospital and felt calm. It was too early to tell whether the NHS system was working for me.

I’d read that people afraid of having cancer were not coming forward for testing because they were now frightened of hospitals, despite doctors urging them to seek attention. I wanted to tell them to make the call so I went public on my website, then on other social platforms and finally in the press.

You don’t need advice from the Genius Bar to know that the best way to stop worrying about a nebulous ‘thing’ is to see a GP and get diagnosed as quickly as possible. I had been the biggest hypocrite of all about this, failing to do it in the past because I was scared of what I would discover. I started getting mail from readers who had overcome their fears and seen doctors. Often they were relieved to find that there was nothing wrong with them.

My mantra became: ‘If you’re not in the system you won’t be treated.’ If someone as flaky as me could manage it, admittedly with the indispensable aid of a partner and a great GP, anyone can. It’s important not to get all fretty about your prognosis.

‘Don’t be afraid’ was part of the mantra, but there was a downside. As soon as my health situation was in the public arena, creeps appeared. I learned to avoid certain acquaintances who took a sinister pleasure in explaining what could go wrong with my treatment. When I was younger and placed on a ventilator in an ICU, a complete stranger managed to get through on my phone and explain why I should ‘just let go and be accepted into God’s hands’. I am not a vindictive man, but I really, truly hope she’s dead.

The memory of this came back now. There are energy vampiresfn1 out there who live to talk about disease and vicariously share in the pain of others. Strangers began calling me out of the blue to discuss my health. Well-meaning friends pushed mad remedies at me. There was much enthusiastic chatter about bee pollen and sunflower oil. One acquaintance actually mentioned tannis root, which was invented by Ira Levin for his novel Rosemary’s Baby. I remember thinking that if one more person said ‘in these strange times’, I’d go mad.

I was also confronted by various members of the Maniac Community, including a well-meaning neighbour I have never properly met who informed me she had ordered me a book on Amazon that would completely cure my cancer.

A few days later she handed me the book. The cover looked as though it had been potato-printed. Dr Sebi was here to tell me cancer was completely curable with a raw vegetable diet and certain medicinal supplements purchased from his website.

I decided to do some checking on the author. It was written by a globally discredited Honduran ‘doctor’ (he had no medical qualifications) who had preached that HIV did not cause AIDS.

He told his acolytes that the acidity in our bodies needed to be counteracted with herbs and alkaline foods, which is gibberish because our blood has molecules of sodium bicarbonate and carbonic acid to keep its pH within a tight range. It can’t be altered.

He also claimed that African genes had a higher ‘electrical resonance’ than European genes (as doctors pointed out, genes are not tuning forks), working the old discredited ideas of racial genetics.

Dr Sebi was eventually arrested in an airport fleeing with suitcases of money made from his quack seaweed tea cures. His scams were a little more sophisticated than those employed by the witch doctors of Badalona, but only fractionally.

You’re giving me a funny look, I can feel it. OK, a quick sidebar here, slightly too long for a footnote.

Don’t you hate it when people thrust flyers at you outside the station? When I come out of the tube at King’s Cross I get energy-drink samples, magazines, mad stuff about Jesus and requests for cash. When I come out of the underground station at a small town further along the coast from Barcelona, I get witch doctors.

Badalona, it appears, is the centre for Northern Spain’s witch-doctor community, and there are lots of them. Even better, they offer rival services and fight for each other’s pitches. I enjoy collecting their flyers and talking to their exponents (file this under ‘hobbies’).

They’re mostly from Nigeria and Uganda and they can cure everything. They’ll help you with love and matrimonial problems, diseases of the eye, buying and selling, impotence, protection from enemies, ‘cleaning with maximum efficiency’, negotiations and deportations. All you have to do after consultation is buy ‘Stay Away’ powder and Attraction Candles. Best of all, the ointments and potions guarantee 100 per cent perfect results in just one week! Professor Madiba is a grand seer; Professor Kaousou is a high magician; Professor Setis is a medium. These dudes give Maggie Armitage a run for her money.

The witch doctors are dressed in smart suits, sometimes with the addition of a colourful cap. They don’t have a very salubrious track record, however. Drug traffickers are known to hire witch doctors, who are paid thousands of dollars to provide supernatural protection from law enforcement. I’m always amazed to see them working their patches alongside lottery-ticket sellers and restaurant greeters.

My neighbour asked me what I thought of Dr Sebi’s book. I told her it was – I think the words I used were – utter shit. I was angry that someone should feed upon the credulous and build a business on such lies, and angry with my neighbour for helping to propagate it. This was a bit awkward because her two Nigerian friends immediately started yelling at me in the street. They still believed that this lying, ointment-peddling con man, who died just before the commencement of his trial, was a saint. The tragic coda is that his books are still for sale on Amazon in shiny new editions, and his fans litter Facebook with their drivel. It’s not enough for the desperate to believe; they must also pay for the lies they are sold.

During the pandemic it became easy to spot others who were quick to monetize ill-health. A pharmacy in Hampstead started selling hand sanitizer for twelve pounds a bottle and masks for fifteen pounds each. For every useful remedy there were a dozen ludicrous quack products. Overnight we turned into a nation of Dr Sebis.

I still couldn’t be prescribed painkillers as they masked the virus. I was expecting morphine, hashish, Valium at the very least. I was going to mooch about in a quilted floral housecoat, whacked out of my head like some fifties American housewife.

During bad times you need structure. My days were planned, as much as my body would allow, around specific times and goals. These included several hours of work, lunch, a short nap, research, reading and a lot of tea. I laid the table out for each midday meal. If you haven’t learned to cook by the time you’re thirty, you are insensible to the grace of living.

At least now I sat in an armchair to read instead of walking along the street with a book in one hand. I had sustained many book-related injuries, mostly walking into/falling off things.

What I was reading ‘in these strange times’

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

In which the Viennese author recalled a golden, graceful age of intellectual free thinking, systematically destroyed by philistinism and Nazi thuggery.

Paradise Lost by Giles Milton

The account of the burning of Smyrna in 1922 in which Milton treads beyond official interpretations and theories to show how Islam’s ‘city of tolerance’ was destroyed by Turkish forces.

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

Explains Al-Qaeda’s path towards destroying the Twin Towers on 9/11, and how internecine squabbles between the CIA and the FBI undermined America’s ability to deal with their adversary.

The Road to En-Dor by E. H. Jones

One of those true First World War escape stories that you think cannot possibly be true, in which wily British officers hoodwinked their Turkish captors with phoney spiritualism, ghosts and tales of hidden treasure.

Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon

Features reviews of tenth-rate splatter movies like Frankenfish and is a perfect amuse bouche after reading so many apocalyptic books about the destruction of liberalism, intelligence and joined-up thought.

No fiction, you’ll notice. Too real. I should have reread Rosemary’s Baby. I was trying to remember who Ruth Gordon, in her Oscar-winning role as Minnie Castevet, reminded me of when my phone pinged.

I did the cancer job wearing a blue coat that made me look like a small blue florists box. Also took some black thigh boots which are defo time to give to charity. I have still not managed to lose ugly walking stick but at least theres life in the old woman yet. I do not like being old though. The lady I did the commercial with admitted that she does not read books. How can you live like that xxxm

22

Paradoxical

As there was no such thing as normal any more I decided I might as well enjoy rolling with the punches. Partial lockdowns came and went. The British government’s latest hilarious mail-out amounted to instructing the nation’s at-risk population to lock themselves in an oubliette and throw away the key, ignoring the fact that the conditions keeping them inside were also the ones that drove them out to seek help. It became an intriguing paradox worthy of W. S. Gilbert:

Three little maids who need to shield,

Wearing our masks we shall not yield.

We must say no to street and field,

Three little maids who shield.

Ev’ry trip is a source of pain,

For we must go out in the rain,

And for the law must show disdain,

While cancer and Covid reign!

(Etc.)fn1

Go to work in London, but don’t travel to your office. Wear a mask in a restaurant but not in a pub. Buy a sandwich in a takeaway but not in a coffee shop. Cover up in a corridor but not at a table. Everyone wanted clean air and wildlife back, but needed the commerce that sent it all away again.

My local shops had plastic shielding panels installed, most of which were just four feet high and appeared to have been made for Peter Dinklage. I am over six feet tall and would have been spitting on to the cashier, so I did what everyone else did and stepped to one side of it.

The paradoxes became more obvious when restrictions started to lift. You could take your mask off to eat in a restaurant but had to keep it on in the common areas. As many of my local restaurants were tiny this meant donning a mask to walk a distance of three feet.

The water in the canal outside our windows was finally clear all the way to the bottom. It was not a pretty sight, being full of bicycles, shopping trolleys, the occasional body part and, at one point beneath a bridge, two dozen grey rectangular hotel wall safes, which the police came and cleared out.

The canal was also full of large black carp, which I was told by a Polish friend you could eat after flushing with fresh water in your bath for twenty-four hours. Today there were half a dozen geese, moorhens, herons, ducks and something that looked like a shop-soiled cormorant, all yelling at each other, although perhaps the ducks were just laughing. More wildlife than people.

Of course we need paradoxes to survive. I think of this every time I see someone with a low-fat yoghurt and a cigarette. A human being is a collection of opposite energies bundled into a machine that just about runs. Perhaps we’ll learn that there are better ways to keep things turning over smoothly.

Pete slipped out to the terrace every few minutes for a smoke. He was the master of the long exhale and thousand-yard stare that only born smokers could really pull off. He was also the only smoker you could hear smoking from a distance. Inside the flat, all he heard was one side of the endless hospital phone calls. I could not imagine how he felt and he was not happy discussing his feelings, so we left a lot unsaid.

The lack of stimulus was a tricky problem to get around. I wasn’t good at passivity; watching TV was almost as much of a struggle as it had been for my father, who always stood beside our tiny set jingling the change in his pockets. He never once saw the beginning or end of any programme. It took me half an hour and four remotes to find the channel I wanted, whereas a book was technologically simpler and could be set to the right page via the use of a peripheral device (bookmark).

My head was still filled with new ideas but the market was now retrogressive and safe, and most embarrassing of all, I was in my sixties. New readers wanted to see themselves reflected in their reading matter. Sure, you wouldn’t get invited to bookshops with lots of stairs but if you were interesting enough wouldn’t someone want to continue hearing from you? How do you keep your prose full of vitality and immediacy? How do you continue to write like that for years? Not by writing with self-conscious youthfulness, which would be as cringeful as a middle-aged man in a backwards baseball cap, but by being yourself.

And before you can write you must read.

So you look for clues in books; clues to who you are, what you like and dislike, how to find your voice. Later, you look for ways that will help you go on. I was becoming stuck and starting to feel I had nothing to offer. All I could do was read those who wrote with more passion and eloquence than I could ever muster. Read and read and try to write again.

While I was having a blood test Maggie texted me:

Due to trying to change fuel suppliers I completely forgot to go see my Dr at the National [presumably hospital, not theatre] whom I have been waiting to see for months as if there is any part of my DNA which is not folding up its wings and keeling with exhaustion. I am disappointed in myself so I cleared out my unmentionables drawer and wondered if putting a suspender belt on my charity wall was too risqué for this street. I will have to find a woman who still tantalizes her partner wish I could find one to do it but have no stockings to put on said belt. Please call me love you xxx Maggie

23

Lost Language

What made me decide to set my first published short story in New York, when at that point I hadn’t been to America?

It felt right for the tale but I got the details wrong. The streets were misnumbered and there was something ‘off’ about the whole piece. Luckily a good editor bailed me out. I still believe that ‘Write what you know’ is terrible advice, since many penniless young writers don’t know a lot, so their stories are too often set in schools, at home with parents, on public transport or just walking around, and they become trapped by prosaic prose.

Of course, you can write a story about a housefly and make it exciting. Books are limited only by your imagination, which can be unfettered by research. An old friend began her novel with a man sitting on a brandy barrel on the prow of a ship, watching the coast recede. Then we discover that Dr Polidori is sitting on the body of his patient, Lord Byron, pickled in brandy.

My friend had invented a terrific image and a wonderful novel, but failed to find a publisher for the book, one of whom told her that the story was not ‘relatable’ to modern readers. I care little for relatable material and much prefer disruption, leaving the prosaic behind to explore the surreal.

It’s remarkable how many new novels are rooted down with appearances from real people. Did George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo need to be about Abraham Lincoln? As far as I could tell, not really, as the terrible grief of a lost child is universal. But it seems many readers don’t trust writers unless they add a strong real-life element. This is partly because it’s a lot easier to get festival space and press coverage for a non-fiction book, a story with a hook or a true-life character who can become a brand. Film companies are keen to explore new stories featuring peripheral characters in the old films they own, intellectual property with recognition value that can be exploited.

When H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds he had no experience of a Martian invasion, but he understood the fear of an unknown enemy. Mary Renault’s vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great somehow feel right, although of course they can’t be, any more than Robert Harris’s Cicero is right or Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian has total verisimilitude. Is Hilary Mantel doggedly following historical minutiae in her Wolf Hall books, or is she imagining Thomas Cromwell’s life and filling in the parts she doesn’t – and cannot – know? ‘Ulfela’, the original Domesday Book name for Wolf Hall, is irrelevant in the Cromwell story and was chosen to evoke the idea that man is a wolf to others. Alan Bennett added an entirely fictional scene to The Madness of King George III because it felt organically right. He once described the process of writing as crossing a patch of swampy ground, jumping from one tussock to another, trying not to get your feet wet, and suggested that fifty years on ‘the anguished leaps may seem like confident strides’.

I developed an early allergy to heart-warming tales of self-development because at school I was bombarded with perversely surreal words and images. We loved Monty Python because it not only horrified our parents but they couldn’t understand its odd, disruptive, callous attitude. Brigid Brophy, J. G. Ballard, Joe Orton and Mikhail Bulgakov were in our libraries, on stage and in cinemas. I remember seeing the post-apocalyptic The Bed Sitting Room, with its escalator leading through a field of smashed teacups to the submerged St Paul’s Cathedral, and knew that these were stories of dream-logic, ideas, proclamations and issues, not kitchen-sink tales of single mums and embittered husbands.

When the times are confident, fiction can afford to take risks. At sixteen we were less interested in analysing our own lives (which probably explains my hatred of the selfie) than seeing the world outside. In the greater world there were places and people we could not imagine. During the creation of my next few stories I discovered something else.

Writers are allowed to make shit up.

In the 1960s there was a huge reaction against the kitchen-sink dramatics of the previous decade. Out went hand-wringing naturalism, in came non-naturalistic dialogue and absurdist satire, pushed on by the success of the TV show That Was The Week That Was, a refreshingly sceptical and often political view of the week’s events.

A BBC boss recently claimed that modern audiences would be left baffled by the humour in Monty Python’s Life of Brian because they have such ‘poor religious literacy’. A few months back, a group of English teachers agreed that nearly all of the jokes in the TV series would go over the heads of today’s kids.

To see if they really were that hard to understand, I went through a couple of the programmes. In the first two episodes I picked at random (20 and 21) there are jokes about: Attila the Hun and the Visigoths, the Commonwealth of Nations, the Black Rod (ceremonial position at the Houses of Parliament), West Indian test cricket, the Pennine mountain range, Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin, Parliamentary back-benchers, ICI dividends, Eton and Sandhurst, the Epsom Derby, Lord’s Cricket Ground, reactionary politicians, archaeology, insanity, the Tories, Queen’s Counsel, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Goethe, Wagner, Scottish assizes, Mozart and underwater goats.

Python was initially a minority taste aimed at cynical undergraduates, but it didn’t seem to any of us that it was hard to understand. Python was a comedy programme without jokes, and helped to create a true generation divide. Waiting for stereotypes and punchlines that never arrived, many viewers found themselves adrift.

This grounding in surrealism prepared the way for alternative comics, unpredictable storylines, damaged characters and dark endings. In short, much of what any adolescent needs to make sense of the world. But it also put the exploration of ideas ahead of character development.

There was a further element to be added to the mix: an appreciation of the musicality of language.

The founder of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev, once dragged Igor Stravinsky to the Savoy Theatre to see Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. Stravinsky had this to say about the composer Sullivan’s gift for matching music to Gilbert’s words:

The composition of the music to the rhyme is a demonstration of the sympathy that requires a special, rare skill at its best. The values of the words as words – their sounds, their rhythmic qualities – are always apparent. I heard Rosenkavalier for the first time after the war and confess I prefer Gilbert and Sullivan. The poetry is understandable and the music is unpretentious. They will probably last beyond any sunset on the British Empire.

‘Commissariat’.

‘Emeutes’.

‘Caravanserai’.

What did these words mean? Gilbert knew, and took pleasure in confounding his audiences. How on earth could the Major General in The Pirates of Penzance ever find a rhyme for ‘strategy’? (He came up with ‘sat a gee’, as in ‘ride a horse’.) Stephen Sondheim, Gilbert’s twentieth-century equivalent, affectionately parodied him in his political play Pacific Overtures.

This was W. S. Gilbert’s forte and Arthur Sullivan’s glory, to match such abstract language with harmonious music. At school we had been taught to avoid them as outdated and impure. It was ‘operetta’, which did not contain recitative, and therefore was not divided into arias but songs.

What we were not told was that when Gilbert wrote ‘Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes’ for the peers to sing in Iolanthe he was waging a class war of his own that delayed his knighthood until twenty-five years later, after Queen Victoria’s death.

He repeated his satirical attacks on the state and the law throughout his lifetime. During the 1980s, The Ratepayers’ Iolanthe retooled Gilbert and Sullivan for a new generation, with lyrics aimed at the government.

Their language missed my generation because the only licensed performers, the D’Oyly Carte company, had become a cobwebbed, clapped-out troupe plodding through crepuscular productions, their every movement preserved in aspic. Even more appalling were the amateur reinventions that added no lustre to the works as they emerged from copyright in the 1960s. I speak as someone who sat through part of Starship Pinafore.

Formality and sexlessness. Instead of the lusts of the Gods we had pirates arguing about mathematical anomalies. Could anything be more English?

There was nothing more unfashionable than admitting to liking them. Who would still listen to the work of two ‘pale, male and stale’ gentlemen routinely dismissed by classical-music lovers? Where Argentina had the tango and Spain the flamenco, smouldering, passionate and erotic, we had G&S.

To be fair, we also had Elgar, Handel, Holst and Delius, but I’m not sure that any of them could have told a joke in a pub. As for opera, we were stuck with Benjamin Britten, and he wasn’t exactly a night at a funfair.

The prolific, absurdly melodic Jacques Offenbach had become a superstar in France, so Gilbert created English equivalents that avoided censorable sexiness and relied instead on wordplay and satire. Their first attempt, Thespis, was a lame burlesque, and their last, The Grand Duke, was a flop despite featuring an aria about sausage rolls, but in between was a run of a dozen barbed, topical hits.

Gilbert was confrontational and thin-skinned, though prone to acts of extraordinary kindness. The louche, affable Sullivan avoided conflict. Gilbert loved topsy-turvy situations in which the social order was inverted. This was at odds with Sullivan’s desire for realism and emotional content. Sullivan felt his work with Gilbert was beneath him, but it’s what the world remembers. His one grand opera, Ivanhoe, was boring and bombed. His sacred music, hugely celebrated at the time, is now mostly forgotten.

But The Mikado, Iolanthe and the rest worked. Sullivan offered sublime music to fit around Gilbert’s tongue-twisters; especially the parody-madrigals and quartets. When they’re well performed they’re not only funny but have a surprising sharpness to them. Best of all, they’re filled with paradoxes, from the curse of being born on 29 February to the problem of having to execute yourself.

The Mikado was zeitgeisty – the first imports from Japan arrived via Liberty’s department store and caused a stir in London, inspiring japonais housewares in every smart home. One production set the play in a Victorian sitting room, with the characters stepping out of willow-pattern plates on a mantelpiece. Recently, a lavish new version of The Gondoliers toured British theatres with surtitling that finally allowed audiences to appreciate the tangled prose. What history discards becomes arcana, and that’s where this strange body of work now resides, sandwiched between satire, low humour and high art, to await rediscovery by those who have a mind for such esoterica.

By now, between crime novels and comic operas, you can see how I’ve set out my stall. When you remove the snobbery from the arts and level the playing field, the lyrics of the Smiths balance the poetry of Stevie Smith. Heresy, cry the Sylvia Plath-clutching opera lovers of Middle England.

Your loss, say I. One may be heeded without damaging the other, so enjoy all.

24

Lying for a Living

My phone pinged.

Loving you as I do I have just eaten coconut yogurt. I am a computer leper so I’m appealing to my doctor in actual writing saying that Margaret wants to be made well again for the remains of her no doubt illuminating and very necessary life. I am not cut out to be an invalid. In Valid what a nasty cruel word. I had a blood transfusion today. Humans all hooked up to red bags like a surrealist play. Tomorrow I will be Superwoman yes its all liver steaks and muscular thighs from now on. Fountains of love xxxM

I knew Maggie had been sick again, but I had not been able to visit her. One thing about my treatment: I’d got to know my bathroom in a way that I had never imagined. Every crack and blemish on the opposite wall, any tiny dead insect that had missed the mop. I was in there a lot, sometimes twenty times a night. I took a book with me to try to keep my mind off the pain.

And sometimes you’d suddenly be in your toilet when you were out and about. At the opera, say. It wasn’t shameful or embarrassing, Pete told me, it was just life. Remember how you had to deal with your mother, he said with a shrug.

If you’ve had to change an elderly parent’s full knickers in Starbucks then you’ll know that you can cope with anything, and it gets less awkward as you go along. You start by being terribly English and mumbling apologies, and in under two weeks you’re shouting, ‘Hey, the fuck you looking at?’

By this time I wasn’t so much having gastric problems as redecorating the bathroom every fifteen minutes. Pete kept a watchful eye on me and helped out whenever there was a problem. Nothing fazed him. I could imagine him in a war, the bombs raining down, standing out of cover and staring into the shell-lit sky with nothing more than frank interest and a lit fag. He offered strength and shelter, like an oak tree.

I would lie in bed, notice a nick in the window-frame paintwork and make a mental note to repair it when it’s all over, but the date of this magical event never got any nearer. ‘When it’s all over’ had begun as a destination, something to aim for, like waiting to glimpse the sea from the back of my parents’ car on a day trip out.

My consultant nurse was young, smart and nicely roughened around the edges. She looked at my health charge sheet and my postcode and sighed. ‘North Londoners. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a white sliced loaf in your life. You need to switch to bland food right now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Let me put it this way. It’s time for you to start going down the supermarket aisles you’ve never been in before.’

‘So no more Five-Spice Tofu with Cardamom Passata for me?’

‘I’m thinking custard. Mash. Peas. Baked beans. Sausage rolls. Cottage pie. Gravy. Have you ever gone to a Greggs?’

‘No, but I’ve heard of it. Don’t they make food for Cornish tin miners or something?’

‘Spaghetti hoops. Trifles. Doughnuts.’

‘Empty calories? Are you insane? You mean I have to switch to the kind of foodstuffs I have only ever glimpsed on Coronation Street?’ I cried. ‘Very well, but I draw the line at putting a ketchup bottle on the table.’

I sent Pete to buy a loaf of white sliced bread and got a Gail’s sourdough walnut and rosemary loaf back.

‘Well, obviously I’m not going to buy processed bread,’ he explained, looking mortified. This from someone whose idea of a plain midweek supper was knocking up tempura courgette flowers with fennel. That’s pushing it, even for North London.

He promised to give me appropriate food, but it still made me sick. I sipped a spoonful of his chicken vegetable soup and found a whole chilli in my mouth. ‘Naturally there are some spices still in it, otherwise there would be no umami,’ he explained.

‘No chillis, ever,’ I warned.

‘None at all?’

‘Not a single one, OK?’

‘Fine, it’s up to you. But it’ll be inedible.’

As a result of my new prison-food diet I ballooned overnight. This was apparently a Good Thing as I would soon be unable or unwilling to eat. It did not help that I was also on a medication known for causing pot bellies.

‘What would you rather do,’ asked Pete sagely, ‘be fat or be dead?’

Late that night I scrabbled around and found a tin of baked beans (not Heinz, obviously, Duchy Organic) and greedily emptied them over some almost non-white bread that I pretended was Sunblest. I ate it like a whipped dog in a corner, guiltily glancing around in case anyone came in.

After thirty years of existing on regular exercise and a high-fibre Mediterranean diet with daily fresh fish I became as listless as a spayed cat. For the first time in my life I produced sweat. The palms of my hands became so sticky that I thought I was turning into Spider-Man. It was as if parts of my genetic code were being daily erased and written in afresh.

Soon I was drooling at the thought of ready meals. You just needed a microwave and a spork. You didn’t even need a plate. Or teeth. I was afraid I’d start calling lunch dinner and dinner tea, and forget whether supper even had status any more. Coming next, drawstring day pants and watching reruns of The Repair Shopfn1 over breakfast.

A few days later text messages started to pour in from privately partnered medical companies who were ambulance-chasing me to offer all kinds of unnecessary services. I started to get an inkling of just how far the government was selling the NHS down the river before the virus kicked in.

The texts were followed by a sudden flurry of government letters warning me about things that happened months ago, as if someone had poked a snoozing civil servant with a stick. They were the equivalent of getting something like this:

MEMO from the WHITE STAR LINE

Last month the RMS Titanic sank after encountering an entirely unexpected health issue in the Atlantic Ocean. If you are one of the passengers affected please self-isolate until you are fully recovered from drowning.

We’re sorry if you feel you have been inconvenienced by your demise.fn2

Yesterday’s government post read:

It has been determined that you are EXTREME HIGH RISK – do not leave your home or stand near others and remain absolutely motionless until the end of the month. Have your groceries delivered. Do not speak to anyone, especially Northerners. Do not go anywhere ever again, and certainly not to hospitals, which our records show you must attend every day. Failure to do as we say, not as we do, will be punishable by death. Rest assured that you will be safe because safety is much more important than common sense or logical thought. Better yet, why not just die so that the Home Secretary can cross you off her nuisance list?

PS House party Saturday, bring a bottle.

I reached the worst part of the treatment, in which the errant corpus defied all control.

I’d never had much of an appetite, but suddenly couldn’t stop eating. Despite having had no alcohol for three months I went from rangy to stocky. You cannot be over six feet tall and ‘stocky’ without seeking a job in a sideshow. Because of the need to be awake all through the night I would find myself sitting on the terrace at 3.30 a.m. eating a family-sized Waitrose cherry chocolate trifle, and follow this with a bowl of cereal topped with demerara sugar. I hated sweet desserts – what the hell?

Some days symptoms seemed to change every three to four hours. Despite chemo my hair showed no desire to drop out. I remember thinking that my last extended bout of radiotherapy nearly thirty years earlier involved something like a primitive alien death ray that scorched its way through the body like a high-tech blowlamp. At first chemo seemed less overtly destructive but turned out to be far more insidious. I noticed my skin was becoming more ashen when I couldn’t tell where my grey roll-neck jumper ended.

On the day of my penultimate treatment I got ready to leave the rock and enter the hard place I’d been warned so much about. Pain was not the enemy now. Pain I could deal with. The real enemy was overthinking, which is unfortunately a key component of the writer’s arsenal.

Being sick was a passive and dull secondary activity, as boring as watching a new dog owner fussing over a puppy or waiting for someone to google something on their phone. It showed me what a life without energy must be like. As my ancient Auntie Nelliefn3 used to say to the nine-year-old me, ‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers, dearie.’

I’d broken the law every day since the lockdowns began because you couldn’t simultaneously shield and reach hospitals. Now came more rules for high-risk patients, but I couldn’t tell if they allowed for trips to castles with the purpose of checking one’s eyesight.fn4 Cummings’s excuses for breaking the lockdown rules remained as ludicrous as the perjury committed in court by the former politician Jonathan Aitken, which led him from Eton to Belmarsh Prison and eventually to the priesthood, religion being the natural extension of a rich fantasy life.

The best writers are liars who understand a basic rule: never over-explain. This is where the American author Dan Mallory (A. J. Finn) went wrong, by telling gullible publishers he had punishing bouts of cancer that still allowed him to socialize in the evenings. When you’re having chemo treatment you do not socialize much in the evenings. Mallory embellished his stories with increasingly strange details that gave him away, like a serial killer wanting to be caught. Cummings did the same thing. The more he spoke out, the sillier his story sounded. But maybe – just maybe – he was telling the truth, because the truest facts of life are inherently unbelievable.

I love early mornings because they offer the possibility of fresh adventure. The day after my treatment I rose early and walked through Abney Park Cemetery, the maze-like burial ground that sat right in the middle of Stoke Newington Church Street, the main road of a busy North London neighbourhood.

Atmospheric rather than picturesque, the cemetery had always been muddied, battered and tumbledown, with many of the tombs lying cracked and exposed. It felt appropriate that Stoke Newington’s most famous pupil should have been Edgar Allan Poe. If he hadn’t moved before it opened, he would have loved walking through the labyrinthine confusion of ivy-edged paths between desecrated angels.

Studying the few still legible epitaphs, I could see that the average Victorian lifespan rarely passed beyond seventy, and many ended in their forties when they ‘fell asleep in the arms of the Lord’. To be here you were presumably fairly well off, so one can only imagine how the mortality rate climbed among my Auntie Nell’s social class.

When I heard millennials comparing the lockdown with the Second World War I felt dejected. For many in the metropolis the biggest hardship had been taking Zoom meetings and watching Netflix.

Authors faced tremendous mental health problems after the Second World War, but not too many tackled the subject of physical illness in their writings; perhaps Virginia Woolf and Albert Camus come first to mind. The neurasthenic novelist is keen to explore mental states, but who wants to be reminded of the reductive grind that gradually removes our energies?

Milton put cat ointment in his eyes to cure blindness, most likely a detached retina.fn5 Joyce went blind after a dose of clap. Any list of consumptive, sickly writers would have to include John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Walser, Thomas De Quincey (his own fault, frankly), Katherine Mansfield and poor coughing George Orwell.

Or there was another course: to swing back into humour, which critics are never happy about because such material is written off as inconsequential fluff. Yet for many humour is a natural response to fear. Nervous laughter covers our discomfort. Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar is still a touchstone novel for me because it’s a humorous story about a catastrophic failure of nerve. Later, Waterhouse wrote Maggie Muggins, a darker take on Mrs Dalloway in which the titular character realizes she is ‘solely built to survive’.

We were both seated in armchairs reading one evening when Pete looked up at me with a question in his eyes. He said very little, so when he suddenly spoke I tended to pay attention. As his eyes are as blue and wide as desert skies and appear to be focusing into deep space, the effect of their sudden attention can make you jump.

‘You’ve been talking about your chemo treatment online.’ It sounded like an accusation. Pete is extremely private, so being married to me had to be a nightmare.

‘I thought it would help others.’

‘I understand that. My mother shouldn’t have had to read about it online first.’

I was horrified. She was almost as serious-minded as her son, and I had not thought through the consequences of my actions. Who else had I involved in the collateral damage?

I had been open about my condition but needed to respect others and tone down my open-mic penitence. ‘I’ll be more careful about what I post. I could take down the last article—’

‘You don’t have to change anything, just think first about what you’re doing to all of us.’

It was all that needed to be said. Pete would have been very good at composing telegrams.

‘I’ll be more circumspect in future,’ I promised. ‘But I should not stop writing about it.’

The age of blogging had turned the laptop into a confessional. Sometimes it’s easier to study a social milieu from the outside. The twenty-four-year-old Colin Wilson told everyone he was living on Hampstead Heath when he wrote The Outsider in 1956. Around this time Colin MacInnes was writing Absolute Beginners, taking as his subjects urban squalor, racial tension, drugs, sexuality and the new decadence. Noël Coward was twenty-four when he wrote The Vortex, about sex, drug addiction and coded homosexuality. He became London’s bad boy, upsetting the old order by being interviewed in his dressing gown and smoking what people assumed to be opium (it wasn’t). All were prepared to look underneath rocks but none of them was exactly born on the streets.

I had always felt there was a line one instinctively knew not to cross, so that when an author unveiled an apparently honest portrait it was only what they were prepared to let you see.

I underwent my final chemo session. There were no balloons or cakes to be cut. The nurses didn’t even stand in a neat row and wave goodbye like the porters on the Orient Express. Why not? It wasn’t as if they were ever going to see me again, was it?

I went home and told Pete what had happened. ‘There’s nothing you can do right now,’ he said, ‘so rest up and save your energy.’

‘But what do I do about … about …’ I tried to articulate my scrambling thoughts but failed. ‘What about – dinner?’

‘Poached chicken in ginger with sweet potatoes and leeks,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you when it’s ready.’

25

Nothing

It’s traditional to mark the birth of an author’s book with some small gesture that says, ‘Well, you won’t be saving our collective bacon with this one but maybe one day you will help protect our pensions. Please accept this token of our esteem.’

But lately I’ve noticed that even these acts of old-fashioned grace have diminished.

The decline in author status according to publishers’ gifts sent on publication day

A yacht (NB only applies to J. K. Rowling and Richard Osman).

Launch party at glamorous venue attended by obsequious media-twerps.

Champagne dinner in fancy restaurant.

Launch party in pub.

Lunch in café next door to publisher’s office.

Buffet hosted by PR girl who gets name of book wrong.

Bottle of carefully chosen champagne delivered to your door.

Bottle of prosecco delivered by Royal Mail (i.e. lost).

Bottle of wine from vintner who supplies all publisher’s parties on the cheap.

Box of wine.

Box of quality chocolates.

Box of Quality Street chocolates.

Box of macaroons originally ordered for teen social influencer who wrote a book and killed herself.

Congratulatory card.

Congratulatory text.

Generated SMS text with your name misspelled.

NOTHING.

Whenever one of the Carry On films wrapped, the studio used to hold a party. A traditional sight at the end of these was of eccentric actor Charles Hawtrey collecting the leftovers in a plastic shopping bag to take home.

Given the newly straitened circumstances in which writers operate today, I wouldn’t be surprised if the tradition isn’t taken up in the literary world.

The endless texts, emails and letters that kept popping in from the HM Government advice centre on Covid were now beyond anyone’s interest or comprehension. The latest included outdated advice, contradictory suggestions and irrelevant notes dashed out by junior civil servants trained at Switzerland’s famous School of the Bleeding Obvious.

Occasionally they were unwittingly elitist. Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, granted the people of Great Britain one hour of exercise a day, which was ‘ample time for a game of tennis’. Instead we squandered our hour with games of French croquet, foie-gras-goose strangling and slapping the servants.

I am always amazed at how the classes remain so unaware of each other.

Lyndsey, my favourite press officer, once conducted some research on how readers felt about bookshops. She said, ‘If WHSmith and Waterstones were personalities, who would they be?’ The response was: WHSmith would be Jeremy Clarksonfn1 and Waterstones would be Sir David Attenborough.fn2 Waterstones was perceived as the serious readers’ bookstore because it had armchairs, and WHSmith was for casual browsers because it was a newsagent’s. People who bought paperbacks in WHSmith did not see themselves as ‘proper readers’ even though they often bought a far greater number of novels than Waterstones’ customers. Once again, class had left its mark on the simplest of all pleasures.

Meanwhile, the problem of virus containment was exercising the minds of inventors all around the world. The Italians came up with elegant clear plastic boxes to put around sunbathers on its beaches. I don’t think they ever actually made it as far as the sand. After twenty-four hours they would have been smashed, defaced, stolen or rented out by one of the many colourful branches of the Mafia that infest the country, news having already come in that week concerning the Mafia working with corrupt city officials to take over supplies of PPE.

In London our exaggerated politeness in everyday life reached late-Victorian levels, suggesting what we had suspected all along – that people were more timid than the government and were continuing to live sensibly if unquestioningly. While our Prime Minister was banging down the Chateau Gumshrinker and playing Twister with cabinet members much of the nation was masked and socially distanced, doing the right thing. You didn’t have to be a royalist to feel sorry for the Queen, seated alone and masked as she mourned her departed husband.

I was due for another scan but it was delayed. Finally I was called in for another meeting with an oncologist. I thought that perhaps they wanted me to be the poster boy for future cancer lectures. As usual, Pete was not allowed to come with me because of health restrictions.

This time I was greeted by the doctor walking hurriedly down the corridor to greet me, which is never a good sign. Dr Ramalan hastily ushered me into an office like someone not wanting to be seen paying off a blackmailer. As usual he was dressed somewhere between a beekeeper and a Chernobyl technician.

‘I’m afraid it’s not good news,’ he said, probably for the fifteenth time that morning. ‘The chemo, it didn’t work.’

‘What part of it didn’t work?’

‘Any of it.’ He waved his hands impatiently, his mask sliding about his wet face. ‘This is your body, yes, here is the chemo, yes, it didn’t work.’

‘What happened?’

‘When?’ He looked around. ‘Just now?’

‘No, with my treatment. What went wrong?’

‘Nothing. Nothing went wrong. It just didn’t work.’ He gave a shrug. Who knows?

‘So what do we do?’ I asked.

‘You start again.’

‘Hang on, what happened to “we”?’

When your family’s mantra is ‘Keep your voice down and don’t embarrass us’, you’re bound to grow up scared of everything. Curiously I felt no fear, just a nagging irritation at the sheer unknowability of it all. How did other people cope? On television soap operas people with serious illnesses were rarely shown juggling their careers.fn3 The only example I could think of on film was Bernard Rose’s ivansxtc, in which agent Danny Huston manages the career of a deeply unpleasant actor while coping with his own prognosis, and comes to see that both situations are important to him.

When I think about how the apocalypse is portrayed in books and films, I get Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (unnamed event, societal breakdown), Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (plague, vampirism), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (nuclear destruction), Train to Busan (plague, zombiedom) and a rather nifty little British film called Silent Night (government balls-up), but nobody had expected a pandemic to simply derail normal service. Even the most outlandish scenario, A Quiet Place (aliens), had got one thing right. The end of the world isn’t the most important thing happening to the heroine; she’s about to give birth. Even when it’s ending, life goes on.

I went home again with bad news. Pete was working at his desk and took it in his usual practical, unhysterical fashion.

‘Start the treatment as soon as possible,’ he said.

I sat before my laptop screen and tried to concentrate, but the block was appreciably worse now and nothing came. I don’t believe in writers’ aids like Scrivener and Final Draft and all of the other nonsenses that merely add an extra layer between you and the words, but I appreciated that some people enjoyed them because they could feel more like productive writers that way. I had half a dozen projects on back burners, all of which had something wrong with them and needed to be fixed. I kept doggedly telling myself that writing could keep me focused. Books had kept me sane so far.

As my new course of chemotherapy began I developed my own approach to recovery. I would conduct my own therapy, not that I had much choice; the hospital’s only therapist was fully booked for the rest of the year. In order to work I needed a clear mind, and to clear my mind I needed to be calm, and to be calm I just had to read a book. At three thirty each morning I sat on the terrace sofa with some early breakfast and my Kindle, recalibrating its light as the sky passed from indigo to hesperidean, glowing pink then orange on the glass vertices of the Square Mile.

Nouns and verbs stubbornly refused to connect themselves in my head. A return to longform writing suddenly seemed impossible. Unconnected paragraphs read inelegantly and didn’t quite make sense, as if they had been translated from an out-of-print phrase book. I needed some form of brain training.

Shakespeare.

At school we had never been taken to Shakespeare plays. Instead we’d had to listen to our classmates reading play scripts out loud. It goes without saying that this did not really work very well. It reminded me of Nigel Molesworth reciting from ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna’ by Charles Wolfe.

‘Notadrumwasheardnotafuneralnote

shut up peason larffing

As his corse

As his corse

what is a corse sir? gosh is it

to the rampart we carried …’

For me the revelation came when the Olivier Hamlet was screened free at our local library. My obsession began then and never went away. How did he tell such stories, and why? By what osmotic process had he gathered together so many myths and folk tales?

There are only pointers, no clear-cut answers. All those odd digressions and inappropriate comic diversions, the dead-ends, the sidebars, as if the central tale was not enough for him, he had to throw in a hundred other bits of business. How he would have laughed if he’d known that centuries later scholars would be analysing every facet of a single word and reinterpreting it as if he had done exactly the same. There’s much that a good writer instinctively sets down because their brain is hard-wired to think in certain patterns.

At some point I asked myself: ‘Why is all the attention only on Shakespeare?’ The canonical Shakespeare tragedies and comedies are endlessly revived ahead of his contemporaries. The Bard’s pre-eminent glory tends to eclipse the admittedly lesser splendour of his fellow dramatists, who don’t get much of a look-in. When you’ve a mountain in view you don’t see the foothills.

Prior to the year 1915 Shakespeare’s rivals were less visible, but then a single volume published in the World’s Classics series revived interest in the key playwrights. London’s addictive theatre habit allowed room for a great many plays and writers. In the nine years that Samuel Pepys was filling his diaries he saw 350 performances of Shakespeare’s plays. He didn’t think much of Twelfth Night because it wasn’t about the Twelfth Night. He had a rubbish seat for Henry V and couldn’t hear it, and thought A Midsummer Night’s Dream ‘insipid, ridiculous’. He loved Macbeth though. But there was much else for him to choose from.

Your main man here is Kit Marlowe, of course – born in the same year as WS, an eminent playwright of the Elizabethan era and a major influence on Will’s writing. The two would have had (we assume) a tricky but close relationship, although we know little about that because Elizabethans weren’t generally into sharing their feelings. The key texts are Doctor Faustus and the nigh-endless two-part Tamburlaine. Marlowe’s blank verse has grace but is easier to discern than Shakespeare’s, which paradoxically makes it less interesting. He only wrote for six years before being famously killed in a Deptford pub, his full potential unrealized.

Running closely behind him is John Webster, especially admired for The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil (which we studied at school but weren’t allowed to see on stage because it was too violent). Although Webster also wrote comedies he’s more remembered for the tragedies. The White Devil is a highly intellectual and complex satirical revenge drama that proved unpopular with its audience, who were expecting knockabout fun.

The Duchess of Malfi is even gorier and has a werewolf in it – Ferdinand, the Duke of Calabria, comes to believe he’s a lycanthrope and starts digging up graves. The play was performed with special lighting and musical interludes, which probably helped audiences accept the Duchess’s curious ability to have babies at high speed. There’s a theory suggesting that the British have taken to loving Webster’s plays because the horrors of world war experienced in the twentieth century added a deeper level of understanding.

Interestingly, P. D. James and Agatha Christie both used The Duchess of Malfi in their books.

Webster collaborated with Thomas Dekker, who wrote The Shoemaker’s Holiday, whose lead, the inexhaustible Simon Eyre the shoemaker, is one of the liveliest characters ever written, out-Falstaffing Falstaff himself. ‘Let’s be merry whiles we are young,’ he cries, ‘old age, sack and sugar, will steal upon us, ere we be aware.’ He doesn’t have the lyricism but it’s a hoot of a play, not often performed but endlessly quotable.

I’d suggest as a final rival Philip Massinger, for his A New Way to Pay Old Debts, which for a very old play feels oddly modern. Its theme concerns living beyond your means – the idea that one can be thought well of yet survive entirely on physical and emotional credit. The extortionist Sir Giles Overreach says:

We worldly men, when we see friends and kinsmen

Past hope sunk in their fortunes, lend no hand

To lift them up, but rather set our feet

Upon their heads to press them to the bottom.

No change there, then.

Shakespeare is really something but he isn’t quite everything, and clearly not everyone responds to him. I made the tactical mistake of taking a group of Californians to King Lear. After fifteen minutes they got up and went to a pizza parlour, where their discussion of thin crust versus stuffed crust far eclipsed any interest in one old man’s attempt to reorder his kingdom.

26

Received Pronunciation

I’m bored of writing about illness so let’s discuss more interesting subjects.

Did the above sentence bother you? The ‘of’ instead of ‘with’? I notice the Youngs are using it. Does it matter? The flickering intricacies of the English language would test the patience of a poet. We learn to write in one style and are shocked when we discover there are others.

One day I realized that my Turkish friend Evrim was writing me emails in Edwardian English. His touch was so light that at first I didn’t notice. He wrote, entirely unconsciously, ‘Tell me of Barcelona. I am afraid to visit lest the changes prove too heartbreaking.’fn1

I think we should all speak like this; the Edwardians were succinct and stylish and to the point.

‘I shall draw myself a bath, the better to exude last night’s intake of champagne.’ ‘Today I shall be keeping an open bed.’

‘They were the most disgraceful pickles I ever tasted in a respectable boat.’fn2

It would make the world a gentler, more thoughtful place.

Of course, British coarseness can also be a delight. Some of my readers feel compelled to email me in a sort of patois, especially certain kindly Canadians, who sometimes seem to imagine I am seated at my desk dressed as a Regency fop. While respectful fans posted remarks about my author photograph – one suggested I looked ‘ready to press the nib to fresh vellum’ – a British chap wrote, ‘Blimey, you look good for sixty-eight. I’m fifty-three and look like a fucking potato.’

More to the point, one feels.

People of my age were born between two linguistic worlds: the distinct, rounded English of the post-war years and the softened, casual drawl of newly Americanized speech. Watch David Lean’s This Happy Breed and you’ll hear lower-middle-class and working-class language used in a way that has been totally forgotten, not just in the ‘ow’ sounds but in the looping conversational structure: ‘You make me ill, Vi, really you do.’ Three generations of the Gibbons family are represented, but it’s the film’s children, who will leave home to become part of Britain’s new professional workforce, who are already losing their old speech patterns and moving toward today’s broadly middle-class enunciation.

I feel a family connection to Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) even though there is none. His tirades against bad habits in English stay with me now. One of them is swearing.

The English are superb swearers because they really put their backs into it. The word ‘bloody’, technically a swear word because it distantly references the blood of Christ, is one of the most heavily used intensifiers in English, but its power was eroded in the Second World War. It was reduced to a mild expression of frustration: ‘Bloody hell!’ There’s a theory that it’s a contraction of ‘By Our Lady’, a phrase which was popular with Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift, but one which would have gradually died out after the Reformation.

Why did it have the power to shock, right up until the 1960s? A ‘blood’ was a young rake, out to raise hell. There was certainly a link to religion. It may also have become associated with the idea of menstruation, but most likely the population simply needed to create its own vulgarisms. ‘Crikey’ and ‘Blimey’ (both blasphemous contractions) have vanished in my lifetime as Britain has become a secular nation. The once familiar cry of ‘Oh Gawd blimey’ (‘Oh God blind me’) is rarely heard any more.fn3

Now ‘bloody’ is dying out. In 1994 it was the most commonly spoken swear word, accounting for around 650 of every million words spoken in the UK – 0.065 per cent. In second place was ‘fuck’, at more than 550 per million, with ‘shit’ the third most rife, at around 150 per million.fn4

‘Fuck’, formerly confined for use as a verb or noun, became universal in the late twentieth century, I assume because it had been popularized in music and films, where imaginative new usage develops.

Will ‘bloody’ go the way of ‘bugger’? Most likely, as the rollout of a universal language culled from television, social media and music continues its inexorable sweep. It’s a pity; such words feel positively quaint and enjoy great usage in the Fowler household. Mine, not his.

Nobody remembers the Swiss beekeeping pastor Johann David Wyss.

In the early nineteenth century he was so impressed by Daniel Defoe that he wrote The Swiss Family Robinson. As a child it never occurred to me that I was reading a translated Swiss novel, even though the clue was in the title.

It’s about a suburban family shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. They swiftly christen it ‘New Switzerland’ and fight pirates, wild animals and the elements, not that the Swiss ever fought anything in their lives, and the book went on to become a beloved classic.fn5 Jules Verne wrote a direct sequel, The Castaways of the Flag, which nobody I know has ever read. Anyway, it enthralled me. I have a resurgent desire to reread everything I enjoyed when I was young, so during my treatment I made the huge mistake of trying to read it again.

But the experience of rereading can often be revelatory. After dealing with the complexities of sentence structure in older books, you find themes and ideas present within the prose that you never noticed before. Some books become completely different the second time around. In my library there are old volumes waiting to be reread that suit every mood. If you read several at once you can programme your reading to quell or enhance your emotional state. I can be pulled back from somewhere dark and feel my heart lightened for days.

Walking back from the hospital one morning I chatted to my long-suffering agent (clear rounded ‘ow’ sounds, very middle class). I’d been receiving review copies of crime novels and found many of them unreal, as if they had been copied from television dramas.

‘It’s surprising how often authors misuse language,’ he complained. ‘Many of them have stopped following the guidelines.’

The guidelines have been around a long time.

A device like parataxis, the docking of conjunctions, was there in Shakespeare’s plays and reflected a more realistic form of spoken English. Victorian language became too ornate and verbose to use, but Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Forster and Conrad also helped to push the written word towards a new modernism. Christie was fond of parataxis; her characters speak, call, decide. Many authors use it emotionally: she was miserable, he was furious.

Much of our language is instinctual, and while it seems that our placement of words is a settled, natural process, adjectives have a strict running order. It’s so strict, in fact, that you can’t mess with them, thanks to the Royal Order of adjectives. The Royal Order requires words to fit into the following eight categories: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose.

So a sentence must be: The nasty big old shapeless yellow Egyptian cloth bag. You wouldn’t use them all at once, but you’d say, ‘The nasty Egyptian bag’ and not ‘The Egyptian nasty bag’. In fact it’s virtually impossible to swap the order of words. I’ve yet to read a satisfactory explanation of why this is beyond ‘it doesn’t sound right’. And if you use ablaut reduplication, you’ll say ‘bish bash bosh’ – but not ‘bosh bash bish’ because the running order of the vowels always has to be I, A, O. When you switch words you get Yoda talking, but that can sometimes work; it’s called anastrophe.

Adjectives should be used sparingly, like salt. They’re not meant to raise questions but answer them. ‘Blonde-haired’ tells us a person is a female with blonde hair, the adjective having one of the few gender-specific spellings. ‘Vivacious’ tells us that someone has written the word ‘vivacious’. Into this group of non-words I would place ‘stylish’, ‘legendary’, ‘lifestyle’ and ‘vibrant’.

While we’re on the subject, Keith Waterhouse was alive to the eroding nuances of language and wrote Waterhouse on Newspaper Style in 1989 as an in-house guide for the Daily Mirror’s journalists. In it he laid out every bad use or ‘utilization’ of grammar. He was the enemy of the polysyllable: ‘There is no such word as miniscule … Utilise does not mean use, as some style books advise. It means make use of.’ About the humble comma he said: ‘It is not the function of the comma to help a wheezing sentence get its breath back … Commas are inserted when sentences lose confidence in themselves … A healthy sentence can get by without [such] aids, so long as it keeps its nerve.’

There are many other forces at work when we speak. Germans and Spaniards are amazed by the number of times the British say please, thank you and sorry. German is in practice quite a blunt, imperative language, yet full of subtleties. Spanish speech is trimmed of excessive niceties but is granted the grace of Latin inflection. The British soften speech to be polite, and in doing so become vague, unclear and, in the case of politicians, evasive.

The gap between taught English and spoken English is vast; our insularity has created a kind of alternate language reliant on shared knowledge that only becomes apparent when you watch TV shows like Detectoristsfn6 or Only Fools and Horses.fn7 The former represents Middle England: reasonable, literate and filled with unquantifiable, undetectable humour that is somehow amusing. The latter represents the respectable underclass of ‘Sarf Lundun’ and uses an exaggerated version of speech that does the same thing more clumsily.

You can follow the genesis of our speech by listening to speakers from different periods. Charles Dickens died seven years before the invention of the phonograph, but Tolkien, Tennyson, Daphne du Maurier, E. M. Forster and Conan Doyle can all be heard today. You can hear a perfect example of RP – Received Pronunciation, also known as BBC English – in Virginia Woolf’s speech.

RP didn’t really take hold until the 1920s, although it can be traced much earlier to the East Midlands accent. Celia Johnson’s clipped speaking voice in Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945) quickly became an object of parody as standards changed.

RP represented an ideal. The Handbook for Teachers in Public Elementary School (1891) suggested that RP should be used because ‘it is the business of educated people to speak so that no one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed’. My mother certainly spoke it and I suppose I did when I was young, but the edges were removed by a South London upbringing. A Northern friend of mine says she spent her first pay cheque ‘having the corners of my accent knocked off’, but they didn’t change her speech patterns, leading her to eventually return to her birth voice.

The hidden class signifiers in language are picked up, often mockingly, by those from outside of that class. The ‘ow’ sound of ‘ou’ is particularly hard for non-natives to handle – I’m usually called Mr Fuller or Foller in Europe. Our language is filled with traps, and regional accents can reverse meaning so that ‘They’re never digging up that road’ in Sheffield actually means ‘They’re digging up that road.’

We use zeugma because it’s pedantic to write ‘she liked cocker spaniels and liked fresh-cut flowers and liked Benjamin’, so we say ‘she liked cocker spaniels, fresh-cut flowers and Benjamin’. Writers of suspense use a lot of something called schesis onomaton. I used it without knowing what it was called. Dickens uses it best in the opening of Bleak House, in which he sets the scene of the first chapter without using a main verb. It makes scene-setting feel very modern. And don’t get me started on sylleptic phrasal verbs, when you add a preposition to a verb to get a new meaning.

Whenever you’re sentence-building it helps to have the right tools at hand. But does it help to know quite so many grammatical terms? Should subordinate clauses and modal verbs be drummed into children? Do they add to our true understanding of language?

A facility with words has nothing to do with memorizing participles, but much popular fiction is lazily written. Want to write a quick bestseller? Putting it into first person present tense gets around the need for eloquence. Write only about your emotions and you’ll never need to do any research. It suits our self-obsessed times; we favour self-belief over self-improvement, hubris without homework. Telling people in print that they have unlimited power is life-affirming and builds confidence, but it’s also a trap; class and money actually pin us in place.

When the Scottish author and broadcaster Muriel Gray set out to write a thriller, The Ancient, set on a supertanker out of Lima, she signed on for a voyage in one, and when she wrote about long-distance truckers she boarded a big rig. Prior to the internet age this was perfectly normal behaviour; the best way to write about something was to do it first.fn8

When I wrote a novella about a missing chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula I duplicated the count’s trip by travelling from Bran Castle in Transylvania to Whitby Bay in Yorkshire, the journey only marred by the British railway company’s inability to get me the last few miles.

But it’s not just about getting the physical details right. When Graham Greene wrote his eerie short story ‘A Little Place off the Edgware Road’, he clearly knew the area, but knew himself more; a feeling of melancholic disappointment seeps from the sentences. The emotional atmosphere of this very brief piece is authentic.

It’s hard to write about yourself without including at least some elements of the Bildungsroman. How much are you prepared to reveal, and what will it take out of you? The idea that art is somehow draining invites ridicule, but it killed Dickens and hardly aided the recovery of Kafka or Proust or Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

By concentrating on craft you add a stronger foundation to art.

Does that mean it always has to be tough work? Well, yes. Try this test: read the ‘Look inside’ sample of whichever crime novel of ‘unguessable twists’ is currently being pushed on Amazon and ask yourself if the writing is interesting or if it’s merely a mundane list of actions.

The first thing you’ll notice is that many of the extracts are interchangeable. The second is that they’re little more than soap opera. And that’s an example of zeugma.

27

Not England

Over the years I became used to the role I’d been assigned; I had the chest diseases, the fevers, the eye problems,fn1 while others seemed to barge rudely through life in perfect health. I was not especially put out by it; these tranches of downtime didn’t remain in my memory. I can’t recall the scorching summer of ’76 because I nearly died of pleurisy and watched it from hospital windows.

Which brings us to Marcel Proust. The author famously spent the last three years of his life writing in his ugly yellow cork-lined bedroom. Although he only lasted until fifty-one, he was considered a hypochondriac not only by the endless specialists he consulted during his lifetime but also by his critics and peers. His correspondence, which detailed every symptom, provided clues to Proust’s real illness. He was most likely suffering from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, misdiagnosed.fn2 Being ill seemed to suit his purpose as a writer, although his vivid sickbed detail is too enervating to be endured for long stretches.

Authors rarely discuss their illnesses, perhaps seeing them as mundane and offering limited scope for insight, like elderly relatives fixated on doctors’ appointments. There’s also a taboo element; writing is public, illness is private.

In Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-Longue Melanie, a young mother recovering from tuberculosis, is moved from her bed to a chaise longue purchased in a junk shop. Falling asleep, she awakes in another sickened body in an earlier time, surrounded by solicitous strangers.

The connecting bridge between the two eras of 1953 and the mid-1800s is the chaise longue itself, but Melanie cannot return because her earlier failing body keeps her trapped in the chair. She is equally held in place by the repressive patrician attitude of the times. As her husband peers into her face looking for signs of life and seeing none, and others try to help but fail, we come to appreciate that she would have been trapped whether she’d been well or not.

The fable is eerie and disturbingly open to interpretation, and although two television versions were produced the novel has largely been forgotten. Laski links illness to powerlessness, reminding us that there are always those who enjoy controlling the physically and mentally weakened. Unable to rise from her chaise longue, Melanie is exploited by the kindly ones around her.

This was a recurring theme in fiction for post-war female authors forced back into the role of homemakers, reduced in status once more after discovering a degree of independence. Husbands have traditionally been keen to push their women back into the kitchen. At the time of Oscar Wilde’s trial, one newspaper suggested that decent men were being driven into the arms of boys because their wives were too busy being feminists and everything would go back to normal if they returned to making jam.

Sometimes it takes a subversive writer like J. G. Ballard to turn illness into an advantage. His mentally disturbed and physically afflicted characters are often defined by flaws which make them gifted. Even the Marvel Comics Universe specializes in transforming ruined humans into gods, from the blind Daredevil to the crippled Dr Donald Blake (Thor’s secret identity), the physically grotesque transformations of Ben Grimm (the Thing) and Dr Banner (Hulk) and the pacemaker-dependent Iron Man.

While I was waiting to restart chemo it occurred to Pete that we might get away somewhere in the brief window between lockdowns and hospital trips. One of the few places still available to visit was the island of Gran Canaria. After failing to check the calendar we arrived in the middle of a fiesta, with our hotel – somehow inevitably – at its masked-up epicentre.

I was seeing the capital of Las Palmas from the perspective of a middle-aged man who had no desire to slam vodka shots at 3.00 a.m. while listening to ‘Despacito’. These islands off the coast of West Africa had become synonymous with cheap British package tours but were also famous for stargazing, with some of the clearest nights in the world. If you really wanted to consider the unimportance of your mortality, it was the place to be.

Since the fifteenth century the Canaries had been the most frequently crossed spot between Europe and America. The Columbus Museum recreated his voyages and even reproduced the night skies he saw, while the Canarian Museum featured a diorama of corpses in a cave and periodically plunged the room into darkness, making parties of schoolchildren scream. The Tate should have studied these museums to learn how to curate on a budget.

Restaurant translations provided amusement. ‘Duck Scum’ turned out to be a jus, while I translated ‘Yemas de Erizón’ as ‘hedgehog eggs’, probably thinking of the French hérisson. The waiter assured me that yes, these were the tender parts of a hedgehog. When the dish arrived smelling strongly of brine I thought to myself, What else is covered in spines? and realized it was the colloquial term for sea urchins. While writers fret about correct language, civilians sling together inelegant sentences in order to make themselves understood – and it works much better.

At least there was nothing to remind me of grey King’s Cross and the Euston Road. To hear birdsong in the sun, to feel warm thermals drifting across from Africa and know that the hospital was thousands of miles away was enough. I could finally enjoy food without recoiling from the taste of rusty metal. I sat with a glass and watched children play, feeling like somebody old in the Godfather movies, contently waiting to drop on to my face.

We drank tintos de verano outside the little bars where all life could be seen passing in the space of an hour. Unfeasibly handsome couples – men with narrow waists and glossy black haircuts, girls in little yellow summer dresses – laughed, flirted, sang and danced along the streets. Why had I never looked that carefree? Oh, now I remembered; I lived in a country where it hadn’t stopped raining since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

We went for the sunlight and the vitality of the streets. Pushing back the louvred windows in our room, I released a wash of hot yellow light on to the bedcover. I sat on the tiny terrace with my eyes shut, feeling the sun on my face. You’re not allowed to sit in the sun after chemo for fear of skin cancers. Already the watery London light had freckled the backs of my hands and my forearms, but for a minute I could sit here and remember a time before all of this began, and how happy I had been.

Reasons why I wish I’d been raised in Southern Europe instead of Southern England

1. Railway station destination boards have half a dozen countries on them instead of saying ‘Replacement buses from Didcot Parkway’.

2. Facial hair at fourteen (Spain, Greece, Albania and Italy only).

3. Can sit outside for more than twenty minutes without having to go and dry off.

4. Emotional freedom: gesticulation, sweary gestures, shouting, kissing, public hugging, random protests, lost tempers, generally being demonstrative and over-emphatic about everything.

5. Seafood and salad every day if you feel like it; beaches don’t sell cockles or candyfloss.

6. Matriarchal societies make men nicer, children well behaved and good to their mothers.

7. Sunglasses on a kid; first chance to look cool. You don’t grow up with knees like bits of white string.

8. Given first glass of red wine at age seven.

9. Don’t have to spend entire childhood in a sweater ‘for when it gets damp later’.

10. Beach trips do not involve losing money on rigged arcade machines and standing over a jellyfish with a brick.

NB Much of this is offset by the one good reason for growing up in England: books.

28

Beeps

Pete went off to roam around the town and I sat at the edge of the beach in a small circle of shade, thinking about what had happened since 23 March 2020. For writers the ending is always lurking in the background. Virtually all of my short stories are fatalistic worst-case scenarios shoring up the hero’s rickety emotional state, and the novels have endings that require you to go back and reassess what happened. This is not the best way to court popularity.

Besides, I couldn’t die yet. I had a million questions that still hadn’t been answered, many relating to musical comedy. Send in which clowns? What do you mean, they’re already here? Why does a Harris pat mean a Paris hat? Does anyone still wear a hat? Is Janet’s ring really nicer than the one Betty Monroe has?

Back in London, I studied the newspapers left behind on tube seats. The so-called ‘broadsheet’ English newspapers were appallingly opinionated compared with high-end European press, but if you read them after a week away they became strangely enjoyable.

The President of the United States had already suggested that drinking bleach might be the answer to Covid, so all bets were off. What would he do next? Perhaps he’d recommend storming the Capitol, who knew? Immediately after his rambling press conference a thousand bizarre remedies appeared on social networks. It seemed an appropriate time for Dr Sebi to rise from the grave and show us all how he did it.

When I came out of the tube at King’s Cross I had to forge my way through people who didn’t believe there was a pandemic, that the virus was manufactured by the Russians, the Chinese, aliens, anyone who didn’t think exactly as they did. I was handed the usual energy-drink samples, magazines and leaflets about Jesus, and now anti-vaccination brochures. I had always secretly believed that we were far too sensible to believe in this sort of rubbish; we were British, after all.

Yet here was a shopkeeper serving Pete in a sandwich bar, with a stack of anti-5G warning leaflets on his counter. He explained to his customers that the new phone masts were causing people he knew to suffer blinding migraines.

Pete pointed out that the masts hadn’t been turned on yet. The shopkeeper threw him out of the shop.

It was time to think about pointing the finger of blame. Oleaginous Nigel Farage and Victorian retronaut Jacob Rees-Mogg had mysteriously escaped without being whipped through the streets. Like many others in government Rees-Mogg had an increasingly cartoonish air of villainy about him. He described food banks as ‘rather uplifting’, and condemned abortion, same-sex marriage and climate action. He liked fossil fuels and zero-hours contracts. He had bought a Bentley at twenty-three. The motto on his escutcheon is paradoxical: ‘Cura Pii Diis Sunt’ (‘The Pious Are in the Care of the Gods’). Or perhaps just their bloated investment portfolios were.

I imagined he was probably in favour of privatizing the NHS – it seemed the sort of thing he would like. But in 1948 wellness was recognized as a right, not a privilege, with the founding of the National Health Service. It had taken nearly forty years to sort out, to grow into a world wonder which was then underfunded, overmanaged and finally so inefficient that plays and films savagely parodied it. Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital and Peter Nichols’s The National Health both took scalpels to the inept bureaucratic body of government.

Now I returned from a week away, my holiday cut short by the latest ban on flights, and entered a gleaming white NHS cancer centre controlled by scanners and apps, its grand glass atrium soaring up like a set from a 1970s science-fiction film – Logan’s Run perhaps.

It was as quiet as a library and almost as empty. Half of its screens were out and the lifts didn’t work. A row of bright yellow buckets had been set out across the floor to catch the rain from ill-fitting glass panels. That made it more English somehow. Since nobody knew how to fix the problem, the buckets remained there in perpetuity. There’s been a similar bucket standing in the ticket hall of King’s Cross underground station for over twenty years.

Upon arrival in the clinic I was weighed and sometimes my height was measured, because obviously there was a great risk of it fluctuating. There were patients here but they were hooked up to machines out of sight. A different medic oversaw each stage of the treatment process, so it was a bit like chefs assembling burger patties. Everyone wore a large badge. The most English names had been adopted by Indian and Thai professionals seeking to make pronunciation easier and more memorable for patients. Today I was being looked after by a Korean girl called Shirley. I would rather have learned her Korean name but she wasn’t prepared to divulge it.

There was an area in one spot on the open-plan floor that the staff referred to as Fat Nurse Corner. This was the counter where patients left family-sized boxes of chocolates, biscuits and cakes in gratitude, like worshippers coyly leaving votive offerings in temples.

When nurses cannulate you they wince as if they were hurting themselves and apologize. It’s not easy locating a vein and threading a tube inside it. Having the thing in your arm is not particularly comfortable but the brain dismisses it after a minute or two. Then the flush, followed by the drug, and a nurse who asks a tick-box list of questions. I slipped off the planned Q&A route sometimes and asked them something unexpected. ‘What if my feet go numb?’ The answer was always the same. ‘You should ask your doctor about that.’

I opened my laptop and tried to work. In reality I was recataloguing my music library. I could use both arms if I was careful. I was left alone until the machine started to flash and beep with increasing frequency. The chemo-delivery systems have an electronic three-note bleep to warn when they’re coming to the end of an infusion bag. If no one attends to it the tone’s pace increases and becomes more urgent, and then continuous, until a nurse hurries over. It’s a sound that earwormed its way into my head at night. I wondered if Lil Nas X could use it as a sample.

The machines make a lot more fuss than the patients. Most of those receiving treatment were over sixty, some as gaunt as concentration-camp inmates, but one or two were upsettingly young. That’s when you want to rant into the clouds that it shouldn’t happen.

Of course, it’s a lot harder if you don’t have a religion, and I finally started to understand why so many writers converted to Catholicism in later life. I was christened Church of England, which is the same as being agnostic. It’s the wettest, dreariest, most hand-wringingly apologetic religion in the world, so faint that it’s barely there, the millionth carbon copy of something that once had meaning. Whenever I read about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s latest remorseful excuse for a tragedy in the real world I wish he would come out on national television as a witch doctor.

‘That’s you finished for today,’ said the nurse with a nurse-like briskness I associate with Carry On films. ‘Right, let’s get that thing out of your arm.’

I suspect she would have the same no-nonsense smile if she’d been asked to saw off my leg. ‘Right, that’s you done, off you hop.’

And I would dutifully gather my belongings and head home, leaving behind a mountain of custard creams.

29

Flayed

A few nights later the pain arrived. A great black block of grinding, searing agony that collapsed on top of me and pinned me down, crushing all rational thought.

I’ve got something for this, I thought. It’s in the cupboard somewhere. Morphine. I had instant thoughts of Sax Rohmer and Anna May Wong. Did morphine have a place in the modern medicine cabinet?

I checked the bottle. A liquid with a bizarre delivery system involving a plastic syringe and a funnel. You fix the syringe to the funnel and turn it all upside down, a leap of faith that I fully expected to result in a sopping shirt. You then squirt the liquid down the inside of your cheek.

The moment the smell of rotten strawberries hit me I realized this was ‘Kaolin & Morphine’ without the kaolin, a chalky mix that used to separate when left on the sickroom shelf. As children we’d also had cocaine – at the dentist in the form of gas or an injection – and heaven knows what else. They probably gave us something for being good after, a sweet cigarette and a sly finger down the bum crack.

I took the morphine, carried on reading for a while, dozed, woke up with a mouth so dry you could have shot Ice Cold in Alex in it (do I mean that? The one where Sylvia Syms and the flight crew go for a freezing beer), went to get a glass of water and fell over most of the flat’s furniture, which had been secretly rearranged in an effort to make me think I’d gone mad. Morphine turned me into one of the Walking Dead, only softer and more bruisable.

I explained to the spouse (whom by now I had woken up) that I felt like Liz Smith in Alan Bennett’s A Private Function, desperate to prove she was not ready to be put away by loudly reciting her times tables. He looked at me as if I had just started to speak Mandarin.

I had foolishly thought that being married to a Johnny Foreigner with no matching pop-cultural references would be fun. ‘Nurse! The screens!’ I cried, sitting down heavily, then rolling on to the floor.

‘Bloody English.’ Pete scratched himself in puzzlement and stumped back to bed.

I used to be quite good friends with Clive Barker. The next time I see him, remind me to kick his teeth down his throat. Clive knew quite a bit about pain. He wrote about it in the most visceral, extraordinary way, as if no one had ever written about it before, as a living thing, something so solid-edged and real that you would come to savour it and even learn to respect and love it, greeting it like an old friend. I often wondered if he had experienced some debilitating long-term childhood illness. Knowledge like that does not come easily.

I should have listened to him. I was plunged into the most astonishing pain I have ever experienced, too powerful to be halted by drugs or even the distraction of books. It was a transformative agony, as if I was shaking off my outer skin so that the raw flesh inside could undergo the icy heat of exposure. I felt like St Bartholomew holding his flayed skin, rendered in gold leaf by Damien Hirst. Perhaps the experience would turn me into something different, although I wasn’t going to be pleased if I woke up as a gigantic cockroach.

During that long night I talked to someone online who had undergone this treatment seventeen times. I wondered how much it scarred you, the chipping away of one’s personality. It certainly made you less frivolous, less able to conceive flights of fancy. Daydreaming was replaced with urgent practicality.

I set aside my copy of Camus’s The Plague, which now read like a survival manual, and took up a beloved favourite.

The fantasy writer Mervyn Peake’s heroic powers of description appeared to wane so shockingly and suddenly that reading his third volume of the Gormenghast books, Titus Alone, was quite unbearable, and seemed to reveal how difficult it was for him to continue writing after witnessing the horrors of Belsen concentration camp.

The first two books represent a staggering achievement that many find claustrophobic and exhausting, but if you’ve never read them give them a chance; it’s a rewarding experience that may stay with you for ever. He’s a densely descriptive writer and every sentence adds to the atmospheric whole. C. S. Lewis pointed out that ‘Peake’s books are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.’

They’re also very good to read when you’re icky dick.

Gormenghast is a castle built on arcane rituals, the meanings of which are long lost. It is sinking under the weight of its history, a fractured mirror for England, static in time and smothered by centuries of conservatism. A disrespectful upstart of a kitchen boy is determined to bring it all down, which means destroying those in control: a sheltered, vulnerable girl and her eccentric family. It’s a feat of imagination rarely, if ever, equalled. My father, who never countenanced such flights of fancy, adored it. Death stalks the pages, the end of tradition and all things grown too familiar with time.

There are some books you don’t just read; they accompany you through life. I have books which move house with me and are repurchased for friends and get taken on holiday. I know at any given moment where such a book is. Not all of them can weather the times, though. Some authors pen silk-light prose that becomes calcified and hard to read across the years. Their words grow old and fade, but the age at which you read it remains like a bookmark within its pages, so it can’t be abandoned. You can be reminded of what it once meant to you.

Can the earliest sensations we experience ever be recaptured on the page? There’s nothing worse than reading an author who has outgrown simple early joys to become cynical and world-weary. I’m sure readers prefer to delight in the recognition of fresh experience rather than share the writer’s gathering disappointments.

We had built bookshelves above the bed so that the books could enter sleepers’ dreams. On days when I felt unwell it was comforting to curl up beneath hundreds of paperbacks. The funny thing about fictional characters is the way in which some lodge in the mind and endure. I may fail, I thought, but they will remain up there, just above me, wide-eyed and laughing with delight.

One night I took down a P. D. James novel and read it to keep the pain at bay.

After years of writing every kind of fiction imaginable, I had arrived at the crime genre and had discovered its greatest secret: that you could smuggle any subject you want into it. I knew that Baroness Phyllis Dorothy James, once considered to be the grande dame of British crime writing, had issued her ten commandments for writing crime novels, but I wasn’t convinced. It was heresy to contravene the rules, but I decided that what worked for Baroness James was not necessarily what works for every aspiring author. I counted out her edicts on my fingers.

1. You Must Be Born to Write

The Baroness (b. 1920) said, ‘You can’t teach someone to know how to use words effectively and beautifully.’

Not everyone has the benefit of supportive parents or an extended education. James did not come from a wealthy background. Her fame rests on her ability to provide powerful insights into human nature while exploring the criminal mind. Much as a brilliant chef may grow up in a home where no good cooking is ever attempted (Nigel Slater wrote about this in his charming memoir Toast), a writer can be taught to understand the beauty of words. But you need to possess a natural curiosity about the world and its people. How that curiosity is shaped depends on a good teacher, opportunity and passion, not birthright.

2. Write What You Know

Many of us believe in writing about what we don’t know. We write what we hope, we dream, we love, we fear. You can learn what you need to know easily enough; you just have to provide telling details. Many crime writers have set their stories in ancient China or 1930s California without being there. H. R. F. Keating had written a decade’s worth of very successful Inspector Ghote novels before he ever visited India, where the books are set. You can write what you don’t know, but you must be passionate about it.

We write about distant travel beyond the stars, although in all likelihood we will never get there. We can’t time travel but we understand that human yearnings never change. And we make a lot up – it’s called fiction. As one of Tennessee Williams’s greatest creations, Blanche DuBois, said in A Streetcar Named Desire, ‘I don’t want realism. I want magic … I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth.’

3. Find Your Routine

Life is changing fast. Routines are a luxury few of us now have. Write when you can, where you can – that’s all. But it’s important to write regularly and not break the Three-Day Rule: when working on a novel, never leave it longer than that without writing. The same applies for fish in the fridge, with the same result.

4. Be Aware that the Business Is Changing

Yes, but you’re writing something that will always be needed – a story. And that doesn’t change even though all the formats and selling systems around it do. We should concentrate for the most part on what we’re good at – the words – and let others sort out the carriage or we end up becoming the harassed, endlessly networking business managers of our own livelihoods. We don’t need to spend too much time on the pipelines. We own the well.

5. Read, Write and Don’t Daydream

This is possibly the worst advice imaginable. Without space and air and light and calm, those lacunae of everyday life, there is no imagination and the ideas can’t form. We all need to spend a day wandering around a city so that we can come back with our heads filled with plots, characters, consequences, dialogues.

6. Enjoy Your Own Company

Safe advice, but the most productive time I ever spent was in a cramped office with four other very noisy writers, all of whom were bursting to share their ideas. Do what’s best for you. Only the thinking-it-through part has to happen inside your lonely head. You can share your ideas with others once you’ve stopped worrying about whether somebody is going to steal it. Unless you’re working with the BBC.

A friend of mine, a very fine writer, told me, ‘I’ve just finished my new novel. All I have to do now is – you know – write it down.’ Antonio di Benedetto wrote Zama in just over three weeks, but the research took him years.

7. Choose a Good Setting

This is the point I most agree with the Baroness upon. Without a clear location stories often feel empty and unanchored. Where would Sherlock Holmes be without the misty cobbled streets of London?

8. Never Go Anywhere Without a Notebook

Today that means carrying a phone, iPad or electronic device. For years friends have bought me notebooks but although I start with good intentions I never manage to complete them. They begin with an extortionist being throttled to death with a 2,000-year-old cursed necklace and end up full of shopping lists. ‘Electrocute the professor in Chapter 27 – also we need shampoo.’

9. Never Talk About a Book Before It Is Finished

No, no, no! If you stay silent you’ll never iron out the improbabilities. Talk to a friend, discuss the book in natural conversation, read the dialogue aloud and you’ll quickly come to spot its faults. You need a real-world sounding board for something that has only lived in your head until now.

10. Know When to Stop

The Baroness’s stature probably allowed her to circumvent this, but most publishers specify the length of works in their contracts and have been known to ask us to pump up the word count accordingly.

The days of writing as a higher calling are long gone; we write on the fly whenever we can, talking to everyone and anyone as part of a global society, not in a silent room with a desk and a lovely view of the lawn. The information age has changed the way we write for good. There are, incredibly, still writers who are snobbish about television. To them I would say, watch the opening scene of The Newsroom or the ending of Six Feet Under, the whole of Years and Years, Squid Game, The White Lotus or La Casa de Papel and tell me why television can’t be as good as books. Most great American writing is now produced for TV.

I felt I was finally done with the Golden Age of popular fiction. I’m not a baroness. I had written a Golden Age whodunnit as an experiment and had fun with it – if we’d stuck an art deco font on the cover we’d have guaranteed more sales – but it was time to move on.

I fell asleep dreaming of words, the pain banished.

30

No One’s Anybody

There were good days and bad days.

I sat in an armchair with the laptop, making more and more mistakes as I went. Eventually I gave up and watched old science-fiction movies. Something pernicious was happening inside me. Chemo is the Agent Orange of the medical world, a poison that tries to kill everything except your life-spark. It tears at your gut, attacks your brain, burns your nerves, silences your mind, undoes your ability to connect events or even remember what you were doing a minute ago. Chemo fog is the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

The cancer I had when I was young was in my upper gum. Radiotherapy put a hole right through it like a Dan Dare ray gun. I ate through a straw for months. Incredibly, skin and bone grew back. This time, I knew things were different and parts unseen would never be restored, but I never doubted the science.

I had read that Donald Trump once snubbed a climate-crisis meeting to attend a prayer meeting instead. Belief, which once drove the world, had become a poison that could destabilize our lives. From the overabundance of information that inspired incontinent thinking to escalating lunatic rumours and social panics, the world of half-truths continued unchecked because it suited everyone to leave it be. Hysteria sells well. A TV documentary on the Flat Earth Society revealed that it was a strictly for-profit organization, the selling of a ridiculous idea through conventions, products, books, subscriptions and T-shirts that could be promoting anything at all.

How does this change in beliefs feed into the writing of a book? Fiction writers face a choice: you either factor the real world into your writing, allowing it to be influenced by what you see and feel; or you shut the world out entirely.

In what we may come to think of as the Complacent Years of the new century the franchised fantasies of Marvel™, Harry Potter™, Star Wars™ and Game of Thrones™ kept to the simplest themes, which meant that the depiction of evil always came down to a banal physical representation, a giant floaty thing of fire, a hidden face in cloak and cowl, an emaciated body of bones and claws, because you cannot create an enemy if you’ve failed to establish a belief system.

Instead we roll back to Bunyan, to Bosch, to the ideas perpetuated in medieval art in which the generic pure must spend their lives fighting off Satan’s faceless slaves, a half-remembered Judaeo-Christian brat pack of predestination and sin.

Watching posters for another Hollywood action film going up in Europe, Pete asked, ‘Why does America think we want to see someone killing with a huge gun?’ Aggressive symbolism is currently being reduced in the mainstream public arena.

I suggested that after fighting its way to the West Coast a mutant gene from America’s pioneer spirit had been left with nowhere to go.fn1 Those who decry the Marvel Comics Universe fail to see that it has diverted attention away from guns and anything approaching real violence in favour of phantom death-beams, the weaponry of the streets dissolving into coloured rays of light.

Pete is eminently sensible and grounded, humourless to the point of mistaking jokes for news, intellectually rigorous, incapable of dishonesty, a born sceptic, argumentative at an international level. He once attended a dinner party whose hostess, a newspaper astrologer, started holding court on auras and past lives until he demanded to know why those who regressed always turned out to be connected with Cleopatra and never any other ruler of Egypt’s Ptolemaic dynasty. The evening became so tense for everyone that the two of them went off into a separate room and argued it out, returning under a flag of truce.

Pete has an old sports injury that returns periodically. Having worn out his list of muscle therapists and chiropractors he was recommended to ‘a professional’ by a friend. She lived miles away in a town that was all but inaccessible, so seeing her required determination. When he met her he realized it had been a terrible mistake to do so. She fluttered her hands over his chest and told him that his mother had had a traumatic experience when he was in her womb. She talked about homeopathy, magnetic therapy and other discredited bits of infantilized new-age lunacy wrapped in Hallmark phrases about ‘healing your heart’ and ‘learning to love yourself’.

Then she fished about for a bit of deep-reading, Derren Brown crossed with Madame Arcati, and found traumas throughout his life, at six months, three years, six years, all the time asking if that’s possible, could this have happened, fishing, fishing.

By this time her subject, the sworn enemy of woo-woo, seemed to be buying it.

When Pete came home I found he had purchased several expensive little bottles from her. Unsurprisingly, when I translated the fancy ingredients labels I got snake oil. The first bottle primarily contained water, glycerol and blackcurrant. The second was echinacea and sugar. Or, in the memorable phrase used by Sweeney Todd of his rival’s potions, ‘piss with ink’.

So what happened? He’d bought the flat-earth theory, the waving-hands-over-your-aura prognosis, the primitive healing rituals retooled for the twenty-first-century consumer, or perhaps she had simply guilted him into buying something. Gwyneth Paltrow had transformed woo-woo into a financial empire for silly people, so she’s not so silly. But as someone at the mercy of labelled bags containing radioactive liquid to be pumped through my sore veins I was still staggered that a hard-nosed realist could have chosen to have his pocket picked by a con artist.

‘When everyone is somebody then no one’s anybody,’ wrote W. S. Gilbert in The Gondoliers. Social media has made everybody somebody. Is it so surprising that we’ll try the snake oil now, just in case? With a shrug I submitted to a reiki session. The big surprise was that it worked, although I’m not sure it did so in the way it was intended.

The not-quite-laying-on of hands forces you to lie very still. You can’t see the practitioner’s hands so you can only guess where they are. You try to keep that part of your body even more still than the rest.

After half an hour my muscles were aching. After a full hour the tension burned through to a sense of deep relaxation. Afterwards I ate a litre tub of chocolate and tangerine ice cream and read Caryl Brahms’s magnificently theatrical memoir, Too Dirty for the Windmill. Brahms had a luncheon of oysters and champagne to celebrate the second print run [italics mine] of her book No Bed for Bacon.

After midnight I got a text.

Sorry I missed your call I went on bus no 4 to get my hair dye. Went into very narrow packed shop catering to young African women and really friendly lady picked me a reddish hue. It was a fiver and I hope it works out or I’ll look like a pomegranate. Amber came back and we ate Ramadam cake. The new colour is very startling. I will get used to a bright red scalp. I can wear a scarf. Met a lovely tall older man who was so complimentary he made me nervous. I did a photo with him. I think he had a name on his jacket, I shall have to get my magnifying glass out. He could have been my last love. I am so small now I have to creep inside my duvet covers to put them on. I think there should be a gadgets for midgets like me or maybe just a tall man xxm

31

Big Words

A feline, indolent facility with language marks us out as people with time on our hands. How the literate classes used to read and write is not how we do so now. Here’s Charles Dickens writing to his clockmaker in 1863:

Since my hall clock was sent to your establishment to be cleaned it … has struck the hours with great reluctance, and after enduring internal agonies of a most distressing nature, it has now ceased striking altogether. Though a happy release for the clock, this is not convenient to the household. If you can send down any confidential person with whom the clock can confer, I think it may have something on its works it would be glad to make a clean breast of.

We read and write best at our leisure, not when the clock (even Dickens’s clock) is against us. It might be helpful at this point to offer up an incredibly brief history of English words.

You could argue that English’s messy spelling came about because of its geography. The Romans left us with ‘triumph’, ‘circus’ and, er, ‘video’. Anglo-Saxon, or West German, lasted for about five centuries. Then the Normans brought French spelling customs into our upper echelons and ordinary Britons found themselves unable to speak their own language. As spelling norms were still settling, the English vowel system underwent the Great Vowel Shift, a series of changes in pronunciation that took place mainly between 1400 and 1700. Transcription errors muddied things further.

But let’s blame the Normans. French became the language of the monarchy, through which we gained about ten thousand words, while English peasants only managed to come up with simple onomatopoeic nouns like ‘cow’. A two-tier language was bound to cause trouble. Words were power, weaponized by Shakespeare. If you find Shakespeare challenging, try Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. One of Britain’s oldest tales is made ludicrously complex because its text is not just filled with Sondheim-like internal rhymes but is also in Middle English in a long-untranslatable short-lived Midlands dialect.

So-called Middle English hung around until the end of the fifteenth century, to be gradually replaced by Early Modern English. A lighter touch crept in too, so that by the eighteenth century, the satirist James Gillray was happily ridiculing the British Prime Minister in print without reprisal. We satirized our social mores with the smug self-confidence of ruthless colonialists. Our authors had already learned to play jokes on readers, as anyone who has climbed the Everest of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) can testify.

English novels sold well. Throughout Victoria’s reign the combination of grisly slaughter, melodramatic coincidence and dry humour proved irresistible and continued into the twentieth century. British literature honed its sharpness in the Great War and emerged with new elements of irony, ridicule and gallows humour.

In 1930 a group of British mystery writers formed the Detection Club, members of which included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Baroness Orczy.fn1 The novels of Evelyn Waugh are cruelly funny but beneath the wit is a howling darkness that in Black Mischief ends with the perfectly logical act of cannibalism. Killing becomes a social faux pas on a par with grammatical errors.

After the Second World War, death lurked at the edges of even the most conservative English novels. As secularism took hold it became commonplace to explore risqué subjects and say the unsayable. In the 1950s a family film could be made about a fictitious British girls’ schoolfn2 whose sexualized pupils are sold off to Arab sheiks, and a book about the St Trinian’s story included contributions from the likes of D. B. Wyndham Lewis, future Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and Bertolt Brecht.fn3

Books like How To Be Topp and Whizz for Atomms delighted children and horrified parents with their mangled spelling. Why did I spend five years studying Latin at school? Well, etymology allows us to understand old words and create new ones. Correct (i.e. traditional) spelling reveals important information. Early English writers put a ‘p’ into ‘receipt’ to make clear its connection to Latin’s ‘receptus’, even though the letter was silent. The ‘p’ also connects the word to ‘receptive’ and ‘recipient’, which ‘receit’ couldn’t do.

Linguistic anomalies are not stumbling blocks but signposts. One of the reasons why illogical language systems never get overhauled is because those who are in a position to create new rules long ago memorized the old ones. It leaves the less literate stranded and a great swathe of people in the middle, muddling through. Computerized grammar checks don’t make much difference; they straighten thought into Orwellian channels. American schools aren’t helping much by banning books.

So language is also a political idea. Sudden changes go against the grain of human nature, which is to gradually refine through experience. Until its fourth draft, my unlikely-to-ever-be-published fantastical-historical novel used baroque language to condition the mind to its peculiar subject. Obscurity for its own sake is damaging. Even so, I opted for words like ‘chasuble’ and ‘reredos’ because they had a richer flavour and you still get a general understanding of the meaning in context.

My favourite words include ‘pandiculate’, to stretch and yawn, ‘rodomontade’, boastful or inflated talk or behaviour, ‘patulous’, spreading like the branches of a tree, and the delightful ‘abicidial’, following on from. I could find no record of this last word except in an old Tom Sharpe novel. But if just one writer has used it, it’s real. It exists. It will always be there.

A love of esoteric language encouraged me to add rare words or make them up. That’s how my novels ended up with ‘essoinment’ and ‘mataeologian’ in their pages. I figured that if Mr Shakespeare could casually drop over 1,700 new words, I could just about manage three or four.fn4

A vague knowledge of Latin helps if you’re planning to create a word, and a cavalier attitude to word-slinging is essential. Grammar must be respected but you should be able to have fun. Like me you’ll commit all sorts of appalling solecisms along the way but it’s a bloody good laugh. You need to be careful about antanaclasis (using the same word in different senses, which looks awkward) and frequentative suffixes (like having ‘le’ at the end of a word, as in ‘twinkle’) but if you come up with the basic form someone else can figure out the declensions.

Easier than this is the repurposing of old words for new uses. You can start with base words nicked from medieval cookery instructions or Jacobean stage directions and find a strong visual image that mirrors a modern action for which there is no word. Take ‘Eudaimonian’, which is simply turning Eudaimonia, the condition of living well, into an adjective. Hooray then for Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, whose wonderful The Meaning of Liff reused the names of defunct railway stations to describe states not otherwise covered in English, such as ‘Ardslignish’, ‘the behaviour of Sellotape when you’re tired’.

Language is robust enough to withstand our tinkerings; after all, it’s continually adapted by its users. For example, the term for an adder – one of the two British snakes everyone here knows about – originally referred to a German natter snake, and became anglicized to ‘a nadder’, but users misheard it and detached the ‘n’.fn5

Researchers have been trying to understand why the evolution of English is so weirdly random. ‘The grammar of negating a sentence,’ they observed, ‘has changed from “Ic ne secge” (Beowulf, c. 900 but likely earlier) to “Ic ne sege noht” (the Ormulum, c. 1100) to “I seye not” (Chaucer, c. 1400) to “I doe not say” (Shakespeare, c. 1600) before returning to the familiar “I don’t say” (Virginia Woolf, c. 1900).’

That’s pretty much what you’d expect, but then you hit the puzzle of past-tense verbs. They’re changing and nobody knows why. ‘Lit’ is more frequently used than ‘lighted’ now; it’s ‘weaved’, not ‘wove’, ‘dived’ not ‘dove’, ‘leaped’ not ‘leapt’. Language generally changes towards the regular form because it’s easier to remember, but there’s a sharp rise in the irregular form of the past tense.

Language fluctuates, but not always in the way you’d think – it should simplify, not become more complicated. As our politeness and caution increase, our language becomes more precise yet more verbose, so that it gets closer to Victorian prose. Still, we can play fast and loose with language, treating it with confidence but also with disrespect.

In a recent edition of The Times there was a piece about Banksy’s art being hidden in the National Gallery, and ‘fears that it has now been pinched’. It’s inconceivable that this sentence would ever have appeared a few years ago in the Thunderer. But while we break down linguistic barriers we tend to honour (and obsess about) correct structure. You’ll note that even in It’s inconceivable that this sentence would ever have appeared there’s a contraction and a complex past conditional at work. The mix ’n’ match thing seems to come naturally to us. Although ‘pinched’ feels both too modern and dated.

Anyone who has flicked through Viz magazine’s Roger’s Profanisaurus will know how outrageously imaginative the general public can be when it comes to sexual euphemism. ‘To keep the lid of his sauce bottle clean’ is an example that does not derive from a direct sexual connotation but operates as linguistic code for being gay, which is sometimes associated with excessive tidiness. The phrase also has working-class links: a bottle set on a table. But it has other links too, to phrases like ‘he knows what’s in his herbaceous borders’, which suggests preciousness and unmanliness. No wonder other nationalities have such a struggle with English; every phrase is loaded with echoes and phantoms that need filtrating to reach their meaning.

Living with someone who has no knowledge of British pop culture, I realized I had an ancient habit of repurposing Monty Python phrases in conversation. That half-century-old show even left us with comedic manners of speaking, from the mooing Gumbys to the Pepperpots, men dressed as old ladies speaking in a low screech. Much of our linguistic fluidity is down to the incorporation of elements outside our language taken from simple observation and popular culture. In this way English works more like German, where there’s a special word for ‘the feeling you get in your fingertips’. Cultural magpieing can be heard in the language of the English middle classes, who insert Latin, French and German words into everyday conversation with more frequency and less pretence than you’d expect.

Mark Forsyth has built a career on the study of language with books like The Etymologicon. He suggests some words we could bring back. I rather like ‘pectination’, meaning to sit with one’s fingers interlaced (the Latin for a comb was pecten). It suggests patience, and also waiting something out. But using funny old words for their novelty value doesn’t push them back into the linguistic limelight. Mainstream English eschews novelty, and ruthlessly edits itself.

One of the first language tricks I learned was litotes, understatement by the use of negatives, an extremely English form of eloquence. Mr Thomas Jones, the popular Welsh singer, sang ‘It’s Not Unusual’ – that’s litotes. And by writing Mr Thomas Jones, the popular Welsh singer I am signifying something else by using the phrasing of the British music hall to suggest a faux-unfamiliarity with a famous figure that places me hierarchically above him.

It gets much more complicated from there on in.

One of my favourite writers, Beryl Bainbridge, always managed to convey enormous complexity in simple language that I imagine would be hard to translate. I’ve noticed that one of her few obvious tricks is to provide slivers of timeless relatable detail in her historical novels, a dirty fingernail or something stuck to a boot.

On Shaftesbury Avenue there was a huge neon sign for ‘Les Miz’ which appalled a French friend – but it’s a fun contraction with a clear meaning so why not, when that’s what everyone calls the show? Old spellings varied so much because they were primarily heard rather than read – and to be honest, what does it matter if the spelling varies a bit? So long as a language breathes it has life.

Words are like people; they’re at their best when they remain flexible to the passing of time, whatever it may bring.

32

Schrödinger’s Virus

Another late night bulletin arrived from Maggie:

Ray Davies from The Kinks had a crush on me. I was married but he was lovely. He is in his late 70s now so that makes him a younger man. Amber signed up for microdermabrasion on her eyebrows. They cost £80 and she now looks like Groucho Marx. My hernia would not allow me to eat organic pasta. The dog was sick on the lawn but ate it all up again. Radiating love xxxMaggie

Wordmongering is a ridiculous job for a grown-up. Most of my adult male friends wanted to talk about the chances their team had next season, why they were considering an electric car and how they’d find the time to turn the box room into an office before Christmas, not whether they could weave ‘hesperidean’ into a sentence.

After a week of continual pain largely kept at bay by my deep-dive into books, I arose feeling a little better, and looked out of the window. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been for a walk.

Summer, distinguishable from winter in name only, gave us a better manifestation of philosophical pessimism than Schopenhauer ever came up with. As the rain lashed down it appeared to be taking with it Covid, which had largely vanished from British front pages even though the infection rates on our overcrowded little island were higher than anywhere else in Europe.

This ghostly there-but-not-there effect manifested itself in maskless shops, maskless theatres, superspreader student parties, overflowing hospitals and No. 10 knees-ups. But instead of causing mass panic, riots and burning cars, no one appeared to be particularly worried. I imagined a scenario wherein other countries (Canada probably topping the list, then Austria and of course China) would be zipping their sanitized populations into hazmat suits while we merrily cavorted about with trays of canapés.

The casual attitude was largely due to our Prime Minister telling people to wear masks if they wanted to. Schrödinger’s Virus appeared and vanished; although the number of infections was through the roof, the number of deaths fell as the virus moved down through the unvaccinated age brackets. Like others who were in the ‘extreme high risk immunosuppressed’ category I was vaccinated early, then boostered. I continued to trudge back and forth from home to my chemo sessions, and was always exhausted by midday. Walking along Europe’s most polluted road was technically exercise, although I needed a good cough at the end of it. My brain was still functioning after a fashion but the extra synaptic snap that encouraged me to spin a ludicrous series of events from a simple sentence wasn’t there any more.

The vaccine rollout revealed Kafkaesque flaws. To get chemo I needed to test negative for Covid. To do so I had to enter the centre for a test two days before my treatment, which meant doubling the risk by making an extra visit to hospital. If they vaccinated the extreme-risk patients at the centre they could have halved our hospital visits, but, said a nurse, ‘That’s the kind of logical solution that continually evades this government.’

By the time I had finished the latest bout of chemo I was suffering from severe word drop-out. I could see the nouns and adjectives hanging right there in the air in front of me, but before I could grasp them they slithered away and were lost. Sometimes, if I really concentrated, they came back after fifteen minutes or so. Lately I had started to recover some of the schoolboy Russian I had forgotten, but then I would lose the English for ‘pencil’. I took to calling the bathroom cleaner anti-calcaire because for some peculiar reason I could only remember it in French.

The mind mist hovered in wisps around the cool edges of the day. My keyboard skills began to erode. I was never a touch-typist; after writing thousands of pages I still couldn’t remove my eyes from the keyboard. Now I typed like a distracted child and left a bigger trail of dropped consonants than a London cabbie.

Further side effects manifested themselves, including an inability to stand upright for more than brief periods. My hair finally started to thin. Nails split from top to bottom. Skin dried to the consistency of overcooked pastry. I looked mummified.

My brother said, ‘My God, you finally look like our father,’ and I thought, Yes, but he’s dead and didn’t look very alive before that.

My peripheral vision altered so that an open cupboard door would appear from nowhere to startle me. Strangest of all, my handwriting started leaning backwards, which my mother had always said was a sign of weak character. These were brain changes, amorphous and fluctuating, the level of change varying from day to day.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Pete. ‘Nobody needs their signature now.’

‘I’m a writer,’ I told him. ‘I sign stuff all the time.’

I did not have the right-shaped head to be bald. When Pete put on a grubby baseball cap it looked as if it had been tailored for him. When I wore one I looked as if I had arrived at a fancy dress store just as it was closing and had accepted the only hat left.

But I did not go bald. The chemo killed everything else in me except the cancer and my hair.

Cancer journeys are boring to read about because most have one conclusion. We don’t want to hear it because it’s unhelpful and defeatist and giving up. We fall ill and get back on our feet. We recover from other illnesses but we have to battle cancer or lose the fight. One day, watching the rain stream down the hospital’s atrium windows, I decided to update their euphemistic brochure with more honest language and present it to one of the nurses. It did not go down well.

The memories of the summer of 2020 had been flushed down the drain. London’s rainfall was now 48 per cent above its average. It was as if someone had turned most of the lights out for weeks on end, adding to the feeling of being trapped. The ruling Ottomans used to lock the weakest members of the family up in their apartments for entire lifetimes, so that they could live in isolated luxury but never seek positions of power in the outside world. I fantasized that I was one of these feeble-minded Sultan’s sons, prepared to risk a death of being dragged by hooks in order to walk openly in sunlit streets.

‘You are such a fucking drama queen,’ said Pete.

I played Ibiza tracks from more carefree times and stopped when I read that José Padilla, the great Spanish DJ, had died. We were roughly the same age with the same cancer.

Sometimes I played the Big C card. ‘Be nice to me, I may not be here for much longer.’ Roll the eyes, look pitiful. It’s funny the first two or three times.

Look, it’s all a bit exhausting, this, isn’t it? But I’m trying to replicate how it was, daily swinging between fantasy and reality, so like me you may wish to take a short break.

Let’s talk some more about writing. If the art of the short story is not your thing, this is your chance to go for a cup of tea and marmalade on toast. You can rejoin us at Chapter 34 and no one will think any the less of you. And because it’s a book you don’t have to do that trying-to-close-the-door-quietly-and-slip-into-the-back-row-unobtrusively thing that latecomers always do.

Short stories seem to accumulate. When I put together my output in a hopeless attempt to understand what I had been trying to achieve, it came to more than 160 stories. A friend of mine who freelances as a sensitivity reader asked me if there was anything in them – they go back to 1985 – that might ‘jump out and bite us’. It’s a good point, and I’m still checking.

I’m always being asked about short stories, mainly by someone with a gleam in their eye who tells me they’re about to attempt one. When I found myself repeating the same advice over and over, I decided to write it down.

It’s here, over the next few pages. Ironically, it’s quite a long chapter for a piece on short fiction.

33

A Little Guide to Writing Short Stories

Old Wine in Pretty Old Bottles

We consume more stories than ever before. We are more literate now, more passive and receptive. We no longer simply read books and newspapers. The ways in which we receive our information are myriad. We absorb information without even realizing it, collecting knowledge we don’t need through advertising, EPGs, apps and social media, and it’s very hard to escape. No wonder most males of working age in the Western world have reduced their reading; they have less time left for fictional stories.

When I was a small child we had two TV channels, BBC radio and two pirate stations, cheap and plentiful comics and an awful lot of books, but we were bored often enough to pursue hobbies.

Although we absorb more, the stories we read barely progress. They’re still written in a style that was popular over a century ago. The storylines of the Marvel comics which have so far been filmed date from the 1960s. The retrenchment to earlier, simpler times continues with a little more self-awareness, that’s all. So with that in mind …

Write What You Don’t Know

If you want to get a short story published, publish it. Do it yourself online. Stick it on a blog. If you don’t have one, piggyback it on to someone else’s and link to it on Twitter. There, you’re published. Then speak to small-press editors about your published story. You don’t have to spatter the metaverse with lots of different works; you just have to get one right.

A lot of what follows here will go against accepted wisdom. I can only speak from my direct experiences and those of my friends.

First, know that bad stories get published; these listless dead-on-arrival things appear regularly in magazines, paperbacks, in small-press editions and on the major bestseller lists. They are filler, and provide modulation. Great stories are often overlooked. The system is not a meritocracy. Publishers will tell you they’re looking for the next big thing but really they want nice little earners that occupy the middle of the road.

If an editor senses a big audience for a terrible book, it will be published. One could argue that you don’t write to please the reader but to please your publisher, who will present your book in an acquisitions meeting and hopefully get approval to promote you. Your publisher is not your enemy but an ally.

What do you hope to achieve? If you want to create a tightly contained, polished piece of work that lasts, you also have to accept that it may never see the light of day. The world is not waiting for you to finish your novel. If you’re writing fiction, you cannot simply sell an idea. Everyone has ideas, even your cat. OK, possibly not your cat. All writing should be delivered complete until you can prove yourself. A finished story is one that’s the best you can ever make it.fn1

We’re living in straitened times when every creative artist is rushing to find a safe earner. This is not exactly the Renaissance.

That’s the bad news. Now let’s bust a couple of myths.

Feelings ruin short stories. Antonia Byatt said that, so forget your feelings for now and concentrate on the circumstances of the story. Detailed descriptions of emotional states don’t take the place of a good tale well told. Build your structure; then you can hang whatever you like on it.

If you’re not having fun don’t do it, because it will show in the writing. Leave out anything that the reader will feel like skipping over.

It’s important to relax. We’re not all the same and you can make no assumptions about your readers. You can’t set out to write something profound. Profundity emerges when characters make decisions based on their circumstances and deal with the consequences. In the prescient 1962 climate crisis novel The Drowned World, the hero perversely does the opposite of what he needs to do to survive. Why? The author, J. G. Ballard, doesn’t tell us, because we don’t need to know.

In Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, the hero jumps ship to save himself. It’s a split-second decision that has lifelong consequences. We understand why he made his choice but in hindsight it’s the wrong one. Both novels ask universal questions about free will to which readers can relate even if the circumstances are alien.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. In any work of art there are three parts: the creator, the work itself and the public. No two factors can operate without the third.

In a short story you can afford to go wild. You can make the main character hateful, alien to yourself. You can make your heroine a cactus if you want. Don’t be afraid. Make lots of mistakes but be sure to finish what you started, and keep going through the part where you don’t think it’s any good. Don’t worry about going off track. Often we do that because it’s where the story leads us, where it starts to get interesting.

Who Cares What Happens?

What does a short story need to do?

Well, it doesn’t have to teach or explain, so there go all those exercises about story arcs. It needs to surprise and entertain and have some kind of a point. It should linger in the mind. What surprises us most? The truth. The details of other people’s private lives would shock you. If you really want to be amazed by incomprehensible human behaviour, spend Christmas with someone else’s family.

Your story needs to ring true, so no copying from TV. Make it something that touches you, something a person said that stuck, something you saw on the way to work. Can you tell the truth when you’re writing a story in which your hero is a bathmat? Yes, if it behaves like your worst relative.

Here’s an opening line from John Collier’s ‘The Devil, George, and Rosie’. It starts ‘There was a young man who was invariably spurned by the girls, not because he smelt at all bad but because he happened to be as ugly as a monkey.’ You want to read on, don’t you?

So, the aims. To entertain. To surprise. To reveal a truth. To touch the reader.

Pick a single aim for your story. It must be easy to follow, with a singularity of purpose. Don’t try to squash the events of the novel you once had an idea for into a single piece of short fiction.

The Secret

The secret – and I think it is a secret, because no one talks about it – is to be so relaxed that at first you really don’t care how the story turns out. You’ll write badly at the start – we all do. But hopefully it will get better. There’s a certain kind of determined writer who approaches a laptop with an earnest intention and pages of crabbed notes. They overthink every word from the outset and demand answers about motivation before they’ve put their characters through the mill. A reader will be keen to empathize with a character and experience their dilemma as directly as possible.

Will your story feature a crime? Will it have an element of the supernatural? Crime stories combine easily with the supernatural; theoretically they shouldn’t because the supernatural is inexplicable and crime novels explain.

But we’re not rational people. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories are drenched in an atmosphere of supernatural dread even though they are fairly straightforward crime stories. Sherlock Holmes thrives on the seemingly impossible, and even though explanations are provided, the solutions don’t always make us completely comfortable. We remember the Hound of the Baskervilles as a supernatural creature, no matter how much we are told otherwise.

The initial circumstances of a crime are always remembered better than the solution. Why else did the Mary Celeste fascinate so? We ask ourselves ‘How could this happen?’ Surely some greater evil hangs over the participants? Adding an explanation assuages the fear. We explain away the strangeness.

Scary Bingo

In his short story ‘Caterpillars’, E. F. Benson’s hero stays at an Italian villa where he sees ghostly pale caterpillars with crab-like feet in the bedroom of his friend Mr Inglis. He names the hitherto unknown (to him) species ‘Cancer Inglisensis’. Six months later he discovers that Inglis has in fact died of cancer. The disease had taken the physical form of caterpillars. The story is barely ten pages long and contains all the key elements needed to tell it well, but it has something more, a hothouse atmosphere of sickness that’s hard to shake off. And there is a suggestion of something even worse; at one point the caterpillars start moving towards a new victim, indicating the terrible randomness of the disease.

If we look to writers like H. H. ‘Saki’ Munro, H. G. Wells or Rudyard Kipling, we find tales that combine the rational and the irrational in a simple, satisfying balance. There’s a Kipling tale about a man who grinds a cigarette stub out on a statue of Hanuman. He’s attacked by a leprous beggar and contracts an illness, but the story is complicated by the leper’s supernatural power to remove the curse.

‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ by M. R. James tells of an introverted academic who happens upon a strange whistle while exploring a Knights Templar cemetery on the East Anglian coast. When it’s blown, it unleashes a supernatural force that terrorizes its discoverer. What does this force look like? It looks like a man some way off in the distance, always walking towards you, always getting nearer, like an image from a nightmare. How does it turn out? That’s not important – it’s the image that stays with you.

Writers love rules and the short story is a perfect place for setting them. You won’t reinvent the wheel and nobody expects you to come up with everything fully formed – it’s a process in which each development stage adds something new and fresh. At the end you’ll look back and see the idea is there, and that the theme has emerged. And then you revise.

Sometimes it’s hard to spot where the idea is. Joyce Carol Oates wrote a tale called ‘The Bingo Master’, and if I tell you that the idea is about a young woman winning at bingo, you’d not be interested. But the woman is desperately lonely in a dreary small town, the travelling bingo master is handsome, urbane and charming, and when she wins his game he must meet her to give her a prize.

So the idea involves a budding romance? No – because the bingo master leads her on, then spurns her advances and makes her feel ashamed. She has misread the signs; she thought he was interested in her and he is not.

So is the idea about how you can be mistaken in love? No, because in her haste to leave his room, the young woman leaves with her prize cheque unsigned. The bingo master manipulated the situation to shame the woman into keeping silent. That way he can keep the prize money, for he is a con man.

So the idea is actually about a girl whose fragile confidence is no match for a ruthless trickster. But you can’t get there without thinking the process through. Is it a frightening story? Yes, because you become frightened for her.

If Ms Oates was writing the story now I’m sure there would be pressure on her to send a more positive message, but the point is better made with a sad ending.

Pick Your Scenario

Your other go-to gals for brilliantly unsettling short stories are Margaret Millar, Nedra Tyre, Charlotte Armstrong and the deeply haunted Shirley Jackson. In Millar’s ‘The People Across the Canyon’, a mother gradually loses her daughter to her new neighbours, with a punchline that’s perhaps too good to spoil, but it’s the atmosphere of dread that proves most bothersome.

The shape of a story is built by the idea, the characters, the aim, the scenario, the plot, the style, the atmosphere. If you don’t approach the construction of the story with care you can end up with something plodding and manipulative, because you have to keep dragging at your characters to get them back on track.

Stories and films about race, gender and politics often end up doing this because they don’t unfold in a natural progression – they start with an authorial aim that the characters are forced to follow. In everything but the whodunnit, exposition is the enemy.

Having established the story’s purpose – to entertain, to surprise, to reveal a truth, to touch and disturb the reader – we should go to the scenario, which runs concurrently with plot and character.

In his short novel Concrete Island, J. G. Ballardfn2 imagines a man who crashes his car off a motorway and survives in the long grass at its base, eating the food thrown from car windows. Here he meets others who live like this. Ballard tells you nothing of what the man is like or what will happen to him. Instead he uses the idea to explore our alienation in modern society; the hero has himself been thrown away. The scenario allowed him to take the tale in any direction he wanted, and perhaps it would probably have served best as a short story, but the path the author chooses is unexpected.

Pick your scenario. A pair of schoolboys play a cruel trick on an old woman. An African girl from a small village arrives in a big city for the first time. An idiot tries to impress a sophisticated woman at a party. Whatever you come up with, stay with it to the end.

Give Your Hero a Terrible Time

Your scenario can be as grand as you like, or as small. Tiny moments can reveal great truths. Sometimes it’s fun to be big, but it’s important to keep the opening clear and engaging. I recently attended an art exhibition in which most of the classical paintings were vast and allegorical except one, a picture of a woman fishing inside her nightshirt for a flea. A crowd had gathered around this picture because it was instantly relatable.

I read a story about a man who witnesses a death in the countryside, but the thing I remember most is a moment before something bad happens. A fat raindrop the size of an old coin smacks on to his car bonnet, making him jump. We’ve all jumped at something silly. The raindrop is a forewarning of the unexpected. Mood creation is essential, but think about the details. Sometimes it’s the topping that flavours the main course.

Short stories have no time to waste. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Bottle Imp’, a sailor buys an old bottle. The genie inside it comes with a warning; he must be sold for less than he was paid for, or the sailor will have to take his place – but it’s impossible to sell the bottle for less because the hero bought it with the smallest coin in the realm. So he thinks he can beat the genie by sailing to a country that has even smaller denominations …

Stories are more enjoyable when the main character has a terrible time. Panic breeds action and action gives you pace – when I read a short story in which a lonely woman stares out of a window thinking about her life my heart sinks, because I know we are off to a slow start and we only have a few pages. The reader is often ahead of the writer, considering the likely outcome of the tale, playing over all the possibilities – and how awful for the writer if the reader has already thought about where the tale is going and dismissed it as boring?

Writers have blind spots. We concern ourselves about getting every element in place without noticing that we’ve become long-winded and dull.

Good plots satisfy immensely. For this reason Roald Dahl is often cited as the perfect short-story writer, but he’s only one of a great number, and certainly not as good as, say, Daphne du Maurier. Dahl is accessible and shares a common understanding of people. He’s also easy to read; no crime, this – for some reason, certain writers go out of their way to be unreadable in short form. I’ve been guilty myself. I once wrote a story in futuristic phonetic teen slang – I’ve never met anyone who’s read it.

Fifty Years of Fears

Inspiration for a plot can come, of course, from newspaper reports, friends, the internet, anywhere, but they’re rarely enough on their own.

A few years ago I judged a competition in which we asked first-time writers to produce a piece of fiction about something that genuinely upsets them. Fears change. If you could go back in time and ask your grandparents what they worried about, they might have said the war, or ghosts and murderers and the dark. If you ask a teenager now they may say they have a fear of being not liked or respected. That’s why I wrote a story called ‘Hated’, in which a man has a curse placed on him that makes everybody hate him. He’s used to being liked and can’t handle this, so he asks for the curse to be lifted and for everyone to love him. He gets his wish and dies. And at his funeral everyone falls over themselves to say nice things about him.

Fifty years ago our list of fears might also have included fear of poverty, starvation, darkness, old houses. But now, we see that the modern list would probably include body dysmorphia, loss of control, peer pressure, disrespect, sickness, ageing, climate change and that perennial favourite, the fear of war.

Having grown up a shy and timid boy, I feared the dark at the top of the stairs more than any idea of ageing. The concept of peer pressure didn’t exist. That modern list would have meant very little to the nine-year-old me. Fears change with the times, but the root cause is fundamentally constant.

Over the past thirty years something changed about the nature of genre fiction: its barriers were removed. Many of us first discovered strange stories as teenagers. Originally, they were specifically not for the young. They were forbidden fruit, often revolving around unspoken adult concepts. They unsettled by encouraging the exploration of alarming ideas. Most of our adult lives are spent trying to get comfortable, and trying to forget the stories that upset us when we were impressionable.

The short stories of Dino Buzzatifn3 have the grim inevitability of an infinite downward spiral, as roads never end, grand houses collapse, rivers flood, good people get sick or starve, revolutions occur and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that anyone can do about it.

It will come as no surprise that he is largely out of print, while M. R. James is constantly republished. I find James’s tales filled with comforting nostalgia, hardly disturbing, and the same goes for H. P. Lovecraft, whose tales of nameless horror I have never enjoyed. I prefer Elizabeth Jane Howard, whose final haunting image in the story ‘Three Miles Up’ stayed with me for years and shows her terrific storytelling strength. In it, two friends take a barge up a river that keeps getting emptier and creepier, without end.

Keep Something Hidden (Part 1)

If there’s one piece of advice accepted by almost every short-story writer, it’s that part of what is displayed should remain hidden. And perhaps that is what we’ve lost, because now everyone tells everyone everything. There’s no information we can’t get hold of.

What is there left to hide? What is unthinkable? Unimaginable?

If you have too much happening in a short story, you’ll lose your reader. Too little plot unveiled too slowly will bore them as much as too much plot will confuse.

A short story is not a three-act play. It doesn’t need the kind of structure one would expect in a novel. It may even end before the main event. In Ballard’s ‘The Watchtowers’, sinister towers are built all over a frightened town and nobody knows what they’re for. In the last line of the story they all begin to open at once. What happens? We don’t know. The point is to highlight the effect that a police state has on ordinary people.

In a very famous story, Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’, villagers hold a raffle and cheerfully stone a character to death, but there is no explanation provided that will allow us to understand their cruelty. The point of the story is that real cruelty is inexplicable. So the plot doesn’t directly provide the reader with satisfaction. It is the author’s delivery method for the idea.

A plot is a skeleton; it’s hidden beneath the skin. It needs characters and scenario to function. The perfect plot may well be one that emerges from a hidden factor that’s only visible from one angle.

Here’s a good example.

‘Don’t look now,’ says John to his wife, ‘but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotize me.’

John and Laura have lost their daughter – she drowned – and now they’re in Venice. Daphne du Maurier’s short story ‘Don’t Look Now’ combines three ideas.

1. John and Laura lost a child.

2. Two people are psychic but only one of them knows it.

3. There’s a killer on the loose in Venice.

The writer creates a situation in which these three facts rely on each other. If the couple had not gone to Venice; if there wasn’t a killer roaming the dark alleys; if the old ladies hadn’t been in the café. Laura spends too much time with them and John gets frightened for her. We can’t see what’s coming because we’re looking in the wrong direction and missing the obvious, just as John has missed it.

When John spots the old ladies watching him and his wife in that café he’s annoyed with them because they say they can see the ghost of a little girl sitting between the couple. John thinks they’re mad or sinister or crooks. He also knows that his wife is desperately looking for a reason to believe. We don’t know that much about anyone – it’s a short story, after all – but we do know they’re in conflict with each other from the very beginning.

The story is a masterpiece of misdirection that gets readers jumping to the wrong conclusion from the outset. If John understood what he was seeing everything would have been different – how often in life do we ask ourselves what would have happened if we’d only behaved differently?

Be Unpredictable

A plot can’t simply be dropped on to its characters. Free will must be exercised – but of course people are blind, or optimistic, or selfish, and this affects the outcome. Characters tell us who they are by the actions and decisions they take. The critic Kenneth Tynan said that you don’t need to know why two people fall in love, you just need to know that they do. Similarly, in a time-travel story you don’t necessarily need to understand how time travel works. In the much-loved Time and Again, author Jack Finney actually talks through the mechanics of time travel and makes it simple but still just beyond the reader’s reach.

There is a tendency for new writers to create one-note characters. People are rarely just one thing. They’re infuriatingly contradictory, but you don’t have to reveal all their facets in one tale. Rather, you highlight the facet that the scenario brings to the fore.

The greatest plot danger is predictability. I’ve read a great many stories where I’m ahead of the writer. It’s not because I’m especially astute – I had trouble following Game of Thrones – but what seems original to the author is not always original to the reader.

The unexpected is important. It’s the element in any story that makes you want to describe something you’ve read to others. ‘You’ll never guess what happened today’ is a phrase that begs the other person to undermine any surprise.

Mystery writing, in particular, is about the fair withholding of information. It would be a cheat to reveal at the end that the protagonist is an alien. Holding back a random surprise is not the same as withholding information. You’re the one marshalling all the facts; you can choose how to release them.

In another Du Maurier tale, ‘Adieu Sagesse’, a dull sixty-year-old banker has three children and a wife obsessed with appearance and status. He owns a leaky old boat that has never been sailed, and lovingly tends it. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that he’ll soon give his horrible family the finger before taking off for the open sea. After all, the title can be translated as ‘Goodbye Common Sense’. But instead of a closing scene in which the old man sails into a calm and glorious sunset – the perfect happy ending – Du Maurier makes him sail off into stormy grey seas. This is a lower-key ending, but a surprise all the same. The suggestion is that it won’t be plain sailing, but at least he’s got away. It’s more realistic.

Stephen King has a good trick. He asks himself: What if? What if a schoolgirl has telekinetic powers and doesn’t know it? He often mixes two scenarios to form a new plot. He’ll also use another trick: take a very, very simple idea and keep pushing it further and further, beyond its natural ending.fn4

Create Paradoxes

I can’t create your plot for you, but I can give you an example of where one might come from.

I once read a newspaper report about African towns with no natural water supply. How do they survive? They have the water delivered in a tanker once a week. What if somebody steals the truck? Why would they do that? Well, how about a guy who needs to leave town fast whose only way out is by hijacking the tanker? Suddenly I knew the story was there, because a moral problem had been created. The anti-hero can save himself by taking the truck, but will doom the whole town. If I care about what will happen, so will the reader. I called the tale ‘Cupped Hands’.

Look for stories where there are urgent decisions to be made. Look for stories where the decisions are impossible to make. Then have your character decide to act in a way that surprises everyone, including yourself. How do you do that? By asking yourself what is the most outlandish, unlikely, incorrect solution. You probably won’t go with it, but it’ll get you thinking about other decisions, right or wrong.

I personally love outlandish ideas that somehow justify themselves, thanks to good characters and good writing. Characters lose sight of themselves when they fall in love or are filled with hatred. The reader has the advantage of watching them from the outside.

Create Characters

There’s one other thing we have to do – create a memorable character. In a short story you have limited time to fix characters in your readers’ heads.

Don’t over-describe their physical appearance.

Don’t make them instantly likeable or dislikeable.

Don’t add too many characteristics or make them too complicated.

Don’t over-explain or over-analyse them. People are intrinsically annoying and mysterious. If you ask them to all go this way, some will go that way. A murderer may stop to pat a dog.

My mother once wrote a short story in which she established a family dynasty of about thirty characters – on the first page! By page two, I was hopelessly confused. Keep your story simple.

However, a short story frees you up to do anything with your characters, and you can establish a lot in a brief time. You can write, ‘When Jack Smith was born, his mother was frightened by a taxi and gave birth to him in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. For the rest of his short life he walked around London acting as if he owned the place.’ A bit of childhood history can establish your hero’s later behaviour.

In John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’, a wealthy businessman decides to swim home. How? Via the swimming pools that cover the neighbourhood. As he goes from house to house and swims across his friends’ pools and has cocktails with all his neighbours, we get a snapshot of their safe and comfortable lives. But when the hero makes it home, there is no home, and has not been for a while. The bank has repossessed it.

It’s fatal to describe someone thinking about their life on the page when you’ve only got two thousand words. Why should we care? A simple action can place us with or against them from the outset. Jill catches an old woman who is about to fall in front of a bus and sees her home, but she also takes some money that’s been left lying on her table. Those two actions tell us much more about the character than having her stand at the window.

Horrible People

Most great short-story writers use action to reveal the nature of their characters to the reader. Your lead character doesn’t have to be a nice person – some of the most exciting ones are horrible – but you still need to make the reader care about them.Evelyn Waugh’s characters are often hopelessly passive. ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ is actually the concluding chapter from the novel A Handful of Dust. Its ineffectual but entirely sympathetic hero becomes lost in the jungle and is saved by a kindly old Englishman who has been living there for years. But when the hero’s rescuers arrive, he misses them because he is sleeping off a fever. They look around and leave – and our hero is doomed to stay in the jungle for ever.

Why? Because the old man drugged him and hid him before the rescuers arrived. He enjoyed having the hero read Dickens to him, and wants him to stay there reading the same book to him over and over for ever. But, thinking about it, is the villain of the piece really any worse than the hero? They both wanted something, but the ‘villain’ took action – which makes him, strangely, almost more appealing than the leading man.

Make Them Flawed

One way to jump-start a story is by giving your hero a flaw and putting them in a situation which will expose that flaw. For example, a writer gets a job looking after a haunted hotel for the winter but he drinks. A sickly child venerates a pet ferret as a god but uses this obsession to take revenge.fn5 In Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades’ a young officer hears about a countess who knows the secret of card-playing because she sold her soul to the devil. The young man is ambitious and in debt so he gets hold of the secret. Doesn’t that present a lot of possibilities to you?

The simpler the set-up, the more fun you can have with it. Stacy Aumonier is a long-forgotten English author who used to do just this. Here’s the set-up to his story ‘Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty’.

A shy county spinster who has never been abroad before has to stay in a French hotel. Using the shared bathroom, she goes back to her room and shuts the door, but the handle comes off in her hand. Then she realizes that there’s a man asleep in the bed – she’s locked in the wrong room. Mortified, she hides under the bed, unaware that the man beneath the sheets is dead. Her escape from the room involves a trick with matches, a candle and a hairpin.

After her adventure she writes home, but her letter is only filled with mundane news. It’s in her nature to be reticent, and that means avoiding sensationalism. So, this is a story that achieves all of our opening aims: to entertain, to surprise, to reveal a truth and to touch the reader. By dispensing with anything too complex the author was free to explore the situation for several pages.

If you want, things can be made even simpler. The title of a Julio Cortázar tale is ‘House Taken Over’, and that is literally what happens, although we never discover by whom. There are a great many stories where characters are almost entirely undefined. In ‘Seven Floors’ by Dino Buzzati, a businessman with a very minor ailment is admitted to a hospital in which each floor denotes a different severity of illness, the ground level being reserved for those about to die. By accident, he soon finds himself being shunted downward, floor by floor. For me the punchline arrived thirty seconds after I’d finished reading the story, but I’ve always been a bit slow on the uptake.

In Buzzati’s ‘Just the Very Thing They Wanted’, a touring couple visit a small town and find themselves denied the most basic human rights: the need to sit down, to drink, to rest, to gather their strength. That doesn’t sound very frightening but it is; to be refused the simplest things makes you realize just how helpless you’d be without other people. But Buzzati goes one step further and makes the other people locals who despise strangers.

Tricks of the Trade

There are other tricks you can use, like the Unreliable Narrator. Example: ‘It Didn’t Work Out’ by Margery Allingham. Polly and Lou are performers and best friends until Lou marries creepy Frank, who’s a liar, a wastrel and a braggart who destroys Lou’s career. Polly tricks the drunken Frank into climbing on to a building ledge and pushes him off. Lou can now resume her career and the friends can go back to being how they were before Frank came along. How does it end?

Lou kills herself. She can’t live without Frank, and her best friend was too obsessed to see that she was acting out of selfish jealousy.

Another trick is the Story Without an Ending. In Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’, no explanation for the birds’ violent behaviour is given. The lack of explanation is what makes it so powerful. I saw an interview with the director of an utterly pointless (and very bad) sequel in which he said, ‘This time we’re giving audiences something they really want to know: what makes the birds act like that?’ And I thought, No, that’s the very last thing they want!

The beauty of the twist story is that it can be very, very short. In Harlan Ellison’s ‘The Boulevard of Broken Dreams’, Fenton, a man in a coffee shop, sees a Nazi war criminal walk past, but he’s sure the man died many years ago. It must be someone who looks like him. But when he goes out on to the street Fenton sees another dead Nazi and another. And when Fenton looks down at his arm he finds an armband with a yellow star on it. He’s still reliving the horrors of the past, many years after arriving in America. The story is very short but its idea is big.

Nobody expects you to do this sort of thing straight away. Simplicity is difficult and comes with experience. The moments that get under the skin are betrayal and disappointment, love and fear and suspicion; it’s part of being human.

As I’ve mentioned, most writers fall into one of two types. We’re mapmakers planners or gardeners. That is, we either map everything out on a grid in advance, or we throw handfuls of seeds and see what ideas germinate from those. I’m a gardener. Ideally though, you need to be a bit of both in balance. And that’s the hardest part of all.

Keep Something Hidden (Part 2)

Let me give you a good example of a story in which parts remain hidden. Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is a novella and rather difficult to read, but the 1961 film version, called The Innocents, crystallizes his intentions. It involves possession and madness, ghosts and suicides, sexual perversion and child cruelty and even, possibly, paedophilia – but you won’t find any of this on the surface of the tale.

It’s not until you think about it afterwards that you realize just how depraved the hidden story is, but it lies beneath the sunshine and flowers and birdsong and gentility and politeness. Later the story was misguidedly revisited by director Michael Winner, who spelled out many of these hidden things, with the result that it had no power at all.

How do you hide your secrets? By telling a tale about people and what they do to each other, then taking out the parts where you’re giving the reader too much information, so that they have to work the rest out for themselves.

This may not be what you want to do. You may want to write the story about a ghostly pirate girl who cuts off people’s heads and drinks their blood in order to live for ever, but it will just go on that pile of stories based on other stories which are based on films and TV shows. You may write a story about the Spanish court of four hundred years ago, only you’re in England in the present day because the Armada succeeded. I’m afraid the SF author John Brunner beat you to that one, but it doesn’t matter; you can tackle the same story but your personal vision will alter it in every way.

Finding Your Voice

Your main character doesn’t have to be nice to be heroic. But they should be redeemable. Damaged characters are more interesting, but don’t lose sight of the fact that in the real world people can hurt you physically and mentally. Small women are understandably wary of big men. Kids are nervous around strangers. Some sense danger while others misread signals and stay with those who will do them harm. There are people who cannot differentiate good from evil, just as if they were colour-blind. There are liars and thieves who will do anything, say anything to get what they want.

All of these elements go to make a memorable story, but of course you can’t itemize them and drop them in like recipe ingredients. You use what you need.

Write as if you don’t care what anyone thinks, trust your own judgement and don’t be judged in advance. As a child I slavishly copied the plots and styles of every writer I admired. Copying is fine until you can throw away the results and use your own words.

Writing is analogous to painting and performance. Each tiny decision you make changes meaning and gives your art its personality. You’ll find yourself repeating certain sentence structures, themes and phrases. It’s all part of finding your voice.

A Favourite Short Story

Actually I have about two dozen favourites, and arranging them into an anthology occupies my lying-in-the-bath moments. Here’s an example of a perfect tale that covers every point we’ve been discussing.

The Door in the Wall (1906) – H. G. Wells

This was one of Wells’s last short stories, because he was starting to see that the market was controlling what he wrote, and he no longer felt comfortable producing short fiction. So it’s a valedictory tale, and all the more profound for being so. Its sixteen pages hold within them an entire life, from innocence to experience, love and loss, hope and regret, closure and a hint of paradise. One cavil: it’s that maligned beast, a white middle-class middle-aged male story – and yet it’s not at all.

Albert Camus once said that the whole of our adult life is an attempt to recover the first images that gained access to our souls. That’s Wells’s theme here.

The hero is a man called Lionel Wallace, a successful Edwardian gentleman living in Kensington. He tells his old friend Redmond of the inexplicable events which have dogged him all his life, starting when he was five years old. Lionel is on his way home from school when he discovers a scruffy street, and a green door in a white wall surrounded by vines.

He doesn’t know why, but he goes through the door and finds two spotted panthers, parrots, an exotic sunlit garden, a pretty girl, a capuchin monkey. An older lady takes him into the house and shows him a book where each page has moving images from his life. When he tries to see the future he ends up back on the street.

And so he goes home to the grey reality of English life. Then, one day on the way to school, he sees the door again. He’s late, so he doesn’t stop because he’ll get into trouble. But he tells his friends, and they demand to see this incredible place. Yet when he takes them there he can’t remember the name of the street. And he can’t find the door anywhere.

Time passes. He’s now seventeen, on his way to Oxford and a scholarship. He’s in a cab, smoking a cigarette, and there it is, the door, but it’s his first day, so he sends the cabman onwards. He has a more important door to deal with, the door to his career is opening.

The years pass. Lionel falls in and out of love, advances his career in politics, becomes successful, and throughout it all he sees the door every now and again. It seems to move about, from Campden Hill to Earl’s Court, but every time he sees it he is not in a position to stop and go through it. One night he is heading to the reading of a parliamentary bill and there it is again, before his car headlights. But if he stops now the bill will be lost, so on he goes into parliament.

The door only ever appears when he has no time to stop. Heartbroken, having told his friend his story, Lionel goes home.

A few days later his body is found at the bottom of a deep excavation, behind a white hoarding with a small door cut in it. A railway extension is being built through London.

His friend Redmond wonders, was Lionel on his way home late from parliament, did he think he’d finally found the door? Did it ever even exist? And did he somehow discover paradise beyond it, once and for all time?

34

Pride & Extreme Prejudice

I wanted dreams of sunshine to fill my head, but sat at the kitchen table unable to clear the grey clouds from behind my eyes. I opened my box of medication and removed a leaflet concerning side effects.

Caution: May cause rashes, blurred vision, loss of appetite, loss of taste and smell, poor fashion choices, failure to concentrate, confusion, dizziness, forgetfulness, permanent hearing problems, inability to walk steadily, think clearly, stand up, write, speak or piss without missing the bowl, projectile vomiting, violent and unstoppable evacuation, humiliation in public, insistence on being possessed by the demon Pazuzu, setting off fireworks indoors, screaming into the night sky, leaving omelette pans on a high gas, burning down whole towns and starting Putin-style international conflicts.

How many dictators committed atrocities because their emotions were heightened by a burnt-out neurovascular system or irregular bowel movements?

The healing process was not quite as linear as I’d hoped it would be. Not to sound too Blanche DuBois about it but there were days when the mirrors had to be turned.fn1

The summer of 2021 grew colder and colder. I watched forest-fire footage from Australia and felt envious. The Californian hills were ablaze. I sat closer to the TV to try to bask in the warmth. I saw abortion protests in Texas with blue skies above the protestors and thought, ‘Not a single cloud. Wow.’ That’s how selfish I can be. I could watch footage of a serial killer and think, ‘He’s kind of cute. I mean, if I was careful …’

I called Maggie. There was no reply. She had written me a note on Monday. It said, ‘Thank you so much for lunch yesterday. I wasn’t actually sick.’ Which I supposed was a compliment of some kind. She texted me most days. I’ll spare you her multiple spellings of ‘diarreargh’.

‘You were a long time answering,’ I said when she finally picked up.

‘I was frying bacon. I think I know why it always catches fire. The butcher slices it too thinly. It’s so gloomy here that I had to put the lights on. July, it’s a disgrace.’

‘It’s probably smoke. Don’t blacken the kitchen again. You have to be more careful.’

‘I know. Last week I put the oven on the self-cleaning setting. It gets ever so hot. I forgot I’d left a plastic bowl inside with some pork chops in it. What do you need?’

‘I need some decent daylight,’ I told her. ‘It’s the only way I can think clearly and work. When I went to Barcelona to write Oranges and Lemons I finished it in two-thirds of the normal time.’ There was a long silence. ‘Can you hear me? Do you have your hearing aid in?’

‘I can hear you perfectly, love. You said something about fruit. Do you want me to bring you a persimmon? It may be off.’

Maggie refused to wear her hearing aid because it made her feel old, and after a lifetime of modelling and looking artificially young she did not wish to feel old even at eighty, a number she had banned from her house. The one time I had managed to fit the hearing aid into her ear she had lost it in the street three minutes later, where a taxi ran over it.

‘A burst of sunshine first thing in the morning is enough to make you sleep better at night. Are you feeling well?’

‘Well no, not really. I’m waiting for a scan, but Covid—’

‘I’m staying indoors, except when I go out,’ she interrupted because she hadn’t heard anything on the line. ‘I’ve changed my hair colour. I got hair dye on all bathroom surfaces, then slipped over, but I’m too vain for grab-rails. My hair is not what I expected.’

‘Your hair is never what any of us expect.’

‘I can’t stop on the phone. I am reading about coconut production. I dealt with a very hot Indian receptionist yesterday when I was handing in my faecal sample. Apparently I didn’t close the lid properly. He told me not to fill it so full next time. I think he likes me.’

‘Maggie, you can’t flirt with your bowel doctor.’

‘Oh, innards are all the same to me, love. I always thought when men talked about the prostate it meant lying on the ground.’

‘You spend even more time in hospitals than I do.’

‘I have a natural affinity with them. Seven years ago I left my body to the British Medical Board for Research as I wanted to be useful. My daughter says nobody wants a cadaver with Covid.’

‘You haven’t got Covid,’ I all but shouted.

‘I probably will have. The dog did a poo in the lounge and I didn’t have any of those little plastic bags so I used oven gloves and got it all over me. Do you want to come round for dinner?’

‘I can’t at the moment.’ There were very few things I could eat right now, and the last thing I needed was Maggie’s Greek Lamb, which often had surprise ingredients like handfuls of chillis, condensed milk and, once, a Brillo pad. ‘I need to start writing again.’

‘You’re just finishing your chemo, aren’t you? Why don’t you give yourself a break?’

‘I’m waiting to get a scan. I’m wound up. I need something to occupy my mind.’

‘You should do something practical. Have you tried talking to Jesus?’

I had reached the age when most of my friends had gone mad. The faint traces of abnormality they had shown when we were all young, those traits we had all found amusingly eccentric and bohemian, had blossomed into complex illogical behaviour, too many cats and strange beliefs. Thank God Maggie couldn’t figure out her computer otherwise by now she would have been drinking bleach and setting fire to 5G masts.

She and her friends had a flair for drama. As a consequence, Pete and I were urgently called to their houses to find lost keys and missing pets, to ‘mend the internet’ or bleed radiators or make calls cancelling the purchase of three hundred yards of wire fencing ‘accidentally ordered’. This is what gay men do in the second halves of their lives; they keep an angel eye on the lonely women who get left behind by men who selfishly desert them by dying or running off with younger women.

One day I was urgently summoned and found Happy, Maggie’s old cat, lying stretched out and very dead on the ironing board.

‘I’m having a wake,’ she explained. ‘I thought you would want to pay your last respects.’

We buried Happy in the garden with about ten other pets, not all of them hers.

Normality had left the building. There were lockdowns, there weren’t lockdowns; nobody was quite sure where they stood. It was a summer of waiting. With the chemo finally coming to an end I could heal and maybe we could return to a semblance of routine life.

London is an indoor city that turns the eye upon itself. It stages outdoor arts events with a kind of dogged desperation, as if the arts must go on no matter how miserable and uncomfortable the experience. I’d sworn never to attend another open-air A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the month of August. ‘I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon.’ That’s because it hasn’t stopped pissing down for the last two hours, luv.

Once I could write anywhere, with any amount of noise and disruption. Now I was a hostage to chemistry. It was important to treat this as just another form of writer’s block that could be overcome.

At the hospital I watched the nurses at work, moving from one supine patient to the next in rotation, running lightly when an alarm alerted them, exuding nothing but calm. They were African, French, Spanish, Italian, Taiwanese, Korean, Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Lebanese. No Japanese, no Americans, and now hardly any Europeans.

It goes without saying that there was no such thing as political correctness in the post-war years; the concept would have been anathema. Actors blacked up and caricatured the vocal inflections of other races because most British people had never seen or met any kind of foreign person. There’s a difference between ignorance and venality. We lived on an island. The first people of colour did not start arriving in any quantity until the 1950s. The hospital clinic was full of old people with old ideas. Most of them had learned to keep their mouths shut in order not to sound racist. I got the feeling that they wanted to say the right thing, but were nervous about what they were supposed to say instead.

When I was a child language was forthright, bluntly descriptive and static, simpler and more succinct than it is now. There were fewer words in circulation. Thoughts and ideas were more straightforward. My mother would say ‘cripple’ or ‘spastic’ because this was received vocabulary and the idea of anyone taking offence was absurd. The signs of the war were still around – men with missing arms, eyes and legs. A few euphemisms were used to spare feelings; ‘chest problems’ referred to pleuritic lungs and bronchial damage. ‘Twice round the daffodils’ referred to bronchial healing.fn2 Some men had turned ‘simple’, others were suffering from undiagnosed PTSD and ‘lived on their nerves’ or ‘didn’t go out much’. ‘Don’t mention the war’ was not a comedy phrase but a seriously intended admonishment that carried risks.

Yet to sound like a racist was not automatically to be one. My father’s cheerful bandying about of insensitive terminology did not extend to his personal relationships with Black, gay or Asian people, all of which were lifelong and deeply felt, and he was very accepting of my sexuality, unlike my religious mother.

Thinking about it now, I have fewer Black friends than my father had. I mostly hung around with writers and there were virtually no British authors of colour in the field of published popular fiction. There still aren’t. Being gay was different, less visibly marked out, and I weathered the pervasive poof jokes without much sense of outrage. The fear of difference did not just emanate from males; my mother’s female friends constantly monitored their children for signs of effeminacy. Few bonds formed between Black and gay men. People of colour in London were mostly Jamaican and Christian when I was growing up. After equality, flamboyance left the streets, where it had been tribal and had an earthy sexuality. It gravitated to RuPaul shows, where drag queens became family-friendly, as colourful and anodyne as tropical fish.

The times move with insidious speed. Many people got left behind. Far more disturbing were those who embraced Black friends and then condescended to them insultingly. But some recently unearthed television documentaries revealed a more nuanced and articulate reaction to race, poverty and women’s rights in the 1960s than I’d imagined. In one, a group of working-class women stood in the street discussing what to do about two Black children who had smashed their windows, and decided among themselves that the first thing was to take race out of the equation.

Oddly, my kindly, liberal mother once shocked me by voicing a commonly held post-war opinion that ‘the Jewish people had tragically suffered for controlling the banks’. She was a woman who avoided any discussion of money because it was vulgar, and it was this very English fear of worrying about what others might think and being thought common that governed her behaviour. She once told me she felt sorry for homosexuals because they would be ‘condemned to loneliness in later life’. She had clearly never turned her attention to her own arid marriage.

As I watched the patients who gratefully received the attention of their nurses I wondered: Is this how you think too, even now? Would you be so civil to your nurses if you encountered them in the street? This woman just helped you put your skirt back on in a toilet. Will you talk to her socially outside?

Fear of difference takes many different forms. That summer Pete was at a dinner in Somerset sitting next to a woman who asked him, ‘Wharfrm?’, which he was able to translate as ‘Where are you from?’ (Like most people with privileged educations she sounded as if she had slightly too many teeth.) When he replied, ‘London,’ she turned her chair away from him. If you can shut out the world you can keep your prejudices intact.

‘You English are all the same,’ said Pete over dinner. ‘You just don’t see it because you’re in London. I listen to you all apologizing for your ignorance without doing anything about it. You and I have no shared background, so I don’t have to believe in your country. Your leaders used to break the law when they thought no one else was looking, but now they don’t even bother to hide their lies. You never take the lead unless it’s in your interests. Britain, the butler to the world, grasping at all the poisoned money that falls their way and using it to prop up a rotting system.’

‘Steady on,’ I said, but I knew he was fundamentally right, that Johnson and his shameless chums had destroyed my belief in my own country. Like most of my generation I had been raised to naïvely believe that we held the moral high ground. I had been a baby when the Suez Crisis had initiated our fall from grace.

‘Where has it left you now?’ he pushed. ‘Brexit has curtailed your freedom and reduced your standard of living. Your nation is irrelevant, forgotten but not gone, and none of you will stand up for your rights. Why aren’t you angrier? What do you want for dessert?’

A week later, some good news.

Dr Ramalan called me at ten one evening and said I was good to go. He wouldn’t see the full results just yet but things looked promising and I should get out and have some fun. Of course there was nowhere in the world we could go with the possible exception of Christmas Island and a handful of rocks solely inhabited by penguins. Nobody wanted the English with their soaraway virus cases and casual attitude to social distancing.

While Pete and I were sensible about our health and the health of others, we weren’t obsessive. He continued to pick up all the rubbish in the street daily and I usually caught the tube. Some of our neighbours were horrified: how could you go out there and try to live normally, especially with your extreme-risk health status? Why not seal yourself inside Ziploc bags?

One lovely couple invited us to a cocktail party that was going to take place in their front garden with them staying inside the living room waving out of the window. I couldn’t see much fun in that.

The local cinema bravely opened. I went alone to see a depressing film called Saint Maud. The lady in the box office brought me free coffee and cake, just for making the effort of venturing out and sitting through it.

‘We thought you looked lonely in there,’ she said, ‘what with the film not being very good and you being the only one in the cinema.’

35

Binning Books

Pete and I had not been planning to live together.

One minute we were salivating outside estate agents’ windows, the next we were sitting in a café calculating service charges. The only snag was that the property we chose had glass walls that were not conducive to the care and protection of beloved old books. Only one room could be shielded from the relentless glare of daylight, so that would be where the library lived.

Condensing two cluttered homes into one, when both of you own enough books to provide Hay-on-Wye with a satellite town, was never going to be easy. Books, we realized with trepidation, would have to be abandoned, and not just one at a time – whole strands and themes, entire oeuvres needed to die. I had far too many anyway, I told myself, collecting was a sickness, I never opened half of them. The culling process should be easy.

Shelves were ordered, but only enough to keep the lines of the room. In my old house I had sat surrounded by wobbly stacks, shifting them from tables to eat, piling them beside my bed until I was in danger of being buried alive.

‘We’ll take them all with us, then decide,’ I said. ‘First, let’s remove the duplicates.’ Pete sat on the floor and began opening boxes. The dog-eared student texts, from Christopher Isherwood to Günter Grass, were all doubled, so they went. We stopped worrying about the subtleties of different editions because we were readers, not collectors. Practical choices were made – we dumped the gardening books because we no longer had gardens. For a while the process remained polite and even developed a peculiar kind of quid pro quo. ‘No,’ I insisted, ‘you keep your African authors, they mean something to you, but I’ll hang on to my British theatre histories because I might need the research.’ Being an author I could unashamedly pull rank.

Arguments developed over specific classics. ‘Are you honestly telling me you’ll ever finish Tristram Shandy?’ Pete asked.

‘All right,’ I agreed, ‘but Vanity Fair goes because it’s boring.’

With that remark, matters of personal taste were introduced and the gloves came off.

‘Of all the Wyndham Lewis books you could keep, you want to hang on to The Apes of God? It’s unreadable!’

‘What about Henry James, then? Long-winded and full of commas!’

‘Nobody needs a full set of P. G. Wodehouse, too much white upper-middle-class humour.’

‘Fine, then your horribly twee Armistead Maupin books have to go.’

At least there was never an argument about Dickens, Woolf or Waugh, although the latter’s sneery diaries were binned. Biographies were deemed largely dispensable. Couldn’t authors be remembered through their own words?

There were still not enough shelves, even though they ran to the ceiling. We needed to carry out some tougher editing. I kept Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday but released The Napoleon of Notting Hill, saved a place for Hamilton’s Hangover Square but bid adieu to Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (which I later regretted). J. G. Ballard and Flann O’Brien survived; Larry Niven and James Joyce went.

‘You can buy Kate Atkinson novels anywhere,’ I pointed out. ‘We should only keep the harder-to-find books.’

‘By that criteria we’ll be keeping plenty of your own works,’ came the terse reply.

We dug in our heels about touchstone texts. ‘I’m keeping On the Origin of Species because Americans are advocating Intelligent Design and we need it to counterbalance the Bible,’ said Pete.

Friends became involved, poking through crates of discarded books in dismay. ‘You’re abandoning your identity,’ one warned. ‘These books are what make you you. Nobody else I know has all ten volumes of the Arthur Mee Children’s Encyclopedia.’ She leafed through one. ‘Look, how to make macramé pot-holders for Empire Day.’

I noticed I was hanging on to some very strange choices. The worthy tomes we felt required to keep had been discarded in favour of guilty pleasures. The Pan Books of Horror, Classic Spider-Man and The Films of Norman Wisdom had inexplicably been deemed more valuable than Proust. Ultimately, the new truncated library that emerged was every bit as idiosyncratic – perhaps more so – than the old one, and, it turned out, a sight more enjoyable.

When I surveyed the curated shelves one anomaly emerged. There were hardly any books about traditional families. For a couple of decades London urbanites had looked upon children as if they were visitors from Mars.

‘Are they dwarfs?’ asked my friend when she came out of a film screening one morning.

‘No, Sarah, they’re children,’ I told her, although admittedly they were dressed like miniature hipsters.

The plots of books and films are largely centred on family units, but although I remember my own childhood I had little conception of how today’s families operated from day to day – although I gained a bit more insight during the lockdowns, when everyone overshared the details of their daily lives.

In literary fiction families are dysfunctional and lose control after a catalyst event occurs. In films a traditional home life is set up only so that the protagonist can break away from it. Too many wives turn up at the start and end of films to offer their husbands comfort and breakfast. It’s shocking to see how many scenes consist of two males and a female, with the female given no lines to say at all.

Different cultures provide only minimal variations. In Korean films the wives never stop serving food while husbands go off to work. It’s a one-size-fits-all template that grounds a story in familiarity. When I wrote my first novel, Roofworld, the Hollywood studio execs who were keen to adapt it asked me to change the Black female lead to a white male teenager. It was after I refused to do so that I realized Hollywood and I were probably not compatible. Those same executives are now busy casting Black women in former white male roles, trusting public opinion to lead them to the money.

It’s an embarrassingly simple formula that for all the talk, social evolution doesn’t change from one decade to the next, and it’s backed up by all the data I’ve ever read on reading habits. Setting your story in a generic family unit will let you produce popular stories featuring feisty, independent homemakers and child-rearers who value their independence but talk constantly about men. Crime stories set in exotic locations sell well to women at home with children.

A talk with my New York agent confirmed the transformation: American males of working age have all but stopped reading fiction. Work hours are transforming, the lines blurred by our ability to carry our jobs around with us on devices. E-readers were partly responsible for wiping out mass-market novels, but Amazon fell out of love with them and started pushing audiobooks instead. Publishers follow the demographics, the upside being that women writers are finally getting their due. It’s been a long time coming. In particular female suspense writers proved something that should have been obvious from the start – they’re better at it than men.

When a great chunk of the market vanishes overnight there should be a conversation about what just happened, but it’s tricky. The disappearance of male readers is a phenomenon that has nothing to do with sexual politics. It’s time-poverty, multiple-device technology, multi-platform market grabs, fragmented attention spans.

It’s harder to start reading again when you’ve been out of the loop for a while. Is there any way to revive mass-market books? A new small-sized format could refresh fortunes by making the paperback something to carry around again. Margins are tighter on physically smaller books, but if hardbacks can become attractive objects of desire, a book could become a status symbol. I know, I’m dreaming.

It had been bothering me that reading might become the pastime of dilettantes with nothing relevant to say, but then I heard about the annual competition among young BAME actors in America to perform the best monologues by August Wilson.

Wilson’s ten-play Twentieth-Century Cycle is the gold standard by which Black US actors are judged. Although not well known in the UK, his polemical plays contain powerful speeches grounded by authentic voices hitherto unrepresented. Inevitably, the monologues cover big themes: childhood, family, love, God and history.

In the documentary Giving Voice some of the young Black US actors chosen to represent their schools explain what Wilson’s monologues mean to them, and it’s clear that many feel their hopes, dreams and opinions are being expressed for the first time in voices that they recognize from their own lives.

So in one area at least, there’s a move away from fantastical escapism to realistic drama featuring characters to whom the young can relate. As writers mature they inevitably lose touch with life’s early simplicities. We can stay relevant but it’s harder to find the right voices.

The actor/playwright Harvey Fierstein said: ‘Visibility at any cost.’ You need to find something of yourself in what you read or see. I’ve always been a fan of non-naturalistic writing, especially in plays, but it’s very much out of fashion in the hyper-connected conversational world, and it gets harder to know how the young speak and feel today.

In 2021 an Ipsos MORI poll of sexual orientation across generations found that 84 per cent of baby boomers (aged 55–75) described themselves as heterosexual. The figure was 72 per cent for Gen X (41–55), 60 per cent for millennials (25–40) and 54 per cent for Gen Z (under-25). But how can you talk to the young about that? How on earth would someone of seventeen be comfortable talking to a stranger in their sixties? The world I grew up in is not the world that’s here now.

I was raised in a time when the only Black male you saw on film was a pimp, a junkie or Sidney Poitier. As for gay representation, we were stuck with 007’s sinister killers Mr Wint and Mr Kidd, and sexless John Inman and Larry Grayson. We were told that to be artistic was to be feminized and rendered useless.

On balance I’d rather be in this new world, although I abhor its inequality. But to write about it now from the sharp end? That will take a new generation of young writers who have the confidence I lacked at their age.

The top-selling fiction books today are those with readily identifiable home situations. If I have to write an interesting breakfast scene with children I need to use more imagination than describing a journey to Neptune. If I chose to write about the teens on my street I’d get cancelled for cultural appropriation. While I don’t know many normal families I do know plenty of dysfunctional ones, with children on medication or sectioned, missing husbands, psychologically damaged wives. They’re why so many stories now have flawed, lost, introspective characters.

In giving representation to everyone we must provide relatable figures, but for many authors that’s harder than setting a book in the seventeenth century. The secret is direct research – going out and talking to people. And that can be the hardest part of all.

36

Clots

I was still sitting there staring fruitlessly at the half-finished article on my laptop, not especially exerting myself, when I felt a great weight press down on me. I had felt this before and knew that it was not a good sign.

Pete was in bed perusing his property porn. Every week he collected the ‘Homes and Gardens’ sections of newspapers and scoured them for a house that was somehow urban and rural, old and modern, a fixer-upper that needed nothing done to it, cosy yet vast, incredible yet affordable. Ideally he wanted a converted grain silo or an abandoned pyjama factory with a living room you could land a plane in. The one thing he never seemed to check was the actual price or the location. Every ten minutes or so he would suddenly shout out.

‘Where’s … Chichester?’

‘West Sussex.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Almost Brighton.’

After more than three decades of living in England, Pete showed a remarkable lack of curiosity about his chosen country. Like most Londoners, the bit from just above the Finchley Road to just below Edinburgh was Winterfell, a sort of hazy limbo where, for all anyone knew, dragons lived. Although in all likelihood it was probably filled with pedestrianized shopping areas, charity shops and fenced-off fields.

Ten minutes later, another shout. ‘Where’s … Gillingham?’

‘It’s a deprived Medway town. You don’t want to live there.’

Another ten minutes pass.

‘Where’s … Ipswich?’

‘Suffolk.’

‘You can get some real property bargains there.’

‘Yes, I wonder why.’

I noticed it was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe deeply, then even to breathe shallowly. It was a familiar sensation that reminded me of my childhood, the crushing of breath from my lungs.

What is it particularly in males that prevents them from sorting out their health problems? Women seem quite happy to get regular check-ups but too many men are like my brother; Steve has such a horror of hospitals, needles and blood that he’ll wait until a limb is hanging off before getting treated. ‘This? It’s just a scratch, I don’t need to get it looked at. I’ll be all right as soon as I can find the rest of my fingers.’

‘Where’s … Beccles?’

‘Hon, I don’t feel very well. I’m going to take myself off to A&E, OK?’

‘OK. Where’s … Morecambe?’

At the hospital I was immediately triaged into an emergency ward. I was having an ‘event’. It meant I was undergoing a pulmonary thrombosis.

‘See these little things here in your lungs that look like grains of rice?’ said the keen young doctor as my meds kicked in. ‘Your blood is clotting very quickly. You can’t breathe because your lungs are turning to rice pudding. Cancer thickens the blood. Can you see the little rice grains? Don’t worry, we’ll sort it out.’

A few hours later, after responding to treatment, some tea and custard creams, I was free to leave. Incredible. I was handed a big box of syringes.

‘Just follow the instructions on the side,’ said the doctor, who did not look old enough to have seen the start of the MCU films in cinemas. ‘Inject yourself once a day.’

‘How long for?’ I asked.

‘For the rest of your life.’

‘Oh.’

I walked home, a little woozily.

‘I had an “event”! A pulmonary thrombosis!’ I told Pete excitedly when I got in. ‘It didn’t hurt but it was really hard to breathe. A&E was horrible, though.’

‘I know,’ Pete said. ‘I had to go to A&E as well.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘While you were out. Blood clot. Left leg.’

We’d been in different A&E wards on the same afternoon. How was that possible? It had always been the same with us. Standing together on Blackfriars Bridge. Missing each other by minutes.fn1 In a city of 8.5 million people I now believe we had always been destined to meet.

Pete’s doctor had asked, ‘Does anyone in your family have a history of suffering from blood clots?’

‘No, no one,’ he’d said firmly. ‘There’s nothing at all.’ He was given an injection and allowed home.

He rang his mother in Brisbane. (She didn’t like it there as much as her home in Auckland because the men never bothered to smarten up but lived in flip-flops and shorts. She carried herself with grace and remained quietly reticent, more like a woman from an English village, genteel and wearied a little by disappointing men.) ‘Do you know if there’s anyone in the family who gets blood clots?’

‘Yes, me,’ said his mother. ‘I’ve had so much trouble with them that I have to inject myself before every flight.’

‘What? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You never asked.’

I knew a thing or two about family-privacy issues but Pete had a family of clams. They had to be prised open very gently to get any information at all, so I was careful to respect their wishes in a way that had never been necessary with my own family. Their approach was completely different; they pretended that nothing bad ever really happened.

Recently I was talking to my brother and he casually mentioned that everyone in our family suffered from the same auto-immune deficiency.

‘How long have you known this?’ I asked, somewhat surprised. This was a man who didn’t know his own blood type.

‘Oh, for about thirty years.’

‘Why am I only hearing this now?’

‘It’s not fixable, is it? Just faulty genetics,’ he said dismissively. ‘Like when mass-produced motorbikes all suddenly develop the same exhaust problem.’

You sometimes wonder how humans manage to survive a single day, let alone a lifetime.

Writers think they are invincible. In their position as omniscient narrators, they pontificate on the meaning of existence as wrapped up within the pages of their novel, and in doing so fail to credit their readers with intelligence. But we are not crusading literary heroes fighting the enemy of ignorance. In fact, when I step outside of myself I see a neurasthenic over-sensitive liberal weed who’s a cross between Aubrey Beardsley and Ronald Firbank. Not exactly Conan the Barbarian. Therefore I have no right to prejudge anyone or anything.

For over fifteen years I’ve been running a blog on which readers leave comments that cover hundreds of subjects I know nothing about. Many of these educated, experienced people with a bit of time on their hands have proven to be a wonderful resource. Their learning is native, whereas mine is culled for research purposes and then dumped, like an actor discarding a play script after a run has finished.

If there’s one thing of which I am absolutely sure, it’s that around 70 per cent of all readers are smarter than me. So I listen and make notes.

And that’s why writers must never, ever stop learning from readers.

37

Die

Confined to our sixth-floor flat, there was little I could physically get up to. I was always showered and dressed by 6.00 a.m., so the grey days stretched to infinity.

What did we do in the outside world that had been so precious? Eat a meal, take a trip, enjoy time with friends? By such interactions we remove life’s predictability. My brother, who would be quite happy if a neutron bomb wiped everyone from the world, leaving him completely alone in the woods with an axe, was thoroughly enjoying the lockdown.

‘I had to move an enormous pile of logs from one field to another,’ he said. ‘Took me two days to do it. Gashed myself pretty badly.’

I wondered if Steve’s logs had really needed moving. The lockdowns had created new activities for us all. As a child I had endlessly made models from balsa wood, cardboard and modelling clay, so I could see the rediscovered pleasure of building the HMS Ark Royal from an Airfix kit. Sometimes the best use of time is wasting it.

My fear was that taking time off to ‘recharge the batteries’ would coast me downhill faster than any attempts to re-energize the brain. My muscles had wasted away and my mental state had started to alarm Pete, but I was allergic to the idea of analysis. I came from a generation that regarded any kind of therapy as silly nonsense for self-centred people.

Now I understood why prisoners drew sheaves of chalk marks on walls and crossed them through with diagonal lines. Days were to be got through. The world had been reduced to the point where getting out of an armchair became an adventure. Everything was subtly altered: the way I walked, stood, thought, tasted, heard. I felt as if I had survived Chernobyl while knowing I would still die.

I needed cheering up, so I went to get my hair cut.

MY ALBANIAN BARBER (An unmodernized gentleman in his seventies): Why you no been to see me? Where you been all this time? Oh I see, you been ill, you got Cancer Hair! Show me. Yes, thin and fluffy like inside of cushion, we sort that out, one haircut two haircuts back to normal. I can’t do nothing about the cancer, you will still look like you got that, like my father, may he rest in peace. You need to eat more, there’s nothing of you.

This is what my father snootily called ‘the honesty of the lower orders’.

When I was seven years old he proudly introduced me to a barber called ‘Old Morris’ who took tonsorial control of me until I could escape his clutches as a teenager.

When I was a vain and stupid 25-year-old media-muppet earning far too much money for typing consecutive words on to paper, I used to pay fifty pounds to have my hair cut and coloured in Carnaby Street by some bouffanted nymph in an open-to-the-navel nylon shirt and a yellow chiffon scarf.fn1

Soon there were trendy hairdressers in every street: Comb and Get It, Jefferson Hairshop, Hannah and Her Scissors, and in King’s Cross, on its scabbiest corner, the Beverly Hills Hair Spa. Decades later I started going to a hipster barber with an old-fashioned stripey pole in the window, stripped pine floors, an ottoman, racks of badger brushes and its own product line. I continued going there until my ‘Hair Facilitator’ leaned on my head and asked me how far I wanted to go on my ‘hair journey’.

Now that I was a dull-witted fellow shuffling towards life’s flickering exit sign I paid sixteen pounds for a zero fade with a hedge trimmer by the elderly Albanian who last week enthusiastically confirmed that, ‘Oh yes, we have many other customers with the Cancer Hair.’ The floor of his salon was covered in locks of different hues because he wanted to give the impression that he was busy. He was not busy.

My straight blond hair grew back curly and silver, then black. If all of these changes were going on inside my body, what was it doing to my brain? While I was thinking about this I got a call from the hospital. The result of my latest scan was back. Dr Ramalan wanted me to come in at once.

‘At once’ meant a two-hour wait. If the doctors run over this time limit they can be fined, but you can’t factor the wait into your appointment time because on the day you do that they’ll be early.

Dr Ramalan was shut in a tiny, cluttered oven-like office with no windows. He was wheezing badly. He appeared to be stuck in his chair. It looked as if he might ask me to help him escape. Our misconstrued conversation was so absurd that we could have taken it into the music halls.

‘I heard about your narrow escape.’

‘What escape?’

‘The—ism.’

‘Symbolism?’

‘Embolism. The pulmonary embolism.’ I could see his mouth moving behind all the layers of PPE. ‘You’re lucky you didn’t die.’

‘Lucky I didn’t what?’

‘Die. Die. Die.’

‘So I believe.’

He was silent for a minute. I was starting to think he had passed out behind his fogged visor. ‘How did you know what was happening?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘But you came to the hospital? How?’

‘On the Northern line.’

‘No, why?’

‘The Piccadilly line was disrupted.’

‘I mean why did you come to the A&E?’

‘Oh – because I’ve had lung problems before.’

‘Excellent.’

‘No, it was awful.’

‘I mean that you came to the hospital.’

‘Now I have to inject myself every day.’

‘Yes, yes, I would show you the correct way to do it but I keep breaking the needles. They’ve changed the design, you know.’

‘So I heard.’

‘I must tell you something. The cycle.’

‘I came on the tube.’

‘The chemotherapy cycle. Your scan came back.’

The door opened and a nurse popped her head round. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had someone with you.’ She hastily shut the door.

‘My chemo,’ I prompted.

‘Ah yes. Yes, good. Well. It wasn’t good. It didn’t work.’

‘It didn’t work?’

‘No, not at all. Not in the slightest. We will know more when you are gone.’

‘When I’m – gone?’

‘Yes, at five o’clock. Oncologist team meeting.’ He sat back in his chair and nearly went over.

‘That’s it then?’ I rose to leave.

‘I’m afraid so, but we will be in touch. At least the weather has cleared up.’

‘The what?’

‘The weather. It has stopped raining.’

Did he make a list of uplifting phrases with which to hit his patients after he’d given them horrible news?

Oncologists have few social skills. Even when they’re just calling to check in with you they don’t seem to know why they’re doing it, as if it’s something they’ve been asked to do without explanation, like soldiers being sent into battle. Surgeons aren’t like that. The cool dude who had performed surgery on my eyes came out of the operating theatre and removed his bloodstained blue scrubs to reveal a dinner suit and bow-tie, like James Bond.

‘I’m going out later,’ he said apologetically as he wrapped me in bandages.

I needed to talk to someone. I was recommended to Maggie’s, mercifully nothing to do with my crazy friend.

At that moment there were around thirty Maggie’s centres in the country, plus three international ones, for use by anyone being treated for cancer. They are self-funding and free. They’re also beautifully designed, RIBA-award-winning buildings and very open, calm and welcoming spaces, usually with a variety of therapies on offer. They don’t dispense solutions – that isn’t something anyone can do – but they provide plenty of balm for the soul.

My local Maggie’s was in St Bart’s Hospital, right beside King Henry VIII’s gatehouse and London’s only statue of the monarch. It was also virtually impossible to find.

According to my phone’s GPS it didn’t exist. Finally I spotted a milk-pale matt-glass curve in a wall and pushed at it.

I entered in trepidation. Inside was an undulating atrium with a few unobtrusive coffee tables set in the walkways. A kind-looking middle-aged lady called Jane emerged to help me. I gave her a few personal details and she offered me a seat.

There were no offices, no formalities, just open spaces where you could settle if you felt like it. Shafts of sunlight glanced down on to the blond-wood staircases that wound their way to the roof garden. The dome of St Paul’s Cathedral was so close by that it appeared you could reach out and touch it.

Jane smiled and waited patiently.

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,’ I said.

‘Well, you could just try talking to me,’ she replied gently. ‘Tell me what happened to you. What brought you here?’

I realized that I had never done this with anyone before, even Pete.

‘I suppose it began when I was first diagnosed.’

Once I tried to explain why I was here, I couldn’t stop. It poured out of me until the words choked in my mouth. I could not go any further. I was very close to crying and felt ashamed.

Jane had clearly been expecting this, as she pushed the biggest box of tissues I had ever seen in my direction. ‘We get through an awful lot of them,’ she said.

I stayed there by myself for another hour or so. It was incredibly peaceful and womb-like, but also airy and sunny. As I walked away I realized that I had just had therapy.

My mother had once visited a hypnotist to try to cure her smoking habit. She came out irritably thinking, Well, I don’t call that hypnosis, then fell into a deep sleep on the train home and woke up in a railway siding. She didn’t smoke for three years.

At the start of the twentieth century, ‘the talking cure’ had also been known as ‘chimney-sweeping’. It had been used on hysterics suffering from a variety of somatic disorders from hallucinations to paralysis, and became the yeast mother for all psychoanalysis.

During the Second World War, Londoners who were bombed out were often taken in by neighbours and talked out their personal dramas to ready listeners. My father remembered a woman in Greenwich who had been given houseroom by her neighbours when her family home was destroyed just two days after she’d lost her husband.

In her own words: ‘We’d been crossing the street, me and Jack, when we heard the noise of the propulsion cut out. We knew the flying bomb was somewhere right above our heads but for the life of me I couldn’t see the blasted thing. There was no traffic. We just stood there for a moment. Jack said something like, “Come on, girl!” and continued on across the road. I couldn’t take another step – I don’t know why. The rocket landed on his side. There was nothing left of him, just a crater of earth and paving stones.’

She talked about losing her home and having a son invalided out of the war, ‘which was disappointing’, and jokingly said it would take more than a cup of tea to sort this mess out. She went home to live in the remains of her bombed-out house until she could get back to work and possibly sleep in her office.

The stories of ordinary men and women during the war bear a remarkable resemblance to the stories of Syrian and Ukrainian refugees, who had the added problems of obtaining papers to escape.

I was living with someone who used words sparingly, opting for silence unless an answer was absolutely required. Pete conformed to no stereotype I could think of. He was expansive but not empathetic, sensible yet brave. If you were looking for sympathy you’d find it in the dictionary after shit and suicide, but not at home. Like all of the people I most admired, he was a natural survivor. He shopped for groceries as if stocking for a nuclear winter. There was a baseline of common sense in him, as if he was the control part of any experiment. Thanks to the fluctuating isolation restrictions he had been cooped up with me for too many months while trying to work from home and keep his job.

Now, after a twenty-three-year career in the same media organization, he was about to be made redundant. At fifty-four he was hardly washed up, but he understood how tricky it would be to find another job in the present circumstances. He insisted he was fine and seemed happy as far as I could tell, so I let it go. The trouble, I decided, was that corporate life left you with nothing when it was over. If you started out wanting to be a chef you’d at least be left with a lifelong love of food. Nobody hits retirement thinking, ‘Great, finally, now I’ll be able to produce my own spreadsheets on time.’

As I walked back from the Maggie’s centre across the deserted City of London, I suddenly understood why I couldn’t work on the Dark Ages epic.

‘Look at the boy,’ my father had commanded. ‘He’s thinking again.’

‘Is it a long book?’ my doctor had asked.

Too long. Too fantastical. Too … exhausting. If I was going to stay sane I needed to do something else.

I had been trying to write the wrong book. Instead of working on a seven-hundred-page historical fantasy I needed something closer to home.

My phone went.

Had surprisingly non-alcoholic lunch with my 2 rich friends recovering from hangovers. Penny just oozes wealth and diamonds. Went to Cafe Monaco which was lovely I had a delicious crab risotto and a deeply satisfying cream brulee. I am looking after Nero the french bulldog again defo not very bright, has chewed my kitchen table and rampaged through my flowers. Taking Nero out for nearly two hours was very stressful as he is always going after people who are about to eat a sandwich. I have done fish cats dogs children frogs never snakes as they do not have any empathy, beams of love xxxMaggie

Why was it that I couldn’t write and she couldn’t stop?

38

Funny Words

I felt strange, disconnected. When I got home, Pete was cooking duck ramen.

‘It didn’t go too well at the doctor,’ I said.

‘Can you fix it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then don’t worry about it.’ He carried on stirring the pot.

‘You’re very stoic.’

‘It’s not happening to me.’

‘The nurse tore my vein when she was cannulating me. I bled everywhere.’

‘I’m also prepping Mexican chicken with very few chillies.’

‘And I sort of went to a therapist.’

‘That’s good.’

I’d like to explain about Pete, but there are areas of his life I should leave private. I think of him as part of a small group of invincible things: trees, battleships, the Empire State Building. His motto is: ‘I’m going this way, you may do as you wish.’ He’s as loyal as a Labrador but if you’re looking for someone to stroke your hair and say, ‘Poor baby,’ you’ve really got the wrong person, even though a deep humanity runs within him like a seam of gold.

I tried to settle to some writing but it came as slowly and thickly as dripping treacle. On a warm day it felt as if I was inside Henry Reed’s poem, ‘Naming of Parts’, the drowsy mind adrift, the battle to concentrate lost to the sun. I knew that this was the effect of chemicals that had seeped into the material of my body and lingered in a toxic sediment.

I set aside the epic. My American agent had hated it anyway, describing it as too earthy and ‘Euww!’ for delicate American editors to read. I had explained that it was set in the Dark Ages, where sanitation was fairly low on the priority list, but it made no difference. Fine, I’d start something else.

I considered the process. After the words have been mixed into sentences, the sentences trimmed and baked into the whole, it’s set aside to cool and returned to at a later date for decorating. Then it can be parcelled up and packed off, so that the real work can begin.

The agent has to sell it. The editors need to listen and become excited. The thatch has to catch and burn so that the excitement can spread. Everyone in the chain feels differently about the book but they each need to see to its core and understand where its appeal may lie.

Writers of popular literature can produce to a brief, some of which, if you’re a halfway decent mimic of style, are easy money. A moderately intelligent dog can write a Sherlock Holmes story. I love them and have done a few myself, only ever for payment. A Holmes tale is solid and linear and has no subtext, no background, no foreshadowing, no impulse, no real surprises drawn from character. It’s why the short stories work so brilliantly and the novels don’t. Holmes is familiar to the point where breaking with this familiarity courts outrage with readers.

Conan Doyle’s rules cannot be veered away from. His younger son, Adrian Conan Doyle, wrote two volumes of further exploits based on cases mentioned in the canonical stories. The publisher’s note in the first varies from the one in the second in only one detail: it makes no mention of his collaborator, John Dickson Carr, the master of the locked-room mystery who had written The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Adrian was untroubled by any literary talent, so the addition of the more experienced Carr ensured that the stories kept to their original style and were happily accepted by hungry readers.

The public always wants something new so long as it’s familiar.

I wrote a short story from a perspective I thought no one had considered in ‘The Lady Downstairs’. Holmes doesn’t understand women, so when he gets a case from a female, who better than Mrs Hudson to secretly provide him with pointers? Well, it turned out that others had used the same idea aeons ago. There were Mrs Hudson books, and stories in which Mrs Hudson’s cat solved crimes. Mrs Hudson’s secret husband’s Siamese fish probably hunted down criminals too.

The story was recorded by the BBC with Hannah Gordon as Mrs Hudson. She has a wonderful voice but spoke very slowly. The story ended up being much longer than the time allocated, so it was cut by a third. The BBC did not invite me to the recording session. I was not consulted about the cuts. Producers have always been cavalier with writers. One once asked me to get everyone in the studio coffees while she recorded my script, as I wouldn’t be needed.

Great book editors can break new ground. Solid editors find profitable outlets for popular product. There are also bad editors. I know one who has no understanding at all of how words work (I’ve known her for years and she seems not to appreciate why most of the books she publishes are unreadable). But it could be my fault; I condense and overfill and make reading exhausting where others may expand and lighten and allow readers to spin through the pages more easily. As I write this an American author of spectacularly bad prose has just raised $25 million on a crowdfunding site.

Being unable to write well is no impediment to making money.

A book can lie at the centre of a complex web of deals. Companies have been known to take rights that leave you unable to use the characters you created. Books get split between multiple publishers and become encrusted with legal issues much as a boat gathers barnacles.

Several companies own different parts of the Harry Potter brand. Warner Bros keeps what’s unique to the cinematic version. They once flew the idea of copyrighting cobblestones because cobblestoned alleys appeared in their films, until my friend pointed out to them that pavements weren’t invented by the studio. At that level of success everyone wants a piece of the action.

Career authors are impatient because we want to continue selling our words. We never retire and work far in advance, so our books can appear years after we die. For some authors, being dead turns out to be a viable career move.

There are still agents who push their authors to produce better work. It’s important to have this stimulus, because authors don’t help each other. You’d think we would all want to be in some kind of club that encourages better work but we mostly want to be as far away from each other as possible. Novice writers are usually shocked by the lack of cooperation and the snail’s pace of publishing, to which I would say: It’s nothing compared to trying to sell a movie script.

The concept of social reach has affected everything. As TikTokers frantically count the scores they’ve achieved for filming themselves pouting in a mirror, I wonder if the idea of a writer producing a novel for the sheer joy of writing it, whether or not it ever finds an audience, should now be considered absurdly old-fashioned.

I had taken to sleeping in the guest room. Lately I had lain awake most nights watching the rain race across the windows, the lights of the city splintered and smeared. It was the lonely hour, 4.00 a.m., and my mind was alert. I kept a special bookshelf for times like this: a handful of volumes that could always make me laugh.

A humorous novel does not require a funny story. It needs a writer with a diagonal world view. Someone who faces life with a sense of humorous resignation, seeing the absurdities in everyday events.

‘There was a flurry of confused handshaking,’ writes Jonathan Coe in Expo 58, catching the moment when the British first meet Europeans. Coe’s What a Carve Up! was the state-of-the-nation satire of the chattering classes under Thatcher, written with real anger and humour; but, as bitterly funny as that book is, I’d select Expo 58 as my blues banisher. At the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair a hopeless civil servant, twerpish in the Greene or Waugh mould, opens Britain’s contribution to Europe, an ersatz pub called the Britannia. The expo is crawling with spies and it isn’t long before Coe’s dupe of a hero is hilariously compromised.

In The Luck of the Bodkins P. G. Wodehouse writes, ‘Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.’

Should you ever need to keep dark thoughts at bay for a while, and setting aside Mr Wodehouse, who deserves his own special shelf, you could try any of the following.

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh is still hysterical, with its main character Adam close to the front of a long line of hapless himbos who pass for heroes in Waugh’s world. His casual on-off relationship with Nina is blurred in a series of ‘Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood […] all that succession and repetition of massed humanity …’

Meanwhile, along Coleridge Close into Tennyson Avenue and left into Wordsworth Drive you’ll find the home of Reginald Perrin, in three charming, sad novels. The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is probably the best, but author David Nobbs (autobiography: I Didn’t Get Where I Am Today) never repeated the same trick and kept Reginald’s strange life fresh for each outing.

If I learned one thing doing public gigs, it was this: never go on after Charlie Higson. He was so brilliant onstage that he killed every follow-up act. In Getting Rid of Mister Kitchen he offers an irresistible set-up. His anti-hero accidentally kills the man who comes round to buy his car, and he has to get rid of the body fast because a newspaper is coming to photograph his living room. But he’s so incredibly argumentative that, although everyone in London seemingly wants to help him out of his dilemma, he just can’t get rid of Mr Kitchen. It’s a superb backspin on The Trouble with Harry.

Where do you start with A Touch of Daniel? Probably with the opening line: ‘When Auntie Edna fell off the bus, she landed on her pate and remained unconscious for sixty-three days. At the end of this period she died, and they had a funeral.’ Northern humour is loved for its bleakness and Peter Tinniswood is the master. His confused hero, Carter Brandon, careered through a stack of Tinniswood novels, most of which are wonderful. That was the first. His most grown-up book is wonderful too: The Stirk of Stirk concerns the dying days of Robin Hood.

Squire Haggard’s Journal is a parody of an eighteenth-century gentleman’s diary by the humourist Michael Green, and it’s his odd book out. Haggard is like Pepys on steroids, with frog-baiting Squire Haggard shagging the maids, whipping the servants, examining his stools for dropsy, suffering Bloating of the Bowels and generally being of a Lunatick Distemper. Nothing else Green wrote was ever as funny, but there’s a deep-English warning in place here.

Keith Waterhouse is one of my heroes, and in Office Life he tears into the banal horrors of nine-to-fives past, where every Friday requires some kind of cake being dragged out for a secretary’s birthday and nobody writes anything without a top copy and two carbons. In this now pleasingly of-its-time workplace satire (all workplace satires date) a handful of befuddled employees try to understand what their company actually does for a living – why do the phones never ring? The outcome is inevitable yet still surprising. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore performed a surreal sketch called ‘Lengths’ on the same subject.

Michael Frayn’s The Tin Men had me in tears of laughter when I first read it – I must go back to it. In an automation research institute, scientists try to solve the puzzle of making computers human. In doing so they fail to notice their own foibles, as royalty prepares for a visit and they in turn find themselves utterly unprepared. The hunt for a pair of ceremonial tape-cutting scissors is on, and the only man who might cause a disruption has been locked away. Which turns out to be a really bad idea …

W. E. Bowman’s The Ascent of the Rum Doodle is a delightful parody of the adventure novel, described as doing for mountaineering what Three Men in a Boat did for the Thames. The chairman of the committee to conquer the Rum Doodle is Sir Hugeley Havering, and the expedition runs into the kind of unimaginable disasters that only a bunch of truly inept men could manage between them. The simple act of using the walkie-talkies becomes a tangle of codenames and passwords that marks these explorers as unsuitable candidates for a country fete, let alone a life-threatening climb.

Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall was the first of Spike Milligan’s crazy memoirs about the war, a scattershot mess of a book that gives an approximation of what Spike’s mind must have been like. Personally I find his manic style enervating, but I know this is on a lot of readers’ lists, as are his other volumes …

‘Buy this book or your head will explode!’ screams the tagline of Ghastly Beyond Belief, Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman’s trawl through the worst of horror, SF and fantasy books and films – genres which are naturally prone to amateurish excess. ‘One thing is established,’ the detective says, ‘the killer had wings.’ ‘Give me an oscillator and a fast boat!’ shouts a hero. You couldn’t make this stuff, a true collection of stuff that was made up, up.fn1

Their Finest Hour and a Half is Lissa Evans’s love note to wartime movies and the Dunkirk landings. After promoting the joy of swedes for the Ministry of Food, Catrin finds herself required to fabricate a ‘true’ Dunkirk story of heroism for a propaganda film. The script extracts alone are hilarious. A modern classic.

John Fortune and John Wells were known for many things, but A Melon for Ecstasy wasn’t one of them. It should have been, because this book is about a man who falls in love (sexually) with trees. And when he starts going around parks armed with a drill, the corrupt local council springs hopelessly into action … It’s like Chevallier’s Clochemerle for perverts.

Bruce Robinson is the author of Withnail and I, and The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman is his clearly autobiographical account of life as a thirteen-year-old on the South Coast, incorporating puberty, grandpas, meat, Morse Code, enemas and exploding frogs. It’s uproarious, touching and very obviously true. Sadly, it’s his only novel.

Who in their right mind would set out to write a Fu Manchu novel today? Gary Indiana has an indescribable talent. Having read his essays and journalism I stumbled across his least read and oddest book (in an already peculiar oeuvre): The Shanghai Gesture, which a review once said ‘reads as though Cormac McCarthy had rewritten Austin Powers’. Allow me to share the opening sentence with you, which will sort the wheat from the chaff:

‘Among Those That Know, a cabal our story will elucidate in the fullness of time, rumours fluttered that Dr Obregon Petrie defied the laws of gravity when it suited his caprice.’

I’m painfully aware of the lack of women in this list, but I had to go by books on the shelf above my head that made me laugh out loud. I could have added E. M. Delafield, Beryl Bainbridge and Richmal Crompton, and I recently rediscovered Nancy Spain. She was a saucy minx, a large and larger-than-life writer/broadcaster who was one of the earliest media stars. Apart from having a great title, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue is a murderous Christmas panto of a novel in which not a lot of detecting goes on but many farcical situations are set up and delivered with precision.

With these on board I was able to read all night, chuckling to myself, and finally fall asleep.

In the morning Dr Ramalan called me back in. I waited the obligatory two hours in a state of nervous tension before being sent to his poky little office. He was dressed in some sort of space suit, and peered at the chart on his computer screen with great difficulty. It didn’t help that the colour was too bright and lit the room purple.

It was time for another downbeat pep talk. There were some incontrovertible facts, the main one being that the cancer had returned and had spread through my colon, across my liver and into my lungs, presumably heading for my brain. It meant that I would die very soon if it was left untreated. The spread might have been highlighted in a scan if I’d been given one, although equally it might not have made any difference. Sorry about the ‘You’re good to go’ thing.

‘You know I said that the last cycle of chemotherapy didn’t work?’ he continued. ‘Well, we had a meeting and decided there was no point in you going on.’

I gave him a blank look. I couldn’t wait to see where this one was heading.

‘With the treatment. No point at all.’

‘Oh – I see.’ I could feel my blank look get blanker. ‘What does that mean, exactly?’

He looked surprised by my question. ‘Well, it means terminal. You know, when a train has nowhere else to go—’

This time when I left the hospital and walked into the traffic, I failed to check that the road was clear first. I barely even felt the car hit me.

39

A Hole in My Bucket

Poppy wants to be cremated in a woodland walk. If the anatomists won’t take my cadaver we could have a bonfire in the back garden and help a fruit tree grow. There’s a really enormous slug by my front gate. I wish they could talk. xxxMaggie

Terminal is the empty train in the last station, it’s the doors closing in the museum with you trapped inside, it’s a roller coaster with a missing piece of track coming up. The road is out, the bridge is down, the last flight out of the besieged city has gone.

I was a bit dazed after being sideswiped by the car and my leg was bleeding a bit, so I went to the pub, drank two pints of Camden Hells and went home with a plan to watch Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend, figuring there was nothing that a burst of ‘It’s Nicer in Nice’ couldn’t cure.

‘How did it go?’ asked Pete when I arrived, typically not noticing the bloody patch on my jeans. In the kitchen everything was normal. Pots were simmering, a smell of beef and cardamom and buttery shallots in the steamy air.

‘It went great,’ I said.

‘So what did he tell you?’

‘Oh, nothing much. Just the usual chit-chat, you know, hospital gossip, how long my next book will be, that sort of thing.’

‘Are you sure that’s all?’

‘No, wait, there was something else. Oh yes, he said I am going to fucking die.’

‘What did he actually say?’

‘He said I’m now terminal.’

He carried on stirring the pot. ‘I guess that could have gone one of two ways.’

I was aghast. ‘Is that all you can say?’

I could see him trying to think: What else does he want me to say?

‘Couldn’t you at least give me some advice?’

He stopped stirring and thought for a moment. ‘Don’t do a bucket list. You’ve seen a sunset in Thailand. At this point you need to think of other people. They’ll find it hard to accept. Pick a favourite place and the thing that makes you happiest. Think of the terrible stuff that’s happened to other people and be glad you were here. The things you took for granted are the things that will make you happiest now.’

I wouldn’t say he gave a speech but it was the most he’d said in one go for a very long while. His advice wasn’t far off the mark. My favourite place is in my 1950s armchair (dragged out of a Spanish basement by an upholsterer who took two years to finish the repair job; don’t ask the cost because you’d faint) next to my bookcase, overlooking the grey and rainy London skyline, with a cup of tea and two ginger biscuits and the person I love most on the planet. (Really, you would actually faint.)

I thought about bucket lists and those 101 Things to Do Before You Die books. Everyone I knew who had taken a gap year had got stuck doing bar work in Australia in the fourth month (so I’m told; I left school on a Friday and started work on the Monday, as we did in the 1970s, mugs).

Every time I tried to create a shortlist of places to visit they were declared major disaster areas, suffering apocalyptic floods, earthquakes, regime changes, wars, fires or a Coldplay tour.

The Great Wall of China was on the list but my brother went and said it wasn’t that great. Where else do you go in such a vast country, and how do you plan it when Majorca’s so much more manageable? South America – where the hell do you start? Not Rio, clearly, which Brazilian friends describe as ‘the first city actually made worse by the Olympics’. Buenos Aires, for its arts and history and music and food, definitely. The English have a horrible holiday habit. Wherever they go, they have to combine their destination with a waterside bar. ‘Mongolia? What are the beaches like?’

A surprising number of bucket-list destinations do have beaches. They’re the ones my pal Roger, whose idea of a fun holiday was taking his wife to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, goes out of his way to avoid as he sweats above fourteen degrees. For her first-ever trip out of Sheffield, he took his mother to Siberia. She said it had quite a lot in common with Sheffield.

What about bucket-list things to do? Pre-planned ‘experiences’ strike me as being nothing of the kind. What the lists miss is the commonplace everyday unexpected – moments of grace and joy that take you by surprise. Yesterday I watched as half a dozen Spanish ladies started spontaneously singing. You can’t make a list that covers serendipity.

I had long harboured a dream of travelling through Russia. I’d studied Russian for a couple of years but now I knew I would never go. In his book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, author Peter Pomerantsev moves through its layers of grotesque wealth, the vulgar parties and Versailles-like fancy dress balls, to the other side – the suicides, arrests and murders, the bribes, tortures, trumped-up lawsuits and state-induced homophobia.

We can perceive the Kremlin as the perfect alien, replicating opposing opinions and twisting them, burrowing inside protest movements to toxify them, rewarding and robbing with the same hand. The catalogue of lying and liars becomes so exhausting that you quickly accept the idea of Russia as Hell. Russia appears to the West as a country so fractured by its past that it can only survive by believing in nothing. My mother’s dream had been to go to the Hermitage, and she did so, which is more than I would ever be able to do.

When I was a child all foreign travel seemed impossible. Foreign languages! Foreign currency! Foreignness! The only people I knew who had been to Europe had gone there to bomb it. ‘Ah yes, visited your lovely country once. Cologne. Didn’t stop.’

Did I mind about not getting an end-of-life package tour of all the places I’d meant to visit when I was well? Not especially. Did I resent the unlikelihood of finishing my reading pile? Definitely.

‘You could still do it but instead of coming back here at the end, get Air Toblerone to drop you off in Switzerland,’ said my brother helpfully.

My phone pinged. I didn’t want to read it but couldn’t stop myself.

I had truly lovely night seeing this amazing African band with the best drummer ever. African music can make you drift off. Warm quite sensual singer played what looked like a gigantic pumpkin with little strings. I am being my usual torpid self, reading my favourite, Coopers Book of Amazing Inventions. I am tempted yet again by Coopers Mattress Stain and Easer of Allergies Cleaner which is non toxic. Sadly I can’t really justify it at Only £9.99! in case it doesn’t work ha ha. Stains do appeal to my northern forensic mind especially blood faeces tea and coffee. xxxMaggie

Maggie’s text messages could reach a length of about a metre; her voicemails were never less than twenty minutes long. I needed to start deleting them, but I was reluctant to ditch the work of anyone who could manage to get ‘torpid’ and ‘faeces’ into the same text.

She asked me, ‘Do you remember when we first met? You were typing on a portable manual. You hadn’t even got yourself an agent.’

I met my agent through Santa Claus.

40

Serafina

Maggie set fire to her bed yesterday. Her cigarette destroyed the duvet.

Afterwards I was served up squid in a Korean restaurant that could have been Amalgamated Spiced Rubber Rings. I tried to chew them, to get some progress in the search for any resemblance to squid. Then I had an ice cream and a passion fruit vape. Love as usual xxM

I seem to know more than my fair share of unusual women. One was my agent. Serafina had been central to the sixties’ Swinging London scene. She and her husband had owned Chelsea’s notorious Nick’s Diner, London’s first hipster hangout.fn1 She was six feet tall and smoked cigarillos and owned a quarter of a racehorse and mixed killer champagne cocktails.

Her kind no longer exists in the modern publishing world. She was deeply eccentric, imperious, High Tory, firm but kind-hearted. The last time I saw her she was armed with a bottle of strong red wine and a cigarillo, and was going to a bullfight. You didn’t mess with those county ladies. Instead of algorithms they had hunches, instead of emails, cleverly reasoned arguments in restaurants.

Serafina died in the village of Gaucín in Andalusia, which she had belatedly made her home – quite a jump from Shepherd’s Bush, but nothing about her was ever entirely expected.

Gaucín is in the mountains above Ronda, and isn’t famous for much. There are tiny colourful birds everywhere and painted geckos on the walls. Children play ball games in the street instead of watching TV. There’s a small hotel, a neat square and a church. The houses are whitewashed and shuttered against the heat. The residents all know each other and harbour complex grudges.

While I was still just a word monkey I wrote a Christmas TV commercial and cast the marvellous George Baker (my mother’s cinema heart-throb, who was in The Dam Busters and was very nearly James Bond) as Santa Claus. He took me along to meet his agent. She lived in Shepherd’s Bush, he explained, and threw bizarre dinner parties.

‘I hope everyone likes kidneys in their caul?’ Serafina once asked, ladling terrifying bits of offal on to her guests’ plates.

She shook my hand with some violence, closed one eye and peered at me through a wreath of smoke. ‘What have you got there?’

I handed her an envelope of typescript and awaited her verdict with a ball of anxiety rolling about in my stomach. A week later she came back to me.

‘I thought it was rather good,’ she said, waving the wad of pages before her. ‘Can I have another one like it but a lot punchier and with less rubbish in the sections I’ve marked? Say, March?’

After she left England I went to her village to find her. I probably should have called first. On the way to the airport my London cabbie gave me advice about expats.

‘They’re all the bloody same,’ he said. ‘Know how they spend their days? Reading and drinking. Reading and drinking and then they die.’

When I got to Gaucín I found her alone in the empty, baking town square with a bottle of red wine and a book. She had grown her red hair long and got herself a buttock tattoo (British lion rampant). She seemed younger than ever.

We went to a bullfight together where the Duchess of Alba was honouring Juan José Padilla, the matador who had been gored in the eyeball by his bull and got back into the ring.fn2

I couldn’t in all honesty ask Serafina if she missed Shepherd’s Bush. Her neighbours were rough. Somebody had once set fire to her front garden. ‘Darling, it only singed the fuchsias,’ she said airily.

Now she lived in regal but isolated splendour. Didn’t she find it lonely? She laughed, appalled by the idea. She clearly knew everyone in town, including the man who had burgled her house. She forgave him and hired him as her handyman. She had a very good life because she had a very good attitude.

In her house there was a view of Africa from the upper floors. It looked like a Saul Steinberg cover for the New Yorker. In her garden the air was filled with the scent of lilac and oranges.

‘You come from London?’ asked a waitress, vaguely horrified, ‘where they all go buzz buzz, like bees?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ I admitted, apologizing for living in a city where we work hard to make enough money so that we can go and live like people with very little. I suspect writers need to live in lively places. It was too peaceful in Gaucín. You could slow down and fall asleep here, but what made it so pleasurable for others made it an alcohol-laced curse for the under-motivated.

Serafina remained my agent until the day she retired.

There’s a generally circulated idea that writers waft about as lonely outsiders jotting down their observations until being plucked and groomed for success. It’s fairer to say that the craft of planing words to fit smoothly into sentences requires a formidable amount of discipline and most writers can’t work consistently enough to fulfil the publisher’s needs. Serafina pushed her writers so gently that they didn’t realize they were being coerced.

‘Right now everyone’s looking for a “feisty young woman takes on outdated males in a machine-tool company in Durham” kind of novel. Do you have one about you, darling?’ She asked this as she was making sure I was presentable. We were heading to an awards dinner. ‘Could you set aside a month to knock one out? No? At least think about it. I must say you scrub up rather well.’

This as she was straightening my bow-tie. Being an author means owning evening dress. ‘You may have to say a few words tonight. Are you fine with that?’

I held up a crumpled sliver of paper. Rule of thumb: if you prepare a clever speech in advance you never win. I was once unable to attend an awards event and asked my friend Barry to accept for me on the off-chance that I won. Just to be on the safe side, I emailed him some words.

‘I printed them out and took them to the stage with me,’ Barry explained. ‘When I unfolded the slip of paper I saw it had been printed in five-point type.’

Awards are, by and large, rubbish. Having picked up a few and sat on some awards committees, I know that, except for lifetime-achievement awards, which are the equivalent of distinguished-service medals, they are at best handed out capriciously, at worst entirely undeserved. They make very little difference to book sales, no matter what publishers tell you.

‘You’ll certainly have to read a passage onstage at some point in your career,’ Serafina said. ‘Try not to stumble or mumble, as so many writers do. I saw [redacted] accept an award and he was like a mouse squeaking in the distance. And try not to lose the audience by saying something unbelievably off-colour about our Queen’s sister, as I once heard [redacted] do at an event.’

‘I’ll try not to,’ I promised.

Serafina’s attitude to cutting deals seemed remarkably offhand. ‘Will you accept five K for Latvia, darling? There’s hardly anyone there so it’s a good deal, yes?’

She bulldozed contracts through with a wave of her cigarillo. When American literary agents decided to hit Britain en masse and raid their client lists, Serafina and the rest of the terrifying county ladies packed them off smartly with their tails between their legs.

‘I had to listen to a ghastly old author’s interminable stories at lunch today,’ she told me. ‘He so desperately needs an audience. There’s not much left for him to look forward to – a gong from France, membership to the Garrick. But he still sells in Canada and South Africa so on he goes, poor love.’

It was all about status, she explained. ‘First you have fun writing and get chills down your spine when you find yourself in print. Later you crave respect and gravitas, so you start writing seriously and lose all the readers who thought you were fun.’

‘Is that what publishers think I’ll do?’

‘They don’t think you’ll get that far, darling. But I’ll tell you what they’d like you to do. Produce a book seemingly out of the blue, on time and barely in need of editing. Something successful, but not so much that everything else you write will be unfavourably compared to your debut novel. And they’d like you to produce one of these at yearly intervals for a very long time.’

‘And if I can’t do that?’

‘Honestly? You’ll carry on, trying to sell by moving to smaller publishing houses. You’ll see others having great success but soon they’re all younger and more energetic. You can’t write fast any more so you network instead and end up holding court at dinner.’ She patted my arm. ‘Don’t let me put you off, darling boy, I’m sure it won’t happen to you.’

41

A Little Guide to Writing Crime Fiction

I meant to warn you that there would be another one of these along later in the book, and now it’s here. You can skip it if you want and I’ll meet you at the next chapter – it’s your call. Personally I’d stick around because you never know what might happen.

I think it was Balzac who said, ‘Writers are full of shit.’

We tell interviewers that our characters haunt us, but what that really means is that we’re not listening to you, we’re thinking about our novels. ‘And how was your – ah – vacation? Oh, father’s funeral, sorry. Did it go well? Good, good. I’ve been busy on the book. I’m very pleased actually.’

Yet most of us can’t see how lazy our writing becomes, how repetitive, how slipshod, how lacking in rigour. We trot out the banalities, more concerned about deadlines than whether a novel is believable or even interesting to anyone but ourselves. I turn on the TV and watch as the crime fiction clichés roll out.

If a morose middle-aged detective inspector is the hero, you can bet his wife was killed by someone they never caught.

Something bad will have happened in a small town twelve years earlier.

A detective walks into a suspect’s darkened apartment and finds an entire wall covered in press clippings.

If the body of a girl was discovered a month ago, you can be sure there’s another one still alive on a dirty mattress in a cellar.

If a detective wants to discuss something with his contact, they will drive separately to the docks and exchange two or three sentences before one of them says something ominous and drives off.

The killer has left a series of abstruse clues for the police that will cause a lone detective to search through vaguely satanic library books.

If the corpse is discovered in a village, a long-buried secret involving a respected patriarch will emerge. In the film version he will be played by Christopher Plummer.fn1

A rookie cop attending an autopsy will be sick.

The lady who works in the records department will need to be charmed, especially if the detective schmoozing her is acting outside of their jurisdiction.

A mother will have her worst suspicions confirmed about her son when she finds a drawing book full of dense black scribbles.

In order to capture the criminal the detective will have to cross a cellar in the dark.

The killer will only contact one cop. By hand-delivered mail.

A police torch will not be fixed by someone banging the side of it.

A lone woman in an empty underground car park will turn and ask who’s there instead of getting into her car.

An obsessed detective will spend late nights eating Chinese food and staring at photographs connected with bits of string.

In crucial phone calls, killers and cops fail to make adequately detailed arrangements. ‘Meet me at the docks at sunset. No, I think it’s around 6.35 p.m., maybe a few minutes later. Not where the passenger ships come in, where they stack the containers. Well, there are probably quite a lot of them so you’ll want the last entrance on the left, although you may have to go around a couple of times to find a parking space.’

When I begin a new book I go through a kind of hunter-gatherer process. It involves churning through the work of many writers and thinking about the way they approach stories.

Serendipity plays a large part in finding inspiration for a new book. It’s a good idea to skim the classics, the cult novels, manga comics, non-fiction, news items, Victorian recipe books, anything that will refresh the brain. When I started this I was reading The Pierrots of the Yorkshire Coast, By Bus to Malta, Too Naked for the Nazis and The First Night of Twelfth Night. They were great reads but I wasn’t inspired by any of them.

The Pristine Bin: How Technology Changed Writing

‘So, what do you do apart from just writing books?’

I get asked this a lot. Some people are surprised that what they consider a hobby can consume your life. Writing long-form fiction is less a career than a vocation. Yet there are successful writers I know who have simply stopped one day and done something else.

Working on a book starts with its viability, then research, drafts, edits, proofs, publication, post-publication selling and so on. But, like resting actors, we get left with gaps of spare time. We also get holistically involved in projects. An idea for a novel can spread like an infection that you live with for years. It can take on other lives even after you’ve done with it; someone will suggest it could be a game, or a comic. You can guarantee that if you write about a character with leprosy the International Leprosy Foundation (if there is such a thing) will get in touch with you and ask you to front a campaign.

Whichever subject you choose to write about, two things will happen:

Readers will assume you’re the expert on the subject.

Readers will insist you know nothing about the subject.

When I write about London, I get emails from people saying: ‘My cousin and his wife are coming to London on their first trip to England. You’re the expert – where should they go?’

Having said that, we love talking to readers, and many of us would be happy to spend more time at literary events. But writing about a specific subject doesn’t make me an expert – it just makes me a good researcher.

For a few years it became fashionable to run book clubs – this was largely thanks to the efforts of US booksellers and publishers, who did a terrific job of reaching out to involve readers. I’ve turned up at book clubs of about ten to fifteen members (nearly always women) and they can be very rewarding, although men don’t like prosecco.

It’s easy for writers to fill their days with festivals, committees, Q&As, meals and meetings about writers and writing. I’m not a natural organizer and leave that side of the job to those who have more practical brains. I produce quite a lot of work because I stay away from the things I’m not good at, and because I lose track of time at the keyboard.

A file gradually grows beside your books that’s filled with Projects That Did Not Happen. Glancing to the side of this screen I can count around thirty dead or currently comatose undertakings that clearly aren’t going anywhere.

There are movie scripts for Psychoville, Calabash, Hell Train, Disturbia, Spanky and a project called The Waiting Darkness which sadly never saw the light of day (the script went through around twenty drafts). All were ready to go, and then didn’t. There was an absolutely deranged screenplay for Breathe, a novel of mine few have ever read, that passed through fifteen drafts. There are novels in that pile too, one called Crazy Lady (finished, unpublished), another called Mr Wonderful (unfinished) which await my return.fn2

There are deep back-burner projects there – a time travel novel, several non-fiction books, an extremely bleak thriller I no longer have the appetite to write. Plays, video games, weird stuff that never found a home, scripts for short films – dozens of them – a Poirot project and a Hammer project that nearly happened, then didn’t. An anthology film called Bloody London (my section, a script called ‘Down’, went through dozens of drafts before the film simply vaporized). Some never found the right length – too long for a short story, too short for a novel.

If you get involved with film and TV, it’s amazing how many day-long meetings you take with companies that end on an incredibly positive note, only for you to never hear another word. You meet a production team and think you’re a perfect fit. It turns out you fit like Norman Wisdom’s jacket.fn3 People enthuse, oversell, love you and vanish like cheap gigolos, without so much as an apology for wasting your time.

Of this great iceberg of work you’ve produced, just the tip appears. I assume this is true for all writers – I don’t know for sure, because, as I’ve said, we hardly ever talk to each other about actual writing.

As one project ends, we prepare to start again.

Last week, as I finished the edit on a novel and the latest incarnation of its cover arrived, I realized I was about to fall into that odd lacuna which occurs in every writer’s life, when there’s everything to play for and I can do whatever I like.

Not many careers allow you to periodically start all over again (acting is most closely allied to writing, I suspect), and it carries a burden. Make a mistake early in your career and you self-immolate.

When I had my first novel published I failed to think it through as a career move; it seemed like an unreal ancillary sidebar to my main job in the film industry. I had never taken a writing course (and still haven’t, although I’ve read quite a few), nor had I been given any kind of useful writing advice. Consequently I wrote as I thought writers were supposed to: planning, outlining, following a long-gestating blueprint.

But I’m no planner, and my first attempt at a book became an unruly monster-in-a-box of carbon copies, handwritten revises and Sellotaped slivers of sentences.

What I wanted to do was think on the page, but the technology was not in place at the time. We have finally reached a point where ink and paper no longer obstruct thought, and the way I work now is unimaginable to the younger me. Preparation is not just boring, it makes you impatient to start writing. You research and draw out diagrams for a while, but you’re itching to smash on.

Over the last few books I’ve reduced my forward planning to a single page of bullet points and do all of my thinking directly on the screen. Novel-writing now starts with throwing something, anything, up there. It becomes a flexible system of problem-solving, like unpicking oakum, line by line, page by page, chapter by chapter, until the book is finished and everything ends up in the right place.

Pixels are not paper but impermanent, malleable phantoms. There’s everything to play for right up until you type ‘The End’. And after. It’s a blessing for some and a curse for the indecisive. The Bryant & May books are easier because they have a structure and existing characters upon which to build new adventures.

You don’t so much write as construct, trying lines that don’t work, ploughing on until there’s something to look at. You come back later, adding and adding (I always under-write and add, never trim), but there are no ‘three drafts and a polish’ any more – the work-in-progress has become a single blurred thing, only defined by the end result. The bin that once filled hourly with screwed-up balls of paper now remains empty.

Criminal Elements: Why Writers Are Letting Go of the Past

New technology required a new way of thinking – rolling ideas, not finite drafts. For some it’s become a nightmare of open choice. If you’re decisive and prepared to murder your darlingsfn4 you move forward much faster.

The technology has been updated, but what about popular fiction itself? We need to throw out the commonplace, especially when it comes to crime fiction. It’s all very well rebooting Sherlock Holmes for each successive generation but there are many criminal elements which are hard to tolerate any more.

The rules of crime fiction started to crystallize as early as 1862, when The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Warren Adams began serialization. They were set in stone soon after and remained in place for the next century – but there were always mavericks who tested them.

E. C. Bentley, the inventor of a peculiar form of satiric poetry, the clerihew, first ignored the crime guidelines in 1913 with Trent’s Last Case. It was the Catholic priest Ronald Knox who really set the cat among the pigeons with his ‘Decalogue’, a set of tongue-in-cheek fair-play rules for the crime reader of 1929.

Although the fundamental tenets of crime fiction remain, gone is the moral certitude of the cocksure detective who bases judgement on class and appearance (males only need apply). Gone too are the days of the snowed-in, bridge-down, lines-out country-house murder, where everyone dutifully assembles in the library to unveil the killer. Only on stage does Detective Sergeant Trotter still unironically tread the boards in that fustiest of guessable mysteries, The Mousetrap.

American crime writing was not forced through the same moral minefield, partly because it had not been required to deal with the curse of class. If British crime was a string quartet, its US counterpart was jazz. Scenes which would have caused a mass clutching of pearls in the UK cheerfully annihilated the status quo across the Atlantic.

The old stereotypes of crime fiction have gone. Safe-crackers, razor gangs, ‘Find the Lady’ sharps, Black Marias, jelly-men, conners, cosh boys and tarts-with-hearts were once familiar characters in British crime novels. ‘Racketeers’ were children who distracted punters while their pockets were being picked, but the term came to mean wartime wide-boys who hawked stolen stockings and cut blouses from parachute silk.

Avid crime readers were wise to all this. In Margery Allingham’s The Fashion in Shrouds, reformed criminal Magersfontein Lugg says, ‘It’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide,’ and readers knew what he was saying: It’s crazy to bribe a cop with fake money. The past might be a foreign country to us, but Golden Age writers would be just as lost watching Better Call Saul. Traditional archetypes are hard to use when your friendly priest is under investigation and the avuncular banker is an embezzling hedge-fund manager.

Criminal History: Why We Look Back

This is why so many crime novels are set in the past. Much more can happen when your protagonists can’t easily contact each other. Sherlock Holmes was forever dashing off letters to make appointments (it helped that there were telegraph boys and eight posts a day). Protagonists were tied to a single communication line. Dial M for Murder and Detour both hinged around victims using corded phones. Entire plots were constructed around railway timetables. However, authors can still use the old ‘My battery’s died’ routine for phones and sometimes you really can’t get a signal, so miscommunication remains a valid plot-point. Human error is timeless. Last year I received a packet of letters from the Royal Mail dated September 2011.

Better technology meant an end to the mystery night caller. GPS, facial-recognition systems and hi-res photography threw light on hidden identities. When you can name a stranger walking past you by simply checking your Bluetooth status, how can a killer escape detection? Building plots around technology has proven disastrous. There’s nothing more boring than a copper at a keyboard, which might account for the recent rise in period crime fiction, in which a dogged PC still has to wear out shoe leather and fill a notebook.

In an age when your washing machine talks to you and your shaving lotion sends you personalized messages, crime investigators have to raise their game. No longer can they act on mere hunches. The kind of deductions that were blithely accepted in older novels are not admissible any more. In Michael Gilbert’s Mr Calders and Mr Behrens an arrest is based on this: ‘It had to be either you or Rivers. You were the only two disreputable characters in the neighbourhood.’ Try flying that in court today.

R. Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke, Edwardian barrister and man of medicine, solved puzzles that would scarcely interest today’s police. He did it because something felt wrong: a collapsed man vanishes; a fingerprint looks forged. Now one of his office juniors would check a travel card and track a trainer print via an online database, and who needs fingerprints when there are DNA samples? Technology is the great leveller, so new detectives need new skills.

This means there can be no more ‘the butler did it’. The butler didn’t do it because none of us have ever met a butler and ‘the Filipina cleaner did it’ merely sounds exploitative and unpleasant. We no longer have live-in staff, ‘a little man in the village’ or visits from the vicar. There’s a new range of types to use as suspects, from the tiger moms of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies to the self-harming journalist in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. And how about the accused in Knives Out, all of whom sport characteristics that feel freshly minted?

If the suspects need to be more rounded, what about the main protagonist?

‘He’s the best slow bowler in the county.’ That’s how Raffles the oxymoronic ‘gentleman thief’ was described by his creator E. W. Hornung. The square-jawed, wavy-haired, clean-cut chap didn’t look like a criminal. It’s taken us a long time to realize that physical attributes can’t signify goodness. Raffles wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on the streets today.

Our new heroes are angry, autistic, alcoholic, addicted to bad relationships. First they were superhuman, then merely human, and now they’re human flotsam. The next logical step is to turn them into something inhuman – villains – although that’s been done many times in the past, none more strangely than in Valentine Williams’s ‘Clubfoot’ novels from 1918–44. ‘All my life I have abominated two things in a man: fat and a monocle.’ The books are hatefully opinionated and beyond lurid, which makes them treasurable for showing how far we’ve come.

Unshockable: What Do We Do when Shocking Secrets Aren’t Shocking?

The motives that women hid from men and vice versa were always the stuff of great mysteries. Murderous impulses would often be traced to the covering up of sexual indiscretions, secret abortions, children born out of wedlock, ‘mad’ heirs, unmentionable diseases and promiscuity (especially among females – male authors were obsessed with censuring party girls).

It’s harder to power a story using these elements without turning women into victims. The domestic noir housewives of the 1950s managed to turn the tables on their gaslighting husbands and broke free – at a cost. Margaret Millar showed that revenge was a dish best served to a husband demanding his dinner.

Thanks to bare-all reality TV shows, all those subjects that could not be mentioned in polite company have now been forensically aired. Single motherhood is no reason for a blackmail plot. Gay men are no longer required to slope off somewhere and kill themselves out of shame. Child-grooming and sex traffic have become the new motors for many a modern thriller and the ‘missing child’ set-up has become an overworked cliché.

Remember when James Bond stepped into Jill Masterson’s Florida hotel room at the start of Goldfinger? Ever the snob, Ian Fleming was giving his fans glimpses of a lifestyle about which they could only fantasize.

Cheap travel made the exotic ordinary and turned the hideouts of the rich into overcrowded selfie spots. After low-cost airlines and Airbnbs let everyone into Fleming’s world, spies became more interesting when they stayed home in shabby surroundings. In reality, casino tables were not surrounded by beautiful spies but by portly tracksuited dudes with comb-overs. Bond was exposed as an alcoholic heavy smoker with a condescending attitude to women.

There are still plenty of detectives solving crimes in picturesque parts, but the locations that work best for me eschew lifestyle-porn for a sense of otherness, as in Jane Harper’s The Dry, memorably set in the drought-stricken Australian outback, and in many a Scandi-noir novel.

Another point: in the twenty-first century bank robberies seem impossibly quaint. In the last two decades bank robberies have fallen by 90 per cent in the UK, thanks to the banks’ adoption of time locks, cameras and active combat systems. Hardly any guns are used because there are only a handful in the country and the police control the supply of bullets. We’ve come a long way from crooks laying maps on kitchen tables and planning their escape through backstreets with the aid of an A–Z and a bakery van. Now they’re tracked by drones and helicopters armed with laser-sight cameras.

There’s hope for the heist-writer, though. The real-life seniors who carried out the £200-million Hatton Garden robbery in 2015 had the nation agog and inspired two movies and several novels, even though they were defeated by a misunderstanding of how licence-plate recognition works. There were five seasons of La Casa de Papel (the awkwardly retitled Money Heist), which reinvented the bank-robbery genre while acknowledging all kinds of modern technology.

Teens quickly discovered that the addition of a cheap hooded sweatshirt could foil a camera, and in TV’s The Bridge a villain fools a busload of children with the addition of a false beard, an idea going right back to Sherlock Holmes. In Bryant & May: Off the Rails I staged a murderous attack on a tube escalator surrounded by CCTV cameras just to show it could be done. It’s better to confront the challenges of the twenty-first century head on. Necessity makes for originality.

There are new mysteries to unravel with every tick of the clock. When the game gets tougher, you raise your game.

JOHN MAY:

We’ve not had many serial killers at the Peculiar Crimes Unit, have we?

ARTHUR BRYANT:

Not proper saw-off-the-arms-and-legs-boil-the-innards-put-the-head-in-a-Gucci-handbag-and-throw-it-from-a-bridge-jobs, no.

You’re Killing Me: How Comedy Can End Your Career

The first stage play I ever saw was Joe Orton’s Loot, which probably warped my view of the British police for ever. The farce involves a much-stolen corpse and naked bank robbers, and features Inspector Truscott of the Yard, an appallingly cheerful copper who specializes in outright lies, burglary and violence.

Comedy can be fatal ground for crime writers. Slapstick travels but wit does not. If American humour is always benign, a belly-laugh and a pie in the face, on my side of the Atlantic it is harder to pin down: semiotically dense, anarchic and best when bleak, or at least rather cruel. The perfect English insult is one where you walk away thinking you’ve been complimented. The English love to laugh at human weakness, sex, death, embarrassment, sarcasm, class, money and selfishness. No wonder humour can be used to such good effect in crime novels.

The idea that people might exist in a satanic war with their own natures can prove weirdly life-affirming for readers. The leading characters in stories by Muriel Spark, Saki, Beryl Bainbridge and Evelyn Waugh pursue their own aims with a thrilling disregard for conventional morality, sentiment and legality.

Creating a funny character is one thing, but consciously setting out to write a witty crime novel is another matter altogether. Humour needs to emerge organically; you can’t simply parachute characters into a funny situation. It also requires a moral viewpoint, if only so that morality can then be flung aside. The tragedy of sudden death and its investigation needs to be treated with gravity, the humour confined to those who have no idea that they’re amusing. People are at their most ridiculous when they’re desperately serious.

How do you get humour to evolve naturally in a story?

It helps to have the right mindset. I’d recommend a sense of amused resignation. You need the right location. It’s impossible to hang out in London and not have stories to tell. Exaggerated versions of my own experiences usually find their way into stories. So much of my childhood was spent in central London that I grew up thinking Hyde Park was the countryside. We were surrounded by people who seemed normal but became eccentric when they got into scrapes. London’s two-thousand-year history is packed with improbable incidents, which are useful for adding colour. A vast amount of historical and geographical research goes into each volume, yet 75 per cent of it is discarded. When I stumble across a press headline that says, ‘Fish and chip shop sold cocaine’, it somehow gets transmuted and emerges in the book as ‘We’re raiding a funeral parlour? That’s nice, isn’t it? Perhaps we should follow it with a spot of go-karting round the local crematorium.’

I genuinely had no clue as to whether the first Bryant & May book – never intended to be a series – would find an audience. I suspected it was far too esoteric to succeed. Virtually every case I created had factual roots, and the most unbelievable ones were often the truest. The Bleeding Heart had its basis in a grisly local legend that sprang up in Bleeding Heart Yard, just a short walk from my flat.

It’s an unwritten law that comic crime should avoid topicality, but over the years I’ve thrown in all kinds of time-specific incidents, from London’s terrorist attacks and anti-capitalist riots to the mass release of undocumented immigrants. A realistic background can help you get away with murder.

I use no supernatural elements,fn5 no unfair tricks, just diversionary tactics and sleight of hand in bizarre situations. After all, the cases unfold in a city where chapels are sold off as nightclubs, where councils plot to steal parks from children, where residents still tie coloured ribbons on the gates of the Cross Bones, an eighteenth-century prostitutes’ graveyard in a Catholic enclave. Sometimes the only response is a smile in the dark.

You can get away with anything if you say it with a straight face, which partly explains the power of Agatha Christie – and especially Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes adventures had little veracity. Who in their right mind would come up with the idea of hiring a ginger-haired man to copy out books in order to provide cover for a robbery? What was once deadly serious is now quaintly amusing. But if it’s earnestly described it can be given gravity.

New wine can be poured into old bottles because human nature doesn’t change. Dickens’s characters are still all around us, their traits infinitely reincarnated. I certainly know modern equivalents of Uriah Heep, Estella and Betsey Trotwood.

As my detectives revel in their own mortality they’re licensed to use plenty of dry graveyard humour. But you must be careful to respect victims and honour them over villains. There needs to be serious intent underpinning droll events.

Comic crime gets overlooked by critics, who mistakenly assume it must trivialize the unfolding drama. With correct handling the reverse is true; it can highlight everything that’s surreal and absurd about people’s behaviour. Crime novels can use comedy to expose flaws instead of confirming beliefs, leaving readers with plenty of food for thought. A sense of the absurd is integral to life’s balancing act, but it also needs to be kept in check at times.

You can construct all the ridiculous situations you want, but your comedy needs to be taken seriously. When playwright Joe Orton handed his leading man Kenneth Cranham his dead mother’s teeth to use onstage in Loot, Cranham was horrified. Orton was showing him that it was essential to stay connected with reality even in farce.

Comedy Is a Survival Mechanism for Living

As a bookish child I made others laugh to avoid the risk of being bullied. My favourite funny fiction comes from wayward characters in impossible situations. I remember reading a P. G. Wodehouse story in which two inept twits kidnap a child in order to rescue him and impress a girl, but manage to kidnap the wrong child, and an obscure film in which thieves choose to steal a painting they’ve picked from an art book, not realizing how gigantic Guernica is. Both involve crimes exacerbated by the misguided intentions of the lawbreakers, accelerated by panic.

The Coen brothers have always understood how crucial it is for their audience to know more than the players, so when an incriminating cigarette lighter is left at a crime scene in Blood Simple we scream, ‘Pick it up, you idiot!’ Audience complicity is a Hitchcockian device, of course. The Coens aren’t afraid of tackling existential epiphanies either, as private dick M. Emmet Walsh is left to die on a bathroom floor, knowing that the last sight in his grubby life will be the underside of a sink.

There you go: tragedy is sometimes funny, and happiness sad. My first drafts are always serious. The comedy is drawn out later. Any minacious situation can develop elements of absurdity.

My most overtly comic crime novel, Plastic, was based on a disturbing true story told to me by a friend who looked after a high-rise apartment for the weekend and found herself in a blacked-out building where the electronic locks didn’t work. The odd situation had crept up on her by stealth. Only later did she realize what a risky situation she’d placed herself in.

There’s an Argentinian movie, Penumbra, in which an arrogant estate agent looks at an apartment, but the seller turns up with a friend and the building’s power is out. Suddenly we’re in an uncomfortable situation because a lone female is dealing with two male strangers. It would have been too easy (and lazy) to write a standard woman-in-peril story. An interesting, contradictory character can refresh the most commonplace tale, and so it proves.

Joanna, a Polish friend of mine, was on her way to a wedding reception on the Italian island of Procida. She was filming the guests on her phone when their boat started taking on water. A few minutes into the video she realized that the boat was actually sinking in the middle of the ocean, and found herself desperately cutting the bride out of her wedding dress with a pair of nail scissors so that she would be able to swim. Later there would be a court case and a jail sentence, but thankfully no one drowned.

Watching the first part of the film footage, I can see that Joanna is not taking the situation too seriously. She’s tough, smart, practical. What’s happening seems absurd, fantastical – and then it’s suddenly deadly. This is the effect one tries to replicate in crime fiction, and the best way to do it is by talking to those who have had to make terrifying decisions.fn6

There’s an image that always springs to mind when I’m starting a new Bryant & May novel: London office workers on their summer lunch breaks, eating sandwiches while sitting on top of tombstones. Strange histories are all around them, but they fail to notice that their lunch park is a graveyard. The comedy is already there in the people and places surrounding us – it just needs to be brought out and stirred into a suitably dark brew.

Unbelievable

In fiction you can take your reader on the most fantastical journeys providing you give them something to believe at the outset.

When this doesn’t happen you end up with MCU movies, which have very little to do with reality. When Spider-Man began, the main character, Peter Parker, was a believably awkward young student and budding photographer. What on earth is he meant to be in the modern era? Aunt May aged backwards, every other character has had their backstory manipulated and reinvented, and still we buy into the concept. Why?

Perhaps it’s connected to the single shared constant – the memory of the original books. We’re able to rejig all characters and events in our heads without worrying too much because we can access our own memories of the comics. Clearly, those unfamiliar with Marvel get less from the films.

As in much of the rest of fiction, historical dramas are featuring real characters more and more. A great many books and TV shows use real-life situations and characters to give their stories verisimilitude. I hate the disdainful, flippant manner in which the Holocaust is invoked to add instant tragic resonance to a story. This shorthanding of real-life tragedy is offensive and lazy, while turning a famous figure into a crime-solver is simply absurd, a fan fiction device that never proves satisfying.

Of course, for a story to exist in the real world it helps to have a base of real-life background characters, but it isn’t essential. Writers are struggling at the moment to decide whether they should incorporate the world pandemic into the lives of their characters. How much of the present day do you acknowledge? It’s easier to set books in the past and write with hindsight.

Robert Harris is terrific at setting his stories against real events. Pompeii reimagines the natural tragedy through the eyes of a hydraulic engineer who can see that something terrible is about to happen. A good story does not always need to provide believability if the premise is plausible. Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park was based on the idea that a mosquito could contain enough dinosaur blood to allow its DNA reconstruction, and even though this is scientifically flawed it at least sounds possible.

H. G. Wells wrote a story few remember – it’s a little bit racist now and probably won’t be anthologized any time soon – called ‘A Deal in Ostriches’. The opening line is:

‘“Talking of the prices of birds, I’ve seen an ostrich that cost three hundred pounds,” said the taxidermist.’

The tale concerns a diamond that has been swallowed by one of five ostriches, and the bidding war by greedy speculators trying to buy up the birds. You accept this absurd tale because the ostrich that swallows odd items was once a popular trope. After an auction of the birds, which get split up and sold, it emerges that the whole affair was a scam. It’s the simple story of a con.

So perhaps a background of real disasters, real politicians and newsmakers is less important than coming up with something that feels believable – even though it really isn’t.

Getting to the End

A little boy brings home his school art projects at the end of each term, but never scores highly. Then his teacher is replaced, and the boy’s art changes overnight. Before, his paintings were murky and confusing. Now their intent is clear and satisfying.

The mother asks the teacher what she taught the boy that improved his paintings so dramatically.

‘It’s simple,’ the teacher replies. ‘I know when to take them away from him.’

It’s true of writers, too. We rework, overwork and muddle until the original intention is spoiled or entirely lost. We take terrible advice.fn7 Our indecisiveness is transmitted to the reader. It’s what Hollywood does when they try to adapt books for a wide audience.

Distance lends perspective. When I finish a story I treat it like a freshly baked pie. I leave it on the windowsill to cool down, then return to it at a later time. Now it’s possible to see what needs to be reordered or removed.

The Curse of Englishness

‘There’s no market for it over here,’ said my New York agent. ‘I thought you were delivering a thriller but what I got was a cruel English black comedy.’

He was turning down Hot Water, my latest crime novel. My agent was a piece of work: ruthlessly honest, charismatic and usually right.

‘I got halfway through and stopped reading.’ This time he was talking about The Foot on the Crown, the Dark Ages epic that took me ten years to get this far.

‘Things must be pretty bad when your own agent fires you,’ my friend Deborah said. ‘Why don’t you write to their market?’

I considered the idea. ‘I’m not sure I know what their market is any more.’

‘Maybe they expect you to be less English.’

‘But I’m not especially English,’ I lied. ‘I’m a European. Or at least that’s where I’d be living if Brexit hadn’t happened.’

‘You’ – she tapped me on the wrist with a spoon – ‘are the most English person I know.’

I first became aware of the curse when I heard the teacups. To be precise, their endless tinkling.

Whenever I listened to an English radio play as a child the sound effects included a spoon endlessly circling bone china. English characters always seemed to be going out and coming in, but mostly they stayed inside and drank tea, even in the grisliest true-life murder dramatizations. Our plots unfolded in small rooms. It’s an English thing: neat little houses, inclement weather. As we tended not to point guns at each other, our fictional killers dismissed firearms in favour of arsenic-flavoured cocoa. They escaped without leaving footprints and relocked doors with the aid of rubber bands.

When so much time is spent inside it’s hardly surprising that we start thinking about elaborate ways of killing someone. Our crime novels may be domestic but are rarely ‘cosies’. Endings are bleak, murderers admirable, victims deserving of their fate.

There’s a specific kind of English malice based on class and distorted moral rectitude. You’ll find it in the novels of Martin Amis and Jonathan Coe, in the bitter deadpan prose of Beryl Bainbridge and in Kate Atkinson’s characters, who speak as if biting thread from a needle. It fills the entire oeuvre of Mo Hayder, whose crime novels take you into claustrophobic, inescapable darkness.

There has always been a gap in our shared language. One reader in Texas gave up on my novels because they were ‘written in deep English’. It’s not something I can excise from my writing. In two centuries my family failed to move more than five hundred yards from where they had started out. We are an island race whose isolated literary development has led to peculiar ways of thinking.

Englishness could sell well. The combination of grisly slaughter and dry humour proved irresistible. Only now, that tinkling teaspoon is liable to end up in someone’s eye.

The curse of this singularity is that even after a pandemic we cannot stop being so very English. Those judging glances and snooty comebacks are still supplied by the upper classes, who remain blind to their reduced position in the world. Every time we open our mouths the curse reawakens. It’s likely no British person ever called an umbrella a ‘bumbershoot’, but our language is so peppered with peculiarities that it’s hard for others to replicate.

Only Lee Child ever managed to write like an American. In theory, publishing on either side of the Atlantic should be the same but we don’t think the same. The fault line was exposed by the Dan Mallory (A. J. Finn) affair.fn8 US editors hire staff after a forensic examination of their credentials and background. We pat the back of a chair and say, ‘We British have a good feeling about you.’

The accidental/reluctant hero is a traditional British character, turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Barely remembered authors like Pamela Branch and Edmund Crispin allowed ingenuity and sarcasm to take preference over the forwarding of the action. Branch’s The Wooden Overcoat is just 190 pages long and is stuffed with deviations, flights of fancy and nonsense conversations. Crispin’s detective actually forgets what he’s investigating. Our fictional heroes are emotionally strangulated. Embarrassment, snobbery and shame are common motives for murder. I’m surprised Basil Fawlty never became a serial killer.

While many American novels could survive perfectly well without dialogue – I instinctively think of Cormac McCarthy here – English characters rarely shut up. We prefer argument over engagement, which is why the British never made a decent action film.fn9

If British spy novels consisted of middle-aged men arguing in ugly offices, our mystery novels favoured the drawing room over the jail cell, the village high street over the back-alley stand-off. In many the action, such as it is, comes to a grinding halt so that the investigators can potter about discussing entirely irrelevant subjects. In this way the mystery becomes a carriage for other bits of baggage.

Teachers will tell you that if it doesn’t further the action the scene shouldn’t be there, but biffing and chasing is boring to write and dull to read. Better a duel of wits than weapons. If a novel deviates from its subject, does it matter so long as we enjoy it? Margery Allingham was unreadable to Edmund Wilson, not because she was a bad writer but because her books needed to have their language unpacked. We lovingly stuff our prose with secrets. And why not, when a book becomes your companion?

Although we try to keep our fiction relatively realistic, it remains self-deprecating and painfully middle-class, like our theatre. Years ago, Victoria Wood parodied this school of English writing with ‘Fitted Kitchens, Ill-Fitting Relationships’. J. G. Ballard died in 2009 but he had seen where we were heading when he said: ‘We live in a world which is now entirely artificial, almost as though we’re living inside an enormous novel.’

The English novel began with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and lasted for three hundred years. But perhaps, in written form at least, it has reached an endgame.

Books v. Socks

In 1946, George Orwell wrote an entertaining essay entitled ‘Books v. Cigarettes’, in which he totted up the cost of both and came down firmly on the side of books. After setting out to buy socks today and returning with books instead, I’d like to present a further argument to that.

1. Books generally last longer than socks, if you compare, say, War and Peace to a pair of Adidas sport ankle socks.

2. Books are available in millions of varieties, whereas socks are basically black, grey or white, or coloured comedy socks worn by accountants at the weekend to show that they still have a sense of fun.

3. You can’t go without books, but you can go without socks.

4. Socks need to be thoroughly washed. It is rarely recommended to thoroughly wash books.

5. You can have long, convoluted arguments in the pub about a mutually enjoyed book. It is much harder to do this with a sock.

6. I’m more likely to lend my socks to a friend than I am to lend my books.

7. There’s never one spare book left over.

8. When you buy a pack of three pairs of socks, it’s rarely described as a trilogy.

9. You can’t lose yourself in a sock.

10. You’ll never be moved to write to the manufacturer of your socks.

42

Opposites

I met my future husband online. I had been pushed into paying seventy-five pounds to join a dating site by my friend Simon ‘Potty Mouth’ Rennie. I’ve known Simon for ever. Relentlessly perky, filthy-minded and eerily ageless, he was someone who could always be relied upon to cheer me up. Sitting himself beside me, he edited my on-screen profile.

‘Don’t say you “enjoy books”. Nobody “enjoys” books. Say you’re after a good fuck. That’s all anyone’s interested in.’

‘But I would never, ever say something like that. Please leave the part about the books in.’

‘Then you’re going to die an old maid, love.’ He tapped the screen. ‘This one’s great, look at him. Big and stupid. Nothing happening between those ears. Never seen a book in his life. Pecs you could bounce cannonballs off. Probably eats with his hands and wipes his dick on the curtains.’

‘He doesn’t look like a life partner.’

Simon tilted his head to one side. ‘Fair point. He looks like a forty-five-minute partner. Not someone worth freezing your eggs for. Let’s keep looking.’

We continued scrolling through the good, the bad and the desperate.

‘No,’ he said firmly, spinning through the badly lit selfies of people who had chosen to photograph themselves against blank beige walls. ‘No. No. No. What is he dressed as? Looks like he’s going to a drag ball as a minor Doctor Who character. Fashion-impaired. Holiday snap. Nutcase. Child molester. Waiting for the sales. Lives with his mother. There’s something living in that beard. Partially sighted, judging by his shirt.’

‘I think I’d better be in charge of the selection process,’ I said.

‘All right,’ said Simon doubtfully. ‘But you have fucking awful taste. You’ll end up with a psycho.’

Now that I had opened the account I was too nervous to use it. When I finally took a look by myself a few days later, Pete was the first person I saw and liked.

Two other people got in touch with me, and being too polite to refuse I went on two brief coffee mornings in Caffè Nero, Camden High Street, the meetings spaced a day apart. Both were nervous-looking video producers from Camden Town with a startling lack of conversation. I should have introduced them to each other. I cut both coffees short and started wondering what was in my profile that attracted such a specific type.

I contacted Pete because his photograph was slightly strange, as if he didn’t care whether it was being taken or not. He had his head back against a stone wall in late-afternoon sunshine, and was obviously not in England. He looked impassive and disconnected, like a judge bored by a long summing-up.

His replies were brief and bluntly honest. Although we began calling each other regularly we couldn’t meet because it was Christmas and I was in France,fn1 roasting marshmallows in a big open fireplace on the terrace of my strange, uninsurable house on the cliffs overlooking the sea.

I told Pete I was coming back and we agreed to meet up on a street in Kentish Town, North London. Only meet a stranger in an open place, my instinct told me, he could be a serial killer.

My friend Amanda had tried dating on many different sites. She told me, ‘I tried them all. The Christian site was the most boring one. I even pretended to be Jewish on JDate.’ Finally she tried ‘Muddy Matches’, the website for farming folk. I thought it was probably a bad idea to drive seventy miles and then head down a lonely grass track to an isolated farmhouse where a man who had not touched another human being in years waited, but she met her future husband that way, even though he did turn out to own a room full of military regalia.

I returned from my monastic life in France and arrived at the airport needing a pint of milk and some teabags. I was surrounded by Vikings returning from a stag weekend in Latvia. An announcement came over the PA system: ‘Will the gentlemen in grass skirts please ensure that they are wearing underwear.’

At King’s Cross, two inebriated young gentlemen were singing an Arctic Monkeys cover into Budweiser bottles. Outside, everything looked as though it had been sprayed in wet dust. Someone was slumped over an illuminated traffic island bollard being sick. Several hundred clubbers who had been held captive in the Egg nightclub over the holiday season were weaving their shell-shocked way towards the tube. That Austrian girl who’d been locked in a cellar for twenty-four years had looked healthier. I joined a troop of bag-dragging tourists and waded knee-deep through flyers and beer cans until I reached my front door, where someone was having a piss. Sometimes London acts like a petulant teenager, daring you to hate it until you actually do.

I had arranged to meet my date on a street corner that was always crowded with families. Today it was deserted. As I got closer I could see a tall, broad-shouldered figure smoking at the kerb. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might smoke. I could only see a partial profile of his face, a long nose, a strong chin with a dimple. I hadn’t seen a chin dimple since my last Cary Grant retrospective.

He didn’t look as if he was waiting for anyone. When he turned there was enough of a static charge in the air to convince me that I would follow him to the grave, and if I didn’t it was my own fault. The thought nearly gave me a heart attack.

I had planned to take him to a cheap, friendly local bistro near by but its shutters were down. I suddenly remembered that New Year’s Day was a national holiday in the UK and everything would be closed. What had I been thinking? We ended up in the only open pub which, on this night of all nights, was full of my friends, most of whom were aware of my appalling dating history and would be perfectly willing to share their opinions with a total stranger.

They say you accept your friends with all their flaws. My friends took the concept of flawed characters to another level. Generally speaking they were, well, psychotic is too strong a word, but ‘pathologically argumentative after a drink’ begins to hint at it. As an outsider myself I had always been drawn to similar personalities.

I thought back to a time in Barcelonafn2 when I went out for an evening with the Argentinian Sherlock Holmes Society. We settled ourselves in a corner café and began our discussions, which soon shifted from spirited literary conversation into an argument, then a shouting match, then a glass of red wine in the face. The hypothesis under examination, as far as I could understand it, involved a poor Spanish translation of ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’. I sat on the sidelines, mentally placing bets on the outcome.

The two main protagonists agreed to represent their viewpoints. They removed their jackets and handed them to the only girl, who wore a patient, jaded expression. Then they placed their phones, cigarettes, lighters and small change on the table and had a fist fight. When it was over (a bloody nose, a forehead scratch that looked worse than it was) they dressed, formally shook hands and sat down to order tapas.

‘I spend a lot of my time trying to find their phones,’ said the girl.

Faced with a similar battery of pub pugilists, Pete (I liked that he had docked the letter that would have rendered his name unappealing) kept his counsel by remaining silent. He gave an impression of solidity and permanence, rather like a handsome oak tree. In a world of shifting loyalties he gave an impression of reliability. It was as if he had always been there. You could lean against him with a book and fall asleep.

‘You are punching so far above your weight,’ Simon confided. ‘We’re going to have to keep him drunk until he’s married you.’

I would later discover that Pete was in almost every possible way the opposite of me. The only flaw I found was his rudimentary sense of humour. Pete was a Kiwi. He had earned extra money at the University of Auckland by working nights as its janitor, and had arrived in a rainswept corner of East London wondering just how big a mistake he had made. Could this filthy, grey, wet, litter-strewn township really be London?

Unable to get to grips with an overpriced flat share in the East End of such a grim city, he had taken off again, heading for the Sahara and the Congo, where he bartered his flip-flops for a bar of soap in a market, slept under a truck and contracted malaria before being drawn back.

It transpired that we had almost met twice before. The first time I’d had to drop out of a dinner party he’d attended. The second time was on the eve of the new millennium, when we were both on Blackfriars Bridge within feet of one another, clutching empty champagne bottles. He got out of the crowds by hitching a ride on a fire engine. I remembered I had a pal near by, housesitting for a dead man. Michele was looking after Dr Samuel Johnson’s house in Gough Square, off Fleet Street, mulling wine. I spent the evening with her in one of London’s great literary homes. I would have preferred to be on the back of a fire engine.

Having narrowly missed each other twice we were lucky the third time. My brother was delighted. There was finally someone else in the family who could chainsaw logs. My best friend was delighted. A fellow smoker! The rest of my friends took me to one side with friendly warnings, the general gist being, ‘Don’t screw this one up.’

Pete was in television; I was in film. He liked serious hard SF. I liked dark social comedies. He had a sanguine view of the world. I was a dopey optimist. We shared similar politics but not the same views. He had the kind of visual acuity that I was trying to possess in language. Everything balanced out.

Obviously it was all too good to last. I mean, my very first online date.

I didn’t understand exactly what he did for a living. He didn’t understand how I could produce books from thin air. Neither of us had what that lady in Leeds had called ‘a proper job’.

It astonishes me now to think that we needed so little from each other in the way of assurance. He met my friends and did not disapprove. I met his and thought they needed to lighten up a tad. He was into late nights, heavy reds, sushi; I was into early mornings, tea and eggs – so what? Being in love felt so inevitable that it never really came up for discussion. When I visited his apartment I was surprised to see a large framed photograph he had taken of a writer seated at a table in Morocco, poised over his manual typewriter, as if he’d been expecting me.

One day we decided to sell up our homes and move in together. Soon after that we found ourselves planning a more official ceremony.

43

The Chicken Factory

Maggie’s dispatches from the frontline of Finsbury Park, North London, reminded me that here was a woman living alone in her ninth decade, still energetic and prepared to hit Curry in a Hurry or the Slow Boat Cantonese All-U-Can-Eat Bar after a long night out, like the twenty-something she still was in her head.

It was lovely to see Maurice he has Covid. My washing machine man came to help me with my fridge. He has unblocked it. I asked him if he wanted an apprentice. I have just eaten two sausages and am still losing weight. Amber says she has got a job in Cairo. I really do not want her to go there as it could be a repeat of Kazakhstan. I am shaving my legs and applying fake tan while reading Hedder Gabler. Most of my love xxxMaggie

My life had been structured around publishing schedules and literary festivals. (Now all festivals existed only online as a collection of faces in second bedrooms.) The smaller events – the ones where you had to stay in a hotel room that still had a trouser press – were a bit like attending a bathroom-fittings convention. We stayed up too late, drank too much and had a good moan about our co-workers. There are festival towns where conventions serially filled the calendar. I once stayed at an Italian hotel that was hosting a dentists’ conference. Beside the reception desk was an enormous colourful model of a diseased gum.

The Cheltenham Literary Festival was not like that. It remains an engineering marvel. Like Hay and Harrogate, it exists in an enchanted part of the country among rolling sunlit meadows, where the wealthy high street is filled with bespoke kitchen shops and little boutiques full of dried lavender and a weaponized sense of nimbyism which ensures that anyone too progressive is run out of town with burning torches. It is Middle England writ large.

The festival always has a hell of a line-up. It’s the kind of ritzy literary people’s event we rarely get a sniff of in London. The global big names are all here, with appearances from authors like Jonathan Franzen, Monica Ali, Sebastian Faulks, Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín, Isabel Allende and dozens of other recognizables. In the crime-fiction genre there is a similarly huge playbill of familiar names.

Many authors are already known from other spheres of life. The ideal Cheltenham guest is Michael Palin: a solid writer, a familiar friendly face and a fine raconteur who won’t frighten the audience with rude words.

It wasn’t the same thing, obviously, but for years I ran a literary club up in the Pineapple pub in North London, where we drew a phenomenal roster of international authors, the sell being, ‘How would you like to speak at a typical London backstreet pub for a change?’ It wasn’t any such thing of course, being filled with dissidents, broadsheet journalists, poets, failed novelists and freeloading self-styled intellectuals.

Our audiences were hard to frighten, although I felt mortified when, due to a last-minute change of programme, my mother-in-law had to sit through half an hour of shouted lesbian porn. The only author who threw this relaxed crowd off-balance was a young blind American who encouraged people to ‘ask me the kind of uncomfortable questions that might have crossed your mind privately’. Suddenly an embarrassed primness settled across the room and nobody spoke.

Being a guest speaker at Cheltenham was an odd experience. I did it just once, to talk about one of my more respectable non-fiction books, The Book of Forgotten Authors.

When I arrived I was greeted and ushered into a great white tent on the green. From there on it was like a benign chicken factory. You pass along the line to be processed for public consumption, an author ahead of you, an author behind. An official introduction, a brief buffet luncheon, a tidy-up, a formal photograph, a few personal details, a microphone fitting, the main event of a panel or interview, an efficiently organized signing, then you’re out the other end and packed off to the station in a waiting taxi.

It was a superbly polished operation that somehow managed to be completely soulless. On my one visit, there was no interaction – indeed, very little time for any conversation – but I am one of the minor poets, as they say. I assumed there was a part of the festival that authors like me didn’t get to see, a secret world of champagne cocktails and Firbankian gossip, although I was perfectly content in my role as a middle-aged mid-list author and observer.

Cheltenham is faultlessly organized, supervised and controlled by the team of officious dragon-ladies who look as if they are extremely unhappy about having to deal with the lower orders and are doing their best to hide it.fn1

Do festivals sell books? Well, they certainly add to the groundswell of chattering that accrues to an author like barnacles on a ship’s bottom. I was still turning up as a guest at book clubs and talking about writing for fifteen minutes until the good wives of wherever I was that night switched to discussing the difficulty of finding a decent gardener or reasonably priced spa treatments.

Festivals are only as good as their organizers. From a series of readings in Huddersfield in a health centre (poster: ‘Get your free chlamydia kit here!’) to a charming seaside town where the guests were dropped off by the organizer’s dad, it seemed clear that imagination was more important than deep pockets.

In contrast, a few weeks later I was invited to appear at an elaborate event held at the esteemed British Library in celebration of an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland anniversary. A number of performances and ‘immersive experiences’ were set to run throughout the evening. Nothing had been rehearsed in advance. I didn’t meet the organizer but she was pointed out to me: a young woman in a rainbow smock who didn’t seem to be doing any organizing.

My part was to read a story to one section of the audience. A band would play to another section while various Alice characters interacted with the rest. I was to be placed on the far side of the auditorium while listeners heard me through a system of Bluetooth headsets. They were so far away that I could barely see them.

My misgivings grew when I discovered that I would have to stand on a three-foot-deep ledge at the very top of the building. To get there I had to scale a steel-rung ladder up the outside of the roof and enter through a window. It was bitterly cold and trying to snow, but I was game.

I’d like to see Margaret Atwood try this, I thought, shinning through the casement and trying not to look down. I had been asked to read at least three stories at three-quarter-hour intervals, but I couldn’t get down between them and was stuck on the roof all night without a jacket.

To make matters worse, the noise from the band – hard rock not being the obvious choice for Alice – bled through the building and drowned out the storytelling. The interactive characters all wore costumes based on Disney designs, not Tenniel’s, and none of them had been told what to do. Other acts – dance, acrobatics, poetry – had been randomly booked and left to perform in odd corners. The resulting car crash of what must have been a very expensive government-funded evening stayed with me a long time. I hope the organizer now works at Greggs.

You think you’re going to read an intimate story and end up hopping about on the freezing roof of the British Library bellowing over thrash metal, but small events can be even worse.

I was booked for a reading and signing at a Medway town’s literary festival. The Olde Worlde bookshop was in a pedestrianized English Heritage-type zone, and the owner greeted me before beating a hasty retreat as a gaunt, hyperactive man appeared between the bookshelves. Bob – let’s call him – had been appointed Master of Ceremonies. Within five minutes Bob had filled me in on the key moments in his life, loves, hobbies and interests.

He loathed Dickens, who had strong connections with the area, and therefore hated all ‘traditional’ literature. Bob self-published his own poetry, which he read aloud in a high sing-song voice while accompanying himself on a drum. He told me about his adventures with the Sandinistas (a two-week holiday), his interest in middle-aged punk poets, his Shamanism, his ‘instinctive’ paintings and his magical realist haikus.

Bob could have made a crash landing on Neptune sound boring. As he droned on and on, his shy, sweet wife crept over and stood respectfully waiting – as she presumably had on so many previous occasions – for him to finish.

Posters placed around the store positioned Bob as the festival’s headline act. It dawned on me that this man was the reason for the festival, having persuaded the council to cough up so that he and his coterie of failed art-pals could inflict themselves on the local populace. As he wittered on about fighting the fat cats from the sidelines I noticed he was leaning on a ‘£1 each’ box of remainders, squashing volumes of Pope and Keats. His wife gave a little shrug and rolled her eyes.

But sometimes an event can unexpectedly delight you.

In a series of gloomy interconnected jail cells underneath London’s Clerkenwell Green I met a Belgian or possibly Dutch performance group who had been assigned to bring a short story of mine to life. They wore black tights and had pencil moustaches and asymmetrical haircuts and could have been from some kind of European casting agency, probably billed as the Walloonatics or the Flemtastics. Our first meeting took place just a few hours before the event began.

‘What do you need from me?’ I asked the group, as no details had been forthcoming.

‘We’ve marked up your story with little blue dots,’ their leader explained. ‘Just come on and read until you get to the first dot, then go to the next dot. We’ll tell you when to start again.’

‘OK. When do we rehearse?’

‘Oh, no rehearsal is needed.’

Everyone seemed very casual. After my experience on the library roof I was a little wary of this cavalier attitude. It all seemed rather unlikely but I waited for my cue and followed the instructions. Through elaborate sets, lighting, music and mime they performed the story as I read it. Buildings burned and flooded as the protagonists fought. The crowd was delighted. I was completely taken aback.

‘That was absolutely amazing!’ I told them afterwards, overwhelmed.

‘Thank you,’ said the leader. ‘We must go now, we have two more authors to do this evening.’ And they were gone.

I spotted Maggie in the audience, looking bemused. ‘Did you like the show?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I caught the wrong bus. I just got here. Is it starting?’

When I sat in my armchair waiting for the chemo fog to clear so that I could see sentence constructions once more, I wasn’t sure if I could ever produce a well-turned sentence again. Normally I would have turned my attention elsewhere and waited for something to form naturally, but right now there was no time to wait around. The idea of dropping dead halfway through a book was my worst nightmare.

I got another call from the oncologist. What was it this time, I wondered, a meeting to arrange a viewing of casket linings?

‘Would you be prepared to try something more experimental?’ he asked.

Hope is the worst thing you can have. I had just about acclimatized myself to the word ‘terminal’.

‘There’s a drug not funded by the NHS, too expensive, issued on compassionate release. It wouldn’t be a trial, so you wouldn’t be given a placebo. However, to get on it you would have to fit within a narrow set of parameters. I can’t promise anything—’

‘I’ll take it,’ I replied.

Tests were run, data was supplied and forms were filled in. ‘Now what?’ I asked.

‘Now we wait two weeks for a reply,’ said Dr Ramalan. ‘Tell me, how is the book coming along?’

44

Encounters with Dracula

My phone pinged.

I am a bit scared of reading your next funny passage I might have to get a towel under my bottom. I bought some spirits of salts because the water is so hard in London but I can’t get the top off. Checked out ironing board the flirty owner says he will knock off two pounds. Lovely sausage dog on bus called Minnie I might eat a sausage. I have bluebells and have kissed a few also some plants coming up in window boxes but not sure what they are could be young potatoes. xxxMaggie

For a brief period of time in my forties I was making great money. Naturally I did what any typical Englishman would do and overextended myself by purchasing a huge, run-down building in the South of France.

The agent called it a bâtiment because it could hardly be called a house. The immense 1960s white box stuck out of the side of a cliff above Èze-sur-Mer between Monte Carlo and Nice, and looked like a Bond villain’s lair.

Three sides overlooked the Mediterranean. There was a hibiscus-swathed horizon pool and a grenadine orchard with pepper trees springing from between the amber rocks. Red and purple bougainvillea dressed the walls for a party. The house was constructed upside down, the garage and dining room above and bedrooms below; it was the only way to build on a cliff-face. Precarious stone staircases wove their way in and out of the building like those in an Escher sketch. One of the kitchens could only be reached by taking an outside staircase through flower beds planted with razor-sharp agaves and flame-headed birds of paradise.

The owner, Madame Inez, was a charming elderly lady who had not touched the interior since she’d arrived in 1970. There was a terrifying elevator running down through the house via a shaft sunk deep into the cliff-face.

The old lady seemed very glad to be going and virtually threw me the keys before getting into her car, which I thought was odd. As I watched her go in a screech of tyres I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake.

Viewing property in southern climes can be a salutary experience. All too often you’re shown around by a widow and can read the history of the last few years without a word being spoken. Roll-bars beside baths and toilets, stairlifts and a bed moved downstairs, the ghost of a husband left behind, a look of anxiety in the widow’s eyes as she oversells her home to uninterested strangers.

There were so many spiderwebbed rooms that it took a weekend to explore them all. There were also over two hundred plastic hooks glued to the walls upon which the lady of the house had hung everything she needed, from hats to saucepans.

On one exploration of the house I discovered a massive safe made of green-painted iron with a huge brass dial on the door, like something from an old bank-robbery film. Nobody, including the previous owner, could remember its combination or whether there might be something in it, so it remained locked.

All furniture was lost within the concrete labyrinth. There were inside and outside fireplaces, and hidden bathrooms, and cupboards for which there were no keys, and palm trees and many, many rocks that had fallen from the cliff overhead.

The French have a fantastic attitude to danger. The bridge at Avignon has a narrow windswept stone walkway hundreds of feet in the air without guard-rails. I’ve seen toddlers heading across it with the encouragement of their parents, so I could manage cliff-face gardens where the odd boulder bounced down into the bushes, hopefully none as big as the one that landed in Ray Winstone’s pool in Sexy Beast.

Living in an uninsurable red zone meant that sizeable rocks fell down all the time, denting my little Renault or detonating on the carport roof. One neighbour, an elderly American called Larry, roared around the cliff roads on an ancient motorcycle and lived beneath a rock perched on the tip of a crumbling ledge. The rock was so huge that it threw a shadow over his house. I felt uncomfortable going anywhere near his front door, which was daily surrounded by loose shale and sizeable chunks of stone.

I asked, ‘Larry, how do you live here? Aren’t you scared that thing will come down any minute and smash through your home?’

He replied, ‘I’m seventy-nine.’

‘What are the neighbours like?’ I had asked Madame Inez before she released the clutch and did a wheelie down the street.

‘One of them is very nice,’ she replied.

Now I met the other one.

He was tall and wrinkled and stooped and smelled bad, and looked like a former Nazi commandant in hiding. He had an extraordinarily high strangled voice, as if someone had knotted his vocal cords and pushed all sound to the back of his throat. His gimlet eye searched out every tiny fault. His wife stayed silent in the distance. I came to call him Dracula.

He was Belgian, a professional hunter, and he invited me to a party. ‘Just a few drinks with old friends I can trust,’ he said meaningfully. ‘Come. Come. You must come. I insist.’ He bared a terrifying set of long yellow teeth. The old friends he could trust included the Chief of Police and several other huntsmen.

To not go would have been churlish, even though everything about the invitation felt wrong. The open hallway leading to Dracula’s front door was lined with dozens of mounted antelope heads, their antlers knife-sharp. It was difficult to get past them all without slashing your throat. There were stuffed deer on every wall, beady-eyed wolves, weasels and stoats in each corner.

No sound came from within the house. I was just putting my head to the inner door when it opened suddenly and I fell in.

Dracula welcomed me into the living room, which was almost entirely taken up by a full-sized Belgian billiard table. This was different from a normal table in that it had no pockets. The object of ‘carom’ billiards is to score points or ‘counts’ by bouncing your ball off the other two balls on the table. It is the most stultifyingly boring game ever invented.

Just as hard to miss was the full-grown stuffed brown bear rampant, its claws rising above my head, its glass eyes as fixed as those of the man who had murdered it.

A rack of rifles stood against the wall next to the billiard cues, an accident waiting to happen. There was no room for my host’s wife to sit anywhere comfortably so she had moved her armchair into the kitchen, where she presumably spent her days. The interior was peculiarly small, as if secret rooms had been sealed off, leaving just a few living areas. A few perma-tanned middle-aged men lurked near the drinks table, speaking barely above a whisper. They looked as if they should be in uniform, something with silver lightning bolts on the epaulettes.

Dracula caught me looking around and slapped me on the back. ‘You are curious I think, no? Yes, I think you are. Curiosity killed the cat.’ He released a strangled, high-pitched laugh. His eye glinted. I wondered if it was as false as those in his animals. ‘So tell me,’ he said, ‘do you play Belgian Billiards?’

‘Er, no.’

‘Do you hunt?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘But you know how to use a gun.’

‘No.’

‘Hm.’ He thought for a minute. ‘Go and sit with the women.’

He pointed out to the terrace, where several ample ladies, including our hostess, sat with strange cocktails. Grateful to be getting out in the fresh air, I sat in the last empty chair. They turned to look at me as one. They wore high-necked floral-print frocks, looking like middle-aged men in drag. It felt as though I was attending Rosemary’s Baby’s christening party.

‘So tell us,’ said the lady next to me, leaning in confidentially, ‘where is your good lady wife?’

From that moment on things went from bad to worse. Everything I said was wrong, or embarrassingly misconstrued. ‘I’m not married,’ I explained.

‘But you have a lady friend, yes?’ Our hostess had the same glassine eyes as her husband. She peered around the terrace as if expecting to find a girlfriend or two under the chairs.

‘I haven’t got a girlfriend,’ I replied, desperately trying to tell the truth via the sin of omission.

‘But why not? Look at you! No girlfriend? Why, I never heard of such a thing!’ The others all tutted and shook their heads. ‘This is not a good situation, no! What about your children?’

I left and rejoined the huntsmen.

‘Wolfgang is my best friend.’ Dracula awkwardly hugged a man with wild staring eyes and mutton-chop whiskers. ‘He has granted me a licence to build a rifle range in my garden.’

‘How can he do that?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t he need to get permission from the neighbours?’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Wolfgang is the Chief of Police, he can do whatever he likes. This is how things work around here. It will be most exciting. Your lady wife will enjoy it, I think.’

‘I have no wife.’

‘But I have seen her, yes! The lady on the terrace with a broom.’

He had seen Annie, my housekeeper. I guessed that in his head any woman with a broom had to be a wife. I’d like to say I refused to be bullied and stood up for my rights, but for the sake of keeping the peace I did not.

‘When my tree fell down in the storm and chopped my neighbour’s house in half,’ said Dracula, ‘Wolfgang made sure that there was no fuss.’

‘How did he do that?’ I asked.

‘He sent his men next door with rifles to get rid of the problem. They shot the tree to pieces and carried it away, and gave some money to my neighbour. After that, no more fuss.’

I mumbled an excuse and slunk away at the first available moment, a coward unwilling to lie and unable to tell the truth.

I kept on Madame Inez’s aged gardener, and found a caretaker for the premises who was stoned all the time and so addicted to video games that he carried on playing right through our first burglary. The housekeeper I’d hired spent all day on the phone smoking and shrieking in Italian. We were terrified of her. She made us run around collecting gallons of alcool à brûler to chuck all over the marble stairs until I thought the place might blow up.

I also took on another gardener and a pool-girl, and had foisted upon me a variety of unemployable locals who installed lights that burned out, satellite dishes that never worked and solar panelling that failed to heat anything up. Some began jobs and vanished. Others turned into different people: ‘We are Jean-Claude’s cousins. He asked us to finish the job for him.’

‘Where is Jean-Claude?’

‘We don’t know. Maybe Hungary. You can pay us.’ A shrug and another lit Gauloise.

Our local restaurant was entirely open-air and had light bulbs sticking out of walls with fizzing, exposed wiring. Whenever it rained the owner dropped upturned plastic flowerpots over the lamps to stop them from exploding. It struck me that the French were possibly not practical by nature.

While I was back in London I lent the bâtiment to a married couple who I felt could be trusted to lock the place up when they left. I did not know that they would decide to throw a pool party.

When I returned I found a note from Dracula in tiny crabbed writing full of underlinings. It had been wedged under the windscreen wiper of my little Renault. It began, ‘If you want to throw filthy degenerate parties for queers go back to your own country where you are all disgusting Englishes and won’t be noticed.’ The note was quite long and went over on to the other side of the page.

I accused my friends of breaking trust and asked them what on earth they had been doing.

‘It was John’s birthday so we had lunchtime cocktails and snacks, a swim and then tea and cake,’ came the shocked reply.

‘How many of you were there?’

‘Just four of us. Our guests were elderly and left a couple of hours later because they needed to nap. We were very quiet.’

I challenged our brave huntsman. He impatiently waved the idea away. ‘This is beside the point. It makes me sick,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to think about it.’

‘But they were doing nothing wrong.’

‘It was not what they were doing, it was what they COULD be doing to our children in their beds!’ he shrieked. ‘You are in the wrong country! None of you has any right to be here!’

I gave up and decided to keep my distance. Let him fire off guns over our heads and try to have us stuffed beside his stags and antelopes. When another tall fir tree fell over and chopped one of his own buildings in half I was secretly delighted. The same fall brought down the biggest rocks yet. One of them dented the bonnet of my car. The insulting notes from next door continued to appear at regular intervals, complaining about everything from taking phone calls outside to encouraging squirrels.

That was the winter I met Pete and brought him out to the house. There was a rare snowfall and the impasse became so icy that no car could ascend it to reach the road. We were sitting down to dinner when there was a frantic knocking at the front door. Mrs Dracula had fallen on the ice and badly fractured her hip. The ambulance could not get up to their house. Dracula did not know what to do. His friend the Chief of Police was not answering his phone.

Pete led the way back to the Count’s mansion and we made a makeshift stretcher for her, carrying her down through the frozen pass until we reached the medics.

Back in his living room later that night, Dracula offered us brandy from his crystal decanter and we stood around awkwardly for a few minutes before taking our leave. If he never became friendly, at least the notes stopped.

The bâtiment was repeatedly burgled, once while I was asleep in it. I awoke to find everything had been taken from my bedside table. The walls had been spray-painted with insults. The caretaker went missing. I’m not sure we ever saw him again, although I’m told he emerged briefly when we sold the house. Someone was seen in town wearing my sweaters.

The local shops started to close down. First the pâtisserie shut its doors, then the boulangerie. Russians had moved into the area, bringing security guards and attack dogs. To accommodate them and their newly laundered money, the town added Russian translations to the street signs. Onion soup was replaced with borscht.

Without my golden-hued vision of the Côte d’Azur to fall back on I began to notice horrible things. A gourmet snack bar had been built on a nearby cliff, and one night while I was waiting for my order to be filled I idly wandered around the back of it and looked over the edge. A writhing brown sea of rats looked up at me.

How corrupt is the South of France?

There was a beautiful old 1920s hotel near me on a picturesque lookout point. It had a mahogany bar with brass fittings, and fountains and topiary, and old-fashioned staff in black and white uniforms, and a garden that overlooked the sea, with views to Monte Carlo and Italy. It had reached the end of its days and was bought by an oligarch as his private residence.

As the building’s usage couldn’t be legally changed it was forced to remain a hotel, so the new owner made it one that did not exist. He created a dummy website and advertised a restaurant for which it was impossible to book. Outside, he put up the world’s smallest legally required hotel sign (a brass plate three inches across) and posted guards with Alsatians, radios and rifles outside to intimidate people and scare them away from the area. So he obviously had nothing to hide.

Pete does not like this sort of thing. Naturally he made it his ambition to book a table there.

After three months of calling daily, he finally got a reservation in another three months’ time. When that occasion arrived he phoned again and stayed on the line, refusing to quit until the reservation was wearily confirmed. We took two girlfriends along for lunch. Our ancient Renault was too beaten up to even be allowed through the gates, so we strolled into the immaculate grounds in cut-off jeans and scruffy tees, under the watchful lenses of security cameras, trying to look as though we were here all the time and had merely chosen to dress down.

What we found was a handful of incredibly creepy, sunburnt rich old men and a lot of artificially enhanced young women dressed like hookers.

After suffering through an eye-wateringly expensive lunch, we watched as the obsequious English maître d’ approached, thinking he was about to ask us what we thought of the food. Instead he said, ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’

The flunkey told us that there had been a dreadful mistake and could we leave as soon as we’d paid the astronomical bill?

‘It’s a brothel!’ said one of our girlfriends in a stage whisper, but it seemed more like the oligarch’s care home. The allure of the French Riviera tarnished very quickly after that – and things got even weirder.

An elderly actress died in our living room and her ashes were tipped under the birds of paradise. My best friend died there too. We had to decide whether to ship him back or have him cremated on the spot. We opted for the latter, taking him to a Disneyesque funeral home in Monte Carlo, where the rich could cross the Styx in a room painted with pastel scenes of rural tranquillity, a flower-filled field, a view across lakes. It struck me as ironic that the residents of Monte Carlo, a city of concrete high-rises extruded from cliffs, should desire nothing more when they died than a sit-down in a meadow. Shouldn’t the room have been painted with the things that had given them comfort in life: Ferraris, private jets, yachts, gold watches?

Rain sluiced from the cliffs, bringing down mud and rocks, destroying the tiered gardens. Annie picked daily fights with the gardener. There was another burglary. The terraces were invaded by giant red ants that bit. Work on an extension to the elevator shaft stopped as circular saws failed to cut through the limestone of the Massif. A newly installed kitchen simply fell to bits, improperly constructed.

The locked safe sat there mockingly, never to be opened. Scaffolding came down in a storm. The pool discoloured and filled with mud. The house was supported by concrete stilts which were starting to rot and split open. I had dreams in which we broke away from the cliff and cascaded down into the sea, to be lost for ever.

My adventure in the land of the rich had come to a very definite end. When I finally sold the place I must have looked as relieved as the previous owner had been.

45

Keys

I was still not writing. The tension of knowing that I was now terminal had started to get to me.

I told myself I was resting between novels, like an actor coming out of a debilitating run of The Mousetrap and facing a gap before touring in Blithe Spirit. Unlike an actor, however, I couldn’t fill in the time by appearing in Aladdin.fn1

I always felt that an actor friend of mine had a parallel career on the stage. We would bump into each other from time to time and compare work stories. One day I saw him on the tube and asked how he was.

‘My arms are sore,’ he complained.

‘I suppose you’ve been going to the gym too much.’

‘No, I’m playing Lumière the candlestick in Beauty and the Beast. My friend Polly’s just as bad. She’s the teapot.’

I think this is what enrages some people about the arts. If you’re working on an oil rig you’re not going to understand why it’s important not to cut the judge’s song in Sweeney Todd. Careers can’t solely be measured by the revenue they generate, although theatre is a prime generator, easily exported. The Mousetrap has played in twenty-seven languages in over fifty countries.

Writing is a hard career to control. It’s financially unstable and there’s no way of regulating your output because creativity doesn’t really work like that. For a long time I had suffered from Imposter Syndrome, unable to believe that anyone could possibly mistake me for a writer.

Lately the sensation had returned. Writers have one piece of equipment, between their ears. Over the years many devices were introduced to facilitate the flow of ideas to the page. Some had had the opposite effect, especially software that promised to improve your novel writing with the aid of templates, prompts and guidelines. When typewriters went wrong nobody ever said: ‘Have you tried switching it off and switching it on again?’ You untangled the keys, wiped the ink off your hands and carried on laboriously banging away.

If I mention this with a sniff of nostalgia it’s because in 2012 the final typewriter was built in the UK. The manufacturer, Brother, had made 5.9 million typewriters since its factory in Wrexham opened in 1985, and donated their last machine to London’s Science Museum. This completed an arc begun long ago. My own progress had gone something like this:

Deafening Remington ‘Super-Thumper’ upright typewriter. Incredibly noisy, belonged to my mother when she was young.

Remington Portable with hard-shell slipcase marked by ‘Nuclear war? No thanks!’ sunshine sticker. As above but slimmer and harder to thread ribbons into.

IBM Selectric golfball typewriter with Alexis Carrington sticker. Golfball was fascinating to watch in action.

IBM regular electric typewriter with ‘Solidarność!’ sticker. Second-hand; got electric shocks from it.

Brother dot-matrix electric typewriter. Utterly non-instinctive.

Anonymous second-hand PC running BBC WordStar with cassettes. Disastrously slow but you could play Chuckie Egg on it. Out went ribbons, Snopake,fn2 glue, carbons and those tiny white sheets you rubbed over mistakes.

First Mac.

Second Mac.

Third Mac.

Four hundredth Mac.

Signed most of my wages over to Steve Jobs.

Suddenly the older typewriters, and even the crappy Brother, began to appear in antique shops. After decades of being ignored they were now being re-evaluated as delightfully quirky pieces of design. Or as a young friend of mine said when he saw one for the first time, ‘Oh wow, it’s kind of a steampunk computer.’

James Hadley Chase purportedly wrote the bestseller No Orchids for Miss Blandish on a flight. Edgar Wallace said he could write a book in a day. Virginia Andrews became such a successful writer that the Inland Revenue declared her technically still alive after her death because she was still earning so much. John Kennedy Toole’s mother only managed to sell his lifetime’s work A Confederacy of Dunces after his suicide. J. R. R. Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings when he was forty-five and finally delivered it when he was sixty-two. The method by which every successful writer reaches the public is as unique as the book itself.

But for decades the actual process of writing remained unchanged. Research was followed by drafts one, two and three full of carbons, pages, crossings out, endless edits. The return of cheap paper brought longer but not necessarily better books. The novels I loved best were slender compared with modern doorstops.

I stopped keeping a paper copy of everything ‘for safety’ and took to carrying around three or four flash drives on my keyring, in my bag and tucked in pockets. Instead of producing multiple drafts I’d produce two and a half, one blurring into another. Finally, cloud computing meant that you could produce just one version of a novel with no other drafts. No Post-it notes, no clippings, no postcards, no maps or diagrams. The passage between the idea and the prose finally became clear.

The same thing happened to time-saving home hardware. My little brother, an engineer who believes in the power of human and machine, was horrified by my new reliance on AI. How did it happen?

My home became sentient, like Julie Christie’s in Demon Seed. My bathroom scales called my phone to nag me for putting on weight and not doing enough steps. The oven, dishwasher and microwave complained constantly. The TV and sound system were only accessed via my phone, so I managed to call a friend and accidentally turn on the rolling news. The central heating and doorbell were operable from abroad, so I could have international accidents. When I got packages intended for neighbours my phone rang in Barcelona. I asked Siri to set an alarm at ten o’clock and he told me the flight times to Athens. I appreciate that ‘at ten’ and ‘Athens’ could be muddled, but voice search on Netflix ends up with me shouting film titles over and over like a demented parrot. ‘Krakatoa, Krakatoa, Krakatoa.’

This is all very wonderful, but I was expecting a future of screenless televisions, floating sofas and magnetic travel. Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a streaming metaverse merely turned us into porcine fantasists waiting for sites to load.

Walking back from the clinic where I had my bloodwork done, I took a good look around at my gilded cage. Being locked inside the London bubble was a fate that revolted many country dwellers. It’s the level of mental aphasia Londoners enter when they open the Evening Standard property pages, skim an article praising a stack of tiny glass boxes in Dalston Bordersfn3 going for £1.5 million and think, ‘They’re nice.’

It’s thinking, ‘Cars, eh? Who actually drives those things?’ It’s nipping next door to borrow the neighbour’s raclette tongs. It’s thinking four quid for a cup of hot chocolate is normal. It’s going outside London and being shocked by all the babies. It’s stopping to take a picture of a horse. It’s two words that cause panic: ‘mango shortage’.

It’s wondering how you’ll ever survive when the bubble suddenly deflates.

In March 2020 that’s exactly what happened. Commissions suddenly dried up and the jobs that were still on slowed to a crawl. No writer I knew could find employment. Some brilliant scribes decided they’d had enough and took regular employment. Others carried on, hoping to build up a reserve of work that could be sold later. Writing is a long-tail career. Agents and editors talk in terms of seasons and years, not weeks and deadlines. Everything happens slowly and sometimes the work doesn’t pay off for half a decade.

Worse, the publishers who knew of my situation began to move cautiously around the subject of schedules. Nobody wanted to say, ‘We’ll try to get it out while you’re still hanging around.’

Having gone public with the news of my health, a reader got in touch with me a couple of months later. ‘I saw you on Twitter today. I thought you were supposed to have died by now.’

46

In Denial

The mighty Pound Shop is my new fave shop and I went mad with my money and bought a new roasting dish. It was an exorbitant £3 I like it very much. Amber told me a joke about Jesus and Mary being refugees and I tried to suffocate her. I am reading The Times this evening big article on MR James who I thought wrote ghost stories but he is a woman. Author of 50 Shades of Silliness, I did not like it. I once went out with a man who put me in a cupboard as his friend had come to the flat. Oh those were the days. Sadly that won’t be happening tomorrow when I am having a gas and electric check. I will however have to take man down into cellar. Feel my hugs xxxMaggie

Maggie’s linguistic incontinence could not be dammed. Words never ceased to pour out of her. She had filled diaries since she was a child and still had them all, although many had sustained water damage after her basement flooded. Because obviously you stack the easily ruined treasures of your life on the ground near a drain. I thought of Maggie as a latter-day Mother Courage, trundling on through famine and fire, protecting her children by shouting at them, feral in her intensity to survive. She might have been a timeless witch-woman, which was why I had cast her as one in my crime series.

I’ve always been fascinated by the subject of witchcraft – the social politics of demonization rather than the casting of spells. There’s a primal underpinning to society that keeps its mysteries from ever being fully resolved. It’s formed of myths and strange beliefs, apocryphal histories and historical fact, shared across generations and centuries. Cormac McCarthy seems to have tapped into this more than any other author I can think of, and it’s something all writers should appreciate. It’s what gives my novels the air of strangeness that so often gets them misfiled.

It made me wonder if I should restart the Dark Ages novel and try to make it work.

Imagine a world governed by these rules:

Your first child will always be a girl.

Illness can be cured by urinating on a loaf and feeding it to your dog.

Tying a bell on an ox stops it from being struck by lightning.

The wearing of a gold earring prevents eye complaints.

Curses can never be cancelled once uttered.

In the Dark Ages it was thought you could cure illnesses analogously, so if you had heart disease you ate a heart-shaped leaf. Today we associate magic with ancient belief systems that were supplanted first by religion, then by empirical data. And yet magical rites were sometimes based on surprisingly sensible concerns stemming from our desires to take positive action in times of uncertainty and misfortune.

The need for magic was always there, a need to influence our fate and produce happier fortunes. In magic there is no chance or coincidence, only cause and effect. In a world where crops inexplicably failed, livestock sickened and mothers died in childbirth, simple precautions could be taken to reduce the risks to home and family.

It’s no wonder that when people are faced with cancer, logic is defenestrated and replaced with folklore. If we really wanted to know how the scythe of sickness slices through the population the data is right there at our fingertips. I looked it up a little but stopped googling because I’m young and impressionable and dark thoughts keep me from writing.

When I talked to friends about the problem of actually addressing terminal scenarios I sent some of them spiralling off into euphemisms and analogies. Well-meaning people could surprise me by suddenly recommending beetroot stalks fermented in turmeric.

I wondered if the evolving judgements of Woke could be counted as folkloric thinking.

STUDENT:

As a privileged white male you no longer have the right to express outmoded opinions. The term ‘fat’ is judgemental and a feminist issue that does not involve you.

ME:

Oh, I thought it was a non-gendered part of speech denoting the opposite of thin in the same way that a bough of a tree may be described as thick without denigrating the tree.

STUDENT:

Boomer.

My leash extended from the front door of my flat to the door of the hospital about a third of a mile away. As lockdown started to crumble and people tentatively reappeared in the street as if emerging from onion cellars after a hurricane, I remained inside, but not for long. I had neighbours who had sat in their living rooms being fed bad news for months on end. I was pinned in place by tests and treatments, but I could go out.

I made it to an exhibition at the National Gallery. It was painful and difficult but I managed to walk all the way there. Freedom! When I returned I was more tired than the tiredest man in Snoozytown, more tired than the Yawning Man himself. I slept for two days. The pain returned. I took the painkillers I was offered but after a few mornings of trying to pee in wardrobes and taking the rubbish out without my pants on I weaned myself off them. I don’t like the thought of psychotropic drugs because I fear loss of control. I found myself snapping ‘I can manage!’ a lot. But I couldn’t, not really, so I finished off my abandoned bottle of morphine and slept and watched TV.

SQUIZZER:

You watched every single episode of Veep while you were flattened and you don’t remember a single fucking one of them, that’s how much morphine you took.

ME:

I only took a few sips. Look, if I have to have a talking sidekick couldn’t I have something cuter?

SQUIZZER:

Like what?

ME:

I don’t know. A possum. Weren’t they in Bambi?

SQUIZZER:

Bambi was Austrian. Enough said.

ME:

I need to rest. Cancer and chemo have aged me. It was something nobody ever mentions.

SQUIZZER:

Aged you? Gee, you think? Dramatically, I’d say. You’ve got older in the last few pages. You were still kind of fresh when you started, now you look like Maggie Smith.

ME:

That’s because it hurt like a son of a bitch.

SQUIZZER:

I guess you spent so long with your face all scrunched up, you could never relax it again. It still doesn’t explain what happened to your neck. All men become either lizards or toads when they get older. You been sunning yourself on any rocks lately?

ME:

Look what I’ve been left with! Inflamed joints, nervous-system problems, dry skin, bowel damage, memory loss, hearing loss, hair loss …

SQUIZZER:

Weird ears. You’re proudly carrying on a long line of wizened males. You could play Gandalf. The men in your family are all identical. A flick book of your photos would make you look like one person time-travelling.

ME:

I just want to sit in the sun. It’s embarrassing. The simple pleasure of sitting quietly in warm sunlight is enough to reduce me to tears.

SQUIZZER:

Is this sentimental bollocks going to take very long? Because I’m not going to hang around if it does. Why can’t you be more like your husband? He just quietly gets on and does stuff. He inspires confidence.

ME:

I’m not that person, OK? I earn my living by imagining humankind’s worst traits. In my present situation it’s not ideal.

SQUIZZER:

So, what is?

ME:

Come back when you have some good news. I’m not listening to you any more. Nut-hoarding chancer.

When you become seriously ill the first piece of smart advice you hear again and again is, ‘Listen to your body.’ Men don’t, of course. I wanted to tell them: ‘You’ve been worried for a while but you’re like Cleopatra: in denial. You think if you ignore it, it will go away. It won’t. You need to see a doctor. And when you do and the doc says it’s That Word, the one you can’t bring yourself to say, you must learn to say it in order to reduce it. It’s too late to be all private about your body. Students with pencil torches will soon have you up on all fours. Don’t be embarrassed. Vulgarians get things done. Think of Donald Trump. OK, he nearly brought about the end of American democracy, but you have to get this sorted out!’fn1

I tried it on a few friends and some did tell me they’d taken the big step of booking a doctor’s appointment. Enough feeling returned to my hands and thighs to make sitting in my writing chair easier, although the nerve damage in my feet prevented easy walking. A glass of wine sharpened my wits. The Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud maintained that humans are born with a 0.05 per cent blood-alcohol shortfall, and that if we top up the level we achieve more,fn2 although this was based on a misinterpretation of a late-nineteenth-century treatise on wine. So I was going to drink a little anyway. I was going to write myself a terrific Bryant & May short story too, but that evaporated, along with the ability to remember what I’d had for dinner last night or what I was going to drink. I decided to do some linguistic exercises, obscuring words in sentences and forcing myself to fill them in.

My fear was that ‘recharging the batteries’ (i.e. lying around doing nothing) would coast me downhill faster than my hopeless attempts to energize the brain and body. Needless to say, such things were not covered under the NHS instruction manual on cancer. I’m joking – there was no instruction manual.

‘I’m really sorry, I’ve only been thinking about myself lately,’ I told Pete. His hands-off approach had worked; I felt much better for not being smothered with over-attentiveness. ‘Are we still OK?’

‘I don’t know why you have to ask me that,’ he replied. ‘Of course we are. You know it could get a lot worse, don’t you?’

I had a call from the hospital.

My oncologist was on the line. ‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Your request to get on the experimental treatment was unsuccessful.’

At least he was consistent. ‘So what happens now?’ I asked, recalling the ‘Go home and prepare for death’ advice I’d received at thirty-nine.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I have a plan.’

47

Mildew

Midnight. My phone beeped. Whatever she’d written, I wasn’t going to read it. The last thing she’d sent was too enigmatic for me to deal with:

That haggis was sumptuous

Presumably the message was intended for someone else. I tried not to look at this one and failed.

I must not get maudlin what a funny word why Maud. I am reading Tom Wakefield’s The Variety Artists and it satisfies me. Tom once told me that I was not chronological so 80 is the new 50. I have just seen a white mouse. I feel sorry for it. I find Virginia W incredibly pedantic so I am not going to the lighthouse & she goes to the charity shelf. I made a West Indian chicken curry but nearly choked to death on the chillies. Firing love bullets in your direction xxxMaggie

After another scan I left the hospital and hurried through a rainstorm to a cult paperback, pulp and ephemera fair housed in Great Portland Street.

Books will get you through bad times better than good times will get you through no books. Despite that indisputable fact, there was hardly anyone there that day. The sales tables were almost empty, the punters absent. In an age of #MeToo, proactive diversity and cancellation, I’d started to wonder if all the weird old white men were in hiding. Then I thought Covid – perhaps they’re all dead. It turned out that the dealers and buyers had been snatched away by the pingdemicfn1 and would be back.

I had been going to these things for twenty years. The weird old white men usually trolled the shelves of the subterranean book fair in Bloomsbury. It brought them out in droves. They were a special breed of hunters, gatherers, collectors and cataloguers, moulting, dishevelled and well on the spectrum, lacking even rudimentary social skills but able to spot a first paperback edition by Edgar Wallace from thirty yards. Almost exclusively male and sixty-plus, they knew a lot about pre-1900 commemorative hand-coloured German postcards. There were Eastern European professors, hunched elderly scholars and Indian academics – but hardly a woman in sight.

For there in leafy Bloomsbury, in the basement of London’s least attractive sixties hotel, a hundred dealers sold the kind of ephemera that would have Arthur Bryant reaching for his wallet. The rooms smelled of damp paper, rotting bindings, mildew, unread words and overlooked lives.

I knew many of the dealers and their long-suffering wives. They’d spent a lifetime collecting a narrow spectrum of volumes on a subject they now realized nobody was interested in, and the asking prices were low, going ever lower. One dealer checked the price of a book I was thinking about buying and reduced it even before I had spoken to him. Several others said it was their last fair.

‘It’s a dying field,’ one told me. ‘Who’s interested in this stuff any more? We thought we were helping to preserve the nation’s literary heritage, but now we’re being told it’s a pile of old shit. We’re retiring. It’s not worth the effort.’

A bundle of strange, lurid books caught my eye; slightly larger than paperbacks but with a slender page count, virtually pamphlets, printed that way because of the wartime paper shortage.

I bought one (price: 1/6) called ‘Laughs of Mystery & Crime’. Inside was a cartoon. A fortune teller was studying her crystal ball and telling the rather desperate lady sitting opposite her, ‘I see a tall stranger crossing your path – My God, he can certainly run!’

The articles were full of burglars in masks and striped jerseys, cheery coppers on the street, chaps chucking bricks through jewellery-shop windows and escaped prisoners with arrows all over their clothes. Simpler times, simpler pleasures.

Many of the items on display appeared desirable and attractive at first glance, like A Drawing of London’s Devastation Made from a Zeppelin (a huge, elaborate fold-out of how London looked after the Blitz,fn2 with every bombed-out street and building etched in great detail) until you spotted that there was something about them making them unsaleable. The Zeppelin drawing, for example – what would you do with it? Who would you show it to? Or the beautiful Victorian sheet music for songs you’ve never heard of?

There were bundles of quill-penned letters from people writing in 1770, but they were boring to read, and handwritten court rolls from even earlier, but it was impossible to figure out to what they were referring. Rare children’s books featured minor unloved characters and talking animals who never achieved popularity. Early Victorian postcards from seaside resorts offered lurid, unappealing views. There was a book of cigarette-filter-tip analysis cataloguing cigarettes with actual snouts installed in its fold-out pages, all neatly preserved in ashy rows. The book was both pointless and funny-smelling. A theatre programme for the opening night of The Mikado seemed a great bargain. Oh wait, it wasn’t from the opening night but from several weeks later …

I roamed the rows, bumping into old friends I was vaguely surprised to find alive. Excitedly we showed each other our wares. There was a serious side to the browsing; I weighed up buying a book on ancient London, a rare old volume weighing about six kilos. It was forty quid and worth it for the research alone, but I was going out to lunch after the event and the thought of lugging it around …

Five minutes later, just as I was staggering out of the door under its weight, the seller came racing over. I thought perhaps he had realized he’d undercharged me.

‘I didn’t know there was another volume,’ he told me, handing me a second, even heavier book.

‘But I don’t want to buy this one,’ I said.

‘You don’t understand – this one comes with it.’

‘I don’t want it.’ I was now sinking under the collective weight of the bags.

‘You have to have it,’ he exclaimed passionately, ‘because it is incumbent upon you not to break up the set.’

As I left with the books, I heard an old German gentleman getting very excited about finding a set of pristine pre-war anti-Nazi propaganda pamphlets. They might have been strangers, but after a few minutes it had felt as if I had attended a welcoming party where the host says, ‘Enter, you are among friends. Strange, obsessed, odoriferous and poorly groomed, but friends all the same.’

Stuck at home once more and only able to manage short distances without losing my breath or falling over, I was keen to hear of Dr Ramalan’s plan, but he was maintaining radio silence. I just had to be patient. Meanwhile, with nothing to hold them back, my cells were presumably turning rogue and rampaging through my system like a drunk motorbike gang.

I watched the rain fall on the grey slate rooftops of North London. In the past year I had been due to attend literary festivals in Kolkata and Helsinki. Now the end of the street was starting to look exotic.

48

Back in the Chair

A week later the doctor called me in again.

‘I have some good news,’ he said with what appeared to be a broad grin, although perhaps his PPE was pulling his face too tight. ‘After you were turned down for the experimental trial I decided to resubmit your medical history.’

I remembered my medical history in the days before computerized hospital records. A nurse used to roll it in on a trolley that looked like a skip on wheels.

‘You have – phew, quite a bit of history, don’t you? So this time I sent them all the details.’

All of them? What had he submitted the first time, I wondered, a précis? Did I have a Sickness Highlights CV?

‘Anyway, they came back to me. This time we have an approval.’

‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘That’s … When do I start?’

‘Right now,’ he said. ‘Immediately. The sooner the better.’

‘Well, that’s, um, good.’ I pushed the thought of starting all over again to the back of my mind and smiled. ‘So you think I should do it?’

‘I don’t want to be blunt,’ he said, proceeding to be blunt, ‘but you have no other options left. It is not without complications.’

I immediately thought of Mrs Terrain in Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. ‘There was a wittle compwication,’ she says coyly, revealing the acid-stained bandages that cover her botched facelift.

‘It can have harmful side effects, but it’s generally well tolerated,’ I told Pete on the way home. ‘I’ll only have to go in a couple of times a month. It’s not available on the NHS yet because it’s too expensive, so the drug corporation pays for it in return for patient data.’

‘Fine. Don’t care. What’s the bad news?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can hear it in your voice. There’s something else.’

‘Well – it’s only successful in a very small percentage of those patients who take it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a tightrope. Along the way there are a thousand things that can go wrong. Your tolerance fails. Most patients don’t last the course.’

‘Low odds are better than nothing.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘How does an eighty-five per cent failure rate sound?’

‘Let’s call it a fifteen per cent success rate.’

‘Deal. Then let’s begin.’

Ten days later I found myself back in the treatment centre. This time the nurses smiled indulgently. ‘You back again? We can’t keep you away, can we?’

‘It’s not the food that’s the draw, I can tell you.’ I seated myself in my usual spot. ‘Bring it on.’

I was prepped and cannulated. The intern missed my vein and got blood all over my shirt. ‘There’s some leftover jelly and custard,’ said the dinner lady. It was just like old times.

‘What are you reading?’ asked Dolores from the Philippines, attaching a drip.

‘Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens,’ I told her.

‘It looks like a lot of words.’

‘That’s what it is.’

‘Too many for me. I don’t read, I don’t have the time.’ She gave the drip a vicious flick and headed for the next patient.

Fair point, I thought, feeling like a dilettante French aristocrat as I set the book aside and prepared to dream.

London suits tales with an element of the macabre, the camp, the doomed, the tragic, the grotesque. Satires are born of those who abuse privilege and behave abominably towards the less fortunate, so of course the city is full of colourful stories. Dickens knew that if he created indelibly strong personalities the rest fell into place, and if he had a location that meshed together people from all walks of life he could stir up these characters and let them interact.

At the start of his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, a body is pulled from the muck of the Thames to have its pockets emptied of cash. This tumultuous saga presents a city of obscene greed and squalor, and failed to draw in the critics. It wasn’t until many years after his death that we came to fully appreciate the intricate structural engineering of these later works.

What was Dickens up to? Was he doing what many authors do as they age and writing in an ever more complex and demanding way? I think he was feeding the voracious hunger within him to explore everything, and that in part he wanted to serially recreate the whole of London in our heads. Why?

Because he was angry with London. He was angry that this great trading city had corrupted the rich and abandoned the poor, that it promoted a lust for wealth and social standing over the health of its working citizens, that it was calculating and soul-deadening, and he showed this anger through his characters.

Dickens became a superstar by the age of twenty-five, London’s greatest and most energetic writer, despite the fact that the city had put his father in jail and forced him into work in a boot-blacking factory. He outsold his nearest literary rivals by ten to one.

Charles Dickens is a library of life.

Why is he so worth returning to – or turning to, if you’ve never read him at all?

1. There’s a World to Be Discovered in His Work

And you never seem to reach the end of it. His big idea, that the capitalist system changes the nature of people, is as timely as ever. To illustrate this point he populates the books with a teeming life of their own, filling them with incidents great and miniscule, characters generous and venal. The pages burst with enmities, grudges, cruelties, arguments, laughter, love, fights, revels, reverses, everything that makes life worth living. Shut the cover and his characters go on living within the pages. Nobody here is lost in a phone or hiding their opinions behind polite emails.

2. His Characters and Descriptions Are Dialled up to Eleven

His works start in the 1830s and continue for the next forty years, capturing a world that’s hard to imagine now, but his characters are more relatable if you’ve lived in a city. The background roles are lightly but crisply sketched in. His major characters are hypocritical and delusional, pitiable and detestable and timeless, his villains are fabulous, and only the heroes and heroines are dull because they must be controlled by their author and have no room to follow wayward traits. All are more colourful and forthcoming than most people around us.

The modern tendency is to reticence, and Dickens’ characters are far from that. They are opinionated and lie and steal and cheat and complain about each other while being capable of acts of great kindness.

3. He’s More Readable Than You’d Expect

Because they were designed to be published in weekly parts, Dickens wrote in small bites that could be savoured individually without endless referral to earlier sections. His stories are dauntingly overstuffed but at their root they contain a single picaresque journey with a great many detours and byways.

To help you along the way Dickens organically uses symbols to denote states of mind. The theme of imprisonment occurs frequently, with locks, bars and cages besetting the characters, and turbulent seas warning of the risks ahead.

4. He’s God

Dickens is an omniscient narrator. He stands above the world and looks down on it, zooming in on the background extras rather than spending time with the nominal leads. He studies the foolish foibles of humankind and looks back at you, nodding: ‘This is us. Let’s look a little more closely.’ And you follow him in.

When you turn on the TV or open a book, how often do you think that the author has simply read or watched a lot of secondary material and not experienced it first-hand? Dickens was embedded in the city of London, constantly collecting the observations that would serve as inspiration to illustrate his themes. It’s as if everyone is trying to share their stories with him, and he’s listening and writing it all down as fast as he can. His energy is daunting and wearying, and it ultimately killed him.

5. He’s Very Funny

In an early chapter of Our Mutual Friend Dickens stages a dinner party for a nouveau riche couple, the Veneerings, who are too common for polite society. Watch as their suddenly acquired friends creep around them and you realize you’re invited to a social comedy of the highest order. Or look in on Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, too busy with her charitable good works for Africa to notice that one of her own children has got his head stuck in some railings. Dickens is a master at controlling our distance from the matter at hand in order to evoke laughter. His sense of merriment is occasionally inappropriate, but there never was a writer who took more joy in the construction of switchback sentences.

6. He Invented the Novel AND the London Novel

Dickens on London is always haunting. We’re told that Little Dorrit and Maggie ‘had shrunk past homeless people, lying coiled up in nooks. They had run from drunkards. They had started from slinking men, whistling and signing to one another at bye corners, or running away at full speed.’ The streets come alive before our eyes. We see rich and poor, kindly and evil, and feel fear and love for the characters.

As for detective fiction, although Edgar Allan Poe got there first with a short story, Dickens was working his way towards the first full-length whodunnit. He had already introduced Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, and died writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a full-length murder mystery, the solution for which has been sought ever since. If Drood had been finished it would have cemented together the twin worlds of literary and popular fiction.

There’s another Charles Dickens, author of such part-works as ‘The Haunted House’, ‘Mugby Junction’, ‘The Battle of Life’, ‘Going into Society’, ‘Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions’ and ‘A Message from the Sea’. Great writers tend to have certain works repeatedly cherry-picked from the canon until we only remember those tales. (There are endless television versions of Jane Eyre while, say, Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Villette are sidelined.) Dickens wrote short-story collections, non-fiction, children’s works, supernatural tales, sketches, dramatic monologues, Christmas fables and collaborative anthologies. To complicate matters, some books had excerpts removed to be tailored into individual stories. Let’s not even go into his poetry, plays, essays and journalism.

In The Violent Effigy, a study of the creative imagination, the poet John Carey pointed out that Dickens is at heart a comedic writer but tries to hide it because he’s worried that his readers will treat comedy too lightly:

Comedy is felt to be artificial and escapist; tragedy, toughly real. The opposite view seems more accurate; tragedy is tender to man’s dignity and self-importance, and preserves the illusion that he is a noble creature. Comedy uncovers the absurd truth, which is why people are so afraid of being laughed at in real life. Once Dickens starts laughing nothing is safe, from Christianity to dead babies.

‘You’re done,’ said Dolores, unhooking the clear plastic bag from its stand. ‘You were making funny noises in your sleep. Let me take that thing out of your arm. Then you can go home and finish your book.’

49

Q&A

I had not been able to get hold of Maggie, but she was obviously fine, judging by the miles of texts still reaching me.

Did you know that Carly Simon almost slept with Sean Connery? Wish I had slept with Sean Connery instead of some of the stoats I did sleep with. I have been put forward for a job hurray my first job of the year from modelling agency. I am to go and get a tattoo done in shoreditch for a new campaign for older people who want to do new and exciting things like getting a tattoo although of course I already have a palm tree. Sadly there does not appear to be a sheep. Goodnight my sweetling xxxMags

I needed to write, but felt like a tennis player who had torn a ligament so badly he’d been told he would never play again. There was nothing to do but take the treatments and wait. My brain was still filling with mist, and some days I could barely get out of my armchair. Fatigue meant that walking across a room felt as risky as standing up in a punt. I would definitely have to start staying away from the edges of tube platforms.

I met a woman in the treatment centre who told me that she loved coming up to town on days like today, as if this was comparable with taking in a show. I remember thinking, You poor soul. How bad does your life have to get before you start looking forward to weekly chemical injections? Then I looked around and thought, Maybe it’s a good place to meet a future partner.

Why did I suddenly know so many single women? Lately it had started to bother me. They were intelligent, independent, in great jobs, could do their own wiring and couldn’t find a man who was not borderline insane. The ones they met were married, gay or mad. It couldn’t just be that men over forty only dated younger women. I discussed this with my friend Sally, who told me that at her age, statistically she had more chance of being in a hijack than getting married.

‘That can’t be true,’ I said. ‘What about Lisa? She got married at forty-one.’

‘Yes,’ said Sally, ‘but she was actually in a hijack.’

At the Tate Modern, the woman next to me admitted she wasn’t there for the art. She was looking for a divorced man in this year’s Diesel jeans (i.e. could afford his ex-wife’s maintenance), carrying a book (i.e. could hold a conversation), with uneven sideburns (i.e. not gay). If women had to leap out from behind a Rothko in order to meet a man, something was wrong.

When I suggested internet dating to a friend I was tricked into helping her assemble an online profile, and was staggered when she casually dropped ten years from her age and Photoshopped out the laughter lines from her pictures. I thought only men were allowed to do that.

Maggie had once told me that all she asked from a man these days was for him to have his own wheels. Naturally, she had ended up dating a taxi driver.

My younger female friends wanted much, much more. They needed to live in Chiswick, Fulham, Chelsea, Islington or Notting Hill, non-negotiable. They thought their lives could be full of oyster bars and cocktails, not recognizing the universal truth that glitzy expensive spots are mostly filled with the kind of creeps who would rather be with a hooker.

Live in what’s politely known as an up-and-coming area and the first thing you find is that everyone’s friendlier, although when I first moved in my local supermarket cashier wouldn’t hand over my shopping until I’d paid for it. Life in King’s Cross used to mean always knowing where your wallet was, but there’s a better chance of meeting someone nice than shuffling up to a stranger in an art gallery who’s only there for the Kandinskys.

One friend over forty met someone on match.com four months ago, and as of this writing it’s still going strong, which means we’re no longer responsible for lighting her barbecue during the summer months.

Life in King’s Cross could never be normal, and our building was a reflection of the chaos in the streets. My old downstairs neighbour, the astrologer, called me one very hot day to say that she had purchased a piece of modern art by somebody called Bismarck and needed to get it up into her apartment, and would I mind taking care of it for her?

I went down to the main door and found an old-fashioned Armitage Shanks cistern toilet, the kind with a chain-pull and an overhead tank, its bowl filled with black sump oil. In the oil stood a three-foot blue neon tube with a three-pin plug attached. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. There was no way of getting it up ten flights of stairs, so I summoned our tiny lift and eventually managed to manoeuvre it inside at an angle without snapping the neon tube.

As I pressed the floor button, the doors shut on the trailing electrical plug attached to the neon tube before I could stop it. As it was trapped outside the door the cord quickly grew taut and rose. The lift ascended and then jarred to a halt, tethered. The alarm didn’t work so I managed to force open the doors and crawl out of the gap at the bottom, but the lift was jammed and I was now covered in sump oil.

I went down to the basement, took off my oil-soaked shirt and found the lift’s manual override lever, then climbed inside the shaft. I had just finished hand-pumping the lift up to the next floor when the rest of the sump oil poured down the shaft on top of me.

My phone went. It was my brother.

‘So,’ he said, ‘what are you up to? Anything interesting?’

There was always something waiting to disrupt my daily writing routine, and this was good because it kept the idea inkwell topped up all the time. I’m a writer, I told myself, not a patient. I had typed my way through my chemo treatments, regarding needles as nuisances. When my beard started to fall out I was only worried that bristles were getting into my keyboard. I was so relaxed about injecting myself daily that one morning I accidentally pinned my T-shirt to my skin.

I had thought I would meet all kinds of interesting people at hospital but, as I’d found before, nobody wanted to chat. The staff were too busy and the patients were in their own worlds. Hospitals are battery farms controlled by a hundred systems, few of which speak to each other either. You go into the process, much as in Cheltenham, and pass through it, and sometimes you come out of the other end in one piece. At this point it seemed best to retreat into the imagination.

I was acutely aware of the time passing in days, hours, minutes. Walking anywhere had to be planned in advance. Watching TV was still as much a struggle for me as it had been for my father, who would wander in during a drama’s climactic scene and announce, ‘I’m thinking of replacing that drainpipe.’

I didn’t want to waste time watching TV but I couldn’t really go anywhere. The biggest problem remained a lack of stimulus. My friend Joel, who planned PowerPoint presentations on cable channels for corporate sponsors, said to me, ‘You know how hard these times are for people like us – you’re creative as well, aren’t you?’

A lot of jobs dangle the promise of ‘creativity’ as some kind of career sop to counterbalance the mind-blanking dullness of the job, but how do you define a creative career? A group of my friends tried to build a set of ten questions that would help to answer this (all right, yes, we were in a pub, the Edgar Wallace if you must know) and here’s what we came up with.

Are you naturally creative?

1. Do you know where your next payment is coming from?

2. When your accountant is explaining why you’re broke, do you just sort of stop listening?

3. There are two new pieces of mail in your inbox. One is from your bank and looks urgent, and the other is from the Whitstable Literary Festival. Which do you open first?

4. Do you know anything at all about sport, especially cars or horses? Anyone?

5. When you start thinking about plots, do you sometimes forget which direction your house is in?

6. Have you ever described a film on the phone to someone before remembering your real reason for calling? (‘Oh, I forgot to mention my mother died yesterday.’)fn1

7. While arguing with a friend about background colours for a set design, do you fail to notice that you were nearly hit by a car?

8. Do you understand that when the fridge is empty you have to go food shopping?

9. How late did you file your last tax return? Why have you still not done it?

10. How often do you speak Hungarian?fn2

It has always surprised me that the first question I get asked when someone meets me is: ‘Do you write under your own name?’ It seems a peculiar choice over: ‘What do you most like writing about?’, which I never get asked.

Before the pandemic, one of my main interactions with the public was doing Q&As. The readers are nearly always on the side of the writer, and are predisposed to helping you find an answer to their question. Often they’ll start with a compliment and move on to something easy, but there are always one or two who can’t frame what they’re trying to say or ask multi-part questions that never reach an end. When the deranged Christian censorship-obsessive Mary Whitehouse held her Festival of Light Q&A sessions, the questions were submitted in advance and the dissenters were thrown out, as if it was a Nazi rally or a Donald Trump fundraiser.

Occasionally you’ll get what I call a ‘thorn’ – someone who wants to make a splash by saying something controversial. A woman in the audience for publisher Jon Oliver (the only cool Christian I’ve ever encountered) asked how dare he publish stories with sex and violence in them, and what would his reaction be if God found out, to which Oliver replied, ‘God is everywhere so He already knows, doesn’t He?’

Sometimes audience members simply get it wrong. During a Q&A with Jack Clayton, the director of The Innocents, his classic adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, which was being rereleased on the big screen, the mic passed to a man who said he admired the way the director had blurred the edges of the film to intensify the experience of the viewer and place him/her in the character’s head. Clayton explained, ‘That wasn’t why I did it. We decided to shoot widescreen but the sets had been built for 16:9. Several walls didn’t go all the way to the sides, so I had to smear Vaseline on the edges of the lens and hope for the best.’

Similarly, a rather intense young woman told veteran scriptwriting legends Galton and Simpson that they would have been more popular if they’d written happier endings, to which Ray Galton replied, ‘Tragedy is funny. Happiness isn’t.’

Some writers have personas they adopt onstage. Bret Easton Ellis used to affect a sulky bad-boy image in front of the public, but was charm personified behind the scenes. This left him trapped inside an image that eventually must have become tiresomely lacking in dignity.

The nicest reaction I ever had at an event was from the delightful, reading-obsessed librarians at Sutton Library, who discovered their funding had suddenly been slashed and decided to blow the entire remaining budget on publicizing my gig. The event was to celebrate a new Bryant & May novel so they built giant matchboxes and decorated cakes with my characters. The audience had a great time, I stayed much longer than I should have done and I was smiling for days after.

This is all it really takes to please an author. A little enthusiasm.

50

How to Survive

Tungi has finished the painting of the house hurray and it looks really clean. I got him to decorate the stone flowers round the tops of my windows only to discover after forty years that the right side did not have any bunches of leaves. Tungi thinks they got war damage. I found a lovely bright purple-pink as I think the house looked a bit formal. Many people have commented on the colour. I asked one man if he would like a picture as he was really staring at the house. Finally he said well it is certainly different which I think meant it looks shit xxxMaggie

My phone beeped.

Our records show that you are considered clinically extremely vulnerable. You are eligible for a vaccination.

My neighbours had been isolating out of personal choice for the past six months, and managed to get sick after a delivery man brought a package into their kitchen. Our building shared one elevator so it was hardly surprising that Pete was the next to go, then me.

Before I started the experimental treatment I had pretty much assumed that if I caught the virus I would be dead. Now, though, the rules had changed, Covid had become more benign and I bounced back after what amounted to a mild winter cold. As all of our Christmas plans had to be cancelled while we self-isolated, I got on with some reading.

Remember how you read books as a child? I had two modes, one for comic books, seated squarely at the kitchen table armed with a tea and a chocolate biscuit, the other for novels, lying on my stomach with the book flat on the floor. I still read novels lying on my stomach like a five-year-old. Not in the hospital, obviously, although it would solve their chair shortage.

We tend to read in the shape of a letter F, starting with the first and second lines, then scan down the left-hand side of the page. Most of us try to read too quickly and miss crucial pieces of information, but if you have a single glass of wine first your reading speed improves.

While I was recovering at home, my phone rang. Maggie announced that she was coming round to bring me a Christmas present.

‘No,’ I cried, ‘Pete and I are still testing positive and self-isolating.’

‘Stop being silly,’ she said, ‘My whole family have Covid and I just spent Christmas with them, and I’m still negative. I miss my mummy and daddy, don’t you?’

A person is less anchored once his parents have died. There was a sense of being cast adrift that reminded me of childhood Christmases. You don’t want to be around scientists when they cut loose. They work so intensely that when they celebrate they fall down and windows get broken. Consequently our Christmas Days were often a mopping-up exercise as my mother tried to find out which hospital my father was in. I missed three Christmases in a row, waiting for her to locate him.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I miss them as well.’

‘Do you know, our local pub is open but the church is shut. Where is Jesus when you need him?’

‘Please protect yourself, Margaret – you sound like you’re in a tunnel or something. Where are you calling from?’

‘I’m on your landing.’

I opened the front door and there she was, doing yoga exercises. ‘There’s a gift in the bag. I can’t stop. I have other people to see.’

She was wearing torn jeans, big furry boots and a peculiar hat with giant fluffy pompoms. She looked like an overgrown mouse. Before I could stop her she stood up and rushed forward to hug me.

‘Do you have any concept of what self-isolation means?’ I asked, disentangling her.

‘Oh, it’s so politicized now. I’m over all that. Have you seen what the Prime Minister is doing? I no longer feel the need to glue myself to something. I must tell you, I had a Harpo diem and bought Wensleydale cheese with crushed berries today because they featured the magical word “Reduced” on them. I bought four lots so you can have some. You can’t have too much Wensleydale. An older man on the till helped me with my vouchers and I told him he was lovely. Obviously I was intoxicated by the cheese bargains.’ She rummaged in her bag. ‘What were you saying?’

Maggie was still running her charity wall (Christmas edition) on which she lined up everything from household appliances to books and bedsheets, then donated them to people she liked the look of. Sometimes they didn’t want the items she pressed on them. Bemused passers-by could find themselves heading home with a plugless Pifco Teasmade or a Virginia Woolf with the end pages missing (‘It’s not like they’re whodunnits, you don’t miss anything’).

After attempting to deliver another hug she left to catch a bus to Finsbury Park. Ten minutes later I looked out of the window and she was still in the courtyard taking photographs of our building. Eighty was clearly the new sixty.

When I opened the Christmas card she had left for me I cut myself. I discovered she had stapled money inside it with twelve razor-sharp staples that took half an hour to get out. Someone had given her a staple gun for Christmas. Possibly not the wisest gift for a woman who had set fire to her kitchen three times in five years.

Back in hospital I was hooked to my usual drip, my laptop propped up on a trolley, typing mostly with one hand because last time I had started writing a little too enthusiastically and nearly tore the cannula out of my arm.

The nurse handed me a mirror. ‘There’s something going on with your hair,’ she said unhelpfully.

‘Has it finally fallen out?’ I asked.

‘Not exactly,’ she replied.

When I was about three years old I had a wild blond mop. There are only two pictures of me as a child and one of them shows me pressed against a very large fake duck constructed for an unknown purpose, presumably one not intended to act as a device for measuring small children. I’m in too-big short trousers, a knitted tank-top, National Health glasses and socks with sandals, rocking the proto-geek look.

Now I found I had curly hair and black eyebrows, a cross between Harpo and Groucho Marx. I wondered if the facial-recognition system on my laptop would still work.

I was awaiting the result of another scan, and feeling uncomfortable.

‘There’s nothing you can do, so don’t think about it,’ said Pete. ‘You were warned about how many things could go wrong. Even if it turned out that you fitted into the tiny percentage of those the treatment works for, it could still kill you. It’s better to face these things head on.’

The treatment apparently operated by sending my immune system into overdrive, but like a car careering down a hill with its brakes off it could hit a wall at any time, and the odds of tolerating the effects gradually grew lousier. By now I was entirely focused on writing another book. Some of the old chemo mist had lifted and if I didn’t start now I knew I never would. All I needed was something to write about.

‘If I did start a new book, do you think I’d have time to finish it?’ I asked, sitting down at the meal table.

It was a ridiculous, impossible question that was wrong of me to ask, and neither of us could think of an answer.

51

Undisturbed Treasures

When I was a child I believed that all books had to be read to the end. I’m surprised that this determination to plough on with, say, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye didn’t put me off reading for life.

Now I kept a living library built on a ‘one in, one out’ basis because I didn’t have room for books that would not be thumbed through a second time. During Lockdownfn1 I raised my game, lowered my tolerance bar and began some serious charity-shop binning, dumping anything that failed my Book-Keeping Test.

The six-question Book-Keeping Test

1. Is it treasurable?

2. Are its characters still somewhere inside my head?

3. Do I think I will go back to it?

4. Does it make me want to read sections aloud or make notes?

5. Is there something that won’t let me abandon it?

6. Is it a guilty pleasure?

Thanks to my Kindle I’m reading three books at once and consequently muddling their characters together. Luckily, one good writer will lodge in your memory over all the others. E-readers have their limits, and many of the authors whose work I’ve most enjoyed are not available electronically.

Many years ago I’d loved David Pownall’s The Raining Tree War and African Horse, and can perfectly recall set pieces from them (and the language – sex is referred to as hlanganana!) but they’re out of print now and all but lost.fn2 Equally bizarre but more narrowly focused, not to mention violent, crude and scatological, the novels of Tom Sharpe are all available in multiple formats. Who can best be trusted to look after your legacy?

Writers in the later parts of their lives often produce their best work, but editors are reluctant to invest in them. Where’s the market, they’ll ask. Right here, I say. You could use Pownall’s later books to replace some of the rubbish I’m offered every time I open Amazon.

A Kindle is perfect for the purposes of disposable reading. There were books I picked for life’s boring tasks: standing in queues, sitting in waiting rooms or dropping as I fell asleep on trains. If it turns out that I’ve discovered a forgotten gem I’ll also buy it in paperback, so the Kindle can function as a vetting system.

My mother was outrageously cavalier about damaging novels during reading. I once saw her forgetfully use a lit cigarette as a bookmark. I had inherited that habit and extended it into the electronic world, managing to destroy or lose at least five e-readers.

I showered at the beach, forgetting that one sat in the pocket of my shorts.

I fell asleep on a balcony, waking in time to see another slip from my knees through the railings and fall several floors to the cobblestones, where it exploded.

I left two on planes, both stolen within seconds.

I had one knocked from my hands by a rush-hour tube commuter who sent it down the platform gap so that the train could run over it.

I can be as inventive with my Kindle deaths as I am with my fictional murders.

Reading habits are formed early. I was forever on the lookout for bookmarks, hoarding and sharing them out along my shelves, and, as I’ve said, always had three books on the go at once. Books arranged in piles held cryptic meanings: the pile for immediate consumption; the pile for specific friends who might be interested when they came to visit; the pile containing certain passages that demanded revisiting. Plus my own books, just one copy of each, kept as a permanent record, tucked away from sunlight.

There were books on shelves that needed to be divided not by theme or author but by height, the most gigantic volume requiring an entire cupboard to itself. And a special section for strange magazines worthy of preservation, including a one-off issue called Unsung Hero, about Hammer’s swivel-eyed bit-part actor Michael Ripper, which consisted of him singularly failing to recall anything that had happened in his packed film career.

INTERVIEWER:

Do you remember who you played in The Mummy’s Shroud?

RIPPER:

No.

INTERVIEWER:

What about Scars of Dracula?

RIPPER:

Probably the pub landlord. It usually was.

INTERVIEWER:

What did you think of the director?

RIPPER:

I don’t remember much about him.

INTERVIEWER:

What was it like working on Captain Clegg with Peter Cushing?

RIPPER:

I’m not sure I was in that.

INTERVIEWER:

In 1957 you were in The Steel Bayonet, do you remember? You kept coming on with cups of tea and saying, ‘Here’s your tea, sir.’

RIPPER:

No, not really.

This is surely the right way to view your career, to enjoy it at the time, count yourself lucky and not bother reminiscing.

I had a special section for classic works of literature that I had actually enjoyed, rather than being instructed to enjoy, not ones with faux-leather covers and gold lettering but tattered paperbacks with cheesy covers. A 1950s paperback about Boswell and Johnson had bawdy strumpets plastered beneath the title, the kind who fell out of public houses in old Hammer films only to be bitten by vampires. Theatre programmes – a few kept just to prove to myself that such strange shows could ever have existed. Moby Dick – The Musical. Operation Mincemeat – The Musical. Poppy, the only pantomime ever written about the Opium Wars. Sub-Dickensian melodramas. Post-war experimental authors. Nineteen-thirties American pulp thrillers. Supernatural paperbacks of the 1970s.fn3 Obscure Golden Age crime. Angst-ridden modern American novels. And non-fiction volumes concerning forgotten pockets of history that crossed the line from research to pleasure: the invention of laughing gas; the first night of Twelfth Night; the neuroscience of magic; medieval anatomy; a genealogy of 1960s trash culture.

I realized I’d hit my brain limit with Errol Morris’s abstruse treatise on modern philosophy, The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality). And there were tougher challenges on those shelves.fn4 Play scripts, biographies, comics, arcana, compendia and, of course, Viz’s latest Roger’s Profanisaurus, War and Piss. Nothing if not egalitarian, this library.

Books as memory and history. Books on London, film, Victorians, art, transgressive horror, censorship, SF, architecture, modernism, music hall, politics, writing, performance and true crime, including a section on hopelessly unsuccessful murderers, all of them regularly rearranged to create a thematic flow. Books so peculiar that they were completely worthless to anyone else, like Physique by Rupert Smith, about the wartime life of bohemian John S. Barrington, a photographer who frequently ended up in jail for asking random young men if they would pose for him. A curated personal library adopts the personality of its owner, like a dog.

The strangest part of all was that no one ever disturbed these treasures. As I’ve already observed, friends visited and never perused. My husband remained entirely incurious about them. The books lived in bandit country, untouched by anyone but me. It was like having a sports car that no one else was allowed to drive, or wanted to. In a tumultuous world this was my Fortress of Solitude, my last repository of peace and joy and privacy.

I was once in a hospital in the West Indies. In its waiting room was a big red button at child’s height with a sign on it that read DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON, like the world’s biggest invitation. I wondered if I should try the same thing with my bookcase.

I had grown up believing that books excited curiosity in everyone, but of course they don’t. To anyone prone to dyslexia they must seem an irrelevance, an obstruction. My mistaken belief lasted until the internet was born. New technology stole reluctant readers away like a fox taking chickens, but if I were young now and had to choose between reading a novel about an unreliable alcoholic who thinks she’s seen a murder or watching a compilation of drunk Russian decorators on YouTube, I’d probably be more tempted by the latter.

For many of us it took a pandemic to stop skimming and return to deeper reading. So why is it that most of the time I feel like a health-food evangelist waving a fistful of seaweed recipes about?

‘Those who want to read a book, will,’ said Pete sagely. ‘Stop nagging them.’

52

Alternative Fiction

I sat by the lake in Regent’s Park eating a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich. Moorhens shot past as if pedalling tiny bicycles. A black-eyed Egyptian goose, not currently considered in danger of extinction, honked in the face of another goose. I knew what they were because they pattered around our terrace each winter knocking on the windows with their beaks and releasing torrents of bright green shit.

There was still another week to go before the result of the most recent scan. I knew my imagination was working overtime because the damned red squirrel was back again, sitting on the edge of a litter bin eyeing me judgementally.

ME:

What? What?

SQUIZZER:

Nothing. Just looking. (Under breath.) Dead man walking.

ME:

I heard that. Actually I’m sitting down.

SQUIZZER:

What’s in the sandwich? Oh, pink sea lice. No thank you.

ME:

Why are you even here?

SQUIZZER:

I thought I’d come and look in on you one last time. I heard all your chemicals failed.

ME:

Where did you hear that from? Another squirrel?

SQUIZZER:

So you’re going for one last roll of the dice with this experimental shit? You know there are thousands of people out there who won’t get vaccinated to protect themselves from dying because they’re afraid of treatable blood clots? And you’re having God-knows-what pumped into your veins to provide some corporation with data? You’re cannon fodder, mate.

ME:

If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it.

SQUIZZER:

How about a little death with dignity? Sail off to Valhalla in a burning boat? Adiós muchachas?

ME:

Vikings weren’t Mexican.

SQUIZZER:

They both wore silly hats.

ME:

I’m not going to sit here arguing about sombrero-wearing Vikings with a talking squirrel.

SQUIZZER:

I thought it would keep your mind off the inevitability of death.

ME:

The only time that subject ever leaves my mind is when I’m reading.

SQUIZZER:

You’re an ostrich. Whenever there’s a little problem you stick your head in a book.

ME:

I hardly think that being told you’re about to die constitutes ‘a little problem’.

SQUIZZER:

You think you’re so special? It’s everywhere, haven’t you noticed? Death is very big this year. Lot of misery out there. It’s a plague year. They happen every now and again.

ME:

Thanks for that.

SQUIZZER:

I’m glad my visits cheered you up. You know the last thing you hear before you die? The sound of your friends whispering about where to have dinner later. Nothing matters.

ME:

I feel so much better now.

SQUIZZER:

Well, cheerio then. Enjoy the time you have left. Try to love the people you’re going to leave behind. Start with me. I accept Mastercard. And remember what I said: Nothing matters.

I threw the rest of my sandwich at him, but he’d already gone.

When your day job involves dropping into other worlds, it helps if you can draw on emotional experience. Stay at home for close to two years and all you have to write about is a writer in a room. Into the internal life some external stimulus must fall. Nothing goes to waste; the memory of an abortive trip to the shops becomes a springboard.

But according to the futurist writer J. G. Ballard, our lives were turning inward by 2002, a process that largely continues today. The general feeling was that Ballard didn’t care where he lived because he lived inside his head. He invited his interviewers to conduct their sessions in the foyer of the Heathrow Hilton. A less conducive place for an intimate chat would be hard to imagine. His attitude would have left him well prepared for the pandemic. I suspect he would have welcomed it with arms held wide.

Before I read any key novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries I somehow fell into alternative fiction, and that really started with the Bible. My mother had insisted I go to church, but I’d treated it like a creating-writing course.

I had always vaguely known that the Gospels and Acts constituted a ‘greatest hits’ package selected and edited over four centuries, with all of the unpopular bits shed until what was left were just the crowd-pleasers. We know there were many revelations and fables excised – more than three-quarters of the New Testament – and while the Apocrypha has all the best bits, it also contains the marmalade-dropping moments that even the most devout couldn’t get their heads around.

Like the part about Lilith and how she might have slept with the serpent and then went around damaging babies, and how Eve is Adam’s second wife. And then there’s the half-sister. And when Paul’s lady friend Thecla gets thrown into the arena nude to be fed to seals. Or when the post-crucified Jesus kick-boxes Satan in Hell. And when Andrew and Matthias get fed to cannibals who are wiped out by acid-puking statues. There’s nothing in the Aeneid about vengeful marine wildlife or a cannibals-versus-sculptures smackdown.

One of the key reveals of the last sixty years came with new text that suggested Jesus cut a deal with Judas to ‘remove the man who clothes me’ and make him a martyr who could found a religion, this version being no more or less apocryphal than any other. Although it did make a terrifically lurid Spanish television series called 30 Coins.

Colourful renderings of the unknowable extended to nature, too. Scientific and geographical discoveries were taken on trust, so we had books of bizarre rainbow-coloured sea creatures in the Fish Book of 1580, and dozens of others featuring mermaids, sea dragons and long-legged fish that followed you around barking like household pets. And plants that screamed or moved about or blew poison darts, centuries before John Wyndham invented triffids.

One of the world’s strangest books is the Voynich manuscript, found in 1912 by Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich. The tome is filled with drawings of non-existent plants and its gibberish language seems to be a shorthand cipher, but it has never been translated. Considering Voynich sold the British Museum over 3,800 other books over thirty years this could all have been a masterful con trick, but the language, though impenetrable, is said to have internal rhythms of Celtic origin. In 2009 its pages were carbon dated to the early fifteenth century. It’s now at Yale University.

The largest medieval volume is the Codex Gigas, written in Bohemia by Herman the Recluse, who was walled up alive until he got the devil to help him bang out his immense tome. Satan makes a guest appearance in his masterwork, more like a character from a children’s cartoon than evil incarnate.

My attraction to experimentalists had started with the plotless symbolist novel of 1884, À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, in which the hero locks himself away in his house near Fontenay to live in artificial decadence rather than follow the natural order. The strangest thing to happen in the (non-)narrative is when a tortoise dies after having lots of jewels glued to its shell. In its abandonment of outside reality in favour of the solipsistic self, Huysmans’s book had disturbing resonance in a time of pandemic.

From Huysmans I romped through the baroque gothic, from C. R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock to Firbank and Wilde and William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. In the 1960s B. S. Johnson wrote curiously cold satires and hacked narratives into new forms. Frustrated by linear storytelling, he rejected the limitations of the written word. Perhaps he was born too early; he would have loved the internet.

There were others like R. C. Sherriff, most famous for the play Journey’s End, who also wrote The Hopkins Manuscript. This is an unclassifiable novel, sort of about why the myopic British might not even notice the end of the world, in which the only surviving account of the world’s end is narrated by a boring jobsworth more interested in railway timetables and poultry.

Similarly, John Wyndham’s strange The Kraken Wakes tells of a great apocalyptic force arising from the ocean depths, but is recalled by a husband and wife hearing about events from a safe distance. It’s like viewing the world’s demise from the wrong end of a telescope.

The impossible-to-pin-down Ann Quinn had a European hit with Berg, but her menacing seaside-town novel flopped in the less imaginative UK, where malign influence at least reached us through Henry Green’s icily unheroic Caught (even though it was censored) and Rex Warner’s creepy wartime parable The Aerodrome. And of course there was Brigid Brophy, whose passion for Mozart brought her to The Snow Ball, an odd reimagining of Don Giovanni at a London party.

The outsiders produced transfixing work, from the cruel, poetic clarity of Paul Bowles to David Madsen’s gleefully revolting trawl through the horrors of Catholicism in Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf.

Alternative fiction is the stuff you’re supposed to discover after a good grounding in the essentials, not before.

Desperately casting about for what to write, I took another look at my fantastical epic, now longer than ever. Perhaps, with a lot of time and much more effort, I could make it work. I’d had to put it away for a while because it was turning me into an even weirder recluse. I have a number of writer friends working on similar projects who can no longer be taken out in public without frightening people.

‘What would you do if you couldn’t write any more?’ asked Pete.

‘I write to get better,’ I told him. ‘So if I can no longer write I know I’m not going to get better.’

‘It must be harder as you get older.’

‘It’s true, I don’t have the blissful ignorance of youth,’ I said. ‘But I haven’t gained much wisdom from my accelerated ageing process either. I sit in front of the screen and stare at words that make no sense before nodding off.’

Speaking of not making sense, my phone pinged.

I have been reading the new scientist which i did not enjoy wanging on about going to the moon and sun alone who wants to honestly live there? Just showing off, swank heads. Did you know that cheese like my favourite gorganzola has microbes in it which are good for us? My brothers habit of waiting till tiny little maggots made it ripe frightened me a bit also very sad for bitten maggots. I wish I had your pain killers that you gave me. Wish actually I wasn’t me at the moment. I am curtailing my milkman. He seems to have got a withered brain or hand as he does not take my empties away. Now I wish I had not cancelled it but at two pounds a bottle it was too expensive I will switch to evap which Stout Karen from Waitrose assured me will last longer. I will no longer turn off fridge at night. To think I have only one more day of smoking. I have to be brave. I am braver now if I can’t cope on certain days. I just have to say I don’t feel I can cope so I don’t do it. Hurling love beams xxxM

‘She doesn’t seem to have any bloody problem hitting her word count,’ I said enviously.

53

Ghost Shoes

There are no stars in London.

There’s very little nature left at all. Our parks are sculpted, our trees clipped, our pathways lined with coffee shops. Nature has been carefully monetized. I’m reminded of a 1930s drawing of a small child who looks at a rainbow and wonders what it’s advertising. My local natural park now has woodland trails you can follow on your phone and Instagrammable ‘beauty spots’ framed for the iPhone screen ratio.

Winter had finally turned frosty. Maggie and I walked through Abney Park Cemetery once more. For some reason she was dragging around an enormous wheelie-bag full of second-hand books. The spindly trees were blasted with cold sunlight.

‘Poppy took some glasses back that I incorrectly bought,’ she told me, attempting to pull the trolley over a tree root. ‘Apparently they took my Abbey National card to get the money put back on it. Due to me being overcome with anxiety because of pre-assessment at the hospital she didn’t give me my card back. I have to meet her today at Leicester Square to get it.’

‘You must learn to stay in the moment,’ I told her.

‘I’m trying but it’s difficult when you’re shrinking so fast. Did you know that if you have your cataracts operated on it greatly reduces dementia? It used to be called scatterbrained. I’m meeting Poppy to get my glasses back as well. And my bag.’

Maggie’s daughters were cut from the same cloth. They spent their time tracking down spectacles, purses, bank cards, keys, phones, scarves, books and relatives. Without a mask or any social distancing, and with a lifelong habit of giving total strangers crimson kisses because she thought they needed them, Maggie had somehow survived the pandemic unscathed. In the earliest stages of lockdown she had kissed the windscreen of my rented car and I hadn’t been able to get the lipstick off. It seemed to share certain qualities with napalm.

‘I heard a young person comparing lockdown to blackouts in the Blitz,’ she said. ‘I told her the difference was that if you went for a walk in the lockdown they didn’t post your remains home in a Jiffy bag.’

If there was one thing the lockdowns taught us it was the importance of developing interior lives. My father, first and always a scientist, spent years staring out to sea, working out the cubic capacity of ocean-going ships through water displacement or trying to figure out how their electronic circuitry could be massively reduced in size. My mother read, wrote stories and dreamed of travel. Their interior lives moved in such different directions that they had nothing to say to each other.

If the mantra of Forster’s Howards End was ‘Live in fragments no longer. Only connect’, then our family’s was ‘Forward’. The idea of stopping to take stock of the situation did not occur. I wanted to be realistic in order to help Pete through to the conclusion of what I was going through, but checking on him was like searching a castle wall for cracks. I had only ever seen his eyes glaze once, and that was when he had finally spoken about his father. His partial account of what happened between them was so upsetting that I imagined he must have buried it deep within himself for years.

He had not. It was carried with him wherever he went. I wondered what else his natural reticence prevented him from telling me, but knew I would never find out. I had the very English habit of constantly asking him if he was all right, and he would look at me as if I had tried to contact him in a dead language. Part of every story should remain hidden.

Despite the lifting of some restrictions, Central London remained ghost-like, its few visitors creeping past like wraiths longing to be exorcised. This phantom atmosphere continued into the night. At Granary Square in King’s Cross Pete passed a dazzlingly lit pop-up event with a head-miked security guard posted outside. There was nobody else around.

‘It’s an exclusive celebrity launch,’ the guard explained. ‘It all kicks off at nine.’

At nine Pete negotiated his way in. A huge space had been decorated and filled with champagne, flowers, food tables, dancers and a live DJ. There were perhaps ten guests. An air of melancholic loneliness had settled over the event like a shroud. Clearly the celebrities, whoever they were, had decided to give it a miss. After a great fanfare and laser show, the lights went up to reveal … a wall. On the wall was what appeared to be a laser trace of a shoe in outline only.

‘What’s the event?’ Pete asked a waiter.

‘Oh, it’s a world premiere.’

‘For what?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll ask someone.’

The waiter brought over one of the unctuous hosts. ‘It’s for a new Adidas trainer,’ he explained.

‘But there’s only a laser outline of it.’

‘I don’t suppose the designer had the shoe when she was working on the presentation.’

‘Where is the shoe itself?’ Pete asked.

The host looked surprised by the question. ‘At the moment, the shoe doesn’t exist. This is the launch of the concept of the shoe. The design isn’t being revealed until May.’

‘But that’s four months away.’

The host smiled vacuously. ‘Enjoy the champagne cocktails.’

So at the start of 2022, while some were struggling for breath in overcrowded, underfunded hospitals, others were attending empty world premieres of non-existent ghost shoes.

After Pete relayed all this to me, I looked at my phone and was brought back to the real world.

I took all my jewellery off for my shoulder operation but the next day I could not find my two gold false teeth so my gypsy look has gone and I am just a person with missing teeth. I wonder how many other patients forget. I will boringly have to try lost property. Richard had bowel problems after my hot chili meal. I know because he used a lot of lavatory paper. Kissing you better xxM

54

Swings and Roundabouts

By 2.00 p.m. it was so gloomy in Bloomsbury that I was amazed the pigeons hadn’t developed bioluminescence. It was raining stair-rods. The buses coasted through kerbside lakes, spraying their customers with tsunamis of filthy water. London was very hard to love at such times. The city’s personality was once more matching its weather, being perverse, wilful and filled with lowering atmospheres. It fought us back, daring us to find a smile.

I’d been called to the hospital and as I entered I wondered if we were anything more than statistics to the oncologists. A floating pool of them was shared between the patients so I would not necessarily see the same doctor every time. Did it help to protect us both from personal involvement? I tried to imagine a medic cursed with empathy, sorting through data on a patient that showed she only had a few weeks to live.

It bothered me that the process was so alien to natural human behaviour. I sat silently with other patients for hours before being ushered into a chair where I received disastrous news with such frequency that I’d started thinking of it as aversion therapy. I sat watching a medic who watched a screen fill with numerals, waiting for him to translate what he could see, like waiting for a witch doctor to throw bones into a sand circle and read their portents. I had come to attach more sinister supernatural significance to this room than the priests did to Regan’s bedroom in The Exorcist.

While I was waiting I killed time by reading London in the Sixties by Rainer Metzger, a German who understands our history better than we do. I have no nostalgia for the past, but understanding it informs the present. They say if you can remember the sixties you weren’t there, and I wasn’t. By which I mean I was at school, and being a tiresomely studious child knew absolutely nothing about what was going on in certain select (i.e. wealthy) parts of Britain’s capital city. The heady smell of patchouli and dope, the sounds of the Kinks and Scott Walker were not for the likes of me. I was buried in mildewed history books, some of which had last been taken out in 1873.

I didn’t get taken out until 1973. By which time the swinging sixties had ceased to swing and were left dangling by Mr Edward Heath, the hapless bachelor yachtsman who took the helm of the country and ran the SS Britannia on to the rocks. By the time I joined the human race the wildly idealistic dreams of the sixties had sunk to the bottom of the sea.

Writers absorb the years prior to their flowering and become fascinated by the decade they just missed. Sixties design had clean lines, wild ideas, colourful flourishes. Designers, photographers and even hairdressers had become known by their names; Hardy Amies, Peter Blake, Twiggy, David Hockney, Ossie Clark, Laura Ashley and Jean Shrimpton existed beside rock stars in the roll-call of fame. Art, literature, film, fashion and design gained the confidence to be daring and globally influential in a way that would never happen again.

In Soho, commercial writing positions were readily available to those with an aptitude for stringing words together. Had Billy Liar come to London after all he’d have turned into a different person. Penniless at twenty-three, I was able to set up my first company by taking out a small loan. You booked a meeting with your bank manager, pitched an idea and came away with the finance. There was a feeling in the air that anything was possible if you set your mind to it.

My art director pal Martin told me: ‘I remember that feeling too. I was bored at work on Friday afternoon so I chucked it in. I went to the café downstairs and selected three jobs advertised in Screen International. I rang each of them, got three interviews that evening, was offered two of the three and chose the job I liked best, starting on Monday morning.’

Live music nightly, affordable booze, guilt-free dating, experimental theatre, working-class writers and the flourishing of the arts made for a heady mix. There was a tendency to regard anyone over thirty as technically dead.fn1 However, if you wanted your life to run smoothly, some physical workarounds were required. Contacting friends was time-consuming and phone calls could be nightmarishly complicated. I recall booking a New Year’s Eve taxi from a public phone box that had chewing gum in its coin slot by tapping out the analogue exchange clicks using the phone tones – an old trick that eventually worked if you could be bothered.

I started writing in an era when getting high meant drinking Watney’s Red Barrel and a bottle of cough mixture, when you wouldn’t have posted anyone a photo of your dinner unless you wanted to feel ashamed. ‘Brown Windsor Soup’? ‘Gammon Hawaiian’? No coffee shops, no late nights, three TV channels, no cheap flights.fn2

If you fancied going on a prearranged date you could fill out a compatibility form on the back of Private Eye suggesting that a lifelong partnership might be built around a mutual passion for ping-pong. Forget cloud-computing laptops; we thought the K-Tel Soda Maker was sophisticated technology. As for home entertainment, we had to work our way through reel-to-reel, vinyl, cassettes, 8-tracks, Beta, VHS, laserdiscs and DVDs before reaching streaming.

Today’s young have the stuff we could not have imagined: topknots, drawstring trousers you can wear outside without getting beaten up, tattoos in misspelled Tibetan, emotional-support pets, eyebrow threading, artisanal coffee and a weaponized sense of entitlement. They have birthday parties in Prague and Paris. We had Brighton and Benidorm. They can go to work without a tie or socks. We had nylon shirts that nearly shorted out the street’s electrical supply when we took them off.

We couldn’t use the BOMADfn3 because M didn’t have her own B account. We got self-confidence; they got self-harming, low self-esteem, cyber-bullying and hundreds of overqualified graduates chasing one low-paid job. We got pensions, cool fashion, great bands and cheap prices. They got Auto-Tune, the DC film universe, American junk-food outlets and Adele. We had exotic countries with different cultures, lion tamers, seasonal weather and nobody in clown make-up posing for selfies.

So, swings and roundabouts.

In the seventies we talked to each other without anyone saying ‘Actually, I don’t think that’s appropriate’, but we also had toxic levels of racism, sexism and homophobia. As white males we saw the very least of it. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be a young Black female hoping for a career in anything public-facing. BAME staff were kept in the back rooms.

We still watched TV commercials in which housewives discussed toilet cleaners with breathy excitement, as if sharing the details of sexual affairs. That world, there, with the two-point-four children and Sunday trips to country houses, was still the outside world and entirely alien to me, like watching footage of the axolotl or Top Gear. It meant I didn’t write within the suburban family dynamic, so I lost those readers who preferred to identify with more traditional situations.

As we moved forward into the new century, those in the creative arts were encouraged to make money or die. Creativity could no longer afford to be experimental. We were now about inclusion, not exclusion, acceptance, not exception, and it was not entirely a bad thing. But the shock of the new became fan service and experimentalism went the way of the tea strainer or having a splendid navy, something that belonged to another time. I know I’ve said it before, but the public will accept originality if it’s familiar. Original thinking usually develops in isolation; there’s more pressure to conform when you tell everyone what you’re doing every minute of the day.

I looked up to find a nurse calling my name.

Dr Ramalan almost jumped out of his chair when I walked in. Nobody had told him I’d been called. Before I seated myself beside his desk there was a knock at the door and the nurse looked in. ‘You’ve no patients,’ she said.

‘I have no—?’

‘Patients. You have no more patients.’

‘There is one behind the door.’

The nurse looked confused and left.

‘Well, Mr ah – it’s um, nice to see you again,’ he said, waiting for my online chart to load. ‘How is the – ah – things with you?’

I could hear him today. He was only wearing about seven pieces of PPE. ‘I feel surprisingly well,’ I told him. ‘Considering all that’s happened in the last two years.’

‘Two years? Is it now. Goodness. Ah, here we are.’ He was much happier once the screen had loaded. He studied the figures for a few minutes. ‘Well, there you are. The new treatment has stopped the growth of your cancer cells.’

‘Where? In my colon? My liver? My lungs?’

‘All of it. Obviously the cell damage before you started was tremendous, but for now it has been halted.’

‘When you say halted—’

‘You know when a workman holds up a sign saying Stop or Go—’

‘I understand the concept. You mean it’s not growing?’

‘It will most likely start again of course, when the treatment becomes less effective. But for now, so long as you continue to come in for your infusion once a month, it may be kept at bay.’

‘For how long?’

‘A year, almost certainly.’

‘And how long am I on the treatment for?’

‘Ah – two years.’

I decided to overlook the discrepancy.

‘Your odds.’

‘I’m what?’

‘Your survival odds. They’re based on the previous data we’ve amassed.’

‘How many others are taking part in this particular experiment?’

‘Altogether? Let’s see now. That’s a tricky one. This will take a few minutes to work out.’ He tapped the screen with the end of his biro. ‘In total – ah – four. Well, three. One just died. One is doing well. The other two – of which you are one – are undecided. We’ll know soon enough. Don’t let these thoughts keep you awake at night. Try sleeping pills.’ His mobile rang. He looked at it with regret. ‘I have to take this.’

I looked around the room. A poster showed an incredibly healthy-looking cyclist halfway up a mountain. It read: ‘Gareth has terminal cancer but he’s raising money to realize his dream!’ The event had been stamped: CANCELLED.

Dr Ramalan shouted into the phone. ‘Hello, Conchita? I want you to stay on top of the fridge for now.’

He capped it with his hand. ‘My wife. Sorry.’

‘Conchita? No. Stay on the fridge. Keep calling him until he answers and I will deal with the boiler.’ He rang off. ‘We’re having trouble with house repairs. There was a bit of a misunderstanding.’

55

Peculiar

A reprieve.

Most likely short – a year would fly by, long before the publication of another book. Probably before my editor could get back to me. As I walked home from the hospital I detoured into Bloomsbury to visit a couple of bookshops, but my heart wasn’t in it. I had more books than I could manage to read in three lifetimes. Lately it felt as if the end had arrived. I should just read the books I had, otherwise it was a waste.

As I stared at endless shelves of second-hand volumes, I wondered who purchased all these identical brown leather spines.

‘Influencers buy them up by the metre,’ one bookseller confided. ‘They order them online and over the phone. They don’t ask what the books are about. They just want them all the same height. They dye the edges of the pages to colour-coordinate rooms.’

From the pinnacle of iconoclastic intellectual prowess to a tasteful home decor accessory. It was probably my cue to leave the world of books. The best way to accept your fate is to desire it.

I didn’t get much further home before I ran into him.

An elderly fellow, stumping across the road towards me through sifting rain. He was so bashed about that for a moment I thought he’d been hit by a dustcart. He wore a squashed grey trilby pulled down around his ears and a red and green scarf so long that one end touched the pavement. The other was wrapped around the shoulders of an ancient brown overcoat that had two buttons missing. He was stuffing something that looked like fried parcel string into a pipe.

It’s a bit rubbish when an author fails to recognize his own creation.

ME:

Arthur? Is that you?

ARTHUR BRYANT:

I don’t much care for the informality, young man.

ME:

I’m not young.

BRYANT:

To me, anyone who grew up in the era of the motor car is young. I’ll allow you to use my first name on this occasion. You’re a lot more worn out than I expected. Frankly, I look fresher, and that’s saying something.

ME:

It is you! Oh, for God’s sake! You’re smoking Senior Service Naval Thrift, just like you do in my books.

BRYANT:

Old Sailors ‘Below Decks’ Maritime Shag, actually. I’ve only got a minute, old chap, so I want you to listen to me. (Screwing up one eye and peering into his pipe with the other.) You’re podgier than I thought you’d be. First tip: lay off the spuds. Do you have anything to eat? You look as if you might. If not, can you go and get me something? An eclair would be nice. Don’t buy one for yourself.

ME:

You can’t smoke and eat. And you can’t tell me what to do. I created you.

BRYANT:

Being fictional in no way reduces my powers. And after helping you out with the material for the last quarter-century – for no renumeration, I might add – I think I’ve earned the right to exist, especially if you’re prepared to talk to a stupid squirrel. I can see that you’re in big trouble, and I can solve this problem. I am a policeman, after all.

ME:

I can manage perfectly well, thank you. I don’t need any help from you.

BRYANT:

Ah, well. That’s where we disagree. If you don’t start writing again soon you’ll lose the little joie de vivre you have left, and without your writing you’ll just curl up and dry out into a husk, like Christopher Lee at the end of Dracula.

ME:

I don’t see this is any business of—

BRYANT:

Your husband is trying to help you but as usual you’re determined to ignore his sterling efforts. Listen to what he’s saying.

ME:

Pete? He doesn’t want to acknowledge that there’s anything wrong with me. He’s the anti-Florence Nightingale. He walks too fast for me to keep up. When I begged him to slow down he told me to stop making a fuss.

BRYANT:

And it worked, didn’t it?

ME:

For about two minutes. Then I fell over.

BRYANT:

And he was ready to catch you when you fell.

ME:

Well no, not really. I went face down into a geranium tub and he carried on to the shops.

BRYANT:

Do you know how many people have no one at home who can help them?

ME:

No, how many?

BRYANT:

Lots, probably. And another fact. Patients do better if they have a passion that drives them on. Art. Music. Knitted poodles. Keeping bats.

ME:

Keeping …

BRYANT:

You have a passion. Words. You must know what clinomania is because you have it.

ME:

No, I don’t know what that—

BRYANT:

A preference for staying in bed. Therefore, ceteris paribus, you’re quids in to survive the odds.

ME:

I don’t know what cet—

BRYANT:

And beautiful English words! You know at least, oh, some of them. They strengthen the mind, stretch the mouth and touch the tongue to the teeth. Ephemeral. Propinquity. Supine. Solitude. Idyllic. Pernicketarian. Labyrinthine. Incandescent. Aurora. Petrichor. Cherishable. Toblerone. Possibly not Toblerone.

ME:

So what exactly are you saying?

BRYANT:

I’m saying, my dear fellow, that you shouldn’t worry about what’s happening. Everything’s taking its course and there’s nothing you can do about it, so focus your energies elsewhere.

ME:

What do you mean?

BRYANT:

Do you know what just happened?

ME:

No, what?

BRYANT:

You did a fantastic swear and then passed out. Just after you fell.

ME:

When did I fall?

BRYANT:

You brained yourself on a concrete planter as you went down. Torrington Place, Bloomsbury, where you are now. Those drops of blood in the gutter are yours.

ME:

Am I all right?

BRYANT:

I don’t know. Probably not. There’s a pretty amazing gash across your cheek. And even if you are, it doesn’t really matter now, does it? Life, death, it’s like a light switch – it’s either on or off. People say, ‘I don’t understand it. He was looking so well yesterday.’ That’s because he was alive yesterday. You don’t miss the time before you were born, do you?

ME:

Well, actually I …

BRYANT:

So you won’t miss what happens after you’ve gone. I’m more interested in the answer to your creative conundrum. It’s been right in front of you all the time.

I realized we were standing by the picture windows of the Waterstones bookshop on Gower Street. Mr Bryant turned and prestiged his palm across the window behind him like a magician’s assistant.

BRYANT:

The new book. Can’t you see? Open your eyes. Isn’t it obvious? You have to start it at once.

ME:

Well, I’m not sure I can.

BRYANT:

You don’t have much choice, do you?

ME:

I’m writing this sort of historical fantasy novel at the moment …

BRYANT:

Don’t care. Not interested.

ME:

And my editor has asked for a new detective novel.

BRYANT:

About me again? (Blows a raspberry.) Forget it. Move on.

ME:

What do you mean—

BRYANT:

Time is short.

ME:

You don’t know that.

BRYANT:

Time in general. Don’t be so oversensitive. You’re not unique. Being sick doesn’t mystically unite you with everyone else who’s facing a finale. Others are suffering terrors you can only glimpse. Children die. Don’t let anything distract you from the matter at hand. And set aside that historical thing for now, horses stumbling about in mud with arrows in their flanks, dear God. Write something more personal.

ME:

But how am I supposed to—

BRYANT:

Oh, I don’t have time for this. Listen carefully to my words. Look at me. You’ve already got everything you need.

ME:

I don’t know what that is.

BRYANT:

People never do, that’s half the trouble. You writers, you have rough diamonds in your hands but you never cut them correctly.

ME:

Meaning?

BRYANT:

Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

ME:

That’s a line from—

BRYANT:

The real work starts when you begin to shape your raw materials.

ME:

But I don’t know what I’m supposed to be shaping. Arthur?

BRYANT:

That’s Mister Bryant to you, chummy. You wrote two volumes of memoirs, didn’t you? How can that be a trilogy?

ME:

It’s not a—

BRYANT:

Well, obviously it should be.

He’d gone in a curl of autumn smoke, leafy and earthy and catching in the back of the throat, and I was left lying on the pavement in Torrington Place wondering had what just happened. A frail-looking old lady hurried over and helped me up with surprising ease.

My right knee was bloody and my jeans were torn open. My left elbow felt lumpy and painful. My right palm had a bloody abrasion. When you fall, you instinctively put out the same hand and elbow every time. Then I caught sight of myself in a shop window and saw my slashed face.

I have, I thought, possibly overreached myself today. I got my breath back and limped towards the tube station. As I cut across an empty little park behind Euston station I saw a curious sight.

A sturdy young woman was pushing an old-fashioned pram, dragging behind her a child (ginger, squinty, not blessed). Every few paces she would stop, produce an enormous pair of hand shears and dive into the flower beds, emerging with armfuls of daffodils which she proceeded to load into the pram.

It took a minute for her purpose to dawn on me: she was harvesting them to sell. Her pram was stuffed with hundreds of flowers.

I caught up with her and told her to stop what she was doing at once. Being a nice London liberal I told her the flowers were for the enjoyment of everyone, and she told me to fuck off. Then she began to scream, ‘’E touched my bayby! ’E tried to rape me! Police! ’E’s a peedy!’

Short of laying out a woman armed with a pair of shears there was nothing I could do. All she had to do was give me a slight push. I looked like a half-dead junkie to her. This was a demonstration of the most powerful urban law: recognize who is stronger than you and who is weaker.

Ashamed of being so powerless, I walked away. She continued to scream at me as I left the park. ‘Fuck off, you dirty poof!’

Uncharitably, appallingly, I caught myself thinking, ‘Why me, you grubby mendicant, why not you?’

I recognized this as one of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s ‘Five Stages of Grief’, and it was only number two. I still had to go through Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.

And beyond Acceptance? That’s where you were free, so I decided to skip the other stages and start there.

Last year, after the terminal diagnosis, I angrily told the doctor I might go to Africa. I went a few hours after my treatment. At Pete’s coaxing I dived into rough surf and even managed to climb out unaided. He was like a football coach, pushing me out of my fears. I was losing muscle mass and slowing down, but over the next two weeks he had me running across Victoria station and Gatwick Airport. On the other hand, it might have been that I was rising to his challenges (Exercise! Three meals a day! Fine wines!), which I certainly wouldn’t otherwise have managed.

I took a few more falls (sprained wrists, torn knees, elbows, etc.) but I could now recognize that my innate stupidity would keep me from ever doing anything sensible, which is a plus in my book. I just had to make it through another nine months to reach the biblical seventy, which was more appealing than the somewhat sexualized sixty-nine.

So, yes. Terminal. It’s another word for getting things done.fn1

56

Circles

A very nice northern man rang and asked me to come for a procedure where they put a catheter up inside you and take photos. I like having my picture taken. I have Tourettes syndrome when I speak to doctors. It is really sad that the only time my vagina gets any attention it is from a medical instrument. I have a negative equity personality at the moment. The front door colour is ghastly and I have broken it to Tungi also the spy hole is too high for me I cannot due to shrinkage see out of it but filling in the hole costs more money and when I have gone to heaven the next owners may want it. Did you know that Sapiophilia is the love of intelligence? I just read it in the Daily Mail which I get for the health section. Sunbeams of luv always Magsxxx

At one of the first publishing parties I ever attended, I found myself among a group of bright young things discussing new books. I felt out of my depth because the BYTs all worked for literary publications and were littering the floor with unusual Latin phrases and the titles of philosophical novels I hadn’t read. They shouldn’t stand together like that, I thought, not while they’re all wearing the same shirt. Even so, they were an intimidating pack. I was the outsider guiltily listening in at the keyhole while a private conversation took place on the other side of an elaborately locked door.

Prompted to justify my presence in this gilded circle, I explained that my first novel was about to be published. The atmosphere changed, but not for the better. When I told them it was about disaffected youths living on London’s rooftops, the BYTs all but snorted their drinks on to the carpet. Fantasy, SF, horror and crime – elements of which were all present in Roofworld – were considered ‘genre’ and, I discovered for the first time, far beneath their consideration.

One of the group said, ‘Oh, our cleaner reads Popular Fiction.’

Another said, ‘WHSmith,’ and snorted.

When I was young and reading voraciously I had no idea that literary and popular fiction were different. My reading trampled across the borders of both without batting an eye. I saved any book I didn’t understand for another time.

The BYTs worked for publications with miniscule circulations and had no other employment because they did not need to work. I was employed, which only proved that they occupied the social high ground. This being Britain, the reassertion of social order had to be considered in everything. Now more than ever, it was not a battle that could be fought and won. We remained a nation divided into Cavaliers and Puritans, once proud of who we were, now ashamed.

There were no displays of class aggression among the writers of popular fiction. I had been wholeheartedly welcomed into various groups, but it was shocking how often I met new writers who felt too shy or uncomfortable to attend the open nights of any organization.

It still happens. Before the pandemic I sat in on a night for first-time writers. It was a level playing field; all were debuting in a small-press collection and as a published author I was now a different kind of outsider. I bought their anthology and sat in a corner reading the stories, some of which were of an extremely high quality. The quality of any anthology is determined by its editor.

I couldn’t help noticing that a couple of the featured authors were outside the pub where we were meeting, hovering awkwardly in light rain, unable to cross the threshold.

Being shut out of groups is a sensation familiar to everyone at some time or another, and thinking back to that first party it was hard not to notice that it was almost exclusively male and white. Popular fiction has since undergone a bit of a revolution. Empowered by an increased female readership, it’s blurring the dividing line between literary and popular fiction. The circle has been further widened by television series that show how social issues can be smuggled into anything.

Writers’ courses and social media are helping to kick open previously closed doors, but there’s still one golden key that opens every lock: the ability to engage. We should feel the thrill of discovery every time a fresh talent is fêted for its good writing, knowing that it can only make the circle more inclusive. Instead, too many well-intentioned collectives collapse in recriminations, like allotment owners arguing over the planting before anything has bloomed.

‘You must have written something you’re happy with,’ Pete said, pausing his fork above his plate. ‘One short story you like.’

‘I’m not going to start looking back over them,’ I warned.

‘No one’s saying you should. But surely there are a few you feel proud of.’

‘No, not really. I have a couple that may still be relevant but that’s it.’

‘A couple? Out of hundreds? Why do you think that is?’

‘They’re just steps cut into a cliff. None of them are good enough.’

‘Your opinion isn’t the one that counts. Your readers make that decision, not you. The problem is your lack of confidence.’

‘That has nothing to do with my writing.’

‘No, it’s to do with your father. You did read your own memoir, didn’t you?’ He rose and looked out of the window. ‘It’s stopped raining. Do you want to go for a walk?’

‘I could think of nothing worse,’ I replied.

The first time I ever touched my father was the day I cut his hair.

Bill sat very still with his back to me, rigid and upright on a stool, a towel tied around his throat, and remained silent while I trimmed the white tufts behind his huge ears with kitchen scissors. My fingertips could feel the warmth of his neck. His creased skin was much softer than I’d expected. It had always looked like roughly hewn granite. As I finished cutting the last strand, I lowered my hand so that my fingers brushed his wrist. It was the only time in my life that I remember touching him. Two days later, he died.

Children take sides, whether they mean to or not. From an early age I had sided with my mother, who was bookish and lonely. My father was a hard Tory who believed so strongly in being independent that he refused to accept anyone’s help. Even when he was out of work Bill would not go on the dole because he considered it immoral to do so. Only layabouts accepted handouts. His mantra was: ‘When you have family, you don’t need anyone else.’ But we didn’t even have family – we were just living under the same roof.

Bill believed that if you couldn’t do everything by yourself, you were weak and deserved to fail. Yet it seemed to me that he was scared of living because it would involve being evaluated by strangers.

Bill’s beliefs weren’t mine, and we fought so much that it seemed likely that he might actually attack me. I was imaginative, creative, impractical – a cuckoo in the nest. How, he wanted to know, would I ever find suitable employment? The times were not suited to imagination. The social framework of the past was being destroyed, and no one knew what would replace it. Bill was convinced that if we all just kept our heads down and worked harder things would come right. But I knew he had lost his job once before, and things hadn’t come right at all.

As we couldn’t afford to renovate our terraced house, Bill would try to do everything by himself – or worse, would get me to help him, which spelled certain doom. He would tell me to put away my notebooks and force me to hold bits of hardboard covered in Bostik and G-clamps, but my attention always drifted. No job was ever properly finished, and it seemed I was somehow to blame.

I wasn’t frightened of my father; I didn’t understand him. I felt him to be a coward, and he gradually diminished in my eyes. For his part, Bill turned me into the Topic We Never Mention. After the war the English had developed a deep suspicion of anything artistic. Art was feminized as something that would soften and damage masculinity. I wanted to be a writer. To Bill, books needed to be solid, improving and factual. He was disappointed in me. A man who always looked immaculate in his grey suit, white shirt, grey silk tie and polished black Oxford toecaps, he did not own jeans or plimsolls, and always wore his suit and tie on the beach.

My dreams of a university education evaporated when I saw that I would have to get a full-time job and ease the family’s disastrous finances. I went knocking on the doors of advertising agencies, and was immediately offered a placement as a copywriter in a Regent Street company on the condition that I learned to type and painted my own office.

I’d thought this would ease tensions at home and that my father would be pleased, but instead he was furious. It was not that I had shown initiative and escaped, but that I had so easily achieved my ambition without any effort at all. When I went back to the family home he refused to speak to me. I couldn’t simply stop going there because to do so would have punished my mother, so I continued to return and made matters worse with each fresh visit.

When my father realized that his sullen, accusatory silences were having no effect on me he extended them to my mother, so that the house became a virtual tomb. The situation worsened with explosions of temper and destruction that caused my mother to call the police, although she would never have considered anything as drastic as divorce. I couldn’t understand what was going on and had no way of putting the situation right.

My father was not a cruel man, by any means. He was trying to find his way through life without accepting advice or financial support from anyone, including his own family. Once he had hidden behind a door when a friendly neighbour came to call. Nobody in our house believed in self-help, therapy or self-awareness. No one would have dreamed of checking for signs that something might be wrong. The idea of mental wellbeing was frowned upon as being unmanly, a waste of time and money. A healthy mind was about having common sense.

The darkening situation affected my younger brother, who avoided being left at home and went to stay with friends. My mother became so isolated that I now realize she suffered a nervous breakdown, taking to her bed, unable to cope.

It struck me that something must have happened in our past to create this damage, so one evening after work I met my mother in a café and we talked, very awkwardly, about their marriage. Getting any information from her was like tearing up weeds, but she described one event that finally provided a key.

My father had once worked in an innovative scientific unit that had been destined for great things. When the unit was offered funding in Canada it was assumed he would go with them. I was just about to sit my exams and teachers had advised my mother not to uproot me from London, as I was expected to do very well. My father had watched the unit leave without him. Shortly after, he changed careers and became bitterly unhappy in his new work.

Suddenly everything made sense. He had abandoned a decade of hard graft so that I could step straight into my chosen career without any kind of sacrifice or compromise. Meanwhile, he had lost his status and his purpose. Lines of regret etched themselves deeply into his face, until he looked as old as my grandfather. Bill had worked hard all his life and had been left with nothing to show for it but an ungrateful son. The family that should have been all he needed had failed him.

After I had my first novel published my mother told me that, much to my amazement, Bill was proud of me. The subject wasn’t mentioned, of course, but later when he became ill I offered to cut his hair, and the offer was quietly accepted.

I arranged the towel around his neck. As I began snipping, I thought of him standing in the darkness at seventeen, fire-watching as phosphorescent bombs left sparkling trails above St Paul’s. He was imagining life among the stars, thinking of what might have been.

57

The Writer’s Curse

A ping mid-morning. It quite took me by surprise.

As you know I believe in euthanasia. In my case so many nearest & dearest would apply for the job. I have lost last night my hearing aid. I know my house is taking objects or is it just a side effect of the anaesthetics. I am sorry you had another accident and now have a duelling scar on your face. Was it Jung who said no-one can experience another person’s experience. I am very grateful to the NHS even though they left a foot-long plastic drain inside me by mistake. I have asked the surgeon if I can keep it as an objet dart. I put my 1930s Rupert Bear tins on the charity wall & they were taken very quickly. Everyday hugs xxxM

Objects.

They’re the writer’s curse. We have to describe them over and over again.

After a while you start to run out of ways to describe a table or a coat or a drink or the rain. Weather conditions crop up in every book, and colours are so frequently required that you end up rummaging through old Pantone volumes looking for new ways of describing certain shades. Personal belongings: coats and books and scarves. How many ways are there of describing a scarf?

Like playwrights, we lend our characters cigarettes, pipes, forks and pencils because it gives them something to do with their hands. We have a similar problem with locations. Most crime novels consist of a series of meetings, so where do you set all these confrontations? In restaurants, parks, pubs, seashores, shops, streets – and then what? Almost every noir cop film I’ve ever seen has a scene set at the docks or in an abandoned factory, or in an underground car park. It’s almost never in a novelty shop.

If you strip away all extraneous detail and only keep in essentials you can end up losing any sense of reality in your story, so we add the kind of observations you make when you enter someone’s home.

Take cushions. What the hell are they for? No furniture designer spends years creating the perfect chair only to chuck a cushion on it. Yet cushions are among the first things everyone adds to a home. They’re colourful, affordable, bright. Objects are great for signifying something about your character. Objects will tell you a lot about a person, whether they’re sloppy or fastidious, lonely or desperate for some peace and quiet. By displaying your taste you reveal yourself; an ugly object on display may hold a precious memory or show that you have bad taste.

The plays of Harold Pinter are identifiable by their objects. If there are teacups it’s The Birthday Party; if there are glasses of Scotch it’s No Man’s Land. I have trouble identifying character traits from kitchens in American films because to me they all look identical. The next time you’re developing a character, imagine what they would own. Pull at a thread and more is revealed. A cushion first, then a shirt, a car, a partner, a home, a pet. Character-shaping choices are revealed.

The object I would choose to describe is a paperback. Just to feel the width of its spine in my palm, its warm rough pages beneath my fingertips. I lift the cover and inside is a cacophony of imagination that opens the senses, so bright and intense that everything else seems dull in comparison. Inventive, inspirational, ingenious dreams. There are too many worlds to take in.

It’s time to gently close the cover.

58

Off the Roundabouts, on to the Waterslide

Two days later another urgent bulletin from the frontline of Finsbury Park pinged in.

I was weeding the garden forensically and looked in bin for waste flowers and there was the irritating hearing aid. Why don’t they have buzzers inside them that you can press when they drop off your ear? I am reading Elizabeth Jane Howard. I got a letter from hospital matron apologizing for leaving the drain in me. I must have compassion for them and other hundreds of human beings. So many people just need to be loved. People are the only thing worth living for xxxM forever

I didn’t keep many more texts from Maggie even though she continued to give equal conversational weight to her Eustachian tubes and her garden chairs.

It was becoming difficult for me to walk now. I spent most afternoons asleep. I had another scan. The cancer cells were growing again. Treatment would continue for a month or so but seemed likely to be stopped after that. Doctors don’t tell you that immunotherapy may be making giant strides but loses its effectiveness after about nine months. It costs the health service a lot of money, and at some point a patient becomes a financial equation. Or as an NHS manager said to me: would you send a helicopter out for an eighty-five-year-old?

And then I had another scan, and the growth of evil cells had expanded by 20 per cent in a couple of months. The treatment was stopped. There was possibly another experimental trial I could get on but placebos were in place, and for those who received the real drug there was only a tiny chance of survival. Plus it was in Sutton, South London, a deal-breaker in my book. One doctor’s cool summary of trials was, ‘Well, it’s nice for patients to feel that there’s still something they can try.’

No, one must know when it’s time to move on and do so with grace. As Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) observed in The Long Good Friday when his henchman offered to have a colleague’s corpse removed in an ice-cream van, there’s not much dignity in going out like a raspberry ripple.

Well, I thought, there it is. No more scans, pokes, prods and jabs. No more commiserating looks and sentences that began with ‘Well, I have to say the results are disappointing.’ I was now heading from treatment to palliative care. Off the roundabouts and on to the waterslide.

I had the sudden realization that this volume would be published posthumously, if it was even finished in time. Finally, I had a valid reason for not attending a book launch. You can never leave a good party too early. Dickens left us with half of the world’s first whodunnit, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Jaroslav Hašek did the same with The Good Soldier Švejk. When death calls, most authors are too busy to come to the phone.

I had no idea how speedily I would decline, but that was rather the point. Nobody knows and nothing matters. People prove to be extraordinarily kind and helpful. As we shed our baggage, life becomes lighter until it simply floats away.

‘Where were you just then?’ said Pete, throwing his lighthouse-beam in my direction. The blueness of his eyes and his sudden frank attention still made me jump. He would have made a brilliant hypnotist. ‘Lost in a book?’

I thought, I get lost in real life. Books are where I find myself.

I looked around at the room, at the overcrowded shelves, Pete seated in the armchair opposite, a shimmering London sunset surrounding the pair of us.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m right here.’

59

All Packed: A Short Story (2005)

Stuart stared in dismay at the open cupboard before him. ‘Am I to take cardigans?’ he called back. ‘It seems unnecessary.’

‘You’ll feel it if the nights turn out to be cold,’ Daniel called back.

‘But they won’t, will they?’

‘They might at this time of the year, you never know. Just take one or two. Take the black Calvin Klein. The one Laura bought for you. It would be a gesture.’

‘I know what gesture I’d like to give her,’ Stuart muttered under his breath. ‘The sleeves are half a foot too long. She buys the wrong sizes deliberately to show her disapproval of me.’

In the last few months, they had developed the habit of holding conversations through walls. They always seemed to be doing different things. Daniel working on his evaluations, listening to the kitchen radio; Stuart downloading his beloved music and river-watching from the small, perfectly square window in the yellow bedroom. With a sigh, he pulled down the stack of musty-smelling sweaters and chose one.

The scuffed leather suitcase had belonged to his father and was heavy even when empty, but he did not care for nylon sacks with zips. Stuart liked structure and order, lists and hierarchies, elements that had all but disappeared from his life in the last few years, except for his unbreakable regimen. It seemed that as a man matured, his ageing process lost step with the progression of events until it was barely possible to keep up. Whole styles and fashions were now passing him by. Television shows were populated by loud, crude people he had never seen before and had little interest in acquainting himself with. He walked along Old Compton Street, passing unnoticed through the next generation of self-absorbed Soho boys, and the rituals of the young seemed as secretive as Masonic greetings. Even children had become alien, transforming from miniature versions of their parents to wild-limbed homunculi.

Opening the lid of the suitcase, he felt the padded lining of tan satin, a touch of quality from a bygone age. He was thirty-eight years old, and an old thirty-eight at that – he had always been more mature than his partners, and felt sure that the desire for calm and continuity marked him down as a duffer.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about the upcoming trip. It would be like going away to scout camp, he supposed, placing socks and pants carefully in the corners of the case.

He raised his large crop-haired head, lost in thought, absently staring at the Herb Ritts calendar above the bed. The monochrome photograph was of an oil-streaked man carrying a pair of car tyres, an absurdly idealized vision of youth and health, as if this angular male model had ever lifted anything other than bench weights at a white-collar gym. The image now seemed incongruous and absurd.

‘How many shirts am I to take, then?’ he called helplessly. Daniel always made the decisions that required common sense. In almost every relationship one partner is more lost without the other.

‘Enough to get by on. For God’s sake, do you want me to do it for you?’

‘I was just asking, that’s all.’

Eighteen months ago he had undergone radiotherapy for a growth in his throat. The scare had been unexpected and had upturned their life together. If one good thing had come out of it, Stuart supposed it had been Daniel’s newly learned ability to operate the microwave oven. Before that, he had always been relied upon to do the cooking.

He buffed a pair of smart black Oxfords and put them inside a cotton shoe bag. Shirts, trousers – he didn’t care for jeans – and a carefully folded jacket all went in. Shaving kit, a framed photograph of Christine, his sister, two plain ties – what had he missed? He glanced back at the photograph. How young and unformed she had been then, before her particular fall from innocence, a pregnancy and termination that had divided the family.

How lacking in innocence were children now, so ready to show injury from a perceived lack of respect. His sister was a kind, fair-minded woman but worked as though the world turned upon her efforts at the office. Their mother was frightened to ring in case she somehow impeded the wheels of industry by doing so. As a consequence, brother and sister had been left alone too much, to find their own way in the world.

A decent book – something he could reread if it turned out there was no library. He grazed the shelves and finally selected a sunbeaten copy of Bleak House. Into the suitcase it went. The danger lay in packing too much and not using any of it. He had always hated waste.

‘It’s hard to know what to take,’ he said, half to himself. ‘I mean, it’s not like the holidays we used to have in America, before South Beach became so horrible. You won’t be with me, for a start.’

‘I can’t, you know that,’ said the wall. ‘You have to do this on your own.’

He hated the idea. In their twelve years together he had only been apart from Daniel three times, all business trips. Loyalty ran in the family, against the grain of life around him. His grandfather had never left his wife’s side, apart from his war service, and had died just a few weeks after her, from no particular cause the doctor could find.

He looked around the bright little room, and saw now how cluttered it had become. There was hardly an item in the place that did not conjure up some memory of the past. A little Ford Prefect made from glass and filled with coloured sand, a souvenir of a fossil-hunting school holiday in Ventnor, a studded onyx box bought with his first pay cheque, his silver christening ring, reworked by his father into part of an off-kilter letter-rack, a green and silver metal train purchased in Cologne on their first weekend away. They weren’t particularly attractive objects but remained symbols of continuity, tentative marks of hope and faith. They still meant something.

He decided to pack a few of the ornaments, carefully wrapping each one in a sock. Outside, sharp winter sunshine filtered through oak leaves in the quadrangle below, patching the threadbare lawn in puzzle-pieces of light, showing up dust on the bedroom windows. The flat was ill-fitted and draughty but they had bought it together, without help or influence from friends and family. It was something they had created, like the hand-covered lamp on the bedside table.

He decided to pack that as well.

His grandfather had loved to carve. As a boy, Stuart had sat at the kitchen table watching the old man curl thin shavings of beechwood shaped like the slivers of caramel ice cream his mother had scraped from frozen cartons for him. The pair of them had always been packed off to the shed when his grandmother’s threshold of mess had been breached. They stood at the lathe together, turning table legs in the hut that smelled of iron filings and fresh-cut wood. To this day, the scent of that mixture summoned his grandfather’s creased, thin face to him. Stuart had taught Daniel how to make the lamp, and they had filled the tiny flat with sawdust, producing this wonky, amateurish object.

He opened the cupboard and reached on tiptoe. Old computer boxes filled with photographs – he could hardly leave them behind. After all, he didn’t know how long they would be apart, and was bothered by the idea that he might not be able to recall Daniel’s face. The wall montages of their friends were needed, too. He began to remove the framed pictures from the wall and insert them into the suitcase one by one. He had intended to take just one or two, but ended by packing all six. For good measure, he added the moulting teddy bear he had clutched through his early childhood.

‘You’re taking your time,’ called Daniel. ‘You’re going to be late. What are you up to in there?’

‘Nothing,’ Stuart called back, checking to see if he had missed anything.

‘Don’t take too much. You’ve got to carry that thing all the way by yourself, and you know how heavy it is even when it’s empty.’

He realized he had spent the entire morning deciding which clothes and personal items to take with him, and was stricken with indecision. Looking at his watch, he saw that he was due to leave in just a few minutes.

‘I’m trying to see if I’ve missed anything.’

‘You can’t be late,’ Daniel called back. ‘The departure time can’t be moved, you know that.’

‘We have too much stuff,’ he sighed. ‘I have no idea what’s important any more.’

‘You don’t have to take anything, you know, just the clothes you’re standing in. It won’t matter. You can probably get everything you need at the other end.’

‘It feels like every room in this flat contains a lifetime of memories.’ He looked around again, rubbing at his eye. ‘I can’t just leave it all. If I do, what was it all for?’ The bottom shelf beneath the window contained his alphabetized collection of music magazines; lifestyle porn, Daniel called it. Seized with a sudden panic, he began to load them into the suitcase, twenty at a time.

‘There’s no need to get sentimental – they’re only belongings,’ Daniel called back, a hint of exasperation in his voice. ‘You have to think of it as a holiday, which is exactly what it’s going to be. You never took your ornaments to America.’

‘I came back from America,’ he countered. ‘I’m leaving this place for good. Think about that. You’re going to miss me, for a start.’

‘It’s not for ever, idiot. If I thought you were going to make this much fuss about such a short trip—’ Daniel appeared in the doorway, leaning against the lintel in that pose of sexy insolence that had first caught Stuart’s attention on the night they met. ‘God, how much stuff are you cramming into that case?’

‘It’s not even full yet. Room for a bit more.’

‘All right then, what’s it to be? Some of the furniture? Your grandfather’s folding snack table? Go on, knock yourself out. Let’s see you pile it all in; you’ll be like a hermit crab dragging its house around on its back wherever it goes.’

He came closer, annoyance evaporating as he placed his hands on Stuart’s shoulders.

‘Sometimes you have to scrape a few barnacles from the boat in order to make it go faster. You’re carrying way too much. All this stuff, this isn’t our life together – this is.’ He touched his heart; then he pressed his fingers on Stuart’s chest, the kind of corny, sweet gesture he made unthinkingly.

‘All right,’ Stuart finally decided, ‘just one more pair of trainers, maybe two, then I’m done.’

‘Good man. I’ll be by the front door, ready to wave you off. The taxi should be here by now.’

But the moment Daniel was gone, Stuart saw the stack of books in the corner, and his nerve failed him. When he had been thrown out of his old flat they had slept in the twin children’s beds in Daniel’s old bedroom at home for two weeks, weathering the silent disapproval of Daniel’s father until his forbearance had imploded in an indignant torrent of disgust.

Walking the wet February streets, they had stayed in hostels for weeks before finding the damp little flat that needed fumigating and treating before it was habitable. On the day they had finally lowered their paintbrushes and moved in together, they had sat on the floor of the empty apartment and culled their book and music libraries, reducing two collections to one. The process required sacrifice on both sides, but they matched each other item for item, removing Chaucer and Pepys, Handel and Stravinsky, while retaining guiltier pleasures, the Philip K. Dicks and X-Men comics, the boy bands and cheesy old soundtrack albums, the inexplicable personal choices that had hitherto been enjoyed alone. It was a measure of their commitment, a gesture of self-denial that paradoxically opened a wider path forward.

Now he wanted to take them all, every last thing that they had agreed could stay in their shared life together.

‘You are really going to be late now,’ Daniel called from the hall. ‘You always do this. Come on, Stewie, zip it up and move it out.’

He checked his watch: 7.10 a.m., which meant that he was due to leave in just five minutes.

Danny, their dishevelled blue and yellow budgie, started chirruping and dropping on to the floor of his cage, scattering seeds in an attempt to draw attention to himself. They had bought him at the Parkway Pet Store shortly after painting the bedroom canary yellow. Canaries were more expensive, so they had settled for a budgie. Daniel hadn’t been keen on keeping him in the bedroom, not because it might be unhealthy, but because he didn’t like the idea that the bird might watch them making love.

Stuart smiled to himself as he reached into the cage and gently closed his fingers around the budgerigar. He could feel the tiny warm heart beating against his palm. Carefully withdrawing it, he slipped it into a paper bag and nestled it, chirruping, inside the case.

‘It’s here, the car’s here.’

‘All right, I’m coming.’

Stuart reluctantly closed the suitcase and managed to zip it partly shut, but not even sitting on the lid could close it all the way around. Worse, it weighed so much that he couldn’t move it from the bed, no matter how hard he pulled. The damned thing felt as if it was made of lead. He gripped the handle in both fists, and although he could feel sweat breaking on his forehead, nothing would shift it. The more he pulled, the less it seemed to move. He dug his boots into the carpet and strained harder but now his face was hot with pouring sweat, and rivulets broke down his back.

‘Let go, Stewie. There’s no more need to fight it. Just let go.’

And Daniel was there again.

He wiped his cheeks with a blue paper cloth, and laid it down on the pillow, although it was supposed to be dropped in the yellow plastic biohazard bin. He gripped Stuart’s hand with his own, but the icy sweat made his fingers slip.

‘Come on, baby, just let it go.’

He studied Stuart’s strained face and stroked the side of his neck. The drip was nearly empty. The nurse would soon reappear to change the bag, but Stuart’s lungs were filling faster than the drug could clear them. His skin was as yellow as the walls of their apartment. The previous evening, Daniel had helped the nurse transfer him to another bed, one with a mattress that would prevent the sores on his back from returning, and it seemed that Stuart had become weightless. His wrists were swollen and blackened from the endlessly changed cannulas. Two other clear plastic tubes hung discreetly from the bed, one to administer Valium, the other to take away the contents of his bladder.

The doctor had estimated that he would survive the night, but had warned them all to prepare for the worst. It was just coming up for 7:15 a.m. Stuart’s parents were attempting to grab some sleep on the plastic chairs in the hall. Daniel’s father did not want to know about any of it. He was at home, furiously clipping at his garden.

It was very quiet now, so calm and white that anything dramatic would have felt unseemly. He looked back at the skeletal figure sunk flatly into the high white bed and held his hand a little more tightly, taking care not to cause him any further pain.

‘Come on, baby,’ he coaxed softly. ‘Let it go.’

Stuart slowly opened his eyes and his fingers.

He was standing in the bedroom once more, beside the great leaden suitcase. He released the handle now, stepping back from it. The lid would never have closed completely. He reached down and pulled on the zip, allowing it to ride all the way back and release the contents.

Unrestrained, all his belongings burst from within, spilling out on to the bed and the floor, rising out into the air.

Now that the suitcase was easier to move he upended it, completely tipping out the contents: the clothes, photographs, gifts, music, childhood toys, cards, tokens of affection and so many beloved books cascading outward like released emotions, freed from purpose and desirability. He watched the shimmering rainbow colours tumble and fold together for a moment, hovering in the still air until they completely filled the room.

Walking away from it all, skirting the iridescent scraps of his life that turned and drifted past him, Stuart made his way slowly along the shadowed hall.

Daniel was standing beside the open front door, smiling in the light, pleased for him, heartbroken. Stuart placed his arms around his thin shoulders, feeling the warmth of his back beneath his palms, a solid beating life from which you could draw strength like fire.

‘You’re right,’ Stuart said finally, studying Daniel’s blue eyes. ‘I shouldn’t really take anything else. I have everything I need.’

He stepped out into the soft and silent winter sun, the glittering sea, the sky, the sky.

Credits

Quotations in the text are from the following sources:

p. vii: How to Be Topp by Geoffrey Willans.

p. 46: A Reverie of Bone by Mervyn Peake.

p. 47: FAQs on www.jodipicoult.com; Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster; Beloved by Toni Morrison; interview with Bernadine Evaristo in the Guardian; interview with Alice Munro in The Paris Review; ‘Worstward Ho’ by Samuel Beckett; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark; interview with Wilbur Smith in the Guardian.

p. 48: Beryl Bainbridge quoted in Contemporary Novelists edited by James Vinson; Look, I Made a Hat by Stephen Sondheim; Brick Lane by Monica Ali; Writing Home by Alan Bennett; interview with Peter Carey in the Huffington Post.

p.65: ‘Boadicea’ by Kenneth Williams from the album On Pleasure Bent.

p. 107: A Talent to Deceive by Robert Barnard.

p. 108: Snobbery with Violence by Colin Watson.

p. 109: An Autobiography by Agatha Christie.

p. 145: ‘On Being Ill’ by Virginia Woolf.

p. 167: Writing Home by Alan Bennett.

p. 187: How to Be Topp by Geoffrey Willans.

p. 212: Of Other Worlds, essays by C. S. Lewis.

p. 214: ‘P. D. James’s 10 tips for writing novels’ on www.bbc.co.uk; A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams.

p. 239: ‘The Devil, George, and Rosie’ by John Collier from the collection Not Too Late for More John Collier.

p. 272: Quotation by Harvey Fierstein from the documentary The Celluloid Closet.

p. 330: Interview with J. G. Ballard on www.jgballard.ca.

pp. 394–5: Interview with Michael Ripper in a magazine published in 1995 by Donald Fearney Productions, printed in limited run of five hundred copies.

Acknowledgements

Massive thanks to my enthusiastic editor, the ever-chipper Simon Taylor, to James Wills, my agent, always arriving with good ideas and cake, to Kate Samano and Richenda Todd for thoughtfully sorting the language, to Mandy Little for her ever-wise advice, and to Martin Butterworth, forever trying out new ideas. I love working with you, buddy! A great big group hug to everyone who has shown me that there’s always more work to do: Deborah, Sally, Suzi, Maggie, Roger, Darrell, Sarah & Patrick, Dan & Hiromi (thanks for the congee!).

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
His acclaimed memoirs …

PAPERBOY

Superman, Dracula, Treasure Island, The Avengers … when you’re ten years old you can fall in love with any story, so long as it’s a good one. But what do you do if you’re growing up in a home without books? Christopher Fowler’s childhood memoir captures life in suburban London through the eyes of a lonely boy who spends his days between the library and the cinema devouring novels, comics, cereal boxes – anything that might reveal a story. But it is 1960, and after fifteen years of post-war belt-tightening, his family’s not quite ready to indulge a child cursed with too much imagination …

Caught between an ever-sensible, exhausted mother and a DIY-obsessed father fighting his own demons, Christopher takes refuge in words. His parents try to understand their son’s peculiar obsession but they fast lose patience with him – and each other. As the war of nerves escalates to include every member of the Fowler family, something has to give, but do the tough lessons of real life mean a boy must always let go of his dreams?

The memoir of a childhood at once eccentric and endearingly ordinary, Paperboy does for storytelling what Nigel Slater’s Toast did for food.

‘Paperboy is fabulous, and I hope it sells forever.’
JOANNE HARRIS

FILM FREAK

It’s the late 1970s, and Christopher Fowler is a film freak, obsessively watching lousy films in run-down fleapit cinemas. Longing to put his dreams on the screen and become a famous screenwriter, he heads for Wardour Street, the nation’s equivalent of Hollywood, with an armful of scripts.

But he’s made a spectacular mistake. He arrives just as the industry falls to its knees, knocked down by the first appearance of video and the destruction of the old movie palaces. The only films being made are smutty low budget farces and TV spinoffs. He thought he’d be asked to make another ‘Bullitt’, but finds himself writing short films for boilers. Somehow, against the odds, he finds success – although in a very different form from the one he expected.

From the sticky Axminster of the local cinema to the red carpet at Cannes, Film Freak is a grimly hilarious and acutely observed trawl through the arse-end of the British film industry that turns into an ultimately affecting search for friendship and happiness.

‘Film Freak is gold-plated writing: uproarious, then dark, and surprisingly moving. Above all it’s a fabulous evocation of a London, and a way of life, now almost gone forever.’
MAIL ON SUNDAY

THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

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TRANSWORLD

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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Doubleday
Penguin paperback edition published 2024

Copyright © Christopher Fowler, 2023

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design Anthony Maddock / TW
Cover image © Shutterstock & Getty Images

This is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true.

The credits on pp. 448–9 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

ISBN: 978-1-529-91086-5

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Footnotes

2: What’s It About?

fn1 Academics don’t like this term, but the era largely remains a mystery.

3: Unhealthy

fn1 A fag, a smoke, a snout, une clope, a gasper, ‘one less for the beagles’.

fn2 Still there, as of this writing, run by the original owner’s son.

fn3 A blended digestif of Italian bitters once prescribed for menstrual cramps. In 1978 the formula was changed to conform to the Psychotropic Substances Act.

4: Oldsters

fn1 My experience of large green spaces is limited. It’s not agoraphobia; I just don’t trust them.

fn2 The typeface is called Postcrypt and dates from the 1950s. Hammer Horror films had some great blood-drenched typefaces too.

fn3 In the 1960s the Channel Islands tried out something called a ‘Rabbit’ phone, a mutation of handsets and mobile base stations. Unfortunately you had to be less than three hundred feet from a base to make it work. This footnote is an indicator of the scattergun way in which my mind works. I’m afraid there will be more of them.

fn4 The Turkish caterer founded a chain of vulgarian restaurants on the basis of a 2017 Instagram clip in which he threw salt down his arm. Perhaps he’ll inspire a new generation of chefs who cease to care about developing culinary skills and concentrate purely on pouring condiments out of their ears or other orifices.

fn5 Unfortunately Squizzer proved to be foul-mouthed and unreliable in fights. The character shapes the story. I decided to leave him on a back burner.

fn6 I was making a short film, not holding up a liquor store. I returned it.

5: Death Sentence

fn1 One big room with glass walls. Not for agoraphobes. My sister-in-law said, ‘Some curtains wouldn’t kill you.’ The offices opposite start early. Don’t come wandering out eating toast with no pants on, that’s all I can say.

fn2 Physical discs used for storing films, lovingly collected over decades, now redundant because my husband won’t watch anything with ‘inferior pixel density’.

fn3 Don’t get me started or we’ll be here for days. I am reliably informed that all writers feel this way. Once you notice you’re lining up your teaspoons top to tail in order to preserve their parallel stem arrangement you need to go to the pub more often.

fn4 Archaic, but at least its meaning is discernible. Other lost jobs include jakes farmer, loblolly man, withy peeler, touch holer, step boy and printer’s devil.

fn5 Or worse still: ‘Hobbies’.

6: Your Basic Idiot

fn1 To this day I’ll swear it was Covid, although there’s no direct evidence to prove that it was.

fn2 The Three-Day Rule states that if seventy-two hours lapse between writing sessions you’ll be kicked out of the moment and will have to go back several chapters to re-establish the mood, which will take half a day.

fn3 A baroque wrought-iron peculiarity constructed from a series of artist’s drawings that graced the 1951 Festival of Britain.

fn4 The artist’s improbable constructions for making life easier would have made life much harder if actually built.

fn5 Ginger nuts, Bourbons, custard creams, shortbread and digestives. Sadly, garibaldis are no longer in evidence.

7: A Little Writing Advice

fn1 Write in now.

9: The History of Tea

fn1 Don’t worry, this is as depressing as the narrative gets.

fn2 An idea that lasted exactly one week. Also, you can’t wear tight sleeves when you need to have bloods taken constantly.

fn3 I often read right through my number being called, but they don’t take Daphne du Maurier as a valid excuse.

10: Hub of the Universe

fn1 One day Pete went up to the Jesus man and asked, ‘Why are you so angry?’

He shouted back, ‘I’m not angry!’ then thought for a minute. ‘I’m so angry!’ he bellowed into his microphone.

fn2 It showed a picturesque chateau at sunset on the Riviera. Caveat emptor: you took your life in your hands reaching the door from the racetrack outside.

fn3 ‘She said, “It’s queer still being single, But I’m a queen and a queen can’t mingle.”’ ‘Boadicea’ (song), Kenneth Williams.

fn4 ‘Summer Holiday’ anticipated ‘Les Demoiselles de Rochefort’ by four years. I don’t think I’d have helped Cliff Richard build a bus for free.

fn5 Down From London.

fn6 I have always been a cat person. I admire cats for their disloyalty.

12: Nobody Likes a Good All-Rounder

fn1 There was a lot of grabbing, slapping and pinching of pupils by teachers in my school. Today they’d be forced to resign. They were nice people. I’m still in touch with my Latin master. When I was fourteen I thought he was ancient. It turned out he was twenty-eight.

fn2 Lying in a hospital bed listening to the mechanized beat of pumps, it felt important to hold in my mind the boom of the shore, the tropical birds, the wind, the clack of bamboo, as though the senses themselves could heal.

fn3 It’s always hard to know what they really looked like since artists were usually required to flatter their subjects. Francis Bacon wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

fn4 Some of the scenes in it were terrific, except for the bits where you can tell the morphine kicked in, when it became a Dan Brown novel.

13: Reading for Pleasure

fn1 For the full story of Frank Baker and Alfred Hitchcock, see The Book of Forgotten Authors.

fn2 ‘Yes, but when inflation is taken into account—’ Just don’t go there, OK?

fn3 Not the hobbit gentleman but the chap who was fascinated (and fascinating) about everything from clock faces to bedposts.

fn4 There’s more to be said on this but we’ll come back to it later when you’re rested.

fn5 Once the most popular comic in Britain.

14: Eating with Your Fingers

fn1 The Arsenal Tavern, an insalubrious North London inn popular with overweight gentlemen in red-and-white nylon shirts.

fn2 When a nation’s leaders decide to declare a virus a national resource in order to keep a copyright on its antidote.

fn3 A traumatized friend of mine returned from the Ukraine border after a month of processing refugees. I asked her what the worst part of the job was. She replied, ‘The press.’

fn4 I wasn’t too struck on shows like The Walking Dead either. Everyone always ended up trying to reach a rigidly hierarchical compound full of guns where life was worse on the inside but at least there was tinned spam for you if you kept your nose clean. More nuanced by far (thanks to our increasing knowledge of pandemics) is the series The Last of Us.

fn5 It was so good though.

15: In the Library with a Candlestick

fn1 The creation of a book or film that offers fans everything they want, often based on demographic research.

16: So Much for Moisturizer

fn1 ‘Have you moved my phone?’ ‘Who put the spoons where the forks go?’ ‘Do we still have a cat?’ etc., etc.

fn2 As mentioned, the late David Seabrook wrote a truly grim volume, All the Devils Are Here, about this mysterious, impoverished area, which catches something of its Victorian grotesquery.

17: A Rubbish CV

fn1 I had already written my obituary for a national newspaper, the final edition of the Independent on Sunday, when we were allowed to do whatever we wanted, like the last day of school term.

fn2 You don’t get much honesty from film stars. See Film Freak.

fn3 Cue for some bright spark to unearth said books and post them on a site. Not endearing.

fn4 The dream of every writer is to keep going until they produce a perfect short story. It hardly ever happens. I can think of about a dozen examples (none of them mine).

fn5 The workers’ toilets were often situated on the ground floor, and those on the upper storeys could not afford to lose time by going down to the latrines.

fn6 Portillo wasn’t in Cinderella, just in the taxi.

fn7 Campbell’s catchphrase was ‘Follow your bliss’, i.e. let your enthusiasms guide you. Although he made some good points, I never truly believed in McKee’s slickster approach, which has in any case been superseded by innovations in new streaming formats.

fn8 From The Art of Screen Adaptation by Alistair Owen.

fn9 Film producers and directors are basically energy-draining vampires, although even vampires don’t usually say, ‘We’ve a cash-flow problem on this production so bill us low and we’ll make it up on the next film.’

18: The King of Sweden

fn1 They couldn’t afford one, but they adored the idea of it.

fn2 There comes a despairing point when you feel you’re not delivering what anyone wants. All I can say is that you have to ride through it.

19: Lingo

fn1 I’m treading on thin ice here.

fn2 This is a tad disingenuous. Spain is just under nine miles from North Africa but that doesn’t make it African.

fn3 British film released in 1949 about a London neighbourhood that declares itself part of Europe during the long, hot summer. When they finally get their borders back it starts bucketing down.

fn4 The best example of this hybrid language can be heard in the award-winning TV comedy series Stath Lets Flats.

20: Homebodies

fn1 I know that’s a rather cruel joke, particularly when it’s T. S. Eliot who deserves to be bashed, not his wife and her very real illness. After all, what did he leave us with? An incomprehensible poem and Cats. And he was American. QED.

fn2 It was a real well; it didn’t grant wishes.

fn3 The University of Plymouth recorded each chapter with a different performer, bringing the circuitous prose to teeming life, under the title Moby Dick Big Read. Be careful when you type in those words in case you mess up your algorithms.

fn4 This is the same reason why I never saw Top Gun. I know Jane Eyre is supposed to be one of the three greatest works of English literature but I still didn’t like it.

fn5 This debilitating disease particularly afflicted the young when they saw photos of Alexi’s illegal rave in Somerset and it isn’t fair that they couldn’t go just because Dad needed the BMW to check on Gran even though he’s not supposed to go anywhere during lockdown all my friends went it’s just so totally selfish of him I hate him.

FOMO has now been replaced with HOGO, Hassle Of Going Out. People aren’t returning to restaurants because they’ve learned that if you throw tomato sauce on to spaghetti it’s as good as going to your local restaurant. Possibly better.

21: All of Them Witches

fn1 The archetype here is Colin Robinson. If you don’t know who he is, google him.

22: Paradoxical

fn1 To the tune of ‘Three Little Maids’, obvs.

24: Lying for a Living

fn1 A schmaltzy television show in which people repair beloved childhood objects. Basically Geppetto – the Series.

fn2 By mastering this form of apology-without-apologizing, our Home Secretary Priti Patel transformed herself into a saturnine hate figure upon whom the public could fixate while the rest of the villains remained snoozing on the backbenches.

fn3 Black sheep of the family, a resolutely working-class Victorian. My mother: ‘You are not to speak to that awful old lady.’ She secretly adored her for ‘calling a spade a spade’.

fn4 Rather than admit he broke the law, special government adviser Dominic Cummings came up with an absurdly over-complex set of excuses involving a visit to a castle and an optician. Rule No. 1 for politicians: keep your lies simple.

fn5 I’d already ticked that off in my Top Trumps list of catastrophes. Both eyes, major operations, thank you.

25: Nothing

fn1 Blokey presenter.

fn2 Naturalist, celebrated television presenter and saint.

fn3 This was before the You, Me and the Big C podcast reached national awareness.

26: Received Pronunciation

fn1 Ah yes, Barcelona. Suffice it to say that I had lived in other countries, drawn by the aforementioned tropical factor.

fn2 Jerome K. Jerome

fn3 Best spoken in the voice of Sid James.

fn4 The best swear word anecdote is possibly apocryphal: a nervous TV presenter introduced glamorous British film star Diana Dors (real name: Diana Fluck) as Diana Clunt.

fn5 It was subsumed by a Disney version which has now been deemed ‘problematic’.

fn6 A gentle rural comedy about a pair of metal-detector treasure hunters who mostly sit about in fields talking about life.

fn7 Mystifyingly popular series about a pair of Cockney chancers fencing stolen goods. Now a musical.

fn8 Gray was already a terrific writer but her experiences added ballast to books that required readers to believe in the supernatural.

27: Not England

fn1 Zeugma.

fn2 An odd disease in which, for example, double-jointed people (especially acrobats) dislocate themselves in later life. Maggie has it.

30: No One’s Anybody

fn1 The American writer Paul Auster is understandably revealing on this subject.

31: Big Words

fn1 I recently joined their esteemed ranks in a ceremony that involved secret invocations on a skull called Eric in candlelit gloom. Beyond this my lips are sealed.

fn2 The Belles of St Trinian’s.

fn3 The St Trinian’s Story and the Pick of the Searle Cartoons, published in 1959.

fn4 The Oxford English Dictionary has a few of mine up for consideration, including ‘obganiatory’ (irritating somebody by constantly repeating oneself), ‘chatoyance’ (the reflected light from a gemstone), ‘choreating’, (performing involuntary muscle movement), and ‘crepusculate’ (fade to the setting of sun). I’m very excited. Let me enjoy this brief moment while it lasts.

fn5 This process is known as metanalysis.

33: A Little Guide to Writing Short Stories

fn1 Short fiction cultivates decisiveness – there’s no time to hang around with a multi-stranded ending!

fn2 I frequently use him as an example because of the clarity of his intentions.

fn3 Imagine a cross between Camus and Kafka and you get artist, playwright, editor and journalist Buzzati, whose short stories deserve fame and praise.

fn4 If you stayed with me through this part, how are you getting on? You could add a personal list of your own reading. My ideas on short-story length are flexible …

fn5 ‘Sredni Vashtar’ by H. H. ‘Saki’ Munro.

34: Pride & Extreme Prejudice

fn1 These days Williams’s tragic heroine could just opt for dermabrasion.

fn2 If, during convalescence, you could make it around the flower beds and back you were on the mend.

36: Clots

fn1 We haven’t come to that bit yet. It’s just up ahead.

37: Die

fn1 That’s right, RuPaul, you did not invent camp. It was always here, living very happily in the UK.

38: Funny Words

fn1 My favourite, not in the book, is from War of the Colossal Beast:

Dr Carmichael: The foot that made that print is about ten times the size of a normal man’s. That would make him about sixty feet tall.

Joyce Manning: Glenn was sixty feet tall!

40: Serafina

fn1 It appears in Joseph Losey’s film The Servant.

fn2 What transpired on his return was – to my amazement – strangely moving as he knelt before the bull and paid his respects before putting a fuck-ton of banderillas in it.

41: A Little Guide to Writing Crime Fiction

fn1 Or living equivalent.

fn2 Never going to happen.

fn3 The little comic had a character called the Gump, whose jacket was ridiculously small. See ‘Norman Wisdom and the Angel of Death’ in Sharper Knives. Shameless plug.

fn4 Not Dorothy Parker, surprisingly, but Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

fn5 I sometimes get put on panels with writers of the supernatural because organizers have never read me and/or can’t work out where I should be placed.

fn6 Joanna was also filming when her bus went off a cliff in South America. Do not go on holiday with this woman.

fn7 Richard O’Brien was encouraged to dump his brilliant-sounding Rocky Horror sequel by a director who didn’t understand the story.

fn8 Finn’s debut novel, The Woman in the Window, was a number-one bestseller, but he proved to be a serial liar with a falsified backstory. For a while, the scariest thing you could see was his name light up your phone – as it did on mine.

fn9 OK, Troy Kennedy Martin’s script for The Italian Job is a gem. But even that has the most delightfully peculiar scene ever found in an action film: Irene Handl’s misconstrued conversation with Michael Caine.

42: Opposites

fn1 That bit’s coming up shortly.

fn2 Some time later, Pete and I moved to a strange Gothic apartment downtown to indulge my ‘exotic Latin climes’ fetish.

43: The Chicken Factory

fn1 This Victorian attitude is unsurprising. England is now more stratified by class than it was in the late nineteenth century, with the worst social mobility in Europe.

45: Keys

fn1 Writers and actors have fairly analogous careers. They get along well together because they want something from each other.

fn2 I miss Snopake and sometimes still use it on handwritten notes.

fn3 London neighbourhoods go from ‘dangerous at night’ to ‘edgy’ to ‘vibrant’ to ‘cool’ and finally having ‘affordable borders’ in about three years.

46: In Denial

fn1 Then I realize I’m shouting this from my terrace at 3.00 a.m. in my underpants. The man downstairs waves.

fn2 An idea explored in the film Another Round.

47: Mildew

fn1 Historical note: the government’s buggy Test and Trace system had caused thousands of perfectly healthy people to isolate at home.

fn2 The City of London employed two police constables full time to take pictures of all the burnt-out buildings. Arthur Cross and Fred Tibbs built up a complete record of what needed to be reconstructed, so that planners could take into consideration height, bulk and materials. The record was ignored.

49: Q&A

fn1 I did this just a couple of days ago. ‘How was your trip? Did you have fun? Oh, I mean was it fun apart from your brother’s wake.’

fn2 ‘Speaking Hungarian’: London slang for the burbling rubbish drunk creatives talk in Shoreditch bars.

51: Undisturbed Treasures

fn1 Is this a proper noun now? It feels right to abandon the definite article, but there have been multiple lockdowns and it looks weird with a capital L. This is the kind of thing writers think about when they should be doing something useful.

fn2 Although Pownall’s best is The White Cutter, a novel about stonemasons building a cathedral.

fn3 John Christopher’s The Little People was one of the few seventies thrillers to feature Gestapo leprechauns.

fn4 Impostures by al-Ḥarīrī is based on a thousand-year-old Arabic text known as ‘the Everest of world literature’, translated into fifty different styles from Shakespearian to middle-manager corporate-speak via references to hundreds of other literary works. It has two bookmark ribbons and a foreword entitled ‘In Praise of Pretence’. I’m still struggling with it.

54: Swings and Roundabouts

fn1 The poster for the Dudley Moore film 30 Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia read: ‘If you haven’t made it by the time you’re 30, you never will! Ask anybody!’

fn2 Although Amsterdam weekends were so popular that the last flight out on Friday was known as the Royal Flight because there were so many queens on it.

fn3 Bank of Mum and Dad.

55: Peculiar

fn1 See page 297.