Burning Effigies At The Drop Of A Hat...

On the days not spent at TV shopping channels I’ve been hanging around the Harper Collins offices, spending time in the different departments and trying to be dazzling and memorable. When the workers look as though their tolerance of my presence is ebbing away, I try to make myself useful. What starts with a polite offer to take a parcel from one office to another culminates in a two-hour stint at a photocopier for one of the secretaries while she enjoys an extended break in the coffee room, and I begin to suspect that they are taking advantage of me. When Doris the cleaner trundles up to me with a mop and bucket and asks if I could give the women’s toilets ‘a quick going over,’ although the opportunity of a leisurely examination of the different machines and bins is momentarily intriguing, I decline and revaluate my tactics.

I swing by my publicists’ office, which still requires a steely will on my part. In my nightmares the windows are covered in ancient cobwebs and a cauldron boils in the centre of the room but in the mid-afternoon reality there is only the lingering musty odour of decay that could just be a coincidentally dead animal of some kind nearby.

Mavis is there alone, muttering to herself as she does something strange behind the desk. I cough and linger in the doorway and she looks up and quickly closes a drawer. “Christopher.”

I force a smile and take a few cautionary steps into the office. Mavis is masterminding my forthcoming ‘Drunken Public Appearances’ campaign, which so far consists of two fifteen minute slots at sci-fi conventions in the Midlands. “I had a new idea,” I tell her.

“Always appreciated. What’s your plan?”

“I could make a few religiously offensive comments and get some dramatic-looking protests against me going in the streets of Asia. Those people burn effigies at the drop of a hat.”

“What kind of comments?”

“I don’t know. Muhammad sucks donkey dicks, some Hindu Goddess is a slut. Maybe get some cartoons going, they don’t seem to like them.”

She sighs. “I don’t think selling a few more copies of your book is necessarily worth having our worldwide offices firebombed, Christopher. But thanks for the idea.”

“I’ll keep thinking,” I say, and then on my way out, my agent Sid phones me with some good news so I head to my editor’s office for some subtle gloating.

He barely looks up from his piles of papers. “Next time you should clean the copier before using it,” he says, flicking through some pages. “It’s nice that you’re helping out around here but look, there’s a dark smudge on every one of these.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You all set for the big release?” he says. “Going to have a little party with all your sci-fi mates? Maybe dress up as different characters from the book?”

“I might be going to Europe.”

“You are in Europe.”

“Proper Europe.”

“That’ll be nice.”

“Sid has sold the book in Germany and Poland. My words are going to be translated.”

I have Chris’ full attention for the first time. “Sid has?”

“I know, I can hardly believe it myself. Apparently I have an advance magically winging its digital way into my bank account as we speak.”

“Sid did?”

I shrug. “He must have something over publishers there too. So it seems the Poles do read, which makes it even more of a shame that the Ealing community seems against me.”

“Well, that’s good news, anyway. Congratulations. Make sure you tell Mavis and Pauline.”

The thought of going back there makes me cold. “I’ll email them.”

Another man walks quickly into the office and hands a file to Chris. “No rush. Just look them over when you get a chance.”

“No problem,” Chris says. “Oh, Bradley. You should meet Christopher, the author of Clear History.”

Bradley shakes my hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

Chris looks at me. “If we publish a second novel then Bradley will take over as your editor.”

“Right.”

“No, that’s not true,” Bradley says. “Harper Collins always keeps the same editor on series’. Don’t worry, you won’t have to go through some upheaval. Got to get a move on, I’m afraid. Nice to meet you.”

He leaves and Chris slumps behind his desk, eyes glazed and staring at nothing. I lean forward. “That is good news. As soon as I get home I’m going to send you the first hundred pages of the follow-up. I’m going to send you all my notes as well and you can tell me what you think. Of everything.”

Chris looks at me. “We’ll see how the book sells.” It is almost a threat.

I nod. “We’ll see how it sells in Germany and Poland.”

I stand up to leave. “Hang on,” Chris says. “Sid sold the rights?”

“We’ve been through this.”

“No, but…Harper Collins owns the worldwide rights.”

“What?”

“Yeah. That was the contract Sid approved and you signed.” He taps at his computer. “Here’s the press release. We even have the US rights. What a contract!”

Now I stare at him in shock. “And is Harper translating it into German and Polish?”

He shakes his head. “Doesn’t appear to be any plans yet.”

“I can’t believe that man.”

“I wouldn’t spend that advance just yet.” He picks up his phone. “I have to warn the relevant parties. I suggest that you sort this out before it becomes a real problem.”

I point upwards. “It’s like God can’t stand anything going well for people that don’t believe in him.” I walk out of his office.

“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” he calls.

“I know,” I shout from the corridor on the way to a pub.

Shrink In Cold Water...

Hours after exercising for the first time in awhile, before the damage is felt and you spend the next few days unable even to scratch your nose without wincing, you feel just great. You bounce down the high street lighter than air, strutting confidently through the crowds with saucy smiles at the pretty ladies, feeling fit and healthy and attractive. Then you catch sight of yourself in a shop window and you stop and stare in shock, oblivious to the businessman who clatters into you from behind with a loud tut. You have not, as you assumed, instantly transformed into a svelte buff Adonis with a flat stomach and chiselled jaw line. You look, in fact, much as you did that morning. Overweight, pudgy, blobby. Not obese, not by a long shot. But the bulges are there, the ones that never existed when you were twenty-four and drinking beer rather than whiskey every night, for Christ’s sake. How can this be? You’ve just been through Hell.

It’s my fourth week of swimming and before I head into the pool I study myself in the mirror. I think it may be having an effect but since Cheryl broke our bathroom scales (water, not weight) I cannot be sure. I only have to raise my hands to my forehead to look normal now, but when they are by my sides I still wobble and jostle. And so I walk into the pool with my towel apparently casually, but actually artfully, draped over my shoulders to hide some of the excess flesh. It is late morning on a weekday and most of the men here, presumable un- or casually employed, seem to spend their spare time working on pumping up their bodies. The women do not. There is nothing to look at here. Apparently only middle-aged fat women have the time to swim. They do so with excruciating slowness and presumably only so that they can ogle the men in their tight Speedos clinging to impressive packages that, judging from the shower room afterwards, don’t even shrink in cold water.

I go in the fast lane and we pound up and down the ropes. I keep up with them all, breathing every three strokes and tumble-turning, at least until I run out of breath and then I cling to the wall after every length, gasping for air. But this renews me and the boys in the fast lane swim so fast that we send the water into a churning, pulsating wave machine. Those in the adjacent lanes almost drown in our wake. We push until our muscles and lungs are ready to burst and our wrists almost snap when we crash into the walls. When we have finished the water level will have dropped by three feet.

My goggles, inevitably, mist up, and swimmers coming the other way loom into view like ships in thick fog. And, startlingly, one of them is wearing a pink bikini. At the end of the length I stop and rinse out my goggles. On the second pass she looks slim and pretty, even with a rubber hat. On the third length I am already catching her up and the fact that she is slow in the fast lane makes me annoyed with her as well as intrigued and excited, which is confusing. On the fourth I am behind her almost immediately and as people are coming in the other direction and I cannot overtake, I switch to breaststroke and stay just two feet behind her. I am staring right into her, at the thin band of material then runs over the most intimate parts of her, everything rounded and pivoting in front of me, and even though it is not of my planning, I feel shamed somehow. When she stops to let me pass I stop too to rinse my goggles, but regret it because she is looking at me accusatorily. To distract her I look down at her bikini top, and even though it has only dropped a little on one side, I nod at it and tell her that she has popped out.

She drops down under the water up to her neck, grabbing for her top. “God. How embarrassing,” she says.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say.

“It does to me.”

“Come on,” I say with what I imagine might be a knowing smile. “I think we both knew from the instant we first laid eyes on each other that I was going to see them sooner or later. Why wait?”

She rolls her eyes. “Jesus.” She lowers her goggles and pushes off, and I am stuck behind her again, keeping my eyes on the lines on the floor.

I climb out after a mile – a proper mile, not a swimmer’s – and I can barely walk straight. I cover myself with my towel and when my vision clears I look back at my lane and realise that the man I was so proud of keeping up with is in fact swimming with a float between his legs and those resistance paddles that threaten to slice your fingers off if you nick them on the way past.

I get home and read on the couch for awhile and then close my eyes and fall into the kind of nap that leaves you feeling half dead for twenty minutes and then so good that you reminisce about it for the rest of the day. Cheryl is back from work when I stumble into the bedroom.

“You’re always here,” I tell her. “How can I ever bring a woman back if you’re always here?”

“Go to hers,” she says without looking up from the computer. “And stay there ‘cos you’re not coming back here.”

“You’re so fucking square,” I say, sitting on the bed. She is looking up properties on the Isle of Wight. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know. I’m just exploring our options for when we get rich.”

“Have you invested in some amazing stocks I’m unaware of?”

“When your book reaches its first million sales we’ll buy a house.”

I sigh. “It must be nice living in your little world. I must visit one day. Besides, I thought we said Cornwall.”

“I thought the Cornish hated outsiders because we’re taking their houses and pricing them out of their own county and that they think they’re their own country when in fact they should accept that they’re just a small part of England and they should just shut up and run the pasty shops.”

“Cheryl! Some of my best friends are Cornish. You shouldn’t talk that way.”

“You told me that. In fact, you shouted it to me in a pub in Cornwall just before closing time, jabbing your finger at the locals.”

“Oh. How did they react?”

“A couple of them told you to fuck off.”

“See? Proved my point.”

It is two months until my novel is published, and yet this is how I spend my days. Tomorrow I’m working until five am on Sky’s studio coverage of a West Coast basketball game that will probably go to Overtime. It is, in a word, very strange.

"The Best Pubs In The World Are In The East End..."

Sid appears to be sniffing the air as he says this. “In another life I’d like to have my own place on Brick Lane. I’d be like Sam on Cheers.”

“I’d be your Norm.”

“I see you more as Cliff.”

“No one ever gets drunk on Cheers.”

We are two-thirds of the way through our third pints and we are both slowing down because we don’t want to leave.

Reluctantly, Sid brings us closer to the inevitable. “I’m happy to drive you home but we’ll have to leave after this.”

“I know.”

“We can stay but we’d have to get the tube…”

“It’s stupid to leave your car here and have to get it in the morning. We’ll go now.”

It’s decided so we finish the drinks and visit the gents. At the exit, Sid stops suddenly. There are three average-looking girls at a table. Apparently Sid thinks otherwise. “Oh my God,” he says, licking his lips. “Let’s get the tube.”

“What are you going to do, Sid? Ask them out? Take them home? Come on, let’s go.”

“Hey, I’m a world class girl watcher.”

I follow him to the bar and he orders two more pints. He points at where we were sitting. “Look, our table’s taken.”

“So?”

“All the tables are taken. But I bet we could squeeze onto the end of theirs.”

“And then what?”

“Who knows? Come on, you ask them, you’ve got a ring so they’ll think it’s innocent.”

When I ask them though, I keep my left hand in my pocket and they are polite enough to let us sit at the table and then I lean forward to chat to Sid but he is leering at the girls with a childish smile plastered on his face and eventually the girl next to him is forced to talk to him. “What do you do?” she asks.

“I’m a literary agent,” he tells them. “And Christopher here is a writer. A novelist.”

“Really?” they say and we’re off and Sid buys them drinks and shots which they refuse and so we do theirs as well as ours and by the end of the night I have kept my hand under the table and asked all three of the girls in turn for their phone numbers.

“I just heard you ask both of my friends,” the third girl says.

“That was just practise,” I slur. “You’re the one I really like.”

Sid is knocking drinks over and buying more and when the girls ask us to leave we refuse and get rowdier and the bouncers are escorting us out and Sid pushes one of them and gets thrown on his arse onto the pavement.

I walk towards the tube but Sid goes the other way and I stop. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll drive you home.”

It seems like a good idea but we are immediately lost and I squint at his A-Z London, trying to make out the meaningless shapes on the page under moving patches of light from the passing street lamps. When I realise that I have been holding the book upside down I throw it in the back seat. “Try to find the A4,” I say.

“What’s an A4?” he says.

We pull away at a green light and the car leaps into the air. “Shit,” I say.

“Shit,” he says. “What was that?”

I look back. “I think you drove over a kerb in the middle of the road.”

“A kerb?”

“A divider.”

“I didn’t see it. Did you see it?” I shake my head. “That is so dangerous.”

“Are your lights on?”

“I’m not sure.” He leans forward. “No.” He switches them on. Our vision does not improve. The lights were not the problem.

I turn down the stereo. “What is that noise?”

It was a rumbling, crunching grinding.

“I don’t know.” He turns the stereo back up.

We are lost in the Docklands, then deeper in the heart of Tower Hamlets. “If we just drive in a straight line at least we’ll get to the M25,” I say.

“I can’t find a straight line,” he says.

Shadowy figures are staring at us from the side of the road. “Are you sure the car is alright?”

Sid looks at me. “It’s okay if I hold the wheel upside down.”

“Upside down?” Sid had his arms wrapped around each other, fighting to keep the steering wheel in some position that it should not be. The grinding noise is now louder than the stereo and the car is bouncing as though the wheels are square.

“Maybe I have a puncture?” Sid suggests.

“I think there’s something seriously wrong.”

“It’s okay. Where the fuck are we?”

“I don’t know.”

People are running after us in the street now. “I think you should stop.”

Sid suddenly pulls over and scrapes along the kerb. We both stumble out of the car and stand unsteadily in the night air. Sid tries to look at the front wheels. “Christopher. I don’t think there’s any tire here.”

I lean over on my side. “Nor here.”

“Huh?”

“You’ve been driving around on the alloys.” The wheels are smoking.

Three men who may be tramps reach us, out of breath. “You guys are crazy,” one of them says. “Didn’t you see the sparks shooting out of your car?”

“I thought they were in my head,” Sid says.

The tramps look at the damage. “Have you got a spare?”

Sid nods. “It’s okay. We’ll change it.”

“What are you going to do about the other one?”

Sid shrugs. “Call the AA?”

The head tramp waves him away. “We’ll sort it out.”

“It’s okay,” Sid tries again. But the tramps are already getting the wheel out of the boot and jacking up the car.

He pulls me away. “Shit. They’re going to want money.”

“Fuck ‘em,” I say quietly.

“Oh yeah, right. Do you have any cash?” I shake my head. “Stay here with them. I’m going to find an ATM.”

He shuffles off and I wait with the tramps. One of them takes a swig from a bottle of something. “Let me have a shot,” I say.

Reluctantly he hands me the bottle and I take a couple of swallows. They pass it round. Sid returns just as they finish changing the tire. “Here’s thirty quid for your trouble,” he tells them, handing the money to the head tramp.

“Let’s go find you another one,” he says.

“That’s okay,” Sid says.

“I’ve got a friend nearby with the same car. He won’t mind.”

“Okay,” Sid says. He heads off with two of the tramps and the tools. The other one stays with me but I crawl into the back seat and pass out.

Sid shakes me awake. “Have you got any cash?” he says.

“No,” I tell him again.

“They want a hundred for the wheel. I don’t have any more money in my account.”

I get out of the car. Somehow they have put the new wheel on without waking me. “One hundred pounds parts and labour,” the head tramp confirms.

“What happens when their friend wakes up to find his wheel gone?” I ask Sid.

“I’m not convinced they knew the owner,” Sid says. “I think we just walked until we found another Beetle.”

I lead them to the ATM, cursing them. I put my card in the slot. “Give me that,” I say to the tramp with the bottle, grabbing it and taking another swig. It takes me three attempts to enter my pin correctly.

When we drive off Sid still has to hold the wheel in the wrong position. “I can’t drive this,” he says. He has sobered up a little.

We pull into a twenty-four hour service station and Sid calls the AA. I pass out again and am woken up by the tow truck man wrapping chains around the axels. He calls us stupid sons of bitches as he takes us to Sid’s house.

His mother wakes me up on the living room sofa by rubbing her wet hands over my face. It is just as well. I have to be at Bid TV by 10 o’clock.