Beneath the Earth (7 page)

‘If he says anything inappropriate or just keeps banging on with no end in sight, then I'll tell him to stop,' said Audrey.

‘Is that what you did on your Debs night?'

‘I'm serious, Pierce. Why did Mother want him to talk anyway? What on earth was going through her mind?'

I shrugged. ‘Who knows?' I said. ‘She could be rather sentimental at times.'

‘Not in her choice of reading material, she couldn't. Maybe she liked the idea of a celebrity appearing as she was lowered down.'

‘A celebrity?' I laughed, outraged by such liberties being taken with the English language. ‘You're kidding, right? Arthur's not a celebrity. He's just a writer. And he's only got one book to his name so far.'

‘Well, that's how he likes to think of himself, isn't it? And perhaps Mother felt the same way. He has received a lot of attention for his work, you know.'

‘Stalin received a lot of attention for his work too. It didn't make it any good.'

Leaving the kitchen, I wandered upstairs into Mother's room, where the windows had been flung open to release the smell of stale, dead woman. Someone had covered a mirror with a black negligee. I hadn't been in this room very much since I was a teenager and it still felt a little out of bounds to me, but as I looked around at the picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall, the plastic holy water vessel shaped like Jesus on the cross and the collection of erotic fiction on the bookshelves, I felt like I was being transported back to childhood, when Arthur and I would rummage around in here looking for Christmas presents. We'd do the same thing in his house, taking out his father's dresses and prancing around in front of the mirror like a couple of cheerful young benders until he caught us and chased us out.

And here on the dresser was a photograph of Mother with Father, both staring straight at the camera with no smiles on their faces, like a couple from a nineteenth-century portrait, all gloomy-eyed and horror-struck. And here a photo of Mother with Audrey and me. And here, to my surprise, one of her and Arthur at Butlin's. When on earth had they gone to Butlin's together? She'd never taken me to Butlin's.

At the graveyard, before starting his eulogy, Arthur requested that all cell phones be turned to silent or switched off and under no circumstances should photographs be taken. Also, he insisted that whatever he said in the next ten minutes – my heart sank at those words – should be forgotten by everyone after the burial and not reproduced by any means, including but not specifically limited to print or digital formats.

He was incorrect with his timings. In the end, he spoke for almost twenty minutes, by which time I imagine even my mother, decomposing in her ligneous sarcophagus (as Arthur himself might say), was probably growing restless. The priest, a pasty-faced fellow supporting himself on a crutch, was becoming visibly unstable, while several grieving friends and relatives were checking their watches, hoping that this would come to an end soon and we would be allowed to go to the pub.

Convinced by some veiled threats that Arthur made later in the day concerning lawsuits against those who infringed the copyright on his eulogy, I will refrain from reproducing his words, other than to say that they were what you might expect from a preening narcissist. There were an extraordinary number of mentions of how close he and my mother had once been, how he had come to see her in the nursing home before she died, where they had talked of Flaubert – fact: my mother was never in a nursing home and certainly never read a book in translation in her life, unless you count
Fifty Shades of Grey
, which was certainly not originally written in English – and how his life seemed a little more hollow, empty and vacant now without her presence. Correct me if I'm wrong but all three of those words essentially mean the same thing – is it a tautology? – so his literary skills may not be quite as good as he believes. He also managed to recount a joke that he had shared with Haruki Murakami at a festival in Shanghai the previous summer before shaking his head and saying ‘Oh, Haruki!' with quiet delight. The joke was, of course, in Japanese and I glanced at Xi-Go Luan, who ran a debating society that my mother had been involved in for many years, and was rewarded with the expected look of bewilderment on her face.

Finally it ended, my mother was lowered down and Arthur shook my hand before pressing his cheeks against Audrey's, saying, ‘Sweet girl, you can stop running now,' before moving on to greet each of the mourners individually.

‘He's not coming to the pub, is he?' asked Audrey as we got back into the car.

‘Probably,' I said. ‘He knows which one it is anyway. And he asked me something about paparazzi earlier, so I expect that means he'll be showing up.'

‘Christ on a bike,' she replied, shaking her head and looking out the window. ‘What did you think anyway? Did it go all right? Would she be happy with us?'

‘I think we did her proud,' I said.

‘What does the word
fluguent
mean?' asked Audrey, frowning a little.

‘Fluguent?'

‘Arthur used it in his monologue.
Fluguent
. What does it mean?'

‘I have no idea.'

‘And
periphical
?'

‘Sorry, no clue.'

‘What about
cordentious
?'

‘Ah,' I said. ‘I think that means wanker.'

‘I've never heard any of those words before,' she said. ‘Why does he use them, do you think? Why can't he just talk like a normal human being?'

‘The answer's really in the question there, don't you think?'

‘But what's wrong with him? I don't remember him being such a moron when he was younger.'

‘Back when you were dating, you mean?'

‘Really, Pierce? On the day of our mother's funeral?'

‘Sorry.'

‘He was always a little odd, I suppose. But this dose of celebrity—'

‘He's
not
a celebrity,' I insisted. ‘He's a writer. And not even a very good one.'

‘I thought you said you hadn't read his book.'

‘I skimmed through it.'

‘This dose of celebrity,' she continued, ‘seems to have turned him into a complete fool. How can anyone take him seriously when he carries on as he does?'

‘Strangely enough, people seem to,' I said. ‘His publishers must, after all. And his literary agent. He's spoken on the radio quite a few times. What do you expect? The world is full of idiots.'

We sat in silence as the streets went by. I was looking forward to a few sandwiches and a lot of alcohol.

‘Are you a little jealous of Arthur?' she asked after a moment, and I turned to look at her in surprise. ‘I mean yes, quite clearly, he's a total knob. But I wondered, and I'm not trying to be cruel, but do you feel envious of him? Do you look at his life and think that it might have been you?'

‘Why on earth would I think that?' I asked, appalled.

‘Surely the answer to that question is obvious too.'

I never talk about
The Dead Game
, my only published novel that came out to widespread indifference almost twelve years ago. Looking back, I can see that it wasn't a particularly good book but then again I was young when I wrote it and I don't believe that I got a very fair deal. My editor, Timothy Haynes, took the book on after practically every other publishing house in the UK had turned it down. It wasn't the first time any of them had heard from me either. There'd been three earlier novels, all of which had been rejected, but I'd tried something different with
The Dead Game
and somehow I'd landed a contract. Three months before my novel was published, however, Timothy left the house to work for a film production company and no one, as they say, ‘owned' me any more. I was passed over to Henrietta, an editor who already had bad blood with Timothy due to their recent divorce and his decision to commence intimate sexual relations with her sister, and over the course of a single lunch together, where she went through the manuscript page by page, she uttered the phrase ‘Honestly, I don't know what Tim was thinking' on at least thirty-eight occasions and I'm pretty sure she was referring to my book and not their marital issues.

‘Look, it's not dreadful,' she said as we finished up, one of the better reviews that I would ultimately receive. She reached a hand across the table and placed it on mine, as if she was telling me that I might have terminal cancer but then again I might not. ‘There's a lot of people out there who like this sort of thing. Although I'm not sure it will even be to their taste. But I could be proved wrong. I've been wrong about men before, after all. Anyway, it's in the schedule, so we'll go ahead and put it out there and wait and see what happens.'

Rarely has a young writer received such rapturous support from their editor and when the book was published and widely available in at least half a dozen shops, it sank without trace, an indignity that coincided with Henrietta's refusal to answer my calls or emails. I was hurt and angry; I felt humiliated. Audrey was supportive, Mother a little less so, and Father died in the middle of the farrago, which was bloody typical of him. Finally, I decided that I would not be put off and wrote
The Living Game
, an ill-advised sequel, which was returned to me with a form letter from Henrietta's assistant, telling me that it wasn't quite right for their list and that debuts weren't doing very well at the moment.

I'm not a debut
, I told her in a furious reply.
You published my first novel only last year, you bunch of worthless fuckers.

They didn't reply to that, so I called round to see whether something could be done to salvage the book but I wasn't even allowed on to the elevators and that was the end of that, which was the point when I decided to go travelling. I'd had it with publishing, resolved never to write another word, and while living in Tittmoning with my cows I realized that the reason my writing career hadn't worked out was because essentially I simply wasn't very good. Although I had one thing that a lot of disappointed novelists lack: an ability to recognize my outstanding lack of talent. This insight made my life a lot easier and somehow I got over my failure and became quite happy in my new role as Tittmoning's leading
kuhliebhabermann
, but I won't pretend that it didn't sting when I heard that Arthur, my old childhood friend Arthur, big-dicked Arthur, had sold a novel to a far more prestigious publishing house than mine and that there was a lot of buzz within the industry about it. (For some reason, I had kept up my subscription to
The Bookseller
website and even though I genuinely don't care what goes on in the literary world any more, I visit it a few times every day just to keep abreast of developments.)

What did Arthur have that I didn't have, I asked myself? Certainly not talent. On that score, we were each other's equals.

The galling thing was that I knew immediately that things would go right for him in the way that they had gone wrong for me, and when his book was published I could see in every half-assed sentence and overwritten metaphor that he was essentially a conman and all those fuckers in the publishing houses and all those cunts in the media and those bastard bitches in their book clubs sitting around talking about character development and narrative arc and empathy would just lap it up because they'd all be too fucking stupid to recognize a case of the emperor's new clothes when they saw it. They'd latch on to his worthless piece-of-shit novel and proclaim it a work of genius and the media would flock to Arthur and call him the voice of a new generation or some other tired old cliché and I'd have to spend the rest of my life listening to his cunting voice on the radio talking about the shit he produced and pretending to be self-deprecating when it was obvious to everyone that he believed they should just give him the Nobel Prize right away and save everyone a lot of time and trouble and I'd be left, like I'd always been, alone with nothing and no one and no talent and no future and no girlfriend and no media campaign and no prizes and no reason to wear a tuxedo ever and no one thinking I'd done well for myself and no one envying me and everyone who knew me when I was a kid saying hasn't Arthur achieved a lot and what's this I hear about Pierce getting involved in some scandal in Germany with a herd of cattle? And now Mother was dead on top of everything and it seemed that even she thought he could write a better eulogy than me, the author of
The Dead Game
, who
Time Out
had once called ‘possibly a novelist to keep an eye on in the future in case he produces something more interesting'. Fuck that shit.

‘No,' I said to Audrey, looking at her as if I'd never been asked anything so stupid in my entire life. ‘Why on earth would I be jealous of Arthur?'

The wake ended with a song, Arthur singing a piece he had composed for the occasion called ‘The Bride of Battlerea' on a bizarre instrument called a Chinese erhu, a long-necked monstrosity that resembled a pooper-scooper, with two pegs at the top and a set of strings hanging down into a sound-box. Why he chose this title is anyone's guess, for there is no such place and if there is – which there isn't – Mother did not come from there. But there isn't anyway, so it makes no difference. Although it would be unfair of me not to admit that his voice was at least passable. There were even one or two people who appeared to be wiping tears from their eyes.

Mrs Burton, our next-door neighbour while I was growing up, laid a hand on my elbow as she spoke to me. I hadn't been able to look her in the eye for many years for her bedroom was on the other side of the wall to mine and when I was fourteen she took me aside on the street and said that she could hear everything I was doing in there when I went to bed, that I was a filthy little so-and-so and if I didn't stop I'd go blind and she'd tell my mother the reason why. It made me happy to see how wrinkled her face had become.