The Digested Twenty-first Century (6 page)

I replied that I understood how difficult it was to cope now Britain was entering a new social order, for I myself was quite concerned that the new National Health Service would reduce my earnings.

Betty was an utterly unmemorable member of the lower orders. ‘Do you think you might be a lesbian?’ I asked. ‘Nay, sir,’ she replied. ‘Well that’s unusual for a Sarah Waters book,’ I said.

It turned out that Betty was terrified by a ghostly presence within the Hall, and I passed on her concerns to Caroline, a plain, natural spinster with thickish legs. ‘There’s nothing queer going on here,’ she said tartly. I resolved to keep a close eye on the family by offering to treat Roderick’s war wounds that still distressed him greatly.

A few months later, Mrs Ayres decided to have a party and the octagonal chinoiserie room was opened for the occasion. I was talking to the Baker-Hughes when Caroline whispered to me that Roddie was refusing to come down. I found him in a complete funk and concluded he was already inebriated, so I returned to the party to discover that the Ayres’s dog, Gyp, had bitten off the cheek of a young girl.

‘What makes it so bad is that the girl is upper-class,’ Caroline said. ‘A prole could cope with disfigurement so much better.’ We
obliquely debated the decline of the old social values for several pages, before I persuaded her to let me put Gyp down.

Roddie continued to be delusional, claiming the house was possessed by a poltergeist, and Caroline did alert me to several scorch marks and strange happenings, yet I rather closed off any curiosity about the supernatural that the reader might have had with my dogged rationalism. ‘He is haunted by his wartime experiences and his inability to cope with a Labour government,’ I ventured, as his room erupted in a mysterious fire. ‘I shall send him to a posh mental asylum.’

I began to notice that Caroline was not altogether plain and entertained hopes that she might favour me. We went to a ball one night and on the way home, I pressed my hand against her breast. ‘Not now,’ she cried, kicking me in the chest.

‘Perhaps, then, you will agree to be my wife?’ ‘OK.’

‘I had hoped Caroline would do rather better than you, you ghastly little arriviste,’ Mrs Ayres said, ‘but we all have to compromise these days. In truth, I have never really got over my darling Susan’s death. Her name keeps appearing on the walls as if by magic.’

Two weeks later, Mrs Ayres hanged herself in her room. ‘The poltergeist has won again,’ Caroline said. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I replied. ‘She was haunted by her inability ... blah, blah. And look, now the old bat’s dead, why don’t we get married in six weeks’ time?’ ‘OK,’ she nodded absently.

The wedding preparations were proceeding, with me doing everything, including buying the dress, and Caroline doing absolutely nothing. ‘I can’t go through with it,’ she declared one night. ‘I do not love you.’ My embarrassment was excruciating but luckily the poltergeist pushed her over the banisters and killed her.

‘The ghost has won,’ Betty gasped. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘She
was just haunted by her inability to ... blah, blah.’ Though I couldn’t also help wondering if she hadn’t been a lesbian all along.

Digested read, digested:
Everyone gives up the ghost.

One:
Fat men beat their wives, it is said, and he certainly looked fierce when he caught her riffling though his papers. Actually she was searching for a silly business letter – and not trying to decipher his mysterious manuscript. Oh no, it was not a work of fiction, it was a mad neurologist’s testament, but the thing was, of course, an absolute secret. If she mentioned it at all, she added, it was because she was drunk. And because the Nabokov estate was too greedy not to pass off the barely intelligible marginalia of a dying writer, long past his best, as an unpublished masterpiece.

Unsure of to which particular he the opening referred, Flora demanded to lie down, as this enabled her to surrender to one of her many lovers and for her nymphean form – her cup-sized breasts and pale squinty nipples seemed a dozen years younger than this impatient beauty’s – to be described with erotic longing, while Paul de G ogled some boys. ‘Have you finished?’ she inquired. He nodded in flaccidity. ‘Not even a quickie? Tant pis! Then I must go home to my morbidly obese husband and our mulatto charwoman.’

Two:
Her grandfather had emigrated from Moscow with his son Adam in 1920. Adam had married the ballerina Lanskaya, who took lovers mostly of Polish extraction. Three years after their daughter Flora was born, Adam filmed himself committing
suicide while pining for a boy who had strangled another boy. Lanskaya was confused: what had been meant to be sensational was just tired and desperate. But having no other options now that she was past 16, she found a new lover, Hubert L Hubert, who had dropped the m’s from his name in a sad 20-year migration from Lolita while maintaining his penchant for pre-pubescent girls. Flora took exception to his caresses and kicked him in the testicles. ‘You naughty girl,’ her mother said. ‘Mr Nabokov – I mean, Mr Hubert – is a very nice man’. There is little to add.

Three:
Flora lost her virginity at 14 to a ball boy with an enormous member. She and her friends like to compare the dimensions of their lovers while bycycling. This, then, is Flora, the artistic enigma, the DELTA and the SLIT. At 11 she had read Freud and wondered how people could get away with writing so badly. But then, she had never read this. Perhaps we should mention the sweet Japanese girls and French writers beginning with M. Perhaps not.

Four:
Mrs Lanskaya died on the day her daughter graduated – a passage that for no earthly reason resembles the rythym of another novel,
My Laura
, and a hideously fat man stared at Flora’s white legs.

Five:
For no good reason, Flora determined to marry this immensely fat man, the eminent neuroscientist Dr Philip Wild, though she regretted her decision when she discovered he was a miser.

Five – or should it be six?:
The novel
My Laura
was begun soon after the end of the love affair it depicts. And, like this, was torn apart by every reviewer. The I of the book is a neurotic who set out to destroy his lover while annotating her. Philip Wild quite liked the descriptions of himself.

Six:
Suicide made a pleasure. It would be after this.

D1, D2, Aurora, Wild 1, Wild 2:
Philip Wild could no longer maintain any pretence of coherence. He could manage the odd well-turned phrase and repeated masturbatory emblazements, yet he could not yet persuade Mr Nabokov to abandon his attempts to impose an order when there was none. I, Philip Wild, he said, slipping into the first person, hereby begin a programme of self deletion. I hate my fat stomach and the noises I make on the lavatory, so I will start by cutting off my toes. Then my hands. Then my head. Till there is nothing left. Effacement. Annihilation. ‘That, too, is what faces me if anyone were ever to read this card index,’ cried Mr Nabokov. ‘Too bad,’ said his son.

Digested read, digested:
A reputation in fragments.

2000
He belonged to that Salman class of short, fat, ugly, clever men who were unaccountably attractive to women. But Michael Beard was anhedonic; his fifth marriage was disintegrating and he should have known how to behave as his philandering had ended the previous four. This time, though, it was his wife, Patrice, who was having an affair with Tarpin, a horny-handed Essex builder who knew nothing about cavity-wall insulation.

Beard waited for Aldous to collect him. Gosh, how he hated the polar bear rug in the hall. Still, everyone would soon have one, he supposed, if the polar ice-cap continued to melt. Not that Beard was yet wholly committed to the climate-change agenda, but having won the Nobel Prize for his Beard-Einstein Conflation on
Photovoltaics, an idea he was very thankful he was never asked to fully explain, he had been happy to head the New Labour Climate Change Laboratory.

‘I’m afraid it’s not a Prius,’ Aldous said. ‘I’m not surprised, as they were only sold outside Japan in 2001,’ Beard replied. Aldous was one of his pony-tailed post-docs who was being forced into working on the New Labour cul-de-sac of wind turbine energy. Beard nodded off. He was very familiar with the McEwan Conflation of cramming loads of dull facts about climate change into a book and calling it fiction.

‘Tarpin hit me,’ said Patrice. ‘He hit me too,’ Beard replied as he went off to visit an endangered glacier in the Arctic for 30 pages. He returned to find Aldous in his flat. ‘I admit I’m having an affair with your wife,’ said Aldous, ‘but I’ve worked out that your Conflation can satisfy the world’s energy needs.’ At which, Aldous slipped on the polar bear rug and died, a victim of climate change.

‘I could make it look like Tarpin did it,’ McEwan thought. He had no real experience of writing comedy and the gags creaked as much as the plot. But it was an improvement on his previous books, so the judge mercifully sent Tarpin to prison.

2005
As his plane stacked over New Mexico, Beard passed the time unnecessarily recalling his childhood before patting his gut. He had put on 35lb. He couldn’t stop consuming; it was almost as if his size was a metaphor for the world’s greed for natural resources. Still, there had been something in Aldous’s calculations after all, and he was looking forward to seeing the photovoltaic laboratory the Americans had built for him.

Back in England, Beard looked angrily at the man who was helping himself to his crisps and snatched them away. Only later
did he realise they were actually the other man’s crisps! ‘That’s the oldest comedy plot twist in the repertoire,’ said Melissa, his new girlfriend. ‘I know,’ Beard shrugged, ‘But Ian thinks that, like climate change, it may be old but it doesn’t mean it can’t happen.’ ‘Really,’ Melissa yawned.

Beard reckoned it was time to move to the safer ground of rehashing large chunks of climate-change data and inventing an unlikely intellectual disagreement. ‘I don’t think the serious climate-change sceptics are fighting over feminism and postmodern relativism,’ Melissa said. ‘By the way, I’m pregnant.’

2009
Beard had put on another 90lb and his belly was as overextended as the metaphor. Worse still, the plot was falling to pieces. One of his American lovers, Darlene, had rung Melissa to say they were getting married, and Tarpin had been let out of jail.

‘I took the rap for Patrice,’ Tarpin said. ‘I know she killed Aldous because he was beating her up.’ Beard looked quizzically at McEwan. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ian said. ‘I’m OK on the climate-change stuff, but I don’t really understand human psychology or comedy. Do you mind if Tarpin smashes up all your solar panels?’

‘We’ve had enough,’ said the New Mexicans. ‘We don’t mind you being sued for stealing Aldous’s ideas, it’s just we think David Lodge does this kind of story so much better.’

‘Oh dear,’ Beard said. ‘Maybe I should go back to climate change. Perhaps nuclear power is the answer. Or how about a bit of pathos with my daughter?’ ‘Enough trees have died for this already,’ Melissa sighed.

Digested read, digested:
Solar Power: No Thanks.

Shepherd Knacker, Net Portfolio Value: $731,778.
Today was the day, Shep had decided. The day ‘The Afterlife’ would begin. He had three one-way tickets to Pemba in the Indian Ocean and his wife, Glynis, and son, Zach, could come or not. All his life he had been a salt-of-the-earth Man of the Manual, doing his best for his family, sweating 25 hours a day, selling his business at the wrong moment in 1996 and having to go back to work for the new boss as a toilet attendant, but now it was Me time.

‘Tough shit,’ Glynis snapped. ‘I’ve got terminal cancer and we need your health insurance.’

Jackson wiped his 17-year-old daughter’s anus. Flicka had, of course, been born with a rare disability that meant she would die soon. ‘I hate my life,’ she spat. ‘Why did I have to end up in a Lionel Shriver book, where everything is always shit?’ ‘At least you are going to croak soon,’ said her sister, Heather. ‘I’m fat and ugly and there’s no way out.’ Jackson looked up. As usual his wife, Carol, was not paying any attention. Still, at least his friend Shep had arrived.

‘Thank God, I’ve got health insurance,’ Shep said. ‘That’s what you think,’ Jackson laughed. ‘Most company schemes are rubbish and hardly pay any of the bills. Shall I go into a long polemic about Medicare?’ ‘Oh shit,’ Shep cried. ‘It was bad enough before it turned into a John Grisham saga.’ ‘Well, don’t expect anything that well written or pacey,’ Jackson said. ‘Sod this,’ said Flicka. ‘Now I really do want to die.’

Shepherd Knacker, Net Portfolio Value: $721,778.
‘There are two sorts of mesothelioma,’ Dr Goodman said. ‘And Glynis has the
worst.’ ‘Obviously,’ Shep answered. ‘It’s going to cost you $721,778 over and above your healthcare to keep her alive for a bit.’ ‘That’s typical of the way the US rips off honest people . . .’ Jackson droned for the 17th time. ‘Yes, yes,’ Glynis interrupted. ‘Mesothelioma is caused by asbestos so you’ve probably killed me, Shep.’

‘Enough of you,’ shouted Beryl, Shep’s sister. ‘I need to sponge money off you and you need to look after dad because he’s broken his leg. I know you’ll do it because you’re such a pussy. I mean so nice.’ ‘Jesus,’ Shep moaned. ‘Not even a third-rate character would come up with that plotline.’ ‘Too bad I’m fourth-rate then,’ Beryl snapped.

‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ Jackson muttered to himself, while fiddling with his apology for a penis. He had always known Carol wanted him to be better hung, so had undergone secret extension surgery – which, predictably, went wrong – leaving him with a lumpy tuber.

Shepherd Knacker, Net Portfolio Value: $000,000.
‘Don’t expect me to be nice just because I’m dying,’ Glynis sneered. ‘Why would we?’ everyone sighed. It was time for the final meeting with the doctor. ‘How much extra time did spending my entire savings buy Glynis?’ Shep inquired. ‘A good 400 pages,’ Dr Goldman replied. ‘They weren’t good pages,’ said Glynis.