The House of Writers (13 page)

I
OPENED
the wrong door. I was seeking a mop to absorb a spillage made on the beige shag in our office (steampunk dept.), assuming the mop to be located in a cupboard in the stairwell. This proved incorrect. I stepped into a corridor where a sequence of doors stretched long into the horizon, each named after a literary technique or particular quirk of language. I tapped on a door marked “Parataxis” and a hurried man answered.

“There! ... Enter please ... so much to do ... bees aren’t as busy as me ... have you seen Nancy’s necklace ... around here somewhere ... how can I help you? ... I suppose you’d like tea and a nibble ... never like her to refuse a nibble ... must locate that ... take a seat please ... sturdy base those seats ... I—”

“Have you a mop?”

“Have a mop? ... the sort for mopping up? ... how about a chocolate digestive ... or we have crackers ... no tea in the cupboards ... where’s that damn necklace ... I used to mop up in here ... when she was ... well never mind ... I can wax nostalgic later ... better crack on with this tax return ... oh where are those manners, Aidan? ... I apologise, I never have visitors ... take a seat please ... sturdy—”

“Never mind. I’ll ask elsewhere. Thanks.”

I suspected that a mop was not in wait behind a single of these doors. I continued regardless, as the steampunk novel I was writing was losing momentum and would need a complete rewrite, and returning to the desk was to snack on a bitter panini of personal failure. I tapped on “Semantic Syllepsis”:

“Hello! Let me have your coat and your ear, if I may. Enter.”

“I’m looking for a mop.”

“Ah! A wise man once told me never take a man’s mop or his wife. This is a maxim I enforce!”

“So no mop?”

“No wives either! Gillian long ago made her bed and her exit— and now I must lie in it! Her bed, I mean, not her exit.”

“You talk weird.”

“It’s a burden I must shoulder and carry ... that one doesn’t work. It’s a cross I must bear and wear ... around my neck . . as in Jesus ... I need some coffee here! Otherwise I will be taking my hat and my leave!”

“Don’t pinch from Dickens.”

“I offer my apologies and my biscuits. Care for a triple-choc cookie? You will find them in that drawer and in my mouth.”

“Enough!”

I took my leave (and nothing else). I popped into various cupboards after, including “Anaphora”—“You are seeking the mop of our time. You are seeking an idea not a cleaning implement. You are seeking a peg on which to hang the future. You are seeking a mop inside an idea inside the future that is ours.”—and to “Tautophrase”—“To find that mop, you have to find that mop. A mop is a mop is a mop.”—and to “Bdelygmia”—“You mop-loving bleach-sniffing dirt-licking bacteria-seeking filth-coveting cleanliness-obsessed sparkle-skinned shine-suited backstair-scrubber!”—and to “Hypophora”—“Is your mop in this room? No, your mop is not in this room.”—and to “Solecism”—“You is looking for a mop? There aren’t no mops in this room.”—to “Epistrophe”—“The mop you are seeking no longer exists, the same as hope no longer exists, empathy no longer exists, and love itself simply no longer exists.”—to “Dysphemistic Euphemism”—“Hello mophead, s’up?” to “Antimetabole”—“The mop is love, love is the mop.”—and then I left.

P
ROWLING
around The House scouting for material has forced me into making difficult decisions as to which observations to include in narrative form in this novel and which to omit. The House is an infinite repository for stories, mostly horror ones involving writers being tortured in manifold creative ways, and up until this point, I am the only person to attempt to document some of the rottennesses that take place in this building. Some writers have tried bribing me into mentioning them and their works and want to be written into the pantheon of Future Greats if succeeding generations take up literacy; however, I decided not to take backhanders and kept to a flat rate for placing promotional ads in this novel’s interstices. One technique I find successful for removing the otherwise time-consuming and page-hogging business of setting up scenes, working and reworking descriptions, is the précis, the capsule summary of a story that in another’s hands might take several pages to spin. Words are extravagantly wasted in this place, thoughtlessly shat onto the page, innocent nouns and verbs are used and reused blithely, pounded into misshapen sentences until they emerge bloody and incomprehensible. As I walk down the corridors, I hear paragraphs moaning and pages in states of extreme distress. I encounter sentences cowering in corners, bleeding clichés, their syntax broken and irreparable. Before I sat down to write this section, I saw a wounded description crawling towards the incinerator, terminally disgusted by its hackneyed properties and desperate to snuff itself, and I attempted to ail its ache by dropping in some stylish words, but the thing was beyond repair. I deleted the hopeless line, venturing onward into my scouting journey, where I made note of the following observations, précised below in the equally useful list form: a daisy-chain of moths stretched along three overhead lights; a sabre-toothed tiger in platforms dancing to
Saturday Night Fever;
a pattern of carpet beetles spelling out “Mathematics is the one true artform”; C.B. Hickson perched on the edge of a pancake in deep contemplation; a shaft of moonlight peering into a woman’s underwear drawer; a Morrissey impersonator too miserable to sing a note; a plate of chips served with concrete and mortar; C.A. Drayson writing a novel while asleep; the entire alphabet flagellating itself; a tap dripping into a basin with the volume of an airplane crashing into a canyon; an infant prodigy recreating, line for line, Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote”;
the sixteenth floor temporarily developing wings and travelling to Mars; Red the Fiend biting the shins of Harlequin Romance novelists; a mutation of thrushes driving a Ford Sierra and parking in reception; Russell Hoban resurrected for several minutes to say, “Here’s the wine!”; the longest farewell ever recorded at over two years and nine months; a plate of goulash sprouting horns and cursing the Creator; a wax model of Christina Rossetti winking at me; an opaline rendering of Paul Gauguin exposing himself to nuns; the smoking entrails of Arthur Rimbaud cursing his navel; and a donkey meditatively urinating on a picture of my stepfather. These may sound surreal and improbable, but remember, earlier I made the promise that nothing whatsoever in this novel reflects the absolute or approximate truth.

O
UR
next case: Hattie. She is a former photographer. Brace yourself for her expression.”

“Expression?”

The doctor introduced a woman with a fixed rictus—the look of a clown whose children were to be shot if no one in the audience tittered—who bounded up to Erin with a frightening: “Pleased to meet you!” Sensing Erin’s terror, she added: “Don’t be scared! The trauma I suffered left me looking this way!” Her rictus forced an exclamation point and upward inflection on each utterance. Erin nodded.

“Now, Hattie. If you’d care to tell Erin what happened to you?”

“Why, who is she!?”

“A curious visitor. Do you mind telling her?”

“No! Here’s my story, Erin! I began volunteering part-time for the Bretton Agency upon leaving college, and after a successful trial run, I was hired to take author photos to appear on book covers! First in the door, from Birmingham, Alabama, Anthony Vacca! Vacca’s debut novel,
Waves of Putridity,
had been praised from pillow to postbox, and Vacca had been hailed the heir to Will Self and Harry Crews! At that time, Vacca sported a side-parting and semi-quiff and spent hours practising the perfect ‘menacing’ expression to appear bad-ass and dark on his inside flap! We settled on the image of him unshaven scowling into the camera, exploiting the mystique around his intense eyes, and the handsome cheekbones! A week later, Vacca had changed his mind and wanted to use the image with his chin perched on his knuckle, half-smiling in an impish way, with the same intense mystique in the eyes! When the hardcover was released, Vacca was furious that the picture had been compressed for the back flap, claiming that his face could not flourish at such a measly ratio, demanding the novel be pulled from the shelves so the publisher could print a larger image to cover the back page! The publisher refused and Vacca threw a public tantrum, increasing his media profile! For his next novel, I took over three hundred shots, several topless and holding strange objects (an apple, a ukulele, an iguana), and Vacca was not pleased with a single one! He brought in a ‘monitor’ to comment on the manner in which I took the photographs—this ‘monitor’ made insulting remarks about my inadequate lighting and low-grade lens, sniggering with Vacca at the ‘low calibre’ of my work—before firing me, hiring expensive lawyers to ensure I was paid not a penny (the lawyer cost outstripped my wage)! My next client, Fiona Rix, was worse! She made me take individual photos of each facial constituent, commencing with her left eye, ending with her collarbones! She then chose the preferred shot and sent me away to photoshop the selected elements to present the ‘best’ of her face! I returned with a dire photofit and she exploded, accusing me of incompetence! I explained that even the most skilled photoshopper in the land couldn’t transfer these individual shots into a coherent face! She wanted to appear ‘coy yet cocksure, steely yet loveable, dynamic yet vulnerable, husky yet svelte, intellectual yet approachable, worldly yet naïve,’ among other contradictions! I was then made to pap several hundred facial expressions, and suffer her comments as I touched up the face on photoshop!”

“Sounds painful.”

“It was.”

“Authors are vain bastards!”

“So we hear.”

“See you, Hattie.”

“Bye now!”

D
EVOUT
mainstreamist Cheddar Yolk—bestselling author of
Two Guyz, A Gurl, & Aheckafun Part-tay—was
rather aggrieved when one Tuesday he was hurled into a grungy basement against his will, left to shiver for an hour in the cold until an overhead light was turned on by a man with deep divots on his scalp in the shape of blooming chrysanthemums, spreading as if in motion along his forehead to form an ace of spades on his right cheek; Brillo-pad hair singed free, leaving only one wiry strand, combed over and enhanced with tattooed-on follicles that traversed the neck to form an amusing caricature of a ramfeezled librarian; and bearish hands with scratches spirocheting at festive levels of engorgement up his knuckles towards his fingertips—this was Alan, the leading experimental writer of his generation and head of the experimental dept. (A mishap with an ethanol-soaked effigy of Stephen King had wiped out a chesterfield, twelve stationery cabinets, and half of his face).

Cheddar was collared into the lair of the experimentalists: a studio basement where ten restless, twitchy, and hairy men leapt around the room composing prose in every and any form except conventional. A squirrely ginger named Charywarble was making an origami novel, writing a chapter in biro on the twelfth wing of an A5 swan. A scowling goth named Cyphertz was composing an automatic novel by staring into space and typing entirely from her subconscious: the text comprised the words KILL and HATE among two million pages of non sequiturs. A skinny one named Hoopoe lay on the floor channelling his prose through the spirits of the masters, flinging his words upwards after gluing them to beefsteaks— ten mouldering sirloins, forming a curious kind of beefy poetry, dangled from the ceiling. The others included Bryswine, a sweaty ferret composing a book about Shakespeare by whispering the sonnets into a tethered monkey’s ear, proffering a banana for every sentence knuckled onto a fat-keyed keyboard; a skeletal oaf named Mortickle who wrote conventional sentences longhand, administering electric shocks every third sentence to create a sense of mental dislocation and physical extremity in the prose, a technique known as Plathitudinizing; and a squat smirker named Poppov who listened to Beethoven’s symphonies and typed at the speed of the music—slow, laborious description during the legato stretches and wild illegible spurts during the allegro. Because the rest were busy, Cheddar was dragged to a wide-eyed man in his eighties doing nothing in a chair.

“This is Tendon Palmer. He published books ages ago.”

“Nice to shake you. I was the first person to write an entire novel through a stick of Blackpool rock. They called it Suck-lit,” he said.

“Unfortunate name,” Cheddar said.

“Yes, well. I put my words in people’s mouths.”

“Must have been a pleasant feeling, having your prose sucked.”

“The glory days.”

“Tendon is one of the more balanced of our writers. The others have relapsed into Creative Trances,” Alan said.

“What you see before you,” Tendon said, “are the last dregs of innovation. Reduced to starveling humps of stuttering desperation. To mewling boils of nevereverness. Sad scientists clinging to their hopeless and bizarre attempts to collapse the totalitarian superstate through writing experimental fiction.”

“You don’t believe you can change anything?”

“I’m waiting to die, guy. Sadly the damp atmosphere seems to be proving beneficial to my health. I should have been dead years ago.”

“What do you do?”

“I keep the place tidy. I send Horace up to forage for food,” he said. He pointed to Horace, a hulking creature cleaning the floor.

“Is he a writer?”

“No, he’s a security guard who ate a radioactive Caramac during the stock dump of ’40. We use him as a janitor and hunter in exchange for loving words and a comfy bed.”

“Ah.”

“We’re moving on,” Alan said.

“It was nice to meet you, Tendon,” Cheddar said.

“Likewise. Hopefully I’ll be dead before we meet again.”

“I hope so.”

Alan sat the irksomely unfazed Cheddar (success made him invulnerable) on an upturned bucket and produced a selection of his bestsellers, including
Don
’t
Gooooo There, Gurlfrenz!, Love Iz Kindza Weirdz Sometimez,
and
Put Your Heart upon My Shoulder.
Alan trained his wild bloodshot eyes on the place where Cheddar’s soul might have been.