Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (28 page)

They don’t give you directions to Writers’ Week, because it is so easy to find. At the end of a long straight road you drive into Listowel, and you keep going until you hit a bend that turns into the town square. In the crook of that bend is the Listowel Arms Hotel. The end of the road.

My accelerator leg was shaking from nine hours pressing the pedal as I slung my dress over my arm and checked in to the hotel. The woman behind the festival desk didn’t, in fact, seem really,
really
pleased to see me. She didn’t seem to recognize my name, but she checked a list and told me there would be photos in fifteen minutes’ time. Up in my room, I showered cold and slapped my face a bit. I put my dress on and did a big Aaah, Eeeeh, Oooh, stretching my mouth in the mirror. I looked at myself very seriously, eyeball to eyeball, then twinkled, as though sharing a secret joke with my reflection. Then I lifted my chin, and left the room.

I went down to the foyer and found my old English teacher. We shook hands and laughed at our changed circumstances and she told me that I had not, in fact, won the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction. She tried to soften the blow. She said that, in a way, I was the wrong kind of writer for the award, and probably shouldn’t have been on the list at all.

The organizer came along and was delighted to see me and said that the photos were happening any minute, outside.

‘Right,’ I said, and I walked out into the square. Then I kept walking and sat in my car. Then I got out of my car and went into a country hardware shop and bought two plain plastic window boxes, that were really cheap and just the right size. Then I went into a toy shop and bought the baby a toy phone. I hadn’t been in a shop for months. I used the change from the toy phone to ring my mother from a real phone in the square. She told me the baby was just fine. I told her I hadn’t won.

‘Be nice,’ she said, a little frantically, as the pips started to go. ‘Try. Do try to be nice to everyone, will you?’

Back in the hotel foyer the organizer, who seemed to know what was wrong, said, ‘Have a drink, there’s a buffet inside.’ I hadn’t eaten in ten hours. There was a huge crowd around the buffet, but she found me a glass of wine. I drank it and left. Two women followed me and caught me at the door of the hotel and brought me back inside to the organizer. She said, ‘Please sit here. Look, here’s your chair.’

I realized as I sat down that I was placed in a convenient position for going on stage. The question was, when? The evening never seemed to start. Then it did. There was a choir. Then there was a keynote speech from an intellectual with ferociously witty eyebrows. Then more choir. Then a corporate, sofa-shaped man from Kerry Ingredients, which seemed not to be, as I had thought, a company that made cake-mix, but something far more important. Then a few more speeches. Then finally, mercifully, the award ceremony began. First, the winner of the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Award was called up and handed a cheque. There were smiles and photos. Then the winner of the Eamonn Keane Full Length Play Competition bounded up. After this came the winner of the Poetry Competition; followed in quick succession by the Short Story, Humorous Essay, and Short Poem category winners in the Listowel Writers’ Week Originals Competition. The winner of the An Post/Stena Line New Writing Competition, which was open only to those living outside Ireland, had come all the way from London. The winner of The Islands Short Story or Poem Competition, which was open only to those who were islanders by birth, held the cheque up high for the photographer, who seemed to be taking his time. After this came the glowing winner of the Kerry County Council Creative Writing Competition for Youth ‘under 9s’ category, who recited a brilliant poem., followed by the winner of the under 12s who read another. This was followed by the under 14s, then the under 16s, then the under 18s category winners and their poems, which were all a joy. Everyone cheered them, including me, but as the evening ground on, I began to realize that I was the only person in the hall who had not won something, or was not related to someone who had won something. Even the other writer who was shortlisted for, but had not won, the K.I.L.W.W.P.F.I.F, had been given a prize in some other category – I can’t quite recall which – I think it was for an Irish debut.

By the time it came, finally, to the climax of the evening I knew what I had to do. I had to go on stage and not get a prize. I didn’t know what the not-prize would be until the man who didn’t make cake-mix announced a ‘Cross Pen’. This is a ball-point pen in a box. It is retractable. He put the box on the lectern and asked my old English teacher to say a few words about the shortlist. She cleared her throat and gathered her notes. I thought she would take this opportunity to say that I was very, deeply special but just, lamentably, not suitable for the prize this year. She didn’t really. And then she called me up on stage to collect the ball-point pen. After which I turned to the audience and gave a little bow. Then we all stood there and got our picture taken.

‘Left a bit,’ said photographer. ‘No,
left
a bit.’

After it was over, I went to the cash machine outside and came back in and hit the bar. I didn’t know anybody. Besides there was a sort of smell off me of the woman who didn’t get the award – people didn’t quite know what I was
for
. I didn’t know what I was for. A guy accosted me. He said I had a sadness in my life, he could see it. He said I drank too much, he should know, he used to be an alcoholic. Then he ordered three vodkas in a half-pint glass with some water on the side – no ice. I escaped over to a man I half knew, or knew of, a much-remaindered journalist in a bow tie who had been watching me across the room with a small smile. I told him an amusing story. I said how he knew my sister a little, then I griped a bit about the long drive, the no lunch, the fucking Cross Pen.

‘Sorry?’ he said, as though uncomprehending. Then he chortled (actually, really, chortled). ‘Oh I
see,
’ he said. ‘You thought you had
won
.’

To which there was no answer really. In the morning, I went home.

‘If only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate.’ Diogenes the Cynic, 4th century BC

My first novel had been published only a few months earlier and this was to be my first reading in the town where I lived then and still in fact do. Many friends descended; people who had moved away over the years, they all returned for the night, off buses and trains and out of cars, all bearing gifts in the form of small folded wraps or bottles. Afternoon lines and cold vodka shots around the kitchen table at what was my flat and then to the pub until dark and then to the reading, which was rammed and went well, although I should have recognized the portent of embarrassment that throbbed in the air when I, being interviewed by a beautiful woman from local TV, went to tap her in a friendly way on the upper arm and accidentally caught her left breast instead. All captured on camera. But by that time my senses had been skewed somewhat and I apologized and she laughed and all my returned friends and I went back to the pub. I remember, some hours later, being hunched over a toilet cistern with Ronnie, rolled-up tenners in our nostrils, whatever powder he had chopped out for us salty and grainy and glistening candy-floss pink on the porcelain a few inches below my face. We snorted simultaneously, and then until the world turned black a few more hours later it turned deep blue all through; a rich and resonant, thrumming blue.

I woke up in my bed. Or I was
woken
up by an odd sensation of being drained as all blood gushed south. Through the hangover tangle, thorny snarl in my skull and skinprickle I could feel it, down there, a hot steel surging, straining so hard as if it was seeking to rip itself away from my own body and dart frantic around the room like a trapped bat. So tight, so stuffed, it seemed like it would explode were I to touch it. Why stimulants have this effect mystifies me; it makes no biological, evolutionary, or even spiritual sense (if indeed that contains any sense at all). That your polluted blood should urge procreation. That your harrowed heart should yearn to beat yet faster. But there it was, as always and again, making a marquee of the duvet, the deep snores of my girlfriend sounding somewhere down there and I couldn’t wake her, couldn’t put my puffed and crusted face all leering in hers and at least not expect her to do anything more than laugh and go back to sleep. Besides which, I could hear other snoring, further sleepy breathing from the adjoining front room; I clambered out of the bed and opened the door a crack and peeked in – four, maybe five slumbering humps on couches and the floor beneath blankets and overcoats and spare sheets. Four, maybe five separate and distinct snorings, a symphony of apnoea wheezing behind a wall of whiff – all that sweated booze and sweated chemicals and sweated sweat. I closed the door quietly, put some jeans on and was led by the bulge in them towards the bathroom, passing through the kitchen on the way where, amongst the empty bottles and full ashtrays on the table, lay a copy of my first novel and I regarded it as I passed. Ey, look at that;
I
wrote that, I did. That’s me, my achievement. Aren’t I clever? Aren’t I good?

I still wonder why I didn’t lock the bathroom door. The key was in the lock, I clearly remember looking at it and shrugging and not turning or even touching it at all. I think I probably reasoned that, to reach the bathroom from the front room, you would have to pass through the bedroom, and whoever did that would surely notice that I wasn’t in the bed and deduce that I would be in the bathroom and so knock before entering. But it would’ve taken two seconds to lock the door. It would’ve been one small and simple twist of the wrist, some tiny, insignificant physical action. So why didn’t I do it?

Maybe the urgency was too great. I remember feeling on the verge of snapping, a millisecond away from detonation; it was there, at centre, burning, bulging, just about to burst. Relief was an utter imperative; there
had
to be relief, and even if it meant a delay of a mere two seconds there was at that overheated moment a better thing to do with my right hand than rum a key.

But of course it’s not, or not always, simple friction. Sometimes there must be stimulus, tactile or pictorial, and although I would’ve preferred tactile it was right then unattainable and I was hungover, my mind was flattened, all the drugs and drink had scraped the surface layer off my brain and to think, to fantasize or even remember, would have hurt it so I rummaged through the pile of damp-swollen magazines by the toilet, the old editions of
Viz
and
FourFourTwo
and
Fortean Times
. For anything, anything; any glimpse of smooth female flesh. Any muscular curve or arc. Any taut tendon or tanned skin. The need for relief was Snowdonia-sized; it choked the entire landscape.

This was a time of celebration. A time to be with my mates and drink and talk and laugh. We’d planned to take a few crates of beer down to the beach that day, build a fire, swim if it was warm enough, cook some fish and spuds in the embers and get drunk again. So if I got this small and necessary obscenity over with I could go and wake them all up with a big pot of tea and some toast. Have a quick shower and a cheeky line before going out. Start all over again.

In the pile there was a copy of some woman’s magazine. There was a tagline: You Too Can Have A Bum Like Kylie’s. Kylie’s arse was only just becoming a big (little) thing at that time, and there it was on page twenty-four in tiny gold shorts. And there it was on page twenty-five, double-smiling from under the hem of a tiny white dress. And there it was on page twenty-six in oh my God a thong; a
thong
for fuck’s sake, Kylie’s arse, the curvature and tautness of it, the dimples in the muscles at either side and the way the light gleams off its brown roundness as she bends and the creamy sheen on the tanned tight skin of it oh my God there was Kylie’s arse there* was one flash and a tremendous groaning relief there was Ronnie’s face over the top of the magazine. I was on my back and holding the mag upright on my chest with my left hand and there was Ron in the doorway, his face visible over the top of the page looking like the bloke in ‘The Scream’. And just for a moment the two merged in my wetly swirling vision; Ronnie’s howling face and Kylie’s arse became part of the same person, a horrible hybrid. A Rolie, a Kylan; as if that arse was actually topped by that face. That shocked and horrored face all purple adjoining that perfect bum. Oh, the sickness.

And that was supposedly a time of celebration, and that’s why I can’t stand Kylie’s arse; because it’s always there, somewhere under the sun, it exists out there in the real world and whenever it appears on the telly or a tabloid it throws up that moment, repeatedly, that instant when relief became humiliation. I can never get away from it, never flee from its jeering; my face so hot you could warm your hands on a frosty morning. The goosepimpling skin. The contracting heart cowering, cringing. I mean, me and Ronnie, it was all grand with us, we got drunk by the sea that day and had a laugh about the whole thing, but I lost touch with him about a year ago yet I still see Kylie, two or three times a week, but I never look above her shoulders because I know whose face I’ll see and it won’t be hers, I don’t even know what she looks like anymore, so I tend to focus on her arse instead as indeed the entire culture does, and base-fixated as we are on these things to ease the anguish of being alive among the emptinesses means and results in only nerves shredded, demolished, only life dying and drying to scale on the belly, only this neverstopping shame until death.

Simon Armitage
was born in 1963 and lives in Yorkshire. He has won numerous prizes for his nine collections of poetry which include
Selected Poems
and
The Universal Home Doctor
(Faber & Faber). His latest novel,
The White Stuff,
is published by Penguin in 2004. He is also a broadcaster and has written extensively for radio, television and film, and in 2003 received the Ivor Novello award for songwriting. He teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University.