The Best Book in the World (4 page)

A
stra has barely left the flat before the doorbell rings again. Titus has just opened the fridge to see if there is a very last beer to be found there. Cold and refreshing, a farewell that must quench his thirst for a long time to come. It would be a waste to pour it away. But the fridge is empty. Damn it! He slams the fridge door and goes and opens the front door instead.

Astra again.

‘Hello Titus. I forgot to give you a couple of important things!’

‘Oh, right…’

‘You’ll have to start by reading this book. It’s called
Cleaning
. It is brilliant. You’ll get a completely new attitude to cleaning when you’ve read this, I promise you. You’ll start to feel comfortable at home. You’re worth it.’

‘Yes, well…’

‘And in this bag is the tool you’ll need to cope with the project. A laptop.’

‘But I’ve already got a computer…’

‘Read the contract and you’ll see that you must write the book on the computer supplied by the publisher.’

‘Oh, really! For what reason?’

‘It has the security features that we deem necessary. Your own computer looks extremely unreliable. This new machine has a memory that can only be opened and read if you have the right codes. The hard drive makes automatic back-ups to the memory stick which you put in here on the side. As you see, there are several extra sticks. When we want to check on your progress, you simply give me a memory stick so that I can read the manuscript. But most important of all: this computer has a BAC lock… in other words, a breathalyser. You must blow into a tube and the
computer will only start if you are stone cold sober.’

‘A breathalyser! What the fuck? Don’t you trust me? Haven’t I already agreed to far too much? This is totally sick!’

‘Alcoholism
is
an illness.’

‘But I am
not
an alcoholic, I’ve told you!’ Titus shouts.

‘No, of course not,’ Astra snaps back. ‘That’s fine. Then there’ll be no problems with logging in on the computer either.’

‘This is just bloody fucking unbelievable!’

‘Take it or leave it.’

‘
Okay, okay. Yes!
’

‘Right you are, be seeing you, then. Good luck!’

Titus says goodbye to Astra, looks for an empty surface and opens the lid of the laptop. As he does so, a plastic tube pokes up from where the start button is usually found. Titus stares at the tube sticking out expectantly. Should he degrade himself and blow into the device? Does he have any choice? He puts his mouth round the tube and blows.

After a couple of seconds the screen lights up and a text box appears:

The screen goes blank.

He feels deeply offended. Degraded. At the same time, he feels a bit shaken. Sure, he has sometimes asked himself whether he has the wrong attitude to drugs and alcohol. It feels like he has overdone it thousands of times. But he loves partying. That’s almost the only thing he is good at nowadays.

Nobody has ever said that he is an alcoholic. At least, not to his face. Somebody might have said that he ‘should calm down a bit’ or ‘be a little kinder to yourself’ and that sort of thing. But from there to being accused of being an alcoholic is quite a big step. This doesn’t feel comfortable.

How many people have actually been going around thinking that Titus is an old drunk? To hear Astra it sounded as if the whole world thought it. At any rate, everybody at Winchester Publishing. Is that why people laugh at him when he does his improvised book readings? Is he just a pathetic pisshead who says funny things as soon as you fill him with spirits and drugs? How would he himself regard somebody like him – if he hadn’t been Titus Jensen himself, of course… completely ‘objectively’ that is…

The insight hits him like a baseball bat. He falls onto the sofa and remains seated a long while, with an absent stare.

He
is
a pisshead. Once he was an intellectual author who had something to say. Now he is a joke. A pathetic nutter of an author dressed in black who loves alcohol and drugs of every type. He stinks like a skunk. He looks like an old rag. When did it go wrong? When did the partying become more important than everything else?

Can he manoeuvre his hull back into the shipping lanes? He must. If he doesn’t succeed in writing
The Best Book in the World,
then he’s finished. This project is more important than anything else. It’s time to choose now, Titus Jensen. Are you a man or a mouse? An author or an alkie?

Yes,
The Best Book in the World
is his last chance. He can feel that with every nerve in his body. This is the turning point for which he has waited so long.

A sense of calm gradually takes over his brain. Lots of small doors of worry and desire are slammed shut. He is well aware that the only chance of keeping them shut is to let the energy from
The Best Book in the World
fill him. Every minute must be filled with energy. And when a new, completely empty minute approaches, he must take charge immediately. Get that minute to work. And the next minute, hour, day and week. Better to be obsessed than dependent, he thinks.

With the help of the cleaning book he starts to clear the mess in his flat in a wild frenzy. He fills binbag after binbag with the remnants of his old life. He vacuums, scrubs and sweeps. Runs back and forth to the laundry room in the cellar. Irons
his shirts. Mangles sheets. He can do it! He wants to do it! His forehead drips with sweat and his skin steams with the poisons leaving his body.

Better to be obsessed than dependent, he repeats time after time to himself.

Better to be obsessed than dependent.

I
t’s evening. The flat smells clean. Titus has showered and made the bed with clean sheets. He is drunk and high. But not from the usual old drugs. This evening he is drunk on new promises and high on the desire to write.

Titus blows into the tube and peers at the screen. A pop-up box soon smirks at him:

Bloody monster, Titus thinks. But he isn’t in the slightest bit angry. On the contrary. He realises that he has to surround himself with routines and ‘musts’ to bring this off.

First of all he must write down a checklist. He is going to jot down some fundamental human elements that he must learn more about.

He looks at what he has written in his list. He can’t think of anything else just now. Wasn’t there more to it than this? Is that all the knowledge he needs to acquire to write
The Best Book in the World?
Pah! A piece of cake.

Now all he needs is a method of working. The book must be ready in six months. It will take at least three months to put together a rough manuscript. But he can’t collect knowledge for three months and save all the writing to the end, that would be taking too much of a risk. No, he must stake out some guidelines first, so that he knows what to look for when he does his research.

Everything he writes must be kept brief. Every paragraph must be just as full of information as a DIY manual. Every page must have a life of its own. If he digresses even a little, he will be abusing the very soul of the book.
The Best Book in the World
should, quite simply, be filled to the brim with emotion, plot and facts. Yes, he’s got it there, that’s the heart of the matter, and in just three words! ‘EMOTION’, ‘PLOT’, ‘FACTS’, he writes under the list of everything he must learn more about. To achieve his goal, he must be prepared to slaughter sacred cows, to reduce explanations to a minimum and to cut out all the dead meat in the text. ‘SHORT AND CONCISE’, he writes last of all. He is going to cut it to a minimum; this is going to be trimmer than trim, he thinks, saving the document as ‘Manifesto for
The Best Book in the World’.

He leans back and looks at the screen. A good and encouraging day’s work. He deserves a reward. Something really fancy and nice.

It is fairly late and he suddenly feels violently hungry, thirsty and in need of a cigarette all at once. Ah, how quickly the craving came back! Now it was a question of finding a formula to survive the evening. He must have food and water, otherwise he’ll die. But there would be no more cigarettes or alcohol. Because if he
smokes then he’ll crave beer or wine. And if he starts drinking beer or wine – then there’ll be no stopping.

He realises that his heart is completely programmed according to old and far too generous reward systems. Tired or miserable? Have a glass! Really, you have done something good? Have a fag! Feeling down and misunderstood? Have a glass and a fag! A mistake? A success? Have two, they are so little!

No, if he is going to succeed, then he’ll have to re-program his brain. Program it back to how it was, so that it will work like it did when he was a child, before his brain had learnt that it was fun to smoke and drink. It is not about being brainwashed – quite the opposite. His skull has been brainwashed time and time again for far too long. Rinsed and soaked in alcohol and nicotine, his mind has become frayed and bleached. But now his brain will have to manage entirely without washing powder and become a self-supporting ecological system. Every time he feels the craving, he must focus on good thoughts instead of on spirits and ciggies. Good thoughts, good pictures. Models.

He tries to find good pictures that he can produce quickly to block the pathways where his brain starts to wander in the wrong direction. He flips through the slides of threat and reward images inside his head for a few minutes, picks the best and discards the rest. Finally he settles for two that he will use as and when required.

In one of the pictures, he is an adult man the size of a baby. He is lying on his mother’s bosom in what looks like a delivery room. His beard stubble has grazed one of her breasts so that it is pink under his chin. In his mouth he has a cigarette, and in his hand a large glass of whisky. His mother is crying violently and holding her nose.

In the other picture Titus is about twelve years old and as yet with no beard growth. He is lying with his head on the exposed bosom of a young woman, holding a book. You can’t see the young woman’s face but her nipples are stiff and goose-pimpled. Who is she? Titus has a white milk moustache on his lip and he is looking straight into the eyes of the observer, that is, Titus himself.

He switches between the two pictures. His craving diminishes. More and more details appear each time he pulls them out. Distinct or far too distinct? Who cares, Titus thinks. Cerebral images work. They must work! Work, work, work!

Better to be obsessed than dependent. Better to be obsessed than dependent. Better to be obsessed than dependent.

F
ood. Food, food, food.
Food
! I’m hungry! Please, somebody, I must surely be allowed something to eat at least? FOOD, FOOD, FOOD!

Titus’ brain gets up speed. He charges out from the flat, runs down the stairs and out onto the street. Fresh air! A deep breath. Food! I must have some food! He looks around. Pizza! He rushes into the pizzeria on the corner and reads the menu. No specials now, Titus, it takes too long!

‘A Quattro, please!’

‘That’ll be fifteen minutes.’

‘It usually takes only ten!’

‘Okay, ten.’

‘Great, thanks.’

‘Eat here or take away?’

‘Eat here. Here and now.’

‘Help yourself to salad over there. Something to drink?’

‘A weak beer, please. No, no, no, not that! Water. I’ll have some water.’

Titus takes a helping of oily grated cabbage salad and sits at the bar counter in front of the pizza baker’s worktop. A little sheet of glass separates him from the various bowls with ingredients. He looks at the pizza guy, who whirls the round dough in the air. Pizza is tasty. In a sense, pizza is the mother of all cooked food. Tasty newly baked bread and various small yummy dishes on top. A portable smorgasbord in a hot portion-pack. Elegant and refined. Pizza must absolutely be given a star role in
The Best Book in the World
! Especially Quattro Stagioni, the Rolls-Royce of pizzas. He must, quite simply, get hold of the perfect recipe for a Quattro and give it pride of place in the book. Perhaps the pizza recipe is the only recipe he needs to make the cookery book perfect?
Let’s be honest, a cookery book doesn’t get any better just because it has lots of long and boring recipes, does it? Surely, it is the quality that counts. What more could you need than a single perfect recipe? And you can eat pizza for lunch as well as for dinner! And breakfast, if you’ve got some leftovers from your takeaway pizza. Isn’t that right? Exactly!

The Quattro can be the main character’s favourite dish, the one the master detective conjures up for his dinner guests and seduces long-legged ladies with. The cunning detective chief inspector’s Quattro is famed far and wide and now the secret recipe will be revealed once and for all in
The Best Book in the World.
The mother of all culinary dishes in the mother of all books!

Titus must immediately learn more about this wonderful dish! He turns to the pizza guy and asks: ‘Hello, is it true that Quattro Stagioni is named after Antonio Vivaldi’s piece?’

‘I don’t know, mister. Where does he work? Is that the Antonio at Melini on Kungsgatan? I wonder about that, you know he has only been in Sweden about fifteen years. I think Quattro was here before him. Long before. But I know it’s tasty, his Quattro, he uses real mozzarella from Palermo. That’s why it’s tasty. Mozzarella is tasty. And expensive. They charge forty-nine kronor for a Quattro there.’

‘No, I mean was it named after the Four Seasons, Vivaldi’s piece for violins?’

‘What do you mean, named? It is called Quattro Stagioni. That means the four seasons. It’s Italian. Pizza is Italian.’

Titus decides to drop the Vivaldi line of enquiry. There are other things to find out about. Lots of things. Who knows where the road leads when you get on with your research? When you have an unencumbered mind, you’ll discover things. I am unencumbered! Titus thinks. Obsessed, possibly, but above all unencumbered. He looks at the pizza guy who scatters small prawns over a quarter of the pizza.

‘Which season is that?’ says Titus, pointing at the prawns.

‘What?’ says the pizza guy, and their eyes meet for a second. What is this guy’s problem?

‘Yes, which season are the prawns?’

‘I don’t know,’ says the pizza guy, and thinks for a moment. ‘The summer, perhaps.’

‘Why?’ Titus wonders, surprised.

‘You know, summer and swimming in salt water and all that. There are, like, more prawns in the summer.’

‘Have you ever seen a prawn when you’ve been swimming?’

‘No, but why not? What do you think?’

‘I think prawns is autumn. Look how they twitch. They twist into themselves, sort of turn themselves off. As if they were suffering from an autumn depression. Suddenly an all-powerful being throws these sea creatures into an oven and dries them, slowly but surely. Just like us humans in the autumn. We are shut up inside our houses with boiling hot radiators that pour out regulated heat while we wither up and whimper. Yes, prawns could very well be autumn.’

‘All right, then, if prawns are autumn, then what are
mushrooms
?’ the pizza guy goes on, having now joined the match. ‘Mushrooms must be autumn, surely. Wild mushrooms are picked in the autumn. Not by me, I mean, but by people who pick mushrooms.’

‘Yes, damn it, of course you’re right about that,’ says Titus and puts his hand thoughtfully on his chin. ‘Okay, mushrooms are autumn and shrimps are summer. But what about the ham and mussels?’

The pizza guy laughs as he slides the peel under the pizza and loads it into the oven. ‘You are a funny one, mister. I have never thought about that before.’

‘So, what do you think? Aren’t mushrooms just as much summer as prawns?’

‘No, no. Mussels are women. Women are spring. When life awakens in the spring, it’s full of women. I know, we Italians love mussels. They open up in the spring. Like flowers that produce buds and then come into bloom, you know. Mussels are spring. The best season, that’s obvious’

‘Then ham must be winter. And that goes with Christmas ham and so on.’

‘Yes, perfect! We have solved the pizza mystery, mister.’

‘Have we? Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely. It was easy!’

‘But we haven’t finished. The artichoke in the middle. What’s that then? It can’t be a fifth season. Is it the sun, perhaps?’

‘No, not the sun. It’s grey. A bit brownish, sort of. That’s no sun. The sun is yellow. Then there would have been a pepper.’

‘But what is it then?’ Titus wonders, sincerely worried by the mystery.

‘God, perhaps?’ the pizza guy hazards, and makes the sign of the cross on his white shirt.

‘Greyish-brown… yes, perhaps,’ says Titus, almost to himself. ‘An elderly man with a beard. Like in the pictures of God at primary school. Yes, perhaps it is God… who watches over the world…’

‘You know, not all pizza bakers have artichokes in their Quattros.’

‘No? Why not?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. Perhaps they think it’s a tastier pizza without it.’

‘Deism. Deism-baker. God has left the world,’ says Titus thoughtfully and looks into the oven. ‘He is no longer a part of the pizza. He only watches it from a distance.’

The surface of the pizza bubbles a bit. It begins to turn nice and brown. A little part of the rim of the pizza is even burnt. God is certainly still on this pizza. The planet is in flames and he sits like a Buddha in the middle, his arms crossed, without so much as lifting a leaf of his artichoke overcoat. He is seemingly completely unperturbed and still has the same nuance that he had when he first came to the pizza. Why doesn’t he do anything? What’s he waiting for? The Big Bang?

The pizza guy takes the beautiful newly baked Quattro out of the oven. He puts it on a large plate, shakes a little oregano over it and slides it over to Titus.

‘
Bon appétit
!’

Titus devoutly tucks into the part with the prawns. But hang on a minute. You must surely start eating a Quattro in the middle of
winter, after New Year? The seasons can’t begin in the middle of summer. There must be some damned order, even on a pizza. That means that you must begin about one third of the way into the ham. Then you eat your way clockwise with the mussels, the prawns and the mushrooms, ending with the ham again.

Titus starts afresh. He turns the plate round and puts the knife into the New Year’s night of the ham.

Then he discovers something horrific. The prawns come after the ham! The seasons come in the wrong order! This was bad news, very bad news. But he makes up his mind not to say anything to the pizza guy. Why trouble him with it? He has been friendly and helped Titus to sort out all the difficult Quattro concepts. It would not be right to burden him with this. The pizza costs only
thirty-nine
kronor after all.

Titus bears his cross and eats the pizza in the correct order, despite the confusion on the plate. It looks a bit strange with the pizza bits on either side of the plate. But what would that matter in a hundred years?

The calories calm him down, and with his self-control secure, he can eat the pizza with a degree of devotion. He thinks that
The Best Book in the World
and the pizza should have the very best of ingredients. Genuine mozzarella, mushrooms from the market, the day’s catch of prawns and genuine Parma ham. But should it have artichokes or not? Which philosophy would suit the heroic detective best?

Titus is energised by the delicious season-pizza. For once, he has had a reward without poisoning himself with alcohol and nicotine. He is on the right path. He’s going to like this.

There is writing to be done!