The Digested Twenty-first Century (7 page)

Jackson showed Carol his new, deformed penis. ‘I’m not going anywhere near that,’ she shrieked. ‘Nor am I!’ screamed the prostitute he showed it to later. ‘Fuck the lot of you,’ Jackson wept, putting a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. ‘It’s sooo unfair,’ Flicka said. ‘How come Dad gets to kill himself and I don’t?’

Shepherd Knacker, Net Portfolio Value: $800,000.
‘Don’t worry,’ Shep said. ‘None of you seem to miss him much, and I’ve
had some luck. It turns out I didn’t kill Glynis, so she’s just lied to a tribunal and got an $800,000 payout from an asbestos manufacturer who didn’t kill her either. So I’m going to take Glynis, Zach – we can forget about my daughter Amelia, because everyone else has – and my dad to Pemba. And you, Carol and your ugly sister can come with us.’

Six months had passed. Glynis, Flicka and his dad were rotting together six feet under the African soil, when Carol came into Shep’s room. ‘I bet you’ve got a huge penis.’

Digested read, digested:
We Don’t Need to Talk About Lionel.

The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. It was labelled fiction but most of it – the snuff movie, the gang rape – was true. The only bits that hurt were those that chronicled my relationship with Blair as the writer was in love with her himself, though too immersed in the passivity of writing and too pleased with his own style to bother with many commas to admit it so he wrote me into the story as the man who was too frightened to love. Make of that what you will, though the real message I want you to take is that I’m a smartass seller of banal meta-fictions.

I went to the premiere in 1987 with Blair, Rip, Julian and all the other empty narcissists who had somehow dazzled the literary establishment. The movie had been a pile of shit. Bret had hated the movie too and what follows is, I guess, his revenge. Shame he involved you in it because the real Julian didn’t die in the movie, he died on the page more than 20 years later.

The jeep had been following us back from LAX to my apartment in Doheny Plaza. It’s meant to be haunted by a boy who killed himself but you can probably do without that kind of banal symbolism. We’re in LA everyone is shallow and on the make. Wow what insight. I nearly do some coke drink a lot of vodka take Ambien put on the Eurythmics and answer my iPhone. Julian wants to meet.

I’m back in LA to help cast
The Listeners
for which I’ve written the screenplay. I still think I’m being followed as I drive out to Blair’s Beverly Hills mansion but I’m too detached to care so I just drink five bottles of vodka and think about Amanda whom I flirted with in New York.

‘You’re looking very thin, Clay. I guess it didn’t work out with Meghan,’ Blair says. I’ve no intention of ever explaining anything so I shrug in a cool sort of way and hope the critics will love the empty unreliability of my narration.

‘Are you trying to fuck me?’ I ask.

I meet Julian. We don’t really talk so I go back to my apartment on Doheney Plaza. I’m still being followed and I drink 20 bottles of tequila do some coke and go off to the casting where a third-rate actress is auditioning. Later that evening I meet Rip at a restaurant. He looks like he’s had too much surgery, then as he points out, this book hasn’t had nearly enough. The third rate actress is behind the bar. Her name is Rain. ‘If you come back to my place you might get the part,’ I say.

We start drinking gallons of vodka and I bully her into having constant sex and she wants to know when she’s going to get the part. I look moody and hit her. Messages appear on my iPhone. I’m watching you. Certainly no one’s reading me. I get another call on my iPhone. Kelly Montrose has been tortured and killed. I yawn. I’d seen it on the YouTube app on my iPhone.

Someone is still following me as I have more meaningless sex. Rain says she’s got to go to San Diego to see her mom. I don’t believe her so I rape her but she goes anyway. Rip calls. Or is it Blair I’ve lost track. Rain is still going out with Julian and Julian runs a vice-network and Rain is one of his girls and she also used to go out with Kelly and Rip. Rip tells me to stay away from her but I’ve fallen in love in four days even though I’ve shown no sign of it.

So what else can I tell you? I could say that I drove Julian to be killed by Rip who had killed Kelly that Amanda lived with Rain that Rain didn’t get the part that I sodomised a boy and a girl and that it was Blair who had been following me and gave me an alibi. But I guess you don’t really care any more and frankly I don’t blame you. If I don’t give a shit about anything why should you?

‘Don’t worry about anything,’ Blair says. ‘I won’t,’ says Bret. ‘I’ve come to realise I don’t like anyone. Especially my readers.’

Digested read, digested:
Still Less Than Zero.

Patty and Walter Berglund were the middle-class pioneers of Minnesota – Patty making the cakes, Walter driving the Volvo 240 – and the very image of perfection. Yet their neighbours had always thought there had been something not quite right about them. They had two children, but we can forget about Jessica right now and concentrate on Joey, the apple of Patty’s eye. Joey was 11 when he started fucking Connie. Neither Patty nor Walter were best pleased, especially when Joey moved in with Connie, and by the time the Berglunds moved to Washington it was a surprise Walter and Patty hadn’t separated.

Autobiography of Patty, composed at her therapist’s suggestion: Patty was unsure why she had started writing about herself in the third person, though she was woman enough to trust that the Great American Novelist knew what he was doing and she supposed it allowed him to maintain a cool, semi-detached style that would make the odd bombshell he dropped seem more remarkable for the ordinariness of its surroundings. Patty had been raped when she was 15, so she was understandably messed up when she went to college. There she spent a great deal of time with Eliza, a girl even more messed up than her.

‘I shan’t be offended if you forget me,’ said Eliza. ‘Part of the deal of the GAN is that there are too many distracting minor characters.’ So the autobiographer, as Patty described herself to differentiate herself from the biographer who was more obviously pulling the strings, let Eliza go, and concentrated on trying to get the charismatic Richard Katz, who played in a band, to go to bed with her. It was inevitable she ended up with his dull roommate Walter. It was equally inevitable that after 20 years of marriage and repressed lust, she and Richard should eventually fuck. ‘We can pretend we did it while we were asleep,’ she said. The autobiographer resisted the desire to point out that the biographer must also have been half-asleep at this point, so dutifully displayed signs of traumatised guilt.

2004. Joey had a great deal on his mind. He was struggling to believe Connie – a woman so passive she had locked herself in a cupboard at his request for five years – was a three-dimensional character, and only a session of anal sex half-convinced him otherwise. ‘Is this part of the GAN deal?’ she had asked. ‘No’ he had replied. ‘It’s just this year’s must-have transgression in serious fiction.’ Oh, and by the way, they had got married. But what was really bothering Joey was his obsession with Jenna, the sister of
his roommate Jonathan, and the side-plot which saw him joining a Republican thinktank and procuring arms for the US military in New York.

That was an improvement on Walter’s situation. It was bad enough he hadn’t had sex for years and his marriage to Patty was falling apart, but now he too was locked into an absurd subplot that forced him to work on a scheme to exploit all the coal from the Virginian mountains in order to create a habitat for the cerulean warbler when it was mined out. He knew the GAN needed big themes, but this was too much. Still, at least the biographer had given him a twentysomething Indian assistant, Lalitha, who had fallen in love with him.

Richard was now a famous rock star and so desperate to sleep with Patty again he left her autobiography out for Walter. ‘Oh dear,’ said Patty. ‘We’ve got to have the big GAN conversation about how I always thought you needed me more than I need you and now I see it’s the other way round.’ ‘Get this straight,’ Walter replied. ‘It’s not the GAN, it’s the G-Middle-AN. There’s no real diversity here. Now get out.’ So Patty left to go and live with Richard for a while, before that fizzled out and Walter started sleeping with Lalitha, until she was killed in a car accident.

The biographer might have convincingly left it at that, but the GMAN demands a more forgiving, less realistic ending. So Patty and Walter got back together and stayed friends with Richard, Joey stopped being a Republican, Connie was miraculously transformed from being a doormat and they too lived happily ever after and were reconciled with his parents. And even Jessica was allowed back into the book.

Digested read, digested:
Couples 2010.

George Sawle gathered his breath. It was the first time he had brought Cecil Valance home and he was keen to distance himself from his family’s petit-bourgeois gaucheness.

‘You must be Cecil!’ shouted Daphne, George’s 16-year-old sister. ‘George is so excited to have met someone so aristocratically bohemian as you at Cambridge. Please read me some poetry about Corley, my country estate.’

‘Come, now,’ said Freda, George’s mother. ‘We must let our guest change into his pressed silk undergarments.’

‘Don’t worry, Mrs Sawle,’ Cecil replied. ‘I’m happy to read some of my own verse after dinner. But first George and I should go for a stroll to ponder the imminent war with Germany.’

‘Few people ever enter this area of the woods,’ said George.

‘Then let me take you the Oxford way,’ Cecil smiled, stripping naked.

‘I thought you would never ask.’

‘Your poetry was wonderful,’ Daphne said.

‘You’re very beautiful,’ Cecil gasped, forcing his tongue into her mouth.

‘No, no! That’s not nice!’ Though in a way she felt it was.

The Sawles felt a sense of deflation in their humdrum lives after Cecil’s departure. ‘Oh look,’ said Daphne. ‘Cecil’s left me a poem: ‘I’ve written a poem / That’s not very good / Though after I’ve died / It will give everyone wood.’

* * *

‘Come on,’ said Lady Valance to her children, Corinna and Wilfie. ‘We must prepare for the great weekend when Sebby
Stokes comes to Corley to talk to us all for his biography of Cecil. But we must not keep Sebby too long as he has to deal with the General Strike.’

As the guests arrived, Daphne felt a sense of dread. It had felt normal in 1917 to marry Cecil’s brother, Dudley, after Cecil had been shot on the Somme, but she was now embarrassed by the attention she received as the person for whom the greatest ever war poem had been written. And Dudley had turned into such a brute, and was almost certainly having an affair with Eva.

George looked sadly at Cecil’s tomb, remembering the length and strength of Cecil’s membrum virile. ‘Ah there you are,’ said his dreary wife.

‘I want to make love to you,’ said Eva to Daphne.

‘Good lord, you’re a lesbian, after all. I’m very flattered, but I shall have to decline as I’m hoping to elope with Revel, who I suspect may be a queer, but I’m hoping to turn him.’

‘I wonder what Sebby will put in Cecil’s biography,’ Dudley sneered brutishly. ‘I bet it’s not as funny as my book about him.’

Daphne reflected on how the war had changed everything. It didn’t matter if Cecil had been a good or bad poet, Sebby would laud him anyway. After all, he’d almost certainly fucked him as well.

* * *

Paul Bryant looked at a colleague in the toilet. Once the Sexual Offences Act was passed, he’d be able to do what he liked with him.

‘I need some help in the garden,’ said Mr Keeping. Paul thought this was an unusual way for a bank manager to deploy his staff, but demurred.

‘I’m Corinna,’ said Mr Keeping’s wife. ‘Why don’t you come to my mother Daphne’s 70th birthday party?’

Paul was transfixed as Corinna and Peter Rowe played a duet. ‘I love Cecil Valance’s poetry,’ said Paul.

‘Well, it just so happens that I teach at Corley, which is now a boy’s boarding school,’ said Peter, ‘so if you’d like to visit, we could bugger one another behind Cecil’s statue.’

‘Did you know that I went on to marry Revel before marrying someone else, leaving an impossibly complicated family tree that I don’t expect you to follow?’ said Daphne.

‘That’s just as well,’ said everyone.

* * *

‘Did you hear about Corinna and Mr Keeping?’ said Paul. ‘Terrible news.’

‘I can’t say that I had,’ Peter replied. ‘And neither will anyone else, because that’s the nature of other people’s lives. You seldom find out everything.’

‘The trouble is that now we’re in the 1980s, the reader has realised we’re not nearly as interesting as the characters in the first half of the book. Still, I’d better press on with my biography of Cecil. My hunch is Corinna might have been Cecil’s child, even though that would mean she had a 14-month pregnancy.’

‘Cecil would fuck anything,’ said George, ‘though you’d better not trust me, as I’ve got Alzheimer’s.’

* * *

Rob was looking for someone to cruise at Peter’s funeral. ‘Isn’t that Paul Bryant, the famous writer over there?’ he said to a stranger. ‘Didn’t he make his name writing a biography of Cecil Valance, the crap poet?’

‘Yes. Though I’ve heard Paul tells lies about himself, too.’

Digested read, digested:
Cecil Gay Lewis.

There were three of us and Adrian now made the fourth. I would tell you the names of the other two, but they are of little consequence. Besides which, my memory is most unreliable and so it is possible I have not even remembered their names correctly and it would be a shame to burden you with even more potentially inaccurate information.

Suffice to say we were all rather smug public schoolboys, though Adrian’s sense of entitlement was perhaps the greatest, given as he was to making remarks such as: ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ The only challenge to our self-satisfaction occurred when a boy named Robson committed suicide after getting a girl pregnant, but fortunately it wasn’t long before Adrian was able to put us right. ‘Eros and Thanatos,’ he said. ‘Camus believed suicide was the only true philosophical question.’ Or maybe he didn’t say that at all.