The House of Writers (17 page)

“Whatevvvver!”;
declare Tonga a principality on the BBC World Service and throw a hissy fit when the reporter challenges your declaration with cries of “It
is
a principality! Tom’s mum said so! I get everything I want!”; meet the charming and fragrant David Wilson; kidnap and eat the charming and fragrant David Wilson; bump into the writer Bo Fowler and during the chat cough “Vonnegut imitator!” under your breath; read
Three Trapped Tigers
by Guillermo Carbera Infante rather than sitting on your pathetic arse talking drivel with your inane friends; slap an elephant on the rump and break down crying and confess your harassment to a psychiatrist then make amends by apologising to the elephant and offering to galvanise his beautiful tusks with gold; sing a haunting Celtic ballad to seduce Bill Gates; interview former Prime Minister Tony Blair, asking him extremely trivial questions about his favourite boy bands, glamour mag babes, and types of spicy food, then before the interview is over, ask him how he feels to be a warmongering baby-killing psychopath selling arms to Iraq and buying Porsches with the profits; force a poor man to pass through the eye of a needle to prove he is destined for Heaven; shake your maracas in public, smiling and encouraging children to take a shake, then realise that you have been shaking and encouraging children to touch your penis; complain loudly about your fourth nipple; send an erotic telegram to a court jester; convert to Judaism for a laugh; open a kiosk selling only rubber mice; come on to a cosmonaut; lounge lizardly in a hammock; attend a PTA meeting and yell obscenely about the lack of atoms in the room; be spellbound by a prosaic duck; rage against the dying of the light, knowing full well that light cannot die because light is not sentient; open a Pandora’s box and eat the coffee liqueurs; use “synecdoche” in a literary conversation and smile cheekily when everyone nods, pretending to know what it means; take your sister to the shops and buy her a custard slice; enervate a peach slice; force the Queen to abdicate, make her work in a supermarket for the rest of her life, and rehouse her in a council flat with no central heating then on her deathbed, say “Only joking!” and reinstate her power; susurrate like there’s no tomorrow; tell an obscene joke about a Swiss hooker and a Scottish virgin on your first date with the Pope; reach over and try to squeeze a breast on your first date with Prince Charles; steal the lizards from the Galapagos Islands and start a circus act in Melbourne consisting of ninety lizards piled in a wondrous stalactite of lizards; yearn for a new year on 1
^st
January 00:02; spend a fortnight on a new diet plan, planning each of your healthy new meals carefully, lining up the food in your fridge and cupboards, then on the second day, cave in and devour the chocolate cake hidden in your pants; x-ray something because it’s the only verb beginning with “x”; curse your stupidity when you realise “xerox” is also a verb beginning with “x”; xerox something because it’s the only word that begins and ends with “x”; do a massive shit on your front lawn because you are the king of your own rectum; do a massive shit on every lawn in the world to prove you are the global king of all rectums; punch anyone who uses the plural “octopi” unselfconsciously; sing! sing! sing! sing! sing! don’t sing!; finish an overly long list on an unfunny and boring entry, leaving the reader disappointed but definitely, definitely, not in the mood for more; write another five entries on the list; pimp an opossum; opimp a possum; post a series of memes on the internet involving kittens, puppies, and penguins, then take out a pistol and shoot off your earholes; sell all your earthly possessions and live a nomadic existence in Chile; become very depressed for the rest of your life, living days of quiet desperation, drinking shots of rum nightly in front of soap operas, making late-night calls to the Samaritans about suicide threats you are too cowardly to carry out, never once trying to remove yourself from the situation, then die bitter, miserable, and desperately lonely in a bleak seaside village. . .

A
petition had been circulated calling for the expulsion of C.J. Watson and her troublemaking son Puff. His list of crimes included:

—
destroying forty photocopiers by bubblegumming the insides

—
destroying ninety staplers by flinging them at writers’ heads and walls

—
destroying eighty hole punches by ditto

—
destroying one hundred and three pairs of shoes by crawling under desks and gnawing on them

—
making lifts unsafe by wedging them open and placing tacks on the carpet

—
abusing, distracting, tormenting and bullying the writers

—
urinating from the windows while singing offensive ditties

His mother Claire, author of the ten-books-and-increasing fantasy series
Firelamp,
was now in the undesirable position of having to take control of her unwanted son and defend her right to remain in The House. Several weeks after Puff’s birth, under the sway of painkillers and placebos, she’d had feelings of tenderness and affection until her mothering instinct expired with the realisation a son was a lifelong thing and she had a nine-book series to complete that she hadn’t even started. She went through the motions with Puff as if he were another domestic chore, changing his nappies alongside other time-zappers like washing up and hoovering—all done with that particular blank expression reserved for inanimate things that couldn’t care less how harassing they were. As a toddler, preschooler, and older preschooler (he was eight and hadn’t been to school yet), he was allowed more freedom until she let him run rampant around the building without even the occasional nondescript scolding from afar or threat of a willow switch across his behind. Every second she spent having to attend to him and lost not writing her manuscript made her hate his face all the more.

Over 2,928 writers had signed the physical petition calling for her and Puff’s removal. She had an appointment with Marilyn Volt that afternoon. She sat down with Puff beforehand, staring at his mussed hair, lice-filled and overlong; the torn t-shirt and jeans from which arms and arse protruded at uncouth angles; the lips forming impertinence in song
(“Mummy is a poohead
/
Puffy is a coolhead”),
and for the first time, felt shame. She had made this rasping and foul entity, and now had to defend her actions, its (his) existence, and save her novels’ futures. As Puff wrote demented semi-rhymes on the walls in crayon
(“I will eat your brains
/
and then your bairns”),
Claire cried her corneas red and made general helpless noises as she shook her head in admission of despair. Then in a surge of decisiveness, she slapped her son hard on the face and held him down, administering hard thwacks to the behind as he writhed in screams and tears. “You will obey me,” she said, “or I will do this to you every hour on the hour until your whole world is a fear factory.”

It was a line from her second book.

The result of her punitive discipline, apart from the knowledge she had crossed the line into being an “abusive mother,” and that her son would later write misery memoirs on the 38
^th
floor about her tyranny, thus undermining her fantasy novels for a whole generation of readers, was that Puff appeared to Marilyn as a neat and well-behaved child respectful to his mother. She had run 10K as usual (whatever time of the day, it was safe to assume she had ran 10K), and arrived with her usual sweat-gummed visage in perpetual rictus.

“So I see a lot of people have signed this petition,” she said, taking her usual slurp on a sports drink between utterances.

“Marilyn, I wanted you to see for yourself how calm and friendly my son is. These petitioners don’t have children. They have no patience for occasional outbursts of exuberance,” Claire said.

“He looks very calm,” Marilyn said. She leaned into the stunned face of Puff. “You’re not a bad boy, are you?” He looked at his mother who signalled he should respond in the negative or else. “No, miss,” he said.

“He’s my little Puff pastry,” Claire added.

“More like Puff pasty. Ought to get him out in the sun,” she said and smiled at his adorable face masking terror. “Well, that’s settled. You both can stay. Sorry for the inconvenience. What are you working on?”

“An eleven-book-and-increasing fantasy series,
Firedoor.
The heroine is—”

“Great! I hope it does well for you,” Marilyn said, rising from her desk to run another 10K or do something not at her desk.

Claire walked Puff to the front door and crouched down to meet his panicked eyes.

“Now listen. I don’t want you growing up to hate me. I’m not a bad person. I just didn’t want you. It’s better you know this now than spend years trying to fight for my love. I don’t love you. But I don’t want to completely abandon you, either. So what I suggest is, you spend your days outside, playing around the fields. Be careful, there’s lots of shrapnel out there. Come back in at lunchtimes and dinnertimes for food. And back in at night to shower and sleep, of course. I think this is the best solution. See you later.”

And so Claire left Puff at The House entrance, relinquishing her parenting duties to the vast creche of fragged motherboards and busted hard drives that littered the stock-dump fields, where he would spend his early youth, sifting through the trash and sitting on a volcanic hatred that would erupt in the nine-book-and-increasing series of misery memoirs entitled
Dumped in the Fields: The Story of my Childhood.

C
.D. G
RUNGE
ate a fungus-tinted marshmallow and sprouted a second head. Unluckily, the second head hated reading and attempted to seize control of his body to do other things like sprinting or singing. The second head had a penchant for the lyrics of Freddie Mercury and the melodies of Gordon Lightfoot. Two weeks later a third head sprouted from his left buttock with a similar aversion to books and writing and a penchant for the lyrics of Mark E. Smith and the melodies of Tori Amos. This made writing an arduous and unpleasant task for C.D. and made sitting down impossible. When a fourth head sprouted from his big toe, he decided to take action and asked me to decapitate the heads. Due to a last-minute act of deception from the second head pretending to be the original C.D., the original C.D. head was decapitated instead and the second head took control of the body. The usurped C.D. left The House and went on the cruise circuit as a Queen tribute act with a less popular sideline in the songs of Gordon Lightfoot. This incident I considered a personal failure. These happen from time to time. I was able to construct a replacement body for the old C.D. from bits of old robot in the stock-dump fields, but as he wasn’t able to write, he pulled his own plug. Tragic.

I
HAD
been writing manuscripts and stories for over a decade when I had a story accepted in
New Writing 49,
an anthology for new writing (read: unpublished elsewhere but submitted within the last year). This story (written fourteen years ago) proved popular and I was included in the New Writers’ Showcase event, invited to read the piece before an audience including agents scouting for “new” writers to sell. I was amused at being branded a “new” writer when I had been around and had published in small presses for a long time, and that I was being announced as “new” with a tale I had written aged eighteen. I was asked to extend the short story (about a teenage breakup—the one piece I had written in a conventional manner, my usual MO being concrete prose arranged in acrostics)—into a novel, and a year later I was signed to an agent and had published
The Time of Heartquakes
. I received a favourable review in a national newspaper and was crowned an interesting “new” voice on the “scene.” A month later, I was unable to contact the agent and a month plus, I was politely dropped. At that point, though I wasn’t to know this at the time, I was to begin a “movement” known as The New Waves, The Bright New Things, The Newest Old Things, or The Sliced Breads.

After the drop, I changed my name by deed poll and wrote another conventional tale in the same manner as the last. This too seemed to contain the formula the panel was after (among the panel’s titles:
The Heart’s Gatekeeper, Shattered Daylight, Learning to Love a Little Less),
so I changed my appearance somewhat (a red perm, fake specs, and partial goatee) and entered the “new” machine once again, with invites to anthologies and readings (I faked a deeper voice), followed by another call from an agent. I penned a second novel mining similar teenage territory to my first, drawing on an unpleasant childhood, and received similar positive reviews, with invites to book readings and libraries. The agent triumphed me as an “energetic and vital voice quivering with wrenching emotion” up until the optimum number of copies had been sold to reap the maximum potential profit, and soon after, I was back into the wilderness of being a second-book author no one wanted.

Several scenesters who had recognised me kept shtum and chose to copy my coup, many of these people former flavours of the month themselves with unwanted second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and in one case, eleventh novels in their cupboards desperate for publication and attention. This scheme worked well for publisher, agent, and writer alike, as second novelists had the writing chops and material ready—all that was required to sell books was a fresh identity, as readers tended to distrust second novels (the sophomore slump, the hatred of a writer succeeding in making a “career,” the usual lukewarm-to-meh response to most startling new voices), and publishers were unable to crank the hype machine or use phrases such as “amazing new voice” or “refreshingly honest new voice” or another combination using the words “new” and “voice” beside each other.

The scene was populated with ex-“new” writers posing as new “new” writers, forcing out the real “new” writers, who forged their own sideline as “up-and-coming” writers (unsuccessful, as no one except smug musos wanted to “discover” writers before their “new” unveiling), and soon the agents and publishers were in cahoots with this mass hoodwinking—keeping various “new” writers away long enough from the scene before their rebranding. I made four debuts until a critic commented on the similarity in style between certain of my publisher’s output, and I became a toxic product and was forced to return to the real love of mine, concrete prose arranged in acrostics. This exit was to become fortuitous, as fame-struck writers, desperate to retain the mild ripple of interest “new” writers savour, sometimes had plastic surgery to alter their appearances so much that scenesters would be unable to recognise them (having exhausted the range of hairstyles, specs, and facial hair options available).