The House of Writers (25 page)

“That wasn’t Nabokov, you buffoon!” Jonathan Coe mocked.

“It’s
terrible,
not
terrorful.
Terrorful isn’t even a word!” Jhumpa Lahiri mocked.

“It’s God and devil, not God and
the
devil. Did you memorise that from Wikipedia?” Agnès Desarthe ditto.

“That was Dostoevsky, you moron!” Toby Litt ditto.

“It is heart of man, not heart of
a
man. I can’t believe you didn’t know that!” Steven Poole “ ”.

“I fail to see the relevance of that line, are you saying you find us beating the shit out of each other beautiful?” Cynthia Rogerson “ ”.

“You are trying in some bungling manner to make us ponder a concept no longer applicable in the modern world,” Georgi Gospodinov “ ”.

“You have proven to us all that you have no handle whatsoever on basic symbolic metaphor,” David David Katzman “ ”.

“You stand proud on that stage, maintaining your ground, while inside that body beats the heart of a simple village dolt,” Silvia Barlaam “ ”.

“I hate your words and the mouth responsible,” Ever Dundas

“How about this, then?” I tried again. “Did not Aeschylus once say, ‘Be nice, for everyone you see is waging a hard fight’?”

“JESUS CHRIST!!!” Dan Rhodes “ ”.

“You are the largest fool I have ever permitted to speak before me on a picnic table,” Geoff Nicholson “ ”.

“That was Jewish Egyptian philosopher Philo, not Ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus!!!” Jim Dodge “ ”.

“There is a 500-year difference between the people you have confused and misquoted!” David Mazzucchelli “ ”.

“Your mere cardiorespiratory existence is a source of persistent bafflement!” Miranda July “ ”.

“Be
kind,
not be
nice.
As if an Egyptian philosopher circa the birth of Christ would say ‘nice,’ like some mum talking to her kids!” Daniel Handler “ ”.

“Everyone you
meet,
not
see.
How can one be kind to strangers on the street? Shoot them kind looks, or stop and ask them if there’s anything they need? You, sir, are an inflated buffoon about to burst,” Carol Ann Sima “ ”.

“It’s
fighting
a
hard battle,
not
waging
a
good fight.
This laughable misquotation proves your IQ is several digits below an earwig,” Frédéric Beigbeder “ ”.

“You are a boil on the neck of literacy,” J.T. LeRoy “ ”.

“I have eaten bagels with more insight than you,” Steven Hall

“A few centuries ago, you would have been shot for such brain-buggery,” Vanessa Gebbie “ ”.

“Your utterances transcend my otherwise prodigious capacity for empathy,” David Shields “

”. “Scum,” Scarlett Thomas “ ”.

“There are no words to describe you, although if pushed I would use ‘pant-wetting fuckbudgie from hell’,” Mary Roach “ ”.

“I could have quoted that correctly,” T.C. Boyle “ ”.

And so, through my sheer idiocy, I had stopped the brawling. My intention had been to make them reflect on the meaning of the quotes, but the fun at baiting a writer for his mistakes had proven the stronger impulse.

A
S
mentioned earlier, before my shouse was constructed, I had to share a sleeping bag with Marilyn Volt. This was one of the strangest experiences of my life, stranger even than sharing a glue bag with a ventriloquist (who offered his dummy some shit before inhaling). Marilyn is, in addition to a nutcase who takes far too many runs under false pretences, a delusional philanthropist, and a spandexed-up nincompoop, a sexual predator of the weirdest variety (and I have encountered a rich tapestry of weird and dangerous pervs in my time). Arriving in winter, where the ground floor is freezing at nights, and with no other sleeping quarters available (or so she lied to me), I was forced to squeeze into her tight sleeping bag, bumping uglies with her and enduring the unpleasant friction. “It can get very sticky under there, so I would advise sleeping in your underwear,” she said beforehand. “I’m fine in these pyjamas, thanks,” I said. She inserted her bronzed veiny physique into the sleeping bag and made a sliver of room for me, and I inserted my pale crack-ravaged physique into the sliver. I entered with my back to her, and she auto-spooned herself around me (there was no room to do otherwise), and I closed my eyes. Apart from the nervy, heavy breathing and the hand snaking along my right thigh, I knew something was amiss when her tongue worked its slimy way along my helix, down to my lobule, of which she took a horny bite and, meeting no resistance (I was in shock), she risked a squeeze of my left tit. At that point my shock ended. “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked. “Come on, relax and have fun with Mommy Volt,” she said. That sent my psycho-radars into overdrive, and I struggled out the sleeping bag. In the end, I had to threaten her with the prospect of me finding somewhere else to sleep, and slightly pimp myself by offering the warm elixir of my body close to hers provided she kept her exploratory fingers and tongue to herself. Over the next fortnight, I had to chastise her for the following manoeuvres: wrapping her arm around me after protests of loss of circulation and probing a pinkie into my navel; breathing and drooling on the back of my neck; removing her bra with complaints of pain and squishing her breasts into my back (with erect nipples); pretending that her arms had fallen asleep and accidentally landed on my front or back bottom; muttering supposedly seductive endearments into my ears, such as “Come to me, honey-child” or “Let me
feel
you, darling babe”; deliberately wearing warm clothes, forcing me to strip to my underthings and have her touch my skin; and frequently stroking my legs with hers and claiming restless leg syndrome. One evening, I was so tired that I let her have a roam around my body, and in the morning I chastised her so viciously, she cried and promised to “have a long hard think about my foul ways.” And she did, she had a long hard think about more ways she could be foul with me in that sleeping bag.

I
WAS
hired by Ms. Volt to spearhead the ill-fated Writing Into the Future scheme.
¹
I had completed a marketing degree at a nondescript college
²
five months before under coercion of the paterfamilias and, after a stint in the ScotCall Talent Pool, decided to swim into less shark-infested waters. The options for marketing graduates not being vast (nor the options for graduates from other schools), I was fortunate to chance upon the one non-ScotCall position in the
ScotCall Examiner.
Thanks to the last three decades of public paranoia and smear campaigning from politicians,
³
I was raised to view writers and books with suspicion. I suspected these supposedly criminal and dangerous “truth-fudgers”
⁴
of producing unpractical propaganda against the ethos of unlimited consumption that ScotCall promoted as vital to a pleasurable existence, and of attempting to dissuade consumers from turning to ScotCall to help shape and give their lives meaning. The sheer outrageous nerve! One month spent in the ScotCall impound cured me of this notion.
⁵

I met Marilyn Volt who, after five minutes discussing her latest 20K marathon to raise awareness for puppies with cancer or doctors with the shakes or whatever,
⁶
sat down to brief me as to the post.

“The problem is Carol is this,” she said, suckling a spout. She consumed about ten sports drinks per day.
⁷
“We’re keen to keep The House going into the next generation. We need our writers to take an interest in procreation and propagating the writer species. No one has time to take an interest in this and consequently we have been unable to make inroads here. We can’t afford to offer our writers childcare or time off for pregnancies. So I am looking to recruit a person who will be able to solve the issue for us.”

“Uh ... ”

“Would you like the position?”

“Yes.”
⁸

“Good. Get to work!”

I was offered a cubicle inside Volt’s maze of filing cabinets on the ground floor. Each cabinet contained receipts, accounts, manuscripts, medical records, and pictures of writers’ teeth.
⁹
I had thought the complex maze between desks might allow me some privacy from Volt’s panting progress checks, however I had underestimated her freakish skill (none of the cabinets were labelled and she knew the location of every file), and abandoned all attempts to obfuscate the maze in case I lost myself.
¹⁰
The first scheme I devised to solve the problem was to devise a HoW dating website. I naïvely believed that all the writers needed was a platform to express their repressed lusts and desires, so set up a free-to-use and basic website so writers could make love happen in their “breaks.”

This was wrong. The site received no hits because creating a profile would have taken too long and eaten into writing time. Plus no writers wanted to waste words on something that couldn’t be sold. Working in The House required an enforced celibacy. Becoming a writer required the eradication of desire, or the supplanting of one’s desire into the manuscripts. I learned this when I asked a newish writer in the Westerns department for a date and spoke to him with frankness about having sex after.

“There’s nothing we can do about this issue. Having a child means career suicide. It’s not like at ScotCall where the pregnant people can answer calls in their beds or offer advice on the phone right up to the first contraction and two hours after having the child. Writing takes immense concentration and we have to deliver tens of thousands of words every week. Children don’t fit into our set-up here,” he said. I tried to override his stubborn practicality using seduction techniques. He was unresponsive. Even childless relationships were too time-consuming and even random sexual encounters were frowned on for draining too much energy, or for constricting the imagination when it came to writing romantic scenes. The act of doing narrowed the potential for dreaming.

So I had to find other things to do. I would meander from floor to floor conducting pointless surveys:

Q
:
How often do you think about sex? (
A
: Never.)

Q
:
How many children do you want to have? (
A
: None.)

Q
:
Who is your ideal partner? (
A
: No one.)

Q
:
What is your strongest goal in life? (
A
: To finish my (present) manuscript.)

Q
:
Do you think you would make a good parent? (
A
: No.)

and place them into shredders. I tried to interest the writers in parenthood with subliminal tactics—leaving pictures of adorable tots on their desks, scenting the air with talcum powder, mother’s milk and fresh placenta, piping in lullabies and nursery rhymes to the offices, and in one case, borrowing a friend’s baby to show around the building. The responses were predictable: rage at having their desks disturbed, their concentration broken, their nostrils diverted, the presence of an irritant in their offices. The act of writing for men had snuffed out their swimmers, locked their libidos; and for women, ostracised their ovaries and murdered their mothering instinct.
¹¹
I tried to contrive romance between writers by leaving love-notes on desks. Failure. The writers merely sneered and hurled them binwards. At one point, I cornered a male in the lift and tongued his neck and seized his penis. He stood there blinking as I rubbed and said: “Have you finished? I have manuscript to go and write.”

I feared being sacked. Volt would slither up and down the building in her soundless sneakers and catch me loafing. I was given an ultimatum—printed up on blue card reading
Ultimatum. Pull your socks up or I’ll have to let you go. Love, Marilyn
—so I searched the building for places to lurk and hide. In the backstairs between the ninth and tenth floors I found a surplus cleaning cupboard. Behind the unused mops and dustpans was a small room where a group of dropout writers met to hide from their department heads. There were five when I found them on a settee, lying around staring at the ceiling. The room had a strong graphite odour. I soon spotted the pile of discarded pencils behind the settee, and that the walls had been covered in desperate scribbles. These were the Blocked Writers.

Having lapsed into complete indifference, turned their backs on their manuscripts, unwilling to leave and face the consequences, they hid in their graphite-scented room waiting for inspiration to strike, scuttling between floors and stealing food to survive. I was to become one of their kind. I openly admit I have no interest in writing. I took an interest in books to spite the politicians and their smearing. The first novel I read was the penultimate book from Zadie Smith called
Black Teeth
—a sombre novel about two families who lose their possessions in the Great Crash and have to turn to hawking spare parts on roadsides to survive. I confess it depressed me. I value the comedic in literature more than anything else. We’re put on the planet to suffer, so we may as well take a reprieve from this in our books. When I found myself bunking up with the lethargic Blocked Writers, I discovered that filling a blank sheet of paper with drivel is not as taxing as writers lament. I wrote a story about a disabled snowman who fought for his right to spend Christmas in a family’s garden alongside the able-bodied snowmen. Paula, a Romance writer, perked up at my presence once she realised I might be exploited. She asked me to write a romance tale between two male builders. I made the first builder drop wrenches and things on the scaffolding below so the second builder would pay attention. When the second builder was brained into a coma by four bricks, the first writer stayed at his bedside until he healed. After exchanging various emotions the two got together and moved to Leeds.

I wasn’t looking to be exploited, only I hated sharing the poky room with five moping writers. If I could produce plotlines, I could remove them from the room and have the settee to myself. Freeloading in The House was quite straightforward—writers didn’t want to waste time eating so left most of their meals in the canteen. I would have some time to think things through before Volt found me. So I came up with ideas for Jo, Vivian, Paul, Jeremy, and Deborah and soon I had the settee to myself. Unfortunately, Volt found me lapping up someone’s spaghetti in the canteen and sacked me.