The House of Writers (26 page)

_____________________________

¹
And, for the record, I was not responsible for any of the repercussions of this scheme. I would like to go on record stating Ms. Volt is not a resident in the same astral plane as the rest of us.

²
Larton Community College. During my time there, one of the departments was always on fire.

³
My earliest memory is of a Tory politician stamping on a copy of George Orwell’s
1984
, saying: “Come on, we’re beyond this.” To rousing applause.

⁴
Coined by Tony Blair on his deathbed.

⁵
A cure helped in part by ads such as: “Freedom? Sounds nice! But how to be free, and how to maximise your freedom potential? JOIN SCOTCALL.”

⁶
All her “charity” money went into the doomed attempt to fix The House building.

⁷
Later I discovered the money she spent on sports drinks undercut the “charity” funds by a considerable amount. If she drank tap water, she could have made fifteen times as many repairs over the course of three months.

⁸
If she had asked me to construct a new moon made from rubber bands on the roof I would have still said: “Yes.”

⁹
You can be turned off an author pretty quickly if you happen to glimpse a magnetised still of their plaque.

¹⁰
Since the outer layer of cabinets were not fixed against the wall, I was able to walk around the room and simply pull back one cabinet to gain access to my desk. Navigating the maze would have lost me an hour of work each day, and driven me mad.

¹¹
Peeking at some of the work these people were peddling, all I can say is ... confiscate their laptops and knock ‘em up.

A
FEW
words on the book blurb business. Blurbs can be purchased with ease in The House—ordinarily, a prawn sandwich or a cup of lukewarm mushroom soup will secure you a burbling blurb making use of trusty superlatives such as “timeless” or “evocative,” and if you throw in a croissant, various hyperbolic statements about one’s novel etching a place in literary history alongside the enthroned bones. I caught up with C.J. Watson who, having turfed her Puff, was in a kindly enough mood to describe this novel,
The House of Writers,
as a “labyrinthine satiric masterpiece ... destined for a place in the pantheon of eternal pleasures,” and later I found C.F. Milton who after a cappuccino and a triple chocolate muffin, described my novel as “the hottest thing in the literary world since Nora Barnacle’s knickers,” and for those who didn’t understand the reference, “a gleefully sadistic romp through the byways and sighways of this daunting edifice.” In under six hours, I had amassed a dossier of extravagantly insincere praise, written with the prospect of warm pastry in mind, a fact that seeped into several blurbs, such as: “This novel is a crisp, buttery concoction that tantalises the mind ... a soft and mouthwatering crunch of pleasure tingling on the cortices and yumming up the imagination.” To redress the balance, I paid people in white chocolate cereal bars for an honest opinion of the novel, paying four cereal bars per day, a total of ninety cereal bars per reader, causing a net loss of £59. Among the blurb replies: “A ho-hum gallimaufry of stop-start narratives, banal tangents, and boorish satirical pokes,” “a towering inferno of misrepresentation,” and “the nadir of attempted comedy.” I decided to insert an equal volume of these verdicts into the novel, because the critical reception for the work would be nonexistent, and by building that reception into the novel itself, the process would be pre-complete (in the same way I am the only unpaid reader of this work).

“T
HIS
is Frank Zemon.”

“Hi.”

“Yeah. Let me explicate. I had written my first novel,
Skeeter’s Banks,
while bumming around Glossop on the last of my student loan. I emailed a tantalising blurb to Lamiel Burkan at Canongate. The novel was a heart-rending romp set in hostels the world over, with interconnecting tales of hedonistic kids from broken homes seeking a path in life, and finding one in their collective pain. I dedicated the novel to my then-girlfriend Marlene, not foreseeing she’d shag my brother between the final proofs and publication. I ended up dedicating a novel to a cast-iron bitch and the person I hated most in the universe. In the acknowledgements, I thanked Grant and Bill Wilthers, both of whom had proofread and helped the novel along. I had a falling out with the brothers when I slept with both their wives following an erotic round of Spin the Bottle. So the novel was dedicated to two men who hated me the most in the universe, and who I hated in turn for their refusing forgiveness. My next novel,
Whistling in the Window,
I dedicated to a more stable thankee—my sister, Erin Zemon. As the novel was sent to the printer, Erin wrote me a long letter explaining she had spoken to her psychiatrist and, after long week’s soul-searching session, decided she could never forgive me for roasting her Barbie doll on the barbecue (“Barbie-cue”), and that she would not be seeking to be speaking to me ever again. My acknowledgements were to Brian and Graham Setplotter, both of whom turned against me for not checking if they wanted the final canapé at an event we attended. Another novel dedicated to people who no longer mattered to me! Forever etched in print, these wankers! I had to play things safe for my next book,
So You Think You’re a Muslim Cleric?,
and dedicated the novel to my mother. Can you see what’s coming? Yes, she disowned me! Cut me out the inheritance and prevented me from making contact ever again. She said that a character in my first novel had been based on her, and she knew I was making her out to be a “neurotic reactionary pinhead,” so ended our relations. My acknowledgements had been devoted to my paid readers, both of whom sued me for poor treatment. I had wasted another two pages on people who hated me. That’s when I hit upon a brilliant idea. I decided to have a sweepstakes as to who received my dedications and acknowledgements. I set this up on my website,
www.thisiszemon.co.uk
, and
Sprinkler’s Matrix
was dedicated to Jan Rachaels of York, and I acknowledged Valerie Smite and Jed Brownimpings. This worked for a while, until I received a letter with a legal letterhead, claiming that as a dedicatee Jan was entitled to at least 25% of the profits. In two days, I received the same letter from Valerie and Jed. I pursued the case and lost, and had to cough up 75% of the book profits to these anonymous people. After agent’s fees, I was left with -5% profit. For my fifth book,
Love is a Cinnamon Condom,
I decided to make the anonymous winners sign a legal waiver, allowing them no claim to the profits. The next thing that happens—the dedicatee, Liza Scrimmage, lawyers up, claiming
authorship
of the novel—that she created a fake name (mine), and set up the website as me, and that the whole idea of selling dedications was part of the fiction. It did so happen that the novel was about a writer who sells dedications (I was running thin ideas-wise), and because of that conceit, the lawyers were able to blur the true authorship to the point no one knew who had written what, and the all-male jury voted in favour of Liza because of her button nose and amazing bosom. As a result, she scooped all the profits. That novel became a bestseller, and Liza appeared on chat shows, discussing how she wrote the book as me and so on. I had been relegated to a character in a novel she didn’t write, and of course, all my past novels were attributed to her by proxy, and my public attempts to claim authorship made me look insane. She contacted me a year later, offering me an insulting sum to ghostwrite “her” next novel. I told her to fuck her fat mother’s ass, then a week later went crawling back and accepted her offer. Once the novel was released, who do I see mentioned in the dedications—Frank Zemon ;). That’s right, she’d added an actual wink! As a final knowing little thing to make me feel like a proper stooge!”

“Cow,” Erin said.

“Thanks for that, Frank.”

“Yeah. Cheers.”

O
NE
of the most lucre-active floors is the fifteenth, a bustling workhouse populated by meekly subservient ghost-hacks taking orders from their hemidemisemi-famous subjects—a stoop of haven’t-beens seeking to sell their hyperboiled tales to a handful of fans. I was assigned at once to ghost the autobio of one of West Region’s most popular reality TV stars—Grenda Navel. Having stumbled to stardom in the programme
Posh and Dropped,
where photogenic upper-class socialites are deposited on a council estate to fend for themselves, she had branched into acting roles in medical dramas, and made numerous appearances on comedy panel shows. Her waspish tongue and take-no-prisoners attitude made her popular, along with her fondness for foul language, criticisms against the ruling classes, and championing of trash culture. She had tried her hand at a rap record, “Grenda’s Agenda,” a seven-minute unexpurgated rant against the losers who dared to ’dis her credentials as an all-around bad-ass-with-class babe.

In a change from the usual procedure—celebrities phoned in their requirements and had no further communication with their authors until publication date—I was invited to Grenda’s abode in the West Region wilds. She lived in an ultra-pimped castle, a castle that was her inheritance anyway, that she tormented with the proceeds of her media appearances. Her conical spires were funked up with fake opals, arranged in a sequence of love hearts with shot-through arrows; her arrow-slit cannon ports were festooned with flags spelling out love banalities in purple and pink hues; her spiral staircases were carpeted in long tongues of pink fabric with salamanders kissing from stair to stair; her round-arched geminate windows were bedazzled with pink-power frillies including several pairs of love-me-tender knickers; her barbican was star-studded with statues of the finest pop singers throughout history, including a silver-plated monument to Lulu (four times her actual size); and her keep was where she kept her collection of gravity-defying 1970s platform shoes. I crossed the drawbridge and thumped the portal.

She appeared in a peach-patterned dress with a croissant in her hand and sized me up. “Writer?” she asked. I nodded. “Come,” she said, thus establishing the faithful lapdog and master relationship to follow. I was taken to medieval dining table where she went straight to work. Despite the décor, her accent felt at home in the surroundings. “I have notes for the book. Firstly, I don’t want anything that might besmirch my image as being down with the proletarians, I must appear to be on their wavelength at all times. Secondly, you must emphasise that my lifestyle is an ironic-slash-satirical squib against the upper classes and their wantonness, otherwise people might become suspicious as to my coveting my inherited wealth. Thirdly, I need you to talk up the importance of my musical career, dwelling on the artistry of my rap lyrics and so on, as that is the direction I will be heading in for the next round of my media blitz.”

We thrashed out the disappointingly uneventful history of Grenda and the Navel family who, apart from Grenda’s considerable media takings, the several mansions and other properties, had been rendered by kismet almost completely bankrupt. Born to a dim father with a fondness for the roulette wheel, and a mother prone to extravagant purchases such as plots of land on the surface of Neptune, a fleet of platinum-plated Mercedes-Benzes, an organisation running tours to museums for diabetic seniors, a collection of authentic spatulas from the Han dynasty, and so on, Grenda’s future was looking insecure from the beginning. When she turned nineteen, she realised that an alternative cash pipe was sought to save her from the embarrassment of having to stay with relatives in a different mansion while her parents began their descent into not having enough to buy vintage wines for a few weeks.

I was taken to meet her entourage. Her personal advisor, Brian Winston-Frye, was former publicist and spin doctor to Prince Harry, renowned for his adroit handling of the heroin affair, when the Prince was caught injecting the drug between his toes on the top of Buckingham Palace, shouting: “I feel free!” A polite man with expressionless eyes, he knew by instinct the correct manoeuvres to steer Grenda towards full media saturation. Her chef, Garland McVeigh, prepared her favourite meals—swan parfait with extra necks, doused in a crisis of violent gunge, a toffee apple suspended above an agitation of vegetable curry, a curlicue of wallabies in a nectarine coulis—and so on. Others included her political consultant Nigel Fromage, her hat appeaser Dana Trimble, her stocking selector Ian Gravy, her anecdote wrangler Bo Pringle, her nightwear specialist Oban Canny, her oboe trainer Juanita Crossroad, her candle snuffer Kay Horse, her horizontal waxer Jo Zander, her collar fluffer Liam Grim, and so on.

I spent the month scraping the barrel of her existence, plumbing her history for relevant material to include, alighting on anecdotes such as the time she raided her grandfather’s liqueurs aged seven and devoured them all, falling drunk in the gazebo, and the time she accidentally shot a parachutist instead of the grouse on her father’s hunting grounds, and the time she rescued three Jesus impersonators from a diamond mine (long story), and the time she emptied the contents of a porcelain vase (petunias and toenail clippings) over her nephew, and so on. I became quite close to her over the three weeks writing the book. Into the second week I reached over for an attempted kiss and she raised an admonishing finger and said: “Not, please.” That was the end of the matter. I was paid my £19 for the book and she went on to a successful career as a hip-hop provocateur with a line in frankly odious tweenage cosmetics.

T
HUS
began the slow dismantling of the ScotCall empire. Policing the crowds became a priority as the undirected and nonspecific anger rose in one long oddly rhythmical moan of incoherent slogans and songs. Including: