The House of Writers (29 page)

A mediocre Media Studies student, Archie was happy to dine out on this one senryu his whole life, earning royalties for the endless reprints and special book versions (including a famous woodcut with one word per page, accompanied by an illustration from artist Debbie Nimmo). He read his poem at Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street, The White House, the European Parliament, Tom Cruise’s funeral, and various venues where VIPs cumulated across the world. A new school of so-called Denissssesque poetry sprung up—a term to describe poems that dealt with hope in an “ambiguous” way for both the masses and the eggheads. To his eternal shame, Harold wrote a Denissssesque poem in an attempt to finagle a couple of schmaltzy billions, but was unable to publish due to the upsurge in imitators. Archie wrote nothing new for sixty years.

When writers became irrelevant to public discourse, Archie’s tours dried up. He lived on his royalties and Monte Carlo hedge-funds until the funds were hedged by gross inflation. He was forced to scrape a living in The House, working on a long-awaited second poem for his ten fans. Harold revelled in seeing his old nemesis reduced to paupery, and his festering lifelong resentment and ever-raging enviousness made a reconciliation impossible (and undesired). Archie failed to recognise Harold, as they had only met fleetingly on the Napier campus, and Archie quit his degree to be an international star in his third week of the first semester. Harold kept his distance at first, plotting the means to slight or humiliate his nemesis, until one afternoon, Archie came to Harold with a request to help him write his second poem. “I haven’t written a poem in almost sixty years. I never thought I’d have to,” he said. Harold set about his plan of destruction. “What you need is a change of direction,” he suggested. Archie was bewildered as he read Harold’s offering:

Fuck all you cuntheads
drown in your mass delusions
I’ll see you in Hell

“It’s a little, er, strong compared to my first poem. What worked about that one was the ambiguity,” Archie said, as though convincing himself.

“Yes, exactly. This is a more startling direction for you. No one will have expected such a radical departure from the hope etc. That’s what so marvellous.”

“And you’re sure I can take this from you?”

“My gift. I’ve been a huge admirer of yours for years.”

“Thank you.”

Archie sold the poem to his ten eager readers. Their initial response was confusion and fear at this startling new direction. However, as disciples of the great poet, they chose to stick by him and purchased “his” next:

No seriously
I hate all you fucking cunts
I piss on your graves

His readers were soon electrified by this
startling
new “direction” and believed his bleak and violent imagery was a necessary reflection of the harsh and unremitting post-capitalist world. Harold wearily forged ahead:

I mean all
you
lot
reading this now—fuck yourselves
and your mums and dads

His readers adored the meta-mention of themselves and the dark humour in this one. Despite feeling an incredulous rage that people were swallowing this drivel, Harold was in a position to earn more ghostwriting Archie’s comeback poems than his own works, so continued to write sweary fuck-yous in ten seconds for his supper over his own knotty constructions. He put together a chapbook of these in a deluxe edition and charged a fortune. Meanwhile, Archie managed to write his second poem:

Yesterday has gone
the sun giving way to rain
life nears its dour end

Despite being a far more appropriate “career”-capper, his ten readers reacted violently to this poem, “a saccharine retread of the first,” and refused to cough up a penny. Archie never wrote another poem again and Harold continued to bankroll his fallen enemy, conning his public with random abusive poems in ludicrous abundance. His fans viewed this as a “late spurt” in his career, and paid upwards of £2000 for what was seen as his crowning opus:

A late spurt my arse
these poems are fucking shite
you’re all clueless cunts

This is the poem Archie would be remembered for when he died two years later from a vitamin deficiency and a general air of abstracted melancholy. Against his wishes and at Harold’s behest, it was chiselled on his headstone.

W
E
are also recruiting team leaders. Are you the sort of person who could motivate an office of 200 operators into upping their daily targets by 5%?
Which of the following speeches would you use to motivate your workers?

Speech
I

“We are behind on our targets, people. It would be really nice if we could hit a target of 400+ inbound calls this week, what do you say? I am sure with a little coffee and pep we can do it!”

Speech
2

“Right, you telephonic runts, time to up the ante! I want an extra thousand calls answered this afternoon. Keep your advice concise, no flimflamming about with maybes and don’t-knows. You know what happens to the slackers: we sever their arteries and feed them to the vultures. Not really. But you know what I mean. Now let me tell you a story about The Little Boy That Couldn’t. Everyone got so fed up with his moaning about can’t-do-this, can’t-do-that, they kicked him out the village and he fell into a life of alcoholism, hard drug use, and depression, and ended up blowing his brains out under a bridge, having caught syphilis from a fifty-nine-year-old prostitute. You might find the moral of this fable instructional as you hit your targets this afternoon. Remember, we are The Little Boys and Girls Who Can. Up and up, people! Let’s punch those slackers in the face with our 500+! Answer them phones!”

Speech
3

“I am very disappointed at the slackness in this office. I thought you were really super-dooper phone-slingers capable of at least 450+ inbound calls, but I suppose I must have formed the wrong impression. I thought you were all cool dudes devoted to excellent customer service and helping to deliver an A plus plus experience. Oh well.”

Speech
4

“How do you think we’re going to out-perform our rivals with this kind of performance? For God’s sake, are you all inbred bumpkins with fifty sister-mothers living in a barn? If this kind of laziness persists, I am sacking one of you useless turnips one per hour on the hour. I have had it up to here with your timewasting and dummkopfing.”

Is this
you?

SCOTCALL.

YOUR FUTURE.

Recruitment Line:

0800 717 717

O
NCE
again I am not writing this novel,
The House of Writers.
I am not writing this novel (as stated in the previous sentence, and again, pointlessly, in this sentence), because the prospect of writing this novel (title:
The House of Writers)
fills me with apprehension and fear, and in addition to these formidable blocks, I am laziness personified. I am not a punctual or reliable (or handsome or prolific) writer, I am a deadbeat internet addict with a penchant for slouching back into bed to read better works than mine (works that deepen this apprehension and fear and laziness), or to listen to another indie rock LP while surfing the net to peruse books better than mine, because these books transport me from this mundane life of bed-slouching and never-ending blank pages calling out to me to be filled with words on a par with those I read in those aforesaid published volumes I covet so dearly. You might think that with this sort of defeatist attitude, I should be fearless in the face of the blank page, that I adopt a nihilist nothing-new-under-the-sun aesthetic, but this would be a naïve assertion, as there is no such thing as a nihilist nothing-new-under-the-sun aesthetic when the writer (me) lives in the permanent shadow of a thousand nihilistic nothing-new-under-the-sun innovators who have proven, in fucking outstanding prose (better than mine times like a million), that there is nothing new under the sun, so let us rave it up with divine demonstrations of literary prowess instead. The novel I am attempting and failing to write,
The House of Writers
(I repeat pointlessly, as I repeat this pointlessly, and this, and so on—hoping to fill up space and cribbing some cred for Stein-influenced repetitions [I hate Stein]) aspires to the incomplete, to the self-terminating void in the manner of other fictions by this author (me), whose entire corpus so far is an attempt confront the sheer pointlessness of new fiction in an age when books pour from every orifice, that all the Great Books have already been written, but battling on regardless, knowing this was the feeling in 1960, 1930, 1900, and that if his own drivel might in some small way contribute to his beloved Babel bookpile (Borges reference), then he will have done his work, despite that work consisting merely of comments about him not writing his work, and so on until you cannot take another sentence like this, where the author once again repeats the title of his unwritten novel:
The House of Writers.

W
ELL,
here we are at last!” the doctor said, cupping Erin’s shoulder for the final time, nudging her into a vacant room.

“Whose room is this?”

“Yours.”

“Repeat that?”

“Your room. Do you not remember? You went on a mad rampage throughout the building, braining writers with staplers, stapling their anuses and lips shut.”

“Erm, no ... I was looking for a stapler on the sixteenth floor.”

“Take a seat, Erin.”

Erin sat on her mattress, scanning its items: sugared apple scented candle; 32”
x
48” canvas art print of Terence Stamp in
The Limey;
a nine-cassette VHS boxset of
Dawson’s Creek;
a photo of Auntie Loretta Grahams in a pearl-studded fame; a plasticine rendering of the Sistine Chapel; various receipts on a kebab skewer sellotaped to an urn lid; a necklace monogrammed “Ayran” from her prankster ex-boyfriend; a thoroughly dog-eared copy of Joel Norst’s
Mississippi Burning;
a signed poster of ’90s one-hit-wonder Shanice; a cheap replica of a Turkish
seccade
Islamic prayer rug; a spanner in a plastic box marked “spatula”; the northwest corner of a ticket stub from a Republica concert with noticeable lipstick smear from Saffron; a bronze statuette of Olympic pole vaulter Renaud Lavillenie; an uneaten packet of fig rolls; and a wall-spanning series of photos showing a Sudanese tribe quizzically confronting a Volvo S70.

“Yes, these things remind me of me,” she said.

“Let me remind you. Two months ago, you worked on the fourteenth floor, where periodically people would pinch your staplers when you needed them to bind your manuscripts for prospective readers. Your manuscripts were sent to readers unbound, causing rage and cancellation of commissions. On one occasion you wrote a whole novel for a reader, and your stapler was filched, so you sent the chapters loose. The reader called you a flaming disgrace, accused you of slovenly presentation and withdrew her $50 cheque. You were unable to sell the novel to another reader. A week’s work, wasted. This regrettable cycle continued, with entire novels being refused and re-ƒ used. You were struggling to afford a pack of microwave noodles. You opted to spend your nights prowling the office to reconnect with your missing staplers. Some writers placed forcefields around their staplers, harnessing the power of magnetic particles to prevent a midnight attack; others set up laser beams, causing powerful skin-flaming damage to invading hands; others chained malnourished guard dogs to their desks; some slept with their staplers in intimate places; some hid their staplers in secret compartments in their desks, and so on. You chose the path of direct physical attack. You raided the stock-dump fields for a weapon to use against the thieves. Finding an old panini sandwich press that heated and fired flaming rocks at targets, you launched an assault on your fellow writers, braining them with rocks and stones at temperatures over 200°C, hoarding the staplers in your desk. You placed a barbed wire fence around your desk and attached mini-missiles to staplers and rigged up hole punches to squirt acid. When the office mounted a collective attack on your defences, you fled with your staplers on that aforementioned rampage, killing over seventy writers from the Sports Thriller department.”

“No great loss.”

“Ha! Quite. You managed to escape your room through an air vent that has now been stuffed with asbestos.”

“I thought I was looking for a stapler.”

“Yes, you have moments where you regress back to your earlier trauma. Sometimes, I will let you hold a stapler if you require consolation.”

“Oh.”

“Well. I will see you later.”

“Thanks.”

“And that concludes the tour!” He smiled.

“Ha.” She frowned and lay back on her mattress. She stared into the intense peepers of Terence Stamp. She opened the uneaten packet of fig rolls and popped a fig roll into her mouth. She ate the fig roll. From under the bed she heard the words: “Hello again.” A man rolled out. The man was the maniac who hated bios.

“Oh no.”

“Yes. I know about your bio. Let me remind you: ‘Erin Grahams writes soap operas featuring the occasional cannibal nurse. She has a fondness for escalators and have-a-go heroes. Her two kittens think she smells.’ ”

“I can explain.”

Erin had no time explain because Gerald had already begun to do his murdering.

I
RESIDED
in Lavelle in Southern France—a serene hamlet responsible for two hundred eclogues and thousands of middling watercolours. Having retired from four decades teaching nippers the alphabet and basic sums, I chose to settle there for the famous stillness (no falling leaf exceeded 0.002dB). I had endured hardships as a school teacher: the unwanted milk siphoned into pockets, blazers soaked in snot and tears, and shoes gummed up with play dough; in addition, I came to the realisation that I would forever be remembered for my occasional stuttering blow-outs, when I would leap from the chair to shout at troublemakers, waving my arms around madly, failing in anger to pronounce words while the kids laughed and taunted me. To teach for four decades is to open oneself up to the insatiable cruelty of the pre-tween mindset and endure persistent humiliations that no other professionals have to suffer. This is why I felt equipped to become a creative writer. I had no problem with being mocked or humiliated on the road to success. However, one incident forced me to retire from the peace I had cultivated.