Paperboy (31 page)

‘They’re poor and have no friends, and have to live in a garret. A writer spends years perfecting his first novel, which is usually a failure, and then spends more years trying to recapture the magic of his first novel because the critics now all say he’s not as good as he used to be, or else he kills himself because he can’t find a publisher for his first novel, and dies a lonely miserable death, upon which his first novel becomes a great success, partly because the public knows he killed himself. Whereas a sizeable number of lyricists own yachts.’

‘I can see you’ve thought this through.’ She rubbed her eyes wearily, trying to imagine what should be done. ‘It’s probably best not to tell your father about your career plans. And I think your opinion of writers is not entirely accurate. I think we should start with what’s actually on the page, don’t you? Perhaps you need to find some new heroes.’

I could have told her I wanted to become a shepherd and she would have sought a positive solution. Drawing out a pen, she balanced the diary on her knee and made a new list on the last page. ‘Go back to the old library in Greenwich and try taking out a few of these.’

I looked at the list. ‘What are they?’

‘Things I read and loved. I never owned them, although I wish I had.’

I returned to East Greenwich Public Library, but when I got there I found its shelves emptier, its parquet floor dustier than I remembered. Its rooms were almost devoid of life.

The seat where my old friend the librarian always sat had now been taken by a young woman with elaborately arranged blonde hair. She was eating a Mars Bar and reading a copy of
NME
. ‘Oh, the Council retired Mrs Clarke, and she died a few weeks later,’ she told me casually when I asked. She took my mother’s list from me and studied it. ‘We don’t have many of these. We had a bit of a clear-out, gone more modern an’ that. Spy thrillers, hospital romances. There’s no call for the highbrow stuff any more. You wanna try a bookshop.’

Highbrow? I had never thought of my mother like that. I looked back at the list:

Scoop
by Evelyn Waugh

Orlando
by Virginia Woolf

The Best of Saki
by H. H. Munro

Labyrinths
by Jorge Luis Borges

Howard’s End
by E. M. Forster

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder

Brighton Rock
by Graham Greene

Hangover Square
by Patrick Hamilton

The Good Soldier
by Ford Maddox Ford

Thérèse Raquin
by Emile Zola

Twelfth Night
by William Shakespeare

Elizabeth and Essex
by Lytton Strachey

The Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham

Diary of a Provincial Lady
by E. M. Delafield

Music for Chameleons
by Truman Capote

Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert

C
hildhood’s End
by Arthur C. Clarke

Were these highbrow? Some thrillers, some dramas, some comedies, some true stories, a lot of exciting plots, most written in easily comprehensible English. Were these books that people honestly found too daunting to read now?

There were perhaps another thirty novels and collections on the list, many of which I had not heard of and could not find in suburban Greenwich, although I managed to turn up more in the sleazy Popular Book Centre than in the library. My favourite purchase was a paperback that sported a racy cover showing a pair of swaggering, melon-breasted strumpets with their hands on their hips. Above the title was a strapline that read: ‘He knew the truth about the city’s sauciest sexpots!’ It was a 1950s copy of Boswell’s Journals.

Over my teenage years I located the rest of them, one volume at a time, and stacked them carefully beneath my bed. As each book I read provided me with illumination, it also withered and destroyed any hope of ever achieving
an
easy familiarity with words. Such grace and erudition was so far beyond my scope that it was pointless to try creating even the palest imitation.

Shortly after reading Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando
, I dragged out a pile of my exercise books, filled with their witless, derivative stories, and burned them at the end of the garden, just as my father had burned my books in Westerdale Road.

As I watched the smoke curl in a thin blue trail over the treeline of the grey-green woods behind the house, I decided that my mother had done me a favour in revealing the gap between my own abilities and those of a real writer.

In that moment, my future was decided. The answer was so obvious that I wondered why on earth I had been struggling against it for so long. I would get a job in an office, where I at least stood a chance of being successful in a mediocre world. I would keep my head down, work hard, fade into comfortable invisibility and be content with that, like any other normal human being.

1
The archetypal music-hall-comic-turned film star, he now comes over as deeply annoying and rather sinister.

2
Coward once said, ‘Television is for appearing on, not for looking at.’ You’ve got to love him for that.

30

Being Normal

HAVING DECIDED THAT
I would live like the robotically predictable scientists I had written about, with none of the emotional upheaval experienced by my parents, the first thing I needed to do was stop hanging around with Simon, whom the rest of the school considered to be a cross between Peter Fonda and the Antichrist. Clearly, he was a bad influence and was preventing my rehabilitation. It was Simon’s fault that I committed my only crime. Without him, I would never have stolen the gun.

Well, it wasn’t a real one, but it was made of heavy black metal and was very realistic. We had gone into London’s West End, to Berman & Nathan, the theatrical costumiers, and had presented them with a forged letter purporting to be from our headmaster, saying that the school was staging a musical version of
Bonnie and Clyde
for Parents’ Day and we needed a gun. Incredibly they had given it to us, in a brown leather holster that fitted under a school jacket. I had no idea what we were expected to do with it. I assumed – rightly, as it transpired
–
that Simon was less intent on holding up a post office than swanning about in his bedroom and striking poses in front of his mirror.

The argument over the gun made it easier for me to stop seeing him. I concentrated on being as normal as possible, so normal that I began to creep people out. Instead of sticking to my throwback short-back-and-sides haircut, I grew my hair over my ears like everyone else of my age and tried a gormless centre parting. I bought flared jeans like everyone else (I had been living in black flannel trousers). I experimented with bead necklaces. I even tried watching television, because everyone seemed to like
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
¹
and quoted the catchphrases to each other at school, but the only way we could get BBC2 reception, albeit in a snowstormy, shimmering fashion, was still by holding the aerial in the corner of the attic ceiling, and staring so hard at the screen while standing on tiptoe made me feel as if I was experiencing some form of brain damage.

I went to the local pub with schoolfriends and tried drinking cider, but got so drunk that the dog didn’t recognize my walk when I came home and bit me on the face when I tried to crawl upstairs.

I bought a Rolling Stones album, but hated it so much that I quickly reverted to secretly taking
Die Fledermaus
out of Plumstead Public Library.

I stopped trying to build all the characters and sets from
Barbarella
in plasticine, and bought a stamp album instead, only I never got beyond the triangular one from Fiji.

I made an Airfix aircraft carrier with my father, and a balsa-wood glider, but got into trouble for cutting out
stencils
on the dining-room table that left imprints of the wings in the still-sticky varnish, like the ghosts of lost pilots.

I bought some aftershave, even though I was clearly years from growing a whisker. It was called Aqua Manda and smelled of rotten oranges. I got through a whole bottle in a single week before someone explained you were only supposed to use it on your chin.

I went to a club with some disreputable boys from the local comprehensive, but it was before the days of disco, and the music was Blind Faith and Colin Blunstone. After drinking lots of cough syrup, everyone just sat on the floor with their eyes half closed, nodding and pretending to be stoned.

I tried to show an interest in the local girls, but they were going through a feminist phase that involved patchouli oil and joss sticks and wearing wooden sandals with floor-length maroon-and-yellow tie-dye dresses, and not washing their long frizzy hair, so they all looked like Cornish lady tramps. Plus, they tended to shout ‘Stop objectifying me!’ if you tried to talk to them.

I solemnly smoked a joint purchased from Frank Knight, whose older brother was a customs officer who brought home tons of drugs. I managed to get through half of it before falling face-down into a bonfire, losing my credibility, my sideburns and one eyebrow in the process. When I came home that night, the dog bit me again because it could only smell smoke.

I tried to remember what made my schoolfriends laugh and go ‘Phwoar!’, and laughed more loudly than anyone else, which just made me weird and to be avoided. On one occasion I laughed so loudly that the conductor threw me off a number 75 bus because I was frightening the passengers.

Being ‘normal’ was supposed to make you popular, but
it
had the opposite effect. The only friend it attracted was a small troll-like boy in my class who kept asking me if I could come round to his house while his parents were out and wrestle with him naked.

I started writing again, tentatively, carefully. This time I would not do it just for myself, as I had with the densely narrated comics and volumes of film criticism, but would search out a proper audience.

As my parents had never given me much pocket-money, I needed to find a way of making some cash. Instead of taking a route as a paperboy, I studied the letters pages of local newspapers and noted that each week’s star letter could earn its writer five pounds. It was a simple matter of studying the form of each paper and understanding what they were looking for.

I had always been a good mimic, and could finally put the skill to use. I wrote dozens of letters to magazines up and down the country, from
Knitwear Monthly
to
Yachts and
Yachting
. Soon I was earning myself a schoolboy salary, while learning about everything from needlepoint to spinnakers. I did it guiltily, worrying that I might be robbing an old lady of the coveted position of star letter, but it was enough to give me renewed confidence. I wrote in masquerade as a college professor, a district nurse, a retired colonel, a dinner lady, a Chelsea Pensioner, a juvenile delinquent, a prisoner, a naval officer. I realized that I had spent so many years being quiet and watching people that I had picked up all kinds of useless information. It was time to wring out the sponge.

I began to quantify my personal feelings by making a list of all the things that made me happy, and when this proved far too bland and embarrassing (it included things like sunlight on wet streets and the smell of cut lemons) I made another list of all the things that made me fearful.

As this list threatened to run to several dozen pages,
I
began to understand the nature of my problem. I was scared of being alive, just like my father.

It was odd that, despite having read hundreds of examples of what could be considered blueprints for good writing, when I sat down at a table to write I could not recall any of the lessons I had absorbed. I wondered if it was because my life bore so little relationship to Captain Ahab’s or those of the five aristocratic families in
War and Peace
. After all, I was never likely to set to sea (unless you counted crossing the Thames on the Woolwich Ferry) or become embroiled in another Napoleonic invasion of Russia.

The answer lay in the idea that you planted little seeds of yourself and the people you knew in different plots. I did not know how my family would react to news that the world was about to end, for example, but I could take a pretty good guess. My mother would lay down stocks of tinned peaches and make sure that the house was tidy, as if preparing for guests. My father would attempt to build a bomb-proof bunker at the bottom of the garden, but would only get as far as finishing two plywood walls and an undercoated door before the apocalypse struck. Mrs Fowler, were she back from the grave, would blame Kath for being the underlying cause of the apocalypse. My brother would come up with the only practical and useful arrangements for the cataclysm. And me, I would probably pick up my notebook and start passively recording details without ever quite grasping the true importance of the event, just as I always did.

But what was the alternative? You didn’t need to fight a bull in order to write about fighting a bull. I had read enough of Ernest Hemingway’s prose to decide that writing was not the ideal tool for proving one’s manhood. English authors were never daunted by the invention of passive heroes. Dickens’s characters had plenty of strong
personality
traits but were pulled from shore to shore by the tidal forces of their turbulent times.