Piranha to Scurfy (2 page)

Ribbon walked to Leytonstone tube station and sat on the seat to wait for a train. He had decided to change at Holborn and take the Piccadilly Line to Piccadilly Circus. From there it was only a short walk to Dillon’s and a further few steps to Hatchard’s. He acknowledged that Hatchard’s was the better shop, but Dillon’s guaranteed a greater anonymity to its patrons. Its assistants seemed indifferent to the activities of customers, ignoring their presence most of the time and not apparently noticing whether they stayed five minutes or half an hour. Ribbon liked that. He liked to describe himself as reserved, a private man, one who minded his own business and lived quietly. Others, in his view, would do well to be the same. As far as he was concerned, a shop assistant was there to take your money, give you your change, and say thank you. The displacement of the High Street or corner shop by vast impersonal supermarkets was one of few modern innovations he could heartily approve.

The train came. It was three-quarters empty, as was usual at this hour. He had read in the paper that London Transport was thinking of introducing Ladies Only carriages in the tube.Why not Men Only carriages as well? Preferably, when you considered what some young men were like, Middle-aged Scholarly Gentlemen Only carriages. The train stopped for a long time in the tunnel between Mile End and Bethnal Green. Naturally, passengers were offered no explanation for the delay. He waited a long time for the Piccadilly Line train, apparently because of some signaling failure outside Cockfosters, but eventually arrived at his destination just before eleven-thirty.

The sun had come out and it was very hot. The air smelled of diesel and cooking and beer, very different from Leytonstone, on the verges of Epping Forest. Ribbon went into Dillon’s, where no one showed the slightest interest in his arrival, and the first thing to assault his senses was an enormous pyramidal display of Kingston Marle’s
Demogorgon.
Each copy was as big as the average-sized dictionary and encased in a jacket printed in silver and two shades of red. A hole in the shape of a pentagram in the front cover revealed beneath it the bandaged face of some mummified corpse. The novel had already been reviewed, and the poster on the wall above the display quoted the
Sunday Express
’s encomium in exaggeratedly large type: READERS WILL HAVE FAINTED WITH FEAR BEFORE PAGE 10.

The price, at £18.99, was a disgrace, but there was no help for it. A legitimate outlay, if ever there was one. Ribbon took a copy and, from what a shop assistant had once told him were called “dump bins,” helped himself to two paperbacks of books he had already examined and commented on in hardcover. There was no sign in the whole shop of Eric Owlberg’s
Paving Hell.
Ribbon’s dilemma was to ask or not to ask. The young woman behind the counter put his purchases in a bag, and he handed her Mummy’s direct-debit Visa card. Lightly, as if it were an afterthought, the most casual thing in the world, he asked about the new Owlberg.

“Already sold out, has it?” he said with a little laugh.

Her face was impassive. “We’re expecting them in tomorrow.”

He signed the receipt B. J. Ribbon and passed it to the girl without a smile. She need not think he was going to make this trip all over again tomorrow. He made his way to Hatchard’s, on the way depositing the Dillon’s bag in a litter bin and transferring the books into the plain plastic holdall he carried rolled up in his pocket. If the staff at Hatchard’s had seen Dillon’s name on the bag he would have felt rather awkward. Now they would think he was carrying his purchases from a chemist or a photographic store.

One of them came up to him the minute he entered Hatchard’s. He recognized her as the marketing manager, a small, good-looking blond woman with an accent. The very faintest of accents, but still enough for Ribbon to be put off her from the start. She recognized him too, and to his astonishment and displeasure addressed him by his name.

“Good morning, Mr. Ribbon.”

Inwardly he groaned, for he remembered having had forebodings about this at the time. On one occasion he had ordered a book, he was desperate to see an early copy, and had been obliged to say who he was and give them his number. He said good morning in a frosty sort of voice.

“How nice to see you,” she said. “I think you may be in search of the new Kingston Marle, am I right?
Demogorgon
? Copies came in today.”

Ribbon felt terrible. The plastic of his carrier was translucent rather than transparent, but he was sure she must be able to see the silver and the two shades of red glowing through the cloudy film that covered it. He held it behind his back in a manner he hoped looked natural.

“It was
Paving Hell
I actually wanted,” he muttered, wondering what rule of life or social usage made it necessary for him to explain his wishes to marketing managers.

“We have it, of course,” she said with a radiant smile and picked the paperback off a shelf. He was sure she was going to point out to him in schoolmistressy fashion that he had already had it in hardcover, she quite distinctly remembered, and why on earth did he want another copy. Instead she said, “Mr. Owlberg is here at this moment, signing stock for us. It’s not a public signing, but I’m sure he’d love to meet such a constant reader as yourself. And be happy to sign a copy of his book for you.”

Ribbon hoped his shudder hadn’t been visible. No, no, he was in a hurry, he had a pressing engagement at twelve-thirty on the other side of town, he couldn’t wait, he’d pay for his book.... Thoughts raced through his mind of the things he had written to Owlberg about his work, all of it perfectly justified of course, but galling to the author. His name would have lodged in Owlberg’s mind as firmly as Owlberg’s had in his. Imagining the reaction of
Paving Hell
’s author when he looked up from his signing, saw the face, and heard the name of his stern judge made him shudder again. He almost ran out of the shop. How fraught with dangers visits to the West End were! Next time he came up he’d stick to the City or Bloomsbury. There was a very good Waterstones in the Grays Inn Road. Deciding to walk up to Oxford Circus tube station and thus obviate a train change, he stopped on the way to draw money out from a cash dispenser. He punched in Mummy’s pin number—her birth date, 1-5-27—and drew from the slot one hundred pounds in crisp new notes.

Most authors to whom Ribbon wrote his letters of complaint either did not reply at all or wrote back in a conciliatory way to admit their mistakes and promise these would be rectified for the paperback edition. Only one, out of all the hundreds, if not thousands who had had a letter from him, had reacted violently and with threats. This was a woman called Selma Gunn. He had written to her, care of her publisher, criticizing quite mildly her novel
A Dish of Snakes,
remarking how irritating it was to read so many verbless sentences and pointing out the absurdity of her premise that Shakespeare, far from being a sixteenth-century English poet and dramatist, was in fact an Italian astrologer born in Verona and a close friend of Leonardo da Vinci’s. Her reply came within four days, a vituperative response in which she several times used the f-word, called him an ignorant swollen-headed nonentity, and threatened legal action. Sure enough, on the following day a letter arrived from Ms. Gunn’s solicitors, suggesting that many of his remarks were actionable, all were indefensible, and they awaited his reply with interest.

Ribbon had been terrified. He was unable to work, incapable of thinking of anything but Ms. Gunn’s letter and the one from Evans Richler Sabatini. At first he said nothing to Mummy, though she, of course, with her customary sensitive acuity, could tell something was wrong.Two days later he received another letter from Selma Gunn. This time she drew his attention to certain astrological predictions in her book, told him that he was one of those Nostradamus had predicted would be destroyed when the world came to an end next year and that she herself had occult powers. She ended by demanding an apology.

Ribbon did not, of course, believe in the supernatural but, like most of us, was made to feel deeply uneasy when cursed or menaced by something in the nature of necromancy. He sat down at his computer and composed an abject apology. He was sorry, he wrote, he had intended no harm, Ms. Gunn was entitled to express her beliefs; her theory as to Shakespeare’s origins was just as valid as identifying him with Bacon or Ben Jonson. It took it out of him, writing that letter, and when Mummy, observing his pallor and trembling hands, finally asked him what was wrong, he told her everything. He showed her the letter of apology. Masterful as ever, she took it from him and tore it up.

“Absolute nonsense,” she said. He could tell she was furious. “On what grounds can the stupid woman bring an action, I should like to know? Take no notice. Ignore it. It will soon stop, you mark my words.”

“But what harm can it do, Mummy?”

“You coward,” Mummy said witheringly. “Are you a man or a mouse?”

Ribbon asked her, politely but as manfully as he could, not to talk to him like that. It was almost their first quarrel—but not their last.

He had bowed to her edict and stuck it out in accordance with her instructions, as he did in most cases. And she had been right, for he heard not another word from Selma Gunn or from Evans Richler Sabatini. The whole awful business was over, and Ribbon felt he had learned something from it: to be brave, to be resolute, to soldier on. But this did not include confronting Owlberg in the flesh, even though the author of
Paving Hell
had promised him in a letter responding to Ribbon’s criticism of the hardcover edition of his book that the errors of fact he had pointed out would all be rectified in the paperback. His publishers, he wrote, had also received Ribbon’s letter of complaint and were as pleased as he to have had such informed critical comment. Pleased, my foot! What piffle! Ribbon had snorted over this letter, which was a lie from start to finish. The man wasn’t pleased; he was aghast and humiliated, as he should be.

Ribbon sat down in his living room to check in the paperback edition for the corrections so glibly promised. He read down here and wrote upstairs. The room was almost as Mummy had left it. The changes were only in that more books and bookshelves had been added and in the photographs in the silver frames. He had taken out the pictures of himself as a baby and himself as a schoolboy and replaced them with one of his parents’ wedding, Daddy in air force uniform, Mummy in cream costume and small cream hat, and one of Daddy in his academic gown and mortarboard. There had never been one of Ribbon himself in similar garments. Mummy, for his own good, had decided he would be better off at home with her, leading a quiet sheltered life, than at a university. Had he regrets? A degree would have been useless to a man with a private income, as Mummy had pointed out, a man who had all the resources of an excellent public library system to educate him.

He opened
Paving Hell.
He had a foreboding before he had even turned to the middle of chapter 1, where the first mistake occurred, that nothing would have been put right. All the errors would still be there, for Owlberg’s promises meant nothing, he had probably never passed Ribbon’s comments on to the publishers; and they, if they had received the letter he wrote them, had never answered it. For all that, he was still enraged when he found he was right. Didn’t the man care? Was money and a kind of low notoriety—for you couldn’t call it fame—all he was interested in? None of the errors had been corrected. No, that wasn’t quite true; one had. On page 99 Owlberg’s ridiculous statement that the One World Trade Center tower in NewYork was the world’s tallest building had been altered. Ribbon noted down the remaining mistakes, ready to write to Owlberg the next day. A vituperative letter it would be, spitting venom and catechizing illiteracy, carelessness, and a general disregard (contempt?) for the sensibilities of readers. And Owlberg would reply to it in his previous pusillanimous way, making empty promises, for he was no Selma Gunn.

Ribbon fetched himself a small whiskey and water. It was six o’clock. A cushion behind his head, his feet up on the footstool Mummy had embroidered, but covered now with a plastic sheet, he opened
Demogorgon.
This was the first book by Kingston Marle he had ever read, but he had some idea of what Marle wrote about. Murder, violence, crime, but instead of a detective detecting and reaching a solution, supernatural interventions, demonic possession, ghosts, as well as a great deal of unnatural or perverted sex, cannibalism, and torture. Occult manifestations occurred side by side with rational, if unedifying, events. Innocent people were caught up in the magical dabblings, frequently going wrong, of so-called adepts. Ribbon had learned this from the reviews he had read of Marle’s books, most of which, surprisingly to him, received good notices in periodicals of repute. That is, the serious and reputable critics engaged by literary editors to comment on his work praised the quality of the prose as vastly superior to the general run of thriller writing. His characters, they said, convinced, and he induced in the reader a very real sense of terror, while a deep vein of moral theology underlay his plot. They also said that his serious approach to mumbo jumbo and such nonsense as evil spirits and necromancy was ridiculous, but they said it en passant and without much enthusiasm. Ribbon read the blurb inside the front cover and turned to chapter 1.

Almost the first thing he spotted was an error on page 2. He made a note of it. Another occurred on page 7.Whether Marle’s prose was beautiful or not he scarcely noticed; he was too incensed by errors of fact, spelling mistakes, and grammatical howlers. For a while, that is. The first part of the novel concerned a man living alone in London, a man in his own situation whose mother had died not long before.There was another parallel: the man’s name was Charles Ambrose. Well, it was common enough as a surname, much less so as a baptismal name, and only a paranoid person would think any connection was intended.

Charles Ambrose was rich and powerful, with a house in London, a mansion in the country, and a flat in Paris. All these places seemed to be haunted in various ways by something or other, but the odd thing was that Ribbon could see what that reviewer meant by readers fainting with terror before page 10. He wasn’t going to faint, but he could feel himself growing increasingly alarmed.
Frightened
would be too strong a word. Every few minutes he found himself glancing up toward the closed door or looking into the dim and shadowy corners of the room. He was such a reader, so exceptionally well-read, that he had thought himself proof against this sort of thing. Why, he had read hundreds of ghost stories in his time. As a boy he had inured himself by reading first Dennis Wheatley, then Stephen King, not to mention M. R. James. And this
Demogorgon
was so absurd, the supernatural activity the reader was supposed to accept so pathetic, that he wouldn’t have gone on with it but for the mistakes he kept finding on almost every page.