The House of Writers (4 page)

I spearheaded a resistance campaign, compiling leaflets on what the immigrant population had done to drag England from the economic marshes, and what the absence of immigrants was going to mean for the future of the nation. TBB, noting the increasing drug problem, decided to replace state benefits with state-supplied heroin (6-MAM content diluted—about as effective as snorting talcum powder). I was in the position of being homeless, under the thumb of the government’s useless smack that still provided enough for a minor kick but left one gasping for more, and performing their dirty work. TBB had bred a generation of obedient ratlike drones willing to persecute immigrants for their latest fix. Things turned violent (as was TBB’s intention) and soon there were murders and witch-hunts from crazed junkies dying to get their veins on diluted heroin. I decided it was better to burgle homes and beat up white people to get my hands on money, with which I could attend a rehabilitation programme. These were run underground, since the TBB didn’t want the youth population to recover from heroin while it kept things under control and proved profitable.

I soon recovered from this and headed into ScotCall to take my chances at The House.

U
PON
completing
Kurious Kat Learns About Industrial Waste Dumping
and
Erectile Dysfunction: A Pop-up Book,
I elected to leave The House and head for the sea. I had a notion that there might be a better life for me somewhere out “there.” In the past I had read the ScotCall slogan A Better Life For You is Here (Not Out “There”) and fallen into their trap. Answering phone calls about the logistics of having sex in a chimney, or how to remove tarragon stains from The Koran, or if the battle of Culloden was ever restaged using weasels, or if the finest word in the English language was “drosophila,” or if tea was T-shaped, or if Atlas ever dropped the sky, or if nasal copulation was unhealthy, is not a Better Life unless one happens to have cabbages for brains. I moved to The House having read the slogan “A Better Life Than at ScotCall is
Here”
and settled down to writing four bodice-rippers set on Neptune per week for a cash-rich slob named Jericho—a Better Life in comparison to an earful of Kirstys branding me an incompetent lackey for failing to answer questions about where Tim had hidden the marmalade, or if spark plugs qualified as real plugs, or if air had a smell. I had no intention of remaining at The House forever. I had to take my chance in the wilds and find the sea. I had heard rumours that a commune had sprung up “there” devoted to the simple life where people lived off the remaining land that hadn’t been used to store malfunctioning toasters and digi-pets.

I made the decision to flee when slobby Jericho flung a bodice-ripper at my face, refusing to pay for my services due to the paucity of bosoms in the first four pages (I had made the mistake of attempting to weave a plot between the scenes of heaving bosoms and bodices being ripped from their wearers). I packed up my clothes (two shirts, two pants) and savings (twelve pounds) and took to the Crarsix roads. I had to make the trip on foot as all buses took passengers direct to the local ScotCall Training and Advanced Brainwashing Centre whether that was your desired destination or not. I would have to be careful to avoid scavenger buses along the hinterland routes, where buses stopped and operatives chased you along the road trying to “coerce” you into signing up as an operative using their arms to “coerce” you into the buses.

The morning of my liberation was overcast. I was grateful for the cold winds so I could wear (and not have to carry) my coat. I headed along the asphalt road towards the first hectare of stock-dump fields. I had armed myself with a bat whittled from my (former) desk to protect myself from the onslaught of rogue digi-pets, electric toothbrushes, and any other menacing hardware-gone-bad that might wish to feast on my throat. The damp weather would keep the attack count low. The summer heat drove these appliances to fighting frenzies as the sun fried their wires and insides. I showed no mercy, warning the surrounding lurkers by crushing a stray digicat to smithereens with my bat—deaf to its plaintive pleas as I hammered its wires and whiskers into the dirt and performed the
coup de grâce
with my jackboot. I continued along the road until an electric hand fan whirred up from the disconcerting quiet and tried slicing out my eyes. I swung my bat around crazily, hitting the pest with the force of a baseball pitcher, and pummelled in its rotors once it landed. I flung its carcass into the field to dissuade its family, but two larger hand fans rose up and tried slicing out my brain in revenge. I readied myself for their approach and powered the bat into action, catching them in a quick swivel. I killed the family, moseyed onward in fear, and emerged from the stock-dump fields unscathed.

A furious washing machine lumbered near hoping to ensnare me in its rinse cycle, but I was able to avoid its feeble attack merely by proceeding at my usual walking pace, and looked on amused as it pursued me for a mile, clattering in desperation until its mechanism fried and the door collapsed from its hinges, leaving a molten plasticky lump bubbling on the asphalt. A microwave spat flaming batteries onto the road, two of which singed my trousers. I noticed that several of the appliances had learned to use other less mobile scraps as weapons and that the overall attitude towards humans had become one of outright hostility, even among the appliances designed to assist deaf or blind people. The prospect of sentience among these discarded write-offs was terrifying.

I
AM
Saul Morton and I should be in a box alongside one hundred other writers, instead of this boxroom in The House (which, admittedly, is not much roomier than a coffin), where I now relate the following.

I recall the notorious
Farewell, Author!
conference of 2045, when the last two publishing houses closed their doors, and The House was the one remaining place to which these once-loved scribes could retreat. Due to staff cutbacks, Random House and Penguin Books relocated into one office in the town of Cumbernauld, where office space was cheap due to a recent infestation of an unidentified species of irritant believed to have bred with super-size cockroaches in the back of basement fridges to form a rat-roach cross-breed of some immense repugnance. Created in the mid-1950s to dump the unwanted scum from Glasgow’s overburdened slums, Cumbernauld earned worldwide fame for its surrealist shopping centre, where a substation, car park, outbuilding, WC, and old office block had “merged” to form a structure that offered millions a sense of eschatological enlightenment—the realisation that their destinies must be sought elsewhere, as far from the town of Cumbernauld as possible, that escape must come in the fastest time between leaving the shopping centre, collecting their things, and taking the first train free to a better place—wherever being irrelevant, wherever being better. The publishers took the one remaining photocopier that hadn’t been taken in the mass liquidation of their assets and set about retaining the reputation of their mutual houses—in past times, some of the most significant literature had been printed there, most of which had been used as fuel for stoves during the brief reversion to medieval times that followed in the wake of the technological meltdown. An ex-Random House author
(Free to Be Dead,
2029,
Fields of Mould,
2037, and
Broken Doilies,
2042), I volunteered to assist in setting up this last hoorah.

Disused supermarket Fossilfoods was the venue for the conference, where the publishers set about toasting their remaining authors, all of whom had to be dropped due to their skinnied budget of four pounds between them for annual expenses. The publishers’ task was to recall snippets from the best books published in past times, and to bind these passages together in a valiant attempt to keep the stove-bound classics in their own (a few other people’s) recall. There had been a whispered agreement among the authors beforehand that that evening each of them would write their final few words and commit suicide
en masse.
I had shaken hands with each author in turn and made that promise too, despite being only 43 years old, compared to most of the pensioner-age authors in the room.

This depressing event on the loom, I helped Julian Porter and Rupert Broth establish a tone of celebration. I siphoned near-expired Fossilfoods cola into plastic cups and placed pineapple chunks and cocktail sausages on toothpicks. Four chocolates had been found in the storeroom and were placed on a plate for the
éminences grises
to feast upon. A banner had been stapled up over the back wall showing the title of the event in the plural (in a rush Julian pluralised both words, so the banner read
Farewells Authors!),
and a cassette recorder with a mix of classical and party tunes, with Whigfield’s “Saturday Night” rubbing up against Chopin’s Nocturne B minor Op. 9 No. 3, creating a contrasting tone of mirth and mournful respect for the suicidal night ahead. I tried fixing the crackle-fizz of the overhead lights and shooing the rat-roaches into the storeroom before the authors arrived (and failed). Foods remained in Fossilfoods’ unplugged freezers—bags of frozen peas and onion rings floated in low pools of water, various moulds had overgrown vegetables and baked potatoes, and unappealing lifeforms were reproducing in the sweat-and-sour curries and hotpots.

The door opened at 6.30pm.

A
N
incident with lighter fluid and my duvet (Marco was furious about me publishing a slapstick spoof featuring the Duke of Winchester—“his second cousin four times renovated”) nudged me to the second floor, where the easygoing guys and gals let me try out their mode. The Middlebrow floor is a modern office with strictly purple walls and morale-boosting petunias curling in table vases, while pictures of sunsets and sunrises over fields, oceans, and scenic country landscapes with little quotes attached hang between the offices and boardrooms. Most prominent is the life-sized sunset at the corridor’s end, blazing the caption:
The sun only shines in the hearts of the hopeful.
As you enter, an enormous smile named Joe will emerge from an office holding a cup with the slogan
Catch your dreams like butterflies
and say: “Hey dude. What s’up?” If he likes you (he likes everyone), he’ll lead you towards an open-plan office where unmanly purple pouffes, sink-into sofas with throw pillows, and bean bags are arranged in a circle of eight around five or six desks, crowded with unnecessarily cutesy trinkets like cuddly-toy dogs, baby photos and potpourri bowls.

The others will be sitting on a circular sofa drinking coffee from similarly sloganned mugs:
On the other side of goodbye is hello. Don’t milk your spilt tears. Tomorrow is yesterday’s redeemer.
From unseen speakers, a fusion of Appalachian and Celtic folk music will soothe your ears. Doreen has a high fringe and a concerned face, Julia no fringe and a very smiley face, and Rick wears his goatee like a chin gazebo. Joe is handsome and happy.

Your bedroom is equally mood-lifting: a cosy space where sponge-painted clouds puff up to the ceiling to meet patterned stars in astronomically inaccurate formations. On each cloud (named after an agreeably fluffy concept) is a creamy “dreaming” button. On my first day, I pressed the cloud TRANQUILITY and harp music swirled out a speaker at such a punishing volume, my heart rate shot up to a decidedly un-mellow 1000BPM. I panicked trying to silence the frantic, celestial strum of the harps and pressed the cloud WORDS, whereupon a cast of basso-to-contralto voices chanted: “Hope, Love, Change, Optimism, Power, You,” in a loop. I hit (punched) RELAX. A boom of crashing waves, cawing seagulls, and raging storms sounded over the harp and hopeful voices. I hit TRANQUILITY again, only to increase the volume of the harp, and tried holding LOVE, where a gospel choir belted out, “Say the woo-oo-oord, the word is love!” in all their Beatley power. Rick raced through and switched them off, calming me down with a mug of “anti-stress soup” and a hug. Hopefully this won’t happen to you!

Ideas are plucked from stories in the newspapers and rehashed into emotionally enriching novels. Every morning over “butterumptiously yummy” (says Julia) brioches and pancakes, they discuss potential bestsellers. Doreen had read in the
ScotCall Herald
about new benefit changes whereby the long-term unemployed were forced to “piggyback” the homeless—carry someone around on their backs, feed and bathe the person, and help him or her perform mobile begging or selling
ScotCall Dailies
on the hoof. These unfortunates had their spines damaged by the obstreperous behaviour of the drug users and alcoholics, and were treated like horses or human rickshaws and bullied into robbing off-licences and stealing food. The minimum piggyback time was eight hours a day. “That would play havoc with the old spine,” Rick rightly said. Julia’s idea for a novel was to take “an unemployed man—a lovely trained research assistant down on his luck—and make him piggyback a ruffian. Over the course of the book, the two become friends and overcome their mutual class conflicts. Work towards reintegration. Maybe they start a double act as jugglers or street tricksters!” Everyone smiled (except me—I was still shell-shocked from earlier, harps ringing in my ears). “That would warm some cockles!” Joe said.

Doreen’s idea: “There’s this story about Los Angeles being too hot for the residents and everyone moving north to Alaska. Apparently the plan is to have African immigrants leave their barren countries and take up residence in Los Angeles, form communities there. I considered how droll it might be for them to take over Hollywood. My hero, a young film-maker called Umbütö or something like that, starts making blockbuster films and the Third World debt is slowly repaid when his movies become worldwide successes. Over the course of several films, Third World debt is paid off, and proper cities with shops and houses can be built in these appalling countries. The West learns an important lesson about the value of generosity.” Everyone smacked their lips (except me). “Just goes to show, guys, that with a little imagination and creativity, you really can move the world,” Rick said.