The House of Writers (8 page)

Several writers (ex-smackheads) noticed and I had to deal with begging requests from those hoping to have their pages sprinkled with extra helpings of Big H—to turn them into instant bestsellers. After taking a few hundred backhanders, I decided to put a stop to this abuse of the scheme. I could only wrangle so much heroin from my Danish cartels at a time, and I had to be fair to each department. (Excessive H abuse had wiped out the experimental fiction department and precipitated their exile from the building—I didn’t have the heart to tell them this). I had saved The House from going under, taxing the writers’ profits to conduct crucial repairs on the building. As “General Manager,” Marilyn keeps morale ticking over—writing her annual reports (each of them a fiction since she has no idea what happens upstairs—she kips on the ground floor in a sleeping bag). So when I arrived at The House, I was hired as a general housekeeper and became self-titled Queen Momma of the building. Aside from running the drug operation, this entails making sure the other staff members—janitors, food-servers, and so on—are content with their mostly tedious lives. These people who aren’t chained to desks and have innocuous blue-collar occupations seem to me the most free. I made a home for myself on the roof, paying a simpleton named Gerald (more on him later) to construct a small cottage overlooking the wastelands of Crarsix. If I tilt my head heavenwards on summer nights, I can glimpse a rogue star through the carcinogenic layers of toxic silt, and my heart is almost happy.

H
AVING
survived the stock-dump fields, I emerged onto the roads where the ScotCall buses prowled. I hadn’t expected the barbed wire laid over the ditches—it was my intention to crouch there when the buses appeared. I had nowhere to lurk when the first bus came and the two operatives approached. I made it five minutes along the road before the bus stopped five paces before me and the operatives leapt out with their plastered smiles and blank clipboards, launching straight into their smarm-drenched spiels. “Howdy, traveller! Don’t you think a Better Life awaits you in the ScotCall compound? We offer our phone operatives a secure package and opportunities to explore the range of things available etc. . . .” I decided to attack. I could see the bald one making a move to cup my arm and the blonde one ditto. I took the bat and swung for the bald one’s shiny head. I brained him on the occiput and delivered repeated blows to his forehead until he was dead. I had to remember it wasn’t a person I was killing but a ScotCall vessel who would never think an original thought ever again and so was dead inside anyway.

The blonde one sprinted for the bus which sped off in panic. I improvised a solution. I changed into the ScotCall shirt and tie that the dead thing was wearing and headed along the road faking a cool exterior, despite the natural terror I felt at facing the Scot-Call cops when the helicopter or whatever descended from above to airlift me to whatever ScotCall rehabilitation prison centre existed in the bowels of their compound. A police car was on the scene in two minutes and despite my nervousness I kept up the façade. “Reports of a psycho with a baseball bat resisting ScotCall assistance?” he asked without the slightest glint of suspicion. “Yes officer!” I beamed. “I managed to overpower the thug and pulp his cranium. He is on the ground back there, hopefully feeling jolly remorseful for his actions!” The officer volunteered to drive me back to the ScotCall HQ, straight into the beckoning digits of the enemy. Since I had no reason to be lurking on the road four miles away, I agreed. I was to be delivered into a position of power in ScotCall with the one hope that I might be able to bluff my way to freedom, if I could think up a single convincing reason to go outside.

The policeman escorted me to the same compound where I worked before as a phone operator being lashed by malfeasant bugs. I used the dead thing’s pass to gain access to the building and reported to the manager for duties. The man who had witnessed me bashing in the head of his partner was there. He failed to notice that I had a different face. I had gained access and was wearing the proper outfit. This seemed to be enough for him.

F
IRST
to arrive, a frenetic Adam Thirlwell. One of the youngest at the conference, at 68, Adam retained his frazzled appearance, his eye luggage weighing in heavy, his intellectual Pete Doherty vibe still apparent. “People have been calling me an upstart for the last four decades because I published a first novel aged 24. Like I’m some perpetual prepubescent scamp having his hair ruffled by the wise-ass elders,” he said the moment he entered. “Hello Adam,” I said. “My last novel
Economics,
published two years ago, still came with patronising caveats like ‘Adam is the adolescent eager to appear smarter-than-thou’ and ‘the look-at-me-sir flash of his prose is endearing but childish.’ I’m almost 70! These dicks! I’ve skipped the mature artist and elder statesman phase. I will be buried an up-and-coming brat.” He knocked back two colas and lurched towards the back freezers where various prawns were dancing the cancan. Next entered the fighting fit Invernesian Ali Smith whose brio remained undimmed despite her long-awaited masterpiece
The The The The The The The The The,
a book containing a record number of uses of the definite article over its 1900 pages, began in 2020, having been lost forever in the technological meltdown. “I am maintaining a stoic outlook on the situation. In the Great Pantheon there are innumerable examples of lost masterworks, from Sappho to Perec. I am working on a novel instead about the disappearance of the masterpiece called
A A A A A A A A A,
because ‘a’ is the indefinite article, and suggests a series of impossible beginnings in attempting to reconstruct what is lost,” she said the minute she entered. “Hello Ali,” I said. “I look to novels like Christine Brooke-Rose’s tale of homeless dropouts
Next,
written without the verb ‘to have,’ where the constraint is integral to the intellectual and emotional core of the novel. There are no definite articles in my latest novel because there is no novel except a series of fragmented stuttered utterances from a work that with each day becomes little more than the spirit of a lost masterpiece.” And she went to brood by the broken biscuits, sucking on a custard cream. Next, Dave Eggers. His publishing house, having folded in 2018, left Eggers nursing a depression from which he failed to recover, penning a painful memoir,
A Heartbroken Genius of Staggering Woes,
which fast became a classic in the genre, keeping Eggers a millionaire, if not bringing him relief. “People say to me, Dave man, you got those riches, you can have four almond croissants for breakfast and only eat one of them, you can drive a Bentley around the hood flinging hundreddollar bills at the peasants, you can sing Shirley Temple’s loudest hits in the shower literally all afternoon without a tax man banging at your door demanding overdue cash due to you bunking off work and being fired and having no money, you can form your own publishing house that prints whimsical fiction about social issues and the dark underside of American families in misleadingly beautiful hardcover quarterlies, you can keep a unisex harem in your gazebo meeting the sexual needs of male and female visitors on a 24/7 basis, and I say to them, come on guys, it doesn’t matter if I can order nine fudge sundaes from the most expensive pâtisserie in Europe and fling them at Chris Ware’s miserable face, or import nine Ugandan rhinos and put them in a poorly choreographed home production of
Stomp,
or record an album of Half Man Half Biscuit covers with the reanimated corpses of David Bowie and Lionel Richie on backing vocals, or take a private flight to any of the world’s most breathtaking places with any number of supermodel girlfriends and drink nothing but champagne the whole time, if the brain is firing frowns, no-no-neurons, then no amount of cash-fuelled mirthmakers will lift Dave from his fragile funk,” Dave said after I offered him a cola. “I am looking forward to tonight, let me tell you.” Next to arrive, a nervous Zadie Smith, who had suffered at being dubbed a scenester, a constant on the literary stage, in the hippest anthologies and publishing ventures. “People accused me of being the axis of hip, or the acme of hip ... more like the acne of hip,” she said. Her last novel,
Endwesters,
was a searing satire on the re-rise of Islamophobia in the West End of London following the brief violence of an extremist Islam sect, received in the papers as “issue-tainment” and latching on to current affairs. “Complete arsecake. I have never cleaved to the zeitgeist. I write about people and their people problems. I am not some rabid trendlicker.” She approached the chocolate and ate a piece, assuming herself to be one of the four
éminences grises
. I hadn’t the heart to disabuse her.

I
AM
known around the department for being a face-chewing Medusa who crushes dreams in a vice until the last few hopeful crumbs fall in hopeless heaps on the floor and their dreamers vow never again to dream of something I never fucking sanctioned. This isn’t even half the truth. I am the best team leader in ScotCall and in under a decade I will have ascended to the upper echelons among the caviar-munching conquerors pouring Romanée-Conti down the spines of lubricated vassals and laughing into the tear-encrusted lids of peasants. This is who I am.

A little preKirstery, if you please (and I do). In 2020, several years after ScotLand (then called) achieved political independence, a referendum was called to determine whether the country should be converted into the world’s largest call centre, fielding the customer queries of over two hundred multinationals to prevent the nation from sliding into third-world status as the national debt racked up to over two squillion zillion. (The natural resources of the nation had been stolen by Denmark and Holland after several cunning midnight thefts, leaving ScotLand bereft). After a unanimous
Yes
vote, ScotLand was rebranded ScotCall and each citizen was put to work in the call centres that usurped all functioning businesses in the country, taking only one fucking heroic week to transform the bankrupted hotels and shops of cities and counties into ScotCall offices. Until the 2039 meltdown, schools and universities remained open while the citizens adjusted to this change.

The technological meltdown, labelled prosaically by the
Daily Telegraph
“technogeddon,” occurred globally. On May 2
^nd
2039, every piece of electrical equipment went fuckadoodlebang at the exact same moment, causing an immediate reversion to the Dark Ages (only with battery-powered torches and not quite so many candles or pagan sacrifices). There are various accounts of what happened depending on which attention-seeking broadsheet hack desperate to make a name for himself with the most original stream of spurious bullshit you listen to. Some people believe that the world’s technology manufacturers designed their equipment to spontaneously explode on May 2
^nd
2039, claiming over nine trillion in insurance money, with each conspirator pocketing a portion of the insurance profits, fleeing the developed world to eke out a simple life oiling the bronze bums of hookers in tropical countries. This theory is hard to swallow—without access to technology, life in hot climes would not be as exclusive and easy for an embezzler
manqué.
Some twits believe an enterprising squirrel forged its way into the master computer at Microsoft and had cable salad for lunch, causing the mass destruction of every piece of electrical equipment in the world with a few naughty chomps. Twits. Other crackpots believe that aliens beamed their destruct-o-ray over the planet; that a drunk and bitter Bill Gates pressed the “fuck-’em-all” button; that coders had accidentally omitted May 2
^nd
2039 from their scripts. The truth is impossible to discern. Most likely the insurance story is true— commonplace greed is usually at the heart of most global fuckups.

After the meltdown, The Great Repair (first capitalised by the
Daily Express)
began and ScotCall entered the first phase of its worldwide omnipotence. ScotCall’s computer system had gone bangadoodlefuck along with the rest, but their phones had emerged intact thanks to the existing prewar lines still active in ScotLand. This allowed ScotCall to storm ahead providing its top-flight customer service, dealing first with all manner of queries on how to fix the two billion or so devices that had exploded. Computers were beyond repair, by and large, and those deemed “responsible” for manufacturing computers had been rounded up in a mass public execution by President George Bush Jr. Jr. and copycat butcherings around the world followed to deal with the last of the technospazzes and internitwits. This meant the number of people alive who could repair or manufacture computers was zero, so older technologies had to be reverted to: hence the re-rise of the phones and the triumph of ScotCall. Education was abolished throughout the world to help economies recover from the crash. It made sense in times of crisis for people to work
en masse
in factories, to keep the poorest people at a certain level of intellectual inferiority, and to reserve education for the upper classes until the economies returned to a productive bustle.

Those born leaders with no tolerance for overly smug and smart people, phenomenally dim and plodding people, or super-humanly average and boring people, were recruited to manage the phone monkeys at ScotCall. I was hired in the winter of 2039 and within a week people cowered at my approach and lived in fear of being caught on my verbal skewer. In those early days, arrogant self-entitlement had to be stamped out—high-ranking businesspeople working alongside their employees were prime shitterbuggers. Tough managers like me specialised in pricking the pompousness of pompous pricks and putting everyone in their place. Those working in low-level occupations such as cleaners were able to retain their prior positions in ScotCall, whereas blue-collar workers or anyone with an inoffensive accent able to speak in a semi-coherent manner on the telephone was set to monkeying.