Tom Raymond's Writing

Impractical Criticism

2011-08-19T10:21:00.001+01:00

This is the first paragraph of a relatively recent, reasonably well-regarded novel. (This quote is already in the public domain, on Amazon.com, so I hope that I'm not breaching any copyright.)

"Five o'clock and freezing. Piledrivers and jackhammers were blasting into the wasteland by the side of West Cross Route in Shepherd's Bush. With a bare ten months to the scheduled opening of Europe's largest urban shopping centre, the sand-covered site was showing only skeletal girders and joists under red cranes, though a peppermint facade had already been tacked on to the eastward side. This was not a retail park with trees and benches, but a compression of trade in a city centre, in which migrant labour was paid by foreign capital to squeeze out layers of profit from any Londoner with credit. At their new "Emirates" Stadium, meanwhile, named for an Arab airline, Arsenal of North London were kicking off under floodlights against Chelsea from the West, while the goalkeepers - one Czech, one Spanish - jumped up and down and beat their ribs to keep warm. At nearby Upton Park, the supporters were leaving the ground after a home defeat; and only a few streets away from the Boleyn Ground, with its East End mixture of sentimentality and grievance, a solitary woman paid her respects to a grandfather - come from Lithuania some eighty years ago - as she stood by his grave in the overflowing cemetery of the East Ham Synagogue. Up the road in Victoria Park, the last of the dogwalkers dragged their mongrels back to flats in Hackney and Bow, grey high-rises marked with satellite dishes, like ears cupped to the outside world in the hope of gossip or escape; while in a minicab that nosed along Dalston Road on its way back to base, the dashboard thermometer touched minus two degrees."

What do you think? Engaging? Involving? Or do you have reservations? For me, what's missing (and what's missing to an alarming degree) is any sense, as Joyce once said, that this has been written. "Blasting" is a cliché and "wasteland", too, is so well-worn that it is almost meaningless. "To squeeze out layers of profit" is vague; how does this work, exactly, when applied to a human being? The mention of the arab airline is clumsy - a nod to the fact that this is a state-of-the-nation novel - and the business about the East End's sense of "sentimentality and grievance" is a laboured, pseudo-philosophical make-weight. "Dragged", too... Well, you get the picture. Each sentence pretends that it is giving us information but, really, it is just telling us what we already know. The prose, meanwhile, could have been written by just about anyone.

And this is a published novel. This extract isn't written in bad prose, exactly; it's mediocre, which is worse. We should all - all of us: writers and editors and agents and publishers - want books to be better than this. And, yes, you need all of the other things - a plot and pace and characters that linger in the mind - but, without decent prose, you might as well be at the seaside, watching a Punch and Judy show. A story on its own is not enough. Great novels sing; they seem to envelop us. And why? The prose. We need to pay attention to the prose.

Flash fiction #4 Chile

2011-07-07T12:13:00.007+01:00

He stood, in the Plaza de la Constitución, fussing with the guidebook.

“So he’s ...Allende.”

He had taken to pronouncing the double “l” diligently, like a “y”. They stood beneath a statue that was in front of the Ministry of Justice. To their right was La Moneda, the governmental palace.

“And he was. Wait. He waaas.”

He hurried backwards through the pages.

“Yes. Here we are. President from 1970 to ‘73. And Pinochet did for him, didn’t he? Yes. Here it is: “On September 11, 1973, Pinochet unleashed a brutal coup d’etat which overthrew the UP government and resulted in Allende’s death ...and the death of thousands of his supporters.””

He squinted upwards for a moment then turned to look at La Moneda. It was stark white and topped with flags, like a memorial. He shook his head,

“So sad”, he said.

He was trying to squeeze the guidebook into the pocket of his coat. Briefly, he looked deformed, a struggling hunchback, and she had to look away.

In Ushuaia, the boat was stacked, layer on layer, like a cake. It was supposed to take them through the Beagle Channel.

“It’s very nice”, she said.

He nodded, not saying anything. They were “up top” as Ian called it. Some of the mountains were so large that the dimensions seemed incongruous. It was the same in Santiago, where the Andes stood above the city like a giant vampire’s wing. She squeezed his hand.

“Happy?”

He nodded again. He was paler than usual and the two lines beside his mouth had deepened, making him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. What was it now? The motion of the boat? It seemed to shift its shoulders slightly, that was all; to shrug and then to settle.

Downstairs, white napkins were arranged in one of the three glasses beside your plate. They were with a party of Australians and one Chilean man, their tour guide, who was holding his hand out.

“Pablo”, he said.

He had thick spatulate fingers and a long camel’s neck. Ian was on her right. He had been speaking over her head but now the man on her left was including her.

“You know, it is a fascinating country, just like your husband says.”

He was pouring her some wine.

“It’s nominally a democracy, of course. My company – I’m Dougie, by the way; I run a software company, in Brisbane.”

“How do you do.”

He took her hand. His was broad, she noticed, and quite warm.

“My company are happily doing business there.”

He shrugged.

“But still.”

Pablo had finished chewing.

“Democracy”, he muttered.

He pointed his knife at Dougie.

“I los’ my farm. Stolen, by thugs. No compensation, nothing. They come one day – into my house; they stan’ there in the kitchen, like it’s theirs - and make me leave. The same day. Jus’ like that.”

“Christ, mate. Bad luck.”

“What can you do?”

Pablo’s shrug was more demonstrative than Dougie’s.

“Long time ago”, he said.

Dougie told her about his life; about Brisbane and the years he’d spent running a mining company in Peru. Throughout, his wife Pam barely spoke. Her face seemed younger than her hands. She had a feathery crop, dyed red, and manicured nails. The nails were weirdly perfect; finicky accessories. Later, in bed, Anne said,

“She hasn’t got a chin. Did you notice? I saw it when she turned her head. She looked just like a fish.”

“He’s handsome, I suppose.”

“What? Dougie? Don’t be silly. He’s a chimp. That stoop.”

Nevertheless, the next day, when Ian said that he felt queasy, she went out anyway. The bay was beautiful: you looked across the water, turned to tinsel by the sun, and saw a line of snowy peaks and crags. Nearer, there was the lavish devastation of a beaver dam. She was acutely aware of Dougie’s presence and watched him out of the corner of her eye. He was bulky and broad shouldered. His false teeth looked like a boxer’s gum shield and his nose seemed to have been broken and then badly reset. She didn’t know whether she wanted to stand nearer to or farther away from him. Back on the boat, Ian was waiting by the ladder, holding a mug of hot chocolate for her. He was wrapped in a fleece and scarf and had a hat pushed down over his forehead. She couldn’t look at him.

Dougie, meanwhile, was perfectly attentive and she found that she was looking out for this. He kept helping her up stairs and shielding her, humorously, from the wind. On the last night, she said,

“Romance. It disappears. We’re like. Ian and I, we’re like …acquaintances.”

Ian and Pam, both sick, had had to go to bed.

“He never touches me.”

How easy it was to say it, finally. She had allowed one leg to lightly press against him.

“Not for years”, she said. “You start to doubt yourself. You think, “My God, I must be old. And ugly. Ugly and old.””

He was demurring, muttering some awkward gallantry, and she saw at once that she had got it awfully wrong; this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go at all. She started to shake her head.

“Oh God”, she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean.”

He said,

“Listen: No worries.”

But, suddenly it seemed, his chair was empty - she couldn’t remember if he had said goodbye – and here was Pablo. How much time had elapsed? Pablo’s thick fingers were stretching down towards her.

“Shall we?”

What must she look like? Still, she allowed him to lead her, with a certain amount of exaggerated gusto, out onto the floor. There was a roaring in her ears – the sound of a shell’s interior - and she had to rest her forehead on Pablo’s shoulder. He was saying,

“You need fresh air?”

She shook her head.

“It is very beautiful here. Especially at night.”

"So many stars”, she said.

“At night”, he said. “My farm.”

He paused, then sighed.

“A picture.”

She tried to focus on his face.

“You poor man”, she said.

Dimly, she remembered the Plaza de la Constitución.

“You must miss Allende terribly.”

She had pronounced the double “l” like a “y”, like Ian did. Pablo stood backwards so swiftly that it felt as though he had leapt away from her. She staggered slightly.

“Allende?”, he said. “A crook!”

“I’m sorry. I thought.”

“This …rubbish he spoke. About the workers. Thugs. That’s all they were. Jus’ thugs.”

“I thought.”

“Of course. You thought. You know, don’t you. A fucking tourist. Your husban’ in bed and you like this.”

He made a rutting motion.

“With everyone.”

He wasn’t shouting, exactly, but his enunciation was horribly precise. Everybody seemed to have stopped what they were doing.

“Your husban’. I feel sorry for him.”

He stood further backwards, pointing at her as though this was an amateur production.

“Look at you”, he said.

He wheeled around and left her standing in the middle of the floor. Yes, she thought, look at me. She stood swaying from side to side but then, clutching her drink, she stumbled slowly off towards the door.

The Conquest of the Incas

2011-06-27T07:30:00.000+01:00

A group of tourists are travelling around Peru. As the trip progresses, one member of the group is bullied with increasing severity...

Chapter One

Lima was dazzling. Or, rather, this stretch was, its low-rise casinos smothered in loops of neon. On first sight, I had expected a festive air - an atmosphere of jubilee or carnival – but, as we approached, I realised that the streets were empty and that the shadows seemed starkly overdefined. The clouds that were smeared across the sky heightened the sense of abandonment; of somewhere that had been left to its own devices in a sort of moral vacuum.

Of course, I was tired. We were meant to be waiting at the lights but had edged beyond them and were straining in the middle of the junction with the other cars edging towards us, nudging at our doors and bumper. Everyone was beeping continuously but it was so constant as to be inexpressive – a dissonant uproar. Our driver’s face, with its wide, flat cheekbones and broad forehead, looked impossibly remote. His name, the guide had told us, was Ernesto. He had leapt up into the driver’s seat, had patted the sign that said “Dios es mi copiloto”, had rubbed his hands together and shouted “Vamonos!” Now all one could make out was a slight tightening of his hands on the steering wheel. It was a form of machismo – a game of chicken that nobody was acknowledging.

I tried to close my eyes but couldn’t keep them shut. I saw that a man had appeared from around the corner of one of the buildings. Out there on the empty, stagelit streets it looked incongruously dramatic. He was hunched into a windcheater and was walking determinedly, and slightly unsteadily, past the “Backcow” steak restaurant, his feet, like a dancer’s, making little feints and adjustments. As he came level with our minibus, he was approached, suddenly, by two men. One had his arm out in a sideways salute that swiftly became a conspiratorial-looking hug – a gathering in, so that the other man’s arms were locked against his sides. The other stood slightly behind them and to the left, looking around them. You could tell that the man didn’t know them, there had been no greeting or acknowledgement, but he put up surprisingly little resistance, just gave a couple of muted shrugs as though he were working the stiffness out of his shoulders. Perhaps the first man had a knife – he had his back to us but you could see that his free arm was held across his chest, pointing roughly at the other man’s arm. He bent his head slightly, beginning to murmur or mutter something, and the two of them walked off together, the first man’s arm around the other man’s shoulders in a parody of affection. The man at the back looked briefly behind him and his face, entirely expressionless, seemed to be looking directly at me – to be daring me to say something; to do something other than stare in this abstracted fashion.

Almost nobody seemed to have noticed anything. Our guide, Carlos, had squeezed himself against the seat in front, his legs in a z-shape. He had a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes and he was staring at a hand-held computer, studying it carefully then banging, in a sudden frenzy, at the keys. It was difficult to look at the rest of the group – I didn’t want to stare. I was aware of their most obvious characteristics: two tense and giggly girls; a middle-aged woman on her own; a man in a peaked cap, holding himself erect. There were two couples, one of which I had already noticed when I was waiting for my baggage. They had seemed almost wilfully conspicuous. She had on a fleece and jeans but the fleece was three-quarters undone, exposing a low-cut T-shirt and a prodigious bust, and the jeans were tight around her legs and buttocks. Her shoulder-length hair was a bright blonde. As I watched, she reapplied her makeup, smoothing the side of her mouth with her little finger as though her face, betraying signs of age and tiredness, needed to be moulded and remoulded. The man was squat and bullish. He had muscled his way into the crowd around the conveyor belt, taking his space as if by right. Forcing his way backwards with his suitcases, he had been cheerfully relentless, smiling at everyone but hauling his suitcase through them all the same. Now he seemed to be the only other person watching what was going on outside. Surely I should say something? They had led the man to a doorway in which the shadow was so thick that it acted like a curtain. The first man pushed him backwards – you could no longer see him - and the second man jumped suddenly into action; jumped literally, propelling himself forwards like a diver. Both men were punching and kicking him now but the bus was crawling forwards, we were over the junction, and I had to lean backwards over the seat to see what was going on. As they receded, they began to look strangely balletic and to seem to recede, somewhat, in importance. I should have said something earlier, I thought, even as I allowed them to get further and further away. You could only see the back of the attackers’ arms and legs now, flickering as if they were in firelight. I consoled myself with the thought that it was certainly only punching and kicking that I had seen and that there had been nothing to suggest the man was being stabbed. My last glimpse was of someone pulling something aloft – a windcheater, probably.

I looked at the man beside me. He was still staring at what had happened and, if it wasn’t for his face, I might have said something. It was a powerful face, brutal and babyish. His close-cropped hair went up into a peak, almost a quiff, and there was a hooped earring in his left ear, giving him a raffish, piratical air; a hint of swagger. Just now, amazingly, he seemed to be smiling. As I watched, he nodded, once, to himself, in what looked like satisfaction. It was an oddly private moment; one that I didn’t want him to know I’d seen. I glanced quickly at the driver. He was looking in his rear-view mirror. Noticing me, he shrugged, one man of the world to another. What could you do? I felt relieved. More: absolved. We shared a feeling of superiority. To what? The muggers? The victim? Their circumstances? I’m not sure that either of us could have told you.

Anyway, we were staying in Miraflores, an “affluent suburb” according to the guidebook. There were broad lawns and balconies and three-storey supermarkets but in the residential district there were also prominent, sturdy-looking intercoms. Our hostel had a courtyard with a fountain and a cage of colourful songbirds but there was a sign in my room that said that visitors weren’t allowed after ten o’clock in the evening, for reasons of safety. The room itself had a stone floor, a shower and a ceiling fan. There was even a little kitchenette. I did what I always did now that I holidayed on my own and placed the clothes in the drawers with exaggerated care, one on top of the other. Judy had always flung everything into a heap so that I’d find them clinging together in the morning. Of course, I slept, as usual, in the normal place, out on the further reaches of the left side of the bed.

I woke to the sound of car horns. Lima was grey, its buildings and cars drifting in fog, and the horns were muffled; lost and mournful-sounding. At the desk, the woman produced a map. She was long and angular, leaning over it with a stern, capable appearance of concern. She told me that I had to stay inside the square. She had drawn it on a map of Lima – four streets, surrounding the centre. She told me that I shouldn’t go to the Museum of Art because the children would steal my hat and glasses. She was scribbling over the map, effacing whole streets and districts. I told her that she had misunderstood; that we were being picked up later and that I had only wanted to stroll around Miraflores. She looked relieved. I saw myself as she must see me, a pasty 50-year-old man in long shorts and a pair of walking sandals. Smiling, she told me that I could go down to the arcade that overlooked the beach but that I must not go down to the beach itself. She shook her finger at me.

“Bad man”, she said.

“Men”, I said, pedantic as always, but she had giggled and now she was ruffling my hair. I was squaring my shoulders, I realised, and this is what she was referring to. Her sense that this was comic was accurate: outside, in the fog, I was as timid as she had expected me to be. People came suddenly into focus as if it were intentional. The men were as bewildering, as removed from context, as a line of masks in an abandoned hallway: the supermarkets, the cafés, the “Old Pub” and the “photoshop” counted for nothing. I couldn’t even see the sea. I was glad to get back inside and to ascend the curved stone staircase up to the dining room with its small wooden tables and beaded place mats. In the corner, a TV was playing CNN; a market square, all its attendant life, and then an explosion, something that seemed to punch a hole in the foreground so that debris could come hurtling through. A party of elderly tourists were reclining their heads towards it. This wasn’t so much a sign of seriousness as of not being able to hear. The man with the earring was moving the tables, dragging them together so that they seemed to be squealing. He arranged the chairs somewhat fussily, making sure that they were all facing in the right direction. In the end, we had nine places. He sat in the centre, facing me, with his wife beside him, and made an expansive gesture that took in the length of the table.

“Voila”, he said.

He made it sound like “wolla”; like the beginning of a football chant. He was wearing a T-shirt that showed Mickey Mouse quivering, without his clothes, at the end of a revolver. The gun was being held by another cartoon character, a meercat in sunglasses and a bandana. I nodded and smiled, aware that I was expected to be appreciative. He put his hand out.

“Stephen”, he said.

“Duncan.”

“Duncan: my wife. Sheilah.”

Sheilah smiled and waggled her fingers. Her nails were a sort of icy pink and she had on a charm bracelet, a tiny set of links from which were suspended what looked like Monopoly pieces, jack russels, an iron and a top hat. Her hair was teased over her shoulders. Stephen was studying me. He leaned forwards slightly, saying,

“See that last night?”

“Oh. Yes.”

I looked down at my plate, remembering the look that I’d seen on his face.

“The mugging”, I said.

“The mugging.”

He grinned.

“Is that what you think it was?”

“You don’t?”

He shrugged. He was a muscular man and the taut definition of his upper arms made the gesture seem slightly exaggerated.

“Don’t ask me, boss”, he said.

He leant over, stretching past his wife for a bread roll. Our breakfast had been waiting for us on the tables: rolls in a basket, two bananas on each plate and mango juice that seemed to have clotted in the glass. He tore the roll in half and stuffed half in his mouth. He raised a hand in apology but he continued to talk.

“Just got here”, he said. “But all I’m saying.”

He moved his head judiciously from side to side. To my right, I could see people running and screaming; a building bleeding smoke.

“All I’m saying is. Well, Christ. Broad daylight; fucking cars everywhere. I wouldn’t, would you?”

I wondered if I’d winced visibly when he swore. I said,

“I’m almost certain that I saw them take something.”

“Almost.”

“Yes.”

“What? What did they take?”

It was odd, this tone of pedantry. His was a different mode to mine. In his estuarine accent, full of elisions and glottal stops, it sounded aggressively insistent – a form of hectoring. Still, the expression on his face was pleasant enough. I shook my head.

“I can’t be sure”, I said. “A windcheater?”

“A windcheater. Come on. What, socks as well?”

I shrugged, weakly.

“Gangs”, Stephen said. “Boof. Brute justice.”

He had thwacked his left hand into his palm. The last phrase was odd, I thought, and mangled-sounding, a quote perhaps. He sat back, looking satisfied. It wasn’t only the satisfaction of having scored a point. I could see that the notion itself was pleasant to him; it had the neatness, the appropriateness, of television violence. Of course, last night, it had seemed as though we were watching television. I wasn’t convinced but saw that my assent was called for. Nodding, I looked around us. The table had filled up. The other couple were to my left, making a show of listening, hoping to be included. Stephen leaned across and took their hands, one after the other. He took everybody’s hand, showing himself to be something of a politician, albeit a rough and ready one. I wondered what he did at home. He had got everybody’s names and now he was making little jokes that emphasized the strangeness of the place, the clotted juice and dismal fog. The inference was that we were a club, or gang, now – that we were all English together. Already, the loudness and the liveliness of our conversation was dominating the room, in contrast to the reticence of the other diners. Stephen looked swiftly around him. Widening his eyes, he put his finger to his lips and went “Shhhhh!” He did this deliberately loudly, causing the people near the television to look over in his direction. Mia, the girl to my right, lowered her eyelids and displayed her teeth in appreciation. Minutes later, her friend, Jess, was still giggling, as though Stephen’s sally were itself a kind of delayed bomb. Mia had short, layered hair and a face whose determining characteristic seemed to be its fierce engagement; the way in which she appeared to be pushing it towards you even when she was smiling and sitting backwards in her chair. Jess was altogether softer. She had been smiling almost constantly and this, coupled with her slow, deliberate movements, gave her the air of someone of a gentle, empathetic disposition. As I watched, she buttered two rolls, placing one of them on Mia’s plate. Mia nodded, distracted. Jess was frumpy and uncomplaining but she was also, in some manner, acting out the role of someone who was frumpy and uncomplaining. There was a proudish tilt to her head; her self-abnegation was a form of self-assertion.

“Small bites”, she said, continuing to smile.

At the end of the table, the other man had turned his seat around so that he could see the television. He was still wearing the peaked cap that he had been wearing last night but this morning he was in a pair of combat trousers and a pink shirt. The shirt was too smart, a work shirt with a collar, and the effect was disconcerting, as though he had been forced to get up and made to put on the first clothes that had come to hand. Taken individually, most of his features were perfectly regular but there was a strangeness about them; a lack of focus. His eyebrows didn’t match, but that wasn’t it. His forehead was bulbous, true, but not strictly out of proportion. It was more that things were oddly, indefinably out of kilter. His face seemed blurred, his head too round. Stephen was leaning over in his direction, shouting,

“Oi!”

He was rolling something between his fingers. Then he threw it, a bread pellet, and it just missed the other man’s head.

“Dave”, he said.

David’s smile came and went in a sort of spasm. He was still sitting facing the television, his thin body weirdly erect, but had moved his head so that he was facing Stephen. Both hands were resting on his knees.

“David”, he said.

There was a pause. Stephen had raised his eyebrows.

“If you don’t mind”, David said.

Stephen seemed to rear slightly backwards in his chair. Diane, the other wife, tittered. Stephen sighed.

“David”, he said.

He pronounced it with an exaggerated patience and his face had hardened a little. His eyes looked slightly glazed.

“Did you think that you might want to join us?”

David blinked. He looked like a fish that had been dragged painfully out of its natural element. Then his mouth flickered again. I could see that it was meant to be ingratiating. However, he raised a finger.

“One moment”, he said.

He turned around and leaned towards the television. From where we were, you could hardly make out what was being said. Stephen was playing to the gallery now, his arms outflung in mock exasperation. I heard Sheilah say his name but it was too late: he had thrown another bread pellet. It bounced, backwards, from David’s cap on to the table. I wasn’t sure if David had felt it. It was another minute or two before he turned around and said, to the woman next to him,

“I’m a history teacher.”

The woman, Susan, was younger than me, forty-five or thereabouts, but was reserved in the same way, I thought, that I was – had, by now, abstracted herself from the hilarity that surrounded Stephen. She smiled at David.

“My husband was exactly the same”, she said.

I thought that that was wonderfully deft. The moment, if there had been a moment, passed. Stephen could not now make an example of David without insulting Susan’s husband; he had to satisfy himself by shaking David’s hand and saying,

“Welcome back.”

Carlos arrived before we had finished breakfast. He was bare-headed this morning and his hair looked as though he had buffed it into a glossy sheen. No more than 20, he lollopped eagerly up to Stephen, who was beckoning him over. He squatted down and Stephen put his arm around his shoulders. Carlos said,

“Your mini-bus.”

He was smiling broadly, gratified by Stephen’s gesture. He made a gesture of his own, a tiny cursive flourish, that made it look as though the bus had been his gift to us. Stephen patted him, a pet, and said,

“Come on. Chop chop.”

This was to us. We would have got up anyway, but it looked, now, as though he were in charge. Carlos, meanwhile, stood smilingly beside him, reduced to being his amenuensis. He had pushed both arms downwards, saying “Is OK”, when Martin, Diane’s husband, had tried to leave a tip and you could briefly see another Carlos, a solemn, capable Carlos, beneath this slap-happy amiability. I mumbled “camera” in Stephen’s direction. In my room, I put my camera in my bag, tightly affixed my money belt then checked my hair, something I hadn’t done for a long time. I attributed the gesture to the presence of people generally. In the mini-bus, Carlos was saying,

“Francisco Pizarro, our founder. He come on the feast of Epiphany, also called the Day of the Kings. Because of this, Lima’s first name was City of the Kings.”

This was all said more or less atonally, in the sing-song delivery of a child who is reciting something by rote.

“Today”, he said, “we will go to the Museu de Antropologia y Arqueologia. Also, the Cathedral, where our founder is buried.”

We were moving by now and I noticed that David was sitting stiffly to attention. He was staring at a point directly in front of him, unlike the others, who were all peering out of the windows. Outside, the mist had all but disappeared and, for the first time, the city seemed to be itself – prosaic and ugly; a crush of makeshift buildings. Washing lines were hung next to a road that was so polluted that I could taste the petrol. At the lights, children were trying to sell sweets. They came to the windows and pointed to them and, if this failed, made eyes at you and pointed to their mouths. All around them, cars and buses were coming slyly, inexorably together. Ernesto’s hand was on the horn and he was pressing it, as it were, absentmindedly. I saw that David’s chest was going rapidly up and down and that he kept feeling, pointlessly, for his hat. As I watched, he gagged then floundered upwards. He had knocked my day-pack over and now he was struggling with the door, saying,

“I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s just. I’m sorry: I can’t.”

Stephen had stretched out an arm, attempting to restrain him, but David smacked his hand away. His nostrils were dilated and his eyes were rolling in their sockets. I had got up – I was next to him and had unobstructed access – but it was too late, he had wrenched the door open and now he jumped out, holding onto his hat as he did so. We were barely moving but, even so, his legs gave a slight jolt and he stumbled forwards before he could right himself. He ran clumsily between the cars and disappeared around the corner. I stared after him. Somebody, Mia or Jess, said,

“Oh. My. God.”

The bus had begun to pick up speed and Stephen leant over and closed the door. I sat down. Susan said,

“Shouldn’t we go back for him?”

“Nah.”

Stephen shook his head.

“Leave him. No point.”

It was possible to detect a hint of amusement, but he was also stroking the hand that David had smacked. Everyone else was sharing a careful look of solemn, incredulous bewilderment. Carlos was standing up but he didn’t seem to know what to do or say. Stephen leant over and patted his arm.

“Don’t worry about it, mate.”

There was a brief exchange between Ernesto and Carlos but Ernesto was driving forwards even as they spoke. He shrugged, which seemed to settle it. Carlos talked to somebody on a mobile phone but then he smiled, graciously, and made another awkward gesture, meaning “onwards”. Nobody seemed to know what they should say, although I did see Stephen grin, once, at his wife. In the museum, we were peering at an arquebus, an unwieldy musket that had been brought over in the conquest, when Stephen said,

“He could do with that.”

He sketched an invisible hat then doddered a little, saying,

“I’m gonna get me a waaabbit.”

He made the “waaa” sound like a baby’s cry. Martin snorted, and, yes, it was funny – you saw, suddenly, that David had the same bulbous forehead and put-upon look as Elmer Fudd in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. The others were clustered around some chain-mail and Carlos was translating the inscription. Stephen looked over at them.

“That as well”, he said.

He thumbed his nose thoughtfully.

“He’s fucking meat.”

It was difficult to know how to respond to this. Still, I could see what he meant. If David had seemed out of place at breakfast what would it be like for him elsewhere? As if in illustration, a group of men were staring at us outside the museum. They looked sullen and dispirited, their hands deep in their trouser pockets. In the centre of Lima, there were police with riot shields and slums that were packed so tightly up a hill that they looked like rubbish that had been poured over it. The cathedral was on one of the few attractive squares, the Plaza de Armas. Outside the “Palacio de Gobierno”, the guards were ostentatiously uniformed and the cathedral itself was spruce and ornate, with lemon-coloured towers and a fussy central arch. Inside, it was starkly grandiose. There were colourful mock-gothic arches, carved wooden choirstalls and a representation of the Madonna, crowned by one of the popes and then presented with a gold rose. There was also the tomb in which they’d placed Pizarro’s coffin. Above you was an idealized Pizarro, handsome and slim, with a neat beard and a plumed hat. He was pointing, ambiguously, at what looked like a group of Indians. It was an image of righteous decisiveness, just as the image, elsewhere, of Bishop Valverde was of calm and poise. Atahahualpa, the Inca, was standing beside him. The pictures were crude and it was difficult to read their faces. It was more a matter of posture – of the relationship between one body and another. Carlos looked up and then away. He cleared his throat.

“This man”, he said. “The bishop. Very religious. And this man.”

He pointed, vaguely, in the direction of Atahualpa.

“He show disrespect. He spit on the bible, trample on it, I don’t know. Whatever he do is very bad. And so…”

There was a pause. He was evidently searching for the right word. Stephen was smiling.

“Boof”, he said.

He had slapped his hand into his palm again. Carlos had flinched, but now he grinned.

“Yes”, he said. “Boof. Is right word. Yes.”

He arranged his face into a look of ponderous solemnity.

“Pizarro very sad. But he sees that it is...”

“Necessary”, I said.

Carlos nodded, gratefully. I turned to the others.

“He had him strangled”, I said.

Mia said,

“Nice.”

“It’s true, he was troubled, but.”

But Carlos had brightened. He was leading us to the vestments, the chasuble and hat and shoes of an Archbishop who had helped the Indians. There was a contradiction, a kind of schizophrenia, here, but I could see that it was endemic to the culture. Outside, on the pedestrianised Jirón de la Unión, they offered you internet space and dollars and even drugs, baggies of marijuana that they attempted to palm into your hand. You could tell that they hated you. Their eyes flickered over our cameras and North Face fleeces; their faces were weirdly immobile even as their mouths were moving. Stephen was in his element. He had insisted that we do this, even while Carlos was attempting to dissuade us, and now he gleefully engaged with everybody that approached him. Just now, someone was showing him a watch. He peered down at it, a chunky, lurid fake, and said,

“Coo, fucking hell. You sheeny. Oi: Duncan. Look at this.”

He had draped it over his fingers, like a market trader. Was he a market trader?

“He might as well mug me now and have done with it.”

He put his face into the other man’s face and spoke loudly and slowly.

“’Cos that’s exactly what you want to do.”

He bared his teeth.

“Innit?”

This was banter, but barely. In any case, the man refused to be drawn, walking backwards even as Stephen was talking to him. He had already dragged us to the Museo de la Inquisiciôn, whose vaulted basement was a sort of negative of the arches in the Cathedral. We had passed waxworks of men stretched on the rack or having their bare feet roasted at a fire. Stephen had hunched his back and lolled his tongue just as, now, he lowered his shoulders, lengthening his arms and swinging them back and forth. It was a comment on the men who lined the route – on the fact that their faces looked exactly like the pots and grimacing figurines in the earlier museum; that they didn’t seem to have evolved. What was curious was the way that Stephen didn’t mind Carlos seeing this. In fact, he seemed eager to co-opt him - to check that he was properly appreciative. Carlos laughed uneasily. As soon as he could, he ushered us into a café.

“Lunch”, he said. “Please.”

The “please” was meant to be polite, an extension of the way that he was holding the door open, but, in the context of what had occurred, it took on an urgency, even a sort of pathos. He was being careful not to look at Stephen, who was sauntering, arms swinging, up to a table next to the window. His wife, the girls and the other couple gathered around him. The tables were fixed to the floor and Carlos, Susan and I had to sit at a table next to them. There was a moment of readjustment. Out there were the scowling hawkers, exotic in their lineaments and in the way that they hampered the passers-by. In here, it was just like home, with a counter backed by pictures of chips and burgers, linoleum on the floor and something lumbering and lachrymose, somebody murdering “Mandy”, on the sound system. Stephen had drawn a smiley face on the misted-over glass. He said,

“So you a history teacher too?”

This, I belatedly realized, was addressed to me. I found myself sitting upright, eagerly, and saying,

“God, no. No, not at all. An amateur. I read history books, that’s all.”

I saw, even as I was saying it, that I was trying to disassociate myself from David. Feeling ashamed, I went to say something else but Stephen was saying,

“But this bloke. This...”

“Pizzarro.”

He nodded.

“A hero, right? Like wotsit. “Gladiator”. You know: tasty.”

He had lifted his fists. I bent my head a little to one side. I was about to give a measured, judicious response – I would have enjoyed that. But Stephen said,

“Fuck, if it was me.”

And we were off. There were snorts and giggles. He stuck his chest out but it wasn’t clear, at this stage, whether he was meant to be Pizzarro or the person that he was threatening.

“Heap big trouble”, he said. “You calm down, mister. Me sell you many wristwatch.”

His accent was a cross between Red Indian and Pakistani. Diane shrieked. Mia and Jess were leaning on each other’s shoulders. Susan, I noticed, was looking down at her coke. Outside, we both lagged behind a little. She turned to face me.

“What do you do?”

After Stephen’s raucous parody, her voice seemed pleasantly mild. There was a steadiness about her – a heightened sense of calm that seemed to extend to everything she did: the way she lifted up her drink, for example, or carefully tucked away a wisp of hair. You could tell that her face had declined from an initial beauty that was still faintly there, in ghost-form. It was like the phantom picture on an old television in that her features kept advancing and retreating. Her chin tightened satisfactorily when she lifted her head. Her mouth, in repose, still had a certain plumpness. I scratched my neck.

“Actually, it’s embarrassing. I’m, um, I’m a proofreader. I look over legal documents, for grammar.”

“And that’s embarrassing because?

“It’s embarrassing because it’s dull.”

She smiled. Ahead of us, Stephen was buying Mia and Jess something. He had his arm around the vendor and seemed to be crooning into his ear. She said,

“There’s nothing wrong with dull.”

I said, comically hopeful,

“You too?”

“Oh, yes. I’m a hausfrau. I spend a lot of time polishing ornaments. I look at old insurance policies and try to work out how much I’m worth.”

She chuckled.

““Dull”’s a tad inadequate for what I do. I’ve grown rather to love my insurance policies.”

“It’s all history”, I said. “Even insurance policies.”

She lowered her head to one side.

““History””, she said.

She was savouring the word, tilting her head so that it looked as though she were actually tasting it.

“I like it. It makes me sound imposing.”

“Well, we do seem to have scared everybody off.”

It was true: they were a long way ahead of us now. There had been a certain amount of calculation in that “we”. I was aware that we couldn’t scare Stephen if we tried but it had been an attempt at bravado – a way of creating a gang of our own. Susan said,

“My husband used to say that to me. He said that my good manners were merely part of my armoury.”

I found that I was scratching my neck again.

“And he’s…”

“He’s gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He didn’t die. He absconded.”

There was some humour to be gleaned from that last word. She had made it sound deliberately ridiculous; it mimicked her husband in some way. She said,

“With a hairdresser.”

She exhaled air, rapidly, out of her nostrils. This, I saw, was meant to represent a laugh. I wasn’t sure whether I should smile or laugh in return. She said,

“It’s been a while. This is my first holiday without him. This. All this.”

She made a sweeping motion with her right hand. It took in the Jirón de la Unión, its bland, pragmatic cafés and shoeshops, as well as the men lining the route and the clouds above us – the grey uniformity of the sky.

“Is my reward.”

She swept her arm around her now.

“Peru”, she said.

There was no sense of irony: her smile and the gusto of the gesture told you that she was determined to enjoy herself. Perhaps there was an element of conscious bravery but that was all. She smiled and took my arm. I felt that she was reluctant to catch up with the others; that part of the point of holding onto me was to regulate my speed. For all of her gusto, I imagined, she still felt removed from the gusto around her.

Nevertheless, they had stopped and were waiting for us to catch up with them. Stephen was holding something in his hands. He proffered it to us as we approached: a bundle that, on inspection, proved to be two scarves. They were a dull cream and there was a repeating pattern of llamas – anthropomorphic creatures with bulging, incredulous eyes and beards. I saw that he was wearing one and, then, looking around, that they were all wearing them. Somewhat in the manner of a Hawaiian host, he hung them on our necks. He straightened mine and I found that his grip was slightly frightening. He tugged down sharply, making sure that the ends were equal in length.

“Lima Two Thousand and Three”, he said.

I bowed, mock-solemnly. Carlos, I saw, had knotted his. He stood, part of the group, awaiting orders. Stephen said,

“The minibus?”

Carlos pointed. We were on the edge of the Plaza de Armas and saw that Ernesto had parked beside the central section. He was standing, smoking a cigarillo, beside the opened door of the bus. I followed the smoke down to his hands, huge fighters’ fists with knuckles that were both notched and scarred. His only acknowledgement was to swiftly discard the cigarillo and clamber up into the driver’s seat. Beyond him, I could see somebody begging at the lights. He was gaunt and bare-chested, a hopping, dancing figure in ragged trousers who seemed to be gulping and then vomiting flame, but the drivers were all ignoring him. He was unremarkable in this environment – one more preternaturally vivid vagrant in a city that was full of them.

In the bus, Stephen started a sing-song. There was a tiny house and a tiny stream, as well as a lovely dreaming girl. There was some difficulty in getting to grips with the chorus, which consisted of “Gilly gilly ossenfeffer katseneller bogen by the sea”, but, by the third repetition, we had all mastered it. Stephen, I realised, was the happiest that I had seen him. He had insulated himself from his environment – had, as far as he could, created his own environment. Outside, there was the crush, the noise and the stench, as well as the sense that you were an enemy, somehow, whether because of historical circumstance or of something inbred – something that meant that you were at odds with everything around you. We all felt this, I think. And, honestly, at that moment I felt a certain regard for Stephen. There was a sort of spirit of the Blitz among us. He conducted us through renditions of “Que Sera Sera” and “Consider Yourself”, as well as the theme from the Dam-busters. He was confident of his position now, safe from all other contenders, and he allowed himself to toy with us – to parody, and thereby make explicit, his own self-satisfaction. He grinned, waggling his head from side to side. He raised his hands above his head, fluttering his fingers, then brought them down swiftly, a cartoon movement that was accompanied by a conductor’s furious frown. Lima may just as well have been a sequence of painted flats. We passed a woman who waltzed, alone, around a rubbish bin. Her hair was crazed, a halo of greasy tendrils, and her face was grubby and without hope. There were more beggars, small children this time, and a continual growling and bleating from the cars around us. The point was, we were no longer experiencing any of this. It was barely even scenery; it was more like something that was on in your living room while you got on with the business of eating or sleeping or talking on the telephone. Martin slapped me on the back.

“This is wonderful”, he said.

I nodded: it was. But there was someone else, another figure toiling up the hill ahead of us. Even from here, you could see how distanced it was from its surroundings. It was self-protective – hunched over as though it were at bay. It was the cap I recognized. I shouted,

“David!”

I banged on the window.

“It’s David. Look.”

I wanted to usher him into the bus; to make him safe. Carlos leapt up into the centre of the aisle. I could tell that he wanted to thump Ernesto on the shoulder but that he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. Instead, he spoke rapidly in Spanish, jabbering into his ear. We were all shouting, now, and banging on the windows. We were pulling across the traffic and the noise of the car horns had coalesced into one angry voice. David turned his face towards us and I was struck by the bleakness of his expression. He had his head pulled down into the collar of his fleece, less for warmth, it seemed, than for protection. His cap was pulled over his forehead, like a visor. Instinctively, as the noise increased, he lifted his arm up to protect his face. Stephen had wrestled the door half-open. Before we had even stopped he stuck his head out and shouted,

“Dave!”

He was holding on with one arm, swinging like a pirate on the rigging of a ship.

“David! Come here!”

There was nothing, at this stage, to suggest that his intention was anything but protective. Surely all he wanted was to welcome him into the fold. He stepped lightly onto the pavement. Even this lightness had an element of ostentation: if he was still a pirate then he was one out of an early silent film, someone who seemed to tap dance around a castle’s battlements. He was big and blowsy, eating up all of the available air, and I wasn’t surprised when David winced at his approach. He put his arm around David’s shoulder. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but David was shaking his head rapidly from side to side. There was something about Stephen’s face, something implacable, that made me anxious to hear him. I followed Carlos, lowering myself slowly onto the pavement and then standing beside him. He looked, in his anxiety, as though he were washing his hands. Stephen said,

“You have to get back on the horse, old son.”

You could just hear him in the surrounding cacophony. David looked ready to run away. Stephen’s face belied his words – it had a tightness, a reserve, that put him at a remove from what he was saying. He was holding firmly onto David’s shoulder, refusing to let him go. He said.

“Come on. They’re waiting.”

But still David refused to move. He said,

“I can’t. I’m sorry. Just leave me here, please. I’m not trying to be awkward. I just…”

He shook his head.

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“You can.”

“It isn’t possible.”

Stephen’s grip tightened.

“Look, mate. See that? It’s just a bus. They’re just cars. Really: no biggie.”

But David was pulling away from him. He had both hands up, it looked as though he was surrendering, but he wasn’t. His body was insistent – it wouldn’t allow itself to be commandeered. Stephen had a choice: he could either hold on harder, forcing David to stay where he was, or he could let him go. His knuckles, I noticed, were whitening. But what could he do if he managed to restrain him? Pick him up and throw him in the bus? It was already beginning to look like a struggle. He lifted his arms in exasperation.

“Fuck it”, he said. “Forget it.”

David shook his head.

“I’m sorry”, he said. “It’s the noise. The…”

He slapped the palm of one hand against the back of the other. The proximity, he meant – the other cars circling, like sharks, around the minibus. He started to say something but thought better of it. He turned around and walked away. Carlos went to go after him but Stephen placed a hand on his stomach, restraining him.

“Leave him”, he said.

Carlos looked rapidly from one to the other. David had reached a junction and now he stood stoically at the kerb.

“He’s never going to get across”, I said.

But no-one acknowledged me. Stephen was already climbing up into the bus. He turned to us and said,

“You coming?”

Carlos and I looked at each other. There was a moment of indecision and then we scrambled, eagerly, after him.

Chapter Two

Carlos was being disingenuous. Pizzarro may have felt sad for Atahualpa, but he felt no remorse about what happened because of Bishop Valverde’s bible.

He was born in Trujillo de Extremadura, 140 miles south-west of Madrid. This was a harsh, empty landscape, a kind of crucible in which Pizarro’s character, as well as that of most of the leading conquistadores, was formed. It’s true, he was handsome, but he was also taciturn and battle-hardened - a thug, in other words. You can see it in his eyes. His face was long, which lends it, in pictures, an odd sort of serenity, but his eyes are both guarded and surly. Life, his life, had made him indifferent to cruelty.

He was the illegitimate son of a professional officer and a serving girl. He had fought in many campaigns, had helped to exterminate the Taiano Indians of Hispaniola, and now he was one of the richest men in Panama. He didn’t have to go, but he did go, hankering after glory, or conquest, in the same way that some of us hanker after love. He drew a line in the sand of the Isla del Gallo, in the Tumaco estuary, and promised “death, hardship, hunger, nakedness, rains and abandonment”. He was a tough, unremitting commander and had discovered that his men had smuggled out a message in a bale of hay, asking for help. Only twelve men crossed the line but, in the end, they took an armed force into the uncharted territory of Peru.

Atahualpa was the Inca, the ruler of an empire that stretched for almost three thousand miles from central Chile to the south of modern Colombia. He was thirty, “of good appearance and manner” and considered to be divine. He could, and often did, spit into the hand of his attendants rather than on the floor. Women would remove the hairs that fell onto his clothing and eat them. He was exotic, in other words. When meeting Pizarro’s envoy, he wore a series of cords with a corded tassel that forced him to look downwards. He didn’t seem quite human or, at least, that’s what they must have told themselves.

They met in the square of the provincial capital of Cajamarca. Beyond it was a huge plain, flat in a way that was unusual for Peru. Atahualpa walked, in pomp, towards the Spaniards with an army that covered the whole expanse. They walked slowly, a processional, with a squadron of attendants removing the straws from the ground in front of them. The Spaniards were in the square. They were terrified, many of them had wet their trousers, and they had hidden their cavalry in the long, low buildings that surrounded them. The Indians came on foot. They were dressed in ceremonial clothes, all wearing gold and silver head-dresses and singing a song that, even then, the Spaniards thought “by no means lacking grace”. The road-sweepers were wearing a chequered livery, “like a chessboard”. Most of them stayed on the plain, leaving Atahualpa to advance into the square with five or six thousand men, unarmed except for small battle axes, slings and pouches of stones. He himself was in a litter that was lined with colourful parrot feathers, embellished with gold and silver plate. They halted, and a captain came out holding the royal standard - a banner on a lance.

Valverde invited Atahualpa to dine with Pizarro in one of the buildings. Atahualpa said no, that he would not enter until the Spaniards had returned every object that they had stolen or consumed since their arrival in the kingdom. Valverde began to explain who he was – that he had been sent by the Emperor to reveal the Christian religion to the Inca. He gave him a closed bible but Atahualpa struggled to open it. Valverde attempted to help but Atahualpa struck him on the arm. At last, he leafed through the book, “admiring its form and layout” but, in the end, he threw it down among his men. He was clearly angry and may or may not have risen on his litter, telling them to get ready. It’s also unclear how the Bishop responded to this. He may have said, “Come out Christians! Come at these enemy dogs who reject the things of God” or “Did you not see what happened? Why remain polite and servile toward this overproud dog?” or “Atahualpa has become a Lucifer!” He may merely have wept. Whatever, Atahualpa was now an animal or a devil and the aftermath was unequivocal. Pizarro launched the ambush with a raised cloth. Two cannons were fired and then the cavalry charged into the Indians on the square. Trumpets were sounded. Rattles had been placed on the horses and it must have sounded like a plague of angry snakes. In any case, the Indians were unused to horses and were so terrified that they climbed on top of one another, suffocating as they did so. Pizarro, meanwhile, had grabbed Atahualpa’s arm. Many Indians had their hands cut off but continued to support the Inca’s litter with their shoulders. A group of mounted Spaniards overturned it and Atahualpa was led away. In the square and out on the plain, the cavalry and foot soldiers were killing men at the rate of fourteen or fifteen each an hour. So many commanders died that, according to one contemporary chronicler, “they [must] go unrecorded”.

Stephen was thrilled. I had described all this to him over dinner and it was true that there had been several interruptions, burps and jokes and self-regarding interjections, but it was also true that he had disclosed impressive, unsuspected powers of concentration. Cutting vigorously into his steak, he said,

“Go on.”

“Well, that was it. They’d won. There were battles afterwards, of course, but the Incas lost that day and I suspect, deep down, they knew it.”

“Just like that.”

“Well…yes. The Spanish had horses. They had swords made out of steel. The Incas had wooden clubs and dinky little axes made of bronze.”

“A primitive tribe.”

“No, no. No, not at all.”

“They didn’t have writing”, said Martin. “I was reading about this: they didn’t have writing or the wheel.”

“They didn’t need the wheel, not up and down those mountains. They didn’t glue their stones together, either, when they were building things. There’s nothing - no cement; no wattle and daub - in any of their houses. But they’re like this.”

I bound my fingers together.

“They had a sophisticated form of government; terraced agriculture; cloth.”

I was ticking them off on my fingers, then I shrugged.

“It was superior weaponry, that was all.”

“And bravery”, Stephen said. “Pissing themselves, you said, but holding firm.”

I hadn’t said “pissing themselves”. Again, I shrugged.

“Perhaps. I don’t know.”

“I do. Fuck. You wouldn’t catch me there, boy”

He was still cutting his steak. His plate was a shambles of soggy chips and meat and blood. I said,

“Romance.”

I was looking down at his shirt. The meercat was in a bandillero now. He had on a ten gallon hat and there was a moustache, like a large spider, dangling above his lower lip. A female meercat, identical but for blonde tresses and a smear of lipstick, held up her skirt with one hand and held on to his arm with the other.

“You know: adventure stories. Tales of derring do. The Spanish loved them and I expect Peru was a little like that: a place where you could defeat dozens of enemies just by swinging your sword around. And once you were there. Well, you were there, weren’t you? You couldn’t run away.”

Sheilah smiled at Stephen, saying,

“One for Monty.”

But Stephen was shaking his head. I looked at Sheilah, who was pointing at Stephen’s T-shirt.

“You know: Monty?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I looked at David. This was automatic – surely, he, too, would be bewildered. He smiled and pushed his palms upwards. He was pleased to be included and I felt a complicated mix of pity and anxiety that I would be associated with him. Mia was saying, “Ooooh. I love Monty” and Jess was singing what sounded like a theme tune – a martial air that had her making pistons of her arms. Sheilah said, proudly,

“We always say that, don’t we Stevie? Something’ll happen and we say “that’s one for Monty”.”

She patted him on the back.

“He’s his”, she said.

More amplification was needed.

“He draws him. Well, not any more. He makes them now, don’t you? The Monty films.”

Monty, it turned out, was a cowardly meercat. He tended to turn up in a historical or geographical context where there had been a known conflict: the Second World War, say, or the Alamo. There were also Monty video games – violent adventures in which he cowered in a corner, firing indiscriminately. The Mickey Mouse shirt had been uncharacteristic – Monty was more likely to quake inside his foxhole, gibbering, or cling to a flagpole, where he was safe above the swords and bullets. He was hugely popular and I could sense that there had been a palpable increase in goodwill. David was saying,

“A bit like Disney?”

“Disney.”

Stephen snarled.

“Romping and singing. It’s cobblers”

Jess said,

“It’s true. Monty’s got attitude.”

She took a careful sip of wine. She had already made sure that Mia’s glass was full. Now she leaned across the table, filling up people’s glasses.

“I mean, we know he’s scared. But he doesn’t take any nonsense, does he? It’s only when the fighting starts.”

It was as though she were trying to compliment one of Stephen’s friends. The restaurant that Carlos had recommended was in an alley, almost a grotto, in Miraflores. The food was Cuban and there was a picture of Fidel above our table; young and handsome, he was another vision of beneficent certitude. Somewhere, music was playing. It had a lazy, sensuous grace and Mia was swaying gently backwards and forwards in her chair. Like Jess’ empathy, it was a performance, although the impression that she was trying to give was that she was lost, somehow, in the dip and shuffle of the song. She had made up her face and her bare shoulders, in the light, had a top layer of glistening dew. Jess’ shirt was more like a sweatshirt, both bulky and unrevealing, and she kept pulling it down, attempting to cover whatever it was that she thought she was exposing. Stephen was telling her that he was tiring of Monty – that he was thinking of killing him off. She smiled and shook her head.

“Please, no. I couldn’t bear it.”

There was a chorus of “no”s. Stephen smiled graciously. He looked as though he had relaxed; as though this acclamation had freed him from something. He passed me the salt and pepper with a certain regal condescension.

“I’ll think about it”, he said.

Sheilah was leaning backwards in her chair. She was smiling, relishing the role of consort, but there was also something motherly in the way that she kept checking Stephen’s face. She had a tattoo of Winnie the Pooh on her shoulder. It was meant to be vivid, a bit of fun, but it had grown faint and, along with her brittle blonde hair and the ruched fold of skin beneath her nose, seemed to emphasize her age. Mia was leaning forward and saying,

“How do you get your ideas?”

She had been trying to look languorous but her intensity kept breaking through. She’d told us that she worked in an employment agency and had described the cold calls that she had to make, calls where you had to, in Mia’s words, bombard potential clients with questions to which they weren’t allowed to answer yes or no. It was like a parlour game. Mia gave us some examples: “What type of waitress do you need?; “Why don’t you need a waitress?”; “How can we help you in the future?” This last was said with a sort of supercilious lilt. Each time she emphasized a word, she thrust her index finger into the table. It was unclear whether her intensity – the way, for example, that she seemed to take a bead on you when you were only a couple of feet away – was willed, a response to her environment or just part of her personality. In the same way, I couldn’t tell if Jess’ ponderous tenderness was natural, a response to Mia or a response to being a teacher at a primary school. She had begun to fuss around us all now, filling our glasses and passing the vegetables as though she were hosting things but had also, paradoxically, been asked to wait on us.

Stephen had shrugged off Mia’s question and was pressing upon her a pisco sour, a white-grape brandy mixed with egg white, lemon juice, sugar, syrup and bitters. It was milky, like medicine, and Mia took it gingerly, holding her other hand underneath it and squeezing her eyes tight shut. She had on a brownish nail varnish that was already, I noticed, starting to chip.

“Oh”, she said. “Yuk.”

She stuck her tongue out.

“Euurgh. Good God.”

Satisfied, Stephen nodded.

“Innit”, he said.

He passed it to Jess and then to Martin, both of whom had stuck their hands out eagerly. I can’t remember what Martin did. It was something generic, something archetypically middle English, like insurance or accountancy. Diane didn’t work, but she didn’t work in a different way to the way that Susan didn’t work. There was no hint of irony or that her horizons might have dwindled. She was eager to make her mark on the conversation. Her “claim to fame”, she was telling Stephen, was that her niece had got through to the final 50 for a reality show. Greased like a channel swimmer, she had had to push a balloon down her male partner’s chest and through his legs, using her nose and chin. Diane said,

“Terrible.”

She shook her head but she was smiling. Martin grinned and rubbed his hands swiftly together. I hadn’t seen the show but it, too, seemed generic – a series of ritual humiliations that led, if you were lucky, to the humiliation of being briefly in the public eye. Mia knew someone, she said, who had taken part in a dating show. They had been chained together, had slept and eaten and gone to the toilet together, and her friend had had to wipe himself while a girl stood next to him, pretending to avert her eyes.

“Hilarious”, she said. “He’s like…”

She retracted her arms and pushed her head down into her neck, staring directly in front of her. For a moment, she looked comically terrified and everybody laughed. Not everybody: David was mopping the juices on his plate with a big hunk of bread. He did this with a disconcerting thoroughness, working his way into the edges of the plate. Mia flicked her eyes towards him, drawing him to our attention, and then returned to staring straight ahead. It was clear that it had become an impression of him. It was funny, just like the Elmer Fudd impression had been funny, but Susan didn’t laugh, and I found that I no longer wanted to. David didn’t seem to notice. He had arrived just as we were gathering in the lobby to go for dinner. He had, as he approached, a look of disproportionate determination, as though he had been wading through a swamp. With an evident effort, he had composed his face. We should have allowed him to change, but Stephen had taken his elbow, had made a show of jovial solicitude, and steered him outside. Partly, I thought, it was to prove a point; to erase the memory of David’s resistance this afternoon. Once they were outside, he left him and walked off, waving us onwards. He had pulled his arm away rapidly, with evident distaste. At dinner, he barely talked to him, his face, when it was turned towards him, both rigid and unexpressive. No-one referred to what had happened. Now Stephen was drawing on the paper napkins. His caricature made Mia look prettier, a purring cat, but he had exaggerated her stare so that it looked as though she had been hypnotized. Jess had a dreamy, lost look – a whimsical introspection that had her walking, all unawares, into a wall. Her shirt billowed around her like a voluminous sail. You were expected to react in much the same way that you would to the television show. The cruelty was matter-of-fact; it was an aspect of the entertainment, and, as such, no ambivalence was needed. You were simply expected to be amused. I was in a gown and mortar-board – a professor – and I have to admit that I was pleased: I had a role already defined for me. As David continued to use his bread just like a sponge, dragging it around his plate, Stephen flashed another napkin up and down, so rapidly that he had to do it again, slowing a little so that we could all see what he had done. Still, the effect was of something that was nearly subliminal – an image of David out of a nightmare, with a bulging forehead and eyebrows that were radically out of true. He looked like an insect. Like an alien: like a B-movie predator. Each time Stephen lifted it he glanced at David, stretching his mouth into a manic leer and lolling his tongue. I was, I felt, lucky to be on the same side of the table – I was under no obligation to react. I got up to go to the toilet. There was a back room, larger than I had expected, and on a rostrum a band was performing the music we were listening to. I hadn’t realised this - I had assumed that it was being piped through from a CD player somewhere. Already slightly drunk, I experienced a moment of disorientation – almost of disaffection. Live music must inevitably add something, I felt, that I could do without. Things would become much less contained.

Sure enough, one of the cooks came out to dance. He had on normal trousers and the top half of his whites, along with a red bandana. He jived and shook and waltzed, alone, his body a wavy line. He struck a cowbell then put his hands into his pockets, moving his hips from side to side. We had pulled a couple of tables together in the back room and now Mia stood up. She tried to partner him but couldn’t do much more than hold onto his hands and look back at us, smirking in embarrassment. Stephen took the mike, of course. This, too, was matter-of-fact; one felt that he was exercising a certain droit se seigneur. He put his head down into the microphone, seemed almost to be butting it, then carefully lowed the melody. There was a guitarist, a bass-player, someone on maracas and a drummer on big floor toms. Stephen took the cowbell and bashed at it with a drumstick. He was shouting now; he seemed to know the song and was coming at it headlong, roaring the chorus and leaning to one side as though a strong wind were buffeting him. He hadn’t doubted that they would want him to sing along with them. The band all watched him warily but followed him nonetheless, mirroring his body language. It might have looked like satire if they had not been doing it so slowly and carefully. When they had finished, he bowed then swept his hand backwards, encompassing them all. We applauded and cheered, of course – we had to. David, too, although there was a visible distance between the intention and the act: he tapped his fingers into his palm as gently as a dowager.

Sheilah, meanwhile, had settled downwards in her chair. She had become flirtatious; on the way back from the toilet she had run her hand along the back of one of the dancer’s legs. This wasn’t like Mia’s dancing. It was nothing, a mere flicker, but I saw that Stephen had his head down and that he had begun to draw the dancer as a mule, his nose and jaw transmuted into the muzzle of a creature who was being tugged, its nostrils painfully flared, by a triumphant-looking musical note. David was reaching for the bottle of wine but Stephen got there first. He filled his glass then slid the little that was left across the table, just within reach of David’s hand. His face had the sullen, powerless look of a child that had just been slapped.

In the morning, we headed for Pisco. It was south of Lima and we drove with the coast on our right and the desert on our left. There were slum dwellings everywhere – half-built, one-storey hovels – but then, all of a sudden, there’d be an advert: a billboard flaunting the gold of Inca Kola, like the gold rose in the cathedral, or a jar of Nivea or a can of Coke. Where would you buy them? There didn’t seem to be any shops. There were political slogans that had been marked out with rocks but down the road there’d be an Absolut logo in the same style. It was incongruous; insulting. We drove through it all in a big air-conditioned coach, in “Inca Class”. There were foot-rests and drinks holders and, above our heads, “The Matrix” dubbed in Spanish. Outside, thin, sickly-looking cows roamed slowly among the dust and rubble. The few people that you saw seemed rooted to the spot; discarded and left to rust.

When we arrived, there was a swarm of touts. The road to our hotel had run out, dwindling into mud and dust, and they ran along beside us, banging the driver’s door. Carlos said,

“Poor people”.

He shook his head. It wasn’t clear if he was being sympathetic or disapproving. They let us through only reluctantly, some trying to sell us trips or offer a better hotel or simply claim that they were guiding us the few yards to the door, smiling and talking constantly and grabbing at our bags. We followed Stephen. Inside, the lobby was all cool stone and potted plants. There were dim corridors and wooden stairs and a display case showing ancient coins, like teeth. The rest of the day was ours, Carlos had told us, but there wasn’t much to do. Once again, you could only walk within a certain area. It was a small town, with a well-tended but dusty square, but there were the same distrustful stares and there were armed guards next to the cash machine. Up a side-street, I could hear the sound of panpipes. I had been looking forward to this - had, indeed, expected to be moved by it - but they were playing a Beatles medley and, in a way, it was doubly disorientating: you couldn’t get to grips with the culture but were forced, instead, to account for the way that they were trying to get to grips with yours.

I had gone out alone. I am solitary by nature and, in recent times, had become more so. Since Judy left, I had traveled alone, mooning through Rouen cathedral and among the Giottos in Italy. I don’t know what I had expected from this trip. Company, I suppose, but not like this. Not this …affinity. Already I was being gathered in. It was both heady and disturbing. I needed to be free of company; of the assumption that we all felt the same way. I could imagine Stephen’s reaction to the armed guards and to the menus outside the restaurants: “Jumped noodles with meat”; “Hot suck of chicken”; a cocktail called “He/she came”. He would be scandalously delighted.

I picked up a key-ring that had been stamped with the image of a seal. The photograph was bleary and the body had been inadvertently doubled so that it seemed almost, but not quite, three-dimensional. The shop was tiny but it looked as though there had been an explosion, a starburst, of tat all over the tables and walls. It was as though someone had flung things everywhere, in a fit of rage or of misplaced enthusiasm, and I stood for a while, just looking, trying, albeit self-consciously, to sort through my own responses. I was trying to find an appropriate reaction, one that accorded more appropriately with being a “historian”, but it was difficult. I was, in my own way, just as delighted as Stephen would have been: this stuff was terrible. But then, of course, what I was actually saying was that our tat was better – that we were a culture for whom producing tat was its own reward. This led, in turn, to a feeling, equally untrustworthy, that Peru was, in essence, prelapsarian – a culture whose continued otherness was proved by the cumbersome way with which it sold itself to the tourists. Of course, all one was really seeing was poverty – the drawn-out consequences of the conquest and the bungled liberation.

My reactions were further complicated by the presence of Susan. She was outside, stroking a jumper that appeared to be unraveling as she touched it. I watched her for a moment and then said,

“It’s molting.”

I leaned out of the doorway and lifted a ball of what looked like fur. I was aware of her hand, up at the neckline, as though it were glowing.

“You’ll barely get it home”, I said. “There’ll be a couple of strands of string and a pile of fluff. You’ll have to knit your own.”

I had wanted to disassociate myself from the jumper’s shabbiness – to let her know that I was too shrewd to buy it. She said,

“I like it. I don’t think I would want to wear it, necessarily.”

“Just hang it up.”

She smiled.

“Or give it a bowl of milk”, she said.

Her mouth, once she had finished speaking, was pertly plump. Her smile transformed her face; it was as though someone had coloured it in.

“There’s an old woman by the square”, I said. “The jumpers are the same.”

I was going to say “but cheaper” but changed it to,

“She looks as though she could do with a sale.”

We walked back to the square. The woman muttered to herself, her fingers banging out a kind of morse, even as Susan was handing over the money. Her fingers were thick and knotty, like carrots, and one of her front teeth had fallen out. Behind her, there was a merry-go-round, a dream of pursuit, with predators chasing grubby pelicans who, in turn, were snapping at startled-looking fish. The predators, pumas and snarling panthers, looked comically malevolent. One in particular displayed a sort of italicised aggression; a relish that was hilariously self aware. I smiled, pointing, and said,

“Stephen.”

She didn’t react. Embarrassed, I shrugged and said,

“Forget it. He’s harmless.”

For a moment, she looked off into the middle distance. Then she grinned.

“And you?”

“Oh God”, I said. “It’s my distinguishing characteristic. My wife…”

She glanced at me.

“My ex-wife. She said that I was passive to a fault.”

“Yes, but that isn’t the same thing, is it?”

We were crossing the road. Our hotel was down a side-street and I thought of suggesting a drink but we were half-way there before I had framed the question properly in my head. She said,

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s perfectly all right.”

“No, but I am. I’m still…”

She gestured, vaguely, in front of her – it was as though she was attempting to erase something.

“Me too”, I said.

We were almost there and now we could hear Stephen’s voice reverberating around the lobby. The ensuing laughter was so predictable that it seemed canned.

But it was different in the morning. Stephen lifted his glass of juice and said “more soup” and all of us, even David, laughed. We had gathered in the garden. Our fleeces were done up to our chins and we all held mugs of tea, two-handed, to warm ourselves. We had gone out together, again, the night before but only for an hour or so. Flies tried to settle on your dinner and, in any case, the meat was both lukewarm and tough. There was a certain atmosphere in the streets and bars but it seemed febrile; liable to break into hysteria. Even Stephen was subdued. This morning, there were rolls and meat, a sort of ham, and, of course, the same viscous juice that seemed to have clotted thickly in the glass. We sat two to a table and listened to Carlos as he gave us our itinerary. He had been leaving us to eat alone but, in the mornings, his routine was to bounce over to Stephen and squat beside him, showing him the paperwork, before he stood up and told the rest of us. This morning, there was another minibus. There was also a different driver, a squat, tough-looking adolescent who smoked roll-ups and who, when he’d finished, flicked them out of the window using his thumb and forefinger. His hair kept falling over his eyes and he was forced to blow it upwards, a gesture that only served to accentuate how young he was. As we pulled into the car-park by the harbour, he swerved needlessly into a space. Outside, he hoicked his trousers up then, sprawling upright on the door, spat into the dust. Carlos leaned over and muttered into his ear. The driver looked downwards, sheepishly, and dragged his toe across the mess, forming muddy little spit-bombs as he did so.Carlos turned to us.

“Paracas”, he said.

We were beside a line of low buildings. Ahead of us was the harbour, a simple horizontal that was intersected by the perpendicular of the jetty. Speedboats were tilting precariously from side to side as people were being helped on to them. The sky was cloudless, the waves so slow that they looked like the wake of a slow boat.

“We go”, Carlos said. “Out to the islands.”

Instinctively, I looked over at David. He had evidently decided to try harder – had laughed, this morning, at Stephen’s joke and had tried, on the minibus, to engage Mia in conversation. This had not been a success. She had stared directly at him, all her intensity frozen into a tight rictus of politeness. Now he was trying to be a sport. He looked at the boats and then at me. He rubbed his hands together, conveying a decorous enthusiasm.

“Nice day for it”, he said.

But a pulse had started on his forehead, just above his right eyebrow. The tendons on his neck were overly prominent. I said,

“It’ll be a breeze.”

I gestured out towards the empty ocean.

“Look”, I said. “No traffic.”

He grinned and nodded rapidly but his thumb was moving up and down the fingers of his left hand. He had on the same pair of combat trousers and another smart shirt. Seemingly of its own accord, his right hand had gone up to loosen the collar.

“Yes”, he said. “Perfect.”

He was making me uncomfortable and I made a show of looking around me. There were pelicans everywhere. The length of their beaks forced them to arch their necks backwards, giving them a slightly martial air – an aggressiveness that had been well represented by the merry-go-round in Pisco. One was muscling its way along the path and Susan was trying to take its picture. A man stepped out of shot then waved at it, waiting for Susan to snap it before he pushed his opened palm towards her. He was wearing a Harvard T-shirt that was ripped under the arms. You could see his upper arms and chest – sunk inwards, like quicksand. It was difficult to know what he was claiming – was he saying that he had distracted it or that he had directed it? I could see that Susan was wavering but Stephen stepped between them, pushing the man’s hand upwards with his own.

“Fuck’s sake”, he said. “Go on. ‘op it.”

He shook his head.

“Muppet.”

David nodded, at nothing in particular. I think the intention was to be seen to approve of what Stephen had done. But Stephen had already turned his back on him. He was marching to the boats, taking the lead to such an extent that Carlos had to jump up onto the jetty and hurry to keep up with him.

I was sitting opposite David when we set off. I could see his hands tighten on the seat; could see him straining slightly forwards as we accelerated. Mia retracted her head again. She boggled her eyes at Jess and then at David then back again, and Jess stifled a giggle. Stephen was staring at him. He said,

“How are you doing?”

“Oh, fine. Fine, thank you.”

But the way that he was projecting, sending his voice up and outwards, told you of the strain that he was feeling. Stephen’s enquiry hadn’t been remotely solicitous. He looked wary and exasperated, as though he was prepared to throw David out of the boat if he did anything stupid. Carlos was pointing at something.

“The Candelabra”, he said.

This was an ambiguous shape, something between a plant and a candlestick, that had been scratched into the surrounding rock. The local landscape was ruddy and bare and this symbol had been here for hundreds of years. The trouble was that no-one knew what it was supposed to symbolize. A cactus? Something hallucinogenic? A Masonic candelabra? At the mention of the masons, Stephen did a little secret handshake, sinuously dipping his arm so that it looked like a reversed swan’s neck and dabbling his fingers in Jess’ palm.

“Pass it on”, he said.

She did, but it ended at David. Diane wouldn’t do it. She tried to cover it up, to mimic a sneeze, and David showed no sign of noticing. Ahead of us were the Islas Ballestras, the islands that we had come out to see. There were two of them, in close proximity, and as you approached them you realised that they were covered in sea-lions, big glistening animals, barking and diving and splashing around you. Rearing upwards on the rocks they seemed to be almost headless – the sun glistened on their skin so that they seemed to be made, partly, of the water that surrounded them; to have coagulated into something like the spit-bombs that our driver had created earlier. Their heads, when you saw them, were oddly expressionless, with bulbous foreheads and bewildered little eyes. Stephen nudged me, nodding towards David, who was staring intently at them over the side of the boat.

“Separated at birth”, he said.

Even as he was joking, he was staring at him intently, like a marksman.

“Look at him: he’s home. He’s going to swim out to them in a minute.”

I couldn’t resist a small complicitous smirk. Ashamed, I looked for Susan. She was looking away from me, up at the cormorants who were flying in close formation overhead. They were like a display team – even if two of them broke off from the main group they would bank and wheel together in perfect unison. As we got closer, we could see that the rocks were white, covered in bird droppings. This was guano, Carlos said.

“We farm”, he said. “Since Inca time.”

He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.

“Very valuable.”

He had given the word four syllables. He pointed at the island’s summit.

“Security guards. You try to steal...”

He slapped one palm into the other. Slyly, he looked at Stephen.

“Boof”, he said.

We all laughed. David’s laugh was an odd sort of muted shout. He was still clutching the seat, I noticed. Stephen turned to look at him. He paused, allowing the pause to lengthen, then clapped his hands. He did it again.

“Keep going”, he said. “Go on: I’ll throw you a fish.”

David laughed again. He had made himself do it in much the same way that someone would force himself to vomit. He sounded as though he was in pain. His teeth were bared and his eyes went swivelling from Stephen to the rest of us then out, as though escaping, to where the sea was slapping at the rocks. His cap had been pushed backwards, exposing a patch of scaly skin. His top button was still done up and his hands were both pressed tightly between his knees. I thought: how odd he is.

We were idling in sunshine now. The iridescence on the sea-lions’ flanks was dazzling. There were orange sea crabs clustered on the outside of the rocks and they mixed with the white of the guano to form a sort of impasto. Stephen’s mood had darkened. He was asserting himself, insisting on directing our attention to a group of penguins. Ahead of us was a beach that was covered in sea-lions. The noise was tremendous, a confusion of barking and braying that sounded oddly affecting, as though they were pleading with us to be saved. The boatman looked at Carlos, who looked at Stephen: did we want to go further in?

“No”, Stephen said. “Bollocks to it. You’ve heard one fucking sea-lion you’ve heard ‘em all.”

Nobody argued with him. By now he was up at the front of the boat; he looked like he was leading some sort of expedition but it was obvious that he wanted to get back as soon as possible. At the jetty, he leapt out of the boat and helped the women ashore. We were unwilling to question him. We struggled after him, waiting to see what he would do. He was conferring with Carlos and now he was gesturing us onwards, throwing his arm over his head as though we were going to run through enemy territory. The minibus took us, through red hills and rock and sand, out to a nature reserve but this, too, seemed to exercise Stephen’s contempt. There was a wooden watchtower and, far away in the distance, a group of flamingoes that were little more than a smear of pink. There was a line of stones that he insisted we all cross. You weren’t supposed to step over them – they were the limit of the flamingoes’ boundaries. He sneered.

“Fuck sake”, he said. “Just stones.”

But even he could see that there was nothing to be gained from trudging down to where the flamingoes were. Even now, they were distinctly edgy. As we watched, they rose upwards together, a coherent group.

“Come on”, said Stephen.

It was as though something was rubbing against him, causing needless electricity. Back at the harbour, he bought us all a drink. I sat back, trying to bask, or, at least, to give the impression of basking, in the sunlight. But Stephen’s mood was catching. Mia’s thumb was twitching slightly. Martin was rubbing, rapidly, at his neck. Beside us were a trio of fishermen, broad, muscley men whose catch was glittering in a bucket. Sarah and David had gone to the toilet and now he was edging his way back between the tables. He had tried to make conversation but it had been like trying to make a difficult ascent in which you couldn’t get a handhold. Now, the set of his shoulders was similar to when I had watched him trying to cross the road. As I was registering this Stephen was standing up – was stepping over to the fishermen. He threw a note on the table and, with the other hand, he lifted out a fish. It flashed briefly in the sun – a limp dream-scimitar. He wielded it with a certain amount of confidence, slapping it into his palm, before he shouted “Dave!” and David turned his head towards him. He tried to smile but it was nothing more, really, than a brief exposure of his teeth. Stephen threw the fish. He hurled it, giving it everything he had, and, for a moment, you could register the incongruity of it – the weird beauty as it passed overhead. David reared backwards, kicking uselessly. We were all watching him now. He bumped into a table and attempted to catch the fish, one-handed. It went up into his face, as though it was attacking him. Someone’s coffee had gone over and there was the crash of falling cutlery. He looked like he was fending off a wasp, he was grimacing madly, and Mia started to laugh – staccato bursts that enabled us to label what we were seeing as entertainment; as would-be funny. Stephen sat down. He was flushed and grinning. Shrewdly, he looked at me.

“Damn it”, he said.

He clicked his fingers.

“I was going for the face.”

I smiled.

“Bad luck”, I said.

Flash fiction #3 Moscow

2011-06-21T09:58:00.020+01:00

Magda is telling me a joke about pre-Putin Russia. She says,

"A woman wants to buy a car. She is given a voucher and told, "It will be delivered in 10 years"."

Her voice is intoxicating; a throaty gauze.

"She says, "Morning or afternoon?" The man says, "Why?" "Because the plumber is coming in the morning.""

I laugh. I am already three-quarters drunk. We are in a restaurant that is decked out as a sort of souk. They have pipes, here, that you can suck through vodka. It is like the bar in A Clockwork Orange: people are closing their eyes and falling backwards. I say,

"Yes. Funny."

She nods; she doesn't smile. The only time, so far, that I have seen her smile is when she saw me at the bar. Her friend seems to have disappeared. It's like a dream: the tented walls; the way the vodka seems to smother you. And Magda, too: her beauty. It is forbidding; angular and terribly symmetrical. She is languid and elegant. She looks, when she leans over me, as though she is dancing slowly towards me.

I pay for her. The next day, she shows me the sites. There are boulders of snow in Gorky Park. We see St Basil's, of course, and Lenin's tomb, which is a ziggurat; a modernist pyramid. Most of the buildings are too dispirited to be called brutalist but there are billboards, too: big, vivid dreams, which loom above the city.

"This", Magda says, "is where I would like to shop."

It is superbly tasteless: there are armchairs with ivory arms and gold and silver pool tables. She hangs onto my arm. I pay for lunch but I am happy too: I feel as though we are getting on. She tells me about her mother, a factory worker, and her overbearing father. She kisses me then brushes lipstick from my cheek. I am a litle drunk again. I think: I could get used to this. She likes me, I think.

We walk into the park. Someone is leading his dog across the lake. An old man is barking, repeatedly, but there are children, too, playing on swings, and couples holding hands. The snow is like geological strata: you can see the coloured paper, like confetti, that has been left over from New Year's Eve. I see that Magda's face is layered, too. There is her make-up and then her actual face, its thinness and its watchfulness. We, Magda and I, are holding hands. I think: this is romantic. No, I think, it really is. But then she bolts away from me. She pushes me out of the way. She races over to the snow and snatches something up. It is, I see, a 50 rouble note. She turns and tries to smile. She is no longer elegant; her elegance, I see, is something that has been, at it were, painted on. She shrugs.

"Moscow", she says.

Flash fiction #2 Rock Climbing

2011-06-17T10:20:00.025+01:00

Katey, her arms outstretched, looked like she was nuzzling the air. She said,

"I'm at one with nature!"

Daniel snorted. Still, if he had planned a beach - if he could, himself, have arranged the sand and the rocks and the bright hut at the top - he couldn't have done a better job himself. The weather was a compendium: bright light and spots of rain and everywhere the wind. This wind - its constant bullying - insisted on the primacy of its environment; it told you that you counted, in the scheme of things, for almost nothing.

He said,

"Come on. There's no point sitting on the beach."

He led them up into the rocks. Susan, his teenage daughter, lagged behind. She had a gimmicky hand-held device on which she was rearing an electronic animal. She had to nurture it, she said; to pamper it. Her hair had been pushed outwards - she had done this herself - so that it looked like something you might see at Halloween. Her nails seemed to be slathered in neon light.

"Susan", he said.

He was going to tell her to hurry up; to watch her feet. They were on a plateau of rock but there were also egg-shaped stones, big boulders and jagged detritus; gravel, almost. But, he thought, what was the point? It was the same with Tom, his 9-year-old. He felt, sometimes, as though he was dreaming it, his family; as though he was the only one who heard his voice. His wife, meanwhile, had found a spot in the lee of a rock. She looked, from here, bulky and indeterminate but she was like that anyway. She had become generic: a wife and mother. In bed, he concentrated on different areas, as though he was trying, and failing, to dig for treasure. She said,

"Dan! Over here! The blanket: quick."

He spread the blanket. He helped to distribute the food. He watched the sea, its stateliness and grandeur. Here, in the chaos of his family - amongst spilled food and Susan's ipod, tssking everyone, and Tom's loud hatred of the wind - the sea seemed an ideal. Like poetry: line after rhythmic line. His wife had blobs of ketchup on her chin. He said,

"I'll just..."

He didn't want to complete the thought. If he put it into words then Katey might complain; Tom might ask if he could come. He picked his way away from them, over the rocks. He felt as though (this was ridiculous, but let it stand)he felt as though he was fending for himself. If one concentrated on one's own body - if one really concentrated on it; if one lived in one's feet and upper thigh and in the disposition of one's arms and legs - then family all-but-disappeared. It was delightful. Like meditation, or being drunk, you felt as though you were both inhabiting your self and watching it. More: watching over it. Behind him, the noise of his family became just that: noise. It was like a stain, a smudge, that was being erased by the wind. They looked like litter that he had, recklessly, left behind. He felt free.

By the cliff face, the rocks increased in size. Insects, too small to be identified, ran off the surface, in rivulets. He started to climb properly; to use handholds. He could hear the depth of his own breathing. He began to feel a little frightened but he also felt as though he had committed himself to something. It was as though the success or failure of the climb would say something definitive about him. He turned and, there, before him, was the sweep of the whole bay, defined more by the sky than by the sea and shore. He was a good way up. The wind was slapping at him, trying to tug him off.

And there, too, were his family. They were waving at him, now, and everything - his wife and children and the sea and shore and sky and the brilliant light, like water poured into a bowl - seemed to make perfect sense. He saw the way his son and daughter fitted beside his wife. He saw them as a pattern but, more than that, he saw them all as triumphantly human; colourful and vibrant in the grey and ragged rocks. He saw a space, too: his.

And then he fell. There was a moment of panic; no more: his head hit a large rock. He would never be able to tell them what he knew. Even as they began to run towards him, his body was cooling down. He was - his body was - becoming one with the larger, colder landscape of the beach.

Flash fiction #1 My Father's Ghost

2011-06-17T07:16:00.004+01:00

My father's ghost is sitting beside the bed. He is crosslegged, which he never was in life, and he is natty in a way that I can barely remember now. He has sideburns; his collars are broad and purple.

"Wotcher, cock", he says.

He sounds exactly like he used to sound. There is a sly irony in this; it is as though he is still talking to a naughty boy. I say,

"What's up?"

Why am I not surprised? Part of me thinks: this is exactly right. He lolls and smiles, just as though he is in a swimming pool. Not that he floats. He just sits there, crisply, one hand resting on his knee. Grinning, he gestures indolently at my face.

"Lipstick", he says.

"It's not the same."

"A chip off the old block."

"It's not the same."

I am whispering; I don't want to disturb my wife. He touches my shoulder but I don't feel anything.

"It isn't", I say. "You used to tell Mum everything."

"Not everything."

How often do you get to taunt your father's ghost? I say,

"Carol; Rosemary; Linda; Hannah; Maeve..."

I am counting them off on my fingers. He looks at me; I mean, he really looks at me. Two years ago, before he died, his eyes were the colour of salmon. His nose was strawberry-shaped. I'm not used to this steadiness of regard. He says,

"And how's my grandson?"

"Fine. Ben's fine."

"That's good."

"He is."

I am aware of grief. It comes, a clammy hand, to squeeze my throat. But who am I grieving for? I say,

"It's not the same."

I can't talk to him about this, even now. Once, when he didn't know I was at home, I heard him with the woman next door. It was the effort, the earnestness, that upset me most. With me, he had always adopted a lighter tone, as though he was reciting humorous poetry. He shakes his head; a show of sadness.

"Desire", he says.

The smugness of this, I think. The incongruity. I say,

"Don't tell me that it disappears."

He rubs his upper lip.

"No. You remember everything."

He is smoking. It covers his head; his arms; his chest. He looks half here and half as though he's been erased. He makes a shape with his hands - a potter's wheel.

"You see it whole", he says.

He smiles, and then my father, a man who only ever read the Racing Times, quotes Kafka at me. He says,

"We human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell."

He leans towards me - reverently; lovingly. He touches my shoulder - it feels as though I have shrugged, or flinched, of my own accord - and then he is gone.

Later, I send a text: "I can't. I'm sorry." I ease myself into bed. I put an arm around my wife and place my nose against her neck.

The Hay Festival (Part Two)

2011-06-05T18:26:00.017+01:00

One of the things I used to hate when I was travelling was being told that somewhere had deteriorated. You were expected to feel culpable, I think - you were the kind of person, after all, who enjoyed pancakes smothered in honey - but I always ended up feeling that, yes, there are places that have been hollowed out by tourists much as certain wasps hollow out the bodies of certain spiders but, in the end, most beauty spots still have something (an essence, call it) that is pretty much inviolable. Cusco's walls are still vividly there - they still seem to speak to you - even if you have had a fry-up before you visit them.

It seems to me that the Hay festival's like this. The presence of the Daily Telegraph; the glib slickness of its offshoot, The Hayley Telegraph ("His [Chris Evans'] trajectory from broadcasting hero to boozed-up zero and back again is a riveting story"); the crowds; the way that you are hustled from queue to queue - well, let's just say that there've been better years. Still, once inside, one's irritation tends to fade. While it's true that I saw trousers and jacket that were, let's say, egregiously red and yellow (V.S. Pritchett called it the "loud shabbiness of wealth"), it's also true that what I was left with once an event had started was simply the words themselves - their power and the pleasure that I take in them.

So. Don Paterson called the sonnet sequence "the hula hoop of the 1590s". He said that the iambic pentameter was like a hi-hat over which Shakespeare riffed; he had perfected the form to the point that "it didn't exist". Alfred Brendel said that, for a pianist, form and expression were "near identical twins". Eric Hobsbawm told us that his world view was still, essentially, that of a man who had been involved in the popular fronts of the thirties while Paul Theroux spoke in an African dialect, quoting a proverb that said that "if you're ugly then you'd better learn to sing". Howard Jacobson quoted Dickens, pointing out that his happy endings aren't happy at all but return us to the way that "the arrogant and the froward and the vain fretted and chafed and made their usual uproar".

These are the type of statements that remain with you. They linger in the mind - they light the subject up - and, yes, I will be going back next year.

Thrilleresque

2011-05-26T12:32:00.016+01:00

He told her he was running for his life. He pointed towards the street light and beyond it, out towards the darkness which was looming just as though it was about to pounce. Even his words seemed to have weight and mass. He fumbled with them; they felt slippery.

She laughed. But it was true. He had just run across the bridge, newly aware that there, below him, was the Thames. He’d felt, or thought he’d felt, them following, so that the walkway – was it his imagination? – had begun to throb. Air seethed between his chest and throat and floated in his legs. The river was murky; horribly sinewy. The pavement was much worse; he could see himself – could feel himself - fall onto it even as he was making the last steps that took him to the stairs. His hand, he noticed, was still gripping the girl’s shirt. He said,

“I’m sorry.”

He patted the air between them.

“I’m…”

“Drunk?”

He was. If he had been less so he would have been more concerned about the fact that his gestures were so disproportionate. He’d seen her peer at him when he came in. She had a wan, abandoned look; her fringe was clustered, wetly, in the middle of her forehead and her nails were clumsily stuck on. But she had allowed him to manhandle her and now she was shrugging and smiling and her eyes were eagerly exploring his. He did his best to look as though his eyes had snagged in hers. They wouldn’t come for him, he thought, if he wasn’t alone. Smiling, she looked over his shoulder.

“I’m still not seeing them”, she said.

Neither could he. Where were they? They’d disappeared in the same way that they’d appeared, as though they really were from where they said they were. One minute he’d been alone and the next they were standing on either side of him. The toilet was tiny and they were both bulky and broad, in suits, but it wasn’t that. There was something studied, something over-deliberate, about their immobility. They were book-ending him - were managing, it seemed, to loom towards him without moving – but it felt like they had rubbed briskly against him because he was, the room was, fizzing with electricity. It felt intimate and oddly unsurprising; it seemed to be happening inside his head. When the door of the cubicle behind them opened, it sounded disproportionately loud but it was also an opportunity. Nathan backed away, as quietly as he could, and pushed, quickly, around the other man. He didn’t run; he felt sure that, if he did, they’d go for him, like dogs.

Upstairs, he didn’t say anything. Part of him had been expecting this. He was aware, already, of the way the Room could bleed into real time. Last week, he’d stolen a CD. He’d hidden it under his shirt then run through the alarm. The thrill had been almost sexual. The recklessness was out of character but, then, he was beginning to see that you didn’t have to be defined by “character”; you could add to it or, more relevantly, subtract from it: he’d sworn at Jill, in bed; he’d contemplated hitting her. It was the sort of thing that, in the Room, had gained him a reputation but it was also what had led Heather to say that she would fix him; that she would find him.

And here they were. It was like CGI: his worst thoughts had become three-dimensional. They were both standing by the hatch and he could feel them, now, like heat on his left side. They had their backs to him and, turning, he checked them out. Their bald heads were like knuckles. Time seemed to have slowed around them: people moved past them one delicate step at a time. One of them, the smallest one, seemed to be crushing a cigarette, and, yes, Nathan wanted to run but he also wanted to talk to them, to try to reason with them. What if this random-seeming meeting was just that? What if it wasn’t about the Room at all? What if it was just… life?

Quickly, before he could change his mind, he stepped into the space beside the biggest man. He could, or thought he could, smell something powerful: flop sweat, perhaps. Before he could even turn, the other said,

“You didn’t wash your hands.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You didn’t wash your hands.”

The man had turned to face him and his eyes were, somehow, vividly empty. This emptiness was a matter of will; of bouncing yourself back at you. Still staring, he slapped the other man on the arm.

“Did he?”

“What?”

“Wash his hands?”

The other man shook his head. The first man said,

“See?”

“Dirty little fucker.”

The other man wasn’t looking at him. He was still staring at himself behind the bar; he hung there in the mirror, snarling and burping. The first man said,

“He doesn’t like you, Nathan. He thinks – I have to be honest, here – he thinks you’re skanky, mate.”

He was speaking through gobbets of smoke. He flicked his cigarette outwards, away from where he stood.

“He sees the hair – all this (he mimed the way that Nathan’s hair sprang from his head) – and then he reads the things you post and… Well, you know.”

There was a gap between the words themselves and the flatness of the man’s delivery. It was hard to explain why this should feel so threatening. It was the words, too: “the things you post”. Something – it felt like someone’s hand – was crawling up Nathan’s chest. He couldn’t speak but neither could he seem to walk away. The man was leaning into him.

“You, cocker, are a dirty boy.”

A blotch of red flared upwards, covering his face. The tendons on his neck were sticking out and he was gurning; staring at Nathan as though they were in the ring.

“See: there’s a line. And you, you little prick, went sailing over it. See this?”

He pulled his jacket open and Nathan saw a screwdriver. It was far worse than he’d expected. He had imagined a gun, or else a sort of cartoon weapon: a kukri or a samurai sword. This, on the other hand, was terrifying precisely because it was so prosaic. He could feel the man’s breath; his sweaty ardour.

“This is from Heather.”

“I’m sorry. I…”

“What? Don’t understand? We’re from the Room. Where else would we be from?”

“No. I meant…”

He sighed. He rubbed his forehead with his index finger. They were gestures that were meant to be disarming.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t give me that.”

Several things seemed to happen at once. The man was putting his hand inside his jacket pocket. His neck and shoulders were expanding outwards, like a lizard’s. The other man was off his stool – he was rubbing his hands together – and it was like fireworks going off: something surged and then scattered upwards, so that Nathan jumped and turned at the same time. He ran. People were three deep at the bar but he still managed to buck and skitter from side to side. He had beer on his shirt. He both did and didn’t feel it, just as he was both aware and not aware of the pavement and the road outside. The restaurant next door felt weirdly peaceful, like an illustration in a children’s book. He registered the television station, the primary colours in its window, in the same way that you would register somebody laughing while you drowned. Behind him, he could hear their footsteps. He risked a look and saw their jackets billowing around them. They seemed to be sloughing off a skin; you saw the monster underneath.

Part of him registered the disappointment that, once out on Oxford Street, he didn’t feel any safer. He had been expecting to feel as though he was back in the open air, away from the constriction and the game-like intricacy of the back streets. But there was no distinction between the two. It was still him, long-legged but floundering. He was flailing in real time in the same way that a fish would struggle in a net. He swerved then swerved again. They chased him down Dean Street and so he lunged into Old Compton Street. It was as though he’d dived. It was a summer night; the air, like a warm sea, both buoyed you up and lifted you a little. But now he was aware of something else: a current that ran from bar to bar; a lurid, jungle atmosphere. Soho was slickly lit; it thumped and squawked. It might have been designed – buffed-up and soundtracked - for a chase like this.

But he had given them the slip. He had been forced to run in here and they had seemed to disappear. He realised he was staring at the girl. He said,

“I’m sorry. I should have asked. What is your name?”

She placed her forehead just above his nose. She nuzzled his ear; pretended to bite it. She was resting something - something sharp - below his ribs.

“Heather”, she said.

rio (a story)

2011-05-22T19:37:00.001+01:00

The vendor had staked the handle of their bags with an umbrella. He pointed downwards, pushing his palms towards them in a gesture that was meant to be disarming.

“For your security”, he said.

Barry gave him a thumbs-up. Slowly, as though it were a bath, he lowered himself into his deckchair. He scratched his chest then shot a pair of phantom cuffs.

“Gentlemen”, he said. “I give you Copacabana.”

He swept his arm so that it took in everything: the Sugarloaf; the bright blue sea; the girls whose rears tick-tocked behind them. Dave nodded his approval. He was staring at a girl whose legs, coated in sand, looked like they were covered in bristling fur. He rubbed his hands together.

“Fuck”, he said. “I could do her some damage.”

The girl was adjusting the front of her bikini.

“Oof”, he said.

He looked around then slapped the arm of the man who was sitting between them.

“Oi”, he said, loudly, as though they were at a distance from one another.

“Look. Over there, Chubby.”

A woman was wallowing in the sand. She had tried to push herself up and reach over for her bottle of water but had failed; had given up. Her scalp was visible beneath her hair.

“Go on, my son”, said Dave. “Get in. She’s just your type.”

Chubby smiled. He was a small man, going bald. Sensitive about it, he dabbed carefully at his hair throughout the day. Just now, he had touched the top of his head before he could stop himself. Where the other two were bare-chested, he was wearing a T-shirt and he had arranged a magazine over his paunch. Still smiling, he clicked his fingers.

“Shucks”, he said. “The wife.”

“We’ve all got wives”, said Barry.

Chubby laughed. Good humour was his stock response. He was a meek man, nearing retirement, but he had surprising reserves of tenacity. Selling, he slyly nagged at you. He had been there longer than anyone but now he was an anomaly, almost a mascot. Since Barry had been in charge the house-style had become ultra-male; pseudo-Barrys swore and raced each other at the lights.

They had flown overnight and now they slept. When they woke up the light was softer, making distances more ambiguous. People were packing things away. Barry fluttered his fingers.

“A drinky-poo?”

“Rather”, said Dave.

The comedy was in the intonation; in the loutish distance it implied from what they were saying. Gingerly, Barry fished for his mobile in the pocket of his shorts. He was incongruously dainty with it, holding it between two fingers as he spoke.

“Alright tosser?” he said.

He did this twice. Afterwards, they took a taxi. They had arranged to meet at the bar where Antonio Carlos Jobim had written “The Girl From Ipanema”. You could buy T-shirts with a few bars of the sheet music on the front, like a Bach manuscript. The windows were all open and, outside, a busker in a waistcoat and top hat performed the song for them. In Spanish, it felt more like a promise than a song. Its soft percussive lilt mirrored the rhythm of a certain kind of girl; one who was langorously, perhaps half-humorously, aware of her own body. It felt pre-coital. What’s more, it had come to represent the world’s view of Rio as a place of sun and soft guitars and sex. Listening to it, you felt as though you were already fulfilling your expectations of the place, never mind that there were six of you, all male, and that, at this hour – six o’clock; the bar barely open – there wasn’t a woman to be seen.

Barry was holding court. He had downed his first caipirinha, a mixture of cane spirit, sugar and lime, and his face was ruddy and sweating. He had just lit a cigarette from the embers of another.

“So anyway”, he said. “I’d lost the fucking thing.”

He was surrounded by smoke, like a stage demon.

“I’m stark bollock naked, it’s on the bed, and I’m doing this.”

He mimed turning swiftly round; a dog chasing its tail.

“And the old man’s doing this.”

He held up his hand so that the back of it faced away from him then moved it rapidly in and out of his face. There was laughter. One of them had begun even before Barry had started his mime. Dave, his right-hand man, was smiling indulgently.

“So what did you do?”

This was Tony, the youngest. Barry sat back and sighed, expansively. Again, there was that loutish distance; Barry was mimicking, and guying, the sated, courtly gestures of a moneyed host.

“What could I do? I slipped it in then whipped it out. George Chisholm everywhere.”

It was clear that Barry hadn’t finished. The laughter was pitched so that he could deliver the punchline.

“Fuck me if she didn’t look like a yule log.”

A roar. He had pronounced the last two words with a kind of comic orotundity, making his lips stick out. Chubby smiled but was already feeling dissociated. It wasn’t just the conversation: the caipirinha had left him feeling slightly stoned. Dave, who was allowed to take certain liberties, was saying,

“Coo fuck. How rank must your dick be?”

Etcetera. They were crowded around a table that was too small for them; it exaggerated the feeling of a club, or gang. They were in shorts and T-shirts and were too red, already, from the sun. Eric and Ken had stayed in the hotel and had been drinking all afternoon. They were both in their mid-thirties and both had yellowing teeth and saggy, sallow faces. Ken was shorter. Eric had thick bags under his eyes, like egg-cups. Tony was in his early twenties. He eagerly followed the conversation, moving his head rapidly from side to side. Barry called him “Dozybollocks” and sent him, three times, for more caipirinhas. At one point Barry stood up and gave a speech. As they all knew, he said, Langley’s had gone from strength to strength. They were selling more windows than ever before. This trip was by way of a thank you. He looked as though he was going to say something else but, as they all banged their glasses on the table, he allowed himself to slump back into his seat, his jowls compressing like an accordion.

The bar was more crowded now. A group of Brazilian girls was sitting at a table in the corner. They were all animated, their faces vivid; each one seemed to be talking with her entire body. Above their heads were several strata of smoke. Chubby watched with a show of dispassionate, amused enjoyment as Dave, Eric, Ken and Tony approached them. Dave’s looks were a coarser-grained approximation of a movie star’s. He had the beginnings of a double chin and a nose that thickened out at the bottom but his smile and slightly mannered swagger - the way he focussed on you, giving you his whole attention - acted as propaganda, convincing nearly everyone. He held his arms out over the girls as though he were blessing them. An hour later, they were still there. In their absence, Barry had become sentimental about his wife and children. Now he looked at his watch. He turned in his seat and made eating gestures. Dave leaned over and said something to the girl that he was sitting next to. He was so close that he might almost have been kissing her. Chubby was beginning to be aware of how drunk he was. There was a jolt, a sudden movie cut, and they were all outside. Tony said,

“Sorted.”

He was looking hopefully at Dave but Dave was talking to Barry.

“Club Help”, he said.

He was making sure that his money belt was still there. He pushed his T-shirt back down over it then shrugged rapidly two, three times, like he had just been in a fight.

“On Copacabana. Those birds are going to be there later.”

Tony said,

“Sweet.”

He rubbed his hands together. Barry studied him for a moment. Then he went to punch his balls.

“Look at you”, he said.

He mimed another punch.

“You haven’t got a hope.”

Tony had twice jumped out of the way. Now he smiled, uncertainly. Barry made another feint then gave up interest. Another cut. They were in a restaurant now, around a low wooden table. The guide-book had described the floor cushions they were sitting on as “an exotic touch” but Chubby found that he kept slipping onto the carpet. The arrangement of the food was too modern for him; too minimal. Barry was badgering him now, telling him to sit up and eat his food - the others, a grateful Tony especially, were joining in – but he was almost asleep. He wanted to go back to the hotel but they wouldn’t let him. They forced him into a taxi and paid for him to get into the club. He was aware of light and noise as well as of the thump of an amplified backbeat. Barry bought him another caipirinha. “No”, Chubby was saying “no no no no no” but Barry made him drink it. Then he pulled him to the edge of the dance floor. The beat was moronic – a series of hammer blows - but within it, or on top of it, they were playing an amplified samba. Knots of girls had insinuated themselves into groups of male tourists and were dancing among them. It was as though they could flick a switch: their buttocks shook rapidly up and down, seemingly independent of the rest of the body. Chubby kept pointing at his glass, trying to give the impression that he would come out when he had finished it, but Barry dug his heels in, tugging at him so that Chubby had to execute a couple of wooden dance steps. He could see, through the fug of the caipirinhas, that Dave and the others had met up with the girls from the bar. Tony, keeping an eye on Barry, had begun to imitate Chubby’s dancing but Chubby barely saw it; he was watching a girl come up to Barry and pull at his belt. They began to dance together, mirroring each other and then moving closer, hips touching. Barry buried his face in her neck. Chubby slipped away.

The next morning, he went for a walk to clear his head. He had come back alone and had eaten alone at breakfast, assuming that the others were still in bed. He saw, but didn’t really see, the names of shops: “Shok”; “Chifon”; “Foot Feet”. Lianas hung from the trees and he could see air-conditioning units, squat boxes that had been slotted into the windows of apartments. He had been expecting an edgier atmosphere and had deliberately not worn his watch, much to the others’ amusement. He had left most of his money in the safe so that now he had to buy lunch at the supermarket. In the queue, an old woman suddenly stood in front of him. She was keen to make him understand that the sign by the checkout said that she must be given preferential treatment. Chubby nodded and smiled. He approved of it; he framed it to himself as “family values”. It stood to reason. In a country that took its religion seriously there would, of course, be mutual respect.

When he got back, they were all in the lobby. Barry said,

“We knocked for you, you wanker.”

Chubby went to speak but Barry waved away his explanation. Tony, whose confidence had improved dramatically, was doing a laboured two-step, meant to be Chubby’s dancing. Dave, Eric and Ken were all eyeing a waitress. They were all, except for Tony, wearing dark glasses. Shifting slightly, Barry winced.

“We’re going to do the sights”, he said. “You coming?”

He made “the sights” sound like an odious duty. Nodding and smiling, Chubby said,

“I’ll just...”

“Too late”, said Barry.

The concierge was beckoning them over and they were encouraged into a mini-van. As it shouldered its way into the traffic, Barry said,

“We’ve decided you must be a mincer.”

Tony sniggered.

“All those birds”, Barry said. “A fucking smorgasbord that’s what it was. And you’re like this.”

He drew the corners of his mouth down, shaking so much that he looked palsied.

“Christ”, he said. “Even Tony pulled.”

Tony was beaming. Bowing, he said,

“I thank you.”

Dave cuffed him, playfully. Tony leant forward so that he was leaning over the seat.

“You should have hung around, Chubby. My bird did a runner so Barry got me a late birthday present. I bet he would have paid for one for you if you’d asked.”

It was the first time that he had called him Chubby. The van was taking them up the Corcavado, past houses with high security walls and fences. They seemed to have run out of conversation. Chubby said,

“Do you think this is where the drug lords live?”

There was a pause, then Eric shrugged. Chubby found himself anxiously trying to fill the vacuum.

“I’ve read about it. There’s only a few of them but they control all the favelas. You know, the slums. Twenty per cent of all Cariocas live there. And a lot of them haven’t got electricity, sanitation, a home address.”

He was ticking them off on his fingers. No-one was listening. At the top, they got out, silently, and ascended a series of steep steps. The Christ statue turned out to be an arrangement of crisp folds topped by a gentle-looking face. Chubby had his guidebook open but he knew that no-one would be interested in the statue’s provenance. They milled around aimlessly for a while. It felt like you could see Rio in its entirety: the Sugarloaf, the Lagoon, the beaches, the centre and the suburbs and, far away, the settlements by the distant mountains. The platform felt mobbed and Chubby had to wait in what was, in effect, a queue before he could take a picture of the statue that was unobstructed. The others had gone down to the café for a drink. Despite the crowds, there was an odd sort of privacy up here that Chubby found comforting. You were above everything. The city, with all its crush and ambivalence, had resolved into a pattern. Chubby put off going down to the café for as long as he could.

Their driver, Max, took them to the foot of the Sugarloaf. He surprised them by coming up in the cable car. He was squat, with a tanned, angular face and hair that glittered like wire wool. At the top, he maintained a discreet distance, keeping a couple of paces behind them. Chubby had an urge to make conversation – the others had headed straight for the bar – but Max only spoke Portuguese. The sun was about to set and people had drawn up rows of chairs so that they could look down on the hills that rose and fell behind, and among, the buildings of Rio. It was an extraordinary setting – a famously extraordinary setting; circling for landing the pilot had said, “There it is, folks” – and Chubby was saddened by the fact that his feelings failed to match it. Barry and the others had sat around a group of girls who were all wearing boots and carrying rucksacks. They hadn’t set aside a chair for him and now he was forced to lift one over the heads of the back row. Dave was saying,

“Holland.”

He had rested one arm on the back of a girl’s chair.

“Lovely place. You been to Holland, Tony?”

Tony shook his head. It was clear that he was Dave’s wingman. If things worked out, he would pair off with the girl’s friend, a lank and unlovely blonde.

“I was in Amsterdam”, Dave was saying. “Beautiful. Canals. Flowers. Naked women with horses.”

The girls, both in their late teens or early twenties, laughed. Chubby felt vaguely disappointed in them. He became aware that he had sucked his stomach in. He pulled his hand down from the top of his head. Looking away, he saw that they were going to miss the sunset.

“Look”, he said.

They turned their heads towards him. Tony said,

“Don’t mind him. He’s my grandad.”

“He doesn’t get out much”, Dave said.

The girls both laughed. Smiling, Chubby felt the beginnings of a strangled sort of rage; an intense frustration that he had felt before. It was mirrored, on the way down, by the soap that they were showing on the TV screen next to the queue for the cable car. A man had pushed a girl onto a bed. She was shaking only a little less than Barry had done earlier. It was unclear whether the man was in the right or in the wrong - he was obviously going to chastise her in some way - and Chubby felt himself responding. The volume had been turned down but the acting was so close to mime that it didn’t matter. He wished for a belt that he could take off; for a situation where he could take one off and be taken seriously. He wasn’t sure who he would wield it against. Tony? One of the girls? They had arranged to meet in “Club Help” that night. A girl had ruffled his hair and said, “Look after him.” She hadn’t even looked at him when she was saying it.

Later, Chubby got dressed. He was meticulous; far more so than he had been on the previous evening. He looked at himself in the mirror: he had sucked his stomach in again and spent several minutes on his hair but it wasn’t any good, he still had the same pedant’s face – the small chin and the puffy cheeks and uptilted nose – and, when he relaxed, a baby’s belly. He had wanted to ring his wife but had decided not to. What would he tell her? Leaving the room, he closed the door as gently as he could then pushed it slightly, making sure that he’d locked it. He walked carefully, continuing to hold his stomach in, but could still detect a roll – a waddle - as he approached the mirror next to the lifts. His earlier frustration had become a tautness in his neck and shoulders and now he rubbed them, wincing. Even when he relaxed his belly it still felt taut inside.

They were in an empty restaurant bar, already drinking. As he approached, Barry shouted,

“Oi oi. Mincer at twelve o’clock. Watch your backs.”

Tony flattened himself against the bar. Chubby smiled graciously. He pulled out a note that he had placed in his pocket earlier. He had prepared for this moment upstairs. His wallet was in his jacket pocket but this, he thought, was slicker. He had brought out his credit cards, ready to show himself to be a man of substance. To no-one in particular, he said,

“A drink?”

“Fuck me.”

Barry clutched at Tony’s shoulder.

“Hold me up”, he said.

He pointed at the note.

“What happened? You find that somewhere?”

Chubby was still smiling. Barry snatched it away and studied it, holding it up towards the light. Tony mimed a close interest, looking over Barry’s shoulder. Eventually, Barry gave it back.

“Keep it”, he said.

“No, really, I.”

“Keep it. My shout.”

He ordered a caipirinha, clicking his fingers ostentatiously for the barman. Leering at Chubby, he said,

“You never know. You might need it later.”

Dave said,

“You reckon?”

Eric laughed. Tony was lighting a cigarette. He pulled the smoke back up his nose and said,

“Does it still work, Chubby?”

Etcetera. Still smiling, Chubby felt his shoulders tighten. He was aware of an urge to throw his drink in Tony’ face. In anyone’s face. It was like selling: you learned to smother any feelings that might endanger things. They ate in the hotel then moved on to the same bar as last night. No-one let him buy a drink. He tried insisting but was firmly told to put his money away. Our shout, Dave said. Let us pay for them, Eric said. Even Tony did it. He didn’t socialise with them at home, the inference was. He was a guest; a stranger. He hadn’t noticed it as much last night. No, he had liked it last night. He hadn’t wanted to pay for anything. Now he felt emasculated. Doubly emasculated in that he didn’t know how to stop smiling.

The club was even more packed than it had been the night before. Again, they had paid for him. Chubby wedged himself into a corner of the long bar. He felt a mixture of frustration and loneliness that was in danger of becoming a prolonged depression. The others were dancing. The Dutch girls hadn’t arrived yet and everyone had surrounded two girls who were dancing back to back, their shoulders touching. The girls dipped and rose, hands shimmering up each others haunches. Tony had been pushed into the centre and now he was doing a kind of twist, dipping and rising clumsily with the girls, grinning at everyone, while he held out his arms on either side in what was supposed to be an embrace. Chubby saw Barry lean across and talk to a girl who, seemingly alone, was dancing out on the edge of the group. He pointed to where Chubby was standing, and the girl came slowly towards him. They were cheering and clapping now. He would have liked to hide, to burrow into the middle of the crowd at the bar, but he didn’t want to look any more ridiculous than he had already. Sick of smiling, he stood glumly, with his arms folded, while she came towards him. It was strange, she had seemed to divest herself of erotic intent; the swift transition from dancing to walking purposefully had made her look a little too businesslike, even if she was smiling at him and holding her hands out. When she got closer, Chubby could see that she was very young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. She looked bruised around the eyes and her teeth were discoloured; she had looked tough from a distance but now, close up, her arms held uselessly out in front of her, she looked uncertain. She glanced quickly over her shoulder, to where the others were all shouting and giving them the thumbs-up, then looked back at Chubby. She cocked her head slightly and put a hand on her hip, affecting confidence.

“You wan’ dance?”

Chubby shook his head. He found that he didn’t feel he had to smile for her - she was too young, too foreign, to worry about. He was enjoying bullying her a little.

“No”, he said.

He still had his arms folded. There was a stool beside him that had become empty. Making a swift decision, the girl sat down. She pouted.

“You wan’ buy me a drink?”

Did he? The tautness in his stomach had increased slightly. Not wanting to speak, he leaned into the bar and waited for service. She had crossed one leg over the other and now he could feel her shoe, rubbing his hip. He bought her a caipirinha without asking her, wishing to take charge. The fact that she could suck the straw with such childlike absorption and still arouse him with her foot wasn’t a contradiction so much as a paradox. He didn’t know what to say but then he realised that he didn’t need to; they had already gone beyond the preambles to a place where it was a matter of a simple choice. Or of economics: she couldn’t afford to waste her time. He looked over at Dave, who caught his eye. He pointed at him and shouted something and the others joined in. They didn’t think for a moment that he would go through with it, he realised. Barry had never believed that he would. He looked back at the girl, deliberately, making himself look from her face down to her breasts and back again. She leaned into his ear.

“You wan’ go some place?”

He paused, afraid, then nodded. She slipped down from the stool, holding his gaze, and took his hand. It was another childlike gesture; her hand was warm and slightly sticky. As she led him past the dance floor, the others clapped and cheered. Ironically? It didn’t matter. They were suddenly outside and it felt like they had stepped from one mode of existence into another. Inside the club, the heat and the insistent heartbeat of the bass had seemed at one with his delirium; they’d mimicked him. Out here, everything else seemed far away. He was all sensation: the blood in his crotch and a tight feeling in his chest and his hand beneath her skirt, pushing her across the road in an oddly paternal gesture.

She didn’t want to go to the beach – it was too dangerous. She knew a place, she said. She took his hand and led him down a side street, then another. There was a sign, saying “Vac nsi s”, and a man standing unsmilingly behind a desk. The girl was murmuring “Money?” and putting her hand out and he realised that he was expected to pay for the room. There was a brief moment of indecision over the bill – how much had he given her? – but then they were in the lift and she was pressing herself against him. She opened the door of the room with her back to it, kissing his neck, and led him, backwards, so that she had to sit down on the bed. She went to unbutton his trousers but he slapped downwards at her hands so that she had to stop. She sat slightly away from him and her face went blank – it was a child’s untrusting incomprehension and this only aroused him further. He pulled her up and undressed her slowly, almost tenderly. He made her lie on the bed, her legs closed and her arms down by her sides. Naked, he straddled her. She went to move and he held up his opened hand, ready to slap her if she did it again. He wouldn’t let her move her legs or shift his weight. He arranged her and then lifted his hand again, to keep her there. When he was ready, he pulled her legs apart. She wasn’t allowed to make a sound. The first time that she moaned, an ambiguous little whimper, he put his hand over her mouth. His delirium was at its height. He stared into her eyes, willing her to remain motionless. Afterwards, he lay on his side with his back to her. He woke at three o’clock, ready to do it again, but she had slipped away.

He woke up properly at nine o’clock. His wallet had gone. He went through his pockets once, twice, three times. He felt ready to cry. There was a different man on the desk. In any case, what would he have said? Outside, the sun felt harshly bright but, if you looked between the buildings, you saw the clouds that seemed to be boiling up behind the Christ statue. Chubby walked back. His head hurt. He felt sick. He was hardly aware of his surroundings but recognised the hotel from the long awning at the front. There was an hour before the taxi was due to take them to the airport. He packed and showered. He sat on his bed, staring dully at the carpet. At last, he stood, took a deep breath, and carried his suitcase to the lift. He didn’t check his stomach or his hair. Downstairs, he got a round of applause. Dave said,

“You dog.”

He slapped him on the back. Ken said,

“How was it?”

Smiling, Chubby gave them a thumbs up.

The Hay Festival

2011-05-18T08:39:00.006+01:00

It always starts – at least, it starts for me – in the back room of the Addyman Annexe. It may be the brightness, the cleanness, of the room but in my memory the books give off a soft but compelling glow; something like heat. Once I’ve examined the entire stock… Well, then I can take my pick of all the other bookshops in the town. I don’t so much browse in Hay as binge. If I’m short of time, I run.

Who have I seen? Salman Rushdie. Tony Benn. Ian McEwan. Richard Dawkins, claiming that, yes, the Archbishop of Canterbury was just as bad as Osama Bin Laden. Christopher Hitchens, who all but asked someone outside. Updike was a thrill; a proper star. He was charming but guarded, too; brahminical. DeLillo was genuinely professorial whereas I wasn’t sure if we were getting Alan Bennett or “Alan Bennett”. It didn’t really matter in the end.

I haven’t asked a question in a while. It was embarrassing: I used to wave my arm around. The first question I ever asked was to Don Delillo and I was so nervous that my voice swooped suddenly downwards; I sounded like I wanted an assignation. One woman said to Sarah Walters that “I’ve never read your books but can you give me some advice on how to write?” Another told Graham Swift that she didn't think that his main female character was believable "but well done you for trying!” Still, if you get it right the whole discussion seems to open outwards. I asked Tony Benn about the government of 1945 and he told us about their decision to ration bread. It was because the Germans were starving, he said, and we wanted to send them aid; could you, he asked, imagine a government doing that today? No, he was proud to have served on the back benches, he said, and I suddenly thought: God, he was there. It was a thrilling moment.

Nevertheless, Hay makes for a quiet sort of pleasure. As Philip Larkin wrote:

“…someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious.”

That’s what Hay is: it’s serious. We live in a world of sound-bites and of literary fairground rides but Hay always gives me hope. Here we all are, the writers and the readers, and, for this one week, we can pretend we’re really a community.

Pure Pleasure

2011-05-16T10:52:00.014+01:00

I was asked, the other night, to come up with a list of books that were "real". It was an interesting - an idiosyncratically phrased - request and I've been mulling it over ever since.

F.R.Leavis, the great Cambridge critic, had a preoccupation with what he called "life" and it's something like this, I think, that my friend was alluding to. She said that she had tried Martin Amis but that she hadn't been able to get on with him and it strikes me, now, that many of the books that I reread for pleasure - "Money", say, or the stories of Saul Bellow - are books whose main virtue is the style; I read them, that is, in the same way that I might listen to Itzhak Perlman or watch Fred Astaire. When it comes to the characters or the plot... Well, there are other books that I would read before I read "Money" for any sense of passionate identification. Flaubert dreamed of a book "which would entail only the writing of sentences" but even Flaubert, the stylist's stylist, lavished a sort of love on Madame Bovary.

Here, then, is a list of books whose prose might well be "streaming with colour" (Flaubert again) but whose language doesn't bully you; whose plots are never mechanical but which can leave you breathless all the same. In the words of John Carey,

"I took pure reading pleasure as my criterion - the pleasure the books have given me, and the pleasure I hope others will get from being reminded of them, or perhaps introduced to them."

"The Old Devils" Kingsley Amis

"Cat's Eye" Margaret Atwood

"The Birthday Boys" Beryl Bainbridge

"The Regeneration Trilogy" Pat Barker

"Earthly Powers" Anthony Burgess

"Oscar and Lucinda" Peter Carey

"Wise Children" Angela Carter

"Quarantine" Jim Crace

"Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha" Roddy Doyle

"What Is The What" Dave Eggers

"The Bingo Palace" Louise Erdrich

"The Great Gatsby" F Scott Fitzgerald

"The Good Soldier" Ford Madox Ford

"The Spire" William Golding

"The Quiet American" Graham Greene

"The Mayor Of Casterbridge" Thomas Hardy

"A Single Man" Christopher Isherwood

"The Portrait Of A Lady" Henry James

"The Naked And The Dead" Norman Mailer

"100 Years Of Solitude" Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Atonement" Ian McEwan

"We Were The Mulvaneys" Joyce Carol Oates

"The English Patient" Michael Ondaatje

"Netherland" Joseph O'Neill

"The Bell Jar" Sylvia Plath

"American Pastoral" Philip Roth

"On Beauty" Zadie Smith

"Waterland" Graham Swift

"Anna Karenina" Leo Tolstoy

"The Colour" Rose Tremain

"The Night Watch" Sarah Walters

"Brideshead Revisited" Evelyn Waugh

The Photographer (A Story)

2010-11-24T14:18:00.004Z

If you study the exhibition catalogue – if you look at Monk’s Yard, that is, and study the upsweep and the blackness of the crossbeams – then you might feel as though you can sense a sort of immanence. The photographs, most of them, are angled, just as though the buildings are beginning their ascent. They’re all in black and white; they have a sombreness, a solemnity, which makes you feel that this is the sort of place where great art should have been created.

But it didn’t feel that way at the time. In Frankie’s shop, light dribbled down the window pane. The yard itself was sepia. You came around the corner and, if you hadn’t been there before, the shop, its awning and striped blind, seemed vivid and desperate, like a flare. Queeny, his wife, kept pansies in a window box. She “manned” the shop; this was a local joke, a sort of homage to the way she glowered at you from behind the till. Frankie and Queeny were the embodiment, it seemed, of what was more a piece of local folklore than a joke: the woman, big as a blown-up ball, who kept her husband in the same way that you’d keep a ferret or a dog. Frankie was only five foot four. He made nervous gestures, little stabs and feints, like he was directing the air around him. This morning, in the studio, his face was deadpan.

“Try to relax”, he said.

Harry was standing to attention. Now that he was in the camera’s eye he looked as if he was frozen into the kind of gesture that a statue makes, a sternly benevolent blessing or angry warning. Frankie, impatient, tugged at him. He pulled his cap so that the right side touched his ear. He threw a ticket machine into his hands. Harry said,

“Coo. Where did you get that from?”

Frankie ignored him; stared at him, spat on a handkerchief then worried at his badge. Harry said,

“Leave off.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s only for the missus.”

But, of course, this wasn’t true. Nobody, Frankie knew, was ever entirely impervious to the power of the lens. Later, in the darkroom, there he was: Harry. Wooden; on his dignity; half-drunk (Frankie left these in a drawer) and then – these two - the Harry that Harry would have wished the world to see. Frankie’s presence, the camera that had seemed to want to nuzzle him, had made him gather the ticket machine into his chest. He had a look of mildly affronted rectitude; he looked the type for whom it was important that he get you safely home. When he came in he held the photo, sheepishly, between his thumb and forefinger. He lifted it to the light and tilted it from right to left and back again. At last, he said,

“’as it”

He nodded.

“’as me.”

He made a grab for Frankie’s hand. His huge paw next to Frankie’s delicate, tapered fingers was like an illustration of their relative sensibilities. Frankie had the bearing – the cockiness and breeding – of a court photographer. He said that you had to be a mind reader but, really, it wasn’t hard. Mothers wanted to look maternal; builders swaggered through the door; bookies and publicans all worked at being convivial. Mods – it was the time of mods - wanted a blend of masculinity and something else: a surliness but also a languid and free-floating grace. Frankie gave people what they wanted. He coaxed it out of them; he seemed, sometimes, to be caressing them. He made a good living at it, too.

Until Diane came in. It was a Spring day but the yard was grey and wet. Her raincoat was bright pink and she had modish batwing eyelashes; two lines of exclamation marks. She pointed to the blinds that led into the back, saying,

“He in?”

Her hands, after all that, were a bit of a shock. The hair; the raincoat; her bare knees – all told you that she was a typical London girl; a clerk, say, or a secretary. But her fingers were stubby and grimy; greasy, even. Queeny looked her up and down. Diane began to speak but, at that moment, Frankie wandered in. He was studying an advert, a woman who, in her fur coat and chalky lipstick, might just as well have been one of the bottles of perfume (“Joy!”) that were advertised out in the yard and in the streets beyond. She looked expensive, which was the last thing that Diane was. She said,

“You free?”

Frankie looked at her for a moment. He seemed to see something; some splash of light. He nodded, almost to himself, and grinned. To Queeny he said,

“Alright?”

“You only ‘ave ‘alf an hour.”

“Okey-doke.”

He went dancing round her, plucking a packet of fags from behind the till in the same way that a magician might produce a bunch of flowers. This jauntiness, too, was part of local (indeed, of national) myth; one recognised and felt a certain comfort in the presence of someone cheeky enough to guy – to float around - the battle-axe that he had married, seemingly inadvertently. It was Diane’s turn to grin. In the studio, she sat on the stool provided for her. She said,

“It’s for my mum.”

Her hands hung awkwardly between her knees. She was… what? Frankie studied her. 19? 20? She rubbed her nose. Below her miniskirt, her knees were red. She was smiling, though. She nodded at Frankie’s camera.

“She says you’re good. She says that you’ll make me look bee-yoo-ti-fall.”

She did a daffy pout and flounced her shoulders so that her hair fell down behind them. Frankie smiled. He lit a cigarette. She seemed to dance, just for a moment, in a heady sort of gauze. He bent expectantly then fired off a round of shots. He tried, he really did. He came so close that he could feel her breaths, short rapid puffs, against his skin. He made her sit, demurely, with her hands clasped in her lap. He introduced a hair-band, then took it off. He went for thoughtful; innocent; womanly - but nothing worked. She was impervious. Not indifferent or defensive – just impervious. Something resisted him but it felt, in actual fact, just like its opposite; as though there was nothing there. His hands felt oddly awkward, now, like flippers or spades. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and it felt like somebody else was doing it. He had another go. At last, he said,

“I, um.”

She looked at him expectantly.

“I need more time.”

She didn’t say - she didn’t seem to be thinking - anything. Her face was perfectly in proportion but this perfection didn’t seem to have anything to do with her. It was a sort of fruit – no more expressive than that. Again, he nodded, like an idiot.

“More time. I need…”

He moved his hands together and then apart, like he was trying to negotiate two shapes into alignment. She smiled, but it was astonishing, really, how you could smile and yet seem to communicate so little. He felt a frustration that was unfamiliar. Diane was like some stubborn material that had refused to shape itself under the sculptor’s hands. He wanted, just for a moment, to throw something at her.

He said,

“Tomorrow?”

She shrugged.

“If you say so.”

But nothing happened. Not on the next day or the next. She smiled, she fluttered – she flapped - her lashes, but she could have been anyone. She had a blandness that felt, somehow, generic. All over the country, there were girls like this, smiling and giggling in ways that were, essentially, identical. He said,

“What do you want to be, Diane?”

He sounded both as irritated and as nonplussed as he was feeling but, at first, she didn’t seem to understand. Her mouth moped downwards, pointlessly sensual. At last, she smiled, and shrugged.

“Dunno.”

She giggled.

“Sandie Shaw!”

She kicked her feet and waved her hands but later, in the darkroom, it looked abstract; a mime: she was mimicking somebody else’s joie de vivre. Her face was an eerie blank. Frank stared at her. That night, Queeny turned to face him. Wherever in the bed she was, she seemed to wallow in it. But she also loomed above him. She said,

“You’re old enough to be her dad.”

Outside, the noises of the street – the comfy shouts; the snort of traffic – sounded more intimate than anything in here. The clock gave a thump, like the thump of an axe, whenever a minute passed. Queeny breathed, laboriously, through her mouth. When Frankie stroked the bedspread he realised, all over again, just how thin it was; how it seemed to express his dissatisfaction.

But Queeny was wrong: he had no sexual interest in the girl. If he could have put it into words he would have told you that she represented something. It was intangible; something unrecognisable that he had lost, or, rather, had never had. Queeny’s grossness – the look she had, now, of a duenna - was of a piece with the way that Frankie’s life felt cumbersome, somehow; both circumscribed and dutiful. He’d been a soldier and then a husband and now he was a photographer; each role was, as it were, prepared for you: you knew exactly how to act. But Diane didn’t seem to be anything. She was 17, she said; she worked in a factory. But beyond that – beneath it – there was nothing. At first, he’d thought: she’s lost. But she wasn’t. She was free.

In the third week, she came in wearing a jacket that was daubed with the Union Jack. He asked her what it meant. Again, she shrugged.

“Nothing”, she said.

He thought that that was perfect. If he had had the nerve, he would have asked her to take off everything else; to roll around in it. Instead, he asked her to pull a face. He had her smoking, then chewing gum. Her sense of freedom was elusive, like a rare bird. You had to stalk it. He began to see that the more wooden her gestures were, the more she seemed to toss them off or wilfully exaggerate them, the freer she seemed to be. He encouraged her to strike poses but to undermine them, too: to cross her eyes or fake a limp. He joked; he prodded her with the camera. He gimped around the room, his hands lolling below his knees. She said,

“You’re mad.”

Still, she kept coming back. She was flattered, he thought. She thought that he found her beautiful.

But something strange was happening elsewhere. It was Harry’s wife who first drew attention to it. Marching into the shop, she waved a photograph in Queeny’s face.

She said,

“What’s this? Go on: who’s that supposed to be?”

Queeny peered down into the photograph. She looked incongruously scholarly, but cautious too, as though whatever it was might bite her or run away. Nora, the Nora in the picture, looked angry and defensive. She gripped her grandchild just as though she wouldn’t let you have him back. You saw that the love she felt was like a net or a set of chains; it seemed appropriate that the child should be squirming to be released. Queeny said,

“You, Nora. ‘as you.”

But Nora backed away. She said.

“It’s not. I’m telling you. He’s made me look…”

She couldn’t seem to find the word. Her face contorted, so that, in the end, she seemed to spit it out.

“Dreadful”, she said.

Yes, Queeny saw this at once. Nora was full of dread. She held her grandson like a treasure that would, inevitably, be snatched away. Where she had wanted softness - a shimmering gauze of sentiment - Frankie had found a terrible sort of truth.

And he kept doing it. He had the bit between his teeth. He made builders look like slabs of meat; their unresponsive eyes were like the eyes you’d paste onto a teddy bear. Bookies were twitchy. Mods were sly. More: swishy and droll. People began to go elsewhere. One day, Queeny edged into the studio. Diane sat, mermaid-like, in pink shorts, smoking a cigarette. Around her, there was a ripped-up pile of schoolbooks. Queeny ignored her. She said,

“What’s this?”

He didn’t seem to know. He smiled and shrugged. He looked like he was drunk, she thought. She was aware of herself in a way that she hadn’t been for years. She felt enormous but she had a countervailing urge to flaunt herself; to use her body like a fist. She said,

“Who’s she supposed to be? Nell Gwynn?”

Diane was looking round the studio, just like she had discarded all her clothes and now she wanted to put them on. Queeny was saying,

“You’re ruining us.”

She raised an accusing arm. She was Commerce; Morality.

“These pictures. What you’re doing. It’s dirty, Frank.”

Even as she was saying it, she knew that she wasn’t saying what she meant.

“It’s filth.”

She meant that Frankie was digging up what would be better hidden. No-one, she knew, would want what Frankie wanted on their mantelpiece. And she was right. The shop closed two years later.

Which makes her pause, now, at the picture in the middle of the gallery. It is the shop but, somehow, a platonic version; shorn of all the sounds and smells that she remembers, it looks iconic; terribly significant. The card beside it talks about Frankie’s “purple patch” but all Queeny can remember are the unpaid bills; the customers – the ex-customers – who crossed the street whenever they saw her coming. Here they all are: Harry, an overweening drunk, and tarty Marge and Morris the homosexual; poor swishy Mo. Here, too, is Diane – four or five of her, gurning and doing the splits and showing you that, really, she hadn’t a thought in her head. That was what Frankie had managed to expose, all unbeknownst to him: her silliness. His silliness.

She wants to cry but when has she ever cried? Even the room is a sort of dream; pristine, bright white, soft, somehow, it buoys you up and has you drifting from face to face. The journalists ask: what do you think of when you look at them? How do you feel about the fact that he’s not here to see it?

Queeny shrugs.

“His loss”, she says.

Class (A Story)

2010-11-24T13:28:00.006Z

The boy’s face was almost perfectly circular. It was red, now, in the same way that a basketball, or else something vividly red – a belisha beacon, say, or a slapped arse - was red. Philip found that if he concentrated on it properly he could separate it from the rest of the boy’s body. He could send it bouncing across the room.

This was what you did. You turned it – turned him; the boy - into an abstraction, so that you could absent yourself. Alfie no longer seemed to be doing, quite, what he was doing: he was no longer shouting, or chanting, quite at you.

“You can’t make me!”

He was banging his hands on the desk.

“Go on, arsehole.”

Bang.

“Try it!”

This time, he shook the table. His curls – smug, oily-looking little things – were bouncing up and down. Usually, there was something jowly about the way that his cheeks pushed outwards, forcing his mouth into a pompous little slot. Now, though, he looked as barbarous as a toddler did when it was throwing its arms and legs around. Philip continued to look at him. He gave – he displayed - a smile that blurred, out at its edges, into a smirk. He looked at the class, pretending to present Alfie to them, opening one hand in his direction and then shrugging so that his shoulders nearly touched his ears. He said,

“Mary. Could you just pop down to the office for me?”

He was pretending to study Alfie. He was staring at him, fingering his lower lip.

“Tell them.”

Alfie was still shouting. He was banging the table and drumming his feet. Philip tilted his head; it was as though Alfie was a clumsy daub that any right-minded individual would fail to understand.

“Tell them that Alfie’s …”

Somebody shouted “fat”. Philip was looking up at the ceiling.

“Struggling”, he said.

He nodded. This was part of his performance; a visible note to self.

“Yes. Struggling.”

He paused.

“Poor lamb”, he said.

He chuckled. Again, his shoulders came into play. It was a gesture that was meant to reach the girls in the back row. A demonstration of control, it showed you that Alfie’s response was both humorous and meaningless; that it was humorous because it was meaningless. That it was also perfectly possible to dissect him - to diminish him, in other words. Philip sat on the edge of his own desk. He steepled his fingers.

“Tell them that if they don’t come soon he’ll almost certainly explode. There’ll be bits...”

He gestured around the room, appearing to sprinkle water, in a staccato fashion, over the ceiling and the walls. The class were tittering. He still had them: he had managed to isolate Alfie; to keep his influence – to keep him - from spreading. He walked slowly to the whiteboard.

“So”, he said.

But Alfie was surging upwards, pushing the table over as he did so – it was as though he was expanding, revealing an irresistible otherness; an inner core. Philip skipped, nimbly, backwards. Alfie was swinging a chair as though it were an axe; was throwing it two-handed, so that it bounced off the window and hit the computer screen. He was sobbing, now; it sounded like he was gagging, and then retching, continuously. Hurling himself into the corridor, he slammed the door behind him. There was a moment, a sort of bubble, of silence but then it broke. Philip called out names and watched the pupils jerk or else reluctantly twist back their heads as though he had cast a line to bring them back. In the end, all that was left was an ambient murmur. Afterwards, of course, when he talked to the Headmaster, he would almost certainly get away with it. He could say, with perfect honesty, that he had been calm. Indeed, he was always calm. He had a reputation, he knew, for a certain – what? Coolness? Elan? Detachment, call it.

He liked the school: there was an orderliness, a hierarchical list of punishments, which meant that students were processed quietly through the system. And he had always liked teaching. There were times when your voice became super-supple, as it were, and seemed to stretch to fit the job’s requirements. You lowed; you barked; you all-but-crooned. You lobbed a joke – you threw it underarm, let’s say - but then you crisply marshalled the pupils into obedience. You emphasised certain words with a precision that made it seem as though you were following notation; as though you were the piano and the pianist all at once. The trick was to retain a certain likeability. He was remote but warm. That is, he performed warmness.

Still, he avoided the corridors and ate in the English office. Outside the classroom, the students troubled him. A school is an anonymous space – a box – that is only made meaningful by the people in it; by their effort to will it into being and to keep the idea of it aloft. You end up identifying with it. When students smeared each other against the walls he wanted to shout at them – to grab them. That night, he said,

“King George the Third.”

His wife went “Hah!”, which may or may not have meant that she was laughing. Her tongue was layered in a coating, a sort of compost, of uneaten food. Her slip, tilting beneath her skirt, had a serrated edge. Philip was saying,

“He’s like this.”

He blew his cheeks outwards, stretching his arms into a pair of precarious-looking brackets. He was a balloon; a bouncy castle. He said,

“He’s like a Hogarth print. He looks like he has gout; like they’re about to wheel him off .”

“Listen to you.”

“What?”

“Such contempt.”

“Miriam, the boy threw at chair at me.”

“I’m not surprised. And don’t do that: don’t stroke your moustache at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m some. Some giddy shop girl.”

“That’s the last thing that you are.”

He said it with a certain amount of resignation. Miriam prodded – she seemed to spear – her fish.

“Poor little sod”, she said.

The next day, Lucy touched his arm.

“Are you OK?”

“What? Yes. Of course.”

He made a Churchillian grimace, seeming to shrug his lower lip.

“I’m an old man”, he said.

What did he mean? That he was tough? Seasoned? She said,

“You’re not.”

He watched her walk away. She had a way of minimising her presence by sloping forwards. She had bright, furtive little eyes and a face that was almost pretty; a half-baked sort of face. But she was shapely, too: her thighs flared outwards so that her rear seemed to be displaying itself. Its weight seemed to affect her walk; she swayed, as though she was conscious of carrying it.

Her voice, meanwhile, came through the wall. That day, he was speaking to his sixth formers, suavely suggesting that,

“Nobody dies for love. Kingdoms don’t topple; castles don’t fall. It’s being used, here, as a metaphor and, actually – you’ll like this, Watkins, so pay attention – actually, if you consider that “die”, in the Elizabethan lexicon, means…”

But her voice was swelling and subsiding, seeming to tug at him. She had a way, he noticed, of carefully placing a full stop – she poised her pen above the page as though she was taking aim. Miriam’s hair seemed to have its own weather system; stray hairs flickered around her head. She’d bumped against a door and now a bruise – a spreading purple stain, like jam – discoloured her upper thigh. Her thigh was mottled, in any case. It had a casing of fat, like a cold chicken wing. She said,

“Did you clean this?”

And it seemed to him that, in essence, this was all she ever said. Lucy was 22. She could twist her legs, like pipe cleaners, around each other. When she leaned forward, it looked, from behind, as though somebody was embracing her. Miriam was an MA. Her field was modernism; its intricacies and austerities. Her seriousness had a Grand Guignol quality. She was sharp; outrageously so. Lucy was just like everybody else. Her intelligence, if such it was, was bound up in her desire to look professional. Her nails, discreetly polished, were like small pools of sunlight. Whatever she did, her hair seemed to arrange itself.

But she was uncertain too. Sometimes he’d joke and she would seem to smile, to try to think of a reply, but then she wouldn’t say anything. She bowed her head and blushed; it was ridiculously alluring. He took to walking into her classroom and staring at the boys that were giving her trouble. He felt, on these occasions, as though his assurance and experience were the equivalent of a good suit. Once, he lent her a book of poems. Blushing – bowing, almost, towards the cover - she said,

“You’re so clever, Mr Hamilton.”

She never mentioned it again. He chose to see this as more proof of vulnerability; as a gap, or lack, that was tantalising. That Christmas, she sidled up to him. The whole room was tinselly – disco lights formed glittery patches on his jacket and on her dress – and they were playing something from his youth, a Christmas song whose harmonies were like the breath of an opened oven. Her dress exposed her shoulders. The dress itself went straight down – it was more of a smock, a period costume, than a dress – and its simplicity and the scalloped dimple in her neck, as well as the complicated look she gave him, half-way between a simper and a challenge, made him feel as though he was floating above the ground. He was expanding, basking in the song, then, suddenly, he was standing up; he was taking her fingers and leading her out onto the dance-floor. There, they did a stilted, decorous waltz. She leaned into his ear.

“Such grace.”

“Oh please.”

“No, really. You’re a…”

She paused. He had the impression, sometimes, that words were things that had to be hoisted up into her mouth.

“A cut above”, she said.

She smiled. Her arms – you could only feel this; you couldn’t see it - tightened around him. But there was a hint of tolerance, too, in the way that she was allowing him to lead her around the floor. Outside, she smilingly presented her face to him. Here, in the moonlight, it didn’t look quite like her. She had been, as it were, balletically playful, taking his hands and leading him into a patch of darkness, nuzzling him lightly on the nose. After they’d kissed, she left her lower lip inside his mouth, just like a piece of fruit. There was a coolness about the gesture that he found a little bewildering; it was as though his experience had been rendered irrelevant. He watched her walk back beneath the trees. In the end, all that he could see was her dress; it was like the after image that you see when you have been staring into the light.

In the staff pantomime. Lucy played a pirate. She forced her prisoners to take part in a brutal, souped-up form of callisthenics, taking off her pirate’s jacket to reveal a gym outfit that clung to her. Smiling up into the lights, she placed her arms together so that it looked as though she was going to swan dive into the audience. Her slenderness was a revelation; it preoccupied him all through the holidays, re-emerging in a candle’s flame or in the way that his niece went skipping, on resonant tiptoe, up the stairs. He’d both wanted and hadn’t wanted to ask Lucy for her phone number. He’d waited in his classroom but she never came. Now, covertly, he watched Miriam; he eyed her chins; the broad bump on her nose; the way her stomach went bulging outwards when she sat down, just like someone was squeezing her chest and thighs. He drank too much. He wouldn’t follow her upstairs. He lay with one hand underneath his waistband, attending to the gaudiness in his head.

The first week back, the school came in and out of focus. It felt as though, if he didn’t concentrate, it might waver and drift away. The thought of Lucy – how near or far she proved to be; her voice, lilting beyond the wall – felt infinitely more material: it made him hot or cold; aware of his posture and of his breathing. He found that he was watching out for her. He became adept at calibrating her expression but it was only, really, because she was expressionless. This Lucy – this unlurid; quotidian Lucy - was disturbingly autonomous; her movements and her conversation had almost nothing to do with him. She was heavier, too, less sleek, and her nose was lumpy, like someone had pressed a piece of unshaped clay into her face. Nevertheless, he cherished it. He said,

“How was your break?”

She smiled, brightly. Too brightly; she wasn’t communicating anything. She said,

“Lovely.”

She bent over a book.

“Thank you”, she said.

He didn’t know what to say. He nodded, thinking: here; I’m over here. He stumbled on his way out, barking his shin against the filing cabinet. The next day, walking past, he did a sort of smile cum shrug – more of a flinch. So much for grace.

At home, he read all of the usual poetry but kept returning to the obviousness –the lexical shamelessness - of “Be My Baby” and “Hey Jude”. Pop songs promoted a rush of blood that made you feel, obscurely, as though you were doing something. In class, meanwhile, he found that his voice could carry on without him. He surfaced, finding that his students were writing or asking questions - it was like discovering that you had negotiated five miles of motorway traffic. He handled Alfie mechanically, as though they were at a practice net. His classes weren’t noisier so much as woollier; he couldn’t always say exactly what students were doing. Once (it was during a group discussion) Lucy shut her door. On a night out, he made sure to sit beside her. He couldn’t tell if people knew or if the sense he had that their movements were warped, somehow – that they were behaving just as though they were under a magnifying glass – was a result of his imagination. Everything, these days, was exaggerated. He joked loudly, as though he was still in class; he thumped the table for emphasis. Politely, pulling her chair away with a precision that was unusual even for her, Lucy went to sit with someone else.

He cornered her. He said,

“Tell me.”

They were in the English cupboard. Like Lucy’s, its neatness was a sort of statement and Philip had an urge to go kicking amongst the boxes. He said,

“I’m sorry.”

She looked both sullen and scared. He turned to look at the wall.

“I am. I know I shouldn’t. What I should do…”

“Is go back to your classroom.”

“Yes.”

She wasn’t exactly staring at him. Her face looked bloated, blunted, and there were reddish patches on her neck. He said,

“But…”

“Philip.”

Her voice was soft – incongruously so, considering her face. He felt slightly encouraged.

“Just…”

He flapped his arms, uselessly. He was a big, ungainly bird: all neck.

“Lucy, just tell me. What were you doing?”

“Me?”

“We, then. Me, if you like. What did it mean? To you?”

He didn’t know what was worse, the pitying look she gave him or the way that her jaw was so stubbornly set. He found that he could feel the dimensions of the cupboard – you had to move forward on tiptoe, just as though you were on a precipice – but it was also a kind of world: everything he wanted was right here. He dithered. Lucy left; she shrank away from him.

So this was passion. He’d had no idea. It was the like the wind in The Wizard Of Oz – it hurled you into a landscape that was both familiar and unfamiliar; a refraction of the life you’d lived before. There were phrases that he’d always loved – “the brute blood of the air”; “La Belle Dame Sans Merci hath thee in thrall” - but they were useless, now; no, worse than useless. The thing he’d thought so valuable, the power of words, turned out to be just that: just words. Once, during a free period, he found that he was crying; was sobbing, in fact: his shoulders were going up and down. His room, his old familiar room, appeared to be deliquescing in front of him.

At home, Miriam said,

“Since when did you lose your appetite?”

She was working her fingers through her hair. Philip wanted to look away. She had exposed her skull; had scarified herself.

“You brood”, she said. “When did you start to brood? Where have you gone?”

She cried, and he was sorry. Nevertheless, her sorrow – the way she gestured, grandly, in a pool of light provided by a table lamp – barely affected him. That Easter, there was another show. Lucy wore a mini-skirt but that, too, was something that seemed to be a long way off, far out on the other side of consciousness. It was the consciousness that mattered; the hole that he seemed to have dug for himself. By now, it didn’t matter what he saw.

Nevertheless, after the holidays, the students were still discussing it. Alfie in particular. He had begun to gurn. He made claws of his hands. Philip said,

“Yes, alright. Thank you, Alfie.”

“But did you see it, Sir? Did you see her…”

“Enough.”

“…bend over, though.”

“I said enough.”

Alfie looked at him shrewdly.

“What’s the matter, Sir? You fancy her?”

“Alfie…”

“She’s buff, though, innit.”

“Alright. That’s quite enough. Sit over there.”

“Why? Just because I said she’s buff? She is buff.”

“Alfie…”

“I only said she’s buff! What’s the matter with you? I ain’t moving anywhere.”
Philip stood up. Alfie went “Whooo!”. He placed his hands, palms outwards, in front of him.

“Feeling protective, Sir?”

Philip could feel something begin to rise in him.

“Up”, he said.

“Make me.”

“I said…”

He was beside him now. He’d never stood this close to him before. He bent down into Alfie’s face. He could see a spot, more of a welt, that marred his forehead, making it look burnt. It made him hate him all the more. He said,

“Up, Alfie. Now.”

Alfie leaned backwards.

“Uuurgh. You spat on me. He spat on me!”

He was looking behind him.

“Good job”, he said, “I didn’t say anything about her tits.”

The class were laughing now; they knew Philip was losing. Alfie’s face, when he turned back, was red again, but it was also triumphant.

“Don’t you like tits, Sir?”

He was leering, but it was odd: beneath his outward expression – beneath the laughter – there was a sense that he was perfectly composed.

“Don’t you like Miss Hampshire’s titties, sir?”

He should have walked away. Of course he should have walked away. Instead, he took one step backwards. Here it was again: passion. The pummelling wind. Before he knew, properly, what he had done – before he had registered the pleasure of both surrender and defiance - he had punched Alfie in the face.

Forward (A Story)

2010-11-24T13:24:00.008Z

It was a beautiful afternoon: the air itself seemed to be sparkling. The sea, crumpling beside us, looked like a scattering of bedclothes. And I was singing and dancing. I was yelling and running backwards and forwards in front of Valerie. We were on the dunes, now, and the difference in texture – the way that the sand had started to slow us down – felt like a provocation. Once we were sitting down, I started to dig under her skirt. It had begun as a sort of joke, but then I couldn’t seem to stop. She moved away, of course, and all I remembered afterwards was the redoubling of awkwardness: the realisation that I had recklessly, almost methodically, ruined my chances. And the feeling, unexamined at the time, that that was what I have wanted all along.

The Motorbike (A Story)

2010-11-24T13:14:00.006Z

In summer, in certain villages, it’s hard to separate the silence from the heat. From where we sat, the river didn’t seem to move. The sky looked opalescent; polished with a clumsy thumb so that the surface dust had formed the outline of the houses underneath. They looked like smudges; like something’s shadow.

Richard’s face, meanwhile, was vivid with disgust. He lay flat, with his arms outstretched, so that it looked like he’d been pressed into the grass. He said,

“A bike.”

“Well done.”

“No, Mick. A bicycle.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I’m seventeen years old. I come downstairs and it’s all “Happy Birthday, son” and there it is. It’s like…”

There was a pause. At last, he shook his head. His face – the bulbous chin; the eyes, bulging like ping pong balls – was a cartoon in any case. He always looked outraged; he seemed to lunge at you even when, as now, he was merely sitting up. It was too much for him; he threw himself back down.

“My God”, he said.

His feelings always seemed to rush up to the surface. Even his arms were flushed.

“This place.”

We’d seen a motorbike, in a shop window. It had had the same forward tilt, the same musculature, as Richard but it was set there in the gloom just like a jewel in a case. Inside, he’d drawn his fingertips over the seat. He’d bent over the engine, just as though he was going to murmur to it. Now, he spat his gum over the quarry’s edge.

“A bicycle.”

He looked out over the meadow, at the snail’s trail of the river. He said,

“Where would you go?”

He shuddered.

“Who would you end up being? I’d rather die.”

The thing was, you believed him. His eyes, his rigid frame, compelled you to. He walked to where a tree hung at the edge. He swung himself over the drop and back again until I felt my stomach go. He rode an invisible bike along a ridge, a sort of path, with a sheer drop on either side. We’d seen this done, by men on motorbikes, but even so... Later, I said to Natalie,

“He frightens me.”

She laughed.

“Me too.”

She was drawing a monkey with her finger, in spilt beer. There were just the two of us, which is why we had been served. She tilted her head and pursed her lips then gave it Richard’s hair; a shaggy Beatle mop. I laughed, but circumspectly: Natalie was his girlfriend. She was saying,

“I like them to be… You know: mad. And…”

“Built.”

“Oh God, yes. Built, of course.”

She ruffled my hair.

“No offence, sweetheart.”

There was a softness, a creaminess, about Natalie. Her gestures were sleepily self-aware. You only had to look at me, meanwhile, to see that I was safe. Richard would urge me to go for a drink with her so that I could report back what she’d said. I did, and didn’t. She lit a cigarette.

“He’s broke”, she said. “At least, he claims he is.”

“He’s going to work for Stan.”

She spluttered. Her breasts, I knew, were shimmying under my nose.

“For Stan! That’s good that is.”

Smoke seemed to curl itself around her neck.

“Oh: love him. He’ll be shovelling shit all day.”

She was still giggling when we left the pub. I walked her home, the river lisping somewhere near at hand. Her hand was on my arm. Why would you want to go anywhere? The sleepiness – the sideways-leaning cottages; somebody’s weight against your arm; her slurring feet, in step with yours – contained a germ, a version, of future happiness.

And Natalie was right: he smelt. He hadn’t, quite, managed to get his fingers clean. He said,

“She won’t come near me.”

“No. Well.”

“I’ve bathed. I’ve scrubbed. It won’t…”

His hands dragged downwards at his skin.

“So you’re giving it up?”

“I’m bloody not. I want that bike.”

He’d taken a second job; construction work, on Saturdays. Three times a week, he washed dishes in a restaurant. (They wouldn’t let him serve the customers.) He hardly saw Natalie now.

“I told her. It’s for her.”

“You live two streets away.”

“I can’t take her anywhere on a bicycle, can I?”

But there wasn’t, really, any difference between the way he looked off into the middle distance now and the way that he had once looked at Natalie. He seemed to be staring, in his imagination, at the bike. He looked like he was going to track it down; to bring it down, with a lassoo. I summoned all my courage. I said,

“I don’t think that she cares, Richard. I think she’d rather just have you.”

“Yeah. ‘cos you know all about women, don’t you, Mick?”

I didn’t say anything. But I could see what Richard couldn’t: that, for Natalie, the bike might just as well have been another woman. He wanted it so very much; you could see his hands shaking when he smoothed its curves. Natalie carried herself, most of the time, with a sort of ostentatious lightness – a humorous slyness, as though she were in an operetta – but, these days, one could see how heavy she would become. Richard was saying,

“Stan says I can have double time if I do Sundays from now on.”

“But not on the weekend of the festival?”

He shrugged.

“Oh, Richard: no.”

His hand moved rapidly under his nose; it was the embarrassed, compulsive gesture of a drug addict.

“You’re going to have to look after her for me”, he said.

I found, to my relief, that I was angry with him.

“God”, I said. “Look at you. Why aren’t you satisfied?”

“With what?”

I pointed. With all of this, I meant: the apples hanging over the garden wall; the wall itself, like cake that crumbles to the touch; the way the water ravelled and unravelled so that the weir looked like a loom. And Natalie, of course. Her plush and mottled throat. Her grin. The way her fingers hovered above your arm.

“It’s greed”, I said.

It’s difficult, now, to resurrect the intensity of Richard’s stare. At last, he said,

“You have to keep her sweet for me.”

What could I do? You wouldn’t have mistaken us for a couple, in any case. In those days, I was all nose and neck, with hair that seemed to rush upwards, like I’d dived into a swimming pool. Not even when she put her arm through mine would you have thought that we were together. I said.

“You know what he’s like. He’s a primitive. He likes it because it’s shiny.”

“Nuh-huh.”

She shook her head.

“It’s big.”

She giggled.

“And what we have here, you see, is a man who…”

She wiggled the tip of her little finger. She tilted the bottle of vodka up, she hoisted it, and took a defiant swig. She used the back of her hand to wipe her mouth. The combination of the whiteness of her arm and the navvy-like gesture was alluring. So were her eyes, which had become a little blurred. They were hooded, piratical, and I found that I wanted to encourage it. I said,

“Have another one. Go on.”

This time she held it like a trumpet, doing a burlesque bump and grind so that her bottom swivelled, slowly, from side to side. I led her through the hot food stalls, up to the stage. The festival was something that the three of us had been looking forward to for months. There were local bands – none of which I can remember now. I remember lying on my back and staring at the sky. The bands were turgid and mechanical; they merged, in the end, into a sort of soup. Later, in the evening, the sky itself seemed to thicken. The vodka had all gone. I looked at Natalie and tried, but failed, to speak. Behind her, tracing the outline of her breasts, the stage-lights looked like distant fires. My hands weren’t actually touching her but they were making the very same gesture that Richard had when he had stroked the motorbike. Up hill, it seemed, and then down dale, then, suddenly, she was leading me towards her tent. Inside, it felt like I was being flung around; as though desire was a dog that had me in its teeth. I couldn’t see Natalie; could only feel her piecemeal, as it were. Afterwards, she turned her back. I crawled into my tent and, in the morning, she was gone.

The site seemed vast. Its emptiness and my own emptiness seemed, somehow, to correspond. It was the same in the village. I wandered the streets, aware that I had done something irrevocable. Aware, as well, that part of me was glad; that I wanted to do it again. The torpid river; the war memorial; the antique shop, dark as an aquarium – all of this had an expectant air; an air of having been paused, somehow, so that, once one had pressed the button, something dramatic, something irrevocable, would happen next. I avoided traffic; jumped into a doorway at the buzz, like a giant bee, of a passing motorbike.

And then, on the Wednesday afternoon, the doorbell rang. When I opened the door, the first things that I noticed were Richard’s gloves, thick leather things that doubled the size of his hands. His face seemed preternaturally calm. Beyond him, his bike reared upwards on its stand. He said,

“Come on.”

He thrust a helmet into my hands. I distrusted him, of course, and the helmet felt disproportionately alien; cold and hard and, once it was on your head, too snug, like something that someone might forcibly strap you into. He drove too fast. I held on to his thighs and, at the bends, had to lean outwards with him. It was a subservient position, one that depended on his mastery of the bike, and, once we had stopped, I considered staying on, just to continue to give him the satisfaction. He gestured, roughly, with his head and I saw that we were above the quarry. I stood beside him, but he didn’t get off, nor did he switch off the engine. He kept revving it. He said,

“So.”

“So.”

“Big man.”

“Richard…”

“Big sexy man.”

“I didn’t…”

“What? Think? You didn’t do anything, is that it? Go on: tell me that you didn’t do anything.”

I looked away, over the river and the empty meadow. He said,

“Uh-huh.”

Slowly, he dismounted. I could feel everything – my lips; my stomach; the tops of my legs – beginning to clench. He stared at me but then he gestured to the bike.

“Go on.”

I didn’t understand.

“The ridge. Go on, big man. I dare you. Ride the ridge.”

That “dare” was accompanied by a sudden lurch, so that his face was only inches from my face. I didn’t know what to say. He was holding the keys towards me.

“Go on”, he said.

He continued to stare at me. He seemed, obscurely, to be pleading with me. There was a pause – a terrible, fathomless gap – and then he shook his head.

“Thought not.”

He turned away. Already, he was getting back on his bike. I said,

“Richard…”

But he wasn’t listening. He and the bike, a composite animal, seemed to leap hungrily towards the ridge. What could I do? It was all over in a second. He slipped. The bike seemed to complain; to buck and whine. I didn’t see his face or hear him make a sound. There was a thud, no more, when he hit the bottom. I saw a little mushroom cloud of dust; saw Richard, sprawled, like a dog’s toy, beneath his bike. I shouted, or screamed – I can’t remember. And then…

Well, then, there was just the silence.

A Christmas Story

2010-06-08T08:26:00.000+01:00

Walking from the cellar into the bar could feel like stepping out of a plane. First there was silence and a kind of contemplation but then there was a buffeting; a rocking, almost. Cellar work was hermetic. Physical, too, but even that had a weird – a satisfying – kind of precision.

Each empty barrel was a reliable pleasure. No matter how many times you did it, there remained the assumption that barrels, even empty ones, were going to be heavy. Lifting one – lifting it with ease and even with élan – felt like a dream experience, like lifting a train or car. The full barrels were trickier. They tapered at both ends and you had to use the middle as a fulcrum, rocking it (but not too much) until you had it resting on a rack. There was always a moment that teetered, suspensefully, before you tapped the seal with a metal spike and rapidly pressed in a wooden bung. This was supposed to help it breathe. The beer came fuming upwards, like champagne. There were hops in it, horrible-looking things, like flies, and it was this that always led, intuitively, to a brisk, obsessive clean-up. The mop had a hose attached and scrubbing with it was a relief; a sort of purge. In so far as a cellar could, it ended up looking spotless. Nick kept checking it. Not checking it, exactly. Identifying with it.

He changed. Literally: he showered and put on clean clothes. But there was more to it than that. The vivid glaze of the bar; the drone (a sort of “om”) of all the early evening drinkers; the Christmas songs – Nick felt this on his skin and in his stomach. He opened his arms and welcomed it in. But he was also, subtly, on guard. He rubbed his hands together in what was also a mime of somebody rubbing his hands together. He said,

“Lovely.”

This was more to himself than anyone else. It was as though he had to act out his own enthusiasm before it existed for him. Unwilling to let it go, he jiggled up and down, even as he was pouring himself a half of lager. Bob said,

“I’ll have whatever it is you’re having.”

Bob, it seemed, liked to act out the part of a regular in much the same way that Nick was being a barman. Bob was… what? Fifty? Sixty? He had a Ho Chi Minh beard and a face that was as glazed, in its own way, as the bar was. He was an academic, a professor of something or other, but clichés seemed to comfort him. His terrified eyes peered out at you, as though his face was a kind of burrow. Nick said,

“It’s joie de vivre.”

Bob nodded.

“Quite right. Not beer at all.”

Nick drank half and then filled it up again. He liked Bob but he functioned like the first act on a bill; you had to force yourself to pay attention to him. Nick asked him about Christmas Day. It was the kind of thing he almost never did. Bob placed both hands beside his belly. The belly was generous; pseudo-Christmassy. He said,

“I will, of course, get drunk. There will be poetry. I will recite The Green Eye Of The Little Yellow God to a reluctant audience then fall asleep. At some point, my son-in-law will get me in a fireman’s lift and take me up to bed.”

He puffed, with evident satisfaction, on the soggy nub of a cigar.

“And your good self?”

“My good self?”

But it didn’t do to draw attention to Bob’s turn of phrase. Nick looked over his head, out at the green. The circles, like the bottoms of bottles, in the windows warped the view, making it look smaller and more distant. The V-shape of the roads around the green, itself a tiny postage stamp; the spacious road beyond; the broad sky and the Georgian houses – all served, in miniature, to highlight where you were: inside. “The Highwayman” was an old coaching inn, with wooden beams. There was a fireplace, a two-way chimney breast, that formed part of the archway from the short bar, where Bob was, into the long. Beyond that was the restaurant. Nick barely ventured into it. The bar was as much his home as anywhere else had ever been. He shrugged.

“Pub food”, he said.

He took another sip.

“Hot, hopefully.”

“And then?”

“Oh: sleep. I don’t care where. Right here will do.”

He patted the bar. A patch of stickiness had blurred the surface so he took a cloth and rubbed it clean. The pub was filling up. Here were the bar staff: Bob, Melinda, Angel, Sam, Claude, Caroline and Serge. They all wore crisp shirts and clip-on bow ties. Angel, who had three razor marks, like sergeant’s stripes, cut into his Larry Blackmon flattop, wore his collar up. He had a swaggery roll, a sort of sailor’s walk, and flicked his fingers, two or three of them, like castanets. Caroline’s bob was bright white, like a wig. Apart from that, there was a pleasing uniformity about them all; the way they moved around each other felt, sometimes, almost precise. Nick marshalled them. Not obviously. He joked; sometimes he sang. He yelled non-sequiturs. Sometimes, they yelled them back. It was a performance; a distance that could feel like intimacy.

Here, meanwhile, in the corner, squeezed between the fireplace and the door, were what was called “The Corner”, painters and decorators who came here, most of them, every night. They had a chant – “0i-oi!” – and a confident, an almost aristocratic, way of summoning you; a nod or a wink that signified that they knew just how important they all were. When one of them said “When you’re ready” it was essentially meaningless; almost a catchphrase. They had brought their wives tonight, as well as Rebecca and her friends. Ann, one of Rebecca’s friends, was tapping her fingers on the bar. Bob looked at Nick looking at her. He said, recited rather,

“She upbraided poor Carew in the way that women do,
Though both her eyes were strangely hot and wet.”

But Bob was fading; his time was almost up. Nick’s language, his delivery, had undergone a transformation. His deliveries. Down in the longer bar, he preened and tap-danced; clattering steps that served no useful purpose, not even to entertain. He had a gesture, a sort of tic, in which he checked his hair repeatedly in the mirror, tucking and then untucking his fringe. Elsewhere, he played up to The Corner. Here, with Ann, he mimed – he lightly, and as it were accidentally, touched one of her fingers; he shook his head briefly, no, when she tried to pay him – as though it were really eloquence. Caroline disapproved. She bristled, seeming to thicken, slightly, in the neck and shoulders. But Caroline was altogether too three-dimensional. Ann was a face, that’s all, and slender legs. Barely a face: it was more her expression, the way that she continued to look at him, that had Nick hovering over her.

She wasn’t pretty, exactly, nor was she any older than 17. This streamlined things for Nick; it felt as though she was barely there. It was profoundly sexy, although Nick wouldn’t, or couldn’t, have put it into words. He was aware, instead, of having been lifted, like a balloon; of feeling, somehow, lighter and heavier all at once. The songs, the same old Christmas songs, had an erotic charge; a blundering but insistent rhythm. Ann stayed put. She watched him. Caroline said,

“Oh, Christ. The smoke: she’s sucking it up her nose. She’s sucking it up her nose.”

“The dirty slut.”

Caroline looked at him. Pertly aggressive, she flicked his forehead, hard, with an index finger, saying,

“You could do better.”

Swiftly, she stepped around him. The bar was four deep now. Nick turned the volume up. His dips and sways, the way he sashayed or else span around a corner, felt choreographed. Ann was a persistent presence, like an itch. Once, passing glasses back to Serge, smoking a cigarette, he leant a leg against her leg. He said,

“Don’t move.”

She leaned against him; placed a hand, ostensibly to help him, on his hand. He said,

“Thank you.”

He was lowing into her ear. You had to trust that, in the middle of all this noise, you could communicate. The tone itself, its murmurous throb, would serve, he felt. But then The Corner heaved from side to side; he ended up, beached, at the corner of the hatch. Now, though, he couldn’t concentrate. He totted up what Ann had drunk; three double vodkas. He had had four pints. There was an inevitability to the way he knew that he was going to act; the gap had narrowed between thought and deed. (What would his “good” self have done? Pointless to wonder now.) He gave her a drink; she hadn’t asked. He lit her cigarette. She continued to look at him; to stare levelly at his face and, afterwards, at his profile. Her nails danced idly around her glass. They fascinated Nick; they glittered, like trinkets, in the flushed pink of the lamps. It wasn’t that she didn’t speak to people but she did it, mostly, sideways.

Caroline said,

“Don’t, Nick.”

She turned a pump off with what looked like a karate chop.

“Just don’t.”

Angel had noticed, too. He said,

“My man.”

His words and easy, lilting tone didn’t match up. He wasn’t impressed. Nick made a face and Angel nodded.

“Innit”, he said.

But Nick had already made up his mind. At twelve o’clock they closed the bar. They counted down until there was, it seemed, an entire fiesta: whoops and the sharp crack, like rifle fire, of party poppers. Nick edged into the space between the fireplace and the corner, staring at Ann until she turned her face to look at him. Still staring, he edged around The Corner, through the door. The streets were sleek; they fizzed with rain. The wind threw gusts of it, like pellets, into your face. Ann’s face, not yet aware of him, looked studious and resigned. He took her hand and led her round the back, into the car park, where he placed her, like a model, under a tree. What happened then felt oddly second-hand. His wheedling tone; his tenderness; even his faux brutality – he’d learned it all by rote. She didn’t talk; he didn’t want her to.

Afterwards, anxious about the pub, he barely gave her time to dress. There was a moment when she stumbled over her knickers - she nearly fell - but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, wait for her. Inside, he picked five glasses up, one-handed, but Caroline wasn’t fooled; she wouldn’t talk to him. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, look at Ann.

Where, before, he had been buoyant, now he felt as though he had been flooded with dirty water. He saw them, all of them, with a terrible clarity: their slack, distorted mouths; their bodies, radically out of true. Eventually, she left. She had the look of someone who had found a spider in her bed. They all left, every single one, back to their homes and families. Once they were gone, the bar staff huddled at the short end of the bar. He stood and poured himself a drink. Caroline was saying – almost singing – something. The Christmas songs were faint, now; a collective memory. When he looked into the mirror it was like looking at someone else. He smiled, slowly. He tucked, and then untucked, his fringe. He saluted himself.

“Happy Christmas”, he said.

Bolivia (A story)

2010-06-08T07:15:00.003+01:00

Lily flew into Santiago screaming. She was excited anyway; she’d made the decision to visit her brother all in a rush. And then there was her fear of flying, which meant four double vodkas in the air, and not quite sleeping, and then, of course, the plane went into its descent. She screamed delightedly. Or mock-delightedly, she wasn’t sure.

Santiago was wild. Lily jabbered at the taxi driver, prodding his shoulder and demanding an explanation when they passed an Easter Island statue (was it real?) and then the river, which was just a sullen trickle. (Why did they bother building bridges over it?) The Moneda Palace gave out a kind of hospital glare. There was a demonstration in the Plaza de Armas. The speaker thumped his heart, waving a book in the other hand, while, next to him, there was a statue of a man holding his own head at chest level. You could see it as a sort of oblique commentary. Well, Lily could.

But then making connections was what you did when you were at this stage of the cycle. You had what she called the super-excitement – the feeling of surfing the spume of a wave; of teetering at the high point of a rollercoaster (the toppermost of the poppermost!) – and then you crashed. You’d be more frightened of the approaching damage if you weren’t so fired up. And she was fired up! That night, she went drinking in the Barrio Bellavista. She peered in the windows of the expensive restaurants but they all looked just like bad TV; like a reality show at three o’clock in the afternoon, when you feel like the only one watching. The bars on the main drag were better. You sat on plastic furniture and listened to music pulsing - no, pounding - from the open doorways. It thudded at you, making you move your head as though you were being punched. Listening was way too passive a word for what Lily did; she moved her shoulders and upper body as though the song was an element that she was swimming in. She closed her eyes sometimes and stretched her neck, shaking her hair so that it brushed at her shoulders. Her father had always told her that it made her look cheap and so she’d done it whenever she could, to goad him, and now it was a sort of habit. Exciting, too – the power. You’d come round, sort of (you didn’t know yourself if you were putting it on), and there’d be somebody who suddenly had to look somewhere else.

Like Carl. She hadn’t noticed him at first. His face was a sort of first sketch for a face. He had a weak mouth – a wavering line – and he was pale, but not so you’d really notice. His hair went up in a gelled peak, which only made him look more forgettable. And, of course, it was easy: she only had to hint, ever so softly, at a growing fascination. She’d always revelled in role-playing; in the rush you got from cutting yourself adrift. You could be anything you wanted, that was the thing. Tonight, she was a veterinary nurse, from Southwark. She had tears in her eyes already.

“They come in like this”, she said.

Her fingers were clasped together, like bird’s wings, one hand lying awkwardly on the table.

“They struggle.”

Her hands were shaking rapidly now.

“And you have to wait. You have to hold them firmly, and then you just …wait. Until they stop fighting you. Their hearts are going like this.”

She panted rapidly.

“But you can see that they’ve calmed down. It’s like they trust you. Like they know that you won’t hurt them.”

She wiped the back of a hand across her eyes. Carl said,

“I saw this sparrow.”

But she was already bored. She slipped her hand slowly between his legs and leant into his ear.

“Why don’t you show me your hotel?”

He was a boy; it was all over in a moment. But then she worked on him. She was somebody else again now, could he tell? The empathy – the pathos – of the nurse had disappeared. She kissed him everywhere, she straddled him but then, out of the blue, he grabbed her hair. Staring her down, he pushed her on the bed. It was the last thing she expected, and when it was over she was nuts about him.

A boy. She liked that, though – the drama of it. She looked into his eyes and said,

“I’ll hurt you. I always do.”

He shrugged, rather charmingly. His room had turned out to be an attic, more or less. He had been sharing it with a friend, Rory, who hadn’t, in the end, been able to bear being away from home. Carl had two tickets that they had booked up to the north of Chile. From there, they’d hoped to travel through Bolivia. Bolivia! Lily stroked his chest, her eyes wide, willing him to ask her. She had forgotten all about her brother, and didn’t remember him until they were in the air. By the time they had taken a bus, from Calamar, to San Pedro de Atacama she had forgotten him again.

San Pedro was like a set in a Western. But it was deceptive; the primitive exteriors were hiding restaurants and natural juice bars. Lily found it all delightful.

“It’s just like Disneyland!”, she said.

It wasn’t. But the harsh light, alternating with thin strips of shade, made a chiaroscuro effect. So-called stray dogs were nuzzling at each other, lying paws upward, grinning. If you walked past the restaurants, you heard a kind of disjointed soundtrack; jazz, mostly, but also dance music and the Beatles – your mood could alter from doorway to doorway.

“We’re in a film”, she said. “A road trip!”

It never rained here, and there were square holes in the roofs of the restaurants. On their first night, they ate and listened to a house band: a guitar, a miniature guitar, a violin and a man playing what looked like scaled-down organ pipes. He was good-looking actually, white but with dreads. Lily began to sway from side to side, clicking her fingers, but Carl was staring down at his plate and in the end she stopped. It was the same in the travel office the next morning. Lily spoke slowly and loudly, miming manoeuvring a steering wheel. She drew a hotel in the air. There was a rapport, she felt, between herself and the woman behind the desk – the woman was laughing immoderately; her shoulders were shaking up and down - but then she saw that Carl was studying the space between his feet. She had to fight an urge to ruffle his hair. Laughing, she led him back to their hotel and let him do whatever he wanted with her.

They had booked a trip to the salt flats in Uyuni. They had seen pictures of it, a vast white space with islands covered in cactii. From there you could either travel upwards into the interior or go back to San Pedro; they hadn’t decided yet. In the morning, they were driven by minibus to a passport check a little way outside San Pedro. Then, just a little further, there was another one; a low one-roomed border post, like a cardboard box. The landscape so far had been barren – lunar, almost – and there was still only a little variety: the upcurve of the mountains in the distance; a single cactus in a ring of stones. The wind came rushing along the plateau and they had to shelter behind a wall. They were being separated into smaller groups then transferred into landrovers and Lily found herself regretting the loss of the Israeli boy who had been sitting at the front of the bus. He had a pierced eyebrow, wild curly hair and an “I love New York” T-shirt. Without asking, he had pushed a tape, a disco mix, into the music system and turned it up. A bully, Lily thought. Carl had turned out to be a pussycat; all his ferocity was willed – his way of proving himself a man in bed. Now, he was shivering and banging his hands together. The tip of his nose had reddened. Lily didn’t know whether she wanted to kick him or pat him on the head.

Their driver was called Cesar. He was a dynamo – a squat, smiling Bolivian who slapped the other guides on the back then jumped into the driver’s seat, shouting “Vamos!”. They had been told, the day before, that they were going to pick up a group of four, all from the Czech Republic, and here they were suddenly, all hunched, heads down, into their fleeces. Frederick, the English speaker, shook their hands. He was slight but self-sufficient looking; he took his friends’ bags one by one and threw them, easily, onto the roof of the landrover. Carl struggled with theirs. Frederick’s friend, Ivan, was a giant. Lily and Carl had got into the seats over the wheel arches but even so Ivan was still crammed in, his knees up by his mouth. His girlfriend, Lotty, leant her head against his shoulder. She was pretty but insipid; a giggler. Frederick’s girlfriend, Magda, looked, and stayed, morose. A would-be gamine, Lily thought. High maintenance.

The Czechs were horribly self-sufficient. It wasn’t so much that they were humourless, it was just that the humour, what there was of it, was all turned inwards. At the first stop, they wandered off to have a cigarette. Cesar had driven them into a “fauna reserve” – the tickets had coloured photographs of flamingos on them - and parked next to a group of landrovers. They were beside Laguna Verde, a brilliant aqua marine. The guidebook said that it contained high concentrates of lead, sulphur and arsenic. It had a sort of tainted beauty, Lily felt –it could probably kill you if you swam in it or drank from it – which made it glamorous. Behind it was a volcano, its peak a broken crust. Lily said,

“The Incas used to take young men up there, as a sacrifice. They let them freeze to death.”

She was aware that she sounded approving. It was the aesthetics she approved of; the seemingly perfect match between what they did and where they did it. Carl looked bewildered. The Israeli boy had dipped his finger in the water and was licking it. Lily gave her camera to someone and had a picture taken with Carl. She squeezed tightly against him, her cheek against his cheek, but was aware, even as she did it, that she was play-acting; that she was a little hysterical, desperate to perpetuate the feeling of the last few days. What would replace it if it died? She tried hard not to think about it. She tried to kiss him passionately but he withdrew, embarrassed. She kicked him on the shin.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“You’re fickle”, she said.

Cesar loved driving. He hunched over the wheel and talked continually to himself. He’d swerve, sometimes, and laugh. There were no roads, just rutted tracks, and Lily and Carl had the worst of it. If you weren’t careful, your head could bang against the roof. Lily was trying desperately to enjoy herself. She shouted “Yeehah!” and thumped the seat in front of her. At the hot springs – mud baths, producing thick wads of steam– she stripped off to her bra and knickers and took a dip. Carl concentrated on his food. She had jumped into the Israeli’s pool and now he smiled at her encouragingly. He spoke a primitive, resonant form of English that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, but soon the landrovers were pulling out and she had to struggle back into her clothes. That night, in the refugio, she saw that he was glancing at her but she’d based this whole trip on a rush - a peaking wave - of feeling that she couldn’t now just dismiss. They were staying by Lake Colorada, which was a vivid red. The wind snatched at your hair, grabbing your breath and trying to push you backwards. Lily loved it. She held her arms out by her sides and tried to run directly into it but Carl was suffering from being at altitude - he had a headache, he said, and felt sick; could they please please just go inside? – and so she took his hand (a nurse again!) and led him back to bed.

The refugio had broken windows and no heating. At night, it went down to –20 and they had to put all their clothes on and get into Carl’s sleeping bag. They were sharing a room with the Czechs but it wasn’t long before Lily had slipped her hand beneath Carl’s trousers and thermal underwear. She could only just see him in outline and it felt like she could be seducing almost anybody. It excited her. Carl wouldn’t co-operate at first; he feigned sleep, even though she could feel that his breath was quickening, and then he tried, half-heartedly, to push her away. She wouldn’t be put off. She waited until she was on top, until there was no stopping him, and then she started to groan. She wasn’t too demonstrative, at least she thought she wasn’t, and she was, anyway, almost entirely submerged in what she and Carl were doing, but all the same a part of her – the part of her that always stood a little to one side of her – was relishing the thought that one of the others might be awake. She groaned a little louder. Carl’s hand reached for her mouth but she didn’t care. She let him muzzle her, she found the restraint delicious, and moaned louder still. She was aware, out on the edge of what she could perceive, that someone was turning over in bed. She thought she saw a sihouette sit up. It was too much for her; she found herself finishing with one last strangled shout. She collapsed on top of Carl, not caring if she was squashing him; not wanting to murmur to him, or touch his hair – all those endearments were superfluous now. It wasn’t Carl she wanted any more, but something that she knew was out of reach – some feeling, or sensation, the search for which would always, in the end, send her plummeting down that rollercoaster.

The next day, the sun was much too bright – things were either too vivid or took on a kind of furtive life. Flamingos in a lake looked incandescent, as though they were about to burst into flame. Rocks looked like claws or clenching buttocks. The Czechs, and Carl, avoided her eyes. She became convinced that Magda was talking about her; muttering things under her breath to Frederick. The Israeli had grinned and nodded at her approvingly, but now he was nowhere to be seen. Last night she had had a dream, she couldn’t really remember it. It had felt off, somehow. She felt as though she were trying too hard; as though she was critiquing it as she was dreaming it. She had woken up suddenly, gasping for breath. Now she shut her eyes and held on tightly to the seat in front of her. (How had they managed to get the seats over the wheel arches again?) The landscape felt completely empty – all sand and rock – and, in the afternoon, they went through an army checkpoint made up of strange brick pods. It was like being in a science fiction movie. Cesar’s tapes made it worse. It must have been local music, women yelping over what sounded like a music box winding down, but it was unsettling. It made her feel nervy and obscurely picked on.

They stayed in a village called San Juan. It was an eerily silent place. There was dust everywhere, even on the bottles of water that Cesar bought from a local shop. The hotel must once have been a delicate shade of pink but now it was covered in dirt and had damp patches on the walls. There were three rooms upstairs and three downstairs. A wooden staircase led up to a balcony but their room was out of synch; its doorway was above the staircase so that you had to step down gingerly to stop yourself from falling. Inside, flies had been mashed on the walls and windowsills. The dimensions were all wrong. Carl hit his head on the doorjamb when he went in. The sheets and coverlets were sticky. Downstairs there was one toilet and a filthy dining room. The generator had packed up and so they ate their dinner by candlelight. There were twelve of them, including the Czech couples, but the Israeli boy was nowhere to be seen. Lily was beyond that, anyway. Everything was exaggerated now: the distance between Carl’s seat and her own; the laughter at things she hadn’t heard; the odd sly glance from Magda. She sat and stared down at her hands. She took a plate but couldn’t eat the llama meat. She had seen one earlier that day, gingerly mincing across a dried-up river bank. She had identified with it; it was an exercise in empathy – a role play – that enabled her to leave the lurching, cramped confinement of the landrover. The tentative approach; the startled femininity: it was, she felt, her secret self. She pushed the plate away. Carl was saying,

“I found her in Santiago.”

He had clearly got over his embarrassment and now seemed terribly pleased with himself. He was patting her wrist. Approvingly, he said,

“She’s mad.”

She snatched her arm away, stood up and marched upstairs. Later, she wouldn’t let him touch her; kicked him, in fact. Lay in a ball, tracing the outline of the window frame, until she slept, or thought she did. At four o’clock, Cesar started to press his horn. It seemed to her, still half-asleep, that it was something bullying and big-snouted, blundering through the doorway at her. Coming downstairs, she saw that the Czechs had already taken their seats. Magda was getting out – she was actually getting out, just so that they could squeeze past her, into the back again. She had this shit-eating grin, what Lily interpreted as a leer of triumph, and it was that, she thought afterwards – that and the darkness and the cold and Cesar’s horn and Carl’s remark and something else: the knowledge that she was hurtling downwards now; there was no stopping it – that tipped her over.

“No”, she said. “Nonononononono.”

She was shaking her head and stepping backwards.

“I won’t”, she said. “No. I’m sorry. I can’t. No way. I mean: look at her.”

Carl tried to touch her. He was trying to offer a steadying hand, she was aware of that, but she was already screaming, “Get off me!”, flailing her arms at him so that he had to step swiftly away from her. There was always a kind of pleasure in the first few moments – in this surrendering of herself to something. Part of her watched herself dispassionately as she suddenly went for Magda, put her in a headlock and then toppled the two of them over, trying to punch her head with her other hand. It took three of them – Carl, Ivan and Frederick - to restrain her, and she was still trying to kick them and snapping her teeth together, trying to bite their hands, while part of her was thinking: yes, here it is, at last. The end always proceeded with a kind of dream-logic: she’d struggle and try to shout out “No!” but someone was always there to hold her down.

She let them carry her upstairs and lay her on the coverlet. Carl said,

“OK?”

He was standing above her, looking terrified. She nodded. Smiling, he stroked her hair. She felt a shudder go through her and had to close her eyes. He grew more confident, smoothing her forehead. It was what they always did: mistake hysteria for pleasure. Smear their hands across you. Her face was inches from his crotch. So easy, she thought, and sank her teeth into it.

Literary Snippet No.9

2009-12-27T21:00:00.003Z

William Golding drank. Waking up in the middle of the night, he destroyed his friend's Bob Dylan puppet, thinking that it was Satan. Then he buried it in the garden. On the other hand, he felt so "anguished" when three-quarters of his audience left that he stayed to watch Kazuo Ishiguro, asked a question and led the applause.

At a stretch, you could say that that pretty much sums up his books.

After the Christmas party...

2009-12-19T20:54:00.006Z

On sober reflection, I'd say that if you are wielding an imaginary lassoo then you're probably not dancing as well as you think you are.

Pantos and symbolism

2009-12-17T20:42:00.003Z

Somewhere in Isherwood's diaries (and in "A Single Man", I think) he talks about the notion of symbolic living. Sometimes, in other words, one doesn't live one's life so much as exhibit it. (To others as well as to oneself.)

On the last day of the Christmas term, the teachers in my school put on a pantomime. The first time that I saw it I was desperate to be in it. It seemed to me, and can seem still, to represent us as a pseudo-family; you know: the team. (Christmas can do that to you.)

But the point is that it only represents it. On stage, I found, the lights blot out the audience. Their laughs seem far away, like surf. You're all of you on your own, edging around each other awkwardly.

Which is why I save my symbolic gestures for the Christmas party.

V.S. Pritchett

2009-12-16T19:21:00.000Z

In Esquire magazine in 1991, Martin Amis wrote the following:

"As for ...snooker, well, to approach the televisual ideal, by which we all measure ourselves, I'd have to do nothing else for the rest of my life. Then snooker might work out and measure up, with everything going where you want it to go, at the right weight and angle. Then snooker might feel like writing."

I've always thought that that was an astonishingly arrogant thing to say. What: everything? Blimey. How gifted he must be, especially when you consider that Graham Greene (no slouch himself) thought that a writer's style was made up, partly, of all of his or her limitations: of all the things, that is, that you cannot do.

Amis has always been a distinctive writer but I doubt if, in the end, he will be judged as a distinguished one. He is like Hemingway - all prose. No, if you want to talk about precision, then you would do better to consider V.S. Pritchett.

I am rereading Pritchett's memoirs, "A Cab At The Door" and "Midnight Oil". It has been 15 years since I last looked at them and I might as well be reading them for the first time. (This often happens to me.) He is a wonderful writer, accurate and insightful, but also with a sort of feline silkiness; a mellifluous skill that conceals, or, at least, ameliorates, the sharpness of the judgements underneath. Here is just one example:

"Here I saw a graceful but militant, well-tailored woman with straw-coloured hair come in with a girl so strange and exquisite that my eyes filled with tears. Her body was slight, but she had a fine forehead and black hair that had the soft gleam of oil in its waves. Her long eyelashes hung over her large blue eyes and she had very heavy short eyebrows. She wore a big bow in her hair so that the effect was of being half-girl, half heavy-headed, thin-legged butterfly, rather than anything human; yet the artifice was not complete. Her lips and her round chin could hardly keep still for amusement. ...Afterwards, a middle-aged Italian was talking to them and gazing as intently as I was at the daughter and the mother looked at him mockingly as if she were saying: "Yes, of course, you have fallen for her. Everyone does. Isn't she dazzling? I invented her.""

There you have it: a whole life - what Pritchett himself called somebody's "essence" - captured, and with not a word wasted. This skill is even more evident in Pritchett's stories, which are miracles of compressed lyricism. He was a master craftsman but he was also a self-deprecating one. When reminded that "Mr Beluncle", one of his novels, had been criticised for being static, he said:

"Yes, I found it hard to make the characters move: I had to get a furniture van or a bus to get them from one chapter to another. The business of making a novel move simply defeated me."

Of course, this pragmatic humility only increases my admiration. Writing is difficult, Pritchett is saying. What's more it should be difficult; one mustn't confuse good writing with facility.

Urbanity

2009-12-15T19:54:00.001Z

A while ago, I read an article on Hitler, written by a woman called Janet Flanner and published in The New Yorker in 1936. It's good: her analysis of Hitler's character is acute and even scathing. But there is something urbane, something humorously superior, about the writing that makes me wish that I could ring her up and shout at her. This is her description of Nazi social etiquette:

"To people distant in the street, lifting the hand is enough, though for personal greetings in a room, "Heil Hitler!" should definitely be added. Should you meet someone who through social circumstances is not of your rank, then don't bend the right arm but stretch it straight on a level with your eyes, at the same time saying "Heil Hitler!" Always heil with your left arm if you are leading a lady with your right."

This is all very amusing and it's true that she does mention the current Jewish laws (and true, too, that this was two whole years before Kristallnacht) but my knowledge of what comes next makes it impossible to read this with the same pleasure that I might read, say, an article about Walt Disney. It's positively eerie going back in time to contemporary reports like this. You want to shout: "Stop! This is all wrong", but, of course, nobody can hear you.

There are monsters before whom urbanity pales into a series of pointless, ritual gestures. Perhaps the monsters are right: what good is irony? Who does it help? This mild, after-dinner form of psycho-analysis looks terrible in retrospect: they should have hired an exorcist.

Venice

2009-12-12T11:18:00.002Z

Venice looked just like I thought it should. It's a living postcard, a place of crisp perspectives and of slyly flickering reflections.

But we were young. We couldn't afford a gondola nor could we drink a Bellini at Harry's Bar. We found the Titians dull; we were intimidated by the modern art and, at the Guggenheim, I was relieved to be able to comment on the genitalia of the statue who, with arms outflung, was enthusiastically exposing himself.

One night, my wife and I were sitting outside a restaurant that overlooked the Grand Canal. She asked if I liked my pizza and, entirely without irony, I said,

"It's not as good as a Safeways' Meat Feast."

We really should go back.

Santa

2009-12-08T19:15:00.006Z

Santa arrived at the Christmas fair on a jeep this year. (Is this part of a tradition? If so, which one? My brother-in-law says "M*A*S*H".) He was frail-looking and his beard was like the cotton wool you bunch and stretch to make fake snow. It didn't fit; his little eyes peered out suspiciously at you. Or not at you. Through you. Where was the laugh? The belly? I took my daughter over to meet him, saying "Look! It's Santa!" He nodded. "It certainly is", he said and continued to talk to the woman next to him.

Later, he was irritated with the Head Mistress, a jolly but steely sort. To no-one in particular, he said "I wish I was a ventriloquist". He struggled to think of questions to ask the children. The Head, meanwhile, told them to remember that he would be watching over them. She said this with a relish that wasn't altogether festive, as though he was Big Brother or Chairman Mao.

Of course, none of this bothered my little girl. Elsewhere, she had her fingernails painted; she coloured in an angel; she made a cracker; she swept up and then licked the brush. When asked if she had enjoyed herself, she gave a double thumbs-up. (She's four.) The point being not that children are pleased more easily but rather that, already, my daughter is pleased (forgive the tautology) by what she is pleased by. I wanted a Winter Wonderland. My daughter, on the other hand, wants... what? It's good, I think - it's healthy - that I don't always know.

D-Day

2009-12-04T19:52:00.002Z

My grandfather, Tom, was in his early twenties when he jumped out of a glider over Pegasus Bridge. This was on D-Day, or, perhaps, D-Day + 1. He helped to defend it for a day, my grandmother said, before he was killed by a sniper.

This, at least, was what my grandmother told my mum. After my nan died, however, it came to light that what had probably happened was that he had been taken out of the air. He was dead before he hit the ground. My nan's version was what Philip Roth once called a "useful fiction": his death, in this version, had a point; it had more moral tone.

But does this diminish what he did? Of course not. Try to imagine it. I can just about get him in the air. I can get him to the open door, but after that...

Well, after that he stepped into the darkness. My nan told me that, once, he came to meet her on his fork-lift truck. He was a bugger, she said. I think he looks intelligent; as though he's knowingly (reluctantly and charmingly) off-guard. I know next to nothing about the man. But I am very proud of him.

Grimaldi's grandfather

2009-11-28T07:15:00.001Z

I am now reading "The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi" by Andrew McConnell Stott. Grimaldi was a famous 19th century clown and the following is the story of his grandfather, a sauteur ("a kind of gymnast specialising in high leaps that were achieved by bending one leg at an oblique angle and coiling it low to the ground before jumping explosively into the air"):

"It was ...during the performance of Le Prix de Cythere that the Grimaldi family first leapt to national prominence. According to legend, the show was visited by the grand figure of Mehemet Effendi, the ambassador of the Ottoman Sublime Porte. The ambassador, a vain and preening man, announced his presence by taking the box nearest the stage and, excited at the prospect of performing before such an eminence, Giovanni bet his colleagues that he could jump as high as the chandelier that flanked the box. He won his bet with his first leap but, in doing so, kicked the chandelier with enough force to smash it. One shard found its way down the throat of the laughing Mehemet, while a second hit him in the eye. Blind, choking and humiliated, he was quick to complain of the indignity he had suffered at the feet of a mere jester, and demanded that Grimaldi be punished before the full Court. A public act of contrition was accordingly arranged, only for Giovanni to seize it as a further opportunity for self-promotion by lacing his apology with such a dash of fairground double-talk that he reduced the courtiers to hysterics, heaping further dishonour upon the injured man."

The people of Paris "delighted in the audacity of this son of the market-place who had ridiculed the loathed turk" and began to call him "Iron Legs", creating a "popular squib" that went:

"Hail, Iron Legs! immortal pair,
Agile, firm knit, and peerless,
That skim the earth, or vault in air,
Aspiring high and fearless.
Glory of Paris! outdoing compeers,
Brave pair! may nothing hurt ye;
Scatter at will our chandeliers,
And tweak the nose of Turkey.
And should a too presumptuous foe
But dare these shores to land on,
His well-kicked men shall quickly know
We've Iron Legs to stand on."

Later, he absconded to France:

"Nothing was heard of him for several years, until he eventually turned up in Flanders in the company of a stage-struck bookseller he had duped into funding a troupe. Although he had added conjuring to his various skills, the venture met with constant ill fortune that culminated in an attack by bandits on the road to Brussels. Having been stripped and robbed, Iron Legs, the bookseller and Iron Legs's mistress, "a Parisian lady of questionable character" would have been murdered on the spot had not the lady thrown herself upon the brigands' mercy and promised to become their collective wife in return for her lover's salvation. They agreed, and departed with their prize, leaving the dejected comedian to tramp into Brussels alone, wearing the only thing he had left, a tattered Harlequin's costume."

How's that for a novel in miniature?

A Gate At The Stairs

2009-11-24T20:28:00.003Z

Now this is funny:

"She had bequeathed me her vibrator, a strange swirling, buzzing thing that when switched to high gyrated in the air like someone's bored thick finger going whoop-de-doo. Whose penis could this possibly resemble?"

And so is this:

"We had also once had an ebullient pig named Helen, who would come when you called her name and smiled like a dolphin when you spoke to her. And then we didn't see her for a few days, and one morning over bacon and eggs, my brother said, "Is this Helen?" I dropped my fork and cried, "This is Helen? Is this Helen?!" and my mother, too, stopped eating and looked hard at my father: "Bo, is this Helen?" The next pig we got we never met and its name was #WK3746."

Moore has always been a witty writer but she is also a gifted one. That "smiled like a dolphin" is characteristic: it's a perfect image; a flash of insight. Note, too, the accuracy and the swing of the dialogue, the canny reversal of "this is" and "is this"; it sings. If her previous work has seemed to drift a little, to form, at times, a sort of slightly snarky reverie, then this quality seems almost perfect here. Why?

Well, for one thing, this sideways approach is perfectly in tune with her character, Tassie Keltjin. I don't agree with those critics who have called this an updated "Catcher In The Rye" because Tassie's voice, her syntax, is pretty much the same as Moore's: this isn't an impersonation. But her preoccupations are her own. A teenage girl, she plays Metallica on the bass while lying on her back; she drinks bottles of medicine; she is wide open to the phenomena around her - like all farm girls, she says, she "did not think of the weather as something separate"; "we accepted the weather as being us... as a kind of defeatedness" - but the way that she apprehends her self is both defensive and oblique:

"I found an old pack of Murph's Marlboros and smoked one in front of the bathroom mirror, blowing the smoke up and out, and turning my head slowly this way and that as I did. In the dim lights I did not look so bad."

Moreover, America is drifting, too; it's losing focus. This is post-9/11 but pre-Obama and Tassie's college courses are: "Geology, Sufism, Wine Tasting, British Lit. [and] Soundtracks to War Movies." Students are studying Islam, trying to understand what, precisely, is going on, but there are boys joining the army who think that the war with Afghanistan is over. Tassie is minding a mixed-race baby and her attitude to it, a sort of winded acceptance and love, would seem to be the very best that anyone can do right now.

I said almost perfect because there's a point when the narrative becomes darker and and more dramatic and when the tone... Well, to be honest, the tone is still perfectly appropriate, but I miss the earlier stuff. Before we return to it towards the end, I miss the minutiae of Tassie's day-to-day existence. It seems to say more, somehow; to be more revealing. Nevertheless, apart from the occasional obscurity and those moments when the prose teeters perilously close to whimsy, this is a beautiful book. Tassie seems both half-formed and wonderfully concrete. Her story is moving; it feels true.

Wolves and Eagles

2009-11-23T18:02:00.004Z

A Serbian professor once told Ted Hughes (I think I have this right) that he had known that a war was approaching when he noticed the frequency with which wolves were appearing in his students' stories and essays.

In December 2001, three months after 9/11, my wife and I were staying in a motel near the Joshua Tree National Park. The park was already forbidding enough - the evening light was like a developing polaroid - but it was the American eagle that made me feel the most uncomfortable. It had been drawn by hand and stuck, unframed, next to reception. Wherever you went, there were American flags. Next to the Grand Canyon, our helicopter pilot buzzed the rocks and scrub, saying, "This is how Santee Clause flies into Afghanistan". It wasn't until we got to San Francisco that I was able to read a liberal leader in the newspaper.

Of course, one understood. In Vegas, there were notes of sympathy stuck to the fence outside "New York, New York", a hotel that is a kitsch amalgam, a sort of greatest hits, of the New York skyline but with a rollercoaster running through it. In this context, the notes were jarring but (perhaps because of this) they were moving, too. Elsewhere, the response was more ...bellicose, and this aggressiveness, coupled, already, with a frank and fearless self-regard, predicted perfectly the mood of the Bush administration.

2009

2009-11-22T18:20:00.004Z

"Uncut" magazine have already published their round-up of the year. Here, then, for what it's worth, is my top ten of 2009:

"Quiet Dog" by Mos Def

"Bulletproof Love" by Massive Attack

"My Body's A Zombie For You" by Dead Man's Bones

"Bust Your Windows" by Jazmine Sullivan

"Trading Things In" by The Voluntary Butler Scheme

"La Pantera Mambo" by La 33

"C'mon Train" by Don Thomas

"Empire State Of Mind" by Jay-Z

"Simple Man" by Graham Nash

"Monkey Man" (Live) by The Specials

You may have noticed that some of these weren't actually released this year. Nevertheless, they are the tracks that, with the exception of one or two very maudlin ballads, have meant the most to me. I don't know whether this says more about me or about 2009.

Wolf Hall

2009-11-21T06:21:00.004Z

It's a measure of how geeky I can be that, when I was at school, some of my friends and I talked seriously about putting on our own (our own, mark you) production of "A Man For All Seasons" by Robert Bolt. I have loved this play for 30 years (my copy, which I have in front of me, cost 70p) and it's only now, after reading "Wolf Hall", that I realise that I love it in much the same way that I love, for example, the last ten minutes of "White Christmas" or of "The Railway Children". More is so very good, he's like a shrewd and witty cuddly toy. Here he is, trying to persuade Richard Rich not to seek office:

"...they offer you all sorts of things. I was once offered a whole village, with a mill, and a manor house, and heaven knows what else - a coat of arms I shouldn't be surprised. Why not be a teacher? You'd be a fine teacher. Perhaps, a great one."

Great office taints you, in other words, but More is godly - no: saintly - enough to remain pure at heart. Or how about this? This is More's wife:

"As for understanding, I understand that you're the best man that I ever met or am likely to; and if you go - well God knows why I suppose - though as God's my witness God's kept deadly quiet about it! And if anyone wants my opinion of the King and his council they've only to ask for it!

MORE: Why, it's a lion I married! A lion!"

I can still get a little blurry over this, but it is nonsense, of course. Bolt is strong-arming you; he's forcing your assent. (A little like the King, in fact.)

It isn't just that Mantel disagrees, although she does: her More's a zealot; a man who tortures and then burns his victims. No, Mantel is infinitely subtler and more knowing. This is from the viewpoint of Thomas Cromwell, her protagonist:

"In the days following he follows Henry's eyes, as they rest on various ladies of the court. Nothing in them, perhaps, except the speculative interest of any man; it's only Cranmer who thinks that if you look twice at a woman you have to marry her. He watches the king dancing with Lizzie Seymour, his hand lingering on her waist. He sees Anne watching, her expression cold, pinched.

Next day, he lends Edward Seymour some money on very favourable terms."

Edward is Lizzie's brother. Cromwell is smoothing things over or else he is smoothing the way: putting in place an obligation that will aid his king should he decide to marry again. Perhaps he is also bolstering his own position and making himself amenable to someone who may, in time, be related to a future queen, or, at least, one of Henry's future paramours. Mantel's narrative often proceeds by way of hints and feints but, whatever Cromwell's motive here, one is encouraged, throughout the book, to hold several opinions of him at once: that he is self-serving, potentially violent and sympathetic; a family man. He is a human being: take him, as Hamlet says, "for all in all".

"Wolf Hall" is a tremendous book: it's fluid, vivid and wise. True, it's old-fashioned - it's a big, methodical blockbuster - but it's modern, too, in that it shows you everything (all of those ambiguities that dog our every step), as opposed, in Bolt's case (and how I hate saying this), to almost nothing.

Pop Life

2009-11-17T19:59:00.009Z

One of Jeff Koons' photographs at the current "Pop Life" exhibition shows a close up of his ex-wife, La Cicciolina, being penetrated, while another is of her rapt, bespattered face. True, they are so burnished and stylised that they appear to be almost mythic, but even so...

They made me (make me) very uncomfortable. They're dumb, in both senses of the word: they're wilfully blank and they refuse to speak to you. They seem to exist in a moral vacuum. (I don't care if she was a porn star, this was his wife.) To be honest, I am still struggling with my own reaction. I didn't want to be shocked and I worry that it might say something about me: that I'm more conventional than I thought. Thank God, as usual, for George Orwell, who wrote,

"People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked, or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals. One [ought not] to pretend, in the name of "detachment" that such pictures... are morally neutral."

They may not be bad pictures, in other words, but they are still bad pictures.

The consolations of philosophy

2009-11-15T19:27:00.004Z

While I understand the impulse (nobody's getting any younger), it does seem a little unfair that, having lived out all of our fantasies in the early '80s, Duran Duran should now want to be seen as both serious and significant. Still, I did enjoy Simon Le Bon discussing the lyrics of "Save A Prayer" on Friday's "Classic Albums". Here is the verse under discussion:

Pretty looking road,
Try to hold the rising floods that fill my skin.
Don't ask me why I'll keep my promise,
I'll melt the ice.
And you wanted to dance so I asked you to dance
But fear is in your soul.
Some people call it a one night stand
But we can call it paradise.

Those last two lines, apparently, are about living for the moment. Le Bon was glad, he said, that he'd avoided the idea of "rumpled sheets" and had, you know, dealt with what he called the "philosophy idea". Who knew? I look forward to the ballad about logical positivism.

I'd like to thank...

2009-11-14T22:18:00.012Z

...Lexi Revellian, who has nominated me for the above "award".

The idea, apparently, is to nominate seven bloggers who you like, create links for all seven, tell them that you've done this and then write seven things about yourself that people don't already know.

The trouble is, the bloggers who I keep returning to are published authors and I'm sure that they have no need to take part in what is, in essence, a pyramid scheme. Still, they can write - they can really write - and that's a skill that is at a premium out here on what I imagine somebody, somewhere, has already called the blogosphere. You should read them. In no particular order, they are:

Jenny Diski

John Lanchester

Thomas Jones

Andrew O'Hagan

Robert McCrum

Simon Reynolds

John Sutherland

Finally:

1 I once auditioned to be a Butlins Redcoat. Unfortunately, I chose to sing a slow jazz ballad.

2 I am afraid of heights.

3 I crashed my father's car. The upside, though, was that I could pretend to have amnesia and thus persuade my school to judge my A Levels on my year's work.

4 My favourite painters are Sickert and Whistler. I am slightly ashamed of this.

5 My father once met Terry Thomas.

6 My great-grandfather, who was in the Civil Service, was awarded an OBE. This means, according to my mother, that if I had wanted to I could have got married in St. Paul's Cathedral. (She didn't tell me this until after I was married.)

7 I once wrote a song for Dusty Springfield. (It was never recorded.)

Letters from Iceland

2009-11-12T07:40:00.011Z

I have never liked Auden's poetry. There are too many abstract nouns. (Or should that be Abstract Nouns?) But "Letter To Lord Byron" is different: it's chatty, the rhythm - the ottava rima of Byron's own "Don Juan" - helps to makes punchlines out of the rhymes, and it forms the centrepiece of a book that has a sort of unbuttoned, holiday feeling, a kind of scrapbook (a proto-blog, perhaps) that includes poems, travel advice, letters to friends, mock-letters to fictional friends and quotes from previous travellers. (I especially like Burton's extraordinarily camp description of the different colours of Icelandic hair, which had, he said, "all the gradations of Parisian art here natural; the corn golden, the blonde fulvide, the incandescent (carroty), the florescent (sic) or sulphur-hued, the beurre frais, the fulvastre or lion's mane, and the rubide or mahogany, Raphael's favourite tint.")

The letters are particularly entertaining. Even the bizarre "Hetty to Nancy", a breathless joke in which one "woman" writes to another, contains some lively descriptive passages and throughout the book there is a wonderful sense of informality. (It reminds me of the way that Isherwood, Auden's friend, commended E.M. Forster for the way that he "lounges so easily" into his novels.) You learn, for example, that Auden would love to dive skilfully because it's "such a marvellous way of showing off"; that he doesn't understand "logical punctuation" as he can "only think of them as breathing indications". He drinks brandy in the day, and he has a "companion", one Ragnar, who is "a mine of information about songs and proverbs". It's fun, in other words; you find yourself warming to him. (It's definitely Auden's book. MacNeice is present throughout but his contributions dim almost to invisibility when you compare them to Auden's. Their joint contribution, "Last Will and Testament", is little more than a private joke.)

Here is Hetty, writing to Nancy:

"After all what is a tent? A tent is a make-believe house; when there is a real house about why go on making a belief one?"

This is neither portentous nor Important, which is why, I think, I like it so very much.

Literary Snippet No.8

2009-11-09T18:30:00.000Z

According to Auden and MacNeice's "Letters from Iceland", the longest word in Icelandic is: haestarjettarmalaflutunesmanskifstofustulkonutidyralykill. It means a latch-key belonging to a girl working in the office of a barrister.

The Humbling

2009-11-09T18:29:00.000Z

William Skidelsky in The Observer writes that "The Humbling" is a piece of "scandalous frippery"; that it's an exercise in wish-fulfilment. Robert McCrum has also talked about the "thinness" of Roth's current material. Well, they're both wrong. Roth's focus may have narrowed, his latest books may not have the breadth and gusto of his earlier ones, but he is still investigating what he has called the "immense domain of sex" and he still does it with clarity and with fervour.

For Roth's characters, sex is a matter of urgency and, at times, a means of self-transformation but it can also be terrifying (it's often engrossing because it's so terrifying) and it can contribute, too, to a delusion of potency; one that enables you to keep from noticing, if only for a moment, that you are teetering on the edge of the grave. It's true that Roth, as a writer, seems fond of threesomes but critics should stop sniggering and notice the way that he utilises this stuff. His character (an elderly actor who can no longer act) is momentarily enthralled, he feels rejuvenated, but he is also shaken. Almost immediately afterwards, he dreams about fathering a child. He wants, but is unable, to domesticate the woman he loves.

Roth is like Henry James in that he comes at a subject insistently, from different angles. He is a master, and he retains the grace and concentration of a master. I would still rather read him than anyone else.

The Woman In Black

2009-11-06T07:42:00.002Z

The current production of "The Woman in Black" is hokum, pure and simple. It's more like a fairground ride than a piece of theatre in that in place of a coherent plot it delivers a series of well-modulated shocks. (The fairground analogy feels even more appropriate when, in the second half, the audience scream in unison as though they're going over a precipice.) The faux Edwardian language is barely worth mentioning.

But, God, it's scary. Like Dickens' fat boy, it "wants to make your flesh creep". And creep it does: it feels as though someone has taken the skin on your chest and stretched it.

Literary Snippet No.7

2009-10-31T09:08:00.008Z

Here is a beautiful passage by Elizabeth Bishop on some of the poems that were later included in Robert Lowell's Life Studies:

"They all... have that sure feeling, as if you'd been in a stretch (I've felt that way for very short stretches once in a long while) when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry - or not material, seemed to be poetry - and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time!"

On the other hand, here is Allen Tate:

"Quite bluntly, these details, presented ...at random, are of interest only to you."

God, if he could talk like that about Robert Lowell, what would he have said about blogging?

On reading

2009-10-30T23:42:00.016Z

My daughter is learning to read. She spells the letters out phonetically and then there is a gap, a tiny cliffhanger, before she runs them all together and shouts out "red!" or "lip!" It is a lovely thing to watch and it makes me realise that I still do something similar.

I finished "Pride and Prejudice" a couple of days ago and I am now reading "Robert Lowell" by Ian Hamilton. Lowell was a manic depressive who spent time in various hospitals and I wish that I had space here to write out the whole of the extraordinary, and extraordinarily moving, description of a breakdown that you can find between pages 215 and 218. Here, instead, is an extract from "A Mad Negro Soldier Confined At Munich" (the quote marks are in the original):

"We're all Americans, except the Doc,

a Kraut DP, who kneels and bathes my eye.

The boys who floored me, two black maniacs, try

to pat my hands. Rounds, rounds! Why punch the clock?

In Munich the zoo's rubble fumes with cats;

hoydens with air-guns prowl the Koenigsplatz,

and pink the pigeons on the mustard spire.

Who but my girl-friend set the town on fire?"

And so on. It is that "fumes" that I find the most memorable image here. What does it mean? Well, there is a blurriness, an insidiousness, to a moving cat and it can seem to smudge the horizon in much the same way that smoke does. There is also the suggestion of something violent, of lots of cats all churning together, but either way there was a moment's pause, a breath, before I realised that this is what it meant (or that it was what I thought it meant) and, then, immediately afterwards, a moment when I had to put the two things together, the cats and the smoke, in order to see - to really see - those cats. By "making [them] strange", to paraphrase the Russian formalists, Lowell has enabled me to see them in an entirely new light. (This, quite apart from his lucid and eye-opening portrayal of madness.)

Or what about this? This is Jane Austen on Elizabeth Bennett, a woman in a society where "matrimony... was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want." In other words, you don't, if you know what's good for you, turn down a decent proposal of marriage. But this is exactly what Bennett does. When she realises that, despite this, Darcy is still interested in her, her thoughts develop in the following manner:

"...its impression on her was of a sort to be encouraged, as by no means unpleasing, though it could not be exactly defined. She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him, she felt a real interest in his welfare; and she only wanted to know how far she wished that welfare to depend upon herself, and how far it would be for the happiness of both that she should employ the power, which her fancy told her she still possessed, of bringing on the renewal of his addresses."

Elizabeth is weighing up how she feels. In a world in which women are all-but-powerless, her delicate qualifications seem brave and morally weighty; we respect her enormously because of the way that she insists, here, on the primacy of feeling. Austen has bridged a gap in our understanding - she has told us how her society works - and now we can judge Elizabeth's integrity.

This sort of thing is so important, it seems to me, because we are all currently bombarded, or smothered, by images and words that are both crass and, essentially, meaningless. Jordan; "Big Brother"; "The Da Vinci Code"; "I'm a Celebrity"; "Avatar" - who cares? There's a flatness to each of these because, in order to sell itself, it reflects back at you what it thinks you want. Where are the insights and observations that surprise us? That encourage us to look properly at the world and to ask those questions that we should always be encouraged to ask: What do I think about this? What do I feel about this?

In literature, that's where. Great books are more important than they have ever been. We should all, it seems to me, be reading like my daughter reads.

Mexico City

2009-10-30T21:47:00.026Z

It was late afternoon when I saw the bullet holes in Trotsky's bedroom. The light had thickened into a murky wash and it made the room feel gloomy, even frightening, just like the city outside.

Because, for one thing, you mustn't get in the taxis. You were liable to be robbed, the guide book said, and, what's more, this could happen to you twice: they'd take you to a cash point, force you to withdraw your limit then drive you round until you could do it again. This can induce a certain amount of paranoia, even when you are walking the streets. (Which, of course, you have to do because you can't get in the taxis.) At night, you find yourself hurrying as casually as you can. The intention is to promenade, but quickly.

There are bright knots of flowers and the Zocalo, the massive square that seems to throb at night, and Frida Kahlo's house and mariachi songs: brief gusts of melody that lift you up as you walk past. But on the Plaza Garibaldi we were charged $50 for a beer and a diet coke and, when I queried the bill, two giants (no, really) came wading out of the shadows behind the bar. Back in our hotel, we made an arrangement to see the pyramids at Teotihuacan but, when the first clerk disappeared, the second one told us that he had only been working there for a couple of days. If we booked a trip through him, he said, he couldn't guarantee our safety...

So, actually, on the whole, I'd say that the murk and the bulletholes were really quite subtle, as symbols go.

Literary Snippet No.6

2009-10-30T11:10:00.004Z

This clip is not only how James Joyce would have heard one of his favourite songs, it is also how he might have sung it. According to Richard Ellman, he shared a stage with John McCormack, singing "Down by the Salley Gardens" to an audience that included Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom he later eloped. She was, he says, "delighted with him". This was their music, their Motown or Girls Aloud, but now, of course, it is as dead as madrigals.

Etiquette No.2

2009-10-28T08:08:00.009Z

Seeing Nick Griffin on Question Time reminded me of when I was drop-kicked by a member of the National Front.

We were asking for trouble, I suppose. We were next to the old GLC building, attending a concert that was in aid of the (left-wing) General London Council. What's more, the band that we were watching was the Redkins, or, if you prefer, the "red skins"; socialist skinheads who played an earnest, lumpen rock, with horns. (They were a very '80s touch, those horns. If your band was leaden or scratchy or if you blurted out the words then horns could function as a sleight of hand; they could convince your audience that you had soul or that, at the very least, you were playing it.)

Anyway, we were jumped. There were about twenty skinheads and... what? Two hundred of us? Nevertheless, we ran; we went tumbling over the wall. I had hesitated (I didn't know where to go) and I was kicked, once. It was almost an afterthought - a sideways swipe - but I was limping for the rest of the day. I think I fell over, actually, but here's the thing: I'm not embarrassed by any of this. The panic; the running away - it seems natural to me. What makes me uncomfortable is what happened afterwards. I had limped around the stage to talk to Billy Bragg and we were telling him about what had happened earlier. For some reason, as I turned to go, I patted his arm.

God: why? Well, it gets worse. For one thing, I was attempting to show some sort of solidarity. (We were all in this together, I was saying.) Also, I think, I was trying to make a connection; to establish parity. (I was worthy of consideration; I was a songwriter too.) And, let's be honest, I wanted (I am wincing) to be his friend. He looked bewildered and wary, as well he might.

Despite all this, I still enjoy his music and I like this clip a lot. It was recorded only four years after the concert that I was at and, if you look at the audience, you can see why we were no match for the National Front.

Poems

2009-10-27T20:17:00.017Z

I gave a friend a play once and, after careful consideration, he said, "You're not a playwright". Well, I'm not a poet, either. The following are overwordy but what the Hell... (Where else am I going to put them?) I wrote them a long time ago and, apart from one that I can't find, I haven't tried to write one since. (In the original, "Sally" was a whole wine glass but Blogger changed the shape.)

1 Star On National Network Experiences Trauma

I mime rage and despair (but pertly) while

The pseudo-unruly mob attacks the stage

With party poppers. Our host, of school age,

Asks me (he works his red specs and huge smile

Like comedy props) if, in the future, I'll

...etc. I grin past his grinning face

And feel the tall lamps blast my panstick-beige,

Tight forehead white as a blank bathroom tile.

Later, after the make-up girl has gone

(Adazzle with charlie; dim), naked, I watch

The stars gutter and brim. I'm on TV;

The confidence of him! And he's just one

(Compare the younger profile; not a blotch)

Of all the selves that don't belong to me.

2 Daisy Chain

Lily: A Note

F lowers are failing in the vase, lilting

O ver in a swoon.

R adio one contraltos sob of "capture"; of "surrender".

T his is the game we play:

H e buys me flowers and I forgive him

E very ordinary transgression (lateness; winded torpor;

O nanism).

N ever enough. At work, hands flickering on a keypad, I

E legantly mimic myself, stiff and

I nhibited, stuck in coffee's boom and bust.

L ook at me doing the rounds:

O bliquely smiling, making contacts;

V eering from Boots to Sainsbury's, clinging to

E arrings, doughnuts, decent...

Simon, in the park

Tulips, brushes dipped in sunlight, are seemingly suspended, waiting.

I lie, breathing in, then out; a winded buddha, a tyre deflating.

Drunkenness is like a haiku: sentences recede; thoughts taper off.

I am not here. I am all breath. I am my hands, puffy and too soft.

In this snatched city silence, normal time becomes drink's endless hour.

Spittle, in the water of the pond, blossoms like a paper flower.

The sky's bruise colour heralds rain. Clockwork pigeons ratchet anxiously.

And then it rains, in slow fat drops. I watch them fall: singly, seemingly.

In the pond the rain makes mouths ("mwah"; "mwah") and disengenuous dimples.

Sally is seeing someone else, so I just lie here; drunk, slumped...

Sally

Simple Simon sits and sits
in deep sea light from the TV,
next to a wine glass and its lolling
tongue. He crushes cans of lager, slowly,
while I try to watch a travel show
(horizons; paint-box greens).
We swim in the unsaid:
whose fault is this
diminishment?
Nobody's,
surely.
Still,
I often
imagine
you, punishing
my bed's slumped bulk
and failing springs. Brash and self-

Doug, with Sally

Possessed! She preens and wriggles as though she was

a child dressed from the toy-box, rolling in place

in mummied sheets. She shouts: "We're playing hookey!"

Afterwards, I half-watch her do her slow

swoon back to normal; her slow fat lips unlearn

their pout; her features mimic langour. Alone.

Why do I feel alone? I squint, and make

a school-room snowflake from a standard lamp,

thinking, again, that all this heat and light

is like a nursery; we play, we cry tears

and fight. We grow; we blossom. But, in the end,

it's only the most fragile of beginnings,

and when it rains the room seems even sadder:

it's slapped about, beleaguered like...

Doug, on Lily

A boat blunders past Bankside, its truffling snout

bullying the water; its wake a wavering ladder

ripped half across the river's rumpled linen.

I watch it dwindle slowly down the Thames.

It honks and splutters, diminishes, disappears.

I think of you; of coming home, most nights -

a sated hog, a husk, tired and damp -

to face your febrile pallor and disarray;

of how I dwindle. Petrified (scared; a stone),

I submit to the rigours of your concern,

stock-still; a model husband. Where did I go?

Well, surely, you remember Bob, the Bookie...?

Each lie aspires to elegance and grace,

like this new Globe, it's tour guide's chirpy...

Lily: A Note

G loss it all you like. It's

O ver. That haymaker was a premonition

O f real pain.

D on't try to

B uy me off.

Y ou don't care, so I don't care. (Where do you go?) Still,

E ven now

F lowers are failing in the vase...

Much Ado About Nothing

2009-10-26T08:01:00.004Z

I am teaching "Much Ado About Nothing" next half-term and, on first reading, it feels as though Shakespeare got it the wrong way round. Why is the story of Beatrice and Benedick only the subplot? I hope that, when I reread it with the class, I'll like the play more as a whole but at the moment it is Beatrice who, in the best Shakespearian tradition, comes lunging out of the text.

Beatrice is imperious; she's passionate, irritable, witty, defensive and combative. She never leaves well enough alone. She's sexy, in other words, and, like certain women of one's acquaintance, one would much rather spend time with her than with other people who are deemed to be more important.

Literary Snippet No.5

2009-10-26T07:57:00.004Z

Last night, Professor Stanley Wells was talking about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. It was necessary, he said, to judge it "on the "external evidence", as we call it". This begs the question, what does he think the rest of us call it?

Etiquette

2009-10-24T19:00:00.001+01:00

I go to a "gentleman's barbers" and there are times, frankly, when I wish I didn't. Last time, the girl's hands were shaking so badly that she made me look lopsided, so, today, I told her that I was going to wait for the boss.

I hadn't been looking forward to it. I didn't want to hurt her feelings, obviously, but there was also the fear (well-founded, as it turned out) that I would feel awkward afterwards; that I would get up, place my book in my coat pocket and walk towards the chair just like I was miming it all. When she came over to sit next to me and read a paper (was this deliberate?) I had the feeling that she was going to say,

"Why? Tell me: I want to know. You seemed perfectly happy when you left. What's changed?"

It would be wonderful, wouldn't it, not to care about what other people thought. I have a colleague who claims she doesn't but I do have my doubts. How would that feel? Like dancing, I suspect, or floating.

Camera Obscura

2009-10-24T18:51:00.003+01:00

How could I have missed this the first time round?

V

2009-10-23T19:30:00.000+01:00

Martin Amis wrote that, when reading William Burroughs, he was reduced to identifying the good bits. This was how I felt when I read "V". There is, for example, Esther's plastic surgery (a good bit), Father Fairing's conversion of the rats (a very good bit) and the following list of guests at Iago Saperstein's party:

"an inventor celebrating his seventy-second rejection by the U.S. Patent Office, this time on a coin-operated whorehouse for bus and railway stations...; a gentle lady plant pathologist, originally from the Isle of Man, who had the distinction of being the only Manx monoglot in the world and consequently spoke to no one; an unemployed musicologist named Petard who had dedicated his life to finding the lost Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto", and so on.

Now, I like this very much. It's Joycean, I think; it's like one of those lists in "Ulysses". However, there's also the following:

""Inside, outside", he said, "you're being inconsistent, you lose me."

"I'd like to", she said, rising. "I have bad dreams about people like you."

"Have your analyst tell you what they mean", he said.

"I hope you keep dreaming." She was at the door, half-turned to him."

I don't care if this is meant to be laconic: it's terrible. There are whole swathes of this sort of thing. It feels like a first draft, with bits of plot that don't join up as well as a weird sort of styleless style that hustles you clumsily over events. It's a kind of literary fugue state, a mixture of dream and paranoia, and you feel as though you have been cast adrift.

Well, I say "you". My copy has a quote from the Atlantic Review, saying that it "may well stand as one of the very best novels of the century". The New York Times says that it shows "staggering promise". Elsewhere, Anthony Burgess calls it a "higher game". Pynchon seems to have an unassailable reputation; he is one of those (counter) cultural touchstones, beloved of the Simpsons.

It must be me. I could say that he feels terribly dated; that he sounds, at times, just like a cross between William Burroughs, Lenny Bruce and Nelson Algren. I could say that the sense that everything is connected in some sinister way - that, if you could only devote enough time to it, you could fathom the relationship between the First World War and World War 2 and crash test dummies and Auschwitz and the bomb and Maltese independence and the characters' personal unhappiness - is terribly dated too. (Conspiracy theories just aren't respectable anymore.)

But, in truth, I just don't understand it. It infuriates me to have to say this, but it's true. What's more, I don't want to understand it. I have devoted a lot of time to "Ulysses", for example, and this has given me enormous pleasure. But I won't be returning to "V".

Craft

2009-10-23T18:52:00.000+01:00

Here is Hunter Davies writing about Lennon and McCartney:

"Towards the end of making the album, they decided they had to do a song Ringo would sing. John and Paul were upstairs in Paul's music room working on With A Little Help From My Friends. Also there that day were Cynthia, John's wife, and Terry Doran, one of their Liverpool friends. Cynthia had settled down with a book. Terry was flicking through a horoscope magazine.

"Do you believe in love at first sight", sang John, then stopped and said it didn't work. "It hasn't got the right number of syllables. What do you think? Should we split it up?"

John then sang, breaking in the middle:

"Do you believe-ugh-in love at first sight."

"How about", said Paul, "Do you believe in a love at first sight?"

John sang it, accepting it. They sang it together and John found himself changing it to "Would you believe" instead of "Do you believe", and asking: "What's a rhyme for time? It's got to rhyme with "I'm certain it happens all the time"."

"How about "I just feel fine"?" said Cynthia, looking up from her book.

"No", said John. "You never use the word "just". It's meaningless. It's a fill-in word.""

Why do I like that last sentence so much? Well, for one thing, Lennon sounds just like an English teacher. But it's also to do with something else. When Philip Norman wrote that Lennon had a liking for "flawless syntax and perfect scansion" I wasn't sure that I believed him. But here's the proof: Lennon's concern with the weight - the relative merits - of words. Of course, I should have known. But it's lovely to have it confirmed that "Strawberry Fields", for example, only seems to meander; that it is in fact perfectly judged.

A category mistake

2009-10-20T17:55:00.000+01:00

According to Wikipedia, a category mistake, or category error, is a "semantic or ontological error by which a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property".

I was in a tiny village over the weekend and there, on one of those noticeboards that detail village business, was an advert for a band called "Jinn House". (Pictured above.) Photos of the band showed them grimacing, or gurning, in a way that let you know that they were "rocking out" but at the bottom it said something like, "All proceeds to the scout hut fund".

Now, is this a "gig", in the true sense of the word? The pictures promised something - a "rock" gig in a "rock" environment; you know: a proper speaker stack; a mosh pit; fans - which was then denied, effectively, by the statement at the bottom. The property that is being ascribed here is... what? Rockness? Rockitute? Whatever, it seems to me to be a perfect example of a category mistake.

I've done it.

2009-10-18T18:10:00.000+01:00

I have just finished "Remembrance of Things Past", all 3,285 pages of it, and, yes, it's superb, a masterpiece, but at the moment I feel a little like an exhausted channel swimmer. Proust wrote that, in order to attempt his book, he would have to "endure [it] like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline ...follow it like a medical regime [and] vanquish it like an obstacle" and, frankly, I know what he means.

Still. Onwards and upwards. I have a list of books that is like something out of "Alice in Wonderland" in that, no matter how I subtract from it, it never seems to get any smaller. Thomas Pynchon next...

On reading Proust

2009-10-15T20:53:00.005+01:00

In 1919, Harold Nicholson, who was part of the British delegation at the Peace conference, met Proust at a party. Here is his diary entry:

"A swell affair. Proust is white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced. He asks me questions. Will I please tell him how the Committees work. I say, "Well, we generally meet at 10.00, there are secretaries behind..." "Mais non, mais non, vous allez trop vite. Recommencez... Vous descendez au Quai d'Orsay. Vous montez l'escalier. Vous entrez dans la Salle..." So I tell him everything. The sham cordiality of it all: the handshakes: the maps: the rustle of papers: the tea in the next room: the macaroons. He listens, enthralled..."

This, it seems to me, pretty much sums up Proust's method. He magnifies the everyday, so that you can start to see - to really see - what it consists of. He is at his best, I think, with what we think and feel; he teases out his characters' thoughts so that, eventually, they seem like the most intricate music.

But, God, he can go on. I imagine that the critical consensus is that the following are the words of a philistine. But, I have to admit, I do sympathise. Here is Alfred Humblot, one of the publishers that turned him down, to Louis de Robert:

"My dear friend, I may be dense but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep."

Stratford

2009-10-15T18:55:00.000+01:00

Wood panelling; pictures of characters from Shakespeare plays; a pedigree of the "manor house" in an ingratiating copperplate: we were in a hotel in Stratford. Outside, Stratford itself was pretty but, as always, self-aware. If you want, as many people do, to "commune" (whatever that means) with the spirit of Shakespeare then you can go to the birthplace (where he almost certainly wasn't born), the church (where his bones are buried) or "New Place" (which was razed to the ground but where you can see an "exact replica" of an Elizabethan knot garden).

Or, on the other hand, you can visit the Clopton Bridge. The river does a wiggle here, a sort of localised flurry, that may, in its more extreme aspect, have been described by the man himself. Here is Captain Jaggard, who was, as of 1935, the owner of a print and book shop in Sheep Street:

"...you should stand on the ...arch of the bridge (the one nearest the London side), for when the river is in flood, the force of the current under the adjoining arches, combined with the curved shape of the bank on to which it is driven, produces the most curious effect. I have often stood there and watched the current being forced beneath the narrow Tudor arch, on to the bank at an angle which produces a swirling eddy, so that the water is then forced back through the arch equally swiftly and in an exactly contrary direction to that in which it has just come."

Shakespeare, as always, says it more skilfully. Here he is, writing in "The Rape of Lucrece":

"As through an arch the violent roaring tide
Outruns the eye that doth behold his haste,
Yet in the eddy boundeth in his pride
Back to the strait that forced him on so fast,
In rage sent out, recalled in rage, being past:
Even so his sighs, his sorrows, make a saw,
To push grief on and back the same grief draw."

Now, I have never seen the Avon in flood. But I stand by what I said: there is a wiggle, a flurry, even when things are calm, and Shakespeare must have seen it. I may not know, in this context, what "communing" means, but I know a frisson when I feel one.

Literary Snippet No.4

2009-10-13T21:19:00.000+01:00

Proust wrote,

"We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute."

Is it me or is that the perfect description of Twitter?

In a second hand book shop...

2009-10-10T19:36:00.000+01:00

...in Conway, in North Wales, there was (and, hopefully, still is) a book section entitled, "Books by people that have written a lot of books".

First Novels

2009-10-07T18:37:00.000+01:00

In this Sunday's Observer, Robert McCrum writes,

"One of the unintended consequences of the recession has been the collapse of the book trade's support for first novels. Once upon a time your promising beginner was all glamour stock, now he or she looks much more like a junk bond."

Well, that's nice to know. (You'll excuse me, won't you, if I go for a long lie down.)

Reading a poem about Rembrandt

2009-10-05T19:22:00.001+01:00

Tucked away in the acknowledgements for Laura Cumming's book, "A Face To the World", is this poem about Rembrandt's self portraits. (It's in Scottish dialect and it's best, I think, to approach it a little like one would a 3D picture. If you concentrate, then certain lines come into focus.)

He kent as thae een lookt at his
Oot'e the dark he made in yon picter
He lookt on a man, himself, as on
A stane dish, or leaf fa' in winter.
That calm was his strang sough.
But in that dark twa wee lichts,
Een that is hope like lit windaes
An in that hoose muckle business.

Alright: I don't understand every word. To be completely honest, I'm focussing, here, on lines 3 and 4 and on the last three lines. But, if I think, as I do, that those lines are beautiful, does it matter that I don't understand the rest?

The point of the poem, I think, is that Rembrandt looked at himself with the clear-eyed objectivity of a great artist but that you can, nevertheless, see the "muckle business" - all the intricacies and compromises - of a lived life in his expression and in the darkness that surrounds him. Like I said, a beautiful poem. (Or, at least, partly a beautiful poem.) The lines that I like are deceptively simple, just like the paintings that they describe.

If You Go Away

2009-10-03T21:37:00.000+01:00

Further to my last post, the original is by Jacques Brel. I struggled with this clip at first but I'm growing to love it. You feel that, beneath the mannerisms, he really means it and, what's more, the English translation is wonderfully florid. If he sometimes seems to be singing against, rather than with, the piano then I suppose you could argue, just like my father did when defending Tony Bennett, that he has his own sense of rhythm. (And is that really a saw being played at the end?)

Cabaret

2009-10-03T18:17:00.000+01:00

Who did the definitive version of "If You Go Away"? I checked on itunes this morning and found both Shirley Bassey and Scott Walker but who did the original?

I ask the question because Barbara Streisand was on the Jonathan Ross show last night and she did a version of it, a faux sort of cabaret thing, along with a version of Sinatra's "In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning". They're both great songs - great grown-up songs; you can't imagine them being sung by a teenager - and my problem was that, despite, or perhaps because of, her extraordinary technique, Streisand just sounded as though she were ladling the material with syrup. Bizarre: here is a woman who, one imagines, knows pretty much everybody - who, in her earlier performances, was, whatever else you thought of her, both vibrant and sexually charged - and yet she sounded, last night, as if she'd had no life experience at all.

1945

2009-09-30T18:35:00.000+01:00

Here is James Agate, the theatre critic, writing about the night that he found out that Labour had won the 1945 election. (I should, perhaps, make it clear that I am on the side of the waiter.)

"I rang up the head waiter at one of my favourite restaurants and said,

"Listen to me carefully, Paul. I am quite willing that in future you address me as "comrade" or "fellow-worker", and chuck the food at me in the manner of Socialists to their kind. But that doesn't start until tomorrow morning. Tonight I am bringing two friends with the intention that we may together eat our last meal as gentlemen. There will be a magnum of champagne, and the best food your restaurant can provide. You, Paul, will behave with your wonted obsequiousness. The sommelier, the table waiter, and the commis waiter will smirk and cringe in the usual way. From tomorrow you will get no more tips. Tonight you will be tipped royally."

The head waiter said,

"Bien, m'sieu."

That was at a quarter-past six. At a quarter-past nine I arrived and was escorted by bowing menials to my table, where I found the magnum standing in its bucket and three plates each containing two small slices of spam."

The Adventures of Augie March

2009-09-28T19:48:00.000+01:00

Read this. (It describes a middle-aged man.)

"The spirit I found in him was the Chanticleer spirit, by which I refer to male piercingnesss, sharpness, knotted hard muscle and blood in the comb, jerky, flaunty, haughty and bright, with luxurious slither of feathers."

Wonderful, isn't it? But there is a whole book of this stuff. After a while, it's like being asked to eat cake after cake, with nothing in between. I get it, I do: "Augie March" is a classic; it's the book in which Bellow made a huge leap, discarding the standards, or strictures, of a writer like Flaubert in order to start writing something closer to the argot of the Chicago he grew up in. But I don't always enjoy it. How about this:

"Huge-headed, huge-chested, stalwart, calm, he was like an enormous case of the finest capacities. Like one of those Egyptian mummy cases that follow the outlines of the bodies they enclose. And also his resemblance to a horse continued very strong."

It is the "continued very strong" that I find difficult to stomach; it feels like, after all that skilful, high-flown prose, Bellow has dropped a heavy weight.

And then there are the lectures about destiny. The truth is, I want to like Bellow more than I do. (He is a classic, after all.) I love "Humboldt's Gift", and some of the stories, but, in the main, reading Bellow makes me feel as though I'm not as clever as I think I am. I feel overmanned by him. It isn't an enjoyable experience.

Empire State of Mind

2009-09-22T18:32:00.000+01:00

There are moments in Jay-Z's new track, "Empire State of Mind", when he sounds breathless. Twice, it's like he reaches out and fails to grasp a word - he croaks - and I like this a lot. Without it, the track would still be great but it would be monolithic; relentlessly confident. But Jay-Z's fluff, if it is a fluff, reduces it to something that is much more human. Did I say reduces? No: raises. It dignifies it.

I am haunted...

2009-09-20T18:59:00.000+01:00

... by what Rick Rubin says in Q Magazine this month, but in a good way. When asked who he would most like to produce he says ("without hesitation", apparently) Paul McCartney.

Rubin's method is to leave notes for his artists which tell them what does and doesn't work. I know something similar was tried with Nigel Goodrich a couple of years ago but, come on, this is Rick Rubin. McCartney should bite his hand off.

Elvis Costello

2009-09-18T21:48:00.006+01:00

Go on: indulge me.

My Band (Part Four)

2009-09-18T20:27:00.010+01:00

Glenn and I moved to London. We advertised for a drummer and Lisa answered. She was just what we wanted: if she lacked Mark's flair she made up for it with a crispness and a deft sort of rightness.

God, we were arrogant. We went to a gig, once, headlined by the Ya-Yas, a London soul revue. The soul singer did what soul singers do, asking the room to get down and corkscrewing his knees to show us how he wanted us to do it. I shook my head at Lisa and Glenn: our band wouldn't lower itself for anyone. We crossed our arms and stood and wouldn't budge, no matter what the singer tried to do. (What was the point of this, exactly?)

As far as I can remember, we played one gig. We were good, but not that good. Soon afterwards, I left to work behind a bar. Glenn locked me out of our shared flat and left a note that read THINK AGAIN. The two of them joined a band that very nearly made it, a group that sounded like a cross (this was the '80s remember) between Prefab Sprout, the Smiths and XTC.

Later, after they split, we got back together for a couple of last Hurrahs at the Dublin Castle. People danced; they cheered; somebody offered to manage us. There was one song, called "Louise May", that didn't, really, sound like anybody else. But I had lost heart by then. I left. Glenn is, as far as I am aware, a sound engineer, and so is Lisa. I am a teacher. But sometimes, at a gig, the audience will respond in a way that we couldn't have hoped for in a million years. Shaking my head, I'll say,

"God, listen to that crowd."

My Band (Part Three)

2009-09-18T20:26:00.008+01:00

We were from a small town, and it showed.

It was odd: on the one hand, I was deadly serious - there were times, in rehearsals, when I left blood on the pick-ups of my guitar - but, on the other, it was as though I was sleep walking. At one gig, I wore an Oxfam coat and a pork pie hat. At another, I was persuaded, by my bass player's sister, to wear some dungarees.

Our new bass player was called Glenn. He was good but in a methodical way; his bass lines were painstakingly melodic. I had written another uncommercial song, a jazz ballad, and I was so pleased with it that I wouldn't let Glenn add anything. Daniel came back to visit us, picked up Glenn's bass and wound a bass line snugly around the melody. At a gig at the Hadleigh Labour Party, he added piano to a track I'd written called "Kerry Doesn't Mind". It was wonderful - it was ersatz, almost, like an organ on a carousel - and at times like those it was as if the band in the room was the same as the band in my head. But then we were a three-piece again. We didn't look the part. We didn't know enough to know that we should look the part. We were provincial; we played village halls. Nevertheless, I miss it.

When I left, I stared at the town until it disappeared. I wanted to be able to remember it exactly as it was. Of course, it's so much easier to do that now than it was then.

My Band (Part Two)

2009-09-18T19:12:00.001+01:00

Looking back, I imagine that we sounded terrible. We didn’t have the right equipment and the voice and guitars were drowned, made into an ambient scribble, by the drums. What’s more, I had decided that I wanted, like Elvis Costello, to be eclectic. But Elvis had earned the right to be eclectic. He had been shrewd: in the beginning, he had harnessed his songs to punk's spiralling energy and he had produced something… explicable. I, on the other hand, in the era of the New Romantics, was spending all day in my bedroom, listening to Phil Spector. In my defence, I was trying to really listen – to soak it up and to assimilate it – but that didn’t count for much when we were performing a song that sounded like “Baby I Love You” with a bass and a tinny guitar.

There was, for example, my 13 minute ballad. It was an attempt to sound like Marvin Gaye but, again, we were a three-man line-up and people were bewildered by the pauses and by what, in my head, I had heard as something that ebbed and flowed, like everyone breathing together. The band urged me to shorten it, which I did, but it still lasted for 8 minutes and, when we played it again, at a school disco, we had the plugs pulled on us.

I was so busy trying to sound like everyone that, in the end, we didn’t sound like anyone. We should have tried to find some sort of group identity; we should just have played together. But I was hung up on the songs: I wanted to do them justice. The mistake I made was in thinking that writing songs, like other forms of writing, was a solitary activity.

My Band (Part One)

2009-09-17T19:22:00.014+01:00

It is 1983 and I am talking to Daniel on the phone.

"I want a piano solo in the middle", I say. "I want it to be, you know, baroque. Like "In My Life"."

"I haven't heard "In My Life"."

This is typical of Daniel. He is my bass player but in real life, as it were, he is a cellist; he has a place at the Royal Academy of Music. Later that Summer, he will tell me that he feels as though he should take up his place and I will ask him why. This is typical of me at the time.

Anyway, he writes a baroque piano solo (he hasn't heard my song yet) and it is perfect. Mark, our drummer (my drummer), is also talented. Once, in rehearsal, I ask him to drum as though the song is "Be My Baby". He hasn't heard of it (what is it with these people?) but, once I have mimed it, he gets it right, first time.

Daniel and Mark are not what you might call trendy but they are gifted. Their playing is vivid; both fluid and imaginative. Richard, however, is stiff. He is classically trained and he plays the piano like he is dipping his fingers into a fingerbowl. In the photo that was taken for our local newspaper, he wears sandals and socks. Still, he responds well to my bullying and, by the time we play our first big gig, we are fighting fit; the whole town seems to be behind us. There are all sorts of songs, including a dour, and deeply serious, song about El Salvador, with Daniel playing cello. (One of my fondest memories is of the way that he experimented on the piano at his house, with his ear pressed close against the keys. He was testing the song, like you would a car engine: what its attributes were; how it fitted together.)

But what were we doing playing in the school theatre, in front of friends and family? Why was that deemed to be a good idea? And why did we encore with "Ain't No Pleasing You" by Chas and Dave? We had promise; we did. But I also realise, now, that, in almost every other regard, we didn't have a clue.

Literary Snippet No.3

2009-09-17T19:13:00.000+01:00

In 1924, Somerset Maugham was paid the modern equivalent of 50,000 dollars for one short story.

Sentimentality and "The Pitmen Painters"

2009-09-16T20:15:00.000+01:00

Somebody once said something like (and I have scoured my "Dickens" by Peter Ackroyd, where I'm sure the actual quote exists), "Show me a man's politics in his twenties and I'll show you his politics for life." I sympathise with this view. I came of age in the UK in the 1980s - an age in which it sometimes felt, if you'll forgive the melodrama, as though we were in the middle of a struggle between the forces of good and evil - and it is partly because of this, I'm sure, that I have retained an attachment to the left.

If I was being honest, though, I'd admit to myself that this sentiment tends to attach itself to left-leaning narratives (the Cuban revolution; the Spanish Civil War) rather than anything messy and ambivalent like the minutiae of actual politics. In other words, I don't know much about politics, but I know what I like. On Saturday afternoon, for example, I was almost in tears when "The Pitmen Painters" ended. It's a true story, if you don't already know, and is about a group of miners who discover that they can paint. In its current production at the National, it makes for an enjoyable couple of hours and, if the first half is, at times, a little like a sitcom, then in the second the writer (Lee Hall) marshals the arguments about art and socialism with an impressive subtlety and dexterity.

But is it art? There they are, at the end, four solid fellows with their hands placed on their hearts, singing along to what sounds like a colliery band. Behind them there is a banner, one of those banners that you used to see in the miner's strike, and, yes, I was moved but I was aware, even as I was surreptitiously rubbing at my eyes, that there was something spurious about all of this. Hall's play never presents anyone as being anything other than essentially decent and loveable. He wants us to share in his love for his characters and, consequently, it seems to me, he sacrifices the important things: ambivalence and that unflinching eye that proper artists are supposed to have. If his characters had been harder to love then I think that I would have liked them more.

A tribute?

2009-09-16T19:01:00.000+01:00

Try this extremely interesting article about the relationship between "The Great Gatsby" and "Breakfast At Tiffany's".

My favourite bad assembly

2009-09-15T18:24:00.000+01:00

My runner up is the one where the Assistant Head told a group of bewildered Year 9 students that, if they didn't do well in their SATs, they would ruin their entire lives. But my favourite is the following:

My second school was in South London, on an estate. The children were, in the main, malnourished and suspicious; urchins, in other words, but not in the Dickensian sense: these were children who had been badly damaged and who were intent on damaging something or somebody in return. Our Deputy Head - let's call him Mr Smart - had a wife, a Head of Year, who was, if you can imagine such a thing, voluptuously mousey. Her assembly started well. She showed a blow-up of Mr Smart's report card and, wouldn't you know it, Mr Smart hadn't done very well at school. It seemed obvious to me (as I'm sure it is to you) where this was going. But then Mrs Smart spread her arms, leaned over the front row and shouted,

"And Mr Smart's got a porsche!"

Why blogging is like being in a band

2009-09-13T20:32:00.012+01:00

When I was first in a band, we played a lot of village halls. A village hall is a generic space, like a warehouse or a portaloo, and, really, there's not a lot that you can do to change it. No matter that the lights are down and you can see the silhouette of people's heads against the bar, no matter how big or stylised you try to make your gestures, it's still obvious to everyone that you are in a village hall.

The thing to do is to admit this to yourself. You shouldn't, for example, behave as though the 15 people who have bothered to turn up are "fans". You should just be grateful that they're there; you should ask them stuff: what do they like; what don't they like; would they be willing to spread the word?

The thing is, I was very young when I was in a band. I didn't bother to talk to people because I thought that our momentum would drag them along behind us. And, of course, it didn't work out. By the time that we were playing in London I had already lost heart.

This blog is, in a sense (stay with me here), another village hall. People are reading me and a few - only a few - are coming back to look at my site again. If you are one of those people, I'm very grateful. The object of this blog was (and still is) to help me get published but I'm discovering that it's nice to be read and I'm starting to post things here simply because I know that people are reading it. Try to leave me a comment, if you can. It would be nice to get some feedback, even if (or perhaps because) you vehemently disagree with what I've said. What's more, please tell people or send the link to them if you have liked what you have read on here. Thank you for dropping in.

Weird Books

2009-09-11T21:37:00.000+01:00

Here is a small selection from the online "Weird Books Room" at AbeBooks:

"Ductigami: The Art of the Tape" by Joe Wilson

"Doga: Yoga for Dogs" by Jennifer Brilliant, William Berloni

"Is Your Dog Gay?" by Charles Kreloff, Patty Brown, Victoria Roberts

"The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories" by Alisa Surkis, Monica Nolan

"Bombproof Your Horse" by Rick Pelicano, Lauren Tjaden

"The Great Pantyhose Crafts Book" by Edward A. Baldwin, Stevie Baldwin

"Nuclear War: What's in It for You?" by Ground Zero

"How to Avoid Huge Ships" by Captain John W. Trimmer

"How to Survive a Robot Uprising" by Daniel H. Wilson

"The Waterless Toilet - Is it Right for You?" by Ron Poitras

"The Bible Cure for Irritable Bowel Syndrome" by Don Colbert

Real Men

2009-09-10T20:10:00.001+01:00

My father's ashes were scattered over the beach at Jaywick. My grandparents had a holiday bungalow there and the beach - the new beach; it was different in my father's day - is lovely; a broad, curving sweep that's defined more by the breadth of the sky than by the beach itself.

After the ceremony, my youngest uncle said something like, "We were real men back in the '70s". I wonder exactly what he meant. If he meant what I think he meant then, for one thing, he meant the ability to drink. The men in my father's family were all heavy drinkers and, if you look at the surviving brothers, you wouldn't think that they would want to boast about it now. Time and booze seem to have pummelled my youngest uncle, leaving him dented and with a drawn-in, wary look. My other uncle looked like Elvis when he was younger and he still does, a little, but it is late-period Elvis that he resembles now: the swaggering, lonely, bewildered Elvis of the final years.

What else? Well, violence, I suppose. My youngest uncle was ferocious in his day. He followed West Ham around, and, although I never saw anything resembling a loss of temper, he had a careful way of carrying himself, just like his body was an unexploded bomb. His wife told us, matter of factly, that he had hit her. I'm sure, too, that I remember him training a guard dog for the warehouse that he ran, a doberman, by keeping it chained in his cupboard over the weekend and throwing in meat when he thought that it might be hungry. He explained all this to us and there was something about the way he did it that made you feel that he was really saying something else; that he was demonstrating his grip on life and on its deeper, more primitive realities.

But my prevailing memory of him is a trivial one. I was eight or nine and I had a new "trick"; I would put a tiny amount of water in the bottom of a glass, place 10p below it then tell someone that they could keep it if they kept their eye on it. Obviously, I would flick the water upwards and, yes, it wasn't particularly nice and I probably deserved to be taught a lesson but I can still remember my uncle's face as he continued to stare into the bottom of the glass. It was as though he was the same age as me. He was proving... what? His superiority? He had a smug-looking lack of expression that seemed to be saying that he was, I don't know, bigger than me, in every possible way.

A real man? I don't think so.

The Iraq War

2009-09-08T19:43:00.009+01:00

In my first school, there were a group of girls (13/14 year olds) who were pretty much everything that you would want a group of girls to be. They were empathetic, opinionated and terribly terribly serious and, one lunchtime, they sat in the loading bay and held an impromptu protest against the war in Iraq. Soon, the other students had caught on and we had a crowd of children, all blocking the gate and the carpark beyond it.

Now, I have to admit that I greatly enjoyed all this. I had approved of the girls' initial impulse but I also enjoyed the developing chaos. (As long as no-one gets hurt, I've always liked a bit of spontaneous anarchy.) It was broken up eventually but not before two boys had passed me holding, respectively, an A3 sheet of paper and some pens. One said,

"What are we going to write?"

It was one of those occasions when you could see what someone was thinking. The other boy had tilted his head and now his tongue was resting on his upper lip. Eventually, he said,

"No more war."

Even he could see that this was bathetic. But then he brightened. Grinning, he said,

"And show us your breasts!"

Karaoke Culture

2009-09-06T19:03:00.006+01:00

In the late 1970s, a group of slightly older students performed for us in the dinner hall. All that I really remember is that they were loud but it seemed exciting at the time. It was a sort of promise; a glimpse of what a real gig would look and sound like should I ever go to one. This is what teenagers were doing then; making a racket. But it was a productive racket - a messy but hopeful fumbling, like action painting, or sex - and what felt like people floundering led, in many cases, to something tantalisingly original.

Now, I hate to return to the X Factor but it really is, for the most part, a dispiriting phenomenon. This week, a girl from a village near Cardiff did a version of "I Will Always Love You" that had the audience standing and applauding and, of course, the girl was crying and her mother was crying.... And it struck me that there was a paradox here, in that, while she was probably thinking about all of her future happiness, this, the moment when it was still in the future, was probably the happiest that she will ever be. She won't fulfill her potential. What she has - the way that her voice wafts upwards and then seems to float there for a moment - is going to be used as a sort of party trick while she herself becomes someone who just seems to be playing dress up. Of course, that might be what she wants. It's so much easier to sing to someone else's backing track than it is to start from scratch; it's so much more gratifying to perform in front of millions of people than to struggle to be heard in some sticky club.

Even "Bandslam", which I took my daughter to see today and which is about real, honest-to-goodness bands, gives the impression that all you have to do is meet, pick up your instruments and - shazam! - you're really rocking. "Bandslam" is, weirdly, both hip and anodyne; it namechecks Patti Smith and Peter Tosh and all the bands do have a certain vibrancy but it's the same kind of vibrancy that you see in a cartoon; nobody struggles to play in time or can't quite reach that high note that they need. We live in a karaoke culture: nobody wants to work at anything; we want results right now.

Which brings me to "The Beatles: Rock Band". Despite what the co-founder of MTV's games division says about the game "delivering this incredible music in the most impactful way imaginable" (is "impactful" even a word?) I doubt that doing what Paul McCartney describes as "pushing buttons and things in time" is going to be remotely like playing in the Beatles. (Let alone being in the Beatles.) The game costs between £40 and £50, the bass, drums and microphone, with stand, retail at £180 and the two plastic guitars (they haven't got strings, remember, only buttons) cost £90 each. Is it too old-fashioned to suggest that you buy a guitar instead? Or, God forbid, form an actual band? Go on: I dare you. Make a racket.

Live Music

2009-09-04T19:42:00.000+01:00

Watching Radiohead at Reading, it struck me, once again, that my idea of a good festival has always been to sit on the sofa with some cake and watch it on TV. A one-off gig is different, though, and I started to think about all of the things that made watching a gig so much better then seeing the band at home. In no particular order:

Presence

Be honest: don't you feel, a little, as though you've come to warm your hands at your favourite artist's aura?

You also have to be in the room to consider how an artist can work a room. Bono, for example, who seems to devour the space around him, or Stevie Wonder. The O2 Arena may feel like a sort of five-tiered ocean liner (and, my God, the seats have drinks' holders) but Stevie made us feel as though we were dancing in a sweaty club.

Proximity

When I saw Elvis Costello at the Ipswich Gaumont (this would have been in 1981) I was so close that I could see him spitting. I promise you that this added to the experience: it was proof, somehow, of all the passion that he was laying claim to. True, I could have seen this on TV but it was more than strictly visual. The spittle; his bulky frame, squeezed into a dark suit; the way he moved - you felt that you had a sense of him as a person, or, at least, of the way that he, somewhat awkwardly, took up space. You could feel an identification with him. There are times, too, when the artist will acknowledge this. Once, at Dingwalls, I was staring so hard at Clive Gregson's guitar that he tilted it towards me, showing me the chords.

Which is why big screens at gigs are so difficult to love. U2 and Stevie Wonder were simultaneously present and absent, like God. But, then, so are you. You may be part of a Mexican wave, but, if you're at the back, you can't really make your presence felt. When Bono offered us another, unscheduled song - when he thanked us, obviously moved - I was a little bewildered: what had we done?

Atmosphere

Intangible, this. But I can offer an example. This year, when I went to see the Specials, I was at the front and it was like being in a washing machine. I also, rather wonderfully, felt like I was reliving somebody else's youth. What with the jostling and the shouting it was possible to be a sort of thug by proxy. You felt as though your memories of the songs were stronger and more significant than they were. Your own life, having these pseudo-milestones in it, seemed to make more sense. You don't get that at home. (Nor do you get the moment just before a band comes on; that sense that you are on the edge of something, all about to dive into this experience together.)

Community

A friend of mine saw Madnesss at Madstock. In "The Return of the Los Palmas 7" the whole crowd said "waiter" in unison. I'm sure that, just for that moment, you could convince yourself that everybody feels exactly the same way.

As a final observation, it's only fair to say that I noticed, watching Radiohead at home, that Thom Yorke was often flat. They all looked exhausted, actually. I couldn't tell you if this was or wasn't the case when I saw them last year in Victoria Park. What with seeing them in the flesh, being close enough to see every twitch and grimace, being soaked in evening sunlight and being part of a crowd all singing "Karma Police" at the tops of our voices, I'm not sure that I would have minded even if it was.

"In Cold Blood"

2009-09-03T20:08:00.000+01:00

I am having to read this for the second time in order to teach it. I resent this not because it is a bad book (it isn't) but because I find it absolutely terrifying. It is, of course, the first, and most famous, piece of "faction", meaning a piece of reportage that has been written just as though it were a novel. Capote is an expert writer, describing not only the landscape but also the victims and the killers with the same kind of careful grace. His "plotting", if that is what it is, is very canny; he administers a series of narrative teases and shocks. He also writes about the motive, or lack of motive, very carefully, making sure that he leaves blank what he cannot know. This feels very modern; the fact that Perry Smith, for example, cannot remember why he cut a man's throat - the fact that he can't even remember doing it - feels true in the way that a lot of fiction doesn't; his motives are inexplicable, even to himself.

And yet. "In Cold Blood" was published as a four-part serial in The New Yorker and here is Joe Orton in his diaries, a year or two later, describing that magazine,

"How dead and professional it all is. Calculated. Not an unexpected line."

One is tempted to respond, "You should be so calculated". But I think I see what he means. True, The New Yorker is exceptional; a beacon, if you like, in that its prose is uniformly thoughtful and intelligent. But read this sentence,

"The sound of Dick's voice was like an injection of some potent narcotic, a drug that, invading his veins, produced a delirium of colliding sensations: tension and relief, fury and affection."

Is it me or does the very excellence of the prose (all those elegant subclauses) distance us, a little, from the messiness of what is on display? Here is Norman Mailer from another piece of faction, "The Executioner's Song",

"He stood up. There was a lot of blood. It spread across the floor at a surprising rate. Some of it got onto the bottom of his pants.

He walked out of the rest room with the bills in his pocket, and the coin changer in his hand, walked by the big Coke machine and the phone on the wall, walked out of this real clean gas station."

The first paragraph not only describes the murderer's thoughts, it mimics them: the way that his mind seems to be avoiding what he's done by focussing on what's around him. The subclauses in the second, meanwhile, not only mimic what he does but also the way that he thinks. (The "real clean gas station".) Mailer's prose is simpler, and uglier, but isn't it truer to experience? Isn't Capote a little, well, patrician? I prefer the kind of writing that's prepared to get its hands dirty.

Literary Snippet No. 2

2009-09-03T19:34:00.000+01:00

Ernest Hemingway claimed to have slept with Mata Hari, who, he said, was "very heavy throughout the hips". This despite the fact that she had not been to America and that, by the time he got to Europe, she had been executed.

Drum Fills

2009-09-03T19:11:00.000+01:00

Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned drum fill? One of the pleasures of listening to Motown, for example, is hearing a crisp two-second roll before the verse begins. It's analogous to someone throwing a frisbee: a flick of the wrist can seem to send a track aloft. I was listening to Elvis Costello's "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down" the other day and the drumming in that can make you feel as though your own heart-beat is speeding up.

So what happened? Is, as one of my friends maintains, that whole verse/chorus thing an anachronism? Are the differences not considered significant enough to punctuate any more? Or am I just listening in the wrong places?

Willy DeVille

2009-09-03T08:00:00.007+01:00

Willy DeVille died on August 6th. I knew almost nothing about him but have always loved this:

http://www.last.fm/music/Mink+DeVille/_/Spanish+Stroll

Literary Snippet No. 1

2009-09-02T11:51:00.001+01:00

According to "The Annotated Wind in the Willows" (ed. Annie Gauger), Rat's heartfelt cry of "road-hogs!" was originally going to be "stock brokers!"

My Favourite Novels

2009-09-01T09:49:00.003+01:00

"Oscar and Lucinda" by Peter Carey

Oscar, the son of a clergyman, is a hydrophobic and a compulsive gambler, while Lucinda, another gambler, is conspicuously out of step with fashionable Sydney. Decent but odd, they are a touching pair, even though (or, perhaps, because) their passion is never properly expressed.

The novel is set in the nineteenth century and Carey shows that it isn't only historical detail that makes a period come alive. It is the sensual detail that's important: the smuts of dirt; the smells; the way a character has to edge his way, suspiciously, through his own environment. Carey's prose is both lyrical and muscular, which is a difficult trick to pull off. The book has the precision, and tight plotting, of a great short novel but its length gives you that luxurious feeling that only a long book can; you feel as though you are reading about an entire world.

"Underworld" by Don DeLillo

And talking of entire worlds... This is an astonishing book; an attempt, in part, to encompass the history of America in the second half of the twentieth century. In brief, a baseball gets passed from hand to hand, down through the years, so that, in the end, you feel as though you have seen it all: J Edgar Hoover; Lenny Bruce; the Kennedy assassination; the arms race. You name it.

True, it goes backwards in time, which kills the suspense a little, but there are gains to this method, too: in one of the last sections, the Bronx is brought vividly back to life and characters that, at the beginning of the book, were old or dead are shown in vigorous health. It's moving; a resurrection. And yes, true, the ending doesn't work but how could it? The book moves sideways, from theme to theme; how can you sum that up? There are enough plots here to get your teeth into but don't expect one overarching narrative. Just enjoy the ride: the precise evocation of time and place and the kind of hip, quizzical and startling dialogue that makes almost every other writer look pallid by comparison.

"Miss Lonelyhearts" by Nathaniel West

This is so short that it's barely a novel at all. But there's something incredibly powerful about West's best work. (Which is really only this and a longer novel, "The Day of the Locust".) "Miss Lonelyhearts" is a male journalist, an "agony aunt", who is going through some sort of breakdown. His plight - his knowledge of his own uselessness and hypocrisy - is pitiful but his actions are violent and unsympathetic. There is something not quite realistic about all of this; it is as though the character's world is a concrete version of his own (and our) subconscious. This adds to the novel's power. Miss Lonelyhearts' behaviour may be written in italics, as it were, but it's still horribly recognisable.

West's prose is precisely poetic; he seems to have taken the laconic wisecracking style of Hollywood in the thirties and spun it into poetry. The world that he depicts is ugly in the extreme, but it's a beautiful piece of writing.

"The Counterlife" by Philip Roth

Take a look at this sentence:

"From the moment that we started along the path that sloped down the hill toward the two long unpaved streets that constituted Agor's residential quarter, Henry began making it clear that we weren't going to sit in the shade somewhere having a deep discussion about whether or not he'd done the right thing by seizing the opportunity to return to Zion."

Clumsy, isn't it? But, see, that's the beauty of Roth: there is a quality of mind, a relentlessly probing intelligence, that makes the occasional clunker seem irrelevant. He will not let go; he worries at a concept like a dog stripping a bone. He is also fearless, especially about sex, and his dialogue has the rhythm and pep of a great old vaudeville comedian. (If, that is, you can imagine a vaudeville comedian who is considerably cleverer than anyone else in the room.) Roth is my favourite writer; read this and see why.

"Wise Children" by Angela Carter

Like being cornered in a pub by a drunk but intelligent old woman with "a past". Carter's narrator seems pressed up against your ear and you feel as though it might be possible to smell her breath. This is a raucous saga (the best kind, surely) and is about a pair of all-singing, all-dancing twins who are the illegitimate daughters of a great Shakespearian actor. Carter revels in all of this; she gleefully trounces famous men (Laurence Olivier and F Scott Fitzgerald) while showing how enjoyable it can be if you rewrite history from a working class, female perspective.

This book is fun, it's invigorating, but it's also very moving. Loud and boozy, Carter's female characters are steeped in the importance of family; they keep everything together.

Good Prose

2009-08-31T18:40:00.004+01:00

My favourite bit of advice, when it comes to writing, is from Ernest Hemingway. He recommends that you think hard about an event so that you finally arrive at the most significant details. What you're trying to discover, he says, are the specific sights and actions that make that event so memorable.

I like this so much partly because so few writers seem to do it. Here is Hemingway describing what he has "really seen" at a bullfight:

"When he [the matador] stood up, his face white and dirty and the silk of his breeches opened from waist to knee, it was the dirtiness of the rented breeches, the dirtiness of his slit underwear and the clean, clean unbearably clean whiteness of the bone that I had seen, and it was that which was important."

Yes, you think, that must have been incredibly dramatic but notice how Hemingway has had to find precise, specific details in order to communicate it properly. How many writers would have bothered or been able to do this? Go into Waterstones some time; pick up a book and look at the adjectives. Are they generic? If there's a cup of coffee, for example, is it "steaming"? So much prose, it seems to me, is simply a means to an end; a medium that transports you, relatively painlessly, from climax to climax.

Which is why I chose the picture at the top of this post. Joyce is the writer's writer. He is like Fred Astaire in that, even when everything seems to have been turned upside down, he is incredibly precise. The question mark is apt because Joyce knew what all great writers know: that good prose is an investigative tool. Just as, if you draw a building, you can start to understand its shape, so, if you write an accurate description or a line of dialogue that feels "right" or an insightful comment, you are beginning to approach the truth of things. It's one in the eye for... what? For media distortion; for all of the magazines and tabloids and video games that are currently shaping our world.

Good prose is moral, in other words.

Why I said no to a ticket for the Arctic Monkeys

2009-08-31T18:35:00.002+01:00

One of life's great pleasures, I think, is falling in love with a new band. This happened a couple of years ago with Arcade Fire. Sure, I could identify some of their influences - a bit of Talking Heads; some Old West parlour songs - but it didn't matter; they still seemed to be entirely and wonderfully themselves. Their sound was awkward, a little clumsy, but it was also hypnotic. They looked like some manic collective; there were moments, live, when their drummer would raise his drum above his head and it looked just like a socialist realist poster. But the second album was disappointing. There was a new sense of self-importance, of statements being made, and I knew, even as I was bellowing along to "Rebellion/Lies" at the Brixton Academy, that we were approaching the end of our relationship.

It's true, too, that I fell quite heavily for the Arctic Monkeys. The first album was great. Not great great - it wasn't "The Smiths" or "Please Please Me" - but, still, impressive; promising. One of the things that I liked about it was that it sounded so defiantly regional; the lyrics were sharp but also, crucially, in character. (Who else would rhyme, when talking about a bouncer, "totalitarian" with "scary 'un"?)

The second album was more accomplished but it was also, somehow, sketchier. The one tune that stuck in your head was of the fairground variety; it just seemed to teeter up and down. I've only heard snippets of the third but I fear the worst. It's a "rock" album; it was recorded in the desert; the production is a kind of musical Vista Vision. (As a rule of thumb, I think that it's always best to worry when a band all grow their hair at the same time.) A friend of mine had a ticket to their recent show at the Brixton Academy. Two of us were in the running for it (it was a fans only affair) but I said no. And I'm glad: it's over.

Bands change, and usually for the worst. It happens so quickly now. What starts out feeling like a conversation can end up with you wondering why they're just not being themselves. What is it? Touring? Drugs? Too much initial attention? If anyone knows, please leave a comment here.

Do "books" furnish a room?

2009-08-30T23:10:00.001+01:00

I am the first to admit that I am obsessed with books, but even I was a little ashamed to find myself browsing a framed photograph of a bookcase when I was in a restaurant in Lewes last Friday. (Best titles? Thanks for asking. There was a Kurt Vonnegut and an Edward Lear but my favourite was "Investigations of the Technique of Soil Steaming (With Illustrations)". I imagine that that would help you while away a couple of happy hours.

The X Factor and the democratic process

2009-08-30T21:56:00.002+01:00

I hate the X Factor but I made a point of watching some of it over the weekend, just because I wanted to write about it. I had a James Baldwin quote all ready, something about the fact that "freaks" are derided and catcalled because they "cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires". But then something interesting happened.

If you didn't see it on Saturday, they featured a singer called Behrouz. Behrouz is from Persia (or, as he pronounced it, with laudable ripeness, "Perisia"). He has an alarming stare, like a startled horse, and he was smothered (or should that be draped?) in leather. His performance segued from a sort of muezzin's ullullation to some random falsetto and then to a surprisingly proficient baritone. Simon Cowell (or, as my four year old daughter calls him, "the boy who says no") was miming - telegraphing, rather - his incredulity but it became clear that Behrouz was beginning to work the audience. True, this really only amounted to a series of bumps and grinds but the audience loved him, and I'm sure that this reaction was what pushed him through to the next stages of the competition. He has a strange, cheesy, slightly frightening sort of charisma but it is charisma, nonetheless, and it felt good to see someone... unusual get through. Of course, if he gets into the bland, generic pseudo-karaoke that is the final stages he will, by then, have been groomed to be as bland and generic as everybody else but, just for a moment, I felt as though I had seen democracy in action.

Only, of course, I hadn't. This is what passes for democracy now. Back in the real world, Terry Holdbrooks, a former guard at Guantanamo Bay, was denied entry at Heathrow Airport because, according to an official, a person "must provide financial evidence that they can support themselves for the duration of the trip without recourse to public funds or employment, and satisfy the entry clearance officer that they intend to leave the UK at the end of the visit".

Has that ever happened to you? No, thought not. Could it be, do you think, that this has something to do with Mr Holdbrooks' opposition to the regime at Guantanamo? He was due to speak at a meeting of Reprieve, an organisation that campaigns for prisoners' rights and which is suing the British government over its alleged role in the "rendition" of individuals who were allegedly tortured. Do you think that that, too, may be a factor?

If it is, then it makes me feel very nervous, as well as more than slightly soiled. Don't get me wrong: I don't know anything about anything. I hope we didn't help to move terrorist suspects to countries who are more, shall we say, relaxed about the rules on torture - I think we did but, still, I continue to hope, a little hopelessly, that we didn't - but what really worries me here is what this says about the government's attitude to free speech. Can we talk about the things that truly concern us or can't we? Voting for someone on the X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing is childs' play. Literally. It's as though the whole culture is suffering from a protracted adolescence. If Terry Holdbrooks has been, shall we say, discouraged from sharing his experiences then this isn't a democracy, not really, and no amount of clapping and cheering is going to change that.

Cezanne

2009-08-30T20:36:00.002+01:00

In the "New York Review of Books" this month there is a passage on the way that Cezanne worked from his "apperception", meaning,

"[the way] his emotions... and his experience organized (sic) what he was looking at. In doing so, he ignored the conventions of verisimilitude and painted "distortions" that have been central to his appeal."

Now, on the one hand, I like this very much. It explains, for me, the difference between Impressionism, say, and what came before. It also helps to explain why I don't like the drawings that you tend to see clustered around famous buildings like the Vatican or the Eiffel Tower: because, in a sense, they are attempting to replicate what everyone else is seeing.

Still, words like "apperception" and "verisimilitude" do make me feel a little uncomfortable. Isn't this, partly, why people don't go into galleries? Because terms like this make them feel, obscurely, that they're going to get it wrong? In which case, as a gesture of solidarity, I offer the following perception of Cezanne's landscapes, given to me years ago by a friend,

"They're 3D pictures. If you squint when you look at them, they come into focus."

Go to a gallery and try it out.