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  A simple question. A simple question, that needs an answer. If we could answer all the questions, then they wouldn’t need asking. It stands to reason.

  ‘Ten words,’ I say. ‘Different ones, too. Some long ones. Some short ones. A couple of definite articles. A personal pronoun. It’s a start. In a week there’ll be a paragraph. In a few years – who knows? A short story? A novella even. I’m not counting. Words are like chickens. I know that much. You just don’t count them.’

  Then I stop. She goes away. Silence. It’s the loudest sound on earth.

  Sometimes fate steps in. You win some prizes. You get a lot of money. And then people start to want things. Always wanting things. Like the publisher. On the phone. Always ringing.

  ‘Graham! Haven’t heard from you in a while . . .’

  Hasn’t anyone told him? That it’s a seven-year stretch. With no remission. And no visiting hours. That the words don’t write themselves.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ he says, ‘but you ought to get out more. That’s what the critics say.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I say, above the noise of the humming, drumming, ruthless, sluiceless rain. ‘What do they know? Less is more. More or less.’

  TOMORROW

  GRAHAM SWIFT

  HELLO! I’m Paula and I’m the narrator of Graham Swift’s new novel. If you’ve ever read any of Mr Swift’s other novels then you’ll already know a good bit about me. You’ll know, for example, attentive geographer that you are, that I probably live in South London – in Putney, say, or Dulwich. And you’ll have a good idea of the way in which Mr Swift renders my thought processes down on paper. That’s right. Lots of thoroughly ordinary sentences, filtered through a thoroughly ordinary mind. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. You can take it or leave it. Now and again there comes a flourish – Sussex in the Sixties, the very phrase like a glistening salad – but mostly it’s a succession of stock formulations. Sometimes I wonder whether this is actually a very exciting way of writing a novel, but then I’m not a successful novelist like Mr Swift. Anyway, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And it’s a watched pot that never boils. Oh dear me yes.

  Well, Mr Swift has given me a little secret to divulge, as I lie here in the small hours in Putney or Dulwich or Wimbledon. Quite frankly I’d like to get to sleep, but you can’t always get what you want, can you, and sometimes the thing you need escapes you (Mr Swift has this odd habit, you know, of saying the same thing in slightly different ways). Actually it’s quite a big secret. Have I been cheating on my husband, Mike? Or has he been cheating on me? What is it that our twin children are going to find out tomorrow on their sixteenth birthdays? Well, that would be telling wouldn’t it, and it would remove the whole element of suspense on which the averagely successful work of fiction depends.

  No, I think I’d better string things out a bit. So I’ll tell you about how Mike and I met, back at university in the 1960s, and Grandpa Pete, and Mike’s thesis about snails, and our house in Herne Hill. And all the time you’ll be wondering about what dreadful thing it is that I’m waiting to reveal to the children next morning, won’t you? Except that Mr Swift has this other odd habit of always giving the game away long before the closing page. He did it in The Light of the Day and now he looks as if he’s going to do it again in this one. There’s nothing I can do to stop him. You win some, you lose some. Mumps are better than measles. Après moi le deluge. Oh well, here goes. Mike was infertile, you see, and the children were hatched out of a test-tube.

  So now you know what awaits them, Nick and Kate, in the pale morning as the first stray light of Midsummer glows evanescently over the parched and friable grass – another flourish there, I trust you noticed. And yet I can’t help thinking that it’s only page 153 and most novels go on a lot longer than this. They do, though. Never mind. It would be a shame to stop now, and I don’t think Mr Swift’s publishers would be very pleased. So perhaps I’d better tell you about Otis our cat, and how terribly upset we all were when he disappeared, and the affair I had with the vet. His capable forearms. His rolled sleeves. You don’t miss these things. Oh and a three-page description of a posh hotel we stayed in would certainly move matters forward a bit.

  Nearly dawn, now. I must confess – it’s not something I’d ever say in public, not when there are people about – that I worry about Mr Swift. I mean, he can really write rather brilliantly sometimes, but for some reason the bits where he does this don’t sound like me, which is a bit of a disappointment for a girl. What a clever person would call compromising the integrity of the narrative voice. All the same, though, I got quite excited at the prospect of the final scene. What will the children say when they find out their origins lie not in daddy here but in a phial of anonymous sperm?

  Wait a minute, though, it’s light! It jolly well is! It’s already getting light and here we are on the final page! Now, I don’t know anything about novels, but it strikes me that there’s something a bit weird going on. There is, though. I always thought that if you spent all those chapters, all those carefully marshalled words, all those patient accretions of sentences, building up to a denouement then you owed it to the reader to actually have the denouement rather than just stop at the moment where things are supposed to get interesting. Oh well. Mr Swift won the Booker Prize once, and I’m sure he knows best.

  POLITICS

  ADAM THIRLWELL

  Hello!

  My name is Adam Thirlwell. Although I am quite young, I have been thinking very seriously about the nature of comedy. I would like to share these thoughts with you.

  A lot of people do not properly understand about comedy, I think.

  COMEDY IS . . . NAUGHTY!

  Perhaps some of you are not agreeing with me at this point. Perhaps you are thinking, ‘I like Jane Austen and she is not naughty.’ Well, comedy is naughty and it is not naughty. This is called a paradox.

  In my novel Politics, Moshe and his friends Nana and Anjali are naughty. They do boysex. They do girlsex. They have longlovesexy kisskiss. When they are not having longlovesexy kisskiss they eat pizza and go shopping.

  But they are serious people, I am thinking. Just because they only have longlovesexy kisskiss, eat pizza and go shopping does not mean they are not serious people.

  Or that I am not a serious novelist.

  Oh no.

  COMEDY IS . . . DIFFICULT?

  But what kind of comedy am I?

  Well, I am a bit Martin Amis Rachel Papers era comedy and a bit Alain de Botton when he used to write fiction comedy, but mostly I am faux-naif comedy.

  What is faux-naif comedy, you are asking? Well, it is lots of short, child-like sentences (‘I think you are going to like Moshe. His girlfriend’s name is Nana. I think you are going to like her too’) but obviously written by a very brainy person who has read, for example, the work of the French writer Stendhal.

  Stendhal is a very serious and important writer.

  But it is not perhaps appropriate to mention him here.

  COMEDY IS ABOUT . . . FUNNY DIALOGUE!

  When they are not eating pizza (it is nice pizza and very reasonably priced) or doing longlovesexy kisskiss, Mishe and Nana and Anjali (and Nana’s papa, the banker – I think you are going to like him too) talk to each other.

  Maybe I need to be precise about how they talk to each other.

  You see, when Nana says, ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ I put down, ‘You don mind dyou?’ And when Moshe asks her if she wants water I put down, ‘Dyou wan water?’ Later they visit a ‘restron’.

  This is not, of course, how people really talk.

  But it is funny.

  COMEDY IS . . . READING LISTS

  As I said, I am serious comedy. Where I live at All Souls College, Oxford, there is a big, big library. Sometimes I am allowed to read the books. One of them is by a man named Gramsci. I like Gramsci. He says there is a thing called hegemony, which is ‘the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force p
redominating excessively over consent.’ Moshe, Nana and Anjali are an example of hegemony, I am thinking.

  Well, they had better be.

  Or this would not be a serious novel!

  And Mr Franklin from the publishers (I think I am going to like Mr Franklin) will be wanting his money back.

  Reprinted with kind permission from the Guardian.

  SUNDAY AT THE CROSS BONES

  JOHN WALSH

  ‘Think, John!’ The voice in my ear buzzed like one of the metaphors from my no-holds barred report from the world crab-racing championships at Skegness. ‘Think!’

  I could handle it, I told myself. Naturally the job of chief associate editorial honcho at the Indescribably-boring had its tensions. After all, those in-depth interviews with Elle Macpherson, those poignant accounts of what happened when the fire alarm went off at the King’s Lynn Literature Festival, didn’t write themselves. And now here I was, just back from composing a wide-ranging think-piece about spring hemlines to a top-level meeting with my all-too-fragrant editor, Fruitella.

  ‘It’s no good, John. What your literary career needs is continuity. Say what you like about Sebastian and that other lot you’re always showing off with on the radio, but at least they keep churning them out. It’s eight years now since you wrote that book claiming you were Irish.’

  ‘The Falling Angels,’ I fondly confirmed. ‘Bejasus, yes, you adorable spalpeen. And really don’t you think that pashmina might profitably drop just a little more off the shoulder?”

  ‘It’s called a cardigan, John. And it’s at least four years since the book where you pretended your life was entirely governed by what you saw at the cinema.’

  ‘Are You Talking To Me?’ I eagerly glossed.

  ‘That one. I hate to say this, John – it’s something we only suggest to our authors when Waterstone’s have stopped answering the phone – but have you ever thought of writing a novel?’

  ‘Anyone can write a novel,’ I coyly quipped. ‘And tell me, is there a Mr Fruitella?’

  ‘You’re not anyone, John, that’s the problem. But let’s give it a go. History’s in just now. Why not pick some historical figure people have just about heard of and write him up?’

  ‘The Rector of Stiffkey,’ I breathed, ‘was a very interesting man. Torn between the duties of the cloth and the pleasures of the flesh. A kind of metaphor,’ I extemporised, ‘for the neuroses of the inter-war era.’

  ‘Wasn’t he the one who picked up tarts and got his head chewed off by a lion?’ For once Fruitella looked interested. ‘I should leave out the neuroses of the inter-war era and just concentrate on the tarts.’

  ‘Done.’ Breathlessly I texted my ever-encouraging editor, Simon, with the news. Almost immediately the phone rang.

  ‘John. Is that you, mate?’

  ‘Simon! I take it the idea of a three-month sabbatical to write my novel meets with your august approval?’

  ‘Sorry, John, but apparently Pan’s People are reforming. At least that’s what it says in the Guardian. I told them that seeing it’s a culture piece we’d get our best man round . . .’ [continues].

  THE STONE GODS

  JEANETTE WINTERSON

  Gosh, I’ve invented a new world!

  I have, though. A whole new planet. Up there in the slanting, searing, horizon-hugging sky. What’s it like? This isn’t a work of realism, so let’s just say that it has twigs as big as catamarans and elephants that trumpet through tea-kettles. Chocolate bars, dark as the soil, each the weight of an exploding galaxy. Or something.

  There are a lot of capital letters in all this. M, for instance. M is for Massive, as in advance.

  Hello, my name is Billie Crusoe. Yes, I know that comes from Defoe. Let’s have another letter – I, for example, as in Inter-textual, or even B, as in Borrowed. Up here on Planet Blue I end up having sex with a lady robot called Spike. What happens? Well, the world is dark, and dark is the world. The strange thing about strangers is that you don’t know who they are. She is my mouse-mat, the extra-strong mint that sets my torpid tongue aflame. Together we lurk, enmeshed, on the humid cusp of the world, marionettes teetering at the volcano’s endangering edge . . . [continues]. Another useful letter is D, as in Dangerously overwritten.

  But I haven’t told you about poor old clapped-out planet earth and all the technology that keeps it going. This includes Beatbots, which are a kind of cyber-traffic warden and Nifties, which scuttle about under the floorboards and fix your heating. Jolly clever of me to think them up, don’t you agree? So let’s have Q, which is for Quite good jokes, sometimes. Oh, and there are Jeanies, those rather irritating female novelists who over-dosed on people like Italo Calvino and Angela Carter when young and keep ruining perfectly good ideas with rather obvious digressions on the nature of storytelling. They pop up all over the place.

  I thought I’d just drop in a bit of personal baggage here, and include a page or two about the manuscript of this being found on a tube-train, just like mine was when some dim little editor person at Hamish Hamilton left her bag behind her on the seat. It was in all the papers, you know.

  What are stories? Stories are like roads. Sometimes they go on all straight for miles, and sometimes they have bendy-bits like coat-hangers that take you where you’d least expect. Like things with no endings, they are endless. Once upon a time there was a novelist called Jeanette, a poor girl whom all the world loved until she started writing books that were all basically the same, full of descriptions that didn’t describe anything, lesbian high-jinks on the forest floor and time’s snow-white clouds rolling endlessly away. This one is about saving the planet, by the way, so let’s end with an R, as in Recycling.

  THE BOOK AGAINST GOD

  JAMES WOOD

  We spent our wedding night in a country hotel of quite egregious desuetude. We were too late for dinner, but room service sent up a mixed grill, brumous in aspect, and some subtly unstructured sandwiches. Jane ran the bath, while divesting herself of various abstruse undergarments. Behind her, steam rose in quaintly Niagaran fashion from the taps. I touched her anguished elbow.

  ‘Doesn’t Schopenhauer have a mad but really quite likeable theory that marriage corresponds to the chromatic possibilities of the pianoforte: engagement a cascade of vigorous arpeggios, wedding night a crescendo, old age plaintive diminuendo and so forth?’

  Jane laughed. ‘Darling, is this your way of asking me to commit osculation?’

  ‘I was thinking about the vicar’s address. I really couldn’t stand the Reverend Mulcaster’s pseudo-Dosteoveskyan line of argument. It seemed so fucking unempirical.’

  Silently we climbed into the bed and uncoiled ourselves amidst its punitive pillows. Without warning a phial of the purest provincial atavism broke in my hand and released an odiferous exaltation. ‘Darling,’ I said, ‘something very important has happened. I’ve just decided that I don’t believe in God.’

  ‘How thrilling for you, my love. But can you not sleep?’

  Wasn’t it Heidegger who said that wakefulness was like sleep but without the pyjamas? Sadly the reference books that might have verified this discreet epigram were not to hand. Quietly we nestled together. Stroking her embarrassed shoulder, I knew that an agreeable consequence of our matrimonial state would be the necessity to read Nietzsche to her.

  Meanwhile it was growing late. ‘Darling,’ she said mistily at one point. ‘If you rolled over there would be just a little more space.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I replied seriously. ‘Not more space, surely? Just less of it occupied.’

  PLANET AMIS

  THE PREGNANT WIDOW

  MARTIN AMIS

  Keith Nearing – little Keith – lingered horizontally pool-side under the molten Italian sun. In the middle distance, yet still stratospherically far off, jet trails sped like weary spermatozoa. That molten Italian sun, plonked up there in the cerulean firmament like some fucking fried egg or other, had plans for Keith. Plans for him it had. Keith-plans. Keith-scheme
s. Beside him, Lily stirred one of her horrifying, spatulate legs, picked up his copy of Bleak House, ran a delicate pinkie along its spine and, coyly, said:

  ‘Has Esther Summerson fucked anyone yet?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’d have noticed if she had.’

  ‘What about Lady Dedlock? Has she fucked anyone? Apart from Sir Lester, that is?’

  ‘Lady Dedlock? Bound to have. I mean, Esther Summerson is her daughter, right?’

  It was odd, Keith reflected, squinting sideways at Lily’s torso, those moistly hub-capped hummocks damp beneath the scalloped veil of her bikini, how things worked out. This was the third time he’d turned up in one of Martin Amis’s novels. First he’d been a malignant dwarf in the one about burned-out hippies. Then he’d been in the one about darts (or was it the Bomb – he couldn’t remember.) Now, he seemed to be in one about the debilitating effects of the late ’60s sexual revolution. But you could never tell.

  ‘I heard,’ Lily said, ‘that when Terpsichore’s boyfriend turns up – Zit, or Fraggle or whatever his name is – she’s going to rub cottage cheese into her tits and then sort of squidge them all over him for an hour before they . . .’

  That was another thing about being in a Martin Amis novel, Keith thought: everyone had silly names. Soon Calliope and Esperanza would arrive for tea and soixante-neuf by the fountain. Still, he knew, the vital statistics obsessed him: Calliope’s proud 38–22–36; Esperanza’s vertiginous 44–24–32; Lily’s 60–60–60. No, that was the darts novel, surely?

  Lily had gone off to the banqueting hall to brood about feminism. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the small guy with the leather waistcoat and the scurfy rug conning over his scribble-pad.