69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess (5 page)

I imagined I was falling asleep in the car as Alan doubled back through Port Askaig and Bridgend. I was tired after our long walk. The Bowmore distillery was in the centre of a planned village of the same name. Despite being on a sea loch, Bowmore is the psychogeographical – as well as the administrative – centre of Islay. A single Bowmore Legend was my seventh successive dram and my palate was shot to pieces. Alan’s imaginary journey followed its own logic, a serious whisky drinker would have concluded with the heavier malts from the south of Islay, we had started with them. Alan told me to picture doubling back once again to Bridgend, then instead of heading for Port Askaig, we’d follow the road around Loch Indaal to Bruichladdich. This is the most westerly distillery in Scotland and after I’d downed my dram, we left the pub. Alan wanted to go home alone and read. Before we parted he gave me a copy of
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess
, saying he’d like to know what I thought of it. I made my way to King Street, had a bath and took to my bed.

THREE

IN MY
dream I was flying and then I was running along tracks. I was the Vienna-to-Belgrade express train. I collapsed into human form as the train pulled into Budapest. The station was old and had been conceived on a grand scale but the roof was smashed and dirty. I alighted from the train and Dudley the ventriloquist’s dummy was waiting for me on the platform. We ran a gauntlet of impoverished Hungarians offering cheap accommodation before we finally made it out through the subway and onto the street. It was sunny and Dudley was using a 1989 edition of
Hungary: The Rough Guide
to find his way around town. All the street names had changed since the book had been published and it thus provided us with a wonderfully disorientating psychogeographical experience.

It was three hours since I’d left Vienna and I felt famished. We ate in a restaurant just off Erzsébet Körút called Pizza Bella Italia. We ordered pasta. The waitress was young and flirted with all the male customers. The room was too small for the murals of Italian buildings and a blue sky with clouds to work effectively. A red rose and a yellow banana indicated the gender divide of the toilets. I made my excuses and watched from the street as the waitress engaged Dudley in animated conversation. I was studying graffiti on a door when Dudley caught up with me. He liked the picture of a nude woman with a speech bubble above her head that read ‘GYERC EREZM AKARON AWYELK ED!!!’ This was followed by a telephone number and what appeared to be a name.

We wandered through the back streets and booked into the International Youth Hostel on Andrassy at the Octagon. Then we headed up to the Müvéz to enjoy one of Budapest’s traditional coffee houses. We sat at a table on the street. Cars thundered down the road. After paying for our refreshments we moved on to Café Mozart for a post-modern simulation of the coffee house experience. There was an enormous selection of drinks but rather than providing different types of coffee, the variations consisted in strength, amount of milk or cream and the addition of flavours. The waitresses were dressed up in 18th-century costumes and the murals on the wall represented aspects of old-time Vienna. Mozart melodies were being piped through concealed speakers. I should have pinched myself, then I’d have gained immediate release from this nightmare landscape.

After what seemed an eternity, we left Café Mozart and headed through the red-light district to a bar called The Blue Elephant. We drank cherry brandy, while the working-class clientele played chess, drank and sang. For our second drink, Dudley had Unicum, while I had a pear brandy. The tables in the bar were chipped, the whole place was in need of redecoration. Once it got dark we ventured out onto the street and there were plenty of girls around. I saw Dudley standing under a street lamp. He’d got himself up in drag. Since I’d geared up as a man, I said I wanted sex. Dudley got in my car and we drove to the river. I told him to give me a blow job. I could feel the dummy’s hands undoing my flies and sensed his irritation as he searched for my cock. I took a hammer from the glove compartment and smashed it into Dudley’s skull. There was blood everywhere. I dragged the body down to the water and threw it into the Danube.

I walked downstream to Gresham Palace, a huge building decorated with the face of Sir Thomas Gresham, the man who’d founded the stock exchange in the City of London. One of the bottom corners of the building was now occupied by Casino Gresham. I turned around and looked at the river. Dudley was bobbing about in the water close to the bank. I reached out and grabbed him. The dummy had been dressed in an 80s power suit and this was soaking. Someone had attacked the mannequin with a hammer or an axe and the head was badly damaged. I carried Dudley back to the youth hostel and placed him in a bunk. I was about to crash when the telephone woke me.

Alan wanted to meet up. I was sleepy and the conversation was confused. Through this semi-conscious fog it emerged that Alan didn’t know my name. I was quite shocked. After all we’d been at it like rabbits for a couple of days. I insisted that he’d said my name when I’d met him in The Grill. He explained that he’d said afternoon. That’s when I realised I’d misheard him. I told Alan my name was Anna Noon and he laughed. We arranged to meet in Pizza Express. Both Alan and I had garlic bread and side salads with our pizzas. We didn’t have any trouble getting a table. We met at noon, before the lunch-time rush really kicked in.

I asked Alan what he’d been reading. Explaining that he’d been attempting to compare Bracewell’s output with more recent club novels, he said
Deadmeat
by Q.
Deadmeat
had been marketed as pulp despite the author’s obvious literary aspirations. Although Q appropriated crime-novel clichés such as a narrator who’d just got out of jail, the work made formalist use of cyber, record industry and cinematic conventions. There was a very deliberate deployment of repetition. For example, an appeal for information about a killer runs as a refrain throughout the book. Paul Gilroy had eloquently defended black British identities in
The Black
Atlantic
and other works, Q seemed to be extending this discourse. The varied inflections in direct speech was only one of the more obvious ways in which this interest manifested itself in
Deadmeat
. It should go without saying that Q’s notions and experiences of what it was to be ‘English’ were very different from those of Michael Bracewell, as was what he considered to be hip.

Rather than looking for clarity in his reading, Alan sought confusion. Was the clubber Q aware of the earlier English writer also known as Q and did his appropriation of this moniker form part of a conscious critique of the racial codings to be found in traditional literary discourse? The ‘original’ Q, Arthur Quiller-Couch, was an establishment man. Educated at Oxford, Q went on to lecture in classics at his alma mater, was knighted and even elected Mayor of Fowey in Cornwall, his home town. As well as writing novels and poetry, the ‘original’ Q edited the
Oxford Book of English Verse
and produced a slew of critical works including
Studies in Literature
and
Charles Dickens and Other Victorians
. Alan wasn’t sure if Q had been consciously chosen by Q or whether some other force had brought them together. These doublings left him all at sea. Alan was hedging his bets over whether the uncritical attitude towards cultural commodification in
Deadmeat
was ironic or merely a result of the author’s inability to think through the implications of those experiences that had initially politicised him. Indeed, given that the book as an artefact had provided an early vehicle for perfecting the commodity form, Alan often doubted the advisability of using literature to criticise capitalism.

Alan was deeply puzzled by Q’s depiction of the cyber vigilante in his novel. This criminal, on the loose in London, lynched his victims and turned out to be a black American cop. The cyber vigilante was killing paedophiles and the narrator appears to approve of this. Given the racial connotations of lynching, Alan considered it completely unbelievable that a black American would choose this as a method for disposing of paedophiles. It didn’t even seem credible that the black British narrator of
Deadmeat
would approve of lynchings. Alan didn’t understand what Q was trying to do, he was confused. He didn’t know whether Q was using irony and ambiguity to implicate certain of his readers in the perpetuation of a white bourgeois subjectivity, or whether the narrative merely reflected the author’s inability to escape the dominant code. While double consciousness doesn’t protect you from the code, it certainly gives you different perspectives from which to reflect upon it.

Over coffee Alan discussed
Deep Cover: An FBI Agent Infiltrates the Radical Underground
by Gril Payne. The author of this work narrates the process by which he became disenchanted with his employer and thereby lost his sense of identity. No longer a conservative or a radical, Payne becomes a hostage to fortune, tossed about on the seas of adversity and stripped of his sense of self.
⁴
Alan viewed the book as a cautionary tale, a warning to those who wanted to get involved in the murky worlds of intelligence and counter-intelligence. Once Alan had paid the bill, we hit Union Street for a quick fix of commodity fetishism. I bought lipstick and a new pair of shoes. I dragged Alan into Waterstone’s because I wanted to buy
The Lonely Planet Guide to Iceland
. Bedtime reading that would take my mind off my college work. We were thrown out before I could make my purchase because an assistant spotted Alan rubbing a pornographic novel against his crotch. Alan repeatedly hissed the word ‘bibliomania’ as we were escorted from the premises.

Alan had a backpack full of books and after I’d done my shopping we trudged up to the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. The proprietor wasn’t in, so Alan left the books with his wife after arranging to return the next day when he’d be able to negotiate a price. Then we wandered down to the seafront and had a coffee in the Inversnecky Café. We were filling in time until Alan could pick up his car from the garage. A side window had been smashed by a thief who’d stolen some booze that Alan had left on the back seat. I announced that I felt like the narrator in Tania Kindersley’s novel
Goodbye, Johnny Thunders
. Alan said he’d given up on the book at page 13 when the narrator described a man who’d shafted her as having politics to the left of Lenin. Alan thought that it was the job of novelists to deal with specifics not generalities. He’d wanted to know whether the shit in question was a Bordigist or a councilist, whether he favoured the politics of Rosa Luxemburg or Otto Rühle. Lenin had attacked the entire proletarian milieu in
Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder
and Alan snorted that it simply wasn’t good enough to say that someone’s politics were to the left of a right-wing reactionary.

I defended Kindersley, saying the whole point of her novel was its pointlessness. The story wasn’t worth writing, a poor little rich girl playing at being bad and having a hard time getting over an affair with a complete loser. Besides, Kindersley clearly didn’t intend readers to take her book seriously. No one was going to find characters whose musical tastes incorporated both Johnny Thunders and mid-period Pink Floyd in the least bit credible. The book was arch and ironic. It was futile to dismiss it as a complete waste of time.
Goodbye, Johnny Thunders
was aimed at avatars of boredom, individuals who were seeking out new ways to waste their time and found tedium comforting. It was a book for sad tossers who considered drugs both glamorous and dangerous. Alan didn’t try to counter these claims. He just looked at his watch and paid for our cappuccinos. We chattered about monstrous twins as we made our way to the garage to collect his car.

I was disappointed when Alan’s motor turned out to be a Fiesta. I’d expected something flasher. Still, it got us to Stonehaven, where Alan had located a photographer who was happy to take hard-core pictures of selected clients. I’d expected a bloke but it turned out that Alan had hired a woman to snap us in pornographic poses. Angela had tattoos and piercings but she was wearing baggy sportswear when she shot us making out on her waterbed and in her dungeon. It was all pretty clinical. Alan seemed to get off on it. I guess being a porn star isn’t an unusual fantasy in our post-modern world. There were a whole set of routines Alan wanted to work through. Sucking, fucking and licking. He got extremely excited sitting on a chair with me perched on his lap, his cock up my cunt. Pure pornography. Alan insisted that the photographs of this pose should be taken full frontal with nothing hidden but the three-quarters of his prick buried inside me. This classic variation on a heterosexual theme proved to be the penultimate entanglement of the session. The last shot, predictably enough, was Alan coming in my face. The climax was fun but I didn’t have an orgasm.

After we’d done Stonehaven Alan drove back to Aberdeen. In the car and over a light meal at Gerard’s Brasserie we talked about books. Alan seemed to have William McGonagall on the brain. He had read
No Poets’ Corner in the Abbey: The Dramatic Story of William McGonagall
by David Philips as well as the collected works of Scotland’s alternative national bard. He knew a great deal more about McGonagall than I did at that time. McGonagall wrote doggerel but considered himself the equal of Shakespeare and Burns. He’d started life as a weaver but once the muse descended on him he endured 20 years of poverty as he determinedly followed the poet’s calling. He was mocked and assaulted as he plied his trade in Dundee, pelted with eggs and rotten fruit during his readings. Indeed, his success as a buffoon was such that he was eventually hired to read nightly at a local circus but the disturbances whenever he performed became so riotous that he was banned by the local magistrates from appearing in public.

The upper classes in Edinburgh preferred to mock McGonagall in a gentler fashion. Feigning admiration for his would-be immortal works and paying handsomely for his entertainments. It didn’t take the rich long to tire of McGonagall. They moved on to other things, leaving the poet to die in poverty. Alan considered many writers to be modern-day McGonagalls. The most perfect instance of this phenomenon was Joyce Cary. Obviously,
I Love Dick
by Chris Kraus elevated not only its nominal author but also her husband and collaborator Sylvere Lotringer to a similar status. Martin Amis fell into this category alongside all his scribbler friends. Sometimes it seemed as if there wasn’t a living or recently deceased author who Alan didn’t consider to be suffering from the McGonagall syndrome. Baudrillard remained one of Alan’s favourite examples since no one could take seriously a man who accepted Sylvere Lotringer as his translator. According to Alan, all these hippie hipsters could think about was getting other men to shag their wives.