I Hate Martin Amis et al. (8 page)

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I
f I am to fathom my presence here, then I must make sense of my past, no matter how improbable it might seem. If I cover enough pages of this journal, will everything become clear? If I write about my parents, Bridgette, my childhood, my life as a janitor and my writing, if I put it all down on paper, black scribbles on a white page, will a pattern begin to emerge? That's one of the reasons I'm writing this – but not the main one – to explain to myself how I got here, and why. Is there a pattern in my life, in anyone's life, or is it all meaningless and pointless? I stumble through this existence and all the peaks and troughs of my past, so prominent and intense at the time they were experienced, become flattened with the passing of each year. Everything assumes the grey mantle of unimportance, and the person living this life now, me – in the fleeting present – wanders in a daze of incomprehension through it all, struggling to find my bearings.

Martin Amis writes about this conundrum, this question without answer. He says there is no structure to life, there are no patterns, and that's precisely why he writes: to create a structure, an understandable reality. Or that's how I interpret what he writes. If he's correct, then by writing a journal maybe one can step back far enough to see a pattern, to discern a thread weaving through all those experiences. But creating a link that connects everything feels too rational to me. It's been thought up by someone sitting in front of a computer.

Why am I doing this? My need to escape the stifling conformity and boredom of London doesn't explain anything. Possibly there is no reason, no motivation. There are many authors – and Martin Amis is just one of them – who don't believe in motivation, who think there is no A plus B equals C to life. They say a person will lie for absolutely no reason. Their characters don't act because of something that happened in their past; their actions are random. This, those authors claim, reflects life. So they feel they're perfectly within their rights to impose order on chaos. Someone has to. Quite bluntly and without shame, they manipulate. They don't even try to hide this from their readers, in fact they do everything possible to make sure their readers never forget it, and make it a feature of their novels. They're more than happy if the reader sees them pulling the strings in the background, like the puppeteer at some Norfolk beach, behind the curtain in the Punch and Judy tent, making little attempt to hide himself from the kids.

In
The Information
, Martin Amis drops in and out of the story, making little comments here, there and everywhere like some one-man-band Chorus from a Greek tragedy supplementing the performance of the actors on stage, and telling the reader what he thinks about the various characters and events. I imagine him writing a novel about the chaos of this war, of the siege of Sarajevo. He wouldn't be able to help himself. He'd be in there, pushing his Mladics and Karadzics around like a chess grandmaster, even manipulating the UN and NATO, pretending he had some control over these events that no one else has any control over.

Who is more delusional, I wonder, the Author or the General, neither of whom – and this is the reality – has the ability to understand, let alone encapsulate, what's going on in his world. It's no different to the ant I can see in front of me now, struggling across the debris on the forest floor. To make a point, I reach forward and squash it beneath my thumb. Did it understand what was happening to it, did it have any control over that critical moment? I think not. But then it's possible, I guess, that he may only have been an army ant.

So maybe I should start with Bridgette, try to make sense of her, too – although, with hindsight, I don't feel she's provided me with quite as much novelistic material as I might have hoped for at the beginning of our relationship. Something of a disappointment in that respect, I'd say.

Although I'm a little hesitant to compare myself to the dashing Vronsky in
Anna Karenina
– to hell, why not! – who rushed off to this part of the world in order to help the Serbs free themselves from Turkish rule and to forget the pain he felt over Anna's death, the similarities are startling: I'm here to help the Serbs free themselves from Bosnian rule and to forget the pain I feel over Bridgette's death – yes, yes, yes! I don't wish to be too melodramatic about this but, for me, Bridgette has died. She's rigor mortis dead, like Sharon Stone the cat. She may as well have thrown herself under a train, too, like Anna. There again, perhaps it's Sergei Koznyshev, Lenin's half brother, I should compare myself to. He accompanied Vronsky, having just spent six years writing a book on government and having it published to virtually no acclaim and only one – negative – review. What's more than obvious is that both men volunteered to further their own ambitions rather than to altruistically help the Slavs. And that reminds me of a certain someone too.

The first thing that comes to mind is that she doesn't appreciate how I'm doing something different with my life by coming here. She can't even understand why people want to travel – ‘What do you want to go and see other countries for; what's wrong with where you are?' If I read her this journal she'd say, ‘That's nice, Milan.' That's one of her favourite words – which just happens to be my least favourite word. Nice. I loathe its prissy, spinsterish meaninglessness. I'd say it was the antonym of fuck or something. ‘You have a nice way with words, Milan,' she always said. ‘I wish I could write half as well as you.' And I'd mentally retch.

I called her to say I was going to Sarajevo. Even though we weren't together any longer, I think, in a moment of weakness, I'd hoped for tears. You know, celluloid emotions. Weeping mothers and wives on the steam-covered railway platform as their men leave for the Front. Granite statues of women in an autumnal cemetery, heads bowed beneath their hoods and falling leaves, hands clasped against heaving bosoms, awash with rain and tears, that kind of thing. But no, not our Bridgette. She seemed downright indifferent, displaying an authorial distancing I'd have been proud of. She was more intent on telling me she'd gone out with one of the so-called
creatives
in her advertising agency a couple of times. Already! Had I been forgotten so quickly, cast aside with such speed? ‘I like him. He's nice.' That word again. But it made me think, much against my will, of her already spreading her legs for someone else. It also made me reminisce – which is rarely advisable in situations like these.

This is how it started, the beginning of the end – which came more than three years after the beginning.

‘You'll never be a writer because you can't empathise with people. You're too caught up in your own feelings to understand how someone else feels.' That's what she said to me the last time I saw her, before she left my flat forever. After three years of pretending to believe in me and pretending to support my endeavours, she suddenly did a complete backflip and revealed her true feelings. She turned. Turned is right. Like a leaf in autumn, like a sunbaker on the beach, like a Rottweiler, like a worm, she turned. Like all women, she turned.

I couldn't believe it, couldn't believe she'd been lying to me all this time. She'd only been pretending to believe in me as a writer, and now she was saying she didn't have faith in me at all. All those words of encouragement were just bullshit, and when she said, ‘Don't give up, Milan, you'll make it, they'll recognise your talent one day,' she obviously hadn't meant it at all. It had been lies from beginning to end, totally insincere. Women are so devious, despicable and two-faced, it's staggering. Although I can't get my head around such duplicity, I think I have a sneaking admiration for such a persuasive and professional performance.

For a while she had inspired me – for a while. She was emotional, not in the sense of shouting and crying, but in the sense that she lived through her heart rather than her head. That's what appealed. She was a woman who became emotional at the slightest excuse. I found this attractive, for a while. It made her seem alive, and more involved in life than me. I felt she could open new worlds to me, feminine worlds, new experiences. When we saw a puppy in the street, she had to go up and stroke it.
What warmth
, I marvelled. When we sat in a field, she made daisy chains.
How natural
, I told myself. When we sat in a café and watched passers-by, she stared in wonder as if she'd never seen people before.
So sensitive
, I felt. When we went to the cinema together, invariably she'd say, sobbing in her seat, blowing flabbily and damply into her handkerchief as the credits rolled and the lights undimmed, ‘That was so beautiful.' Although I thought this was dim, certainly none too bright, I was fascinated at the same time. There wasn't an ounce of cynicism in her – despite working in the advertising business. It was both uncanny and unnerving.

She definitely changed over time. Since we first started going out together, she'd become more her own woman, more argumentative – ‘standing up for myself, my rights' is how she'd probably have put it. She started to see her work – in the fake world of advertising, for heaven's sake! – as being as important as my writing. She couldn't see the difference. She became ambitious for herself, and got increasingly caught up with her quick-witted, smooth-talking, Hugo Boss'd colleagues, especially the
creatives
, the glib salesmen of washing powders, baked beans and haemorrhoid creams, coveters of international awards, pursuers of the latest hot young directors and frequenters of five-star restaurants. ‘Honestly, Milan,' she'd gush, wide-eyed with that same admiration she'd once bestowed on me, ‘some of the scripts they write are just so brilliant; really clever and off the wall. I don't know how they come up with such ideas, I could never do it.' Her attention span, which had never been awe-inspiring, shrank to thirty seconds.

I argued with her about the immorality of being involved in an industry that fed the discontent of the proverbial man in the street, the common man – neatly labelled, boxed and categorised in the C socio-economic group; how her genius
creatives
filled this unfortunate individual with unrealisable dreams, flogging utopias of materialism that he could never – never ever – hope to attain.

I tried to explain to her, in simple words of one syllable, the error of her ways. ‘Why dangle carrots, like the excessive luxury and breathtaking speed of a top of the range BMW, when the average fellow is going to have to make do – if he's fortunate – with a clapped-out, rattling, ten-year-old rust bucket? With vinyl seating,' I added for good measure.

‘But it gives them something to strive for, Milan. It gives them hope. Why shouldn't these people have their dreams, too? Why shouldn't they have their ambitions? You have your dreams, why shouldn't they?'

‘Because their dreams are unattainable, that's why. They'd have to win the lottery to buy a BMW, you know that. And the same goes for the Poggenpohl kitchen, the holiday in the Bahamas, the Rolex wristwatch and the Mont Blanc pen. They're not even likely to be able to afford a pair of Calvin Klein jeans, for fuck's sake.'

‘You exaggerate, Milan. You always do, you go completely over the top. You can't discuss anything normally, calmly, like other people. You just go crazy. And it's simply not true what you're saying. People want a better life, and they want to believe they can achieve it. That's what they hope for. And that's what we give them: hope. I don't think there's any harm at all in encouraging people to better themselves.'

Such arguments became more and more regular. Little Miss Wide Eyes started to stand up for herself in a most unhealthy way. I found it most disconcerting. She no longer took things lying down, well, apart from
that
, and even
that
became much less frequent. One evening in early December (I can see now that she'd obviously been keen to clear the decks for the first of the advertising industry's excessive Christmas parties), after we'd eaten and quite without warning, she came out with those dreaded words: ‘We need to talk.' No other four words in the English language can strike such dread into the heart of man. I grunted, struggling for a mix of non-commitment and disinterest. It was so unlike her to speak out, to have her say, but I knew with absolute certainty that she was about to make her bid for independence. All I had to do was decide on my reaction to this.

She said something about admiring me for being so single-minded about wanting to be a writer, and about putting everything else aside to concentrate on that. I could hear the ‘but' coming, galloping like the cavalry over the horizon to rescue her, and sure enough …

‘But I want more than this, Milan.'

At that moment I remember being more stunned than angry. I couldn't believe what I was hearing; I'd just cooked her dinner – a very tasty spaghetti bolognese. And how was it possible I'd allowed her to get in there first, to put the boot in before me – which I was thinking about doing anyway?

She went on to suggest that she'd given me a year to crack it as a novelist, although I have no recollection of this, and that after a year (which I gather was now up), I either had to have succeeded or I had to get a proper job – by which I suppose she meant being a copywriter on a toilet paper account and writing about the ‘nice, puppy dog softness.' That was her idea of writing.

She went on to point out, very considerately, that I hadn't become, during the past year, a best-selling author, nor had I even managed to become a published one. ‘I'm not happy going out with a janitor, Milan – a janitor who's thirty-six, as well. I'm ashamed to tell people what you do. I'm sorry, but it's true. It's embarrassing.'

‘You forget I'm a qualified teacher. The only reason I'm a janitor – apart from it giving me the time to write – is because the education system in this country stinks, thanks to your Conservative friends.' She'd once confessed to me, to my absolute disgust, that she voted Conservative. She admired Thatcher's ‘strength and purpose', was the cliché she used, and now Major was carrying on the Iron Lady's good work. ‘You can tell your friends I'm a teacher if it makes you feel any better.'