Sonata of the Dead (7 page)

‘Creative writing?’ she said. ‘You might try the universities. They all seem to have a course these days. But I guess that’s not quite what you’re after. How about… hang on.’

She collared one of her colleagues, a raven-haired woman wearing a fitted cardigan with a tissue balled up one sleeve. She was carrying a stack of books with the studied indifference of a waiter carrying mountains of crockery. ‘Gill, this gentleman is looking for a creative writing group. Any ideas?’

‘You could try the British Museum,’ Gill said.

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘You’re not mixing up creative writing with Archaeological Studies of Ancient Greece?’ I smiled my best disarming smile, but the pair of them rightly gave me a look that would have put lesser mortals in the grave.

‘Would there be anything else?’ she asked.

I thanked her and left, wondering after all whether a reading group was really all that different to a writing group. I had no idea. Presumably they both had the same priorities at heart. Presumably it was all about story. Did it work, did it not work? Did it entertain? Did it bore you rigid?

Though it was cold I decided to walk, at least until my feet turned to chunks of stiff wood. I reached the museum by mid-morning. I went inside and spoke to a guy on reception who confirmed that yes, there was a creative writing class that met regularly in one of the museum offices every Monday night. And not only that, but the co-ordinator was in right now.

‘Could I speak to him? Her?’

‘Him. Doctor Louis Ferguson. He’s a lecturer at UCL. I’ll take you up.’

He led me to the lift. We went up in silence to the second floor and he led me along a carpeted corridor flanked with wood panelling and unidentified portraits. We stopped outside a door bearing a plaque containing a mystifying combination of numbers and letters. He gestured grandly and I knocked.

‘Come!’ said a withered voice.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ the receptionist said.

I went inside. I thought for a moment that I had entered an empty office, and that I had been the victim of a pointless prank executed by a staff member who had a gift for projecting his voice. But then I saw how the pattern on a gaily upholstered armchair appeared to move, and a figure emerged from the pattern like someone who had given much of his life to the rare pursuit of total domestic camouflage.

‘We aren’t meeting now, are we?’ he asked, looking at his watch.

‘If you’re free,’ I said.

‘We’re meeting in twenty minutes. That’s why I came in here early. To fix my head and relax first.’

‘What is the meeting about?’ I asked.

‘You mean you don’t know? Did you not receive the email?’ He was unfolding from the chair and I was put in mind of spiders with long legs emerging from tunnels of silk. He was very tall, perhaps as much as six foot four, but he was painfully thin. I guessed I probably weighed much more than he did, and I was giving away the best part of ten inches.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I felt hollow, scraped out from too little sleep, and I didn’t want to maintain this pointless bluff. I had no patience for it. ‘I don’t work here. I’m here to talk to you about your writers’ group.’

He sat up straight. I noticed crumbs of pastry glued to a fledgling salt-and-pepper beard. ‘You want to sign up?’

‘Well no, not really.’

‘A good thing, I’m afraid. The Knackers Yard is oversubscribed as it is, and anyway, you’re a little too young for us.’

‘The Knackers Yard?’

‘I know, I know, it’s something of a demeaning, self-defeating name we’ve given ourselves, but well, it’s meant to be ironic. We’re all over sixty-five, but afire, still, with ambition.’

‘I wanted to ask your advice,’ I said. ‘About writers’ groups in general. Do you have a minute?’

He consulted his watch again. ‘I have fifteen,’ he said. ‘What is it you want to know?’ He gestured to a chair.

‘The Knackers Yard,’ I said, sitting down. ‘Do all writers’ groups have names?’

He bowed his lips. ‘I expect so, but I imagine it isn’t crucial. I like telling my friends I’m off to the Knackers Yard.’

I bet he did. I bet it never wore thin. For him. I imagined his friends and colleagues with fixed grins.

‘I suppose it lends everything a more professional air,’ he went on. ‘It gives you some focus, and you treat the two hours with some respect, with purpose. It codifies the whole thing.’

‘What do you do, over that two hours?’

‘It depends if anybody has submitted work for review. We might have a couple of WIPs to consider—’

‘Whips?’

‘Sorry. Works in progress. Members like to get feedback from their peers.’

‘Really? Isn’t that a bit too tempting? I mean, you know, you might read something and like the idea. Pinch it for yourself?’

He seemed genuinely shocked, and insulted. He narrowed his gimlet eyes at me. ‘There is no magpieing in my group,’ he said. ‘Nor have I seen any in the industry in the thirty years I’ve been active.’

‘You’re published then?’

‘Not these days, but back in the late eighties and early nineties I had three novels published by Fourth Estate.’

‘That’s quite some break,’ I said. ‘What happened? Did you retire?’

He smiled at me. I knew that kind of smile very well. If you could transcribe it into words it would say:
Aw bless, you fucking idiot.

‘A writer never retires. You can never
not
be a writer.’

‘Really? I don’t understand. Shelve the typewriter. Throw away the pencil sharpener. Watch TV. Make bread.’

‘I’m writing all the time. Even when, especially when, I’m doing something else. You don’t switch off. It’s pointless even to try.’

‘You must be fun to live with,’ I joked, but it wiped the smile off his face.

‘I used to be married,’ he said. ‘But she was only ever the other woman.’

‘You chose your writing over your wife?’

‘Substitute the word “work” for “writing” and you’ll agree that isn’t such an uncommon occurrence. Anyway, I didn’t choose one way or another. The choice was taken out of my hands. It chose me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I had a sense of the conversation sliding away from me; it was not unusual. ‘I’m here to talk about creative writing. Not marital fuck-ups.’

‘It’s all grist for the mill,’ he said, but he couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice.

‘Anything else you get up to, other than peer appraisal?’

‘We sometimes have a guest speaker. We can’t pay, but we’ll cover travel expenses, and take them out for a curry. Bottle of wine. You know… writers, agents, editors and the like. Or we’ll talk about publishing trends, or recommend books to each other. And we’ll always begin and end with a writing exercise.’

‘A packed two hours, then?’

He nodded. ‘Oh yes. We frequently go over. Sometimes the cleaners have to kick us out. If we’ve got a second wind we’ll pop to the Museum Tavern across the road and continue over a nightcap.’

‘What kind of writing exercises?’

‘Well, it differs at the end of the night, but we always start with five solid minutes of automatic writing.’

‘Is that like word association football?’

‘No. Not word association. Nothing so structured. This is completely abstract, but quite punishingly regimented. So we write for five minutes using a medium we’re unused to in order to keep it fresh, to take the brain unawares. So I might bring in a piece of wallpaper and write on it with a crayon. Or a piece of black paper and a silver outliner. No laptops. You need that direct contact between the paper and your brain. It must be physical. But it must be unconventional too. A shock to the system.’

He was hunched forward now, bristling with enthusiasm. ‘No taking your pen off the page. No punctuation. No dotting of i or crossing of t. At the end of the line, a delicious scratch as you drag your pen back to the start of the next.’

‘Sounds demanding.’

‘If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.’

‘I can assure you, that’s not the case.’

‘It’s pretty tough at the start, but once you get into it, it can be quite therapeutic. You can lose yourself. I once wrote for an hour and I meant only for it to be a five-minute warm-up. And occasionally, if you can read back what you’ve written, you might find something, maybe one word, maybe a phrase or a sequence, that sparks an idea, and zoom! You’re off.’

‘Seems like a lot of work for little reward.’

He considered this for a while. Time seemed to have slowed down. He was one of those people who make glue of all that’s around them. His slow, rich voice was part of it. The retarded blink of his eyes, which I realised with a jolt didn’t blink all that often. Outside, the traffic on Bloomsbury Street was muted and far away; its aggressive murmur couldn’t find its way in here.

‘I suppose you’ve summed up writing,’ he said. ‘Perhaps all art. But you tap away at the rock regardless, hoping to hit that slim seam of gold.’

I was attracted less and less by this job but who was the clown? My own career was hardly what you’d call stellar or interesting. If writing was a fool’s job then I was scrabbling around underneath it in the great shit jobs pyramid.

‘Anything else you get up to?’ I asked.

‘There are loads of exercises. But all the best ones, I think, involve cutting. Writing is mainly all about editing, really. Kill your darlings, and all that.’

Yeah
, I thought.
Kill your darlings stone cold dead
.

A woman poked her head around the frame of the door. She wore glasses with circular lenses. I couldn’t see her eyes through them for the windows’ reflection. Her short hair was teased out in little flicks around her face as if it had been the origin of some mild explosion.

‘Hello, Lou,’ she said. ‘Are we on?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘We were just finishing up here… that’s right, isn’t it? Or was there something else?’

‘No, I’m done,’ I said. ‘Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.’

He walked me to the door. The woman stood back, scrutinising me with naked suspicion. ‘What’s all this in aid of anyway? Are you looking to start a group of your own?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m thinking of joining one,’ I said.

I walked back to the main entrance. I was no writer, but I guessed that was kind of the point of joining a writers’ group: to improve. I read a lot; I was halfway towards being moderately intelligent – how hard could it be?

All of which was academic if I couldn’t find my way into the Accelerants. Maybe they’d be more receptive to me if I had a reference, from a real, honest-to-God published scribe. I hurried back to Ferguson’s office. The door was open but he’d gone. His meeting had apparently ended, or was taking place elsewhere. But that open door suggested he would be back soon.

‘Hello?’ I called out. But this time there was no chameleon against the upholstery. I sat in his chair and waited. I thought,
Sod it, just make something up. It doesn’t matter.
There was a bulging bookshelf in the room, adjacent to a desk cluttered with the paraphernalia of the habitually disorganised: coffee cups bubbling with mould, towers of paper, Post-it notes petalling a small PC monitor. I thought it couldn’t harm just to check it in case there were any copies of Ferguson’s novels up there. It would help if I could back up my pretence with some bona fide titles at least.

Here: ageing books with rubbed spines bearing his name. I pulled them out and checked the black-and-white author photograph on the back cover. His hair was dark, long, swept around his shoulders. He was resting his chin on the back of his hand, as all authors seem to need to do when the camera comes out. He wore the faint smile of someone who was looking forward to many years of good reviews and improving contracts and no idea that it would be over within the time it took to write a couple more novels. I thought about that for a while. Was it more painful to have tasted success, to have experienced the heady process of publication, than for it to be a tantalisingly unattainable dream, as it was for so many?

I admired the titles.
Suspense Motif. Ghost Notes. Zeloso
. A brief scan of the various blurbs taught me they were all part of the same series featuring his pet detective, a concert pianist called Gala Blau. It looked like a modern-day Modesty Blaise reworking, with faintly ridiculous plots and cartoon characters with Flemingesque names: the villain in the first book, for example, was called Sebastian Shrike.

I checked the dedication pages and acknowledgments.

For Katrin – my love, my love…

For Romy, Daddy’s sweetheart for ever…

‘A page-turner’, gasped the
Daily Express
. ‘Breathless, the year’s best thriller’, drooled the
Sunday Times
. ‘Watch your back, Mr Deighton’, warned the
Daily Mail
.

‘Professor Ferguson?’

‘Yes?’ I don’t know why I said it. Most likely it was because he was on my mind and I’m a bolshie bugger who likes putting himself in tricky situations and—

Sorry. That’s a bunch of crap and you know it. You know exactly why I said yes. I mean, look at her…

She was tall and lean, with a long neck and long, straight black hair, the colour of India ink. Her mouth was a broad cherry sweep. Big eyes, such a dark brown you couldn’t discern the pupil. She wore a knitted stone-coloured dress and knee-length black boots. She looked like Anne Hathaway, minus the flaws.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I was expecting someone—’

‘Older?’ I suggested, and raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, I get that a lot.’

‘I’m here,’ she said, spreading her hands to show just how here she was. She had small hands, slender fingers, no wedding band, no engagement rock. ‘A little early, but better than being late.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Shall we get down to it?’

‘Lead on. I’m starving.’

Right. Lunch. I could do that. I walked out of the office, retracing my steps to the exit, Ferguson’s books padding out my jacket. I made a mental note to phone him and apologise but I doubted he’d mind if it meant someone showing an interest in his work. Outside I bit the bullet and headed towards the Museum Tavern, one of Ferguson’s favourite watering holes.