That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (19 page)

‘
Ah. Aaaahhhh,’ he said, drawing out the syllable like the bowels of St Erasmus on the windlass. ‘Well, have you brought your pen with you? If you show it to me I might be able to tell you what’s wrong with it.’

I dug my pen out of my handbag and gave it to him. He examined it from all angles.
‘It seems to be in perfect order,’ he said eventually, passing it back to me. ‘I can’t detect anything wrong with it. And I’m good at finding fault, you know.’

‘
It isn’t suffering from performance anxiety? After all, it wrote a successful book. Wouldn’t it be natural for it to feel nervous about the next one?’

My ally frowned, a slight sternness clouding the clear night of his Bible
-black eyes.

‘
It didn’t feel nervous to me. And I tend, of course, to provoke apprehension. The fact that your pen was calm when I inspected it suggests that it possesses an unflappable disposition.’

‘
Then if the pen isn’t the problem, it must be the books,’ I declared.

‘
And what books would they be?’

‘
Do you recall me telling you how I met my first book?’

‘
Of course.’ The clouds lifted, and the Devil beamed in an attitude of beatitude. ‘And while you were writing it, I saw the book many times. I remember its dear little legs.’

Some writers are able to make fictions out of whatever they find in the world and their own inner worlds. Others
– perhaps deficient in the literary sense of smell, the natural writer’s nose with its millions of narrative receptors, which scents the beginnings of stories in all kinds of material and ably follows the trails – must wait for unwritten fictions to come to them in the hope of being written. I happen to be the latter sort of writer.

For a long time I didn
’t know I was going to be a writer at all. I had a job in an office, I played the piano for relaxation, and was mildly addicted to craft classes at the local community centre. I had never contemplated sitting down and writing fiction, either for pleasure or profit. I therefore can’t claim that any influence arising from my own habits or hopes had been at work on the night the unwritten story appeared.

It was an ordinary pleasant summer evening. I was out watering the plants and having an after
-dinner cigarette on the balcony of the flat I shared with my husband Ivan. One moment I was alone and the next moment it was there, a few sheets of blank paper clipped together and supported on spindly legs, telling me in a piping voice that it was a story and we’d both have some fun if I was willing to write it.

Why not? I thought. I had been good at English at school, and I read a fair bit. I thought I was probably capable of writing a short tale
.

I took the story into the spare room, which doubled as a study. We sat together on the bed and the story dictated itself to me. I wrote on a notepad, following what it was saying as well as I could
.

It took me a few drafts before the story declared itself happy with my work. I typed the final draft into the computer and printed it out. As it printed, the words simultaneously appeared on the until
-then blank pages of the story itself. When the printing finished the story gave a little bow and asked to be shown out. It trotted down the stairs and I never saw it again. I sent the printed copy to a magazine. It was accepted, and six months later I was a published author.

After that, more stories came to me. I enjoyed the company of each one as I was writing it, but never felt any pain when a story was completed and I had to watch it toddle off. Our relationships were entirely casual.

Then the novel showed up. I was leaning on the railing of the promenade beside the river after a typically unexciting day at work, watching the early evening light on the water, when I heard a small but clear attention-getting noise from somewhere down by my right knee. When I looked for its source, I saw a book standing there. It was a fairly bulky paperback, balancing on little legs only marginally sturdier than those of its story-length kindred. Its cover was blank, and as the breeze coming off the water ruffled its pages I could see that they were blank too.

The unwritten book and I began talking. Or rather, flirting. The book was quite a charming lothario. I found myself unable to object when it accompanied me to the station, nor when it climbed into the train and took the seat next to mine. I didn
’t mind at all when it got out at my stop and followed me home, though I did wonder what Ivan was going to think. We were quite an ordinary couple. The stories had all been quickish flings, but a novel would require a much longer commitment. Was he ready for a ménage à trois?

His car was in its parking spot. Rather than risk a fuss, I snuck the book indoors in my bag. However, as it and I began to spend days and nights in the spare room by ourselves, he wondered what was going on, and one day he walked in on us. We were on the bed, the book dictating to me. I felt I had to be honest: I explained that I had fallen in love with the book, and wanted nothing more than to bring it into the world.

Ivan took this quite well. In fact, he, too, fell in love with the book. For the next couple of years, he and it and I were an amorous threesome. But once the book was finished, it left us. Ivan accepted its departure philosophically, but I felt bereaved. Even though I was delighted to see its clones when they appeared in shops, I missed my sessions with the original terribly.

I was at a loose end, too. The consuming business of writing a novel had caused me to give up the piano and the craft classes, and then, finally, to quit my job. I couldn
’t crank up any interest in my old hobbies, and I was reluctant to apply myself to ordinary work again. When you’ve written one book the world at large expects you to keep writing books, and I would have been happy to conform to this expectation, since I couldn’t imagine any other pursuit giving me as much pleasure as I’d enjoyed in the company of my paper paramour. The only problem was that there had been no reprise of my experience by the river, and months were going by without another novel approaching me.

A few stories came my way, but I
’d lost the taste for brief liaisons. Writing them was more a duty than a pleasure, and they seemed to notice. Perhaps word got around that I was no fun anymore, since the stories eventually stopped coming. And, indeed, I wasn’t much fun. I was getting depressed and irritable, surly with strangers and waspish with Ivan. Some days I didn’t shower or get dressed. Ivan grew withdrawn, and I couldn’t blame him. I lost touch with friends. I felt bad about all of this, but not as bad as I did about my bookless condition.

There was also the matter of the Devil
’s intercession, which had occurred not long after I finished writing the book, and about which I had said nothing to Ivan. He was a highly principled man, and if I were to tell him of whose aid I had availed myself, I feared he wouldn’t be terribly pleased, and would always think a little less of me. The fact that I was keeping the secret from him added a small but constant weight of guilt to my already burdened mood.

I knew my state of mind would only worsen if I didn
’t find another book to fill the void the first one had left. So I resorted to doing what writers of my ilk must do when unsought: I cruised for books.

I soon came to recognise my own type. If you know what to look for, a writer in search of a book is easy to spot. We
’ll always be alone, usually in a place where there aren’t many people around, and you’ll see us glancing with ill-disguised anxiety at the regions in the vicinity of our calves. We respect territory, the unspoken rule being that we don’t loiter within one another’s sight. To help books find appropriate writers, we use a hanky code. I wore an orange hanky with pale blue checks, indicating a preference for speculative fiction and a secondary interest in general fiction.

I wasn
’t unlucky in the hunt. Quite a few books approached me, and I took most of them home. But the next part of the encounter always went the same way. The book and I would retreat to the spare room, both of us feeling hopeful. My pen would stir, and I’d write a few pages; but then I would notice that I wasn’t falling in love. Most of the books were pleasant company, and I felt that all their stories were worth telling. But the stirrings of passion I felt for some of them had a doomed way of subsiding soon after they had begun. Invariably, after those first pages – or sometimes only paragraphs – my pen would droop and eventually fall out of my fingers to lie on the bedclothes in disgrace.

Most of the books left quietly when I told them I couldn
’t write them. A couple cried bitterly, making me feel terrible. One became violent and hit me over the head with itself.

I was enjoying the lifestyle the royalties from the first book enabled me to lead, but my inner life was giving me no joy at all. I wondered if I should give up writing
– if what I was doing could be called writing – but was unable to persuade myself of the merits of any alternative. I therefore kept to a routine of lurking around suburban railway stations and lonely cafés, hanky displayed in the pocket of my jeans.

I still brought books home, but found myself decreasingly able do anything with them. A hundred words, fifty, ten
– that was what my endurance dwindled to. I couldn’t bear to think that I was never going to have another love affair with a book, but that seemed the most likely prognosis.

This was when I began to wonder if there was something wrong with my pen.

‘I even lost the energy to evict books that wanted to stay with me,’ I admitted to the Devil, concluding a précis of my situation. ‘Four of them are still living in our flat. My husband treats them like pets, even though they’re obviously taking advantage of his good nature. They’ve turned our living room into a pigsty. I can’t even bring other books home anymore. I have to take them to hotel rooms, and that costs money. I need to fall in love with a book again, and I don’t think I can do it by myself. I need your help.’

‘
It sounds a most trying situation,’ said my ally when I was finished, ‘but I’m afraid that what you’re asking is the one thing I can’t help you with.’

I was flummoxed.
‘But why not? Don’t tell me you’re incapable of casting a simple love spell.’

The Devil grinned devilishly.
‘I can’t help you,’ he said, ‘because of our contract.’

‘
But we don’t have a contract. You said so.’

‘
Actually, my dear,
you
said so.’

I tried to remember, and had to concede that he was right. I had been the one who said we didn
’t have a contract. But if we did have one, why couldn’t I remember signing it?

‘
If we’ve got a contract, you must have a copy. Show it to me.’

‘
Certainly.’ With a graceful wave of his hand, he plucked a piece of paper out of the air and gave it to me to read.

It was a very ordinary looking contract. No letters of fire, just 12
-point Times New Roman. The signatures were in plain black ink, not blood. One was indisputably mine. The other consisted of barbed and twisted marks that looked like melting pitchforks. Eyes better educated than mine could perhaps have deciphered it. Or perhaps not.

In any case, the contract was short and to the point
.

There were only four paragraphs. The first contained the Devil
’s pledge to promote the book to the full extent of his abilities. The second paragraph, which gave me a shock, stated that the Devil was entitled to claim a percentage of my soul – 20% was the figure – at the time of my death. In the third paragraph I granted something additional, namely that I would never be able to fall in love with another unwritten work of fiction. The fourth paragraph stipulated that the Devil would cause me to forget the existence of the contract, and the circumstances under which it had been caused to exist, for a period of three years or until I approached him with a request for aid in regard to problems arising from paragraph 3.

Would I miss 20% of my soul? Surely not, I tried telling myself. I might even be able to claim it as a tax deduction. Trying to summon a bit of inner bravado, I made a mental note to ask my accountant about the value of a soul, and whether I could claim the loss as an expense while I was still alive. But as for the third paragraph, I couldn
’t believe I’d agreed to such a thing.