The Digested Twenty-first Century (8 page)

Who knows?

Adrian naturally went on to Cambridge while I continued my less than average life at Bristol. There I met Veronica Ford, who was to become my first girlfriend. Though when I say girlfriend, I don’t mean that in quite the sense you may think, as though this was the 60s. The 60s didn’t really happen until the 70s for me. If then. I’m still not too sure. But Veronica and I kissed now and again, and she once invited me to her home in Chislehurst for the weekend. It wasn’t a great success. Her father and brother were stand-offish, Veronica appeared ashamed of me and only her mother was in the least bit pleasant. Though I didn’t understand
what she meant when she said: ‘Don’t let Veronica get away with too much.’ But then, she might not have said it anyway.

I could go on, but as I can sense you might quickly tire of the flatness of my prose, the absence of any emotion and the repetition of the unreliability trope, I propose to keep this short. I did eventually sleep with Veronica, after we had split up, but it wasn’t very satisfactory for me so I split up with her again. In any case she had shown rather too much much interest in Adrian on the one occasion they had met. At least that’s how it all seemed, though I can’t really have cared too much as I went travelling to America after I left Bristol. I came home to discover Adrian had committed suicide. My sense of grief was overshadowed by one of awe for his wholehearted embrace of Camus.

There’s not much to say about the next 40 years. I got a job, got married to Margaret, had a child and then got divorced after my wife left me. I’m surprised you haven’t left me as well. Though maybe you have and I just don’t remember. I was living on my own when a letter arrived informing me I had been left £500 and Adrian’s diary in Veronica’s mother’s will. The money duly arrived, but the solicitor informed me there was a problem with the diary.

I called Margaret to ask for her help. ‘Do you think I loved Veronica?’ I said. It might seem a strange question; stranger still that I chose to ask it of my ex-wife. But the one thing I have never forgotten is that I am almost catatonically disconnected. ‘You’re on your own now,’ Margaret replied. Which was also odd, as I was under the impression I already was.

It fell to me to contact Veronica by email. Veronica’s behaviour was even stranger than my own, arranging to meet me and then leaving me without saying a word and then taking me for a drive past a group of care in the community people, also without
explaining why. And as I am a doormat, it didn’t occur to me to ask. Not that I can remember anyway. It also turned out I had sent a rather bitchy letter to Adrian when I realised he and Veronica were attracted to one another, and that Veronica had burned his diary, apart from one page. From this I guessed that one of the handicapped adults must have been Adrian and Veronica’s child.

Even a novella requires an ending, so I suppose I had better cut to the chase. With an improbable piece of deduction based on an equation Adrian had written, I realised the handicapped person must have been Adrian and Veronica’s mother’s child. So Adrian’s suicide wasn’t so heroic. Or was it? After all, why should I be any more reliable now than I was at the beginning?

Digested read, digested:
The Sense of Familiarity.

Let us start with Madeleine’s books. Jane Austen, George Eliot and Edith Wharton. Yes, she is an incurable romantic, but there was nothing romantic about her on this, her graduation day, from Brown University. She was dishevelled from the night before; her dress had an awkward stain and she was trying to avoid her parents’ disapprobation by spending time with her friend, Mitchell.

‘I still don’t fancy you, but I thought you should know that me and Leonard just split up,’ she said. ‘Why am I supposed to care?’ Mitchell replied, a question readers would soon be asking themselves.

So how did Madeleine’s love life get to this point? In her first year at Brown in 1979, she had had many admirers, but had
remained faithful to her fictional male leading characters, but at some point during the semiotics option she had been persuaded that everything was text and that since she herself was a character in a novel there was no real need to differentiate between Mr Darcy and any of the other students. There followed 50 pages of Barthesian banter and an equally masturbatory relationship with a boy named Billy, which ended when the mirror being held up to the reader broke. For a while thereafter, Madeleine sought comfort in Mitchell, a religious studies student, and might even once have allowed him to have sex with her, had he not been so frozen by her beauty. As it was, the moment passed and she began an affair with Leonard, a dazzlingly semi-detached science undergraduate.

‘I love you,’ she said, as he came inside her.

‘Barthes says that once the first avowal has been made, ‘I love you’ has no meaning,’ Leonard replied. Rather than recognising that Leonard was a bit of a tosser, Madeleine fell even deeper in love with Leonard, as she had read that Barthes had also said that love is extreme solitude. So their relationship continued until he stopped going to seminars three months before graduation. Madeleine chose to deconstruct his absence as him having dumped her and so it was that she had allowed another student to come on her dress.

‘We must hurry, or we’ll be late for graduation,’ said Mitchell.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ said her room mate. ‘Leonard has been in a mental hospital for the past three months.’

‘Marry me, Madeleine,’ Leonard begged, as she entered the psych ward.

Any number of thoughts might have entered the reader’s mind at this point. How did Madeleine fail to realise Leonard was bonkers from the start? Why did she not bother to find out
Leonard was in hospital earlier? And was this the dullest love triangle in literature? But we cannot allow ourselves to enter the realms of sub-text or meta-text; instead we must stay with text and pursue our characters through to the bitter end.

Mitchell was alone in a Parisian hotel, pining for Madeleine, whom he had kissed just before he left New York. How had he got there? Well, he’d set off to Europe, armed with loads of books on which he would frequently discourse at length with his friend Larry, who had come to see his feminist girlfriend but turned out to be gay. Meanwhile, Leonard was trying to lose weight. How had he got to that point? Well, he’d become distrustful of the lithium and the steroids he had been prescribed and had been trying to wean himself off the drugs, both so that he could get a decent erection and to clear his mind for his research.

Madeleine wondered why she had married Leonard. A not unreasonable question, one might have thought, were it not that the narrative was going to take yet another backward leap to again fail to explain why. Like Leonard and Mitchell, she was stuck in a fictive trope and condemned to be a stylistic, one-dimensional irritation.

Mitchell too was in despair; not so much because he had been unable to persuade Madeleine to leave Leonard, but because he knew he was getting on everyone’s nerves by going on for 70 pages about his religious enlightenment and Mother Teresa, yet was powerless to do anything about it because he didn’t really exist. He might have felt a little better if he had known Leonard was also feeling the same way. How he longed to say he wasn’t just a cocktail of drugs and bipolar symptoms and that being depressed didn’t mean he had to be so depressing.

Finally, Leonard cracked. ‘I’m divorcing you, Madeleine,’ he said.

‘I guess this is the moment in romantic fiction when you decide
you’re in love with the good guy,’ said Mitchell. ‘But this is a postmodern romantic novel, so I’m going to leave you to be happy by yourself.’

‘At last,’ said everyone.

Digested read, digested:
The Marriage Plod.

‘It is a great honour to receive you here at Wolf Hall, your majesty,’ says old Sir John Seymour, fresh from tupping his daughter-in-law’s quinny. ‘Though I had rather been expecting you some three years ago, when the first book came out.’

Thomas Cromwell observes Henry’s eyes lingering on Jane Seymour’s heaving, virginal bosom. ‘The King is tiring of Anne and there is no male successor,’ he thinks to himself. ‘A wise Master Secretary would do well to prepare the way for a third marriage –’

‘A wiser Master Secretary would do better to ruminate for a while on the death of his wife and daughters, and conduct imaginary conversations with Sir Thomas More in which he expresses regret that the former Lord Chancellor refused to swear the oath of succession and thus condemned himself to the block,’ Hilary interrupts urgently.

‘And why should I want to do that?’ Cromwell snaps, his mind already on how much money he can make from the dissolution of the monasteries.

‘Because I’m trying to rewrite you as Mr Nice Guy, you moron,’ Hilary says. ‘Instead of the hard bastard you undoubtedly are.’

‘Come, Crumb,’ yells Henry. ‘I need my finest pair of ears to return to court with me.’

‘Gosh, sire, you are much too kind. I just pootle around trying to do silly old me’s inadequate best,’ Cromwell replies. He finds maintaining this self-effacing Stephen Fry shtick annoying, though he has to admit it does make his opponents underestimate him. And Hilary keeps assuring him that the readers love it. ‘But first I must retire to my house in Stepney. This present-tense narrative is making me breathless.’

His spies tell Thomas that Catherine is dying. The news is not unexpected but it is timely, for the Emperor will surely not contemplate making war with Britain once the former Queen is dead. ‘Send my condolences,’ he says. ‘I shall miss her.’

‘You could at least sound as if you mean it,’ Hilary whispers.

‘Would it help if I were to lament the loss of my wife and daughters again?’

‘You learn fast,’ she replies.

‘Ah, there you are, Cremuel!’

Thomas looks up, trying to disguise his irritation. The Queen has addressed him thus ever since the King bought her the Pink Panther box set and he doesn’t find it funny. ‘Gosh, yes, your majesty. Pray tell me what silly old hopeless me can do to help you.’

‘I require an audience with the King.’

He nods, though he has no intention of securing one. Since her latest miscarriage, her days as Queen are numbered. And not a moment too soon, though obviously he balances this thought with regret at how much he misses his own wife.

‘Tell me, Master Smeaton,’ Thomas asks of one of the Queen’s courtiers.

‘Did you make love to the Queen?’

‘Oh yes,’ squeals Smeaton.

‘And you’re not just saying that because I’ve put you in the Tower near the torture chamber?’

‘Oh no, my Lord! Her Majesty is a right goer. She’s shagged absolutely everyone, including her brother.’

The Master Secretary sighs. He does not want to see so many go to the block when his wife’s death’s on his mind, but if they will confess of their own free will, what can he do? He walks purposefully towards the King’s bedchamber and tells him: ‘The Queen’s head has unfortunately become detached from her body. Your marriage is annulled and you are free to marry Jane.’

‘I knew I could rely on you, Crumb,’ Henry laughs.

Thomas retires to Stepney to count his royalties with Hilary. ‘Please take your time over the last volume,’ he begs her. ‘I’d like some time to enjoy my wealth before I, too, get the chop.’

Digested read, digested:
Bring Up the Booker.

2006: Dear Jennaveieve, I’m havin’g an affair with my Gran. The sex is grea’t but Im worried that my uncle Lionel will thin’k there is somefing wron’g wiv me shaggin’g hi’s Mum. I dont know why cos shes only 39 as she ha’d her fir’st child when she was 12 and me own Mum had me at 12 so I is actua’lly startin’g well late as I am 15. Your’s Desmond Pepperdine.

Des was less sure if he would send this letter to the Morning Lark’s Page 3 Stunna Agony Aunt than he was about whether he needed help from Mart with his apostrophes. ‘The thing is,’ said Mart, ‘I know – or care – nothing for the lower orders, so my attitude towards
you is a mixture of contempt and patrician sentimentality. But I’ve always said that punctuation is the key to social mobility.’ Des looked up guiltily as Uncle Lionel entered the room. ‘I’ve just changed me fuckin name to Lionel Asbo,’ he snarled, ‘to celebrate the fact I was the youngest kid to get an Asbo at the age of three. Now wheres they fucking pitbulls? I need them to rip out the throat of your nonce friend Rory who’s been taking liberties by knockin off me Mum.’

2008: Nothing had happened to the literati of west London in the intervening years, but in Diston where Lionel and Des lived, the mayhem that invariably accompanies the criminal underclasses had proceeded with gratifying regularity. Rory had gone awol, Lionel had discovered his bird Gina was getting one from his best mate Marlon and had gone berserk at their wedding, and half the residents of Diston had ended up in Wormwood Scrubs in the ensuing fracas.

‘I have to inform you, Asbo,’ the governor said, ‘that you have just won £140,000,000 on the lottery.’

‘Fuck me,’ Lionel replied, ‘I suppose that means Mart is going to make me owt ter be even more of a caricature of a chav van before.’

‘Well that just shows what a moronic oik you are,’ Mart drawled, ‘because you have no concept of Swiftian satire.’

Des had long since absorbed Mart’s tips on punctuation and had gone to university, so he was in a position to wonder if it was Mart who had no concept of Swiftian satire, but he kept that thought to himself as he now had a respectable girlfriend and was still worried Lionel might discover he had once shagged his Gran.

2010: ‘Your Gran’s so fuckin old now she’s got demencha,’ said Lionel. ‘I’ve packed her off to a care home.’ Des knew that even in Diston the average life expectancy was more than 43, but he had a job working for the Daily Mirror and Dawnie was pregnant, so he had other things to think about other than being patronised
by Mart. ‘You’re a fuckin’ disappointin’ nonce to me, Des,’ Lionel continued, ‘but you’re me flesh’n’blood so I’ll give you a fiver.’ If he hadn’t shaved his head he’d have pulled his hair out at the things he was doing for Mart. Buying a mansion, calling it Wormwood Scrubs, goin out with Threnody the silicon-titted glamour model, making Marlon watch him fuck Gina ... It was like Mart had only just discovered reality TV.