The House of Writers (19 page)

“Go stuff your own hole.”

“Is
this dog luminous?”

“Depends.”

“Might I suggest a hermeneutic approach
?”

“Never!”

“Is
a battered fish bettered when buttered?”

“Bitterly.”

“How do I raise the temperature on cold days?”

“Reach up and twist the knob.”

“Does a leopard with chicken pox have double the spots?”

“A chicken with leopard pox does.”

“Is it possible to reconcile two broken-hearted lovers?”

“Only after dousing them in petrol.”

“Can I swallow eternity?”

“If you believe.”

“Is a button a mammal?”

“All mammals are buttons but not all buttons are mammals.”

“Is it?”

“No.”

“Can I support a privet hedge with bolsters?”

“Yesnobe.”

“Green waders or blue waders?”

“Shoot yourself.”

I became a competent cook and oven-user. My speciality was frozen chips and beefburgers, and I found several robosnail thingies outside and stir-fried them with a dozen strands of grass-substitute I stole from the sheep. Peter suggested I slaughter several sheep to boil haggis (the former national dish when ScotCall was ScotLand—the national dish at the time of writing is a chicken tikka masala wrap with lettuce and mustard). Tired of this samey and punitive diet, I headed toward the concrete fields to bludgeon one of the flocculent idlers. I dealt the killing blow with my makeshift baseball bat and its insides split open, parting to reveal a Gordian of wires and cables. On closer inspection I noted the sheep were nibbling on cables and wires, not grass-substitute (and that I had fed Pete and Rob robosnail thingies with wires and cables—not grass-substitute!). A cursory examination of the wires revealed the word “ScotCall” along their green sheaths, and I wagered that if nibbled down to the nub, mass disturbances could be caused on the lines and help us overthrow their empire. I observed that the reason the sheep weren’t penetrating right down to the nubs was that the wires went between their teeth and they could merely suck and champ on the wires (sometimes being zapped to death and combusting in flameballs).

“If we sharpened the teeth of these mechanical sheep creature thingies, we can have them penetrating the ScotCall lines. If we breed them too, we could have an army of cable-munching annihilators from Hell. Thoughts?”

“Got no other ideas,” Pete burped.

“You get to it,” Rob burped. “We’re busy listening to the Best of Val Doonican.”

“Who?”

“No idea. Music sounds like it was made in the Stone Age.”

“When?”

“Go round up your sheep, fuckyboo. After making us dinner,” Pete sneered.

I hated those arseholes. But I had hit upon an ingenious plan liable to win me folk-hero status four centuries down the line. I proceeded with glee.

A
N
hour later Gail Adams Galloway took to the microphone to recite her most memorable sentences. “Here we stand in ... no wait, that’s not right. Here we are in the middle of ... no, that’s not correct ... I wouldn’t start like that. I think it’s She was walking in the ... road? sidewalk? farmhouse? The cover of the book I wrote was rural. She was walking on the sidewalk and something about a rabbit. I can’t remember,” she said, looking to the audience for help, searching the hostile and sympathetic eyes for some trace of her words, her lost stories swimming in the pools of their eyes, and retreated. Julian Porter encouraged others to take to the stage, but Galloway’s blankness made them realise that, aside from T.C. Boyle, who had his collected works memorised, no one was confident they could quote verbatim from their own or their colleagues’ sentences, and they all refrained from taking to the mic. This left T.C. Boyle free to step up and resume reading from his first story collection,
Descent of Man.
A collective moan ensued and conversation sprung up again. The bleak realisation Galloway had implanted in the writers’ minds turned the conversations hostile and defensive. Álvaro Enrigue accused Stephen-Paul Martin of cribbing parts of his oeuvre from a flash fiction he posted online, and Martin called Álvaro a nutcase, and Álvaro muttered a rude remark about Stephen-Paul’s sister as he walked away, and Stephen-Paul shouted that he didn’t even have a sister; Stuart Kelly accused Jessica Treat of neglecting the work of Boeotian poet Hesiod, and Jessica recited accurate biographical information about Hesoid, and Stuart retorted that this didn’t mean she was familiar with his poems, and Jessica refused to quote to prove herself to some “fourth-rate Hazlitt manqué,” and Stuart was too stunned and confused to retort; Andrew O’Hagan accused Reyoung of patronising him about writing mainstream novels and not hanging out with the hip and soi-disant avant-garde, Reyoung replied that mainstream success meant readers, and he had never had one of those apart from his darling wife Candice Filigree, and O’Hagan said that Reyoung had invented a fake wife with a cool name to outdo him, since his wife was plain old Linda Jones, and Reyoung explained that his wife taught advanced calculus to high school students in hideous sweaters and could never be considered cool, and O’Hagan said he was showing off his wife’s intellect in another attempt to outdo him, and Reyoung said that inventing an uncool wife to impress a Scottish hack was not his conversational bag, and O’Hagan opened his mouth wide in a stunned O, in a clever mirroring of the O’ in his surname; Steve Hely accused Javier Marías of writing over-long run-on sentences to fill up the pages, produce more books, and rake in the cash, and Javier refused to respond to the accusation, tilting his head towards a reanimated salmon dancing the cancan, and Hely hurled unspeakable abuse at the back of this tilted head; James Wood accused Lucy Ellmann of inciting hatred at the peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine by sexting a Ukrainian beefcake, and Lucy said that she had been fucking the Ukrainian beefcake as the peace treaty was being signed so could not be blamed, and James said that she had been fucking the Ukrainian under the table where the peace treaty was being signed, and Lucy said that she had been fucking with no sound apart from the rustle of their mutual thrusts on the axminster, and James said that she had shouted “fuck the Ukraine!” several times under the table, and Lucy that she had shouted “fuck me, Ukrainian!” as she came, and that is what led to the peace treaty cancellation and subsequent war, and James said that fucking a Ukrainian beefcake under the table as a peace treaty was being co-signed was the worst possible time to fuck a Ukrainian beefcake, and Lucy said that one never knows when Eros will strike, and that she hadn’t had sex in two years prior to that, so the fuck was splendid and no regrets; Karrie Fransman accused Antoine Volodine of milking the list form to the point of extreme tedium, and Antoine replied that the list form is a perfect means to distil the experience of living without recourse to the banal business of telling one linear tale of one character after another, and Karrie said that lists were for anal retentives, those with Asperger’s syndrome, or writers struggling to think up proper plots, characters, and storylines, and Antoine said that listing was a means of coping with the infinite potential of sitting before a blank page, and the précis was as valid a form as the 1000-page epic, and Karrie lost interest in the conversation and stared at her loafers, and Antoine praised her taste in loafers, and Karrie asked if he was coming on to her, and Antoine said yes, you are fucking beautiful, and Karrie said sorry, I have a fabulous husband named Nate; Affinity Konar accused Mark Z. Danielewski of popularising the blank page, and precipitating a spate of non-books (not in the Benabouian sense) where the occasional random word-speck could be glimpsed in a minuscule font among the wall of whitewash, and Mark said so , and Affinity said that was a puerile response and a waste of half a minute, and Mark said when , and Affinity said he made a compelling argument, and Mark said therefore , and Affinity said that she couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid, and was there any way she could repay him for her stupidity, and Mark said skateboard , and Affinity said she’d rather not as she had a sore back; Graham Rawle accused William T. Vollmann of excess, and William said that excess, inordinateness, nimiety, overabundance, overindulgence, supererogatoriness, superfluity, and surplusage was always necessary, and Graham knocked him out with a punch to the chin before he could utter another syllable. This act of violence proved prescient for how the evening was set to end.

M
Y
residence on The House roof is a large rectangular shedcum-house (a shouse) containing my bed, two chillout chairs with tiger-skin wraparounds, and my collection of fortune-bearing talismans. These items were discovered at various Highland locations when my parents moved around the country selling vacuum bags, and I have placed them at strategic places in the room due to my superstitious nature. These include: a severed marmot’s foot from Thurso; a poster of a right-wing shepherd from Castletown; an inkblot test resembling the constellation Orion from Braes of Harrow; the diseased bowel of an Angus cow from Dunnet Head; a preserved sprig of a Pictish radish from John O’Groats; a facsimile of unpublished Rabbie Burns poem “Oh! Midges!” from Tongue Wood; a scale model of a Victorian “field of sheds” from Wick; a jar of wandering hydrogen from Borgie Forest; a hygiene wipe signed “To Lydia, I implore you to reconsider, Love Baz” from Loch Lucy; a tapestry criticising the art of tapestries from Altnabreac; a sketch of former boxer Mike Tyson from Helmsdale; a vial of an unidentified liquid believed to be an unguent used to cure Orcadian colic from Dornach; a sprig of heather sprouting through a frog’s corpse from Brora; an instruction manual on how to cheer tenebrous sheep from Golspie; the keys to a Rover 50 parked precariously on a cliff-edge from Lairg; a thistle boiled in milk and strained through a washerwoman’s tights from Alness; the syllabus of a small press founded on the Isle of Bute, consisting of two texts, Robert Alan Jamieson’s
Soor Hearts
and Philip K. Dick’s
Ubik
from Tain; the spare tyre of a JCB hauler from Evanton. These items, although causing considerable clutter and requiring storage outside the shouse, perform important functions to sate my superstitious nature. The shouse was constructed by Gerald, about whom I will write in my next installment.

M
Y
mum suggested I sign up for The House of Writers because I wrote stories about horses and chairs and things so I said good idea. I didn’t want to do it alone however so I suggested she come with me and she agreed. She said she would help me with the writing and manage the financial side so I didn’t have to think about practical worries. I said thanks Mum. The best thing for me to write was erotica so she signed me up to that floor and bought me a desk where I could work and write prose for the readers. At first I was confused about what I was supposed to be writing but Mum filled me in and explained that erotica was a genre that dealt with sexual intercourse between two human beings. So I set about writing scenes of sexual intercourse between men and men and women and women and the variations of sexual possibility that exist in the world and showed the first draft to Mum. She said the descriptions of rimming and fellatio were not adequate so she suggested I add more description about the tongue working the rim of the cockshaft and made tongue movements to demonstrate. I said thanks Mum. I had written a novel containing two adventurous lovemakers who take pleasure making love in public places with an especial focus on oral activities involving the intake of seminal fluid. Mum was proud. I made four pounds on the first book and this gave me enthusiasm to continue with the next. I wrote a tribadic erotic tale this time featuring four women who like making love to each other in train stations. Mum criticised the scenes of anal penetration with dildos and suggested I emphasise the strain taken on the buttocks when the lubricated dildos were being inserted via the rectum. She pulled down her underpants and demonstrated the difficulty of inserting a rigid item into that orifice by forcing a stapler between her wide-open buttocks. I said thanks Mum.

E
VERY
clichéd impression you may have of romance novelists is surpassed when you step into the dense fog of pinkness that is the fifth floor. Scented smoke puffs from two pipes, coating the foyer in a candyfloss mist. You inhale the scent and choke your way along the corridor, past barely perceptible posters of catalogue model hunks and swooning heroines, towards a large room dolled up like an extravagantly cheap hotel. Four ladies in their late fifties with caked-on makeup sit writing beside perfume dispensers, puffing a peachy fragrance into the air every few minutes—a heady bordello scent—and will either leap up to meet you or barely grant you a careless peep, as is their wont. They told me their names, annexed my body, and enclosed me in a peach-scented hug. Over Bertie’s shoulder, I saw Tina’s daughter Oh, a dowdy beanpole cowering in the corner whom I had mistaken for a hat stand. She was one fifteenth the body mass of her mother, as though made from one of her ribs, and stood in a stylishly sulky teapot stance watching without expression as my lungs were cleared of breath. I surrendered to the cushiony heft of their arms and bosoms. As they turned to plant a sequence of unsolicited pecks on my cheeks, their shrapnelly eyelashes scraped my ears and scalp, and when the sequence of slurpy mwah-mwahs had ended, my cheeks were a painter’s palette of reds and pinks. “Aren’t you a big plate of cuteness on rye with salami, soybeans, and peppermint jalapeños?” Bertie asked. “He’s a bowl of unmitigated loveliness with extra pastrami and coochie-croutons,” Tina countered. “No he’s not!” Cassie almost shouted. “He’s a serving of xylophone meat with tuba crackers, cor anglais nachos, trumpet lettuce, horn radish, oboe lemons, fiddle rice, violin turkeys, harmonium dips, and double bass pudding.” An awkward pause followed as Cassie sank back to her desk, having overdone it again.