Loe raamatut: «The Treehouse & Other Stories», lehekülg 3

Critical Murder

An old adage has it that you can't please all of the people all of the time. This is particularly true of critics, whom one is hard pressed to please any of the time. Reviewing my latest novel, one member of this irksome and dogmatic brigade accused me of writing the most 'rancid garbage' it had ever been his misfortune to come across. He denigrated the novel, (as he has flagellated all my other novels), with other choice epithets: 'maladroit', 'graceless', 'obscene', 'vulgar' and etcetera. Well, of course! The prose is 'rancid', but that is by design since the novel is about the lowlife of the fleshpots of London's Soho district. If a writer is dealing with rent boys, druggies, dealers, whores, kleptos, pimps and whatnot, it follows that the prose must be rancid and embellished with a thousand sordid images. The manicured and exquisite narrative of, say, Brideshead Revisited, would be out of place.

The work in question contains 297 uses of 'fuck' (and its creative variations), and 134 instances of 'cunt', plus a great number of other less than drawing-room-approved expletives.

It is interesting to ponder, for a moment, the etymology of that most earthy noun, 'cunt'. It originated in India through the goddess Kunti, and evolved from the Old Norse kunta. So, you might argue that 'cunt' has a divine origin. At any rate, it goes back a long way. Apparently, it first appeared in English in the 13th century. Believe it or not, it was the name of a street in Oxford, rejoicing in the wonderfully incisive Gropecunt Lane, presumably some kind of medieval redlight district. I argue that my use of these, to some, offensive and taboo words, is not in the least gratuitous because this is how my fictional characters, based on real people I met and observed, actually speak. And, by the way, 'rancid garbage' is tautological because garbage is by its nature putrid. You wouldn't say, for example, 'wholesome garbage', would you?

So, you see, novelists write and critics criticize because they can't write, and take great pleasure in savaging those who can. The critic in this case has one of those fustian and effete English Christian names: Aubrey. Rhymes with strawberry. To me, he is forever Aubrey Cuntsworth! An unbiddable juxtaposition of vowels: his name is, in fact, Aubrey Cantsworth. And by God he comes out with some egregious cant for the ghastly right-wing rags he is paid to carp for. He has a great distaste of the demotic in modern literature, his preference being more Margaret Drabble than Irving Welsh. He gives talks about it, and sometimes gets his sour coupon and glib tongue on TV to rant about 'the decline of the English novel, sunk in a morass of ungrammatical depravity'.

Is that so? I have a good mind to act the part of a wild, drunken, hell-raising writer, in the Hemingway mould, and give the reductive Cuntsworth a black eye when I see him next. This bone-headed reactionary who wishes to arrest the progress of the English novel. Who does he think he is? I shall be sure to administer Aubrey a real, eye-popping shiner at some public event. On television would be ideal. For example, during one of those self-congratulatory talk shows the British and Americans are so fond of. It would create a scandal, and the notoriety I would accrue would be good for my book sales. Bad boy author socks critic in the eye on TV! Indeed, a socking good headline!

Now, I suppose, I should tell you about the novel and its 'rancid garbage'. I originally titled it Cunts of Soho. My publisher thought it daring, but the American counterpart had a fit and so the title was truncated and became the abbreviated Soho. My British publisher cravenly acquiesced in the matter of the title to the puritanism of the Americans.

Inspite of or perhaps because of Aubrey's damning and vituperative criticism, the book is doing rather well. My agent informed me just this morning that she is negotiating a good figure for the film rights with the Coast. That is what Margot said: 'The Coast.' Being somewhat hungover it took a few seconds to interpret the Coast as Hollywood. So, ya boo sucks, critics! 'The most disgusting book I have ever had the misfortune to read' (Aubrey Cuntsworth), will apparently be a major motion picture. The producers will probably fuck it all up and anodynize the narrative beyond all description. Never mind, they will have paid me handsomely for the right to butcher my work.

The novel follows the fortunes of a rentboy called Gary Osmond who hangs round the Dilly selling hash and/or his arse to whoever is buying. To give you a flavour of the 'rancid garbage', here is a short extract from chapter one:

'Gary did as instructed and came in the client's arse. Also, as bidden, he took a snap of his spunk oozing out of the still twitching gape. The client's name was Henry, actually a real hooray Henry who had fond memories of being buggered at Harrow. Gary used Henry's smart phone for the pornographic purpose, and together he and Henry admired the spunky masterpiece.

'I say,' said Henry. 'What a splendiferous shot.' Lying naked on the bed and scratching his wobbly, disgustingly albescent belly, he seemed unaware of the pun. Gary lit a spliff and handed it to Henry, saying, 'Yeah, it'll look fucking wicked over your mantlepiece in Sloane Square.' Henry guffawed. 'Not sure the wife would approve, what!'

I realise that this kind of in-your-face realism/smut/filth, whatever you want to call it, will not be to everyone's tastes. But that is a matter of supreme indifference to me. The fact is, you don't have to read it. You can rip the novel up and use it for kindling for all I care. Or, perhaps, use it to level a wobbly table that has one leg shorter than the others. In fact, the leg would have to be a good deal shorter because the tome is Dickensian in length. The story, not of course the prose and vocabulary, is also Dickensian in sweep; it is a social commentary on the depravity of London, involving a large cast of reprobrates and unsavoury characters – modern day Fagins, Artful Dodgers, etcetera.

I reserve the right as a writer to shock, disgust, discombobulate, and, by any means possible, ruffle the feathers of luddite complacency. I am talking about literary evolution, progress, innovation, originality… a moving forwards so as not to become tedious and derivative. Stuck in a rut of accepted style and structure, and so on. Writers need to come up with new ways to whack unsuspecting readers upside the head, otherwise we would still be writing the kind of pleonastic and florid prose found in Victorian novels. I am not bashing Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austin, the Brontes, et al; they were of their time, and they wrote appropriately for it. I am a great fan of the Brontes and Charles Dickens, but to write like them would, naturally, be unnatural. I also admire more recent writers such as Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh, but what would be the point, other than it being a purely academic exercise, to emulate them? It would be prose by facsimile; in other words a complete waste of bloody time.

So, when writing about rentboys, tarts, dealers and other denizens of the street, the writer must necessarily employ the appropriate vernacular, unpleasant as it may be to the delicate ear.

By the way, I detest people who pass their appalled, poker-up-the-arse judgment without actually having read the work they so vehemently denounce. Oh yes, a lot of that goes on. Well, at least, Cuntsworth appears to have read Soho, or skimmed it at least. In some ways, I suppose, I must be obliged to him for fanning the flames of the novel's notoriety. His niggardly appraisal and final conclusion that it was the most depraved book he had ever read (he can't have read any Charles Bukowski!) no doubt helps the book's sales. A prurient and voyeuristic tendency among a great many readers today is something that can be counted on. They want sex, violence, and lashings of dope to titillate them, to enliven dreary commutes to and from their offices and work places. To quote a popular song: 'Sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll is [sic] very good indeed.'

Allow me to digress a little here. In the seventies, there walked among us a hysterical harpie of righteousness, the personification of primness and propriety. Her name was Constance Mary Whitehouse, and she became something of a celebrity in Great Britain. She spent her life being disgusted and bewailing the depravity of the permissive society and its loose morals. Constance was constant in this. She decried television with its parade of promiscuous demimondaines and louche commentators of all stripes. She sent blizzards of complaints to the BBC on a regular basis; her cries of outrage were clarion calls to conservative decency and decorum. But her attempts to bowdlerize anything and everything that smacked of the lewd were akin to King Canute trying to command the waves of the sea to turn back. The times had changed, after all. Sex was in demand. The risible irony is that a well known porn baron of the day decided to dub his candid and gynaecologically focused mag, Whitehouse. A dubious honour, and I am sure it must have maddened Mary to blood-vessel-bursting point, but it really served her right for being such a crashing bore about sex.

Mary was squeamish to the point of delirium about what the Americans call cuss words. But sex was the real bugaboo. According to Mrs. Whitehouse and her cohorts, sex was something you couldn't possibly talk about, or, God forbid, depict or disseminate in any shape or form. Presumably, sexual intercourse could only be indulged in for the purpose of procreation – of course, with the lights out, in the missionary position, and 'thinking of England', although why one would want to think of Blighty when having it off has always been a mystery to me.

Back to Aubrey: a more literary, more astute version of Mary Constance Whitehouse. I know what I would like to do with that canting, mealy-mouthed tosser. Murder him in public! Don't be alarmed – this is a fantasy homicide, and not an original one either; I saw a disgruntled author do this to a critic in a film.

So, I envision a glittering literary event taking place on the rooftop of a very high building. Champagne is flowing and erudite conversation is cascading like clever sewage from a pullulation of publishers, critics and authors – the self-aggrandizing literati of London. I am there with my writer colleagues, Martin, Julian et al, insulting them whenever possible, but in a more or less jocular fashion because I admire them; indeed, I am in awe of their exquisitely woven plots, and formiddable skill at stringing together sentences of immaculate syntax. Perfectly rythmic and balanced. Blown away by their mastery of le mot juste.

Then I spot Aubrey Cuntsworth who is holding forth in a nasal whine about the 'debauched and regrettable prose' of certain writers. I hear my name mentioned and I sidle up to the unsuspecting hack. By the way, I am a fairly hefty chap, blessed with preternaturally strong biceps, while Aubrey is a nauseating little twerp wearing rimless glasses and a florid bowtie. I rip his preposterous polkadot neck adornment from his throat and dump it in a nearby bowl of dip. This causes some consternation but nothing like the consternation that is to follow. There is an altercation, naturally. Aubrey is vociferous in his condemnation of my sullying his beloved bowtie in a bowl of Guacamole.

'You'll pay for that, you odious man!' he screeches.

'Shut the fuck up, Aubrey,' I retort, sharp and nasty. 'It's time you came down off your pontificating high horse.'

'What on earth are you talking about, you pathetic, sewer-talking excuse for an author?'

'I am talking about the fall.'

'The fall of what? Your book sales?'

Aubery smirks at his witticism which really gets my goat. I allow a slight pause for dramatic effect, before screaming at the top of my lungs, 'The fall of yourself! You canting cunt!'

And without further ado, I drag the wretch to the safety wall at the edge of the rooftop and heave him over the top. Yep! Just like that. Aubrey Cuntsworth has 40 floors to fall, and a very brief time to consider the grave error of insulting homicidal authors, before he becomes strawberry Aubrey on the unyielding tarmac below – a sanguinary and satisfying conclusion to his blithering career.

There is, as might be expected, shock and awe, hysteria among the gobsmacked and distraught assembly. I ignore their plangent cries and march to the bar. I demand gin with menaces, and sit back to await the inevitable arrival of the men in blue. I imagine that I shall be going down for some time, but console myself with the fact that I can write in the nick, and that my murderous notoriety should ensure substantial and lucrative book sales for some time to come.

Yes. Don't worry! It is, after all, merely a fantasy murder. But I do think that when I next come across the canting toad, I should give him a good sock in the eye. It's what Hemingway would have done.

Shirt Story

'My God! That shirt is louder than the band,' screeches a voice above the cacophony. We are at the hop. The boys are thrashing away: the drummer pounds a jack hammer in counterpoint to the wailing of electrified guitars. Pummelled by the Pentatonic and Blues scales – 12 bars with a turnaround. Rock 'n' Roll! Each time the lead guitarist launches into a solo his face twists into that contorted look people get when they're trying to eject a troublesome turd. The squealing of his Fender is as intense as a chainsaw.

The shirt squeezes through the sweating, writhing crowd, but it is four years ahead of its time, a riot of colour repudiated for its ludic impudence. And the shock and surprise will shortly turn from simple shirtiness to outright savagery. In a small town in 1962 (never mind where), shirts comply with the prevailing colour-code. Or else!

To begin at the apex, there is the stuffed shirt: pristine and white, sartorial apotheosis for the man about town. White shirt, black tie. The gentleman's choice. For those who tend to expound conservative and overarching views. Theirs is a ruling class, a milieu of suave killers with insincere smiles and fat bank accounts. A regime where the moral philosophy driving their economics attempts to exonerate greed.

There are also the fascist shirts – brown as tobacco, dismal as Death's-heads. They are often seen in ranks, hypnotized, shouting slogans out of harsh throats in a chundering blind delirium.

The Black Shirts are the daring ones. They conduct their politics in the street, at a shady nexus, where justice is frequently dispensed from the end of a barrel. They blend into the shadows, doing deals in back rooms, and appear sleek and appealingly dangerous in the clubs. Their chrome horses gleam in the parking lots. And make no mistake, there are white and yellow assassins who wear black shirts. The skin of the Black Shirts is not always ebony. Ask the Cosa Nostra and the Triads.

The Grey Shirts are those in-betweens, squawking like impressionable school boys. Insipid and powerless. They follow the leader, the one in charge. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir! In terms of allegiance, there is no grey area here because, in awe of their prefects, the Greys look up to the Whites. They follow their every precept and custom – uncritical and credulous. An inculcated and fanatical belief in exceptionalism and primacy are the dominant characteristics of the White Shirts. The Grey follow like sheep in a grey mist, bleating for the Great White Shepherd to herd and gird them. The Grey fear the Black Shirts but are tolerated as long as they don't step out of line.

But this catastrophic and kaleidoscopic shirt that is ahead of its time is reviled. It is in the dock. Rebuked. A shirt of colour! How dare you, sir! Pistols at dawn! A horse-whipping is too good for a cur like you!

In fact, it is a shirt of many colours. Too many colours, as it turns out, frothing in the homogenous stew of Black and White shirts. It is loud, with red, yellow and blue swirls; impressions of palm trees and yellow sands, and a sea-green ocean rippling through its seams. In short, a psychedelic shirt, which joyfully proclaims: 'The spectrum in all its vivid glory is yours to assume and celebrate.'

It is a shirt on lysergic acid, accessorised with bell-bottoms, beads and bangles, and lemon-coloured sandals. Hallucination. Disturbance. 48 months ahead of its time. This is not the Summer of Love!

'Hey man! Turn it down!' That from the Black Shirt. 'Are you a pansy?' says the White, accusingly. 'What kind of shirt is that?' barks the Brown, belligerently. Prejudice spills like dirty water from minds rusted by injurious bias. From the darkest recesses there is jeering at the shirt of many colours.

I forgot to mention the Blue Shirts. They are the spiritual ones, the brave and the free, the immaculate cowboys and sailors. The former ride under azure skies; the latter sail the wide blue sea. Into sunsets and sunrises. They are not present in this den of vice. Nature's boys! Their habitats encompass the neutrality of salt and sand, wind and rain, deserts and oceans.

Prejudice is a predilection, a choice that entrains the inevitable syllogistic clash between the White and the Black shirts. The blood that spills blemishes the White with an incarnadine mark; it is taken as a sign of honour, like a duelling scar. The Black, of course, hides the spillage better. But they both revel in the sight of blood. The syllogism is complete.

One more advantage for the White Shirts in Sodom and Gomorrah is that cocaine doesn't show up on the shirt. Thus, the White Shirts preserve their corrupt dominions, their fleshpots. Their power is money. They dominate the markets, sharking in with sharp suits and winning smiles. They get results: more kills on the stock exchange as they dish out salutary lessons from the pulpits of profit. No religious fervour can exceed their enthusiasm for gold.

'That shirt is louder than the band!'

The voice is a woman's. I don't know her although she looks nice. She is white but her dress is black. She fingers the glittering rocks around her neck for a moment and her eyes appraise with sly prurience. Then she laughs hysterically and dances away with a White Shirt, one of the dominant and princely potent breed. Predators from boardroom to bedroom.

A posse of White, Black, Brown and Grey Shirts has descended. A democratic beating is now in progress in the alley, only witnessed by the moon and an alley cat dozing with one yellow eye warily open. Brutal it is! Fists and bats wielded viciously in the bespattered moonlight, relentlessly smashing into bone; the scene is silhouetted against the grimy walls – a gruesome flicker of shadows. Savage punishment is meted out for failing to conform.

The face is now a kind of mush. Texture of watermelon: soft, pulpy red flesh, with black pips for eyes, the lids of which are livid and swollen. The body lies bleeding from a truly Roman battering: a decimatio. The blood coagulates, an immaculate splash across the shirt of many colours, which is a little torn but still intact.

Diamond Geezer

There was an hour to kill.

Edmund Lyons studied his lean, still fairly good-looking face in the bathroom mirror. He was gratified that he had all his hair, admittedly receded a bit, but basically still all there. It was a reasonable mop. True, at the temples it was silvery grey, but it was a glistening chestnut brown on top, with no bald spot, so far. His normally docile and compliant grey-blue eyes were looking back at him with a look of steely, go-for-it determination.

He walked back into his study and sat down at his desk to write the letter. He looked at his watch. He would be 60 years of age in precisely 60 minutes – a diamond geezer. He sighed. It wouldn't be so dreadful being 60, he thought, if he had actually done something with his life. What had he achieved? A big fat zero. He had always barked up the wrong tree, opened the wrong door, turned left when he should have gone right, and so on. And that was because people had always told him to go and open all the wrong doors and turn left when he should have turned right! Edmund had played a subservient and submissive role all his life, letting other people dominate him and tell him what to do.

He envied those who heard their calling at a young age and went for it with purpose and conviction, regardless of the cold shoulder of criticism and disapproval. At the age of 17, he thought he heard his calling but his father had crushed his 'infantile dreams' of 'playacting', and denounced his absurd and unrealistic ambition as 'stuff and nonsense!'

Edmund had been programed to obey and never, God forbid, have the courage of his own convictions. It had been drummed into him by a succession of grim authority figures, none of whom had loomed larger than his father. Now, after 60 years of lukewarm and compliant living, it was time to warm things up. Tonight, he would do what he felt was necessary, what he needed to do to complete his liberation, post Dorothy.

He had spent his adult life, working for the local council, sitting on his arse, shovelling bits of paper around, attending tedious planning meetings presided over by pompous nitwits and nonentities. It had been a vanilla-flavoured existence. Frankly, in his eyes, a slow, uneventful, creeping death, with insipid and uninspiring flavours. Now he wanted paprika, saffron, cumin, fenugreek, tumeric, grains of paradise, galangal, mace, annatto, lemongrass, juniper berry… the works; all the flavours thrown in – all the spice of life possible. He even planned to go to Morocco for a holiday. He wanted to ride a camel in the dunes, camp under the desert stars by an oasis, and sip mint tea in the beguiling souks of Casablanca. Dorothy would never have gone for that sort of thing. Far too foreign!

As a youth, his big dream had been to become an actor. He acted in school plays and many said how good he was as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. His English teacher, Mr. Witherspoon, pronounced the production – a collaboration between the local girls grammar school and his alma mater – a triumph. There were notices in the local paper. It was whispered that he had talent. Mr. Witherspoon endorsed this appraisal and advised Edmund to apply to go to drama school after doing his A-Levels.

The argument Edmund had with his father about acting at breakfast one summer morning after he had sat his A-Levels was a vivid and painful memory. On that fateful day, he plucked up the courage to inform his parent that he wanted to become an actor, and that according to Mr. Witherspoon he had a reasonable chance of getting into a good drama school, perhaps even RADA. Actually, what ensued between father and son wasn't so much an argument as a brief one-sided conversation that ended with a paternal edict and a dream mercilessly crucified and summarily dismissed.

Mr. Lyons was a prim, soullessly sensible and correct man, a solicitor by profession, with a mournful demeanour and a tendency to irascibility. He listened to his son's ridiculous and impractical proposition with a less than enthusiastic expression on his dour, bespectacled face. He put down the Times, took off his steel-rimmed glasses, examined them critically against the light, polished them assiduously, and finally replaced them. He regarded his son who was looking back at him, hoping for parental approval of his star-struck dreams. But the parent said nothing. He buttered his toast and applied marmelade. Edmund waited on tenterhooks, hypnotized by the knife spreading back and forth, like a pendulum of fate. Mr. Lyons was fastidious in everything; the process of buttering and applying marmelade was done with patient rigour.

'Well, Father?' said Edmund, unable to hold his tongue. 'What do you think?'

'What do I think?' said Mr. Lyons, taking a leisurely bite out of his toast. After chewing thoroughly and taking a sip of tea, he said: 'I think it is a preposterous notion, an idiotic delusion, an infantile dream. Acting is no sort of profession. Stuff and nonsense!'

'But Mr. Witherspoon says I have talent and you know I got good reviews for my Puck.'

'I don't give a tinker's cuss for what your Mr. Witherspoon thinks,' growled Mr. Lyons. 'Or what damn fool reviews you received for being a fairy! I will neither countenance nor pay for you to go to a so-called school for playacting. It is out of the question. Young man, you will do something solid and practical, and get this absurd folly out of your head. At once, do you hear?'

'But…'

'But me no buts, Edmund!' thundered his father. 'That is the end of the matter. Case closed!'

And that indeed was the end of the argument. Father had spoken. Mr. Lyons gave his son a fierce look, and with a truculent snap of broadsheet pages, disappeared behind the Times.

So, Edward toed the parental line and became a bureaucrat. A rat in a bureau, so to speak. Flailing around in a cage, a slave at a wheel of monotony and drudgery. Desk-bound, 9–5, weekdays. For decades. Two-weeks' break in Clacton in the summer.

He was rushed off his feet, mostly. Never had time for a hobby what with his wife Dorothy clamouring for constant attention and his unquestioning obedience. She had been like a sergeant major issuing non-stop orders for things to be done around the house and in the garden. Commands that brooked neither refusal nor malfeasance. He never had any peace. Especially at weekends. There were always errands to be run. Tedious visits that had to be made to maiden aunts and deaf uncles. All the family rituals they were enslaved to were observed. Religiously. Such as church on Sundays, and a walk in the park after lunch on Sunday afternoons, which was compulsory, come rain or shine; and harrowing shopping expeditions on Saturdays, when every other damn fool was also out shopping, jamming the shops and thoroughfares with bags and packages, and all with the plangent din of Saturday afternoon in the high street jangling in your ears.

Edmund had always obeyed the domestic curriculum and the timetables imposed on him. Dorothy would have had words if he hadn't. He had invariably taken the path of least resistance; it was the Chinese idea of a reed bending in the wind. It had been easier that way.

But Dorothy was six months in the ground. He had nursed her through breast cancer during the 12 months prior to her death. It had been a terrible time. He was sad, naturally, when she passed. They had been married for 35 years. He had got used to her, and it's hard to let go of what you're used to. He had grieved as he could. They had married young but hadn't been blessed with kids. Something to do with her tubes. Anyway, he had always complied with her wishes. In everything. And with no complaints – just a mild wistfulness for how things might have been different. Edmund was, essentially, too kind to be jaded and bitter.

But things were different now. He was alone and what was known as 'footloose and fancy free'. And he did feel freer, lighter, less encumbered, less pressured and put upon. It was time to do something, time to suit his fancy – time to act decisively, and with conviction. To do what had always been a dream: retrospectively, to defy Father, and now, Father Time himself!

Edmund had often wondered over the years how his life would have turned out if he had disobeyed his implacable parent and pursued his ambition of treading the boards. Who could say? It had always saddened and frustrated him that he had blown his chances by not having the courage of his convictions, by being lily-livered and allowing himself to be browbeaten by conservative tyranny. But whose to say you can't redeem your ambitions and overturn fate? It's not over, he thought. No fat lady has appeared. The final curtain has not fallen. There's life in the old dog yet, etcetera. He felt resolute. Tonight, on the cusp of his 60th birthday, Edmund Lyons had found the courage of his convictions.

As the minutes counted down to usher in his sixth decade, he wrote a letter to his bosses at the council informing them that he wished to take advantage of early retirement. He felt he still had at least 20 good years in him. But there was no time to lose. Seize the day and all that. After he had written his letter of resignation, he looked with satisfaction at the entry in his diary: Rehearsal, Friday 7 pm, The Importance of Being Ernest, local AmDram Society.

Edmund smiled. He felt elated and had a sense of great personal triumph. As the clock chimed in his 60th birthday, he lifted a glass and toasted his new role as a footloose, fancy-free diamond geezer.