A Short Story About a Man Who Writes Novels

He cries for three days straight, not even breaking for sleep.

Soon thereafter, S and B have lunch at an Argentinian steakhouse overlooking the river Thames somewhere in West London. B is a small man with a square-jawed face and close-set pale green eyes. He is smartly attired in a business suit, his hair combed back off his forehead, with not so much as a strand out of place. S on the other hand is dressed casually in jeans and a white turtle-neck jumper; his hair is a tangle of curls and the lower half of his face is shadowed with stubble. Over steak and a bottle of red wine, they discuss literature. First they compare notes on their all-time favourite writers (B likes Burroughs best, S Borges), then they discuss the fate of the novel in a world awash with digital media (B is optimistic, S is pessimistic), then B relays to S his profound dislike of genre fiction in general, and young adult suburban fantasy in particular (S keeps his views of genre fiction to himself, perhaps because he doesn’t have any), then they debate whether postmodernism represents the apogee or the nadir of literature (they both agree it is neither), then they compare notes on their favourite contemporary authors (B likes Mantel, S likes Ishiguro), then somewhat circuitously perhaps, the conversation turns to S’s novel. B says many things about the book, all of which are exceedingly complimentary, even, at one point, likening S’s literary style to that of Roberto Bolaño’s. Possibly less poetic, he muses, but every bit as oblique and sardonic, maybe more oblique even, though not more sardonic. S is flattered and says so, although he also feels awkward, as if he knows that deep down B is lying or maybe exaggerating is a better word. Then B explains that he’s represented many writers of literary fiction over the years (though he doesn’t name any) and has amassed a veritable treasure trove of contacts in the publishing industry. I’m pretty sure it won’t take me long to find a backer for your novel, he adds. Then B raises his wine glass and proposes a toast to S’s future success. Smiling awkwardly, S raises his glass and clinks it against B’s. After that, B opens his briefcase and pulls out a one-inch thick contract. He asks S to read through it and, if he’s happy, to sign on the last page (he marks a cross in pencil where S needs to sign). S goes straight to the last page and squiggles it emphatically. He hands the contract back to B. And that is that, as the idiom goes.

Three months later, S still hasn’t heard from B. S is running low on funds. He gave up his job as an accountant in order to write and although his living costs are low (S eats like a bird and his only vice is the occasional cigarette), he still has to pay his rent and utility bills each month. He maybe has another three months of money left before the situation becomes financially untenable. Although he’s fairly certain what the answer will be, S decides to phone B and ask him if he’s had any success yet in finding a publisher for his book. Sure enough, B gives S a mealymouthed response to this question, a response that pared down to its essence, means: no, not yet. Unfortunately, these things take time, he says. The best thing you can do right now, he advises, is to write your next book whilst you’re waiting.

The only problem is that S doesn’t feel like writing. He’s the sort of writer who writes only when the compulsion seizes him and not the sort to trot out x number of words per day, come rain or shine. Inevitably perhaps, he runs out of money. He phones B again. B seems distracted, perhaps also a little irritated. I can assure you S, he says, I am doing everything I can to get the book in front of publishers. But have you had any feedback from any of them? asks S. Not yet, replies B, unfortunately publishers are notoriously sloth-like when it comes to reviewing books by unknown writers. S thinks this isn’t what B told him when they had lunch together, in fact he’s pretty sure that B implied his book would be snapped up just like that. He keeps this thought to himself however, sensing that he can push B only so far. So I just have to sit tight then? he says, for something to say. Yes, says B, I’m afraid so.

The sensible thing to do in this situation would be to get a job, but S is done with being sensible. He’s been sensible his whole life and it’s got him precisely nowhere. That being said, he has no idea what the alternative is. Then he realises he could, if he were so minded, sell the antique furniture he inherited from his maternal grandmother and live off the proceeds. That would buy him some time to think things through. Within a week, he’s solvent again. He tells his flatmate he’s going away for a while and that he’s not sure when he’ll be back exactly. His flatmate looks bemused, as if S’s rushing off like this were the final nail in the coffin of their relationship. Where are you going? he asks suspiciously. S says he doesn’t know yet, which is true. Then he writes a cheque to cover the rent for at least two months. Here, he says to his flatmate, handing him the cheque. After that, S packs his bag and leaves.

He takes a train into London, disembarking at Waterloo station. He buys a coffee from the Pret overlooking the concourse. He drinks it sitting on a stool staring out of a window at the people below swarming like ants in an ant colony. He decides there and then to leave the country. He buys a one-way flight to Amsterdam on his phone before he has a chance to change his mind and then takes a train to Clapham Junction, where he changes onto another train for Gatwick. Since his flight doesn’t leave until the next day, he spends the night at an airport hotel. He has dinner in the hotel restaurant, which looks out across a car park with thousands of cars all lined up in serried rows like soldiers at a military parade. He sits at a table next to a woman who is also dining alone. She has her laptop out on the table and appears to be working on a spreadsheet as she eats her meal. Every so often she sighs, as if she’s bored or frustrated. S doesn’t normally speak to strangers, especially women, but for some reason, maybe because of the wine he’s drinking, he feels emboldened. He asks the woman her name. She looks disconcerted to have her attention distracted from the spreadsheet she’s working on, but then she smiles at S, says her name, asks him for his. One thing leads to another and they end up sleeping with each other in S’s hotel room. Afterwards, they smoke cigarettes sitting at the table by the gargantuan window, bathed in moonlight. They don’t talk or if they do, they don’t say anything of any real consequence to each other.

In the morning, they shower and then eat breakfast together naked in the hotel room at a round table by the window. She has a buttered croissant and he has bacon and scrambled eggs on toast. After breakfast, the woman suddenly stands up (her boobs jiggle up and down, such is the alacrity with which she does so) and says she has to go, that if she doesn’t hurry up she’ll miss her flight. S says he’ll go with her, seeing as he has to catch his flight too, but without explaining why exactly, the woman says it would be best if she went alone. S shrugs and says, Fair enough. The woman gets dressed quickly and gives him a goodbye peck on the cheek and that’s that, no exchanging of numbers, no pretence that their relationship meant anything more than sex between two consenting adults.

S dresses at a leisurely pace and then checks out of his hotel. The flight to Amsterdam takes less than an hour. He considers getting a bus from Schiphol airport to the city centre, but in the end he decides to pay a bit more and take a taxi. He gets the driver to drop him outside Centraal Station, which is pretty much the bullseye if you imagine Amsterdam as a dartboard (or so says the taxi driver). S walks around to see what he can see. After half an hour he’s had enough of that. He goes into a canal-side coffee shop with a green neon sign above the door fashioned into the shape of a long-haired man with droopy eyelids smoking a bong. S buys a pre-rolled Moroccan-hash spliff from a kiosk at the back and then sits down at a table by the window with this charming view: a row of four-storey canal houses with kid-colourful facades and brightly-lit windows, the shimmering reflection of which ripples on the canal’s serene surface. S orders a slice of carrot cake and an espresso. As he’s waiting for his order, he lights the spliff using the matches provided free of charge. After four or five drags he starts thinking paranoid thoughts. For example, he gets the impression that the other people in the coffee shop are staring at him as if there were something wrong with him, as if he were deformed or emitting an undesirable odour that they can barely stand to be in the vicinity of. He stubs the spliff out in the ash tray. The waiter brings his order, says something in English with a heavy Dutch accent that is meant as a joke. S does his best to smile, nods, doesn’t make eye contact. S wolfs down the cake (which tastes of aniseed), settles the bill (extortionate) and goes straight to a pub a little further along the canal. He drinks a couple of pints of pale lager in quick succession standing at the bar. The alcohol rubs away his paranoia, as if the latter were a dirty stain and the former were a powerful detergent. That’s better, he either thinks or says out loud.

He leaves the pub and walks the streets, which are suffused with twilight and very beautiful and seem to S as if they’ve been painted into existence. Eventually he finds what he’s looking for: the red-light district. He walks past a row of up-lit windows in which scantily clad prostitutes are posing suggestively, although he feels too self-conscious to do anything more than surreptitiously glance at them. He gets to the end of the parade, lights a cigarette and psyches himself up as he’s smoking. You can do this, he tells himself. He goes back down the road lined with prostitute cabins, if that is what they are called. This time he goes more slowly and tries to look a little more carefully at each woman behind each window. Never one to fear a cliché, S likes the buxom blonde best. He circles back to her. She looks thrilled to have been selected and opens the door to let him into her cabin. At this point, S gets nervous. He’s only slept with a prostitute once before and that was only because his friends had insisted one drunken night on going to a brothel (in Lisbon, where they were vacationing at the time) and he thought he might as well, seeing as he was there. This time, however, is different. This time it’s completely down to his own volition if he sleeps with a prostitute. He breathes in deeply through his nose. He tells himself there is nothing wrong with sleeping with a prostitute, that morality is nothing but a straitjacket placed on a man by society in order to subjugate him and that he, for one, will not tolerate being straitjacketed, not by anyone for any putative reason, and that he can do whatever the hell he likes goddammit, so long as it is legal that is (S is draws the line at criminality, not including petty criminality obviously). With that settled in his mind, S steps into the prostitute’s cabin, which smells of lavender, and she immediately draws a curtain over the window. What’s your name? asks S. Isabella, she says. Then she says: What would you like to do? The directness of her question makes S laugh. I’d like to have sex with you if I may, he says. Now it’s Isabella’s turn to laugh, although S doesn’t think he’s said anything particularly funny. The way she laughs reminds S of a girlfriend he used to have, though he couldn’t say why exactly. Isabella abruptly stops laughing, her eyes narrow into flints and if S isn’t mistaken, her entire demeanour inverts. In a matter-of-fact tone she explains how much it will cost to have sex with her and how long he has to have sex with her. S’s initial reaction is it’s a bit on the steep side given the allotted time, but then what do I know, he thinks. Fine, he says, you have yourself a deal. He’s not sure if this is an appropriate thing to say, but it will just have to do.

They get onto the narrow bed and once he’s put a condom on (there’s a bowl of them on the bedside table, which is next to a bowl of mints) S enters her from behind. He comes after just three or four thrusts. He apologises. He says this doesn’t normally happen, which isn’t true. Isabella says it’s fine. A lot of men come very quickly, she says, it’s no big deal. They share a cigarette sitting on the bed holding hands for some reason. When the cigarette is finished, S asks if he can go again. So to speak, he adds. Isabella says sure as long as he pays for two fucks, which of course S agrees to do. So they have sex again. This time in the missionary position, staring into each other’s eyes as if they were really lovers and not prostitute and client. He comes after twenty minutes or so, by which time Isabella has had multiple orgasms, or so it seems to S. He gets dressed quickly, pulls two hundred euros out of his wallet and hands this to Isabella. She doesn’t offer to give him his change and he doesn’t ask for it. He gives her a kiss on the lips. He knows you’re not supposed to kiss a prostitute, but he can’t help himself. He does it quickly and it catches her by surprise. She lets him carry on kissing her for a while and then she pulls away. Well, goodbye, says S and then he opens the cabin door and leaves. He walks quickly away, eyes on his shoes, which he sees are scuffed and battered looking, which isn’t a bad metaphor for the state of his life, he thinks. Before he turns the corner, he looks back at the cabin he’s just exited from. He sees Isabella staring out at him from behind the glass window with big mournful eyes and for a moment he feels a strong urge to go back and plead with her to come with him, to leave her sordid life behind and make a fresh start. But then the urge passes and he finds himself walking out of the red-light district and into a district that for some reason seems to be infested with shoe shops.

He takes a room at a hotel with a sky-blue façade and latticed sash windows. Opposite the hotel there is a place to hire bicycles. After breakfast on his first morning at the hotel, S hires a bicycle. He rides around the canals for several hours, gets bored and goes to an African restaurant for lunch. He has goat stew and a plantain side dish. The spices in the food are unfamiliar to him, but not unpleasant, far from it in fact. When he’s finished, he orders a bottle of beer and as he’s drinking it, he reads a New Yorker short story on his phone. It’s about a man who loses his mind after witnessing a murder. Or it seems like it is to begin with, but then the man starts recounting a story involving a woman who grows up in poverty, gets married to a wealthy ranch owner and has an adulterous affair with a stable hand who dies prematurely from syphilis (which the woman passes onto him from her husband). The story is written as if it were a poem, which is to say the author uses words as much for their intonational and rhythmical effects as for any putative narratorial reason. I will never be able to write like that, S thinks. It saddens him a little, but he consoles himself with the idea that prose isn’t poetry at the end of the day and that a story is a story however decoratively or not it may be presented. Deep down, of course, he knows he is just jealous of writers like the one who wrote this story for The New Yorker.

He returns his bike and then has a nap in his room. When he wakes up, he can see a constellation of stars in the night sky (that he can’t name because he knows next to nothing about star constellations) through the skylight on the ceiling. He goes for a stroll. He feels lonely, he realises. No one ever emails or phones me. No one cares if I am dead or alive, in fact. This isn’t a great mindset to be in if you’ve ingested psychedelic truffles, but that’s exactly what S does next in the spirit of ‘when in Amsterdam’. He buys them from a quirky little shop that sells all manner of New Age trinkets. The truffles taste revolting (earthy, astringent) but he manages to get them down with ample swigs from a can of Coke. He hurries back to his hotel room, draws the curtains and waits to come up. When he does, he realises with dread that he shouldn’t have taken the truffles. A storm of anxiety barrels through his mind; tornadoes of fear dredging thoughts up indiscriminately by their roots and tearing them asunder. After a while, however, the wind dies down, the interior storm clouds disperse and the sun, or the metaphorical equivalent of it, comes out. S enjoys the rest of the trip, which takes the form of a mystical experience too profound to put into words, so there’s no point even trying. Or so thinks the lazy author. In reality, of course, the author knows only too well that his deficiencies as a writer and the omnipresent fear of failure, which haunts him like a ghost with a grade A stalking problem, preclude his trying.

Other things happen in Amsterdam, touristy things, but after three or four days S succumbs to boredom. So much for that, he thinks. He checks out of his hotel and returns to London, although he doesn’t go back to his flat, preferring instead to stay in a hotel that occupies ten floors of a glass-and-steel tower so unfeasibly tall it spears the cloud cover (okay, it’s not quite that tall, but an author is entitled, perhaps even obliged, to exaggerate occasionally). It’s not cheap, but there’s an all-inclusive buffet and bar and S gets his money’s worth all right. Eventually, though, he has enough of feeling drunk and bloated all the time. He takes the lift to the ground floor, which is teeming with shops hawking so-called luxury wares. There are no customers in any of them, which tells you something, thinks S, maybe something vitally important. He makes a note to himself to investigate what that might be some other time. He tips the ridiculously attired doorman on his way out, who nods his thanks, imperceptibly it has to be said, so imperceptibly that on reflection S can’t be sure if the doorman is thankful for the tip after all. S decides it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t (let’s face it).

S walks to the nearest Tube station. He takes the Jubilee Line to Bond Street and then the Central Line to Notting Hill Gate. When he emerges into the light, he finds B’s address on his phone and then uses Google Maps to navigate his way to B’s office. He buzzes the intercom. He tells the woman who answers that he’s here to see B. After an unreasonably long pause, during which he almost loses his nerve, the door unlocks. S pushes it open tentatively and enters the building. He finds himself in a claustrophobic stairwell. A brass or faux-gold plaque on the wall displays a list of occupant companies. B’s company is on the fourth floor. S walks up the stairs holding onto the handrail for support because he feels dizzy all of a sudden. When he gets to the fourth floor, he opens the door into a corridor. The paint is peeling on the walls and it smells of damp. The olefin carpet is cement grey and the floorboards creak as he steps on them. When he opens the door at the end of the corridor, S finds himself in an open-plan office. Most of the desks are unoccupied. He sees B straight away. He’s sitting at a desk in the corner of the room by a potted rubber plant with unfeasibly large leaves. B rises from his seat. He’s frowning, no doubt wondering what on earth S is doing, uninvited, at his place of work. S? he says. S falters. He has no idea what he thought he could achieve by going to B’s office. I was in the area, he stutters, I thought maybe we might have lunch. B is still frowning. Lunch? he says. Yes, says S, I wanted to talk to you about my new book, or my idea for a new book really. B chews his lip as he thinks through various trajectories. Finally, the frown is replaced with a smile, only a faint one, but it’s unmistakable all the same.

So S and B have lunch. They go to a local Italian restaurant. S has seafood carbonara and B has shitake and arugula ravioli. They drink fizzy mineral water. S makes up some idea for a new book on the spot and B says it sounds interesting because it does. Then, inevitably, S asks how B’s getting on with the publishers. Nothing as yet, says B. One or two have come back and said the book is perhaps a bit too experimental for their tastes, but there’s still plenty who’ve yet to make their minds up. Keep the faith, he says. S is disconcerted. He orders a bottle of wine. Initially B says he won’t have any, but then he reconsiders and pours himself a glass. In next to no time, they polish off the bottle and then order another one, which they have with dessert (tiramisu for B, panna cotta for S). When they leave the restaurant, they’re both quite drunk and it seems the only reasonable thing to do is to keep drinking. Or that’s what B says, S isn’t so sure. They get a cab to Soho and continue drinking in a bar with a polished concrete floor and hyperrealist paintings on the walls. Their table is a neon circle and their chairs are shaped like mollusc shells. They drink martini cocktails. B tells S about his life. He lives alone and that’s the way he likes it, he says. I’m too set in my ways to share my flat, let alone my life, with a significant other. I was, he says, engaged at one point to a woman I thought I was, or rather wanted to be, in love with, but in fact wasn’t. The trouble was, he says, I like men more than women, something I only realised once I’d proposed to this woman I thought I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Fortunately, she ended it with me when she met someone else, someone better looking and wealthier, of course. I pretended to be devastated for her benefit. After that I started sleeping with men I picked up in bars in Soho. I suppose you could say I was promiscuous, although by the standards of some gay men I was positively chaste. Anyway, one guy I met called Felipe I actually wanted to see again after hooking up. There was something about being with him, something that transcended sex, although don’t get me wrong, the sex with him was unbelievably good. He was a writer, of course. He wrote short stories, strange elliptical stories in which nothing happens, or nothing seems to happen, but of course beneath the surface of the words plenty is happening. Which I always thought was a kind of metaphor for Felipe himself. Anyway, I think I fell in love with Felipe and he felt the same about me, or he said he did. We moved in with each other. A swanky flat in a mansion block in Belsize Park. Life was good, perfect even, or as close to perfection as it’s possible I think for me to ever get. Then one day he left for work and never came back. In those days, we didn’t have mobile phones or email accounts and it was possible for a person to just disappear without a trace. I was devastated, of course. For a long time, I stayed cocooned in the flat, not wanting or daring to go out into the world. Then, about four months after he left, I got a visit from two policemen. They’d found Felipe floating face down in the Thames. They said he’d been murdered – there were stab wounds to his abdomen and his throat had been cut. Naturally, I went into shock when they told me this, but then I quickly realised I was a suspect in a murder investigation, perhaps I was even the principal or only suspect, and I needed my wits about me. They took me to Hampstead police station for questioning. I was interrogated all night and then released in the morning pending further enquiries. Of course, I was petrified that I would be charged with murder, but it never came to that because a few days later someone confessed to the crime. Apparently, Felipe had had another lover, a stockbroker in the City who was in the closet, and it was this man who, apparently in a cocaine-fuelled rage, had attacked Felipe with a serrated kitchen knife.

After telling this story, B becomes withdrawn; when he’s finished his martini he tells S that that’s him for the night. S puts a hand on his shoulder, an act of solidarity he supposes, and says that he’s sorry for being so pushy about the novel, that he realises it will take as long as it takes to get it published and that he knows B is doing, and has done, everything it is possible to do. One thing though, he says, swaying slightly, if I may. What’s that? says B. I disagree with those publishers who think my novel is too experimental. It’s too sentimental maybe, too flowery, too whimsical, too many other pejorative things I am sure, but too experimental? No, that I refuse to countenance. S staggers a little as he says this and now B puts an arm on S’s shoulder. You may have had a bit too much, he says, maybe drink some coffee before you go home. The previous novel I wrote, continues S, the one that was roundly rejected by all the agents, now that was experimental! B says he doesn’t recall seeing the other novel. Send it to me, he says. No point, says S. Why not? asks B. Because, B, it’s a pile of elephant shit, says S, trust me on that. Send it anyway, says B, smiling. S says he will surely do that or he tries to say this but he slurs his words and it sounds like he’s said something else, something unintelligible needless to say.

The next day S sends B his other novel. He thought he’d deleted the file, but it turns out it’s still in the trash folder on his Mac. He resurrects and then opens the file. He can’t resist the temptation to read the first few pages. The prose doesn’t seem as bad as he remembers it being. Strange, he thinks. He quickly closes the file before he has a chance to change his mind and attaches it to an email, which he sends to B with the words: as discussed, experimental novel attached, treat with caution. He doesn’t know why he typed the bit about ‘treat with caution’ and regrets it as soon as he’s sent the email. Two days later he gets a return email from B in which B lavishes praise on S for writing a novel that, in his words, reimagines what is possible in fiction. If you’re happy for me to, I’d like to send it to a publisher I know who specialises in taking risks of a certain kind. S doesn’t know what B means by a publisher who specialises in taking risks of a certain kind, but he replies immediately with a terse email that simply states: go for it! A week later B has good news. He phones S to tell him. Remember that publisher I told you about? he says, and before S has had a chance to reply he says, well he loves the novel, I mean absolutely loves it. S is thrilled, as you would expect: he has waited his whole life to get published and now it seems the waiting is over. The publisher offers S a publishing deal that involves not only publishing this novel, but also provides him with an extremely lucrative advance on his next book. (The publisher isn’t interested in the other novel he’s written for reasons that B either won’t or can’t reveal.) S returns to his flat to write his next book. His flatmate seems pleased to see him, or at least as pleased as he’s capable of seeming. S is touched; he realises that he’s missed his flatmate too, or maybe he’s missed the flat, he can’t be sure. Either way, he’s happy to be back.

B has many false starts with his latest novel, but eventually he manages to write a semi-decent metaphysical thriller about a man who wakes up to find he has been transformed overnight into a grotesque insect-like creature. The other novel, the second one he wrote in a fit of pique (or, as S sometimes feels, a fit of insanity), never sees the light of day. In the end, B explains that he’s done all he can do to get the book published, short of bribing a publisher (S isn’t sure if this is a joke or not; B has a deadpan way of saying things that makes it hard to know when he’s joking), and that it’s probably time to come to terms with the idea that this book is destined to remain unread by the reading public. Sometimes worthwhile books just don’t get published, he tells S, in fact I would say that for every worthwhile book that does get published, three or even four worthwhile books fall by the wayside. Sadly, on the other hand, plenty of worthless books do get published. It’s a mystery, he says, sighing in such a way that S senses B is alluding to something far darker and more inscrutable than the vicissitudes of the publishing industry. S tells B not to worry, that he’s grateful anyway for all he’s done for him. Then he says he has to go, he has a pizza in the oven that he can smell is on the cusp of burning. Of course, of course, says B and he hangs up the phone before S has a chance to say goodbye.