Bedlam Burning Read online

Nicola was doing her best to rid me of this illusion. She said her colleagues were grey, tubby men and women who chain-smoked and wore cardigans. They regarded her as dangerously glamorous and well-groomed and therefore frivolous and insubstantial. Her work, much like my own, was a mixture of the clerical and the dogsbody, but there was one part of her job that sounded to me like a reasonable amount of fun. She was in charge of the ‘slush pile’. She had to deal with the unsolicited manuscripts: the military memoirs, the spiritual confessions, the travel diaries, the experimental novels sent in by the talentless, the desperate and the disturbed. It sounded fine to me, but Nicola felt otherwise.

  ‘It only confirms how pathetically low on the totem I am,’ she complained. ‘Everything in the slush pile is, by definition, crap, otherwise it wouldn’t be in the slush pile. So basically I’m wasting my time. And if by some strange chance something good managed to creep in there, and if I spotted it and said we ought to publish it, my bosses would still reject it, because they wouldn’t trust my opinion because they think I’m just the imbecile who’s in charge of the slush pile.’

  There was reason enough for both of us to be dissatisfied, but one of the best things to be said for living in London was that it was always easy to see people around you who were far worse off than you were. And that was how I thought of Gregory Collins when I next met him.

  He came into Somervilles one drab, wet afternoon. I suspect that if it had been anyone other than Gregory Collins I might have been embarrassed to be seen going about my dreary shop-assistant duties, but I felt so sure that whatever he was up to had to be less interesting and fulfilling than what I was up to, I greeted him quite warmly. And he was even warmer in return. He greeted me like the oldest of old friends. Perhaps he thought our experience at the book-burning party had created insoluble bonds.

  ‘This is a posh place you’re working in,’ he said. ‘You must be doing all right for yourself.’

  Poor old Gregory.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘What about you? What are you up to?’

  ‘Teaching,’ he said dourly, and my sense of superiority remained quite intact.

  ‘In London?’

  ‘No, up in Harrogate. Grammar school. One of the last. Teaching history.’

  Yes, that fitted perfectly.

  ‘How is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s champion,’ he said. ‘Teaching’s my life. I’ll always be a teacher.’

  I felt better and better.

  ‘So what brings you down to London?’

  He snorted and looked unhappy.

  ‘London,’ he said, dismissively. ‘I came all this bloody way for a meeting, and the bugger wasn’t there. He’d called in sick. I’m going to be demanding an apology.’

  He wandered about the book shop, opening cabinets, picking up very expensive items, a signed Wyndham Lewis, a Gertrude Stein letter. He seemed to find them interesting enough, but he handled them the way he might have handled the morning paper.

  ‘I’ve got a few hours to kill before I get the train back up north. Do you want to have a bevvy after you finish work?’

  I said sure. I had nothing better to do, although I wasn’t certain I’d have anything to talk to him about. I didn’t think I had much in common with Harrogate schoolteachers. The shop was open for another hour, so I expected Gregory to go away and then come back when I’d finished work, but he hung around till closing time, clumsily handling extremely rare and expensive items. Julian Somerville watched him with mild disapproval but was too feeble or polite to say anything. I was glad when I could finally get Gregory out of the shop and into the pub. He drank half his beer in one big gulp, then considered the taste carefully. ‘Not bad for a southern ale.’ His professional northerner act was even more irritating in London than it had been in Cambridge.

  ‘So, have you done any more acting?’ he asked.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve grown out of it.’

  ‘Very good decision,’ he said. ‘I suppose we ought to be drinking champagne really. Not that I like champagne.’

  ‘Something to celebrate?’ I asked. I wondered if he’d found a good Yorkshire woman to marry him, although that seemed highly unlikely.

  ‘Actually, I’ve not been quite straight with you, Michael. I’m trying not to be showy about it, but the fact is I’m down in London to see a publisher. My publisher.’

  ‘You have a publisher?’

  ‘Aye, I just said so.’

  ‘Is this for history textbooks or something?’

  ‘No, it’s for a novel.’

  The connection between Gregory Collins and novel writing was one that I still found hard to make.

  ‘I thought you burned your novel,’ I said.

  ‘I burned one novel. You’re allowed to write more than one. The first one was crap. This one’s bloody good, if I say so myself.’

  ‘That’s great. Congratulations.’

  I hoped I sounded convincing. Undoubtedly it was great for Gregory and there was no reason why his minor success should make me feel bad. I didn’t think I was competing with the Gregory Collinses of this world, and yet I knew I probably didn’t sound quite as pleased for him as I should have.

  ‘What’s it called?’ I asked.

  ‘The Wax Man.’

  ‘Good title,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not dead keen on it actually,’ he said. ‘I wanted to change it to something with a number in the title, like Slaughterhouse 5 or Catch 22, or BUtterfield 8 or The Crying of Lot 49.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. I just think titles with numbers in them are dead catchy. Anyway, the publishers reckoned it was a daft idea.’

  ‘I suppose they know what they’re doing,’ I said.

  ‘I wish I had your faith.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘It’s a very hard book to summarise,’ he said, and I was rather glad of that.

  ‘I’ll just have to read it when it comes out.’

  ‘Aye, you will. It’s a serious book,’ he said. ‘A dark book. But funny, and very clever, very ironic, full of literary pranks and japes. I love a good literary prank, don’t you, Michael?’

  It seemed an innocent enough question at the time.

  ‘Oh sure,’ I said. ‘So will you be giving up the teaching job?’

  ‘Oh no. I wouldn’t want to be some poncey full-time writer. Like I said, teaching’s my life. Besides, I couldn’t afford to give up the day job. They’re paying me bugger all for my book. You won’t believe this, but they aren’t even doing a proper author photograph. I talked to this lass today and she said I’m supposed to send them a bloody holiday snap or something. I told her it’s very short-sighted of them. You know, they always say Truman Capote was a success because of that sexy picture of him sitting under a palm tree or whatever. If they’d used a holiday snap it would all have been different.’

  This thought made him very miserable, as if he was already anticipating the failure of his book, already seeing that having a novel published mightn’t be the great joy he’d anticipated. I still knew very little about Gregory, and absolutely nothing about his writing, yet it seemed odd that he would have chosen Truman Capote as a role model.

  ‘Why not have some photographs done professionally?’ I asked, but he didn’t think much of the suggestion.

  ‘With my face, what would be the point?’ he said. ‘I know I’m an ugly git.’

  He became even more miserable. Again I was surprised. He was undoubtedly right about his unattractiveness, but given how little effort he made to present himself attractively to the world, I’d assumed he somehow revelled in it.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ he said sulkily.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is. You’re a good-looking bloke. I bet you get lots of girls.’

  ‘Oh yes, thousands.’

  ‘Well, I bet you get a damn sight more than I do.’

  No doubt this was true but admitti
ng it would only have made him feel worse, so I said nothing. I suppose I might have tried to tell him where he was going wrong, suggested that he grow his hair, wear clothes that weren’t a couple of decades out of fashion, but I had no desire to play Henry Higgins.

  ‘Well, I’m no Truman Capote,’ I said, and I bought another round of drinks and tried to change the subject.

  ‘Are you in touch with anyone from college?’ I asked.

  ‘Nobody at all,’ he said. ‘Although I’m going to get in touch with old Bentley. I’m going to send him an advance proof of my book, ask him to give me a quote for the jacket.’

  ‘Will that improve sales?’

  ‘I don’t know. If I was on first name terms with Anthony Burgess I’d ask him instead, but I’m not, am I?’

  Gregory’s depression was becoming infectious. An excess of beer seemed to be the only way to get through the evening and we went for it. Drunkenness didn’t make Gregory Collins any less gloomy, but it made me a lot more tolerant of him. Our conversation didn’t progress much. He was firmly stuck on the twin topics of his book and his lack of sexual appeal.

  ‘I’ll bet you’re a photogenic bugger too, aren’t you?’ he said.

  I had to admit this was true. Being photogenic was another one of those worthless qualities I happened to possess.

  ‘And you do like literary jokes,’ Gregory insisted.

  I repeated that I did, but only because I thought in some vague, unconsidered way that saying so might make him less miserable.

  ‘OK then, do me a favour. Give me a photograph of yourself and I’ll send it to my publisher and tell them it’s me.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘They can’t tell their arses from their elbows at that place, and I’ve never so much as seen my editor, and it’s not as if authors ever really look like their publicity photographs, anyway.’

  ‘What do you mean? You want me to pretend to be you?’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t be pretending to be me. I’d just be using your picture to make the reading public think I’m a decent-looking bloke.’

  We were both well drunk by this time, and after some encouragement from Gregory I agreed that it sounded like a fairly amusing thing to do, but I had no real intention of doing it. I knew that by the next morning we’d both have sobered up and it wouldn’t seem like such an amusing thing after all. But then Gregory looked at his watch, panicked, and said he’d missed his last train to Harrogate, and would I put him up for the night? I didn’t feel I could say no, much as I wanted to, so I agreed to let him sleep on my floor.

  We took the last tube back to my horrible room and while I made us some coffee Gregory rifled through a box of photographs I kept on the mantelpiece. I was anal enough to want to have my past documented but not anal enough to organise the photographs by, for instance, putting them in an album or any sort of order. He took out a moody head and shoulders portrait of me, not a bad one, actually, that the cast photographer had taken as a publicity shot when I was in a college production of The Local Stigmatic.

  ‘But look,’ I said, uneasy with all this but not quite capable of clear thought, ‘how’s this going to work with your friends and family? They’ll see your name and my picture. They’ll think that’s a bit odd, won’t they?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. I’m not telling my family. They already think I’m a right nancy boy for having gone to university. If they ever found out I’d written a book, and especially if they found out what’s in it, they’d bloody lynch me.’

  I wondered what kind of shocking material it contained, but the thought only lasted a second.

  ‘But it’ll still have your name on it,’ I said.

  ‘So what? This might surprise you, Michael, but by and large the members of my family don’t spend a lot of time combing the bookshops or reading the literary reviews. And if by some bizarre chance they ever saw a book with my name on it they’d just say, “That’s a funny thing, a writer with the same name as our Gregory”.’

  ‘And, of course, it would have my picture on it.’

  ‘Right.’

  He said this triumphantly, as though he’d finally got a point across to one of his dimmer pupils. For my part, bleary as I was, I felt sure he hadn’t dealt with all the possible objections and problems, but what the hell, it was late and I was pissed, and it was easier not to argue. I unrolled a sleeping bag for Gregory, and I got into my narrow single bed and fell asleep in a leaden, drunken haze.

  When I woke up next morning Gregory Collins had gone. He’d taken the photograph and he’d left me a little thank-you note saying he’d invite me to the launch party for his book, if the bastards gave him a launch party, which he doubted. In the cold light of morning I had even bigger qualms about him using my picture, but I told myself he’d think better of it once he got home. In any case, I realised I had no way of getting in touch with him. I didn’t know his address, didn’t know which school he taught at, certainly didn’t know the name of his publisher; and I really didn’t feel inclined to start pursuing him. That would have been making far too much of it. So I forgot all about it. I decided that Gregory Collins was one of those people who would flit through my life every once in a while, never become a friend, and certainly never become important to me. Stupid or what?

  3

  I really didn’t have much idea what Gregory Collins’ novel The Wax Man was all about, and as far as I could see neither did most of the reviewers. Yes, I read it, and yes, it did get reviewed, respectfully if not widely, and although most of us couldn’t make head or tail of it, we all somehow felt it was rather good.

  If I’d been asked in advance what kind of book I’d have expected Gregory Collins to write I suppose it would have been something gritty and stolid, realist and urban, possibly set in a northern town and featuring a dedicated history teacher. But I should have known that Gregory Collins was always going to be a man who confounded easy expectations.

  The book opens with our hero, a nameless, stateless, ageless man without qualities, finding himself embedded in a solid block of white wax, completely unable to move. There’s wax in his ears so he can’t hear, and in his eyes so he can’t see, and no doubt he can’t smell or taste much either, though the book doesn’t go into details about that. And he certainly can’t speak; although by some method or other he is able to breathe.

  And so, being unable to do much of anything else, he does a lot of thinking and philosophising. He asks himself who he is and where he is and how he got there. He doesn’t have any answers to these questions, so I suppose he’s a sort of amnesiac, but he realises the mere fact that he has the ability to ask them must mean he once had a life outside the wax block, a life in which he was able to develop concepts of being and language.

  This kind of philosophical, or I dare say ontological, stuff takes up a good half of the book, although mercifully it’s divided into shortish chapters, and they’re interspersed with some rather more upbeat material. In fact, the people who disliked the book worried that these non-philosophical chapters were nothing more than pornography, in which a man, who may or may not be the same one who’s in the block of wax, performs just about every conceivable sexual act with men, women, animals and objects, in every imaginable permutation. This, I supposed, was what Gregory didn’t want his family to read.

  Although I didn’t personally like the book all that much, and found a great deal of it hard going, the porno parts no less than the philosophical ones, it seemed to me to be a very clever and knowing book. It didn’t exactly have something for everyone but I thought it had the right combination of high and low concerns, of philosophical and prurient elements, that would draw people to it. The philosophical passages seemed rigorous and serious enough, and the sexual passages had a trippy, druggy, hallucinatory feel to them that people still found appealing in those days.

  The book didn’t make the bestseller list or anything like that, and Gregory Collins didn’t become a star of the literary heavens, but the book was
talked of here and there as being an exciting and relevant new work by an interesting new writer. What more could anybody ask from a first novel?

  I had received my own copy of the book direct from the author a few weeks ahead of publication. He had been right not to expect a party from his publisher, and an accompanying note apologised for that. I was a little surprised that he knew my address, although of course he had been to my bedsit. I was disappointed still to be in the same place and not to have moved on. Nothing in my life had changed at all: same job, same girlfriend, same discontent. The book was signed and inscribed, ‘To Michael, thanks for helping me improve my image.’ And there, sure enough, on the back flap, rather grainy and in high contrast was the photograph of me.

  It was strange to see myself on the book jacket, and I was surprised Gregory had gone through with it, but basically I thought it was no big deal. As hoaxes went, literary or otherwise, it felt harmless enough. If the public was being deceived, it was not a very wicked or dangerous deception. And yes, there was something funny about plain old Gregory Collins transforming himself into the moody, high-cheekboned character in that author picture.

  I didn’t see what repercussions there could be. It was only a book, after all. How many copies could it possibly sell? Just how widely would my face be seen? I was not going to be mobbed in the street by rabid fans of Gregory Collins, now was I? And if, somewhere along the line, somebody did discover the hoax, we’d simply be able to come clean and admit we’d played this mildly amusing and slightly silly joke. I didn’t think it was a hanging offence.

  Nicola saw it differently. She had never met Gregory in her university days. Cambridge was, in some ways, a big place, and Gregory hadn’t got around much. ‘You’re out of your mind,’ she said, when I showed her my copy of The Wax Man. ‘You’ve been exploited.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. Collins is using your image to make himself more presentable. That’s not right.’

  She seemed to think Gregory was some kind of satanic manipulator. If only she could meet him, I thought.

  ‘It’s a joke,’ I said.