Giles Morris

In the post-office doorway Nigel Dalrymple, Novelist, tore open the letter with the Notting Hill postmark:

"Dear Sir/Madam," (he read)
"Thank you for your recent submission. We regret, however, that present commitments prevent us from taking on many new clients at the moment. Please forgive the impersonal nature of this response, but we receive so many submissions that we cannot reply individually.
"Yours sincerely,"
(then a ragged squiggle, like the pictorial representation of a headache)
"Wenlock and Sly Literary Agents"

Nigel read this letter through three times, then turned it over to see if any clue to the inadequacy of his submission was concealed somehow on the blank underside. Wenlock and Sly had neglected to put a stamp on the envelope, meaning he had to pick up the letter from the post office, pay for the postage and a 50p handling charge. Whether they had done this out of meanness, or absent-mindedness, or as a deliberate and calculated rebuff to an unpublished writer such as himself, he could not quite decide.

He stuffed the letter into the side pocket of his infinitely decayed tweed jacket. Two boys in Von Dutch baseball caps pushed past him. "Wouldn't know great literature if it came along and bit them on the tit..."

He walked up the High Street, passed the Kebab and Fish Bar, Ali's Bargain Wines, Five Star Cars, the American Nail Garden, Pound City. Then the railway station, its sober brickwork caked in graffiti like silvery guano. Once, ten or twenty years ago, Nigel thought, graffiti had consisted of terse but eminently comprehensible slogans: Coal Not Dole, Skins, Smash the State, Wogs Out. Communication, however questionable its substance, in plain English, directed at the public at large. Now it was KREW, NEMO, HAZE, TOX88: the pseudonyms of the graffitists themselves, presumably, with no wider message for society as a whole. Except, perhaps, "I'm here, too." There was an essay in it somewhere, Nigel thought, suitable for one of the periodicals he browsed through now and then on rainy afternoons at the Poetry Library.

It was with such musings that Nigel Dalrymple distracted himself from the unrelenting mantra which repeated in his head like the sequence of a traffic light: Why won't anyone publish my work? Why don't I have any money? Why don't I have a girlfriend? Why am I living alone in a £73-a-week bedsit in this corner of London where the surging murder rate is locked in battle with surging house prices and for the present seems just about set to win? And why, in particular, do present commitments prevent ________________ (insert name of literary agent) from even considering my novel, Tin Pan Threnody - the novel I have spent five years writing, without giving a single reason, or even having the decency to put a stamp on the fucking envelope?

So utterly absorbed was Nigel with these, the contents of his own mind, that as he turned off the High Street and down Carthage Road, he completely failed to notice the handwritten sign up ahead on the pavement:

FILMING IN PROGRESS

Beyond the sign, a film-crew had sectioned off a part of the road ahead, and a young man with raggedly teased hair and ripped jeans was busy sluicing down the pavement with a hose to give the impression of recently fallen rain. Perhaps he should think bigger, Nigel considered, oblivious to the young man's activity. After all, the New Statesman might look at his essay on graffiti. And lost again in delicious dreams of cheques and complimentary copies, and combative yet broadly flattering comments in the letter pages, that he walked on oblivious to the shouts of: "Watch yourself, sweetie" and "Can't you see we're filming, love?" At least until he received a sharp burst of icy water, soaking the fraying material of his corduroy trousers.

"Hey!" ejaculated Nigel imperiously, turning to face his watery assailant. "You should get off the set, you know, love," said the man, half-conciliatory, turning down the hose.

"We're making T.V. here, you know," put in a second man, emerging from behind the boom. "Aren't we, Micko?"

Micko nodded with purse-lipped gravity. "Sure are, Aiden." Then he turned the hose back on, and began to make little circlings of dancing water around Nigel's beige, partially saturated trainers.

Nigel, meanwhile, stood motionless, shocked, like a toddler who has fallen over and is eerily quiet for a few seconds before beginning to bawl. But then, after a second's delay, his soaked trouser leg, the insouciance of Micko and Aidan, and the crackly new rejection letter in his pocket all conspired to coax the vast cauldron of resentment inside him to the boil.

"What the hell do you think this is?" he demanded, his lips whitening with fury. "I have a perfect right to walk down the street without being blasted with water by you shag-sacks..."

Nigel went on in this vein for a while, nostrils flaring, arms clenched rigid at his sides. Vituperation torrented out of him:

"Just because you're making a bloody television programme - since when was the world ruled by Television? Since when are we all your slaves? I don't even have a fucking television..."

As Nigel raged, Micko and Aidan exchanged a rising eyebrow for a smirk. "I've had enough," Micko said finally.

"Mmmm," Aidan concurred.

"Talk to the hand, honey." Micko held up a diva-ish palm. As he did so, he guided the hose round Nigel's feet, directing ever so slightly aggressive flicks of water towards his antagonist's ankles.

But in fury Nigel weltered on: "Who in the name of shit would pay a hundred and something pounds a year for the effluent you people shower nightly on the populace?"

Neither Micko, nor Aidan, nor Nigel was aware that by now their little scene had acquired an audience. First, ten yards away, was Stephen Goodstone, director of this production, a middle-aged man with ruthlessly cropped grey hair, wearing a flying jacket. Beside him was Monie James, the precocious authoress of Black But Not Too Black, the novel Stephen was currently adapting for a six-part series on Channel Four. Monie was a woman of about twenty-five. She wore a long denim coat. Her skin was a creamy sepia, her hair braided, her eyes lustrous and black. She was there partly out of professional interest, and partly because her boyfriend, Fletcher Darling (so often tagged "Byronic" Fletcher Darling that Americans had begun to think his Christian name was Byronic) had accepted the lead. Over Monie's shoulder hung a Mulburry back-pack. Both she and Stephen were sipping coffee from polystyrene cups.

"It's him," said Stephen.

"Who?"

"Tarquin. That guy is Tarquin. The living embodiment."

"Stephen, no, surely. I mean, I know you're pissed off about Orlando not being able to do it and everything..."

"Oh fuck Orlando. Who needs Orlando? Orlando is toast. This is the real Tarquin, just fallen into our laps. It's a gift from the Gods, I tell you..."

Monie cocked her head to one side as she watched Nigel, mentally subtracting the tweed jacket, the corduroy trousers, the trainers. "Hmm, maybe," she said finally.

"Trust me on this."

And without waiting for Monie's response, Stephen strode over to the altercation between Micko and Nigel.

"....David Dickinson, Simon Cowell and that bitch who looks like Countess Dracula after a weekend at a spa..." Nigel was saying.

"Look love, why don't you just go home, lie down, take a valium and forget all about it...?" Micko countered flaggingly.

"...Sharon Osbourne, that's it. Sharon bloody Osbourne."

Stephen, as he passed, turned meaningfully to Micko with his index finger up against his lips, and then drew Nigel, who by now was cooling down, to one side. Despite a six-inch disadvantage in terms of height, Stephen clapped a fatherly arm around the novelist, and embarked on a masterful, Napoleonic précis of his reasons for filming in this corner of North West London.

"You've read Black But Not Too Black, right? I mean - who hasn't?"

"I think I read an extract or two somewhere or other," Nigel lied grandly. In fact he had read the whole of Black But Not Too Black in a single sitting, one lonely night seven or eight months previously. What exquisite, masochistic ecstasy that sticky public library hardback had caused him, ploughing through its well-thumbed pages over cup after cup of bitter instant coffee, until his eyes were weary from the yards of print, and his soul screeched with envy at each curlique of Monie's playful, daisy-fresh style! And then the shower of acclaim reprinted on the cover - "this achingly beautiful beast of a book"...."made me laugh out loud again and again"..."Monie James writes like an angel".... "an astounding debut by one of the most important novelists of her generation"...Nigel suffered it all, even the biographical note about her being born in this same corner of London a full ten years after Nigel, and the photograph of Monie gazing out of the voluptuous half-darkness of the photographer's studio, enigmatic, yet fanciable.

Monie James had written the book between essays during her second year at Cambridge, and when she came down, was offered an £800,000 advance on the basis of an e-mail sent by her agent, Felicity Hustle. Breathless articles in the colour supplements followed. She won the Betty Trask Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was shortlisted for the Orange and the Booker. There were slots on Start the Week, a South Bank Show special. Window displays at Smith's and Waterstones heaved with the now familiar red and ochre cover of this "achingly beautiful beast of a book." And now a six-part adaptation for Channel Four, to be watched, the latest audience analyses projected, by twelve million people.

Nigel, on the other hand, had been writing since he was sixteen, and in little short of twenty years had had nothing whatever published except a short story in a now defunct magazine called The Necromancer. That short story - it had seemed at the time like the first small step along an ever-widening avenue of literary glory. In fact it was a blip. Nigel had published nothing since. Two novels, Lithuania, My Fatherland and Poor Shadows of Elysium mouldered in drawers, each one blanketed in rejection letters like hired mourners at a funeral. Many times, Nigel had considered a career change, but the precarious ladder of day-jobs he had held - dustman, door-to-door salesman, Ferris wheel operative - though perfect for an ironic resume on the dust jacket of a first novel, failed, on the pages of a C.V., to impress anyone with the power to employ him. What on earth could he do anyway, but write? He had no other talents, no understanding of the commercial world, no desire to help others. He had no contacts, no savvy, no drive. Instead, he sat down each morning and wrote from the heart. Nobody wanted what he wrote. Nobody cared.

"So you're not working at the moment?" Stephen said airily, more as an observation than a question. His eyes took in the pin-hole burns in Nigel's shirt; the resinous stains on his lapels.

"Well, there's my writing."

"Oh, you're a writer. Fantastic..." It figured. Nigel had that same moth-eaten, obsessive aspect Stephen recognised from a hundred T.V. script-writers he had worked with before. The same mixture of paranoia, scant talent, and gargantuan self-regard. That was why it was so nice to work with Monie. She wasn't like a writer at all. She was hip.

"...Because you know Tarquin's a writer too," Stephen continued smoothly, "so you have the perfect background to inhabit the role. What kind of stuff do you write?"

"Literary fiction," Nigel said stiffly. "None published."

"Oh, quel domage. But again, great for the role, 'cos Tarquin's kind of a...well, you know..."

"A failed writer?"

"Dark, edgy, unconventional."

There was silence for a while, after which:

"A failed novelist playing a failed novelist," Nigel announced, mainly to himself. "Very Paul Auster."

Stephen had no reply to this. "Look, have a fag," he enthused, shaking two cigarettes out of a soft-pack of ultra-lights.

They stood and smoked, manly and uncommitted.

"I could let you have £500 a day," Stephen said finally.

Nigel nodded slowly through the cigarette smoke, trying not to betray his stupefaction at the prospect of being paid this sum of money for a day's work.

"Think of it this way," Stephen continued sweetly, "plenty of successful actors get into novel-writing. Why not the other way round?"

"Oh I see, a sort of Dirk Bogarde in reverse - " Nigel was not quite ready to give up his wintry dignity " - only without the acclaim."

But Nigel's dignity meant nothing to Stephen. "You're gonna be perfect for Tarquin, ducks. Absolutely perfect." He stamped out his mostly unsmoked cigarette on the pavement and clapped Nigel on the shoulder. "Well, must dash!"

"See you tomorrow morning," he called over his shoulder as he strode away. "Seven o'clock sharp!"