bibliophile kid (excerpt) - "a journey south"

I journeyed south for a day or two to meet with an agent friend – of course I use the term lightly; agents have few friends, I even fewer – I occasionally submitted to who wanted to reject me in person, to berate me for my, he assured me with all of the weight of professional expertise, unreadable work. “Grotesquely unreadable,” he said. “Wilfully awful. I mean, what do you think you’re doing? You had promise. The promise of promise.” He was referring to a short story of mine that he’d read a few years ago, unpublished, naturally, but that caused a minor stir when I posted it on an online writing community and that he considered to be just on the right side of contrived. He had endeavoured to nurture my commercial potential, that he was sure was there, albeit effectively camouflaged among my densely packed sentences, far too effective for anyone else to notice, was sure of it, endeavoured to eke out another of the successful, quirkily formulaic, latterly forgettable texts on which his successful reputation (Agent of the Annum c. ’10, ’11, ’13, thereabouts) was founded from my undisciplined, frankly hostile literary exercises. He traded in big works that felt deep but weren’t, like a falling dream. “Now you’re fucking the hand that wanks you. All this scornful shit, deriding literature, deriding the literarily minded – what do you think you’re doing? You sound like a petulant adolescent. And an unreadable ponce of one at that.”

“It’s not literature I’m deriding,” I said. “It’s the culture, the pretension – it’s the lack of literature, in any meaningful sense.”

“You’re a fucking hypocrite,” he said, a forkful of pan-fried bream and tendrils of samphire chewed messily past his assertion, the spoils of Norfolk consumed by the city in the most vulgar act of subconscious culinary symbolism. “Despise pretension but you’re the most pretentious arsehole I’ve ever met. And fuck, I’ve know them all. Despise the literary circles but you long, fucking ache to be at their centre.”

“I’m conflicted,” I said. Wished I’d had the bream. My trio of sliders felt entirely scant, a plate of poor jokes, kids stuff. Much like my work.

“What you are,” he said, filling my glass. “Is insincere. That’s why no one wants to read your stuff. Write something readable. Give people a reason to read it – character, plot, fucking thrills, anything. Give them a handle. Guide the thick cunts. They like that. Never overestimate your audience.”

“I thought it was underestimate?”

“Impossible to underestimate the idiocy of the many.”

“Isn’t that insincere?” I said. “To bother writing something you don’t believe in?”

“No, he said. “And it’s naïve to think otherwise. You believe in money, so do I. Trust me – you get paid for writing some piece of shit book you’ll soon start believing in it. Literature, as you talk about it – it’s gone. Over. Attention span too. Short and shit – that’s literature now. Write something I can sell.” He gestured the waiter over. “Be a workhorse, not a poster boy for some non-existent movement of one. Fucking adapt. Alienating your audience doesn’t make you a great writer you know.”

We shook hands warmly.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“You too. Truly.”

During the trip I met a distant friend for a drink, a girl whom twice I had bedded some years before my marriage in the kind of intensely passionate but entirely inadequate manner that was once my stock in trade, too drunk to get it up, too inexperienced to slip easily into the correct genital tract, one mess after another. We had at the time seen the new year in together, staggered through the Westminster crowds as fireworks bathed the streets below in clipped brutal violence, clinging hand to sodden hand as we became separated from our friends and kissed urgently on one of the several bridges that become as one generic crossing at that point along the Thames. We kissed further in tube stations and carriages and through the streets of south London, as though years of vague desire shared in flirtatious reference and brief glances and eroticised posturing had only by then simmered sufficiently to swamp without warning the hob of our embodied lust in some foaming rancid mess of reality. By way of great fortuitous unlikeliness we reached my house before morning and in my grim double bedroom, whose meagre curtains singularly failed to cover the windows and left the city’s radiance around the edges of our naked skin like some fundamental aura, I worked her little breasts – for she was rake thin and weakly developed and tremendously beautiful, in her way – in my mouth like gelatinous sweets plastered to her tender yellow chest, and my hands slid and roved across her skin as though it were decadent artisanal raw food I was unable to grip but yearned for immeasurably, and we writhed together apologetically with awkward goofy collisions, and I went down on her with the methodical attention to detail I extolled on my CV and that she was too self-conscious in the artificial dawn of the living city to enjoy or else despised my methods, and she sucked me off sublimely, trying to rouse me back to the erection I had sustained all the way across London but for the life of me had then lost, until eventually, finally I willed it to be and plunged voraciously towards her in ill-timed and ill-mannered stabs that she was too reserved to assist with, and at last like a blind creature feeling through dense damp earth I achieved passage of sorts and we ground like silent kitchenware until the end came. Something similar happened the following night though slightly more satisfactorily, and the day after that she went to the walk-in clinic for morning after medications and had asked me to go with her, an invitation I had at first refused but later relented out of some sense of honour or more likely fear of reproach. We parted like distant acquaintances and aside from occasional groping on sofas at the end of the larger parties of others – during which our relationship or lack of it was but a minute particle only of an altogether larger narrative which would ingest the both of us in quite disparate ways as our own story diverged into multiple, new, separate ones, distinct lives running a course – we drifted far away, emotionally, geographically, whatever, in the months and later years that followed, but in times of sexual decline it is natural to even unconsciously resurrect feelings and trysts long past, in search of the hope of something simpler or more thrilling as once everything had surely been, not the tired or joyless or familiar sessions that had so punctuated life after my twenties, when in truth those same feelings and trysts were as uncomfortable and excruciating as any that had followed or would, and were indeed elevated only by the error of memory that without fail, nothing good was as it feels.

I had sent her some messages once I learnt of my short trip south and we had arranged to meet under the auspices of a nostalgia both fawning and sneering, and so ably vended by proponents of the postmodern condition of which I myself was one. In a pub in Southwark just metres from the South Bank, forgettable for all but the dick-wrenching ferocity of its prices per pint – you’re not in East Anglia now, I admonished myself mentally, and this isn’t ale as we (as in the country at large as it exists beyond the metropolis) know it – we embraced tentatively and drank quickly, hoping to shed the aggressive reservations of years of silence and two marriages between us, one a failure the other less so, but ill-equipped nonetheless to contend with the oppressive weight of the past and the associated shared juices of tête-à-têtes pretty much forgotten in all but the most symbolic ways. We shared pleasantries, non-specific memories, generic titbits, a packet of Irish crisps, skirting around but not directly referencing the fact that formerly we had lain together more than once (twice), that I at least had climaxed in her arms, and that her tuft of pubic hair and the grip of her cunt were ever etched somewhere in my brain as unfocused as most things but permanent regardless, and I thought of the how my life might have been different if things then had been different but it wasn’t and they weren’t and that was all. I recalled her, erroneously I was sure, as a devoted lover, inexperienced but competent, as in her professional life post-art-school, and eager to progress; her face had seemed to shed years with the ease of garments in the half-dark of the bedroom, a youth on the pillow, terrified and bored in something approaching equal measure. She sought cover beneath the foul duvet, doubled in weight by years of skin and fag smoke and ceremonial onanism, but I pulled it from her hands, the most forceful a display I could muster, and then to the floor, where it coiled dejected like a slapped pet, and she lay stretched and pale, her arms by her sides, her blinks slow and immense, the tiny genesis of some great chaos resultant of their movements. It was sexy, all of it, and I had identified it as such, assessed it as sexy, and yet I felt no such sexiness in the functions of my body. With hindsight I saw this as amidst the beginning of my remove from my own sensations, as forging the division between sensations as they were described or otherwise understood, and sensations as they were felt or experienced then or in any such given moment of something really happening. It was in and of me and no fault of hers. I had been drawn to her, but it translated to little but the enactment of the mechanics of biological expectation, hoping all the while for the pop up inside her, the warm release, sunk in my own sauce and hers. There was a stirring in my jeans at the thought of it – the past of a far greater sexiness than even the present could manage, contextually divorced and then reconfigured into a web of half-true glimmers, broadly sensual imaginings shorn of the social pressures of conversation and the staid rituals of courtship around which I had consistently failed to get my head – disturbed only by the noise of the punters and her actual presence, which I found both a distraction from and bolster to memory, an uncomfortable mixture. I felt my phone go, looked briefly at the photograph, my wife’s great breasts – knew those moles anywhere, those hemispheres – kneaded approximately by a thick male hand, “this is not for you”, it said (House of Leaves was one of the few books we had both read and enjoyed, though it was many years ago, and she commonly deployed a variety of its aspects to devastating effect within her frequent extramaritally-oriented SMS contact), then why the fuck’s it here?, I scornfully bemoaned, to myself thank God. I bought two more pints on my credit card – how much? – and felt short of breath as I did so, and peered at the receipt as though it were vital scripture, a truth of universal significance revealed in an itemised list of two antagonistically hopped IPAs. I took them back to the table and found her crying, which to my surprise and relief formed the catalyst that would culminate in some form of sex, which was really as far ahead as I had considered. She explained how her brother had died a few months earlier. He was my age, two children, a good life, she said, a good person, and now he was dead. The big cancer. Pancreas. Gave him a month or two to live but he was gone in three weeks, the sickness spread all over him like jam on toast. The crying intensified in parallel to the pub’s ambient noise; I saw her body making the spasmodic movements and gestures of grief but heard only chatter, depressed chip and pin keys, till drawers opening, TV sports, explosive mirth, like a silent movie projected askance with some incongruent, senseless score. It had been, she said, a terrible year. We finished our drinks in relative silence. I asked one or two questions, offered some ineffectual platitudes, how ours was to accept such reasonless cruelty, what have you, but we both knew there was nothing either worth saying or that it would make any difference to hear, and that it was better to focus on the real purpose of my visit, and the reason she had agreed to meet with me, to conjoin once more, in honour of our fallen youth.

We walked for a few minutes before turning into a relatively quiet mostly residential street, gutters lined with litter and fallen leaves, and I could hear raucous laughter and muffled drum breaks and amplified shouting from the South Bank and I pushed her up against a brick wall half-concealed by a huge recycling bin – romance and time, too, are the privileges of the younger than we then were – and her cheeks were still wet from tears and wracked with the knowledge that death was waiting for all we gave memory flesh once more, my phone vibrating with several new messages in the time it took us to do so, the distance between us greater than ever and growing with every guilty shove. Her husband would collect her by car; they had a car, in London. I’d return home, if that’s what you wanted to call it. What emptiness was ours to enjoy! Thank you Britain! Thank you!