Джон Бойн - A Ladder to the Sky

Theo finished his book, which he titled Two Writers: Erich & Maurice , and he won the Costa Biography Award. He preceded this with an exposé in the Guardian, which won him several journalism awards. He seems set up for life. I feel quite proud of him. Truly, I do.

Of course, the response from the writing fraternity to the revelations of my crimes were mixed.

Some claimed that they’d always known I was a charlatan, that no one with such little self-awareness could possibly write as well as I did.

Some said that they admired how I’d blurred the lines between my life and my writing and that my career was the embodiment of a new type of fiction. They even wrote editorial pieces for the newspapers suggesting that I should be applauded, not shunned.

Some said that they’d never read me anyway and didn’t care what I did or how I did it because they were the only people worth reading and anyone who spent even a moment on my prose was wasting their life.

One said that literature was more important than human life so what was the problem if a few people had died in the pursuit of excellence?

One declared that he had originally considered The Tribesman to be a masterpiece, but now that he knew it had actually been written by a woman, he was revising that opinion and realized that it was just a tedious piece of domestic trivia, driven by sentimentality.

There were interminable debates and discussions on radio, television and in the newspapers about the way my work had been received over the years. For a brief time, I became the most famous writer in the world, which was enormously pleasing and everything I’d ever hoped for. Erich’s novels were republished in uniform jackets – his poetry collection too, which he always said was ill advised – each one with an introduction by a famous writer. The general feeling was that he’d been unfairly treated, which was a bit rich, I thought, considering he sent five people to their deaths. But revisionism is revisionism and at least it gave me hope that, long after I’m gone, readers will rediscover me and my reputation will be restored.

I wasn’t sure when the original newspaper piece was going to be published and was held in a state of suspense for some time until I received a call one day from someone at the Guardian , who had naturally been suspicious of a twenty-year-old arriving in the lobby with such outrageous claims about a famous writer, but then they listened to the conversations recorded on his phone and the evidence was indisputable. I knew there was no point trying to argue – I was exhausted by my life at this point – and admitted that his piece was wholly accurate.

I returned home from the pub a few nights later to find a crew of television cameras and radio reporters waiting on my doorstep, each of whom had clearly been tipped off about what was going to be published the next day. As I paid my taxi fare and stepped out to a barrage of questions, I recalled that YouTube clip of Doris Lessing returning home from her local Tesco only to discover a dozen reporters standing outside her house, giving her the wonderful news that she had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. ‘Oh Christ,’ she said on that occasion, rolling her eyes in exasperation, a priceless reaction. ‘This has been going on for thirty years.’ I said nothing quite as amusing as Doris, simply brushing past them while muttering that they were in my way, and stumbling through my door. I was obviously drunk. I giggled when I got inside. So, this was what self-destruction felt like.

The afternoon that the Guardian article appeared, the police showed up at my door and arrested me on suspicion of murder. I protested that I had never committed such a heinous crime, that the two most obvious deaths on my conscience had been manslaughter, but my claims were rejected by the CPS and I was sent for trial. The jury didn’t believe my story either and sent me down for life. I think that’s highly unfair.

Perhaps I should mention that Edith’s family, whom I hadn’t seen in so long, showed up at the trial. Her mother had died a few years before but Rebecca was there – minus Arjan, who had left her for a much younger actress in Hollywood – along with her sons, Damien and Edward, who had grown into handsome young men and spent every day glaring at me as if they would like to be left alone in a quiet room with me for half an hour. I spotted Robert too, seated in the back row, and wondered how he felt about being back in a courtroom. He’d been released from prison after five years but was forced to be on the sex offenders list, poor man. There was another man sitting near them, one I vaguely recognized from Edith’s and my UEA days, but I couldn’t recall his name. He became very upset when the details of my wife’s death were recounted. I can only assume that they were particularly friendly in some way and I admired him for still caring after all these years.

Of course, my publishers were left in something of a dilemma. What do you do when one of the most famous writers in the world – if not the most famous – is in disgrace but everyone is desperate to read the offending books out of a macabre fascination? This is what you do: you reprint all the books in new editions – except The Tribesman , of course, which is now only printed under Edith’s name – and donate thirty per cent of the royalties to charity. And you pocket the rest.

Now, my health. Naturally, I went through some major withdrawal symptoms from alcohol, and the prison authorities, to their credit, were extremely sympathetic and helpful in this. But the damage had been done. My liver is destroyed and my kidneys are in pretty bad shape too. The doctors say that one more drink would kill me, but that’s obviously nonsense. It would be too much of a coincidence if the moment I was forced to give up was exactly the moment that I would have been teetering on the edge of death. Anyway, I drink regularly in here – although obviously not at the same levels as I did during my later London years – in my cell with King Kong, of whom more in a moment. You’d be surprised – or maybe you wouldn’ t – at how much contraband is available in prison. Everything is banned, of course, but most of the inmates have a phone, a television, cigarettes, drugs, alcohol. There are prostitutes for those who require such services. Men or women. Whenever there’s a big boxing match on television everyone knows whose cell has the subscription services. Honestly, it’s not a bad life.

And I have a job! My first real job since I worked in the Savoy Hotel in West Berlin back in 1988. I teach a creative-writing course and conduct a bi-weekly two-hour session with fourteen inmates of varying ability. They’re a rough bunch, of course – murderers, for the most part, rapists, violent offenders – and they all like to write about crime. All but one, the aforementioned King Kong, who has been given that name because of an uncanny resemblance he bears to that cinematic simian. For almost a year he was working on a novel about an heiress in nineteenth-century Boston and, quite honestly, it would give Henry James a run for his money. He was too nervous to show it to the other classmates, but he gave it to me and I was amazed by his skill with language, his gift for characterization and his witty dialogue. I encouraged him, mentored him, supported him, and he’d just finished his fourth draft when he got into an altercation with another prisoner, leading to a dust-up in the prison yard where he was stabbed in the neck with a toothbrush that had a Stanley blade taped to its end. He bled out in minutes, poor chap.

Which left me with his manuscript. And it was eminently publishable. Really, the kind of thing that wins awards and hits the bestseller lists. So, I did another draft or two, tidied up some of the language, and sent it to a London publisher, being quite clear who I was and admitting that I would never be able to promote the book in person as I’d been committed to Belmarsh for the rest of my natural but that I had found something to fill the time while I was here, the thing that I had always enjoyed most.