Rob Doyle - This is the Ritual

The novel that resulted from this decision, Martin Knows Me , was rejected in its early drafts by nineteen publishers in the UK and eight in Ireland. A smattering of phrases amid the rejection letters, suggesting mild interest in Haynes’s future output, sufficed to keep his determination alive: he kept on writing. Working each night at the restaurant until two or three, Haynes would return to his flat, fix a cafetière, and write for five or six hours. Then he would read a little, and sleep until it was time for the evening shift.

Though he made several attempts to move on from Martin Knows Me , Haynes’s unpublished first novel continued to tug at him. He believed in the book, or at least in its potential — to abandon it would be traumatic. In the earlier drafts, Martin Amis had appeared as a distant, ambiguous figure, haunting the thoughts of the sensitive and ambitious narrator (also named Martin), as he came of age against an oppressive backdrop of sectarianism and narrow-mindedness: Amis was an emblem of the young man’s yearning, disaffection and thirst for culture (or merely glamour). In later drafts, the novel’s tone is considerably darker: the plot now involves a troubled writer who moves to England seemingly with the intention of becoming Martin Amis, or possibly murdering or sleeping with him. Though these later drafts contained, in the words of a young female intern at a literary agency to which Haynes submitted the typescript, ‘some uncomfortable insights’ and ‘moments of real skill’, they failed to attract much attention.

Seven years had passed. David Haynes was still in London, still waiting tables, still unpublished. He was now in his mid-thirties, no longer a young man, and with little to show for it. Over the course of a harsh winter, the truth, buried for so long beneath the furies of work and the late-night chatter of his typewriter, pushed itself to the surface: Haynes could not write. At least, he could not write like Martin Amis. The revelation was the trigger for a prolonged psychic unravelling. More than once, Haynes found himself weeping helplessly while standing in the kitchen at Berconi’s, embarrassing nearby chefs. In his apartment he would sit for hours by the window, gazing into the darkness till a dreary sunrise filled out the cobbled sleaze of Soho. During this period, Martin Amis was at the summit of his powers and acclaim, before the dethroning he was to undergo in the nineties. Haynes could no longer bear to read anything by or about Amis — too lacerating were the reminders of the glamorous life and mercurial talent, the precision and swiftness of intellect which would never be his.

Some months prior to his breakdown, Haynes had met a quiet, twenty-three-year-old German girl named Ann-Sophie, who had been working as an au pair in London. Haynes began writing to her more frequently, confiding his distress at the possibility of seeing himself as an utter failure. Through their correspondence the two became very close, and before long it was decided: Haynes would move to Heidelberg to be with Ann-Sophie.

Though the outline of a new future was becoming visible, Haynes needed to feel some sense of closure. Several days before moving to Germany, he resolved to go and see Martin Amis, who was due to give a talk at Kings Place in Islington. On the night of the event, Haynes arrived alone and sat near the back of the auditorium, which filled to capacity. There was a surge of anticipation as the lights dimmed — it was enough to muffle the sound of Haynes’s first gasp, his first sob. Amis walked on-stage, sat down in a leather chair, and began speaking.

Afterwards, Amis sat at a table in the foyer to sign books. Haynes joined the queue, determined if not to speak to Amis, then at least to stand before him and look him in the eye. Perhaps in that way he could convey some inkling of the ardour, the ecstasy, the sorrow he had known.

When there were only four bodies separating him from Amis, Haynes’s nerve failed: he ducked out of the queue and hurried away, out of the foyer and into the street. He walked through London one last time, intensely aware of the city night, its monstrous poetry; he knew that once he left this place, he would never return.

David Haynes moved to Heidelberg, where he married Ann-Sophie. They went on to have two children, Romaine and George, and ran a café that proved popular with students. Apart from the odd poem, which he chose not to show to anyone, Haynes never wrote again.

She came to London when she was twenty-one. Now she’s older, I doubt she lives in London any more but I can’t be sure (she deleted her old email account, changed her phone).

She got work as an exotic dancer at a club near Russell Square. It was expected of all the girls there that they slept with the owner, the manager and probably another rank or two along the pecking order as well. The owner was an oily, brutal Turk. As you know, people come to London to make money, they stamp on other people and they laugh about it, never any remorse. It’s horrible, unbearable.

She slept with the Turk, he gloated over it. That’s the kind of man he was. There’s no moral to this story, no kind of comeuppance at all. The Turk is happy still. He abides in splendour and he’s slept with more women than you or I ever will, despite his ugliness. I think of this man as a harvester of souls. He is my shadow self, the projection of my own shrieking, sick and mutilated will to power. I’m a total fucking wreck. He is me, on some level. The Turk.

She slept with the Turk. Him first and then me. She was very beautiful (I think she still is). She had a room in a flat in Canary Wharf that seems, when I picture it, to have had no windows in the corridors, only a warm electric light. She was on the nineteenth floor. There were some nights in there, and mornings across the river with croissants and coffee, looking back over open waste-ground at the clustered skyscrapers of the business district. I wasn’t in love with her. Then I was, but it was too late because I had scared her, or she just felt scared, which in the end are one and the same thing. The tables had turned. Life is like that, and there’s nothing funny or poetic about it. More like a mockery.

One night, when I was still with her, I went to watch her dance. I didn’t tell her I was coming. I sat down the back, almost in disguise, hidden behind my drink, in the shadows. Maybe she saw me, what do I know. Really — and this is probably clearer to me now than it was then — really I was looking for the Turk. I hardly even concentrated on her dancing, though I admit it was beautiful (what I saw of it), her pale young body bathed in the blue light, called forth to radiance from the grime and neglect and all that her father could never protect her from. She had many admirers that night, but I never caught a glimpse of the Turk. Maybe he’s backstage, I thought desperately, draining my drink and wiping my lips as she bowed, then stepped serenely from the podium, and out through the narrow doorway.

I got home that night at three a.m., drunk and furious. Bitter, bitter. I masturbated savagely to web-porn and slept with the come not yet dried on my knuckles.

The next day I saw her, I mean we met up, first for a cappuccino, then an autumn afternoon stroll through Hyde Park, where foreign students walk dogs by the dozen (I hear they make decent money). Every man we passed seemed not only to seek out her eye, but to grin a faint, smug grin, like they were all in on some joke and I was the only one left in the dark. I kept it in, I said nothing, I was fucking chivalrous.

Another time we were back at her place in Canary Wharf — the nineteenth floor, London down there like a plane of stars, or neon smears, or just science fiction. And how many cameras are down there, and not one of them ever saved me from anything. We screwed and I tried to memorise the flawless orbs of her breasts, the way the light caught her body — it felt as if, for once in life, all the promise of pornography had been delivered, there was nothing left to be bitter about. But I kept thinking about the Turk, and then it’s like my dick felt smaller, somehow not wide enough to fill her up, to give her the friction that she wanted. It was an illusion, I suppose, but at the time it seemed real enough. I stayed the night and then I had to put in a shift at the Mexican restaurant, wearing that fucking sombrero. It was an alright shift, though, cause Celak was there and we had sly laughs about pretty customers, and got decent tips. After work we went for a few drinks. Celak wanted to go clubbing in Tiger Tiger, but at eleven I said I had to be somewhere (it makes you feel important, it’s never true, even when you think it is). I said see you man, and took a bus. This time I sat closer to the stage, more openly, and I drank more too, and I was kind of short with the waitress cause Jesus, I’m paying here, I’m the customer, what the fuck is this.