Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

Sam dropped his pen on the desk. It was all too complicated. To say anything at all would be a mistake.

The truth was that he had decided to start a new novel for entirely psychological reasons: to protect himself against an unhealthy obsession with the fate of The Frozen Torrent . It was all very well having ‘nothing to say’ in the sense of having no preconceived set of ideas about the fate of his characters and the course of his plot, remaining open, discovering the truth of a situation in the course of exploring it, all of that; but it was no good really having nothing to say: being blank, blocked, lost.

He couldn’t think how to begin a new novel precisely because he was already too preoccupied with the fate of the last one; the disease was too well established for the protection to work. He might as well give in to a fever of hope, dread, second-guessing and imaginary interviews, weird dreams and troubling symptoms.

He had been unable to escape the universal media derision for the Short List. It gave him both a sense of shame at his own inclusion and a guilty exhilaration at his increased chances of victory. He had tried not to read the press, but couldn’t help noticing that The Frozen Torrent was the favourite at Ladbrokes.

Last night he had dreamt that the reward for winning the prize had been changed from the usual eighty thousand pounds to a night in bed with Katherine Burns. Alan and Didier had mysteriously made it on to the List, despite not having written any novels. Also among the finalists was Attila the Hun, who spoke a barking barbarian language in which Sam turned out to be fluent. A translation of their conversation appeared above the stage of the Banqueting Room, like surtitles at the opera. On the stage itself, and on huge screens around the room, the Short List was examined under a microscope by a team of experts in white coats. They bickered constantly and assaulted each other over the head with inflated pig’s bladders. When the winner was finally announced, she turned out to be an exceptionally tall woman in a silver sequined dress who strode majestically across the room, climbed some steps up to a circular bed and engaged in a long, deep kiss with Katherine, to the uproarious delight of the dissolute, sweating guests who sat at tables made of giant water lilies. Bitterly disappointed, Attila burst into tears and had to be hugged and comforted by his motherly agent, who told him that Die Christian Dog was ‘a timeless masterpiece’ and that he’d been ‘robbed’. ‘It’s my karma,’ said Attila, who turned out to be a Hollywood actor, ‘what goes around comes around.’ ‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ said his agent, rubbing his back, ‘don’t blame yourself, sweetie, it’s not your fault.’

Sam woke up from his dream with a pounding heart and an urgent desire to empty his bladder. Since his break with Katherine, he had been woken several times a night, trickling with sweat and convinced that he was about to die of a heart attack. He would lie in his damp T-shirt, breathing carefully and debating whether to take one of the beta-blockers his doctor had prescribed for performance anxiety. The horror was both persuasive and routine, without its familiarity blunting each night’s uniquely convincing chest pains. The Short Listing of The Frozen Torrent had reinforced his panic, as well as adding a layer of ambivalence to it. Would it be good to win or not? Would it be clumsy and tactless to accept the prize after Katherine’s unfortunate exclusion from the competition? Would she hate him for it? In any case, victory would mean a big speech; trunks of beta-blockers sent ahead to Melbourne, New York, Shanghai and Berlin; countless interviews using exactly the same formula to answer exactly the same question, and more and more photographs of him looking wooden and miserable. At the same time, it was out of the question not to win. And it was out of the question to have the thought that it was out of the question not to win. Hubris was bad, but insincere anti-hubris was no better. In the middle of the day, a word like ‘humility’ would present itself, like a sunlit colonnade in all its elegance and simplicity, but by the middle of the night it was transformed into a sinister ruin, with a murderer concealed behind every column.

Sam picked up his pen and wrote, ‘In the middle of the day, a word like “humility” would present itself, like a sunlit colonnade in all its elegance and simplicity, but by the middle of the night it was transformed into a sinister ruin, with a murderer concealed behind every column.’

Vanessa opened The Greasy Pole with dutiful resignation. Knowing that it had passed onto the Short List with the support of all the other committee members assuaged her guilt at not having read it before. It had been selected through a series of mutually beneficial deals, rather than from any spontaneous enthusiasm. Jo, it was true, had said that it passed her ‘relevance test’ with ‘flying colours’, and Penny, rather obscurely, said that it was a relief to get a book that was ‘actually about something’, but other than that, Vanessa had no sense of its merits. Now she had to marshal arguments against it (assuming it turned out not to be a masterpiece) in order to secure victory for The Frozen Torrent , the only remaining work of literature on the list.

She cleared her mind and tried to read the text with as much receptiveness as possible.

As his train hurtled from Edinburgh to London, from capital to capital, Angus Stewart, the youngest Member of Parliament to be returned to Westminster after the closest election for a generation, felt a familiar pang of loss, and a no less familiar pang of anger, at leaving his fair homeland for the riot-torn nation to the south. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Salford, Nottingham, Liverpool, one after another the English cities had been ignited, filling the television screens of peaceful Scottish homes with images of destruction and chaos, and making Angus more determined than ever to break free from the cursed Union between his country and its bullying neighbour; a forced marriage between a comely maiden and a lustful old man, long overdue for dissolution, and too steeped in injustice to be remedied by any other means than divorce. One day, God willing, Angus would be the Prime Minister of a proud and independent Scotland, husbanding its own resources; its own oil, when the contracts with foreign petroleum companies came up for renewal, its own fisheries, once the quotas could be renegotiated with the EU, its own Toyota factories, and its very own wind farms.

Angus’s deep clear eyes, like two Highland lochs, settled on the young man in sportswear sitting opposite him, and he felt a politician’s instinctive desire to reach out to ordinary voters, and find out what they were thinking about the great issues of the day.

‘So, what do you make of these English riots?’ he asked with a broad smile.

‘Well, I seen this policeman on TV last night,’ said the young voter, ‘and he said a gang is people that intimidates members of the public, right? So, I thought, in that case, the biggest gang out there is the police, right?’

‘So would you be in favour of reforming their stop and search powers?’ asked Angus.

‘What I’m in favour of, mate,’ said the young voter, ‘is rioting. I want some of that free stuff I seen on TV…’

When Vanessa heard her phone ring she reached impatiently into her handbag to switch it off, but seeing that the call was from Penny, she decided to take it after all.

‘Hello, Penny, how are you?’

‘Well, I’m rather reeling from the news. Have you heard?’