Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

As Vanessa’s mind approached the black hole of her daughter’s illness, it tended to veer off into generalizations: the paradox that the inflated exam grades designed to banish low self-esteem from the national psyche made anything less than ten A*s into a source of low self-esteem; the fact that the long backward look now taken by universities encouraged an emphasis on obedience and conformity that were not necessarily the best indicators of intellectual curiosity and incisiveness. She took refuge in the platitudes of her social circle, so much easier to contemplate than her children’s individual cases. Tom had returned from the ‘birthday party’ he had been to last weekend, admitting that it had in fact been an ayahuasca ceremony that ended when one of the participants went into a coma. With only eight weeks before his A-levels, Tom had spent three days at home recovering from the weekend’s psychedelic ordeal. Now that Poppy was back in the clinic, Vanessa had lost her nerve and instead of lecturing him, carried bowls of soup to his bedroom on a tray.

Quite apart from this multitude of obligations, she was surrounded by the Elysian Prize submissions, piled up around her armchair. These required an immediate and decisive focus, not only to reclaim some floor space by clearing out the hopeless cases (she thought involuntarily of Poppy’s bed at the clinic being liberated by her death) but also to get down, over the next two weeks, to the final twenty books out of which the Long List of twelve would then be chosen. Her first task, which she intended to dispatch before the Brontë tutorials, was to take a look at one of Malcolm’s candidates, wot u starin at. She was inclined to stay on good terms with Malcolm and to keep her polemical powder dry for the later stages of the competition. Her intention was not to read the book through, unless it became a candidate for the Long List, but to let it through, if at all possible, to the last twenty.

She started reading the first page.

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

Death Boy’s troosers were round his ankies. The only vein in his body that hadna bin driven into hiding was in his cock.

‘I told yuz nivir ivir to talk to uz when Aym trackin a vein,’ snarled Death Boy.

‘That way I needna fucking talk ta ya at all,’ said Wanker, slumped in the corner, weirdly fascinated by the sour stench of his own vomit, rising off of his soiled Iggy Pop tee-shirt. He was fixed ta the corner, as if some cunt with a nail gun had shot him through the hands and feet and crucified the sorry bastard to Death Boy’s floor. Deep in the despair a kenning that he coudna move in any direction, he pissed himself, feeling the warm flood fill his troosers, and at the same time evacuating his tormented bowels, with a mixture a relief, and a touch a pride at the thought that heed be leavin Death Boy’s gaff in an even worse state than heed found it. No easy matter.

‘Shite,’ he whispered with a voice that seemed to come from a thousand miles away and belong to another creature, not necessarily human.

‘Awright!’ said Death Boy, his face twisted in a kinda sweet hatred. ‘Awright! Ay got it, Ay fucking got it, Ay fucking hit the vein. Awright…’ His words trailed off as the skag came on and he climbed outta the refrigerator where heed bin cramped, naked and shivering, and stepped out, inta the heat o tha midday sun, and his aching ole bones and bruised ole muscles melted like wax in a fire.

‘That’s fuckin awright, that is,’ he croaked.

What was so typical of an untrained reader like Malcolm was the claim that this was a work of ‘gritty social realism’, when in fact it was a piece of surrealistic satire. Vanessa decided to sample another passage from the middle of the book.

‘Wot u starin at?’ sais the red-haired cunt at the bar.

‘Ay wasna starin at anythin,’ sais Death Boy.

‘Listen, mate,’ sais Wanker, who wasna in the mood for a fight, being skag-sick, and pissed at the world on account of his AIDS test comin back positive, ‘there’s nae cunt staring at nae cunt.’

‘Well, you can stare a this,’ sais the red-head cunt, and he brings his beer mug down on Death Boy’s heid, splitting his skull open.

Death Boy’s goat more blood pouring outa him than a pig in an abattoir, only he’s so outa his box, he dunna ken he’s goat any cause for complaint until he’s licked up a good half pint o it.

Wanker, seeing that a fight is unavoidable, snorts a line a speed off the bar, goes up to the red-haired cunt and head-butts him, breakin the fucker’s nose. While the cunt is still trying to get his balance, Wanker whips out his syringe and sinks it into the cunt’s neck.

‘Welcome to tha world a AIDS, you psycho cunt,’ sais Wanker.

‘That’s enough of that,’ sais the weasel-faced barman, ‘we’re no havin any fightin in here. This is a respectable pub.’

Yes, well, there it was, thought Vanessa: eighty or perhaps ninety thousand words of that sort of thing. An art based on impact, rather than process, structure or insight, doomed to the jack-hammer monotony of having to shock again and again. She placed it reluctantly on the stack reserved for the final twenty. She would let Malcolm have it, for what she was ashamed to admit were essentially political reasons, but she would advance her literary objections strongly when the time came — and when she had read it.

So far the only book she wholeheartedly admired was The Frozen Torrent by Sam Black. It had what she wanted to call an experience of literature built into it, an inherent density of reflection on the medium in which it took place: the black backing that makes the mirror shine.

There was a knock on the door. Three minutes early. How keen they were to tell her how many cruelties they had spotted in Wuthering Heights , like children bringing pebbles back from the shoreline to distract their parents when they were trying to read.

Alan Oaks had managed to catch an earlier flight than expected, and he texted Katherine from the Gatwick Express to tell her the good news. He longed to be with her again, and although he knew his back wasn’t up to it, pictured himself sweeping aside the keys and the envelopes from the hall table and having her right there, too impatient to make it as far as the bedroom. By the time he was at the front of the taxi queue, he had compromised realistically and settled on the armchair in the drawing room. With her legs hooked over its arms, she was lowering herself …

‘Oh, Craven Hill Gardens, please.’

There had been opportunities in Guttenberg, but they were not temptations. With Katherine he was having that rare thing, a love affair. An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern; nevertheless, when he’d left his wife and moved in with Katherine, a couple of envious senior colleagues at Page and Turner had taken him aside to warn him against the explosive mixture of too many kinds of intimacy, and wheeled out stories of editors who had lost star writers, and novelists who had dried up or, worse, started to write mawkish and baggy prose.

Katherine was not a star yet but she was full of promise, and everyone at Page and Turner hoped and expected to see her latest novel, Consequences , on the Elysian Short List. There wasn’t a line he hadn’t pondered and polished. He had boldly changed the chapter order and meticulously tightened the plot. It had been a real collaboration. He had watched some of the sentences form on her computer screen while he kissed her neck and ran his hands over her body, not sure whether he preferred to distract or inspire her. They lay in bed at weekends, Katherine writing the next chapter while he edited the one before. Being so close to her writing made Alan realize that Katherine’s enthralling sexuality was only part of a broader erotic relationship with experience. She wrote the sentences of someone who trails her fingers over the furniture she admires and inhales the scent of a melon before slicing it open, who touches what she can touch, but also expects the most abstruse ideas to turn into sensations as her imagination takes them in.