Edward Aubyn - A Clue to the Exit

‘Only big thoughts and very small ones. It’s the medium-sized thoughts that jump ship in an emergency.’

‘Write that down.’

‘No,’ I snapped, ending the call.

In any case, it’s a good thing I’m taking the Prozac. I’m enjoying my positive attitude. It’s got me making plans, being practical. The medium-sized thoughts are back. I may only have six months to live but I’ve still got to survive. I’m going to New York to see my agent, Arnie Cornfield. Arnie is famous for his introductory rap, ‘Some people want an agent to hold their hand. Some people want a shoulder to cry on. Well, I’m not that kind of an agent. I’m interested in one thing and one thing only: money.’

When I was writing Aliens with a Human Heart (perhaps you were one of the fifty-three million people who paid to see it) I enjoyed pointing out to novelists struggling with a £3,800 advance spread over seventeen years that the novel is dead. Now that I’m about to join it I’m not so sure. Why should the novel die? Why should anybody die?

Arnie won’t be pleased that I want to write a novel. Too bad. I just need enough money to see me out. This house I bought near St Tropez is expensive to keep up.

It’s a pink house with white gates. At the front there are two palm trees, floodlit, so the burglars don’t fall flat on their faces. At the back, four minuscule cypresses, like self-conscious bridesmaids, accompany the concrete driveway to the garage. If you climb on the roof and jump, you can see the sea. Inside there are still-empty niches everywhere, and tiny flights of steps leading from one thing to another. Two steps up to the kitchen, three down to the living area, one onto the patio, two into the garden, and a final glissando of steps back to the entrance area.

It’s as if the builder had stumbled across the concept of a step and couldn’t believe his luck. Get a load of this thing that goes up and down. C’est un petit miracle . Imagine the atmosphere of excitement on the building site, the dawning of a new possibility, like Homo habilis bringing a stone down for the first time on the bones of a scavenged gazelle and sucking out the marrow. The world would never be the same again.

The strange thing about these discoveries is that they often happen simultaneously in quite different places. It makes you think that ideas might be ‘in the air’.

Is the oyster waiting for the lemon juice, or does the juice just fall? Who thought of bringing together elements from such remote worlds: oysters and lemons, ducks and oranges? It was you, you greedy thing. And so isn’t it natural, in our delirium, on the borders between waking and insomnia, that we should imagine our death as the culinary triumph of a careless superior being? The bitter white splash of some unsuspected fruit, the stubby prongs, the big swallow.

From the way he tucked into his lunch at Mi Casa Ti Casa, I can only assume that Arnie Cornfield was not afflicted by these reflections.

‘Nobody wants to hear about death,’ he said, loading a dripping cable of spaghetti alle vongole into his mouth. ‘It’s depressing. The audience have gotta leave the movie with a smile on their faces.’

‘But it’s my only subject: I live it, I breathe it, I eat death.’

‘Eat death, eat shit,’ said Arnie. ‘Gimme that feel-good factor, like you did in Aliens with a Human Heart .’ His face lit up again. ‘That was a beautiful deal.’

‘But I’m not in that space any more,’ I said. ‘I’ve had some very serious medical news; as you will, if you live long enough. I’ve got to communicate what’s happening — I mean,’ I suddenly saw my opportunity, ‘talk about “Wake up and smell the flowers”.’

‘ Smell the Flowers , I like,’ said Arnie. ‘ Smell the Flowers , there’s a market for. How about they get the files mixed up and he’s not really dying at all — it’s some other schmuck, a weirdo serial killer: someone who deserves to die.’

‘But they didn’t get the files mixed up, Arnie, this is happening to me. Don’t you get it? I’m dying.’

‘Who’s your executor?’ said Arnie. ‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world.’

‘When did you last see a dog eat a dog?’

‘Gimme a break, it’s an expression, like … eh, “The pursuit of happiness” it’s not meant to be taken literally, right?’ Arnie wiped some of the orange sauce from his chin. ‘Even after you die you gotta have representation, otherwise you’re yesterday’s news, kaput, finito .’

‘Will you be my executor?’ I simpered.

‘I’d be honoured,’ said Arnie. ‘Tony!’

Tony came over. He’s big in the theatre.

‘You know Charlie.’

Tony smiled.

‘We’re planning a big retrospective of Charlie’s work. Boy Meets Girl, The Frog Prince and, of course, the jewel in the crown, Aliens with a Human Heart . In about … how long is it, Charlie?’

‘Six months.’

‘Six months,’ said Arnie.

‘Congratulations,’ said Tony.

I looked suitably modest.

‘By the way, I’ve had a peep at your friend’s manuscript,’ said Tony, ‘and I think what he’s doing is very dangerous. One little rule we have in the theatre is never let the public into rehearsals. I don’t know what’s wrong with writers these days. I mean, why can’t he just establish some credible characters…’

Arnie started nodding his head vigorously. ‘Tell the fucking story.’

‘And by imagining their lives,’ Tony went on, ‘explore the themes he wants to bring to our attention.’

‘In other words, tell the fucking story,’ said Arnie. ‘Thanks for having a look at it, Tony. That’s what I figured, but this guy comes highly recommended, and sometimes I think maybe I’m outta touch. I see so much material, I think maybe there’s a market for this shit.’

Tony had to rush.

‘What are ya gonna call it?’ asked Arnie.

‘ Smell the Flowers ,’ I suggested.

‘Sounds great. Send me the treatment and I’ll get you the deal.’

It’s midnight. I am in the Westbury Hotel, sweating over the outline for Smell the Flowers . Arnie doesn’t even know that I want to write a novel yet, let alone the extent to which it will not be centred on a floral tribute. You would have thought that I could write a phoney outline for Smell the Flowers and then write the morbid novel I really have in mind, but I’ve made the fatal mistake of drawing a cordon sanitaire of honesty around the subject of my death.

Earlier today I started writing something a little magical. ‘Magical, there’s a market for,’ as Arnie might say. News travels slowly from Paris to Bogotá, but from that ingenious capital it has pulsed around the world at the speed of light.

Doña S was always very particular about attending confession, no easy matter given that she was permanently asleep and lived at the bottom of a well. The Jesuits from the seminary at San Sebastián refused to come over the mountains to our lonely little village, and so we chose my grandmother’s donkey to be our priest. To us simple folk, Eeh-Aw might as well have been the Pope. Once a week at noon we would follow our beloved confessor to the well in a candle-lit procession, give him a bucket of carrots and leave him to listen to Doña S’s seemingly chaotic but highly symbolical ramblings …

Charming as it might be to skip along in the Andean style, I’ve decided that whimsy is not the royal road to freedom, and that I have to return to the one fact I can rely on: that I, whoever I am, am dying.