You know what this year has been like: a motor-neurone shuffle between surgical wards and crematoria, with the occasional day trip to the Magistrate’s Court or a bookfair thrown in for good behaviour. Now the ultimate blow has fallen and my typewriter, a senile heavyweight I have nursed for months, indulging all its petty-minded eccentricities, has decided to go ape. It’s had enough. It’s sick of the depressive muck and filth it’s been forced to process. I didn’t get my story done in time. My rental with fate was revoked.
Apparently, nobody will touch a Silver-Reed. ‘Pity it’s not an IBM, John,’ they mutter, backing off. ‘Can’t get the parts. Not worth bothering, mate. Only go wrong again in three months, then where are you? Know what I mean?’
Grimly, I started up Holloway Road (forty minutes at the wheel and five years beaten out of your ticker): to the place where I bought the thing. At least, they couldn’t deny that somebody used them. They didn’t have to. They had the perfect answer. The shop was gone. Decamped in the night, with all its booty of iffy keyboards and illicit phials of Tipp-Ex for primary-school sniffers. The site had been grabbed by yet another estate agent. They were staggering in with the palm trees, as I went for a death-or-glory U-turn.
Next, on a tar-bubbling, three-shirt day, to Roman Road. The good old Roman. You can trust the Roman. ‘Bring ’er in,’ they said on the phone, ‘we’ll take a look.’ A blink was enough. I was bounced out of a side-door, a blanket over my head, like some terminal junkie, so far gone he hits the same chemist four times in a week with his pitifully forged paregoric script.
Finally, in raging despair, I tracked down a mechanic, hiding out in an attic off the Bethnal Green Road, who said he’d try anything for cash in hand. I’d have to schlep the monster up three flights of stairs. He couldn’t collect it. His motor was temporarily ‘off the road’. I explained (personally taking on all the guilt, as for a defective child) that every W, every H repeated incontinently, turning my camera-ready sheet into a duff concrete poem.
A fortnight later the repaired machine was back on my desk. Feverishly, I whacked out the first sentences of the twelfth (now never to be written) tale. And was returned a few random lines of gibberish. The keys I hammered bore no resemblance to the symbols that defaced my page. For example: my attempt at ‘From this point, I’ll write by hand’ emerged as ‘Fff- thjy jfjttf Jjuu yfjtt hy hftu.’ ‘I’m going crazy’ was spat back as ‘Jf- fjt uffty.’
‘That’s it,’ I said, and dropped the sick beast out of the window, narrowly missing next door’s neutered and basking tom cat. The ex-machine, a set of fat steel dentures, grinned back at me as it felclass="underline" hit the stones, and exploded, sending a long repressed spiral of mania sawing through the overgrown weeds, the lovingly transplanted hart’s-tongue ferns, the metal-green dust on unpicked raspberry warts.
But my conscience — stabbed by the loss of a companion who had, whatever her faults, carried me so far — left me twitching and sleepless. I crawled out of bed, crept into the garden, and humped the disembowelled veteran on to my shoulder: to jog through the streets to London Bridge Station.
‘What crackpot therapy is this?’ you ask. ‘What primal agony fad?’(I know you lay the letter aside and walk across to the window to see if the pub has opened. It hasn’t. Carry on.)
At five A.M. the early-morning punters were a heavy presence in the town. If they are not actually allowed to sleep at their consoles, they’re panicky to get back to them before the sun rises — like vampires to their coffins. There might be a flicker in the overnight price of peanut butter. These mercury-complexioned sleepwalkers ignored me. Anyone demented enough to hoist a wrecked Silver-Reed must be coming from the dark ages. A head case. A money hater. Unlucky to see, dangerous to approach. I loped in a lather of self-celebrating masochism along Bishopsgate, past Leadenhall Market. I was in pursuit of a fugitive image from a television documentary about South American Indians, road runners, who chew coca leaves and race (God knows why) in dusty, marathon relays, trundling monster tree stumps.
The journey took two hours and involved three changes of train. (I had, by the way, chickened out of the notion of manhandling my burden all the way on foot. Life’s too short for absolutes. This was an instant penance.) My first taste of Sheppey. We were halted for twenty minutes on the bridge over the Swale, no man’s land, a limbo between the living and the living dead. Too much sky. Wide flat fields; maggoty sheep cropping the flame tongues of blast furnaces. Something evil and mean had insinuated its way into a minor Plantaganet tapestry: had poisoned the natural infusions of time.
Later, in Sheerness, on the streets, I saw the inhabitants as wraiths, doubles, fetches, tricksters. They were bloodless, secretive. They were the humble dead going about their business. A colony of the dead (like the end of Jim Thompson’s novel, The Getaway). They could not touch me. I wasn’t there. My typewriter floated among them, a levitating soup tureen.
I buried it at low tide, with a vision of Southend (that fault-cloned Miami) away across the water, rising from its archipelago of untreated sewage. A bone-white jewel in a bisto sea. I ate a lively breakfast (still squirming on the fork), and returned by the first available train — taking care to work my way through a pack of zany local history pamphlets. ‘The Legend of the Grey Dolphin Becomes Fact’. ‘The Minster Miracles’. ‘The Gatehouse Gallows’. ‘Minster’s Stonehenge’. ‘Pagan Gods in Minster Abbey’.
I have to get out from under the burden of a narrative which includes my request to be released from the burden of a narrative. Which includes… Even this letter is part of it; the mess, the horror. The swamp that follows me around. And your response to my letter, the way you are rubbing your chin with your thumb; or the way — now — you are cleaning your spectacles with your shirt-tails. You will do it. I know you will. A few pages, that’s all. It’s a lot to ask, right? The barest report in any style you favour: a pastiche of what has gone before, some off-the-wall neologisms to catch the eye of Anthony Burgess. There is, I assure you, a measure of safety in being the one who holds the pen. ‘I’is the man in possession, but he is also possessed, untouchable. ‘I’is immortal. The title of the survivor. There has always to be one witness to legitimize a massacre. Aneirin at Catraeth. My best hope is to offer you that role.
Don’t you find the world is an increasingly mirthless hallucination? Fredrik Hanbury was waiting on the doorstep when I arrived back from Sheerness. The Guardian had been on to him, could he deliver a message? Did I dream about the Widow? Would I care to describe those dreams in no more than two hundred words? This whole book is a sleep of revenge. But the logic is hers: the dreamlife of a woman who never sleeps. Isn’t it bad enough to be forced to share (to co-author) her bleak fantasies, without having to talk about them to the Guardian? So this is their latest shot: boredom. This is what they have come up with. To hobble her. A perpetual-motion machine, a non-sleeper: a mantis that does not stop to pray.