‘Talk about what?’ I am genuinely at a loss.
‘The safe, where is it?’
‘What safe?’
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Paul shouts.
‘I am trying to find out where the safe is.’
‘Jesus, Igor, would you let it go? There is no safe, I explained that to you a month ago.’
‘But … you say we come here for the plan,’ Igor says. He sounds confused, though he keeps the blade to my throat.
‘The new plan, Igor! The new plan! I told you, we’re helping Claude to get with the waitress, remember?’
‘Oh,’ Igor says. He lays the knife down on the counter. There is what may be safely described as an awkward silence.
‘Why was Igor killing Claude?’ Remington whispers to his father.
‘It was a joke,’ Paul tells him, and then, inspired, says, ‘Right, Igor? It was a practical joke!’
Igor hoists his lips into an unconvincing grin. ‘Look, not even sharp!’ He waggles the cheese knife at me with what is meant to be a comical expression. ‘No way to cut a man’s throat with this! Only child’s throat!’
‘Ha ha ha!’ laughs Paul.
‘Ha ha ha!’ laughs Igor.
‘Ha ha!’ Remington joins in. Now all three of them are laughing.
‘I think it might be better if Igor left now,’ I say.
‘No more veal?’ Igor’s eyes well with disappointment.
Paul shakes his head. Igor turns to me for clemency. With a gasp of disgust, I look away.
‘May I use bathroom once more before I go?’ he asks humbly.
‘You may,’ I reply, still without looking at him.
Igor trudges to the bathroom. The awkward silence prevails again.
‘Dad, was Uncle Igor ever a person?’ Remington asks.
The toilet flushes, and Igor shambles sheepishly back into the room. His rain mac is on again and has been buttoned right up to the throat; with difficulty he stoops and picks up his bag. At the door he turns. ‘No hard feelings,’ he says, and lifts his hand in farewell. Four fresh toilet rolls and a veal cutlet tumble from under his coat. The four of us look at them on the ground. ‘Okay,’ Igor says, and lets himself out.
I make coffee, and Remington returns to the television.
‘So, all’s well that ends well,’ Paul says.
‘From now on, I prefer if it is just you and me working together,’ I tell him.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I am saying, no more Igor.’
‘What? Why? Because he came at you with a cheese knife?’ Paul attempts to work up a plausible tone of incredulity. ‘We’re trying to make art here, Claude! It’s not going to be like working in the bank! Some days you’ll feel inspired, some days you won’t! Some days Igor will come at you with a cheese knife, some days he won’t! That’s the creative process!’
I confine myself to pouring the coffee.
‘Look, I don’t want to pull rank, but I would respectfully remind you that I’m the artist here. You commissioned me to direct your life artistically and now I must respectfully ask you to let me do my job.’
‘I am not stopping you from doing your job. I would love to see any evidence at all of you doing your job.’
He gasps, then there is a silence. I glance over my shoulder, but he is not looking at me. Instead, he seems to be staring at something on the far side of the room.
‘Claude, what is that?’ he says.
‘What is what?’
‘That, on the table there.’
‘That is a novel by Bimal Banerjee, called The Clowns of Sorrow.’
‘I can see that. What I’m asking is what it’s doing in your house.’ His tone is that of a wronged lover who has discovered traces of a rival in his mistress’s boudoir.
‘I am reading it,’ I say, feeling apologetic all of a sudden without knowing quite why. ‘It’s about circuses,’ I add, thinking this might endear the book to him.
‘I know that, Claude. I know because that fucker completely ripped me off.’
He is genuinely angry; it surprises me, especially as Banerjee’s book has only very superficial similarities to his own.
‘Are you kidding? They’re both about circuses! They both have clowns in the title, for God’s sake!’
‘Yes, but your novel is a bittersweet romance about a clown and a starchy office worker, for which the circus provides an occasional backdrop. The Clowns of Sorrow is’ — I turn to the back of the book for assistance here — ‘ “both an allegory for the poverty and wonder of the India of the early twenty-first century, and a brilliantly constructed arena in which language itself is set to perform breathtaking feats of daring and imagination.” ’
Paul listens to this with his head bowed and his hands on his hips, like a truculent footballer receiving a telling-off from the referee. ‘You don’t get it, Claude,’ he says. ‘This is a writer thing. I spent years putting together the first serious clown novel — breaking down that wall, opening people up to the idea of a book about that world. And then he sweeps in and takes all the glory!’
It is true that Banerjee’s novel received praise and prizes that Paul’s did not; however, both books came out at the same time, so it is difficult to see how the Indian could have deliberately stolen Paul’s idea.
‘Exactly!’ Paul pounds his fist into his palm. ‘How?’
‘What I meant was, it seems more likely that he didn’t steal your idea.’
‘Oh, he stole it all right. He stole it, he sold it, and then he disappeared with a big pile of money before anyone got wise. And nobody’s seen him since.’
‘Mmm.’ I am not sure whether I should tell him or not; but I suppose he will find out sooner or later. ‘Of course, he hasn’t actually disappeared. He has a new book coming out.’
‘What?’ Paul goggles, flushes, goggles some more, until he looks rather like one of the creatures in Rainbow Mystery Epic.
‘There was an interview only a few days ago — you didn’t see it?’ I wake my laptop, and a moment later a caramel-skinned man with thinning hair and opalescent gold eyes is glowering out at me. ‘Here we are — Mary Cutlass meets the award-winning novelist Bimal Banerjee.’
‘Mary fucking Cutlass,’ Paul says disgustedly. ‘That’s the witch who slaughtered my book.’
‘This is what she says: “After seven long years, the most brilliant writer of his generation has made his triumphant return. His new novel, Ararat Rat Rap, is a work so masterful and compendious as to make everything else written in the last twenty years seem redundant —” ’
‘Oh Christ,’ Paul says.
‘ “— with the exception, that is, of his own The Clowns of Sorrow, a groundbreaking imagining of India and the originator of the ‘circus-novel’ genre, subsequently much imitated —” ’
‘What!’
‘ “The new book, to whose scale and ambition only the work of Tolstoy comes close, presents both a pulverizing denunciation of the last three thousand years of civilization, and, in its inexorable beauty, its jocundity and its breadth of emotion, a glimmer of hope —” ’
‘ “Jocundity”? What the fuck is “jocundity”?’
‘ “I travelled to London —” ’
‘This woman writes like a fucking hernia,’ he expostulates. ‘It’s like they gave a fucking hernia a weekly column and told it to be as excruciating as possible until all of their readers have hernias too.’
‘ “I travelled to London last week,” ’ I read again, then stop. ‘Well, that is not technically how hernias work.’
‘What?’ Paul says.
‘Reading a hernia’s column could not possibly give one a hernia. Perhaps a better likening might be to a virus, which passes itself on to everyone it comes into contact with.’