Charlie Hill is a writer and former bookseller from Birmingham. As well as being the author of The Space Between Things, he has written for the TLS and the Independent on Sunday, and his short stories have appeared in Ambit, Stand and The View From Here.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
TINDAL STREET PRESS
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R OJH
www.tindalstreet.co.uk
This eBook edition published in 2013
Copyright © Charlie Hill, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 978 1 84765 980 4
For Andrea
I would like to thank, in no particular order: Rachael McKee, Clare McClure, Tony Roberts, Luke Brown, Alan Mahar, Andy Killeen, Becky from Stourbridge, Lisa Hoftizer, Nick James, mum and dad, and Hannah and Drew.
BOOKS
It was three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, the end of a typically long week, and Richard Anger – the owner of the last little bookshop in town – was waiting for a cab to take him to the airport.
He held a small rucksack. In it, a pair of shorts, a shirt, two pairs of pants, a pair of flip-flops and a beach read. The book was by David Foster Wallace. Richard had put his favourite ‘Gone Readin’’ sign in the window of the shop and he hoped that this would be the case: he’d started the bloody thing half a dozen times and had yet to get beyond the first ten pages.
Despite the promise of four days of sun and overly sweet wine, Richard was sporting a sour puss. But then that was to be expected – he sold books for a living, after all. During the course of an average year, he could reasonably expect to afford a weekend away at the seaside; that he always flew somewhere warm was due in part to an original take on debt management and in part to the need for relief from the uniquely draining nature of his day job.
Richard was pushing forty and had run Back Street Books for nearly a decade and a half. He’d started it up as an outlet for his passion for books, a passion that had only dissipated with the appropriation of the phrase ‘A Passion for Books’ by ‘The Nation’s Favourite Bookseller’. Back Street Books was a genuine labour of bloody-minded love, its shelves demonstrating the most minor of concessions to mainstream taste. It specialised instead in anything that Richard liked to read: long-forgotten noir fiction, modernist classics, chapbooks, transgressive experimentation, translated erotica, minimalism, short stories, satires, samizdat, surrealist poetry and smut.
Initially this indulgence paid off. For the first few years of the operation, the pages of his balance sheet turned serenely enough. But then Richard had planted in fertile ground. Despite its name, the shop was actually situated on the High Street of Harborne, a suburb of south Birmingham, and Harborne was a genuine reader’s suburb. Half a mile in one direction and you’d find people who felt politically obliged to take their Julian Barnes with a James Kelman; half a mile in the other and people looking for the latest Lee Child could be persuaded – with only a modicum of bullshit – to leave with a Patricia Highsmith.
Even so, Back Street Books was lucky to have survived for so long. There had been another independent on the high street when Richard had opened up and a Christian bookshop too. The former had succumbed to the usual: commercial pressures, decreasing literacy rates, the rise of the machines, yada yada. And if – as Richard liked to think – the demise of the latter was down to his determined championing of Dawkins, Hitchens et al., there was no getting away from the fact that, whichever way you cut it, it was a bad time to be in bookselling.
It was getting worse too. Business was epochmakingly slow. The figures at the end of this year’s first quarter had been the most harrowing thing Richard had read since the last Ben Elton. Indeed, it was only due to luck that Richard had scraped together the necessary for four days on the Med. Two months ago he’d invested £25 in a dead-cert internet betting scam that involved covering your losses with amateur bookmakers in the Irish Republic. While he was keeping personal tabs on one of his runners at Ripon racecourse, the rain which went on to wash out the meeting caused a flash flood that picked up his Skoda Felicia and swept it away down the River Skell. By the time a farmer and his wife had fished it out of a hedge some way down the A61, the car was a write-off and Richard only had to sit back, wait for the insurance and plan his trip to Corfu.
And yet. Even now, with his flight just two hours away, he was struggling to get enthused. What was concerning him was how long he could carry on like this. Was this his last year as the owner of a bookshop? As his own man? How long would it be before he was arrested on the pavement outside a boarded-up shop, drunk and naked, hurling books and abuse at the slow-moving traffic and its indifferent cargo?
A day and a half later, waking in a hotel room, slouching upright and gasping for air, Richard was past caring. All night he had been sweating wine, and his sheets were damp and sweet and sour. He waved away an imaginary mosquito, reached over to his bedside table, felt for his soft-pack cigarettes. He lit one, then exhaled in surprise, offended by the taste in his mouth. Then he coughed, a phlegm-filled hack that burnt his lungs.
The holiday was clearly doing its job. Richard hadn’t thought about merchandising or profit and loss or refunds (‘This book is supposed to be funny. It isn’t. I want my money back’) for over twenty-four hours. And despite the fact that he was sure he was about to have a stroke, he felt quantifiably better than he had in Blighty. He shuffled to the bathroom mirror and gave himself a celebratory scowl. It was a practised expression and Richard was happy that it was the expression of a truly bad man…
He tried hard to be bad, did Richard. Playing the anti-hero was his reason to be. Not that it had always been the case. Just over a dozen short years ago he’d been ensconced in a respectable suburb, engaged to be married and a long way removed from thoughts of bad behaviour. His attitude had changed only when his fiancée Julie contrived to have an affair. It was a very off-the-shelf number – literally so; she had met the fella in the ‘Exotic Ideas’ aisle of the local Tesco – and at first Richard hadn’t given it long. The two of them were clearly not suited. When he saw them on the street together and they smiled at him, everything between them seemed so lifeless and polite. There was no sign whatever of the extravagant rows which he and Julie had enjoyed. And without any feelings of rancour or bitterness, how could they hope to experience true passion?
But Richard might have been wrong. Julie and her new man had gone on to get married just six months later. Six poxy months. This betrayal had left him heartbroken and furious and – in terms of the remainder of what promised to be a sad and angry life – in need of a plan. Fortunately, this was not long in presenting itself.
The most galling thing about the affair, he decided, was the obviousness of it all. The sheer mundanity of his lover’s disloyalty. Julie might have thought that she was dallying in forbidden pleasures, but she wasn’t. The man’s name was Jeff, for God’s sake. A Sven or a Luigi he could have lived with, but Jeff? They had met in Tesco’s. Not at a poker school or a cockfight, but at a supermarket. And the brand-leading supermarket at that. Furthermore, when Richard had asked her ‘why?’ all that she had said was that he ‘didn’t pay her enough attention’. I mean. Please. Nothing there about Jeff’s devotion to the Ancient Order of Shaolin Monks or his passion for parascending or S&M. Nothing, in fact, of any lasting significance whatsoever. No, the two of them were autopiloting in mute acquiescence through the prescribed pleasures of the echt-suburban gloop. Middle of the road didn’t cover it – it was utterly, miserably and unforgivably mediocre.
From that moment on Richard had been the sworn enemy of mediocrity in all its manifestations. If that was all that Julie wanted from life, well, she was welcome to it. Welcome to her mediocre lover and their passionless affair, the unexceptional children they’d doubtless spawn and the plank-like camber-averse friends who’d come to call with their unoriginal take on their unoriginal world. Richard would show her that he was better than that. He would be different. There’d be no such humdrummity for him.
The way forward was not difficult to pin down. Mediocrity was out. Goodness was way beyond his ken. And that, he was delighted to see, left bad behaviour.
But how best to be bad? The fundamentals seemed simple enough. There’d be lots of drinking and drug-taking and painstakingly casual efforts to bed as many women as possible. Other stuff would doubtless present itself as well, for Richard was sure that badness led to badness and more of the same.
He threw himself into his role. He found himself a natural when it came to the sauce – this part of his plan was a piece of piss. He liked liquor. You knew where you were with the stuff. It was a constant, reliable presence, always there, waiting just around the corner, to lift you, take you up and off and away. And so he returned to a number of inner-city pubs he’d frequented in his time with Julie. He left them in the early morning. He drank on his own at home and he drank from cans while walking down the street. He found himself mullered, mashed and soured, swalliedup and unwell. And then, inexorably, and with the help of more of the same, he found himself better again.
Richard took drugs as well: weed and E and billy and what he was told was cocaine. The weed he found frustrating – he wasn’t one for introversion – even if the E was diverting enough and the stimulants fun. But he was disappointed to discover that such behaviour wasn’t far enough removed from the everyday to be anything but mediocre. Any of the pubs towards town – or at least those that displayed a ‘Drug Dealers Will be Prosecuted’ sign – were a cert for hash, and chemicals could always be found among the older generation of well-heeled bohos in the suburb of Moseley Village, where he sometimes passed a Sunday lunchtime. It all seemed like too little trouble to be worth it.
Then there were the women. The women hadn’t proved too much of an ask either. Most of them had admittedly been on some kind of convoluted search for marbles but then Richard wasn’t consulting them about investment portfolios or the roadblocks to peace in the Middle East. During the first summer of his new resolve, he had met with alarming success and trailed bad sex like a slug. There’d been a lass who worked behind the bar of his local, then her sister and then, somewhat belatedly, her daughter, who had a thing for prescription chemicals and an unnecessary glint in her eye. All had helped him over the hump.
Only once did he have cause to question his cavalier attitude to the opposite sex. Richard would often end his Saturday night session in Selly Oak. The suburb was home to the university but there were attractions for a man of his proclivities too: the streets were covered in litter and rats and there were pubs and kebab shops and dark alleys full of launderette steam and undergrad piss that held the promise of nefarious goings-on.
One of these led to the offices of Richard’s traditional end-of-night taxi stop. The door next to the taxi firm’s belonged to the business above: the Pussy Palace Sauna and Grill. It announced its presence with a pink neon sign that flickered on to the side street and it looked as salubrious as it sounded. One night, worn out after a heroic four-hour after-work sup and faced with an unusually long wait for a cab, Richard decided to take an exploratory mooch. Whether this was prompted by a genuine desire to test the boundaries of bad behaviour in the manner of a Bukowski-esque spit-and-sawdust anti-hero, or merely by pissed-up curiosity, Richard wasn’t sure.
He rang the bell of the Pussy Palace and walked up a damp and narrow staircase. Through another door there was a desk where a woman, or girl, was sitting. She was dolled-up, and the description can never have been more apt: her eyes were bright yet unsmiling and her smile was unsmiling too. As Richard approached the desk, she put down the book she was reading – he was surprised to see that it was Crime and Punishment – and said, ‘Hello, I’m Nikki.’
Even in his befuddled state Richard wondered whether that was her actual name. Not that he hung around to find out. Wherever it had come from, his curiosity had been summarily satisfied. The Pussy Palace was a dismal place. And there was something about Nikki that made it impossible for him to square his contrarian take on the sex industry with the fact that it was a bit too close to the grubby side of bad behaviour for comfort.
Still, this misjudgement aside, things were going well. If not exactly bad, his behaviour was a long way removed from that which would be considered acceptable by Julie and her new ‘boyfriend’. There was just one problem. Behaving badly for the sake of it – or even as part of some pissant personal vendetta – was such a cliché it was mediocre in itself. Worse, if his every transgression was directed solely at his ex-lover, then she had surely won their little psycho-sexual tussle. Richard needed more. Something that would place his antipathy to mediocrity in a wider context. He needed a sense of purpose.
As always he had looked to writing to help him. Richard fancied himself as a writer. Not of novels, not just yet, not while there was still living to be done. But putting words on a page helped him to better indulge his passions. It gave them substance, convinced him that his whims and behaviours had a gravitas, however rabid that gravitas was. And so he scribbled, high on cocaine, furiously and without compromise, snarling away about dirty-bombs and bending before The Man. He doodled experimentally, stoned, about suits and ties and uniforms and public nudity and Gilbert and George and the sausages you find in greasy-spoon breakfasts and organic eggs over-easy or with hominy grits and the secret lives of people who drove the buses…
It was to no avail.
It was on a bus on a Sunday evening that Richard found his sense of purpose. He was sitting at the back, singing songs with an ageing dipso he’d met in a pub that lunchtime. The man had three fingers on one hand and wore shades when he played pool. When the singing started, a few of the other passengers moved down the bus, looking back nervously at the raucous miscreants. They huddled together, animated. They muttered and shook their heads, unaware, perhaps, that Richard and his new best pal were actually singing a medley of hits by the Carpenters.
Richard saw the effect of his behaviour and he was happy. There was nothing pissant about what he was doing, after all. By behaving badly he was causing consternation, stimulating debate. He was provoking people – and he was sure that this wasn’t reading too much into the situation – into questioning the way they saw the world. Being bad was a moral responsibility. Without people breaking the rules – without people like him – how would morality evolve? It was all very well the Jeffs or Julies of this world indulging in their oh-so-snooze-worthy workaday affairs, but humankind needed the bad to work out how best to live. This was why he needed to misbehave. This was his purpose. To provoke. To be a provocateur…
In his hotel room, Richard showered with just the right amount of conviction. The trip had begun promisingly but now it was time to up the pace. He draped himself in his finest Hunter Thompson shirt and headed for the bar.
By seven in the morning the low-slung ceiling fan was already struggling to stir the air in her room. Mindful as she was of her resolution to have a good trip, conditions were undoubtedly trying.
She had come to the town after three days at Perivoli, a small village on the southern coast where she had heard the photography was exceptional. It had proved disappointing.
The scenery had been stunning, the flora dense and varied. Dusty dirt tracks led away from the road by the sea past clutches of crocus and anemone, striped red and purple and white. Higher up, the paths turned rocky and wound through thick bougainvillea, ground-hugging clouds of deep pink, magenta and cerise, heavy with pollen. Every so often the brilliant yellow flowers of Spanish broom blazed like flares or shone through, misty like the sun. Eucalyptus trees, their trunks wind-sculpted, their bark in strips of russet and green, lent the landscape a sense of perspective; from certain points, the hills offered views of a turquoise and tranquil sea that was rounded and immense and hinting at depths that were less benign.
There was much else that teased and pulled at the senses. The sweet perfume of what she guessed was wild rosemary and myrtle, the sharpness of oregano and medicinal density of sage. She had seen goats and lizards. Birds called on the wing, dipping and disappearing in the haze. The air was cooler here than at sea level but there was little shade and the paths were more uneven, making progress slow.
Once, on a walk up the side of a hill that had become a little more taxing than she had anticipated, she had reached a small plateau where she’d found the remains of a building. She sat on a low wall until her breathing had slowed and then she began to explore. The ruins intrigued her. It was an old sheep farmer’s cottage perhaps, or an elaborate shelter for his charges. Whatever its purpose, it seemed to have emerged from the hillside itself, its walls thick like boulders, the skeleton of its roof bound in tendrils of ivy-like vines that stemmed thickly from the earth. She picked her way carefully into the building’s shade. It was ripe in there. She thought she smelled honeysuckle and was momentarily distracted. Then a flutter of birds flew out of the corner of her eye and past her into the sunlight and she was startled and thrilled. Goldfinches! She hadn’t expected to see them this far into the hills…
On that particular occasion she had shot nearly a whole roll of film. And it wasn’t until she was back at her guest house, waiting for a plate of evening mezedes, that she began to feel the first distant aches of dissatisfaction with her efforts on the trip to date. She was happy that the pictures she had were distinctive enough in their own way – each day she had ventured slightly farther inland and had been careful to capture the subtle changes in flora that had resulted from her extra effort – but compositionally they had one thing in common: something was missing.
It was people. She hadn’t expected to see anyone, of course; she hadn’t met a soul on any of her previous walks and if she thought she might this time, she might not have bothered making the trip. But despite her desire for solitude, she found herself craving the sight of people.
There was an order to photography. A way of doing things, a sequence that required of the photographer a particular engagement with the world. For her, taking a picture meant that the most chaotically inspired, the most emotionally charged moment needed to be – however briefly – viewed dispassionately. There was something about this process that she found deeply satisfying. Necessary even. She had experienced this satisfaction on a few occasions on the trip; photographing an unruly tangle of flowers that needed arranging, an insect that needed framing just so. But if you put people in the picture, well, the stakes were raised, the satisfaction became more than merely a matter of aesthetics. Because people could be contained, preserved, kept in their place through their exposure to this process. At the click of a button.
On the morning of her second day in Corfu Town, she left her hotel after a light breakfast and wandered around photographing people. She captured them arguing in front of the ochre cafés of the Spinanda, enjoying respite from the sun in the many churches or themselves photographing the Georgian terraces of the Liston. At two in the afternoon, she returned to her room and took a shower. By now she was looking forward to venturing out in the early evening, to record the people of the town at play.
She walked into the taverna at about four in the afternoon. She was wearing a simple white sunhat, a pale yellow cotton dress and a pair of faded leather sandals. She ordered a slightly sparkling mineral water at the bar and asked about food and then she made her way to a table.
Richard was already half in the bag. He had looked up from his glass of wine as this poppet, no, maybe not, this num-nums, no, that wasn’t right, get a grip, man, this vision had entered. Now he stared at her, in awe. A stomach-sinking feeling of desperation washed over him, the sort that he’d felt many times when five grand had gone tits-up at the last ditch of the last race. This time it came from somewhere else, from a beauty that Richard couldn’t begin to explain or hope to possess. The woman was slightly off-centre, funny looking, even. She moved like a breeze. Her voice was a sponge on a fevered brow. She had a coolness about her and at that moment Richard wanted nothing more than to bask in her cool.
Lauren Furrows sat at a table in the middle of the taverna. It was a small place and quite busy but quiet enough for her to relax and consider her options for the afternoon. For a moment she was distracted by the light in the room. It was good – clear and muted – and she wondered whether she should ask if she could take some photographs. But no. First she would have a drink and a bite to eat.
She watched as the hands of a clock moved unhurriedly on a wall. The clientele was mixed. Near the door, a man and woman in their thirties sat at a table. They were each reading, he a fat, garishly covered book with a title in English, she a loosely bound A4 manuscript. A young local couple – Lauren had them down as friends of the owner – sat close together at the bar and talked in coded love. The bartender was exchanging cigarette smoke with another local, an old man with his face wrapped around his head like bark around a tree. The man on the table next to her was…
Lauren started. My word. What was he doing? Well, staring, obviously. In what looked like dumb fascination. Now he was… my God, what was that? Was he trying to communicate something? Yes, yes he was. He was trying to smile. It was a little lopsided maybe, but that was what it was. What a strange – and unquestionably drunk – man. And what a hideous shirt!
Ignoring him, she looked away, sipped from her glass of water and rubbed the back of her neck with her hand. She was still not used to the humidity of the island. Reaching for her camera, she flicked a few switches, set it down on the table and waited. After five minutes, the local couple left the taverna. There was little noise. The clock made no sound. The bartender was writing out a menu on a chalkboard. The old man was sucking a coffee. Lauren flexed her fingers, picked up her camera again. She liked the feel of the bar, the way that the personalities of the people there were indivisible from the environment, held in place by stone, captured by the surfaces of the ceramic tiles behind the bar. She could do something striking if she picked the right time, she was sure of that. As she had with the cyclist in the quad that evening last summer when the light was pink and the sky was strawberry rippled. She’d waited until he’d got off and was chaining his bike up before she’d taken the picture. And the two lovers she’d spied lying on the grass in the park, she’d watched them for a while, until she’d started to feel uncomfortable with their closeness. Portraiture was all a matter of timing. There was no rush. She decided she would order something to eat. She looked to the table next to her to check on the state of her neighbourly drunk.
At the next table, Richard was slowly emerging from his state of shock. The wine was taking short cuts around his brain and his hapless desire had been replaced with a frenzied need. He had to have her, this woman who could never be his, he simply had to have her. But how best to approach her? Richard was aware that his extreme behaviour was not to everyone’s taste. He would have to approach from downwind for a start…
After what seemed like a terrible age of anticipation, Richard settled on spillage. It was something of a cliché maybe, but it would give him the opportunity to demonstrate both his contrarian take on good manners – despite himself he liked them – and his practised approach to the removal of potentially embarrassing stains.
There were only a couple of flaws in the plan. First, he wasn’t in spilling distance. Secondly, the woman was not sitting on any route that he could realistically take to the bar. Spillage seemed a less plausible scenario than splashage and given the distance between the two of them even that would mean the wine would have to travel a distance of well over six feet. Richard was not sure that he could pass this off as an accident. And the line between a little bit of badness and violently hoying a bottle of wine across a quiet taverna was a thin one.
Just as Richard was contemplating feigning a seizure of some kind, the woman who sat reading at the table next to the door dropped her reading matter, pirouetted off her seat and pitched face first on to the stone floor. The woman’s companion caught his breath sharply and was calling her name even as Lauren was crossing the bar towards the prostrate figure with a controlled purpose that tugged at Richard’s loins.
When Richard saw the writer’s name on the cover of the manuscript the woman had been reading, slick as a lech, he saw his chance to make an impression.
‘I’m not surprised she’s nodded off,’ he said, ‘reading that rubbish.’
Lauren Furrows sat in a pale green room and sipped a cup of peppermint tea. She worked on the campus of the University of Birmingham, in a handsome brick-red Edwardian building of the Byzanto-Italian school. Her office overlooked a quadrangle of grass that was enclosed by small-windowed and immaculately weathered Victorian blocks. A sycamore stood serenely in the centre of the square. Chittering martins and skittish swifts holidayed in the eaves above her window while down below learners and lovers gathered and sprawled and read or were read to by others.
On the worst of days, the view was diverting. Today, however, the early September sky was blue, the sun shone, the birds sang and yet still Lauren was not to be diverted. All morning she had been conscious of a question darting swift-like around her brain and she had spent at least half of this time on the phone, attempting to relieve herself of the burden of her concern. It hadn’t helped.
The cause of her fixation was a newsfeed in the online journal Neurology Today. It was only a few lines long but its significance outweighed its brevity:
Two deaths this summer have been attributed to a previously unknown condition dubbed Spontaneous Neural Atrophy Syndrome, or SNAPS. The first victim was a British holidaymaker who died suddenly on the island of Corfu. The condition came to light following a joint investigation between the British consul, the Greek police and medical authorities in the area, and the syndrome went on to claim the life of the British consul himself.
Examinations undertaken by a local coroner and Sofia Georgiou, a neuro-specialist from the mainland, suggest that the condition is characterised by a spontaneous weakening and failure of the electrical signals that pass through the cells of the brain. Its cause is not known but its pathology – a precipitous cortical degradation – is thought to be similar to that identified as Sudden Onset Cerebrovascular Trauma in a journal article by Lauren Furrows in 2009 (Furrows, L (2009) Qualitative Neurological Research).
Now Lauren was gratified to be referenced in a journal as auspicious as Neurology Today. But this particular peer acknowledgement came with caveats.
The article was sloppy, with insufficient attention to detail. It contained assertions that lacked even the most rudimentary of empirical underpinning. Lauren’s career had been dedicated to the investigation of conditions such as ‘SNAPS’, and if there was one thing that she could reasonably assert, it was that axons didn’t spontaneously weaken and fail without reason. What external factors had triggered the cortical failure? And why didn’t this aspect of the syndrome’s pathology merit a mention?
Lauren had worked too hard to allow her reputation to be compromised by association with a piece as amateurish as this. So. She would get to the bottom of this SNAPS business. And in a quietly satisfying rebuke to the careless tone of the newsfeed, she would do so methodically, incrementally and without recourse to unsubstantiated conjecture.
She began her investigations after lunch. The first phone call she made was to the editor of Neurology Today. She discovered that the piece had been put together by an intern, from a news agency report. The reference to her work had come from the editor himself who was familiar with Lauren’s research in the field. Her next call was to the news agency and then, after five minutes, to the British consul in Patras; later in the afternoon there followed a brief exchange of emails with all parties, some of which she cross-referenced.
Over the course of these communications, Lauren gleaned much. The Greek coroner was conversant with the common causes of brain death and had demonstrated the necessary methodology in ruling them out. But still the questions remained. What had caused the deaths? Were they even connected? And – if it existed – just what was SNAPS?