Nanowrimo Winner

[Total word count: 34,345]

So, gentle reader, you and I will never complete the journey that is Nanowrimo. I feel sad but free. It’s nice to think I don’t have to churn the words out, but I do feel a sense of something almost like bereavement. Until I decided to stop, I felt fed up with the whole thing, but as soon as I made the decision, I started to regret it. And there is one uncongenial task to be completed as a consequence.

After work, I went round to Geoff’s with a bottle of Cristal. I was fairly confident he would be in, since the new regime, if that was the truth, allowed him his evenings free for browsing Internet porn, or whatever Geoff did when he was alone.

Sure enough, he opened the door, but at the sight of the bottle his face fell.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“You win, Geoffrey,” I said, “I’m giving in.”

“Hey, you can’t do that now… look, come in.”

I followed him upstairs and sat down on his tiny sofa.

“You can’t give up, John,” he said earnestly, “Not yet. It’s not been going so badly, has it?”

“Well, I have a few problems,” I said, “I seem to be stuck with Charlie in the hospital and Fenella still alive… uh, those are two of my characters. But also, I’ve sort of promised Julie I’d give up. And this bloke at work knows I’m doing it, and has warned me I’m getting into trouble.”

“Christ,” said Geoff, “Now hang on. Let’s not be hasty here. Do you want a beer?”

“No thanks,” I said.

Geoff waved his finger in the air which seemed to be an indication that he understood but had thought of something else. He went over to the tiny cabinet and took out a bottle of Glenfiddich.

“Geoff!” I protested.

“No, come on,” he insisted, plonking down two tumblers which, to be quite honest, could have been more perfectly clean, “A shot of this won’t do you any harm.”

He poured two glasses, pulled up a chair, settled himself and looked at me thoughtfully.

“I’m sure Julie doesn’t really want you to give up,” he said, “She may have said so when she was in a bad mood or something, but honestly I’m sure she’ll change her mind. Doesn’t she always tell you off for not finishing things? Like that internet thing you were going to do. What was it? Kick-ass something.”

“Yes, but…” I began, and interrupted myself, “Hang on, though, Geoff – why do you want me to carry on? You should be cock-a-hoop, shouldn’t you? This means you’ve won the bet. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it.”

“Yes, I suppose it was,” he said thoughtfully, taking a sip of whisky, “I suppose it sort of seems different now. And the other thing is, if you don’t carry on, I won’t have any motive for finishing myself. I’ve actually been a bit stuck the last few days, you know. I haven’t really written anything much since you came round here last. Been a bit busy, really. You could probably catch me up if you put in a little effort.”

He gestured at the pile of manuscript, which did look exactly the same as it had before.

“See, that’s a point you ought to consider,” he added, “Who’s to say I’m going to finish? If neither of us finishes, it will be a draw.”

“Sort of,” I agreed, “But I think the terms of the bet were that the first person to give up loses. And I’m the first one, there’s no real argument about it. You won fair and square.

“Mmh. I think you’re wrong. It wasn’t first to give up loses, it was first to 50,000 wins. I’m not there yet. Surely it’s a cheek this bloke from your office telling you that you can’t do it. Is he your boss? Is there a policy that employees shall not be novelists? Is he claiming that copyright will accrue to them under the terms of your contract? I can’t understand it at all. The people where I work are all for it. They keep trying to sponsor me, and I have to keep telling them it’s not for charity. Are you sure this bloke is really speaking for your firm?”

“Oh, I think so. It isn’t really him that’s telling me; he’s just drawing my attention to the fact, which I know quite well for myself, that my having a time-consuming hobby, and one which I might be tempted to pursue in idle moments at work, is not going to go down well. It’s not that they’d sack me or anything, it just might stop me getting my interview so soon, that kind of thing. I know he’s right, really.”

“I don’t think it’s any of their damn business what you do in your own time,” said Geoff, with surprising vehemence. “Think of all the time you’ll have wasted if you stop now. Think of all those words that are never going to be used.”

“Well, probably no-one was ever going to read them anyway,” I pointed out, “And who knows, I might go back to it and finish the thing in the end. I just can’t afford to do it to the Nanowrimo timetable.”

“Why don’t you give yourself a bit of time to think about it? You might feel differently in a day or so. Don’t give up yet. I won’t take this now, you keep it until you’ve really thought about this..”

I shook my head in puzzlement and looked at Geoff.

“You’re a strange bloke,” I said, “How’s Mercedes?”

“Now look, don’t change the subject. Promise me you’ll think about it a bit.”

“Well, I’m happy to keep the bottle for another couple of days if you really insist.”

“Well done. Cheers.” He took another sip from his tumbler, “Mercedes hasn’t been round recently. She seems to be busy a lot at the moment.”

“Problems?” I asked, sympathetically.

“I don’t think so, not really. She has problems, though, things she keeps having to sort out. Don’t ask me, it’s all you know, I said this and then they said that, and so I said and they said. I think perhaps she’d be happier if she could see me in the evenings and at weekends, you know?”

“Is there a problem with that?”

“No, not really. No. It’ll all be fine in the long run.”

“Julie… Julie finds it hard to believe you’ve got this woman coming in every day before breakfast.”

“Well, not every day,” admitted Geoff, “Did I give the impression it was every day? To be honest, John, not that it’s any of your business really, I think we’ve only really done it three times.”

“Only three?”

“Yes, but it’s a pretty serious relationship. She has other commitments at the moment, that’s all.”

“Other commitments? What, you mean another boyfriend?”

Geoff frowned irritably.

“Family commitments,” he said, “Family commitments… sort of thing.”

“I don’t know. No offence, but it seems an unusual kind of relationship”

“It is a bit complicated at times,” said Geoff, darkly “It turns out she’s quite a complicated kind of person. But like I say, we’ll sort things out, I’m sure.”

I was walking down the old track to the river when Charlie appeared from behind a tree, and gave me a small wave of recognition.

“What are you doing here?” I said, “You’re supposed to be in Wenham.”

“Yes,” he said – his voice was deeper than I had imagined it, and he sounded more like a Dorset man than someone from the fenny country of Wenham. “But I thought this would be easier for you, since you know it so well.”

That seemed to make sense. We strolled along companionably towards the river bank.

“Are you getting on any better with Lady Jane?” I asked.

“Yes, things are OK,” he said , “It turns out she’s quite a complicated kind of person.”

“She seems to be sort of jealous of you,” I said, “Which is a bit odd, because I’m sure it wasn’t my idea. It just seems to have got into the text somehow.”

“Yes, that happens,” he agreed, “She seems to think I’m going to get mixed up with Fenella. The other day when Fenella rang up about my laptop, there was a definite look of suspicion there. But I would never be so stupid as that. She ought to realise.”

Charlie bent down and picked up a small flat stone, which he sent skimming across the river. It bounced six times.

“I could never do that,” I admitted, “Never even one bounce.”

“You just need to focus.” he said, and threw another. The river seemed to be much wider than I remembered it being.

“Oh,” I said, “I remember what I was going to ask you. How am I going to get you out of the hospital?”

“I don’t see any problem about that,” said Charlie, seeming slightly surprised, “I could discharge myself if you like. You could say it was because I was eager to get back on to the case. You know. Or if you find that bit difficult, you could just cut to a scene where I’m already out. The one where I find Fenella’s body, say – that’s be good.”

“You’re going to find her body?”

“Well, I presume so. More pathos that way, more drama. But you’re the author, aren’t you?” He grinned. He was actually a rather amiable bloke in the flesh; big, but not such a looming presence as I had imagined he would be.

“You can’t find her body after you come out of hospital. That doesn’t make sense Unless…How does she die?”

“She was in a crash.” he said, shortly and decisively, as though I were being stupid.

I began to feel worried.

“God, I’d forgotten,” I confessed, “This is all no good. I’m not going to write it. I’ve given up.”

Charlie turned to me a face which was filled with incredulity and anger. It was such an angry face it hardly looked like him any more. He turned his back on me and stamped over to where a small kind of brick building stood – just like a park-keeper’s hut or something. He opened the door, but I followed him and grabbed his sleeve.

“Where are you going?” I asked, “You can’t go in there.”

“I am the home-owner,” he said, angrily, and slammed the door behind him.

As I looked around I realised that the reason the river had seemed wider was because it was a different river altogether. I had though that this place was a combination of the fields behind our house when I was at school with a river in Portugal – the Tagus? But it was not – it was somewhere else, somewhere I didn’t know at all. I was lost.

“Help! You’ve got to show me the way back!” I shouted, but the hut door was locked.

With a perceptible jerk, I awoke in my own bed, in the dark. Julie was asleep beside me.

I stared up at the ceiling and began to calm down. There is something distinctly weird about feeling guilt towards an imaginary character of your own creation. I mean, if I wanted, I could put a little postscript on Wenham where Charlie and all the other characters expressed their sincere pleasure over the fact that the story would not be completed. But there was no doubt I did feel strangely guilty, in a way which having imaginary characters traumatised and murdered, something I’d done enough of by now, had never occasioned.

Actually, Charlie would certainly have faced his own fictional demise with much more stoicism and loyalty than he had displayed in the dream. I found myself beginning to wonder whether the dream Charlie was the real Charlie or not. Now that I thought about it, dream Charlie had had black brylcreemed hair, which wasn’t right at all. So which was the real Charlie? Unfortunately that was not a question I could get my mind round in any appreciable sense. That way madness surely lies.

Come to that, this whole dream seemed like a worrying sign of mental turmoil – actually another good reason to stop writing, if that’s what it was going to do to me. Now I couldn’t sleep because my mind was racing, although goodness knows I was tired enough.

I got carefully out of bed and headed to the bathroom. Picture your author, gentle reader, sitting stark naked on the toilet: stark naked but for headphones which he has plugged into the radio behind him in order to listen inaudibly to the World Service, which at the moment is broadcasting The Ticket, an arts review programme which is actually quite interesting and sort of comparable to Radio Four’s Front Row, which I often catch in the evenings. Perhaps one day Wenham will be reviewed on programmes like these, but then I remember yet again that Wenham is never going to be finished. My lost baby!

[Total Word Count 32,162]

Lying in the dark, I stretched my hand gently across the bed to touch Julie’s side.

“I’m awake,” she said.

We had made it up that evening, gentle reader. I had turned up on the door step with a bunch of flowers. I know it’s a bit of a crummy way of doing things, but being a bit crummy is OK sometimes, even essential.

“What are those for?” she demanded.

“A token,” I replied, “Their significance is purely phatic.”

Once inside, I apologised, promised to mend my ways, and generally abased myself. It wasn’t difficult. It seemed that Julie wanted to forget the whole thing as quickly as possible.

Now, lying there in the dark in the small hours, I apologised again.

“I’m sorry about all that bottle stuff.” I said.

Julie sighed.

“It’s OK,” she said, “I’m sorry too.” She paused. “I know you’ve got a thing about tidiness, but I couldn’t understand what the big fuss was.”

“I know,” I said, penitently.

“But what really got me was later on. The anal bit.”

“The anal bit? I don’t remember…”

“Well, you’d wound me up quite a lot by then, and I accused you of being anal, and you said, did I even know what anal meant, and I said it means arsehole, arsehole, and you said no, no, what you’re referring to is Freud’s theory that over-strict parenting causes the child to seek to retain its excreta for fear of making a mess, and that this leads in later life to… et cetera… and that I was accusing you of wanting to retain your shit, but who the hell was it who wanted to retain shitty bottles on the shitty table, and I shouldn’t bloody well use words if I couldn’t be arsed to look up properly what they meant.”

“Oh yeah, that.” I said, blushing invisibly in the dark.

“You really need to cut out this Stephen Fry crap, you know?” she observed. I didn’t answer.

“It’s a very male kind of thing,” she said, “You’re, you know, fairly enlightened for a man, but that is just such a macho thing. Using words to show off with. Listen to me, telling you all this stuff. Watch me win this argument. Look what a clever little boy I am. Women just don’t do that. It’s definitely a gender thing.”

There was a protracted pause.

“You’re not going to tell me that ‘gender’ is a grammatical term, and that while words have gender, people have sex, then?” she asked.

“No.” I said, firmly, just a little nettled.

“It’s your hormones, I suppose I should try to be understanding. But it’s incredibly annoying, sometimes.” she said, taking my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but with just a little less enthusiasm than before. A longer silence followed, while we stared at the ceiling.

“OH. MY.GOD!” I exclaimed, sitting up suddenly.

“What?”

“I left the laptop in the pub. Oh my God! I can actually remember standing up and walking away while it was still down by the side of the chair. Oh my God! Should I ring the pub?”

“The pub? So you went to the pub?”

She turned over unhappily.

“Look, it’s three o’clock,” she pointed out, “You can’t do anything until the morning. Don’t worry, they’ve probably got it behind the bar.”

“All of the Nanowrimo stuff is on it,” I said, “I never backed it up or anything. Oh my God!”

I collapsed on to the bed again.

“Maybe this is a kind of sign from my subconscious that I should give up after all.” I said.

“Another thing Freud had a theory about? Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve been thinking maybe it would be better if you gave up after all. I never see you these days, and when I do, all you’re doing is typing. I know I said you should finish, but, you know, I’m beginning to wonder.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said, a trifle bitterly, “I’ve got problems with it anyway. I can’t seem to get Charlie out of the hospital.”

I must have slept some more that night, but I really don’t remember doing so. Not for the first time, I wished that I could stop uselessly thinking about things I couldn’t do anything about. I had very little time to do anything about the laptop the following morning, either: it was the day of Kevin’s big presentation, with me as bag-carrier, and I needed to be in Behemoth’s dingy halls early. A phone call to the Angel revealed that they had not found a laptop in the bar.

In some ways, my problems were helpful: they stopped me worrying about the presentation. Though it wasn’t the laptop that really preyed on my mind so much as what Julie had said the night before. Kevin, normally a picture of sang-froid, was showing some slightly endearing signs of actual nervousness, shifting from foot to foot as we waited outside the Boardroom. I almost felt sorry for him.

“Break a leg,” I said, as we were ushered in, and he smiled faintly at me.

Julie would certainly have seen this meeting as a male kind of ritual, a gender thing, I reflected, as we settled in. There were the high status males, led by John Sopert, sitting in judgement, and here were two little gangs – Kevin’s and George’s – who were going to shout and shake their spears at each other until one or other side retreated.

What Julie didn’t understand, I thought to myself, was what a precious cultural asset this adversarial business was. In China or India, in any proper civilisation, the King had an army that did what he said. Ideas were approved or not approved by authority, and the only way new ones could get in was if the Chief Vizier just happened to be an original genius. Whereas in the West, we were still a bunch of barbarians quarrelling over the wreckage of Rome. Everything was decided by a fight between two sides. But that meant that in any argument, the two competing authorities cancelled each other out: and that created, for the first time in human history, a window for the truth to get in, for disputes to be swayed by the actual evidence. That’s where all the great achievements of the West came from. And it was a macho kind of thing, but so what?

Kevin had done his opening, tension-dispelling joke, and his settling introduction. Now he was beginning to tell them what he was going to tell them.

You see, I’m not brooding over what Julie said or anything, but you know, you’ve got to dance the dance. It’s a battle. It’s like some grand confrontation; a great decisive battle: the Men of the West versus the filthy Orc bands; and may the best side win…

I suddenly roused from a vague meditation.

“John, you did the figures on this?” said Kevin. “Bill is suggesting there actually is a summer uplift in the distribution figures for last June?”

I looked up and saw he was beset by great Troll warriors on three sides while I let the sword sleep in my hand.

“The June figures? Is that a genuine rise?”

“Perhaps John thinks the rise is diminimus.” offered Bill. They chuckled.

“That’s what they used to call it, Bill,” I said, “But I think you’ll find that what we’re calling it now is ‘Fuck all’.” A bigger laugh, and the gnome fell back.

“I think those are some figure you brought with you, Bill,” I said, “but those are on a different universe. You’ve got packaged Mueslis in one and not the other. In fact, I think if you compare the figures from the same dataset, you’ll find that instead of a rise, you’ve got a fall of 15.76 percentage points. Do your sums agree with that?”

I knew and he knew that I couldn’t work out the figures to two decimal places that quickly: but I banked on him not being able to contradict me. If he could, I was sure the figures would still be in my favour, and the net effect would be even more in my favour, since he’d implicitly be confirming my theory.

“Nuh, OK” he said, after a pause.

The Orc’s ugly head went spinning from his neck: Kevin and I stood shoulder to shoulder, cleaving a path through the filthy spawn of Mordor.

“OK, John, well done,” said Kevin later, when we had retired once more to his tiny office. “You did OK once you woke up.”

“Thanks. A shame they wouldn’t take a decision, though. Nothing’s going to change.”

“Well, not this year, anyway. But we made a good impression. You’ve done yourself no harm, and I’ve enhanced my reputation as a caring mentor.” He must have noticed a slight hint of incredulity in my face, because he went on “Look, I know you think I’m just a slave-driving bastard, but the thing is John, you need to do the work if you’re going to get anywhere. You’ve got great potential, but you need to focus on the job, instead of farting around on the internet all the time. By the way, I get my suits from an old Jewish tailor in the East End – not many of those left now. I’ll give you his card if you’re interested.”

I thought for a moment. I thought hard.

“You… you’ve read my blog?” I deduced.

“Not really – I’ve got better things to do than read about you. But I did Google my own name the other day, and guess what came up? You ought to anonymise that thing if you’re going to keep it – you know what the attitude here is. If I catch you doing that stuff at work, you’re in a bit of trouble, but if John Sopert knew you had it at all, it would be clear-your-desk time, you know that? And another thing – you haven’t got time to write novels, OK? Don’t fuck around with novels. Not if you want to get your manager interview.”

I felt slightly winded.

“I was going to give that up, anyway.” I said.

“Good. You did well today. Just focus, that’s all. Focus.”

He was right, no doubt, but I found it difficult to concentrate for the rest of the day. I sat at my desk, toying with emails and pretending to look at figures. I was confused. I probably shouldn’t be writing this, should I? Kevin’s going to read it. Hi, Kevin! I hope you realise that although there may be some slight resemblances between the account in this blog and my real life, it’s all exaggerated, highly coloured, or even imaginary. It would be totally naïve to equate Kevin Johnson, the fictional construct here, the man of fine suits and unexpected insights, with the Kevin Johnson of real life, equally a man of fine suits and insights though he be, of course.

Oh God.

At last the hours rolled round and I set off for home, still feeling a little unsettled and vulnerable. We had agreed that Julie would come round to my place that evening, and she was already there when I arrived: in fact, she met me at the door.

“Who’s Miss Mouse?” she asked, and once again I felt the metaphorical blow to the stomach which goes with the discovery that people know more about you than you realised.

“Did you read the blog?”

“Blog? She’s in your blog? No. What are you talking about? Who is this person? Minnie Mouse?”

“She’s one of the Nanowrimo people,” I explained, neutrally, “One of the people who go to these writing sessions, and so on. I’ve met her there a couple of times. It’s a nickname. I don’t even know her real name.”

Julie raised her eyebrows just detectably, and handed me a post-it note.

“Well, she rang. She got your number from somebody called Tom. She’s got your laptop. If you give her a ring on this number, you can arrange to pick it up.”

“Ah!” I exclaimed, with genuine relief and not-so-genuine jollity, “She must have noticed I’d left it behind. That’s a relief.

“You’re still giving up on the Nanoo thing, aren’t you?” Julie asked.

“I think I’ve got to. Kevin at work knows about it now. All for the best, probably. I’ll have to buy Geoff his bottle, though.”

“Maybe it’s worth it.”

“Yeah, I’m beginning to think so.”