80s power suit and this was soaking. Someone had attacked the mannequin with a hammer or an axe and the head was badly damaged. I carried Dudley back to the youth hostel and placed him in a bunk. I was about to crash when the telephone woke me.
Alan wanted to meet up. I was sleepy and the conversation was confused. Through this semi-conscious fog it emerged that Alan didn’t know my name. I was quite shocked. After all we’d been at it like rabbits for a couple of days. I insisted that he’d said my name when I’d met him in The Grill. He explained that he’d said afternoon. That’s when I realised I’d misheard him. I told Alan my name was Anna Noon and he laughed. We arranged to meet in Pizza Express. Both Alan and I had garlic bread and side salads with our pizzas. We didn’t have any trouble getting a table. We met at noon, before the lunch-time rush really kicked in.
I asked Alan what he’d been reading. Explaining that he’d been attempting to compare Bracewell’s output with more recent club novels, he said Deadmeat by Q. Deadmeat had been marketed as pulp despite the author’s obvious literary aspirations. Although Q appropriated crime-novel clichés such as a narrator who’d just got out of jail, the work made formalist use of cyber, record industry and cinematic conventions. There was a very deliberate deployment of repetition. For example, an appeal for information about a killer runs as a refrain throughout the book. Paul Gilroy had eloquently defended black British identities in The Black Atlantic and other works, Q seemed to be extending this discourse. The varied inflections in direct speech was only one of the more obvious ways in which this interest manifested itself in Deadmeat. It should go without saying that Q’s notions and experiences of what it was to be ‘English’ were very different from those of Michael Bracewell, as was what he considered to be hip.
Rather than looking for clarity in his reading, Alan sought confusion. Was the clubber Q aware of the earlier English writer also known as Q and did his appropriation of this moniker form part of a conscious critique of the racial codings to be found in traditional literary discourse? The ‘original’ Q, Arthur Quiller-Couch, was an establishment man. Educated at Oxford, Q went on to lecture in classics at his alma mater, was knighted and even elected Mayor of Fowey in Cornwall, his home town. As well as writing novels and poetry, the ‘original’ Q edited the Oxford Book of English Verse and produced a slew of critical works including Studies in Literature and Charles Dickens and Other Victorians. Alan wasn’t sure if Q had been consciously chosen by Q or whether some other force had brought them together. These doublings left him all at sea. Alan was hedging his bets over whether the uncritical attitude towards cultural commodification in Deadmeat was ironic or merely a result of the author’s inability to think through the implications of those experiences that had initially politicised him. Indeed, given that the book as an artefact had provided an early vehicle for perfecting the commodity form, Alan often doubted the advisability of using literature to criticise capitalism.
Alan was deeply puzzled by Q’s depiction of the cyber vigilante in his novel. This criminal, on the loose in London, lynched his victims and turned out to be a black American cop. The cyber vigilante was killing paedophiles and the narrator appears to approve of this. Given the racial connotations of lynching, Alan considered it completely unbelievable that a black American would choose this as a method for disposing of paedophiles. It didn’t even seem credible that the black British narrator of Deadmeat would approve of lynchings. Alan didn’t understand what Q was trying to do, he was confused. He didn’t know whether Q was using irony and ambiguity to implicate certain of his readers in the perpetuation of a white bourgeois subjectivity, or whether the narrative merely reflected the author’s inability to escape the dominant code. While double consciousness doesn’t protect you from the code, it certainly gives you different perspectives from which to reflect upon it.
Over coffee Alan discussed Deep Cover: An FBI Agent Infiltrates the Radical Underground by Gril Payne. The author of this work narrates the process by which he became disenchanted with his employer and thereby lost his sense of identity. No longer a conservative or a radical, Payne becomes a hostage to fortune, tossed about on the seas of adversity and stripped of his sense of self.4 Alan viewed the book as a cautionary tale, a warning to those who wanted to get involved in the murky worlds of intelligence and counter-intelligence. Once Alan had paid the bill, we hit Union Street for a quick fix of commodity fetishism. I bought lipstick and a new pair of shoes. I dragged Alan into Waterstone’s because I wanted to buy The Lonely Planet Guide to Iceland. Bedtime reading that would take my mind off my college work. We were thrown out before I could make my purchase because an assistant spotted Alan rubbing a pornographic novel against his crotch. Alan repeatedly hissed the word ‘bibliomania’ as we were escorted from the premises.
Alan had a backpack full of books and after I’d done my shopping we trudged up to the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. The proprietor wasn’t in, so Alan left the books with his wife after arranging to return the next day when he’d be able to negotiate a price. Then we wandered down to the seafront and had a coffee in the Inversnecky Café. We were filling in time until Alan could pick up his car from the garage. A side window had been smashed by a thief who’d stolen some booze that Alan had left on the back seat. I announced that I felt like the narrator in Tania Kindersley’s novel Goodbye, Johnny Thunders. Alan said he’d given up on the book at page 13 when the narrator described a man who’d shafted her as having politics to the left of Lenin. Alan thought that it was the job of novelists to deal with specifics not generalities. He’d wanted to know whether the shit in question was a Bordigist or a councilist, whether he favoured the politics of Rosa Luxemburg or Otto Rühle. Lenin had attacked the entire proletarian milieu in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder and Alan snorted that it simply wasn’t good enough to say that someone’s politics were to the left of a right-wing reactionary.
I defended Kindersley, saying the whole point of her novel was its pointlessness. The story wasn’t worth writing, a poor little rich girl playing at being bad and having a hard time getting over an affair with a complete loser. Besides, Kindersley clearly didn’t intend readers to take her book seriously. No one was going to find characters whose musical tastes incorporated both Johnny Thunders and mid-period Pink Floyd in the least bit credible. The book was arch and ironic. It was futile to dismiss it as a complete waste of time. Goodbye, Johnny Thunders was aimed at avatars of boredom, individuals who were seeking out new ways to waste their time and found tedium comforting. It was a book for sad tossers who considered drugs both glamorous and dangerous. Alan didn’t try to counter these claims. He just looked at his watch and paid for our cappuccinos. We chattered about monstrous twins as we made our way to the garage to collect his car.
I was disappointed when Alan’s motor turned out to be a Fiesta. I’d expected something flasher. Still, it got us to Stonehaven, where Alan had located a photographer who was happy to take hard-core pictures of selected clients. I’d expected a bloke but it turned out that Alan had hired a woman to snap us in pornographic poses. Angela had tattoos and piercings but she was wearing baggy sportswear when she shot us making out on her waterbed and in her dungeon. It was all pretty clinical. Alan seemed to get off on it. I guess being a porn star isn’t an unusual fantasy in our post-modern world. There were a whole set of routines Alan wanted to work through. Sucking, fucking and licking. He got extremely excited sitting on a chair with me perched on his lap, his cock up my cunt. Pure pornography. Alan insisted that the photographs of this pose should be taken full frontal with nothing hidden but the three-quarters of his prick buried inside me. This classic variation on a heterosexual theme proved to be the penultimate entanglement of the session. The last shot, predictably enough, was Alan coming in my face. The climax was fun but I didn’t have an orgasm.
After we’d done Stonehaven Alan drove back to Aberdeen. In the car and over a light meal at Gerard’s Brasserie we talked about books. Alan seemed to have William McGonagall on the brain. He had read No Poets’ Corner in the Abbey: The Dramatic Story of William McGonagall by David Philips as well as the collected works of Scotland’s alternative national bard. He knew a great deal more about McGonagall than I did at that time. McGonagall wrote doggerel but considered himself the
