was still space for more books. He had a lot more in boxes stashed away somewhere.
‘I’m paying for it with the advance on the next book,’ he said. He looked around and grinned. ‘I haven’t earned it yet. I’m living in an apartment that was bought with a book that hasn’t been written.’
‘Nervous?’ I said.
‘It’s more I feel I have to really earn the apartment. It’s like it’s on a mortgage – I bought it with promises. Now I have to deliver.’
Lee wanted to get down to work, but he thought we’d better have some lunch first. It was about two o’clock. He made us some toast. We had cheese (a choice of Cheddar or Stilton – he had a big hunk of Stilton) and marmalade to go with it. And a smoothie (he had apricot, I had strawberry). We sat down in the dining room to eat our toast. It was a lovely old French farm table of some kind, chunky and rustic-looking.
I started telling him about rotten jobs I’d done in the past, how I’d lasted less than an hour in one of them, at a metal factory. Lee had tried a few other jobs in his youth. He didn’t like any of them. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the work, he didn’t like the workmanship. In the jam factory, for example. ‘It was all sugar paste, nothing but sugar paste. If you wanted apricot jam you threw in some orange colour. Strawberry – throw in some red. It was like you were painting jam. What about raspberry with all those little pips? No problem – here, we’ll throw in some tiny wood chips.’ He was really outraged by how bad it was. ‘Nothing was real. Nobody cared.’ He felt responsible for people eating a load of rubbish just masquerading as jam. They were being conned. Lee wanted it to be good jam, whatever flavour it was.
He once had a job in a dried pea factory. He couldn’t believe it: ‘Birds were perched up there on the rafters, way over our heads, and shitting into the peas. Nobody cared. That is how it was.’
And another job in a bakery. It wasn’t a traditional bakery. He wasn’t kneading any dough. Or putting loaves in ovens. Everything was on an assembly line. His job was to take loaves off the horizontal belt and stack them on some kind of vertical system. But he couldn’t get the hang of it. ‘There were all these loaves coming off the line. I was supposed to clamp seven loaves together and transfer them from the belt to the stack. But I just couldn’t manage to do it. Seven loaves, at one time. They would allow you to drop one or two in an hour. But I kept on dropping them. I just couldn’t get my arms tight enough around the loaves to hold them all together.’ He showed me how his physique was all wrong for the job. He was too stringy. His arms were too long. ‘I kept on dropping them. They were all over the place. They sacked me inside an hour. I deserved to be sacked. I was no good at it.’
He really wanted to be good – to find something he could be good at. He thought he was good at television. Then he got sacked from that job too.
We were about to go into his office. The novel factory. I think I was more nervous than he was. And I had a sense of quasi-religious awe too – I was about to bear witness to the genesis of a great work, the Big Bang moment. ‘Do you have anything in mind?’ I said.
Because this was the key thing about the way Lee Child writes. The thing that drew me to write to him and break into his apartment and watch him working. He really didn’t know what was going to happen next. ‘I don’t have a clue about what is going to happen,’ he would say. He was a writer who thought like a reader. He had nothing planned. When he wrote to me he said, ‘I have no title and no plot.’ But he said I could come anyway. He didn’t think I would put him off too much. He relied on inspiration to guide him. Like a muse. Or the Force or something. Something basic and mythic, without too much forethought. He liked his writing to be organic and spontaneous and authentic. He feared that thinking about it too much in advance would kill it stone dead. But still he had a glimmering of what would be. He knew the feel of a book.
‘The opening is a third-party scene, I know that, right at the start. A bunch of other guys. So it has to be a third-person sort of book. Reacher doesn’t know what is happening. He’s not there yet.’
‘Do you see something in your mind, or what? Is that what you mean by “scene”?’
‘It’s visual, yes. In the sense of seeing the words – I can almost see the paragraph in my mind. The physical look on the page. You have to nail the reader right there, on the first page. The uncommitted reader. And I can feel it. The rhythm. It’s got to be stumbly. It’s tough guys talking. I have to get a hint of their vernacular. But, at the same time, it has to trip ahead. A tripping rhythm. Forward momentum.’
I think it was around then that Lee started talking about euthanasia. He was in favour. There is a lot of thanatos in his books, not so much of the eu. ‘I can die right now. I’m fine with that.’ He dismissed the recommendation of a friend to go off to a mountain in Austria and chuck himself off (he thought you might change your mind by virtue of the fresh air and the landscape). Turned out he had some plan, when the time came, involving a veterinary supplies store down in Mexico and a rather powerful cocktail of morphine and horse tranquillizer. Had it all worked out.
‘Come on, man,’ I said, although I basically agreed with him. ‘Think of your readers! Anyway, I’m stuffed if you die. I’ll have to finish your book for you. Pretend you’re still alive and steal all your earnings.’
5 FINALLY, CHAPTER ONE
That got him going. We finished the toast and went into his office at the back of the apartment. No Central Park (couldn’t afford to spend all his time looking through the window like the boy in the Manhattan apartment). We sat down. Lee sat in front of his desk with the desktop computer on. It was there, waiting for him. It was already switched on. The desk is metal. Riveted. Silver. Huge. Solid. On a bunch of shelves to the right, mugs with pens. And a magnifying lens. On the left – a collection of his own books in hardcover.
The first thing he did was light a cigarette. (Second thing was take a mighty drag.)
‘Look, Lee, I’m going to just shut up now. This is like going into church for me. I feel I should be quiet. Anyway, I don’t want to put you off your stroke.’
‘It’s not a problem.’
Lee was sitting in front of the screen of his new computer. An almost empty screen. It didn’t even have a page on it. Nothing. I was sitting on this kind of couch a couple of yards behind him. Just perched on the edge of it, not really lying down or anything.
‘It’s reverse Freudian,’ Lee said. ‘You’re on the couch and you’re analysing me.’
I said nothing.
He flexed his fingers. ‘Naturally I’m going to start, like all good writers, by … checking my email!’
He cast an eye over some kind of gmail list. ‘I’m just going to email the editor with the title suggestion. I don’t know if it’s going to work or not.’ He pressed the return key and I heard the whoosh sound as the email was sent. ‘They like to get it out of the way if possible. We’ll see what she says.’
Then he told me the title. Make Me.
‘I don’t know, it’s not definite. Popped into my head last night. But I like it. It’s got something. Sounds like Reacher all right. Playground machismo. And then there’s that meaning to do with being under surveillance, making someone, identifying them, tailing them. And maybe a little bit erotic or romantic too.’
He
