the first draft, you know.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What is it then?’
‘It’s the only draft!’
Right then he sounded more like Jack Reacher than Lee Child. ‘I don’t want to improve it. When I’ve written something, that is the way it has to stay. That’s how I was that particular year. You can’t change it. It’s like one of those old photos you come across. From the seventies, say. And you have this terrible seventies haircut and giant lapels on your jacket. It’s ridiculous – but it’s there. It is what it is. Honesty demands you own up to it and leave it alone.’
He still hadn’t written anything.
‘I reckon around ninety working days. Should finish it around mid-March – mid-April if I slack.’
He still hadn’t begun.
‘And remember, I’m not making this up. Reacher is real. He exists. This is what he is up to, right now. That’s why I can’t change anything – this is just the way it is.’
I was a couple of yards behind him and slightly to the right. I could see over his shoulder. I didn’t want to get any closer. It was already ridiculous. Lee told me that he had cut his nails earlier that day. He hated it when his fingernails clacked against the keyboard.
He lit another cigarette and took a deep drag and blew out a lot of smoke then put the cigarette in the ashtray.
‘I was thinking – you have a high risk of dying from secondary smoke inhalation here.’
Martin said nothing.
I was thinking: the smoke is all part of it. Like a magic show. Smoke and mirrors. And, quite contrary to standard Magic Circle practice, the magician was tweaking aside the curtain and saying, OK, come on through and let me show you exactly how I saw the lady in two, and over here is my disappearing elephant, and so on. Everyone wants to know how it’s done. And now I was about to find out.
So, I’m behind him. And he is there in front of the computer. I’m trying to keep quiet. Like a mouse, if not quite a fly-on-the-wall.
‘I’m opening a file here. Microsoft Word doc … Now I move it to the middle of the screen.’
He was talking me through it, like some kind of surgical operation. ‘I always use Arial. To begin with anyway. And ten-point. So I get more on the page. But I crank it up to 150 per cent to save my eyes.’
It’s 2.26 in the afternoon. September 1, 2014. Lee is on the verge of something momentous. At the moment it’s a blank page. The file doesn’t have a name.
‘Then I have to turn off all these red lines … Do not check spelling. Or grammar. I am going to let Microsoft tell me what grammar is?’
It’s a huge screen (27-inch). Virgin. Tabula rasa. ‘Single line space. I like to see a lot of text on the page. I don’t want to spend all my time scrolling up and down.’
He has put his tortoiseshell glasses on. Lit another cigarette. Put it down again. Finally he starts typing. He types:
CHAPTER ONE.
6 EXIT KEEVER
It started with a burial. It would have to start with a burial.
Lee types with two fingers only, the index fingers.
The smoke was corkscrewing up from the cigarette in his hand. He stopped to take a drag on it. Looked back at what he had written. Crushed out the cigarette. He was looking intently at the screen.
The first paragraph was five lines long. I could almost make out the first word. An -ing word – a present participle. Something-ing. Ten-point and I’m two yards back. I could see the words, but not read them. Could have been Sanskrit. The suspense was killing me. Next time, I vowed silently, I’m going to bring a telescope. I would have got closer, maybe could have got closer, but I didn’t want to crowd him. I was already nervous about making paper noises as I jotted down largely meaningless notes with a lot of question marks. I was already right on top of a guy in a small room in front of a computer trying to create a novel out of nothing, to conjure it up like a 100,000-word rabbit out of a hat.
Or maybe snake charmer would be a better metaphor – teasing that snake right up out of the basket.
Either way, Lee Child was thinking hard about his second paragraph.
Behind the page, on the desktop – I should have mentioned this sooner – a blue background, plain, no images.
The cigarette went back in the ashtray. The two fingers went back to work. End of second par. He lit another cigarette and then saved the file. For the first time, he was going to give it a name. Stick a label on it. He considered using the title, but then opted for something more neutral. ‘Reacher 19’, he typed.
I leaned forward. I could just make it out. ‘Nineteen?’ I said. ‘Reacher nineteen?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘Losing it.’ Deleted 19. Changed it to ‘Reacher 20’. Personal was nineteenth. Make Me is the twentieth. The file was no longer nameless.
‘I’m working up to Make Me. Not quite there yet.’ Make Me was fresh out of the oven – he didn’t want to drop it.
The second par was longer. The onscreen page was slowly bulking up. He went back and slipped another sentence into the first par. Just a short one. So far he hadn’t deleted a thing.
I deciphered another word. ‘Nothing’. No. ‘Nothingness’.
The second par was twice the length of the first. Now he was into the third. The third was only two words long. I could only make out the second: ‘enough’. Good enough? Bad enough? Looked more like a four-letter word than three, though. A tetragrammaton. Was that an S at the beginning?
Lee, stuck in mid-sentence. The cursor flashing impatiently, urging him on, begging for more.
Another cigarette.
That desk: sheet metal all riveted together, made back in England – is that some kind of homage to all those old artisan metal workers of his youth? Back in Birmingham and Sheffield. Under the railway arches. The craftsmen who knew how to make stuff and make it well. No painted jam. No guano peas. Solid. Dependable.
The fifth par. We’re on again! I could make out the beginning: ‘Only one thing went wrong …’ A one-line par.
Other books on the shelf. Encyclopedia of American Police Cars. Websters. Small Arms. Tourist guides to Maine, Oregon, California.
Lee folded his hands together under his chin. His face was about two feet from the screen. He shoved it a little closer, peering into the screen like a crystal-ball gazer. Now leaning back again, hands behind his head. Rubbing thumb and index finger of his right hand together, as if trying to elicit a flame.
Backs off for a maximum of ten seconds at a time, then into it again.
An asterisk – or maybe a hash sign? Centre. Return. We’re into a new section. A couple
