comes back and yet, despite all of it, some dark part of my brain had been biding its time, waiting for him to pull off that old magic trick – to reassemble himself from a scattering of words and old recordings and come back home to me, just like he did when I was a child.
Google confirmed what the operator said about crossed lines – they do happen from time to time. It’s something to do with all the old analogue cable still out there in the network. Old wires wear thin during the long years in ragged winds, or go brittle in the sun, or rot away in leaky junction boxes. This means you can be minding your own business and the phone will ring – you’ll pick it up, and there’ll be two strangers talking about a garage door, or booking the car in for a service, or about someone called Alison’s new boyfriend. These calls are not really calls, they’re pseudo calls, un-calls, and they do all sorts of weird things to answerphones and caller data records. It’s odd, it’s unusual, but it’s nothing more dramatic than that. Bugs in the system are inevitable, because all systems are corrupting systems to a greater or lesser degree. As Max Cleaver, the detective hero of Cupid’s Engine, puts it: The only thing necessary for the triumph of chaos is for the repairmen to do nothing.
It seemed poetic to me that an analogue fault would be at the heart of things though, my father being such a resolutely analogue creature himself. An analogue ghost down an analogue wire. Except, of course, there was no ghost. Dr Stanley Quinn had no time for zeros and ones. He trusted in ink and he trusted in paper. He always carried a pen and he never traded his typewriter for a computer, not even when lightweight laptops became something that everybody just had. I remember him telling the Paris Review that he’d ‘never liked the damn things and wasn’t about to start at his age’ (I would read interviews with my father from time to time; they’d sneak into the house amongst the papers and magazine subscriptions, another inky aspect of a man who was never, ever in just the one place).
I rubbed my eyes, drained my glass, and I headed to the kitchen to fix myself another drink.
o
By the time I went to bed that night, I felt altogether better about things.
If there’d been anyone around to tell the story of the phone call to, I probably would have done it with a can-you-believe-it smile and a slightly red face. That is, if I’d said anything at all. I definitely wouldn’t be telling Imogen, I decided, not least because I had no interest in a rousing rendition of ‘Cabin Fever’ every time I picked up the phone.
And this is how it is sometimes, isn’t it? When the pendulum swings especially high in one direction, its momentum carries it back to swing high the other way. Love becomes hate, shame becomes anger, shocked disbelief becomes – some sort of embarrassed, comic incredulity.
I decided, on the whole, not to worry about it.
Tomorrow’s another day.
I heaved the duvet up to my chin and went back to reading Cupid’s Engine, and soon enough, the novel’s current began pulling and tugging at me, demanding my full attention. I was only too happy to let go of things and be carried away by it, racing off downstream, disappearing into the distance like a small boat on the rapids.
o
Cupid’s Engine begins with a tall, scruffy man in a white fedora and crumpled linen suit. He’s propping himself up in a doorway, covered in blood. Although we don’t know it yet, this man’s name is Maurice Umber. He has a bloody knife in his right hand, and a telephone receiver pressed to his left ear.
‘Police,’ he mumbles into the phone. ‘You’re going to have to send somebody.’
As my eyes tracked towards the end of that first paragraph, a wholly unexpected wave of emotion rose up inside me: a sudden, overpowering force of words and worlds revisited, a return to another time. The depth and strength of it – it felt like a tight hug with someone you never thought you’d see again, or like throwing on your old self like a faded old hoody; not lost after all, only misplaced for a few years in the bottom of the wardrobe. This is one of the great powers of books, isn’t it? And one that’s easy to forget these days, with everything else that’s going on.
So anyway, I was lying in bed, still feeling a little strange but mostly just silly about the phone call, and allowing myself to relax into this deep, nostalgic haze, when an idea came to me for a script I’d been struggling with for months.
That’s how I made my living, you see. I wrote stories and scripts. I know what you’re thinking, but no, we’re not talking movies and we’re not talking novels. The manuscripts for my last two novels were neatly stored in manila envelopes at the bottom of the linen box at the end of the bed. My agent hadn’t been able to convince anyone to publish either one of them after the lukewarm performance of The Qwerty Machinegun, and so – after years of plodding on regardless – I got up from my desk one ordinary afternoon and in the midst of a long struggle with a particularly tricky passage, I just turned the computer off.
Click – and that was that.
When I say I made my living writing stories and scripts, what I mean is that I made a pretty poor living, and that I wrote digital, downloadable short stories and audio scripts for existing intellectual properties. I created what the industry calls auxiliaries, or officially licensed story products, or, in language an actual, real person might use, tie-in material.
For some admirers of Dr Stanley Quinn, this was an unthinkable, abhorrent thing. It made me the tone-deaf kid who’d jump on stage and belt out ‘Ten Green Bottles’ at the end of a virtuoso piano recital. These people always got the same look in their eyes when they heard what I did for a living. For the love of God, it said, if you can’t do it properly, don’t do it at all. Don’t you know who your father was? It hurt me, of course. It hurt me every time. It still does, though mostly in a dull, itchy-scar-tissue sort of a way, as the years have rolled on by. Truth is, I’m not so bothered any more. These people are not the gatekeepers, judges and tastemakers I once saw them as. They’re refugees from my father’s time, a bunch of ageing Bruce Willises from The Sixth Sense, who can’t see that their whole world has ended, and who don’t have the first clue about the world we’re living in now.
Here’s a question: how many writers do you think spend their days working with new stories, with new characters and new plots? My guess is: a tiny number, compared to how many are working with the old ones. And that’s not just the case at the bottom of the food chain where I make my living; it’s the same at the very top – think about those big brand writers creating big brand book sequels – more James Bond, more Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And it’s the same story times a million in the film industry – a whole generation of filmmakers working on Star Wars, Captain America and Batman. A whole raft of us – at every level you can imagine – are investing our writing lives into the continuation of stories that were new when we were kids, or when our parents were kids, instead of creating new worlds of our own. And these stories tend to be children’s stories; you’ve noticed that, right? Now don’t get me wrong; I’m no snob. I might love Herman Melville and B.S. Johnson, but I also love Star Wars and Harry Potter. Of course I do, we all do, so we roll up our sleeves and we service the IPs. I’m certainly not complaining, and even if I was complaining, there’s really no point burying your head in the sand and hoping that any of it will go away, because – let me tell you – it absolutely won’t. It’s a hard rule of late-stage capitalism – big, established brands dominate, and start-ups find it harder and harder to get a foothold in the market. There’s no changing it. This is our world, and it’s a world of sequels, prequels, remakes, remakquels. This is our age, and it’s the age of the hyperlink and the shared universe, where all the stories
