A Week in December (29 page)

Which meant more to him: his real team or his fantasy? The Aurora/Skunk Two made such a nice call hard to make. Then Danny Bective hit the free kick straight into the wall in any event, so the dilemma was unresolved.

Finn sucked in the remainder of the joint and lay back. His eyes took in the poster of Evelina Belle, gazing down at him in an almost caring, almost maternal way.

There were three minutes added for injuries, despite the protestations of both managers in the 'technical' area, the small white marked box in front of the dugout, so called, Ken had told him, 'because,
technically
, inside it you can call the opposing manager an aunt.' Ken always swore in predictive text.

Finn's mouth was dry from the skunk and he was finding reality hard to cling on to.

Then Ali al-Asraf made a run down the left flank. He was quick, you had to hand it to him. He looked up, passed and - bloody hell, Borowski was clean through the offside trap: the centre halves who'd kept Finn's team up in the Premiership for three seasons - he'd sprung them like a cheap padlock; and the assistant's flag was pointing at the ground ...

Finn stumbled to his feet. And now there was no doubt at all, no choices to be made between a lifelong loyalty and a momentary gain in an imagined world - no difficulty in choosing between the real and the fantastic ...

'Go o-o-o-n-n-n,' he yelled, as Borowski took al-Asraf's pass in his stride, steadied for a moment and buried the ball in the lower right-hand corner.

'Oh y-e-e-s-s-s-s.' Finn fell back against the bed, more than one tear now running down his smooth cheeks.

At midnight, Nasim al-Rashid knocked at her son's bedroom door.

'Come in.'

'Can I sit on the bed?'

'If you like.'

Hassan was reading a book:
Milestones
by Sayyid Qutb.

'You've read that before, haven't you?'

'Yes. So?'

'Hass, darling, we're worried about you. Your father and me.'

'Why?' Hassan's voice had the surly edge it had developed at the age of about fourteen - as though he was being persecuted.

'You seem so ... Angry. And we'd like you to have a job. It's not good for you to spend so much time at the mosque.'

'I thought you wanted me to be a good Muslim.'

'Of course we do. No one's more devout than your father, as you know. But sometimes young men can get too wrapped up in religion. Not just Muslims. Others too. It's not healthy to spend so much time in your room.'

Hassan said nothing.

Nasim looked down at the duvet and pinched the edge of it in her fingers. 'Where were you today?'

'I had to see some friends about a project.'

'You left the house very early. You were away all day.'

'I know. And what did you do?'

'Me?' said Nasim. 'Oh, you know, the usual. Things in the house. Then I went to the West End to see an art show. A man called Liam Hogg. Have you heard of him?'

'Everyone has.'

When Hassan was a child, Nasim believed he would do the things that had been denied to her and Knocker, because their families had been immigrants. The education both of them received had been rudimentary, and the job prospects grim for people of their background in post-industrial Bradford. But Hassan ... Born speaking English, and born beautiful, too, with his long black lashes and his bowed upper lip: the only son of a family that cared for him so deeply and had somehow stumbled on the money to provide for him - surely with his natural intelligence he was destined for greatness, or, at the very least, great happiness. He was a curious and gentle little boy, not rumbustious and aggressive, as so many others were, but not weak or retiring, either - just interested in the world, in how it worked, in stories people told about it, all of which he approached with his head on one side, ready to listen, keen to know the answers. He had something else the other boys didn't have: an ability to sympathise with others, even grown-ups. Sometimes he patted his mother's hand in consolation when he saw she was upset, and Nasim thought he had inherited his father's simple kindness.

The mother's love for her boy was intense; and if there was sometimes a trace of sentimentality in it, then that was necessary, she thought, as a kind of protection or socialising of the dangerously visceral passion that underlay it.

Nasim had found it hard to accept the changes that came over Hassan as he grew older. When he hung out with the bad boys at school she could see how artificial was the veneer of disdain he'd applied to himself, how thin the self-defence. And then the ridiculous student politics. She knew little about these things herself, and some of what he said about what America had done in the Middle East seemed quite likely to be true; but what worried Nasim was not the detail of what he proposed or the old-fashioned Communist language, but the degree of self-dislike that it suggested.

By giving Hassan all the advantages that she and Knocker hadn't had, she believed she would remove him from friction, place him in a comfortable mainstream where he could use all his energies to flourish and waste none of them, as his parents had, on the attritional business of surviving.

She was cut to the heart to see it wasn't so. The boy didn't seem to rejoice in the place that had been carved out for him by the sweat and love of his parents. He became distrustful, separated from them and from their beliefs and alienated too, in some way Nasim couldn't start to understand, even from himself. She asked advice from friends and she consulted parenting manuals. They all stressed that children were their own creatures; that while genetically they were a half each of their parents, this input was of relatively little importance because what they chiefly were was something else: themselves. And there was almost nothing you could do to influence this hard, unknowable core. One of the self-help books compared the mother to a gardener who'd lost the labels on her seed packet. When the young plant grew up you didn't know if it would turn out nasturtium or broad bean; all you could do was encourage it to be as good a flower or pulse as it could be.

Whatever Hassan was, whatever the true nature that he was growing to fulfil, Nasim thought, he wasn't happy. She had to nerve herself for these conversations because she found his abruptness so upsetting and because she feared that by interfering she would make things worse. She approached his bedroom door, therefore, only when she was certain that not to do so risked causing greater damage.

'My love, if there's anything wrong, you would tell me, wouldn't you?'

'What sort of thing?'

'If you were unhappy? People get depressed. It's not a weakness. And boys of your age. Everyone knows that puberty is hard, but in fact it was fine for you, wasn't it?'

'Yup.'

'I mean, it's quite fun, growing up, going out and so on. But for young men I think your age is harder. The early twenties. I don't know why. Anyway, all I want to say is, you'd always come to Mummy, wouldn't you? If I could help.'

'Aye. Thanks.'

Nasim stood up. She felt saddened by her inability to reach the heart of Hassan's problems and bruised by his coldness. Her offer of help if he needed it, to be 'always there' for him ... Pathetic, really, she thought, when once, when he was young, they had had this majestic intimacy ...

But what more could you do?

Five

Thursday, December 20

I

The Pizza Palace Book of the Year prize, somewhat controversially, was awarded to either a children's story, a travel book or a biography. Excluding all fiction was a bold thing to do, but it was felt that novelists already had enough prizes of their own not to need the PS25,000 on offer from the restaurant chain that claimed to have put the pizza into pizzazz.

None of the board of PP was much of a reader (three out of eight voted against sponsoring the prize), but the finance director knew the man who ran the Zephyr public relations agency, which had some connections in the arts world. Trevor Dunn was his name, and his biggest arts client had been a theatre company that specialised in putting on musicals adapted from television programmes. Dunn asked Nadine and Tara, his two most recent trainees, to help him do a preliminary sift of all the entries and gave them lunch at a hotel in Covent Garden for their trouble.

There wasn't time to read the books, but by studying the jackets and the blurbs, Trevor, Nadine and Tara got the list down to about twenty in each category and sent them off to the preliminary judges: reviewers or trade insiders who were willing to look though twenty books for an 'honorarium' of PS400. After the category winners had been chosen, Trevor earned his own larger fee from Pizza Palace by luring in some names for the final three-book judging. As early as June, he had been able to announce his panel for the December showdown. They were a junior transport minister from the second Major government who was said to be one of the few politicians who read books; a lively woman presenter on children's television; the 'esteemed literary critic' Alexander Sedley; the 'well-known reviewer and biographer' Peggy Wilson; and - Trevor's coup - the 'former Girls From Behind singer and now TV personality in her own right', Lisa Doyle. In its mixture of gravity and showbiz, Trevor thought it was the best panel he'd yet managed, and the board of Pizza Palace, counting the newspaper column inches his agency mailed to them, was inclined to agree.

One person violently dissented, and that was R. Tranter. His biography of the Victorian novelist A. H. Edgerton had earned him PS1,000 as category winner and he had reasonable hopes that it could see off a challenge from
Bolivia: Land of Shadows
by Antony Cazenove in Travel and
Alfie the Humble Engine
by Sally Higgs in Children. And then he had seen the list of judges one morning in the newspaper and his cereal had turned to cotton wool in his mouth. The transport man would be all right, the girl singer would be keen to show off and he'd been nice enough to old Peggy Wilson at the books-page party where Patrick Warrender had introduced him. But Sedley ... Christ.

All day long, phrases from his review of
A Winter Crossing
two years earlier kept coming back into Tranter's mind. 'Moribund and ham-fisted'. Could he really have said that? 'Watching Alexander Sedley fumble with the English language is like watching a drunk in boxing gloves trying to pick up his front-door key'. It had seemed rather good on the afternoon he wrote it. Every time Tranter convinced himself that Sedley would have taken his review 'like a man' and would bear no grudge against him, another terrible phrase came stabbing into his mind. 'A prose tone-deaf to its own self-importance'. God. There was really no way back from that.

There was only one thing to do. A week after Sedley's appointment was announced, Tranter, with Septimus Harding on his lap, sat down to compose what he could only describe to himself as 'the hardest letter I have ever had to write'. 'Dear Alexander ...' No, that sounded too friendly, too obsequious; it might also send out some sort of gay message to a private-school type like Sedley. 'Dear Mr Sedley ...' Too hostile, too gas board. 'Dear Sedley' was of course what a posh tit like Sedley himself would probably have started. He settled in the end for the bland, tautologous 'Dear Alexander Sedley'. It would do. 'You may remember we met briefly at that weird do at the Natural History Museum, then again - also briefly - at your excellent reading in Hampstead (sorry I had to dash off in such a hurry that night, incidentally, as there was much I wanted to ask you about
A Winter Crossing
- but duty called!) Anyway, I just wanted to say that I've recently had the opportunity of rereading it ...'

Was 'opportunity' a bit strong? After all, anyone could pick up a paperback. But if he said 'the pleasure' it gave away too soon the volte-face he wanted to prepare more carefully.

'Anyway, I just wanted to say that I've recently had the opportunity of rereading it. I must say that it was a thoroughly pleasurable experience. One's first reading of such a book is necessarily influenced by the cultural baggage one brings to it; and prose as many-layered as your own really requires a second, closer reading. I relished your lightly worn learning and the playful references to other first novels, ranging from Camus to Salinger and, if I am not mistaken, Dostoevsky, no less! All this done with an enviable lightness of touch ...'

Bloody hell. This was laying it on a bit. The trickiest part of course was whether to refer to his own review. It was conceivable that Sedley might not have seen it and the letter would then have the catastrophic effect of making him look it up. On the other hand, it was pretty unlikely that someone so far up himself would not have read the papers. Perhaps then he should go for a sort of generic retraction on behalf of all the bad reviews. Yes.

'I don't really recall its reception at the time, but I suppose not all the reviews were able to rise to the occasion straightaway. History tells us - Katherine Mansfield on
Howards End
, Henry James on
Our Mutual Friend
, almost everyone on
Ulysses
- that it's not the first journalistic reaction that matters, but the second and third and, in the case of a novel such as yours, the subsequent responses over many years that really count. I have now had the pleasure of reading it three times and I have no hesitation in saying that it's not only an extraordinary debut, but in its own way is an important novel.

'I look forward eagerly to whatever you care to give us next.

'Yours in haste--'

The hardest thing was to get the dashed-off feeling of one great, distracted mind in a generous hurry to commune with another; but after three hours he was pretty sure he'd nailed it. In the life-shaping straits that Tranter found himself, anything was worth a shot.

Ralph Tranter had been a novelist himself, once. It was a natural aspiration for someone who enjoyed books and had read English at Oxford, though it wasn't one he felt confident to talk about. His first job had been with a large insurance company in High Holborn, on their graduate trainee scheme, and he had been dismissive of the various 'creative' types he'd known at college who seemed to think the literary or artistic world was agog for their arrival. Three years down the line, he was the only one with a job.

Living at that time in two rooms in a former Peabody building near the BBC, Tranter would get back from work at 6.30, put a large potato in the oven to bake and sit down at his typewriter. He had the modesty to know that he must pay the rent first and buy himself time to write; he had the self-discipline not to go out or watch television; he had read so many books that he also had a prose style that was plausible for most purposes. Most of the prerequisites were in place; all that he lacked was something to say.

But how important - really - was that lack, he wondered? When he looked at the novels he'd read and studied, not much seemed to happen in them. The main characters moved from position a) to position b). Plot - at least in the sense of any real action - was the province of the genre writer: the sadly misnamed 'thriller', the clockwork detective puzzle or a 'disaster' epic of mutant crocodiles in the sewer system. Meanwhile, middlebrow newspaper interviews and highbrow literary biographies focussed almost exclusively on the extent to which the contents of a serious novelist's books were drawn from his own experience and the characters 'based on' people known to him. After two years of torn-up pages, false starts and sober late nights, Tranter convinced himself that - compared to finding a reputable publisher, choosing a catchy title and looking interesting in the author picture - the actual content of his novel was not that important.

So it was that he began yet again, with a main character not unlike himself on a life path that bore a fraternal relationship to his own. This thing about 'inventing' characters that some novelists banged on about; really, when you came down to it, why bother? Very few people knew him, or any of the acquaintances he planned to include, so what was the point of conjuring and moulding new people from the void? At least he and his friends came with builtin credibility; they were, by definition, 'realistic' ...

Tranter's hero, John Sturdy, came from a modest Midlands family and his dilemma was much to do with regional issues: whether he should work in the pottery business or go to London with a girl from art school, who resembled Sarah Powell from the street next to Tranter's parents', though with added sexual charisma - a pretty hefty addition in all honesty. Tranter allowed the voices of the English regionalist school to harmonise with his own; there were intertextual references to the novels of Stan Barstow and Walter Allen, for instance. After three chapters, he found his book gaining traction. Every time he felt the need for a new incident, he would throw in an episode from his own life, but with a small twist. In this way, he had eventually spun the book out to 200 typewritten pages. The death of Sturdy's grandfather could occupy another ten, and then he was only forty short of 250 - the critical mass, he'd been told, that could be leaded-out by the publisher to cover 200 printed pages.

At the same time, Tranter wrote to small magazines, enclosing copies of articles he'd written at Oxford and unpublished reviews he had written 'on spec' of new books. Eventually,
Outpost
printed one; a month later
Actium
followed suit, and Tranter was quick to reinforce success by sending them more. He didn't require to be paid, but when he'd built up a scrapbook of half a dozen cuttings, he began to hawk them round the bigger magazines and even newspapers. Many papers had almost given up reviewing books, but then, following an outbreak of new supplements in the late 1980s, suddenly found their space quintuple overnight. Instead of half a page shared with ads for furniture warehouses, book review editors were suddenly expected to fill three entire pages on a Saturday. They searched frantically through the papers on their desk for R. Tranter's phone number.

At this point Tranter played with the idea of inventing a second initial - calling himself RG, perhaps. The precedent was auspicious. There were the poets Auden, Yeats, Eliot, cummings and Hilda Doolittle, who was known
only
by her initials, HD; in the critical field where Tranter proposed to earn his daily bread, there were the fathers of Cambridge criticism F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards; more recently there were the prolific A. N. Wilson and D. J. Taylor, the last two, he believed, not much older than himself. How many more copies might A. V. Woolf have sold if so called? In the end, however, he decided it was more original as well as more honest to stick with one.

Then, at the
Outpost
Christmas drinks party, Tranter met a literary agent and persuaded him to look at the novel, now finished and entitled
The Potter's Tale
. A publisher, not one he would personally have chosen, accepted the book and paid him PS2,000 for it. It received some friendly reviews but sold only 221 copies in hardback, including fifty-eight to libraries and twelve to the author's mother; no paperback offer was forthcoming. There was a rumour that it was going to be on a long-listing for the Handivac, but this turned out to be false.

Tranter experienced the disappointment at first as an intermittent wave or spasm, but over the following months it changed into crystalline, insoluble bitterness. This was the life event that was exactly the right, or the wrong, shape to fit into a recess in his character. As a child, he had been cheerful and reasonably benevolent in the playground and classroom. He lacked the confidence to be outgoing, but he had friends enough, he was good at schoolwork, he liked pop music and football; if he wasn't in with the cool set, he wasn't quite out of it either. It was no surprise to his teachers or family when he won a place at Oxford; he was good at lessons and had a particularly sympathetic feeling, even at the age of eighteen, for the Victorians.

He found that university, although he liked it, made him develop a defensive layer. He thought he was as clever as the other students, but many of them had a social ease that baffled him. He bought a tweed jacket and a tie from a shop in Turl Street, but they didn't do the trick and he went back to jeans and a safe donkey jacket. He joined societies, went to meetings, spoke up in tutorials; he hung out in the King's Arms. It was not a disaster, but he never seemed to be asked to anything enjoyable or glamorous. He knew these people and they weren't unkind to him; they remembered his name, in either pronunciation; they allowed him to attach himself to the fringe of their pub or college bar sessions, they smiled when he made a joke and they let him buy them beer; but they never condescended actually to invite him to anything. He changed from drinking lager to gin and tonic; he took up smoking, and chose the brand most popular with his friends. He gave up supporting West Bromwich and switched to Arsenal or Liverpool, depending on who he was with; he even considered dropping English and taking up philosophy. But over three years he found that whatever he did, he remained peripheral. This disappointment generated a low but resilient anger in him. One day, without actually putting it into words, he swore that however long it took, he would have his place in the light. Until then, in the short term, so far as university was concerned, he discovered one consolation: he could use what he'd learned from the people who shunned him to discomfit in turn those - and there were many of them - more ill at ease than he was.