Paperboy (36 page)

I added parts of myself to the stories, trawling for scraps of half-buried memories, like shaking seasoning into a stew. The things I recalled eventually allowed my characters to become both predictable and unknowable. It was like attaching a hundred coloured strings to push-pins, and sticking the pins all over a huge map, then plotting the trajectories and intersections of all the bits of string. And after I did it once, I did it again and again, until it started to make a vague kind of sense.

‘Yeah, I’ve been meaning to write a novel,’ said the unimpressed cab driver who dropped me back at the station. ‘I just haven’t had the time to get around to it.’ He made it sound like mending the guttering or putting up a birdhouse, a tiresome chore anyone could handle if they owned a decent toolkit. I did not believe it was something you could simply choose to do. Most of the writers I knew did it because they had no choice at all in the matter. In that sense it was like supporting a hopeless football team or being a kleptomaniac.

The most articulate child I ever met was a pretty little girl called Athena, who grew up in her mother’s steam-filled
restaurant
in North London, and who helped out in the evenings by serving at the tables and talking to the customers about themselves, before falling asleep behind the counter where the dishcloths were stored.

The most doomed boy I ever met went to an incredibly posh school in Westminster, where he was surrounded by every possible aid to becoming ‘creative’, supplied by an angry, determined, media-obsessed father he dared not fail.

From this I realized that it didn’t matter if you grew up in a house with hardly any books, or if you behaved so differently from your parents that everyone thought you must be a stranded foreign-exchange student. You could still pop up like a pavement weed and prove impossible to stamp down, just as a young chef might appear in a household that survived on microwaved food, or an artist could rise from a home that only had The Green Lady on its walls.

An invisible, inconsequential family, marking time together in a small, hospitable neighbourhood, like a Reader’s Digest condensation, only with more swearing and unconscious cruelty. Nothing the Fowlers ever did made any difference at all to the universe, the world, England, London or even Westerdale Road, and yet they were the product of a particular time, and therefore became accidental examples of it. People complained that everyone’s lives were too open now, but for too long they had been closed so tightly that no one could draw breath.

Back at my parents’ bungalow, I studied the photograph of my father. Bill was thirty-five when he married, but looked careworn and much older. The strain of his paradoxical life showed in the creases on his face. My fingers traced the contours of his knobbly skull, wondering what he was thinking in the picture.

I’m sorry I didn’t know you
, I thought.
The fault was mine as much as yours. I got lost in my books. I should have bothered to find out who you really were
.

Kath and I sat side by side, sipping strong dark tea from fat white mugs. The delicate red and gold cups, the bone-china cake-stand and side plates she had kept for best had been the only items to survive the cull, tucked away and taped shut in cardboard boxes, in the tacit understanding that they would probably never be used to entertain friends and neighbours. The civilized social life my mother had been promised in the magazines, all dainty doilies and conversations about literature, had failed to materialize. And yet she had found contentment, after a fashion.

A few days after Bill’s funeral, the neighbours tentatively knocked to see if the coast was clear, and brought her little things they thought she might like. It was as if they half expected Bill to come back, like a Hammer Films zombie, and throw them all out. Slowly, the front room was opened up to guests, just for a mug of tea and some biscuits, a shop-bought fruit cake, the shy delivery of a bunch of flowers, but it brought Kath back to life.

She remained my greatest critic. After finishing one of a series of books I had written, she closed the cover with a final pat and said, ‘Well, dear, I think you’ve mined out that particular seam.’ And yet one day, when we quietly sat in her bungalow, she said after a thoughtful silence, ‘You know, when you first got published, I felt that I did, too.’ Beyond that, she wouldn’t be drawn on the subject.

As I drove away from the house, my mother stood at the door, smiling and waving until she was lost from sight. The curse of youth, I thought, was the determination to ignore the past; the curse of age was a desire to remember it. I was interested in understanding what had gone before, but Kath preferred to switch on the television
and
drown out old memories. Why shouldn’t she? She had earned the right. On the day I cleared out my father’s clothes, I had finally come to understand why I should love him. It was a shame that the realization had taken so long.

At home that night I climbed on to the bed and reached to the top of my wardrobe, pulling down the last few remaining notebooks, which were now covered in layers of grey dust. At some point I had stopped writing in them, and now I wanted to remind myself when that was.

Even though I had switched to writing short stories, filing film reviews had been a hard habit to break. They peppered the pages so much that it was possible to provide an exact date for each book.

I found I had stopped filling them in on the very day I had left Cyril Villa to go and live alone. It seemed that those early, hopeless attempts at writing had not been signs of individuality at all, but of dependence and frustration. The blank pages that followed were the real signs of freedom.

Even though my father’s death had placed a full stop on one page of my life, the rest of the book would continue onward, each sheet as bare and white and wide as the horizon, waiting to be filled with words that might one day glimmer like stars.

‘I don’t know who he is,’ Bill had said of me plaintively. ‘There’s nothing in him I recognize.’

I am my mother’s son
.
Just as you were yours. But I finally became myself. I wish you could have, too
.

Time, I thought, for just one final list. Thinking back to all of the years of advice that my mother and the librarian of the East Greenwich Public Library had given me, for no other reason than to hope I would improve myself, I set down my own list of writing rules:

My Rules for Writing

I had reached the bottom of the page.

No longer ashamed of the notebooks I had hidden for so long, I put them out on the shelf, for all to see.

1
It’s commonly said that the English write as if their mothers are reading over their shoulders. See the dedication in Russell Brand’s autobiography.

36

The Sovereignty of Words

IF LIFE IS
a series of locked doors you must find ways to open, books provided me with the first of many keys. But when I was ten, they were also my private shame. I was embarrassed to be seen carrying them everywhere I went, but couldn’t help myself. If I had walked around the streets clutching a football to my chest, or a bicycle pump or even a shoe last, no one would have made fun of me. Books were things I seemed to be forever hiding. I stuffed them under beds and on top of cupboards, tucked them up my jumper and even hid them inside the brick air vent in the front garden until I could safely smuggle them upstairs. They gave too much away about me, and – as adults were always saying – the money spent on a book could be spent in other far more useful and practical ways. ‘You could have bought a puncture kit for that,’ my father had once said when he saw the price of a book. But all through my childhood I had a secret I could barely acknowledge, which was that if I had to make a choice between buying a book or buying a shirt to keep out the cold, I would always have chosen the book. I was sure
that
if this secret was revealed, it would make me look weak and stupid in the eyes of others. It was a long time before I began to suspect that it might actually make me stronger.

After I had my first novel published, I felt there was something I needed to do.

I went back to Westerdale Road on one final visit. I walked along the same street, retracing my steps from where the little orange brick house had stood, towards the East Greenwich Public Library. The sky was the colour of a bus driver’s socks, it was raining lightly and the street lights were just coming on. The road was as empty as it had ever been, but judging by the dozen or so road signs along its way I could tell it now prioritized vehicles, not people. No children played on these pavements any more.

This time, I was not going to the library to borrow books. I was going to give some back. I was taking a few of my own favourite novels, from
Scoop
to
Orlando
to
The Crystal
World
, from
Gormenghast
to
The Stirk of Stirk
to
The White Cutter
. I was just going to walk in and quietly leave them on the shelves, correctly alphabetized, to repay in some small part the debt I owed, in the hope that another ten-year-old child would find them there and begin to read.

This time, as I walked up the street with my armful of books, I realized I had nothing to hide. The printed page had not imprisoned my thoughts but had given them shape and set them free. Instead of shrinking away until they were invisible, the books in my hands seemed to grow plumper and lighter with every step I took. Each book had a different voice, and each voice could be distinctly heard. Some were yellowed and tinged with obsolescence, others were as stinging and insistent as they had been upon first reading. And there were new voices that had never
been
heard before, the memories of those who had been overlooked or ignored, now newly empowered by paper and print. These writers could be discovered with the rest – although you still had to be directed to them. The library directed children by encouraging them to browse. Without it, I would never have found the books I loved.

It seemed that as I walked the words expanded, signing themselves on the glittering damp air above me, doubling and folding like musical harmonies or sharp and shimmering drips of paint, reflecting their rainbow colours on the houses all around until the entire sky of lowering cloud was filled with sentences and phrases and quotes and descriptions of every kind, spiralling and exploding in every direction. The words became all the emotions they represented, laughter and argument, pleasure, exhilaration and endless, boundless delight.

Faced with such a cacophony of imagination, the rational brick-and-concrete world could only crumble and fall away like burned paper, blackening and drifting from view. The sturdy, sensible Victorian houses of London, branching out across the suburbs like concrete cilia, could not contain the force of these flimsy pages. Surrounded by this heuristic army, I wondered how I could ever have really been afraid of anything at all.

With the precious cargo in my arms, I headed through the rain towards the welcoming lights of the library.

About the Author

Christopher Fowler is the acclaimed author of seven Bryant & May mysteries, including the award-winning
Full Dark House
. He lives in King’s Cross, London.

For more information on Christopher Fowler and his books, see his website at
www.christopherfowler.co.uk

Also by Christopher Fowler

FULL DARK HOUSE

THE WATER ROOM

SEVENTY-SEVEN CLOCKS

TEN-SECOND STAIRCASE

WHITE CORRIDOR

THE VICTORIA VANISHES