The Fictional Man (6 page)

“Well, did I tell you my news?” Niles smiled, telling himself it’d be a good idea to get Bob’s mind off his problems. Bob had been created to be somewhat morose – morbid, even – and Niles felt a distraction from his ever-present black cloud would be welcome. Besides, it was big news, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t heard this particular song and dance from Bob before.

Bob sighed, rolling his eyes. “Is it happening at last? Am I finally going to get to meet Kurt Power – is there going to be a
team-up?
I mean, I’ve heard so much about the guy.”

Niles was vaguely hurt by the tone.
Bob was obviously jealous, the writer reflected, smiling inwardly at the depth of his insight into the human condition. But even in a world where Kurt Power existed, Bob would still be a valued friend. Less valued than Kurt Power, admittedly, but still valued for all that.

“Not quite,” Niles said, getting the barmaid’s attention. “Two more over here.” He turned back to Bob, smiling genially. “You’re in the ballpark, though.”

Bob looked up as the beer arrived, narrowing his eyes slightly. “Seriously?”

Niles smiled, paying for the drinks and adding a hefty tip. “Have one yourself while you’re at it.” The previous beer had put him in a magnanimous mood, and there was a small part of him that was considering buying a round for the house to celebrate recent events. But aside from himself and Bob, the only other customer was a very striking woman with red hair and a glass of white wine watching the TV, and Niles felt that the gesture might be misinterpreted. And if a gesture like that was going to be misinterpreted, he thought to himself, he’d rather Bob wasn’t around to get in the way. He smiled, admiring her dress – ’sixties retro, a multi-coloured op-art pattern. A good omen.

He turned back to Bob. “Seriously what?”

Bob frowned, picking up the new bottle and taking a brief swig. “You get to create a human being?”

“A Fictional, yes.”

Bob shot him a look. “You don’t need to say it like there’s a difference.”

Niles frowned, puzzled. It was the second time today he’d been accused of realism, and he was starting to resent the implication. If there was any realism going on, it was reverse realism – these Fictionals assuming every womb-born human automatically thought less of them.

“You’re the real realist here,” the author murmured, drawing himself up to his full height. The Fictional, caught by his logic, could only stare at the bar top and reassess his entire life. He immediately apologised and left, allowing the author to get to know the fascinating red-haired woman unimpeded.

“You’re the...” Niles swallowed. “I mean, you’re not being fair. There
is
a difference – quite a few differences, actually. You’ve not aged a day in all the time I’ve known you, for a start.” Niles lifted a finger to his receding hairline, pointing to the grey hairs that were starting to come in. “Not a problem for you. One shave and a haircut and you’d be in your mid-twenties again.”

Bob shook his head, looking pained. “God, don’t talk about that.” He spoke through gritted teeth, clutching his bottle of beer so hard that Niles feared it might break. “If I got a grey hair tomorrow, it’d be the happiest day of my damned life.”

Niles’ brow furrowed. “I don’t see how that’s possible...”

“You don’t! Why am I not surprised?” Bob took a swig, looking bitter, and then stared at his drink for a moment. “Sorry. It’s been a rough couple of days. I should thank you for the beer.”

“Yes, you should,” Niles muttered reproachfully.

Bob gave him a wan smile. “Come on, then, Niles. Let’s hear it. Who is it you’re translating? One of your own? You’ve got that other detective character –”

“Madeleine Sorrow.” Niles winced as he said it. Madeleine Sorrow had been a forensic pathologist and ex-porn star with an estranged daughter who solved violent crimes in Edinburgh. Niles had never been to Edinburgh for longer than a day visit, but he felt he knew it intimately after watching
Trainspotting,
and Irvine Welsh’s trick of writing phonetically had appealed to him.

He’d written two books with her, the second of which,
The Cursed Moon –
about a serial rapist who targeted menstruating women – was filled with the kind of searing social commentary and powerfully erotic sexual content that Niles had created Madeleine Sorrow to better express. It was still held up occasionally in places like
The Guardian
and
The London Review of Books
as being one of the worst books ever written by a human being.
Private Eye
had devoted three pages and a particularly well-realised cartoon to ripping it apart. It had only been published in England, and was the main reason he’d left.

Niles had never written a single word featuring Madeleine since, although part of him still considered that decision to be the literary world’s loss.
“They made their choice,” the author sneered as he set the match to the unfinished manuscript – a manuscript that could have ended sexism forever. “Let them live with it as best they can.”

“No,” Niles mumbled, “not Madeleine Sorrow.” He cast a quick glance over at the red-haired woman, as if the mere mention of Madeleine Sorrow would send her running from the bar in disgust – then hurriedly cast his eyes down to the wood of the bar top when he saw she was looking back at him curiously. “Not one of mine at all.”

Bob nodded. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“It’s, ah... have you ever heard of
The Delicious Mr Doll?
It’s a kind of secret agent film...”

“Sure. I think you told me about it once – kind of swinging ’sixties stuff.
Austin Powers,
right?”

Niles smiled tightly. “Probably one of the main influences on it. I never saw
Austin Powers,
myself.” He’d looked at the poster for the film and had the uneasy feeling that the film would have been laughing at him as much as the secret agent genre, and he’d never watched it to find out if he was right. “Anyway, they want to make a new
Mr Doll
film, and they’ve asked me to pitch. If they like what they see... well, they’ll get out the translation tube and I’ll be shaking hands with Dalton Doll himself.”

Bob took another long swig of his beer, eyeing Niles carefully. “I need to visit the bathroom,” he said, after a pause.

Niles blinked quizzically. “What? Why?”

Bob laughed. “Because I need to piss. Jesus, come on.”

Niles pouted, irritated at Bob’s reaction. He’d expected a different one – not awe, exactly, but congratulation, at least. For goodness’ sake, he was about to have a hand in the creation of a living being – one of Bob’s own! A
little
bit of awe wouldn’t go amiss. “You’re not changing the subject,” he said officiously. “I want to know what you think.”

“All right, fine.” Bob thought for a moment. “Okay, let me try and put it into words. What I said earlier about confronting our gods...” He paused, frowning. “I actually did know the guy who created me – on the writing side, anyway. A guy called Malcolm Stuyvesant – he was the head writer, they call it
showrunner
now, on the
New Adventures
. On
Sea-Thru
too, plus I think he wrote a few episodes of
Buffy
or
Angel
or one of those, but... the mid-’nineties were his time to shine. He’s not done too much since. Anyway, he’s the guy who wrote the series bible, the personality description, everything the technicians worked from. I mean, obviously when you’re translating a new Fictional, you put a little more thought into it than you do if you’re just making up a protagonist... right?” He looked at Niles pointedly.

Niles nodded briskly. “Oh, of course.” He didn’t like the implication that he hadn’t put a great deal of thought into Kurt Power. He knew everything there was to know about Kurt Power’s life, from his eye colour (a steely blue) to his favourite song (it varied) to where his daughter went to school (it varied).

“So this guy Malcolm, the lead writer... I got to know him pretty well. I mean, we worked together for as long as the show was on. He’d bounce ideas off me, let me ad-lib a line – towards the end, he was practically letting me co-plot the thing. He’d throw situations at me and ask me what my next move was, we’d write episodes that way. I wonder why more shows don’t do that.”

Niles smiled.
The New Adventures Of The Black Terror
wasn’t really his thing – it was a little too camp for his liking, and the whole premise of a costumed adventurer felt like a trope designed for pre-literate children – but he had to admit that every episode he’d watched had rushed along splendidly, and there’d never been any point where he thought Bob wouldn’t have said or done what was on the screen. Contrast the fifth season of
Cutner’s Chair,
in which the viewer was asked to believe Ralph Cutner was mesmerised by the romantic charms of a female patient who clearly bored him senseless – Niles could hear the raging arguments on the set between Ralph and the writer in question in every line of dialogue – and you did, indeed, start to wonder. Some people, Niles thought, just didn’t know how to use Fictionals properly. “So,” he said, taking a sip of his beer, “you had some filial feeling towards him?”

“I never said that.”

Niles blinked, confused. “But surely you thought of him as a father figure –”

Bob shook his head. “No, no. Jesus, Niles, I know what
filial
means. I’ve already got a father – Rex Benton. Criminologist, gunned down by racketeers, left me his secret lab, yadda yadda. I mean, he wasn’t
real
, sure, and he’s dead, but the guy was still my dad. No, Malcolm was my
creator
– my main one, I mean. There’s a big difference. That’s what I think you don’t realise.” He got up off the bar stool, towering over Niles. “He was a nice guy, but the thing is that we never really got on well – not outside of work, anyhow. As soon as the show finished, we pretty much stopped talking to each other... listen, I
really
need to go...”

Niles blinked. “Why?”

“Because my bladder feels like it’s going to explode. Back in a second.”

“No, I mean –” Niles started, but Bob had walked away, towards the toilets. On the way, he stopped to take a look at a flyer for something called META MEET – probably a band. Obviously not in that much of a hurry to pee, Niles thought bitterly.

He sighed, taking another sip of his pint, then looked over at the redhead. She was still looking at him, her head tilted, and he found himself risking a smile and a nod. There was something about her that was very striking – something about her hair and her eyes – but he couldn’t quite work out what. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, exactly – beautiful women were ten-a-penny in LA, and in that context she was nothing particularly special – but there was something in the way she held herself, in the retro clothing. Something oddly distanced – artificial, even. Every movement she made looked like a performance.

He suddenly realised he was staring, and shifted his eyes to the news report playing out on the TV above her head. The words SHERLOCK HOLMES MURDER leapt out at him. He nodded to the barmaid. “I’m sorry, can you turn that up a little?”

“– coming to you live from the scene of the murder.” A reporter in a dark suit was speaking to the camera in front of a pawn shop of some kind, as police attended to a taped-off area behind him. “We’re not sure what Sherlock Holmes – and to avoid confusion, I’ll reiterate that this is the modern-day Sherlock Holmes, the one whose new show finished its first season on HDI just a few weeks ago – we’re not sure what he was doing on Camerford and Vine exactly. There is a Subway here, he might have wanted to eat something – what we do know is that at around seven-twenty he was brutally struck from behind by an unknown attacker who, ah, crushed his skull with repeated blows from some kind of heavy object –”

The reporter was interrupted by the woman at the news desk. “I’m just going to stop you there, Phil – do the police have any idea of the motive for the attack? Why kill the new Sherlock Holmes?”

“It’s hard to say, Joanne –” The reporter looked around, as if trying to seek someone out. “It’s possible that the attacker might not even have known he
was
Sherlock Holmes. Remember, this was a modern incarnation of the character, so unlike most of the more, ah, historical Fictionals, he would have been dressed quite normally...” He seemed to catch sight of someone off-camera, and made a quick beckoning gesture. “Actually, we have some people here with ideas on that – Sherlock Holmes and, uh... and Sherlock Holmes. If I could just ask you guys to step over here a moment –”

Niles blinked as two more Sherlock Holmeses wandered into shot – one tall and thin, with a roman nose and the full deerstalker-and-pipe outfit, the other shorter, moustached, and looking altogether more pugnacious, wearing a loose-fitting shirt in a vaguely Victorian style. Niles recognised the second from recent movie posters – he was a more action-packed, violent Holmes, who’d been dreamed up by the Nestor Brothers studio to put a new spin on the mythos. He vaguely recalled another, earlier Holmes working as a consultant on that film – probably the taller one, who looked more like the classic model.

“Mr Holmes,” the reporter turned towards the shorter Holmes, before pausing to rethink the question. “Mr Holmes of 2009... I understand you’ve been discussing the situation with the investigating officers –”

“I have been discussing the situation with the officers,” the taller Holmes said in an icy tone. “My companion has been taking notes on the deductive process. Unfortunately the budget for his translation did not extend to inculcating him
in utero
with the proper degree of intelligence to apply my methods –”

“Steady on, old chap,” growled the shorter Holmes in a wounded tone. Niles noted that his accent had some American undertones – either poor programming in the voice, or an attempt to sway the US audiences.

“My dear fellow, each to their own,” the taller Holmes said, sucking contemplatively on his pipe for a moment before removing a magnifying glass from his cape and studying the asphalt beneath his feet. “Were we engaged in a situation calling for use of the fistic arts, or the commandeering of a runaway horse-and-carriage, I would gladly cede authority to you. But this is a matter of deduction and in such matters I remain your superior... ah!” The taller Holmes paused, bending down and studying the ground carefully for a long second.