If a man spends 30 years banging a key for money, it must follow that not everything he writes will come up to impeccable snuff.
There will be up days and down days, there will be up markets and down markets, but if hot meals are to be set upon tables and carpets laid upon floorboards, if pipes are to be professionally plumbed and cats professionally wormed, and if children are not to be dispatched barefoot to school (perhaps for no better reason than to escape the spectacle of their mother taking in washing at the back door even as the bailiffs at the front are distraining upon their father’s chattels), then, willy-nilly, the loin must be girt and, though the mots may not always be justes, the quota filled.
Yet if those three decades have therefore spewed much of which I was not proud, they had not, until yesterday, delivered anything of which I was actually ashamed. But when I recall yesterday’s oeuvre, it pumps the blood into the cheeks, even as the pump itself plummets to the bottom of the boots. Worse, yesterday I put my name to a piece of writing which could settle my professional hash for good.
Its plot was generated some nights earlier, when the next-door burglar alarm sounded. This did not greatly agitate me since it is a capriciously sensitive item and had doubtless responded to a raindrop or a coughing dog, but I went into the front garden to check – one of my dahlias might have fallen over – whereupon the lamp-light revealed a man paused at my neighbour’s gate. Had this passer-by spotted something? I ran back, phoned the police, and ran out again with the idea of asking the man what he had seen.
It now dawned on me that what he had seen was the inside of the house, because he was disappearing up the road at a clip too nimble to be innocent. I clipped after, but before I could close upon him he darted into the unlit playing-fields opposite, and there is an age beyond which you do not follow the unknown into the invisible. Fortunately, even as my amour propre seeped, a police car hurtled around the corner, flung open its rear door at my wave, and we plunged together in a pursuit which happily ended at the quarry’s collar.
As the result of which, I was of course required to make a statement. That I was not required to make it immediately was, I felt, all to the good: recollecting emotion in tranquillity means you can marshal a few smart adjectives and get the semi-colons right. Accordingly, when the CID amanuensis fronted up yesterday, I was ready. He opened his pad, I my mouth, and we set off together towards the Booker Prize.
I had never dictated a story before. Habituated to pecking syllables off a keyboard in between staring out of the window, I had not realized how wonderfully the mind was concentrated by sitting opposite a bloke with a big fat pad and an urgent ballpoint. The stuff poured out.
It was pretty good: true, there was a nod to Wilkie Collins, a whiff of Chandler, but it was in the main my own, and it rattled along a treat. As the policeman scribbled, I thought, this is a watershed, I could do trilogies, I wonder if he’d like to earn a bob or two on his day off?
We finished, and he passed the pad across. Was it, he enquired, a true record of the facts, would I sign it to this effect, would I attend court?
I read it. I said yes. It came out as a croak. For, though every fact was true, every embellishment had gone. The copper was as remarkable an editor as I had ever met. As he wrote, he subbed: it is a great art, though that is not what it produces. It produces Janet and John.
Soon, I shall be in court. Defence counsel rises. His client is alleged to have been caught bang to rights. His only course is to discredit the witness. He settles his gold pince-nez. He reads. ‘I saw a man. The man was at the gate. The man had a brown jacket. He ran up the road. I ran after him. I got quite close. The man had little ears. The man ran across the road. I ran . . .’
Defence counsel tosses the sheaf aside, and takes off his pince-nez. ‘Mr Coren, you have described yourself to this court, under oath, as a writer . . .’