I have to own up and admit that I’ve experimented with the Prozac. I know I said I wouldn’t and I suppose that makes me an unreliable narrator, if that’s what an unreliable narrator is.
What made me do it? It wasn’t a sense of futility. I am consumed by the need to write something honest and complete before I die.
Fear, pure fear. Something’s burning, something’s on fire. It’s me, I’m burning. Instead of standing quietly in the fireplace and agreeing to be a human log, I rush about setting fire to everything – tapestries, curtains, canvases – every one of them irreplaceable and none of them insured. It shows such a lack of consideration. Instead of my daughter being able to say, ‘This is the house where we’ve lived since 1999,’ ruins, just ruins. She might wrinkle up her nose and add, ‘I mean, the point of that house was its things.’ Whereas, if I showed a little consideration and left the Neo-Geo wheel and the Australian aboriginal rugs unscorched, she might say instead, with a strain of tenderness in her voice, ‘Dad wasn’t such a bad sort in the end.’
Well, it wasn’t the fear either.
What made me take the Prozac was Lola. Lola is an unbelievably literary friend of mine and I’ve been dreading her call. What would I say to her gloating condolences? ‘As you can imagine, I’m deep in Marcus Aurelius,’ or, ‘I find that these days I can only bear to listen to the very Late Quartets.’ What would satisfy her greed for seriousness?
I hadn’t had time to prepare anything when she sprang on me.
‘Are you writing about it?’
‘What?’
‘Dying.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Are you writing about it?’
‘No. I don’t think it’s that interesting.’
‘An opportunity missed. You know I’ve always thought you could do something serious.’
‘It’s wasted on me,’ I said. ‘It’s all yours if you want it; no need to feel you’re poaching on my territory.’
‘Well, if I were dying…’ she said. ‘I remember you when you were an undergraduate – you were so interested in how the mind works. We expected great things of you and then you got sucked into that silly film world. Aren’t you having any big thoughts at the moment?’
‘Only big thoughts and very small ones. It’s the medium-sized thoughts that jump ship in an emergency.’
‘Write that down.’
‘No,’ I snapped, ending the call.
In any case, it’s a good thing I’m taking the Prozac. I’m enjoying my positive attitude. It’s got me making plans, being practical. The medium-sized thoughts are back. I may only have six months to live but I’ve still got to survive. I’m going to New York to see my agent, Arnie Cornfield. Arnie is famous for his introductory rap, ‘Some people want an agent to hold their hand. Some people want a shoulder to cry on. Well, I’m not that kind of an agent. I’m interested in one thing and one thing only: money.’
When I was writing Aliens with a Human Heart (perhaps you were one of the fifty-three million people who paid to see it) I enjoyed pointing out to novelists struggling with a £3,800 advance spread over seventeen years that the novel is dead. Now that I’m about to join it I’m not so sure. Why should the novel die? Why should anybody die?
Arnie won’t be pleased that I want to write a novel. Too bad. I just need enough money to see me out. This house I bought near St Tropez is expensive to keep up.
It’s a pink house with white gates. At the front there are two palm trees, floodlit, so the burglars don’t fall flat on their faces. At the back, four minuscule cypresses, like self-conscious bridesmaids, accompany the concrete driveway to the garage. If you climb on the roof and jump, you can see the sea. Inside there are still-empty niches everywhere, and tiny flights of steps leading from one thing to another. Two steps up to the kitchen, three down to the living area, one onto the patio, two into the garden, and a final glissando of steps back to the entrance area.
It’s as if the builder had stumbled across the concept of a step and couldn’t believe his luck. Get a load of this thing that goes up and down. C’est un petit miracle. Imagine the atmosphere of excitement on the building site, the dawning of a new possibility, like Homo habilis bringing a stone down for the first time on the bones of a scavenged gazelle and sucking out the marrow. The world would never be the same again.
The strange thing about these discoveries is that they often happen simultaneously in quite different places. It makes you think that ideas might be ‘in the air’.