It happened when I was in prison. Definitely, that’s where I had my epiphany – if that’s not too grandiose a word. I remember staring at the grey walls and bars that enclosed me, the bars discoloured halfway up their length by the thousands of hands that had gripped them over the years. That’s when it first struck me that I should go to Sarajevo. It was suddenly so obvious and clear: I would escape.
As I lay on the hard, stained mattress trying to block from my consciousness the snores of the two men sharing the cell with me, I looked up at the dim night light outside in the corridor and remembered what my father had told me at Christmas about the city amongst the mountains where he’d been born. I knew I’d be welcomed with open arms, just as he promised. They needed me as much as I needed them. I was so excited by these nocturnal musings, I was sorely tempted to wake up the more educated of my two cellmates and inform him of my decision. But wisdom prevailed.
In the early hours, it dawned on me that I should go to Sarajevo for the experience. That was my sacred duty as an author: to experience life, to record those experiences, to follow my instincts, to surrender to every impulse. So that’s what I’d do. I’d become a sniper. It didn’t sound too dangerous. The citizens of Belgrade were rumoured to go to Sarajevo for a weekend of sniping – for fun. It had a certain frisson about it, but without too much risk. I could then collect material for a novel that wouldn’t be boring, plodding or expected. I’d write a book that Mulqueeny’s reader would be incapable of saying was predictable or he’d read before. It would be different – so different it would be unique. I’d find a story in Sarajevo that hadn’t been written before. In that nightmare city I’d fulfil my lifetime’s dream, discover an idea that even the slowest, stupidest publisher’s reader would be unable to resist.
There was no place for me in England, that was for certain: I’d reached a dead end there. The place was like a stagnant village pond overgrown with duckweed. The place was boring, grey and predictable. I needed change. Not only was it likely I’d feel more at home in the country of my father, but it was likely to be a more valuable experience than cleaning out the school toilets. Like Stephen Dedalus I would choose ‘silence, exile, and cunning.’
Looking back I think the ordinariness of life in London was reflected in my writing, and I had needed to distance myself from the mundane. The London I knew was cold and wet. Just before I left I had lived – no, existed – through those miserable January and February days when the realities of life quietly reassert themselves over the abstractions of Christmas and New Year; when the celebrations, joviality and bonhomie surrender once again to the weary, humdrum, crowded trudge to work. A continuous stream of cars and double-decker buses splashed through the wet streets of Kilburn, while crowds of people jostled and dodged each other on the pavements. The area concentrated hard, did everything in its power, to be rundown, dirty and brickish. In that suburb I felt perpetually bricked in; it was like living life in an unplastered room. Anything green – and there was very little that was green, apart from the baize inside the local snooker hall – had to fight for air, for space, just like the people who lived there. Restaurants, like overflowing rubbish bins, spilled along the pavements: Caribbean, Indian, Turkish, Thai, burger bars, as well as the halal meat shops. Discount-furniture stores battled with cut-price supermarkets, betting and charity shops carried on their uneven fight for people’s dole money, and outside one poky, begrimed shop, suitcases were lined up, padlocked together by a single chain, as if promising a possible escape to a brighter, greener, less brickish place. The incessant noise (as omnipresent as the smell of curry) numbed the brain, the honking, droning, rattling forever in my head.
Little wonder I was struggling to write something different, something that had never been seen before, that was truly original. It had been necessary to escape, I can see that clearly enough now. The only excitement in my last year, the only moment of originality in that dull metropolis, the only event that sticks out in my mind during those twelve months of nothingness was the time I returned to my flat in the early hours of the morning, when the traffic on Shoot Up Hill was only spasmodic, and found the Dawes’ cat, Sharon Stone, hanging from the wrought-iron corbel that supported the lintel above the main door, mouth open as if she was still keen to inhale a little oxygen. Slowly turning in the darkness, she resembled some highwayman of old, on a gibbet at a crossroads on the moors. Bridgette stood next to me on the front doorstep at three in the morning, screaming beneath the gently oscillating body, like some demented Janet Leigh in the shower – Janet Leigh discovers Sharon Stone. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘Well, Milan, this is a bit more exciting than usual. This is a little different. This is nice and neighbourly.’