Tinderbox Read online

  Tinderbox

  MEGAN DUNN

  For the book people,

  especially disenfranchised booksellers.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  The Cutting Room

  The Borders of Love

  The White Clown

  Incendiary Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is one of those classic novels you study in high school. Later on in life, if you’re a chain bookseller, you might find yourself shelving it or merchandising a copy next to Black Beauty in a banned books display. Or plucking the hazardous Fahrenheit 451 Cliff Notes from the in-store spinner and selling it to some poor kid’s mother.

  Fahrenheit 451 depicts a futuristic society in which books are banned and firemen, instead of putting out fires, confiscate books and ignite them. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper catches fire. At the disposal of the firemen is a mechanical hound and inside the hound’s muzzle is a needle programmed to paralyse its prey.

  Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a cautionary tale about the perils of anti-intellectualism and the high price of freedom. If you’re not careful it’s the kind of book that chases you into adulthood, still burning.

  I don’t remember ever selling a copy to anyone but myself.

  The Cutting Room

  ‘IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN.’ In the spring of 1950 Ray Bradbury sat in the basement of the Lawrence Powell library at UCLA, took a dime out of his pocket and slotted it into the small timer. Clunk. He struck the keys of the typewriter; each letter of the alphabet sprang forward printed, its likeness on paper, then snapped back into place. Students sat at the other eleven pay-by-the-hour typewriters in the basement of the library and pounded the keys. Bradbury added his own fingertips to the stampede. He was following a character along the white sheet of the page. Guy Montag left the fire station after a day of burning books and took the tube to the suburbs. Montag emerged on a blank street and turned a corner. The wind picked up. Autumn leaves scattered. The sentence came to a full stop.

  Bradbury stretched in his chair and rubbed his forehead; his eyes felt heavy. His back ached and his right leg had gone to sleep. His wife and baby daughter were waiting at home. Outside, the sun was setting over L.A. but he couldn’t see it. The basement had no windows. Bradbury glanced at the student sitting in front of him. Her blonde ponytail had flared on the edge of his vision all day. She typed in a neat, even rhythm as though she knew exactly where she was going and what she wanted to say. The blonde unwound the last page from her typewriter and gathered together a thick ream of paper. Bradbury watched as she stood up and walked out of the basement of the library. Her pony tail swayed from side to side. She didn’t look back.

  Bradbury had to keep going. He wrote in half hour instalments. His fingers raced over the keys. The typewriter outran his thoughts. The story barely paused for Bradbury to stop and add another dime. He finished the first draft of Fahrenheit 451 in nine days: a 25,000 word story called The Fireman. It cost him $9.80.

  The timer went off.

  In December 2009 I stood behind the till at Borders Kingston-Upon-Thames and held the scanner over the binc sticker on the back of a book. The scanner flashed red as it registered the title, beeped and added the price to the total. A fleet of Borders stores had opened throughout the UK. Born in the USA, the typical Borders’ two-storey stores were large, friendly supermarkets where browsers could freely roam the aisles. Borders’ presence on the local high street had once seemed as assured as a Starbucks Grande Cappuccino. Now size and range had become its downfall. ‘Is the discount on there?’ The customer glanced at the total on the cash register. During the sale I noticed customers had developed a heightened distrust of technology. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The books are all half price.’ I pressed Enter on the till. The receipt began to print. I handed the customer the Eftpos machine. ‘You can swipe your card now.’ He swiped. We waited for the transaction to complete. ‘Does this mean you’re all out of jobs?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Borders is in voluntary administration.’ I explained the difference between voluntary administration and liquidation. It was a difference that sounded tenuous even to me. The customer checked his itemised receipt as I stuffed the last book in his bag, noticing with distaste that it was a Dan Brown novel. Satisfied, the customer looked up. ‘Thank you.’ He grabbed his bag of books. ‘Good luck,’ he said. I didn’t bother to reply. I didn’t charge him 5p for the plastic bag either. I was sick of putting out fires.

  At Borders all the staff wore lanyards that said ‘Happy to help.’ I was not happy to help. I worked at Borders because I wanted to be a writer. I stood behind the till dressed in a red Borders sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. My fingertips were sore from entering reduced prices into the tills. My wrists ached from bagging. My shoulders were tense. I watched customers strip books from the shelves. Pages curled at their corners and crumpled. My face felt scorched. My smile had long since melted away. A conga line of crazed shoppers wound around the ground floor. I turned towards the front of the queue. ‘Next.’

  I picked up the scanner. Beep. Beep. I had been with Borders UK for seven years by the time it was placed into voluntary administration. I was originally hired as a part-time Christmas temp at Borders Islington in 2002, but the job had stuck. I transferred to Borders Norwich in 2005 and was part of the team that opened Borders Dundee in 2006. I’d started thinking about Fahrenheit 451 during those last critical months when I was the sales manager at Borders Kingston-Upon Thames. In the wake of Amazon’s Kindle it seemed unlikely that books would ever be banned: instead books are commodified, turned into movies and TV series, rated and recommended in Goodreads, their individual sales histories quantified on Nielsen Bookdata and in the fathomless depths of the Amazon Sales Ranking system. Even the Kindle was named by a branding consultant who suggested the word to Amazon because it means to light a fire. The branding consultant thought that ‘kindle’ was an apt metaphor for reading and intellectual excitement.

  I bet Ray Bradbury would have agreed. The book people at the end of Fahrenheit 451 wouldn’t need to memorise volumes of literature anymore. Now they could store their libraries on their Kindles or iPads. Project Gutenberg has been in the business of archiving classics since 1971. There are currently over 42,000 e-books available in the free domain. Fahrenheit 451 is not of them. Not because it has been banned. Quite the contrary. Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic has not been out of print since it was first published by Ballantine Books in 1953. The novel is still protected by copyright. If I’d thought about that more at the time I started writing it might have scared me.

  I remembered the mechanical hound from Fahrenheit 451, the watchdog of the firemen, who hunted down the literate like prey. I wondered if the mechanical hound was as shonky as the Elonex e-reader we’d been selling at Borders for the past couple of months. Our slow-witted display device was fixed to the main information desk on a long plastic lead. All I needed to memorise was its unique selling points. It had five adjustable font sizes and a built-in dictionary. The Elonex e-reader also came pre-loaded with one hundred classics. As a selling point this was not unique. The books cost nothing because the authors were dead and the works had fallen out of copyright.

  ‘Does it have a reading light?’ Customers came pre-loaded with their own set of great expectations that the Elonex e-reader could not always fufill.

  The future arrived and it was not science fiction. On Christmas Eve Borders UK was liquidated, forty-five stores were closed and over one thousand employees were made redundant.

  It was not a pleasure to burn. In the spring of 2013, I sat at the desk in the spare room of my rented apartment in Wellingt
on. I’d just joined National Novel Writing Month: an online community for anyone who has ever wanted to write a novel. On November 1st participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000 word novel by 11:59pm on November 30th. Entry is free. I signed up and chose my online alias. I’d decided to write a homage to Fahrenheit 451 but I didn’t enter a synposis of my novel on the site. What if it sounded a bit… weird? 50,000 divided by 30 = 1,666.66667 words per day. How hard could it be?

  The NaNoWriMo site has a word count graph. I could track my indvidual progress against the pack. I had thirty days and one major weakness. Structure. That was okay. I could borrow Ray’s. I picked up the copy of Fahrenheit 451 on my desk. An illustration of flames licked the right-hand corner of the cover. I hadn’t read Fahrenheit 451 since I was in high school, but I remembered the gist: in the future firemen burn books. Wars are fought in forty-five minutes. People are written into TV programmes broadcast through walls as big as screens. Besides, there was no time for stalling. I had less than forty-five minutes before work. I set the timer on my iPhone and typed the first sentence of Fahrenheit 451 into Word. Sunlight warmed my face through the window. I squinted at the white glare on the screen. I couldn’t see. It was time for a coffee.

  In the kitchen I flicked on the kettle and scooped three spoonfuls into the plunger. Fahrenheit 451 is divided into ‘The Hearth and the Salamander’, ‘The Sieve and the Sand’ and ‘Burning Bright’. The kettle boiled. I plunged.

  I returned to my desk and took a sip of coffee. I wasn’t a fireman like Bradbury’s character, Guy Montag. I’d never burned a book, but I’d been burned by them. I hadn’t been able to sell my first semi-autobiographical novel. And my career as a bookseller had also been extinguished. All I needed to do was start at the beginning. I took another sip of coffee.

  The timer went off.

  The next morning I sat down at my desk with a fresh cup of coffee and new resolve. Day 2. 3,333.33333 words to go. I needed to catch up on the word count from yesterday. I’d decided to tackle my homage from the perspective of Clarisse McClellan. I typed Fahrenheit 451 into Google and found a website called SparkNotes that contained abbreviated analysis of classic novels for students and other time-poor readers. Brilliant. SparkNotes had been organised into three main sections: general info; summary and analysis; and study tools. I scrolled through the character summaries to refresh my memory. SparkNotes described Clarisse as a beautiful teenager who introduced Montag to the world’s potential for beauty and meaning with her ‘gentle innocence and curiosity’. I tried to imagine what Clarisse was thinking. Did she drink coffee? I didn’t drink coffee when I was 17. I pictured Clarisse in her bedroom with a pencil and a piece of paper. The words were coming hot and fast from her own mind, she was writing without thinking, she was living the life I wanted to live.

  It was a pleasure to write, I typed. 3,333.33333 – 6 words = 3,327.33333.

  I was starting with a lie.

  Maybe Clarisse liked to write quickly, not stopping to think too hard. If she wrote fast enough her words were completely fresh, as though they had not come from her own mind. It was mad how writing could be like that. A rush of sentences down the highway of the page, paragraphs careening around corners.

  Mad, it seemed like such a Bradbury word, exuberant and full of zeal!

  I stopped writing and look at the timer on my iPhone. Three minutes. I took another sip of coffee and stared at the words on the screen. Maybe in the future it was also illegal to write. Finally I’d had an idea with some traction. If Clarisse wasn’t allowed to read books, then she shouldn’t be permitted to write them either.

  I reset the timer and typed: She glanced at the curtains drawn across her bedroom window as though she was being watched. The fabric shimmered, struck with sunlight from the other side of the glass. Her right hand ached from holding the pencil. She soothed her writing wrist, cupping her fingers around it, like a bracelet.

  I felt Clarisse’s pain. No one writes by hand anymore. It hurts.

  From the city the distant roar of cars, speeding beyond billboards. I flicked back to Google, opened a new search, deleted the word roar.

  Someone knocked on my door.

  I was 14 when I first read Fahrenheit 451. I wore a blue tartan uniform and sat at my wooden school desk at Western Heights High School in Rotorua. The mechanical hound bounded through the desecrated city. The hound ran on eight legs like a spider as helicopters flew overhead, blades spinning. The hound was at the service of the firemen. Wars were fought in 45 minutes. The parlour walls were lit by giant TV screens. In Fahrenheit 451 Montag’s wife Mildred starred in a soap opera filmed live from her living room. She called the people on TV her family. Mildred and Montag slept in single beds like my grandparents. At night, she wore a pair of ‘seashells’ in her ears that helped her sleep.

  Mildred. It’s such an antiquated name. I don’t know anyone called Mildred. The word ‘parlour’ still seems quaint to me and Fahrenheit is not a contemporary currency. In the sixties and seventies the Celsius scale replaced Fahrenheit in almost all countries except America. I suspect this is why Bradbury’s novel has never entered the mainstream vernacular in the same way as Orwell’s 1984. I’ve watched Big Brother. He doesn’t watch me. Like Orwell’s telescreens the parlour walls in Fahrenheit 451 also predate Reality TV.

  Mildred’s favourite TV programme is called The White Clown.

  ‘What do you think the white clown means?’ our English teacher asked us in fourth form.

  ‘That TV is stupid, eh, Miss?’ a boy said.

  Everyone laughed.

  ‘And why do you think that?’ she asked.

  ‘Because clowns are funny.’

  ‘But clowns can be scary too, can’t they?’

  She was right. I had recently read Stephen King’s IT. On the cover was an image of a clown in a red fright wig. IT was much more frightening than Fahrenheit 451. I couldn’t get to sleep after reading IT; I worried that the clown in the red fright wig was hiding underneath my single bed.

  The bell rang and a chorus of chairs scraped backwards. I shut the lid of my desk for the day. I enjoyed studying Fahrenheit 451 in class but I wasn’t afraid the mechanical hound was going to chase me into the future. I walked home from school. Jet streams flared across the sky. My drink bottle sloshed up and down in my bag. Sweat trickled down my back. I stopped at the rusted red train tracks half way along the road. I looked both ways; only the heat rising in the distance. There weren’t any book people walking along the tracks and there weren’t any trains either. At home I lay on the couch in my school uniform, legs slung over the coffee table.

  ‘What’s a hearth?’ I asked Mum.

  ‘The hearth is the area at the front of an old fireplace,’ Mum said. ‘People used to sit around the hearth in the evenings back before there was TV.’

  Mum had just got home too and was dressed in her nurse’s smock and red cardigan. The ironing-board creaked to life as Mum set it up in the lounge in front of the TV. The fireplace in our rented flat was covered with a piece of white gib-board. Mum poured water from a little plastic jug into the iron. The iron emitted a hiss and a faint burst of steam.

  ‘Shit,’ Mum said. Something bad had happened on the news again.

  In 1989 my dystopia was nuclear, a mushroom cloud, the day after tomorrow. In 1990 I watched the Gulf War in night vision. Missiles sparked across the screen. Mint green.

  Arachnid, the mechanical hound tracked his prey at night. He ran on eight legs. His proboscis dispensed a lethal injection of procaine.

  The timer went off.

  It was not a pleasure to write. Day 3. I woke up at 6.30, opened my MacBook Air and logged in to NaNoWriMo. Some participants had already clocked up 10,000+ words. What kind of novels were they writing? Didn’t they eat? Have lives? Standards? I set the timer on my iPhone for thirty minutes. Each sentence felt like a squeeze. The rain began to download on the domed roof of the school, twelve words. The rain was always programmed to
fall at this time, ten words. Why was I having trouble getting into character? I was once a teenage girl, admittedly not a beautiful blonde one. I cast my mind back. What mattered in high school?

  Enter Montag, slightly unshaven, a fireman in a black and orange suit. On his chest the company insignia: a phoenix rising.

  I bet Clarisse had a crush on Montag. Crush. A short rush mounted by that high C.

  The rain fell systematically on the domed roof of the school, like data collating, reacting, endlessly responding.

  ‘This used to be my high school. But it’s changed. When I was here the building was wooden. Of course we would never use the world’s natural resources so carelessly now. When I was your age I didn’t know what I wanted to be. So if some of you feel the same way, I sympathise.’

  Seventy-two words. A school visit. Yes! What could be more fitting. In our last year of high school we were always being pestered with work experience opportunities. Wasn’t it entirely possible that Montag might have been sent to Clarisse’s high school to lecture the students on the joys of becoming a fireman? And wasn’t it even more possible that she thought he was hot? I imagined what kind of lecture Montag might give if he was recruiting teenagers for the fire department.

  ‘Paper burns at Fahrenheit 451,’ he told the class. ‘Flames curdle and blacken the pages till each book crumbles to ash. A library takes time to burn. The other firemen and I stand back and watch it together. We always know that we’ve done the right thing. We harvest the ash and use it as compost. In the fire brigade we value the future of this planet. Our creed is: we burn, so that you don’t have to.’