Tinderbox Page 11

  ‘I guess this is the end,’ he said.

  ‘Of the world or of our marriage?’

  ‘Of the chapter in the autobiography.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Although to be honest I’m not sure I can even write in chapters.’

  He let go of her hand.

  Neither of them wanted to get into the mouldy old depressing stuff again.

  ‘Hey, what do you think’s a better title,’ I looked up from my laptop. ‘The Borders of Love or The White Clown?’

  ‘The Borders of Love sounds a bit Mills and Booney.’

  ‘So, The White Clown?’

  ‘I don’t like clowns,’ my boyfriend said.

  It was the end of the line—

  The timer went off.

  In the spring of 1950 the subway richocheted past Venice Beach, shaking the rented apartment. Up and down, back and forth. Ray Bradbury brushed his teeth. Up and down. Back and forth. One day someone should design a mechanical toothbrush! He could put one in his new story. Or would that be overdoing it? He peered into the bathroom mirror.

  ‘Ray?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Are you ready for bed?’

  Maggie leant against the doorframe in her pale nightdress. The glow of the reading light behind her; the curve of her hips, the outline of her breasts, swollen with milk.

  He splashed cold water over his mouth. The toothpaste hung from his chin in a foaming santa beard, down the plughole with a slurp.

  ‘Ready.’

  In bed, he put his arm around her. Her hand warm on his chest. He felt fully charged. He could feel the alertness in her body too, that part of her that was now permanently on call for their baby. A watchfulness. He kissed her forehead and turned the reading light off.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked in the darkness.

  ‘It’s good,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ he knew it was good, felt the urgency of the story; he only had a few dimes left now, he’d finish ‘The Fireman’ tomorrow. Electric!

  ‘You know it’s good,’ Maggie laughed.

  She stroked her foot along his calf muscle, everything just right.

  ‘What about all the quotes,’ he said, ‘from other books?’

  ‘I liked them.’

  The curtains were drawn but if they had been open it wouldn’t have mattered, they had no view to speak of in LA. Just the side of a building. No moon, no stars. It didn’t matter, Ray was keeping it all up here. His mind popped open every morning like a jack-in-the-box and a new story sprang out.

  ‘The wife in the story seems a little…’

  Maggie turned towards her side, the duvet followed, like the tide creeping out.

  ‘Yes?’ Ray said.

  Maggie had gone quiet.

  ‘A little what. Tell me.’

  ‘Superficial,’ she said.

  ‘Do you think I should change her?’ Ray asked.

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  Whenever Ray said he wanted to write something new, Maggie just shrugged and said, let’s open the window. That was their joke. Open the window and chuck the money out. Ray saw his bag of dimes spinning in mid-air, dropping onto the concrete like rain.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, just sleepy.’ Her voice withdrew.

  She was out like a light. Ray lay next to her, the story still hadn’t finished with him, his mind kept clocking in on half hour installments. ‘The Fireman’. Was it a good enough title? What tempature did paper burn at? He should write that down. Make a list of places to call to find out tomorrow. The chemistry department. Finally, a yawn overtook him.

  In the middle of the night, Maggie’s side of the bed was covered in wrinkles, the duvet slid from his shoulders as he sat up. The light blazed in the hallway and he heard her through the wall talking to his daughter. ‘Sssshh. Ssssh.’ The baby cried on.

  The first thing I thought when I checked my word count on Day 30 of NaNoWriMo was SHIT. Jean Rhys may have been a reclusive alcoholic but she still had the pragmatism to appropriate a character from a novel 100 years out of copyright. I’d thought of Wide Sargasso Sea off and on throughout my draft of 50,000 words. Why wasn’t I more like Rhys? Her prose was incandesent, her point of view beautifully sustained throughout that short brutal novel. Bronte’s Jane Eyre was the pyre on which Wide Sargasso Sea burned. Even if Rhys was bat shit mental.

  I put my draft into a folder on my desktop and went back to school. I took a class in creative non-fiction at Victoria University. The class was perched on top of a small gnarly hill. I passed a cemetary on the way up the hill each week and felt great empathy for the lives now shelved inside, each headstone bookended by a pair of dates: the beginning and the end. The trouble for me was always the bit in the middle.

  My fellow students were not to be underestimated. After one of my metaphors was maimed by a 20-year-old, I met the course tutor, Harry Ricketts, for a coffee. Ricketts was British and polite. A prolific author and poet, he’d escaped the tyranny of the novel. He suggested I could, too.

  ‘What do you want to write?’ he asked.

  ‘I wanted to rewrite Fahrenhiet 451 from the perspective of the female characters but I failed.’ I outlined my flop. ‘My book turned into a farce.’

  He contained his diplomacy. ‘Then why don’t you write about that?’

  ‘Okay.’ I finished my flat white and stood up.

  Maybe I could put Iggle Piggle in it?

  My rebooted draft was now a book about a book. But at least the book it was about was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenhiet 451. I had held his masterpiece up as a lens to examine my career as a chain-bookseller. Borders had been extinguished but the ashes were kind of funny.

  I sent Tinderbox to three agents.

  Number 1 didn’t write back.

  Number 2 told me that my lead character was shallow.

  Number 3 skyped to ask how much I knew about Judy Blume? Because a book about Blume could really find a market. I confessed I’d never read anything by Blume – except the title of Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret in passing, as I shelved it in the young adult section at Borders. (Coincidentially, Megan is actually a the Welsh version of Margaret.)

  None of the agents had read Fahrenheit 451. They obviously hadn’t had to study it in high school.

  The timer went off.

  Bradbury reached into his pocket. His last dime. He span it around between his fingers – here goes nothing – and fed it into the typewriter. His last spurt. Montag plunged into the river and fled the mechanical hound and the city. He’d killed Captain Beatty. Hosed him down and spun him round in a coat of flames. Bradbury hadn’t even know that was going to happen. The story was moving so fast. Montag was on the train tracks now. The world opened up in ways Bradbury didn’t know he was going to describe. A deer in the forest. A barn. The tenderness of it all. Damn. It was good. It was a good story. Montag came upon the train tracks and met the book people. Granger stood up from the fire and welcomed Montag back from the dead.

  This is my favourite scene in Fahrenheit 451.

  SparkNotes described Granger as the leader of the ‘Book People.’ But I imagined his stature as that of a Borders manager who liked to lead from the back. The book people at the end of Bradbury’s novel were just five out-of-work blokes, a former chair of Cambridge, a doctor, a professor of ethics, a Reverend and Granger – who is the author of a book titled The Fingers in the Glove; The Proper Relationship between the Individual and Society.

  The men introduced themselves to Montag as the masterworks they’ve learnt by heart. Plato. Schopenhauer. Darwin. Einstein. Aristophanes and Gandhi. Turns out there aren’t that many light reads in the woods. I can’t imagine most of us will ever read Plato or the Hebrew bible first hand. Including me. So perhaps Bradbury was right? Technology has shortcircuited our knowledge and we’re trapped in a culture of ever diminishing returns. Yet I like to think I stand for freedom of speech. At least I stand in line for it.

  L
ibrary checkouts continue to be automated like supermarket queues in order to aid efficency. The Great Library of Alexandria is responding to changing business models; growing in some areas, declining in others, transforming to match customer demand. Ray Bradbury wrote five short stories set in libraries before he struck Fahrenheit 451. He kept returning to the image of man as a book. So did I. But what if the man was a megalomanaic? The book a farce? In my mind the image of ‘man as book’ had fused with Jeff Bezos, for better or for worse.

  SparkNotes said that Mildred was frightening because her character was completely unreadable. But I didn’t believe that. In my novel Mildred wanted the story struck straight from the wick of her life, burning brightly.

  Truffaut’s film was critisced for neglecting the science fiction elements of Bradbury’s original text. But one of Truffaut’s achievements is that he showed how quickly technology can carbon-date. In a scene at the fire department Oskar Werner demonstrated to a bunch of new cadets the various hiding places for books. He flicked the switch on an electric toaster. Zap! Two paperbacks. Sometimes book people pop up where you least expect them.

  For some time indie bookstores have been reappearing. The author and owner of Parnassus Bookstore, Ann Patchett, has called it a comeback. And even Jeff Bezos is on board. In 2016, Amazon opened a physical bookstore. It seems counter intuitive, even corrupt, for Amazon to cash in on the last refuge of the analogue: community. But there’s good news out there too. Sales of e-books have plateaued. They are, after all, still a bit shit. And under the tuteledge of James Daunt Waterstones has evicted the Kindle Fire from its shelves. But it’s not just a case of one format or the other. I bet most people now read a lot of content digitally, with all the windows on their devices open.

  No-one in their right mind can pity the demise of a chain store. Not even me. Yet I’ve wound up in a Facebook group for ex-Borders employees. There are over 8000 members, including the former CEO of Borders UK.

  Old merchanidse flows on to the page. A teddy bear tangled in a comments thread. A Borders box from Store 74 in Pittsburgh. A reciept from Store 285 in Washington DC.

  What’s the dumbest question a customer ever asked you?

  Who wrote the diary of Anne Frank?

  I want the original Bible. The one Jesus would have used.

  Do you have SparkNotes for Nicholas Sparks books?

  A quick check on the SparkNotes website tells me they don’t. Nicholas doesn’t need his sparks decoded. The Notebook comes with an open heart.

  So do most of the members of the Facebook group. The tone is upbeat. The book people post book porn. The most beautiful libraries in the world. Cats spreadeagled over centrefolds, pages parted. Mugs bolstered by heartwarming mantras. I am a book dragon not a book worm. A house is not a home without books. Its not hoarding if it’s books.

  I confess to a certain fatigue with this smiley faced pro-book endorsement. Maybe my heart has been blackened like Captain Beatty’s? Or perhaps I am just tired of preaching to the converted?

  The Borders alumni die, get cancer and lose their homes. Help out an old Borders peeps! Givealittle. Learnalot. Connect, Disconnect.

  The content providers, still providing content.

  It was the best job I ever had. Sad face.

  I sit on the borders of love. I’ve never posted anything but I watch.

  At the end of my rewrite of F451, the book people were recruiting. The pay was shit but it was an opportunity to be part of something bigger than yourself.

  And it wasn’t only Montag who survived the war. I hated the suggestion latent in Bradbury’s text that Mildred was asking for it, as though her vanity deserved the bombs that flattened the city at the end of the book. Don’t we all deserve peace whether we’re shallow or not? And isn’t the extension of peace to our enemies our most luxurious and hazardous freedom? At the end of my draft Mildred and the mechanical hound were waiting to join the book people. The future might need a bookseller with a taste for the mainstream. Especially if she looks like Julie Christie. The mechanical hound, like the Ereader, had turned out to be less of a threat than first imagined. Reprogrammed, the hound could even quote Dostoevsky, thereby letting readers with a short attention span off the hook.

  I let Clarisse live too. I saw by the end that Bradbury was right. Her face really was soft and gentle like a fragile milk crystal. Whatever the heck milk crystal was. And Francois Truffaut had helped me understand the importance of beauty – its terrible potential for disruption – by casting Julie Christie in the roles of both the revolutionary and the bored housewife.

  At the end of my draft, the mechanical hound looked up at the moon and thought about howling. Then wondered if it was a bit OTT.

  Night crouched on the the other side of the shore.

  The hound comprehended that the moon was round, it rose and fell with the tides, its image waxed and waned in fiction and in fact. That same old moon had slept with writers good, bad and inbetween. The moon inside Janet’s Frame’s The Lagoon lived under water, dim and secret. Whereas the moon in The Mighty Boosh was just Noel Fielding covered in whipped cream. ‘When you are the moon, the best form you can be is a full moon.’

  The moon in all quarters has hosted astronauts and illuminated manuscripts in the deepset windows of monastries, the moon saw the arrival and displacement of the Gutenberg Press, it hung above Allen Lane’s head as he slept and a train blew steam across the tracks near Agatha Christie’s house. The next morning he found himself at Exeter Station Platform, hands in pockets. He looked over at a nearby vending machine. What he really wanted was something light to read. He glanced around the platform at the idle commuters. Imagine a vending machine that dispensed books! When his train finally exited the station that morning, the pale moon lagged behind, just an outline in the sky, clouds chugging.

  If Jeff Bezos ever does make it into space, the moon will be there waiting. No matter what happens during the day the moon comes out every night, powered by the sun’s electricity.

  Incidentially, SparkNotes wasn’t originally set up to support student study. It was founded by four harvard graduates as an online dating site, first called Pimpin’ Cupid, later, The Spark. The Harvard graduates behind the site realised they had a captive student demographic and branched out into providing contemporary study guides.

  Bradbury had at least two affairs during his marriage to Maggie. One began on his fiftieth birthday, when the phone in his office rang. Bradbury picked up and a female voice had said: ‘It’s your birthday, you’re alone and your wife and children have forgotten.’

  What a line! Forget the dandelion and go straight for the jugular.

  Postscript: Bradbury didn’t face any major copyright issues when he published Fahrenheit 451, despite his liberal use of quotations. My situation was a little different. I found a publisher prepared to take my book on. It wasn’t about money. (I didn’t have any.) It was about integrity. (Clunk.) I wrote to the Ray Bradbury Estate asking for permission to use his characters. I toyed with the letter. Procrastinating. I called my book a homage to Fahrenheit 451. I emailed the letter.

  A reply arrived back poste haste. They wanted to see the book. I sent excerpts. Carefully edited excerpts that were respectful. After all I did respect Bradbury, didn’t I? Another quick reply. They wanted to see the whole draft.

  Gulp. Nothing I had read about Bradbury made me feel optimistic. Apparently Ray Bradbury thought Andy Warhol was a thief. Bradbury’s imagination was big but it still had limits. I had graduated from art school, grew up admiring Warhol and I really was a thief. In the late 90s I used to rent mainstream movies from the local video store and burn them into experimential videos in the manual edit suite at art school. I gave big budget films different soundtracks. I altered the narrative arcs. I didn’t think of it as stealing. I thought of it as art. However my brilliant career as a video artist quickly blew a fuse. White fuzzy lines begin to run through the video tape whenever I tried to burn copies in the edit suite. Macro
vision was an early form of digital rights management that added invisible signals to commerical VHS tapes making it impossible to produce copies in a second VHS recorder. Shit.

  Here I am – two decades later and still poaching from the classics.

  An email arrived in my inbox. ‘The Bradbury family have read and discussed your novel and they are uncomfortable with your use of the excerpts from Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451.’

  It was the word uncomfortable that got to me. I was uncomfortable that they were uncomfortable. I didn’t want to write a book about someone else’s book. I couldn’t comfort them. I couldn’t comfort myself. I couldn’t pretend that my affection for Fahrenheit 451 was straightforward. Or that Ray Bradbury was entirely real to me. Let alone his family.

  I could have pursued my right to his characters. But what right did I have? I had taken the master’s vision and sullied it with my own silly thoughts. I am the white clown; I can’t seperate my face from the mask. I hijacked Bradbury’s vision of a future without books to try and say something but what? Technology and paperbacks can coexist? Clarisse isn’t innocent. Mildred isn’t a bitch. Return to sender. Freedom of speech seemed like a lofty conceit when pitted against intellectual copyright.

  After his remake of Fahrenheit 451 was a flop with the critics and the public, Truffaut wrote Bradbury an apology Je suis desolé.

  It was noble of Truffaut to apologise, a mark of the auteur’s character.

  I owed Bradbury an apology too. I had set my book inside his, like a cuckoo laying its egg in another’s nest.

  I felt ridiculous. Sooty.

  I filed the hard copy of the letter from the estate in my underwear drawer where it remains with pairs of nylon pants that no longer fit. The letter has a small window. I can peer through the pane and browse the lines of my own address. This is as close to Ray Brabury as I will ever get.