Tinderbox Page 2

  Another seventy-eight words. My updated creed was a nice flourish. Bradbury was prescient but not quite so prescient as to predict global warming, recycling and the imminent extinction of the bumble bee.

  A fireman sympathising, I decided Clarisse wanted to write this down, to capture it in her diary. Even his name sounded exotic, like a character in a story that she might write and she didn’t know how it would end.

  I looked at the timer. One minute left: The fireman took his helmet off and held it on his knee. The teenager watched. Her legs crossed and uncrossed. She wondered what it might feel like to run her hands over the 451 emblazoned on his helmet, to feel the fireman’s number embossed beneath her touch.

  She glanced at the wedding ring that cordoned him off. His voice was even, almost plain. She sensed that he was not a man who often had an audience. Perhaps he was someone who slipped through life unnoticed, despite his status, his uniform, his touch. Did his wife know he was sad? Did she even know him at all? Every time his eyes flickered over her face, she could feel the heat rising, as though she was burning and he held the match.

  305 words. Phew.

  The timer went off.

  I was beginning to think Clarisse was a little naïve. After work in the evening I needed to write another 1072 words to make my daily count. Instead, I lay on the couch drinking red wine and trying to read Fahrenheit 451, while my boyfriend played Grand Theft Auto on the PlayStation. His car swerved round corners as I turned pages.

  Clarisse first meets Montag one evening when they are both out walking. Walking is unusual in Fahrenheit 451. Let’s not forget Bradbury wrote the first draft in the basement of the Los Angeles library. I’ve never been to LA but I’m told everyone drives there. Fahrenheit 451 was inspired by an earlier short story of Bradbury’s called ‘The Pedestrian’. The story was about a writer who lives in a television-centred society. The writer is arrested by the police one night when he is out walking and taken to the Psychiatric Centre for Research on Regressive Tendencies. Bradbury never learnt to drive. I’ve never learnt to drive either.

  My boyfriend sped around the city in Grand Theft Auto with the car radio on. Eighties pop songs drifted in and out of my consciousness. I took another sip of wine, turned the page. The fireman’s truck in Fahrenheit 451 is called a salamander. Montag the fireman and his big black hose. A teenage girl can find a phallus in just about anything. So can a middle-aged woman. Bradbury described Clarisse’s face as milk crystal. What the heck was milk crystal? In the book he said Clarisse’s dress was white and it whispered. I bet it did. I know the relationship between Clarisse and Montag isn’t meant to be sexual, but she’s a teenager and he’s a married man.

  And she also twirls a dandelion under his chin and asks him if he’s happy. Then she tells him to taste the rain. I snorted. It was pretty forward stuff for the 1950s. I wouldn’t twirl a dandelion under a fireman’s chin now. Let alone ask a married man to open his mouth and let the rain in.

  I flicked back to Bradbury’s introduction for more explanation.

  He was living in an apartment in Venice, California with his wife and baby daughter when he wrote the first draft of F451. He needed more quiet to do his work. He had no money to rent an office but one day when he was at UCLA he’d overheard typing from the basement and went down to see what the story was.

  Bradbury sounded like a nice enough guy. I placed the book on the arm of the sofa and cruised Wikipedia. He was married for 56 years to Marguerite McClure. She was the only woman he ever dated. They had four daughters. What did his wife and daughters think of Clarrise? Bradbury also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel called Dandelion Wine. I’ve drunk a lot of wine, but never dandelion. In 1971, the Apollo 15 astronauts named a crater on the moon the ‘Dandelion Crater’ in honour of the book. I imagined an astronaut reading Dandelion Wine at zero gravity, turning the pages suspended in mid-air.

  ‘Hey baby, what’ll it be?’ My boyfriend picked up a prostitute on Grand Theft Auto. The prostitute gave my boyfriend’s alter ego a blowjob in the front seat of the car. Afterwards she got out, slammed the door and said: ‘You wore my pussy out. You men are all the same. You think you want one thing but really you want everything.’

  I picked up my glass of wine. It was empty.

  The timer went off.

  The next morning I was still in bed at 7am. My mouth tasted fusty from the red wine. Day 4 and I’d already run out of time. I’d have to make the word count up later. ‘Are you getting out of bed?’ my boyfriend asked. ‘In a minute.’ I searched the Aro Valley Video website. I was lucky the shop was still in business. The future hasn’t been kind to music or DVDs. Now everyone streams music and movies online. I hadn’t bought a CD since I worked at Borders but I still rented DVD’s. Not because I cared about the customer experience, but because I was too much of a luddite to work out how to download illegally. Aro Valley had the best back catalogue in Wellington. Not just the mainstream fodder but the good shit. I could pick Fahrenheit 451 up after work. Watching the film might spark something.

  Watching the film did spark something. Memories. I’d seen it before. I was turning into my mother who could never remember the films she’d already watched either. I’d probably first watched François Truffaut’s 1966 version of Fahrenheit 451 when I was in my twenties and at art school. Truffaut was French and even though the film had dated it was arty.

  The film was shot in England at Pinewood studios. Which was probably why I originally thought Ray Bradbury was a British author. Truffaut had cast the actress Julie Christie as both Mildred and Clarisse. Christie was British. Bradbury was not happy about this decision because Clarisse was meant to be a schoolgirl. Not a blonde bombshell from the swinging sixties who was in her mid-twenties. The age change didn’t bother me. I liked Julie Christie. She looked especially hot as Montag’s wife, wearing a long silken wig with bangs.

  I wasn’t happy that Truffaut had removed the character of the mechanical hound from the film. Bradbury thought the hound was an essential element of the story because it showed what the future looked like. I agreed. However, I understood that it would have been technically challenging for Truffaut to create a convincing mechanical hound for the screen in 1966. Especially if the hound had to be menacing. There was no CGI in those days.

  I was non-plussed by Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. I didn’t like Montag, who was played by the Austrian actor Oskar Werner. Truffaut wrote in his diary that Fahrenheit 451 was his ‘saddest and most difficult’ filmmaking experience. Apparently, he didn’t like Oskar Werner either.

  Instead of getting sucked into the film’s plot, I got sidetracked watching the DVD extras. In the production shots Julie Christie and Francois Truffaut sat on a curb in the suburbs. Truffaut held a bottle of champagne and poured them both a glass. In the background was the house that doubled as Montag’s home in the film. The stark white limbs of trees framed the scene like kindling. Even the production shots seemed fused with sadness, with the film’s eventual critical and commercial failure. Truffaut’s head bent towards Christie. What were they talking about?

  ‘I think that he was out of his element linguistically and geographically,’ said Columbia Professor Annette Insdorf in The Making of Fahrenheit 451. Her lipstick was full bodied like a good merlot. She looked like a woman who knows.

  Fahrenheit 451 was the first film Truffaut had made in colour. It was also the first – and only – film he made in English. Truffaut only spoke French; luckily for him Julie Christie spoke French too. Whereas my own French was limited to what I learnt in high school: Ca va? Ca va bien.

  Insdorf pronounced the film Truffaut’s passionate homage to literature, to the written word. Ditto. My homage to Fahrenheit 451 was going to be a searing feminist rewrite of Bradbury’s classic, like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, only blonder.

  I watched The Making of Fahrenheit 451 hoping I’ll relate to Christie’s point of view. Instead it was the film’s editor I really took to. Thom Noble.


  I empathised with Thom’s plight. The cutting room was next door to the fire station on set. Thom could look out the window and watch the fire engine sail past. Fahrenheit 451 was the first film he had edited. In the documentary he wore a Joan Miro T-shirt. He seemed chipper and unpretentious.

  ‘By the end of the film Francois was able to say to me, “have a good weekend,” but that was about the extent of his English,’ Thom laughed, on the DVD extras.

  ‘You’re off topic,’ my inner critic said, as I sat in front of the TV with the laptop on my lap and scrolled Wikipedia for more facts.

  Time magazine had called the film a ‘weirdly gay little picture that assails with both horror and humor all forms of tyranny over the mind of man. It strongly supports the widely held suspicion that Julie Christie cannot actually act. Though she plays two women of diametrically divergent dispositions, they seem in her portrayal to differ only in their hairdos’.

  Watching the film did spark something. An idea. Maybe I could rewrite Fahrenheit 451 alternating between the characters of Clarisse and Mildred. Like Julie Christie I could change my hairdo.

  The timer went off.

  Day 5 and I’m already running a 4,686 word deficit. In the morning I reopened SparkNotes for a quick precis of Mildred’s character. SparkNotes suggested that Mildred’s obsession with TV was a means to avoid confronting her life. It didn’t seem to occur to SparkNotes that watching TV was her life.

  Mildred lay in bed listening to her seashells on shuffle. The rain slashed against the skylight and dribbled down the glass in long rivulets. Her head was fuzzy and her mouth tasted of red wine. She reached for her iPhone on the bedside table and knocked over a wine glass. The glass rolled on its side and pointed at her like a compass. The last drop of Merlot rolled towards the rim. She picked up her iPhone and swiped her finger across the screen. 2:49pm. Soon the neighbourhood children would be coming home from school. She turned her seashells off. The rain was always sharpest before it stopped.

  107 words. Not bad. I stared at my own reflection in my laptop screen and fluffed up my hair so it was a little more bouffy. Mildred opened the bedside drawer, threw the seashells inside, took out a container of pills, unscrewed the lid and popped a couple more. She walked over to the window and gazed at the white flaky tree trunks that lined the suburb.

  I noticed that the view from Mildred’s window looked uncannily like the suburb in Truffaut’s film. Where was the film shot? That dreary cul-de-sac with its stifled sense of pathos – and what were the trees outside the window actually called?

  Mildred shook her head and swallowed. 154 words. Her favourite programme The White Clown would be on soon and she needed to get ready. She stood up and smiled at her reflection in the mirrored door of the wardrobe. Her mouth was crimson and cracked. Another 191 words. And she looked like Julie Christie. She was wearing the flouncy apricot pyjamas from the film. It was a very frou frou costume, one I’d recognise anywhere. It also matched the hue of their bed linen on set. The retro décor in the film added a certain je nas sais quoi. Truffaut said he shot the film exactly as though it was in black and white, which either meant the auteur was lying or he was colourblind. The whole film screamed colour. The red fire engine! The red postbox! The orange bathroom! Julie Christie in those apricot pyjamas – what a peach! In the film Truffaut had renamed the wife’s character Linda. Maybe Linda sounded sexier in French?

  Linda reached under her husband’s pillow. The book was still there. She traced her index finger along its spine. She looked around the bedroom as though Francois Truffaut was standing in the shadows on set watching her every move. (‘Tres bein,’ he whispered, ‘39 mots.’) Then she slid the book out from underneath the pillow, brushed her hand over its cover, dust collected on her palm and also a bit on her apricot pyjamas. The book had a different energy to an iPhone or tablet. She could feel the life force in the paper.

  She flicked it open and the pages sent a rush of old air over her face. She read the title, ‘Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret.’

  The author’s name was not Margaret. Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret was first published in 1970. I thought of the author – Judy Blume – writing the book about Margaret that Linda was now reading in my redraft. It was a great feminist touch, even if I did say so myself. Truffaut hadn’t focused on women’s literature in his film. Touche. That was something I was going to amend in my rewrite. I wondered what Judy Blume’s total word count was.

  One sentence added to another. I paused. The house hummed around me, like silence, but more than silence. Also my laptop was whirring. I slipped my hand underneath it. Hot. It helped to visualise Bradbury’s Mildred as Truffaut’s Linda. I just had to mentally insert Julie Christie into new scenes of my own imagining.

  In my rewrite the rain had stopped. Sunlight angled against the windows trying to find a way in. Linda walked into the en-suite, stepped out of her pyjamas (I couldn’t help but think of the delicate handwash they’d require later) and turned the shower on. Warm water pooled in her right ear as thought it was a seashell. Her husband would want to talk to her when he got home. He’d want to explain why he was breaking the law by hiding books in their house. But she was sick of talking. A siren flared in the suburbs.

  ‘Are you there God? C’est moi, Linda.’ She wrapped her wet hair in a towel and moved back to the window. She pressed her hand against the triple-glazed glass and felt the dying heat of the sun. Two silhouettes stretched across the street. The school-girl from next door slunk along beside the fireman like a white weasel. The girl practically turned cartwheels around him. Her husband looked attractive in his black shiny uniform. She stood in the window and watched.

  The timer went off.

  Day 6 and my redraft had been hijacked by Julie Christie’s apricot pyjamas. The film kept unspooling onto the page. I couldn’t make it stop. The characters in the book and the actors in the film had blended in my mind. I had no idea how Mildred felt. Not the character Bradbury had first created in 1950. Perhaps it would have helped if he’d specified what she wore? I couldn’t fully imagine his vision of the future in Fahrenheit 451 either. It didn’t pop in Technicolor. For Bradbury’s Mildred finding a book in the house probably felt as strange and repellent as finding a severed human hand in a rubbish bin, and this made me aware – with a kind of horror – that books were my life. Books were the only assets I owned in our rented flat. They were spread out on the table like tarot cards and lined up on my chest of drawers, waiting to be read or at least alphabetised. A faded copy of The Idiot had buckled in the sun on my windowsill. I still hadn’t read Dostoevsky. The weight of the past pressed down on me. Or maybe it was just Dostoevsky’s oppressive word count? I closed my laptop and walked away from my desk. Who was I to take on Bradbury’s masterpiece?

  ‘Maybe you’re not a writer,’ my inner critic said.

  I walked past the bedroom and my boyfriend stirred and rolled over.

  He looked at me. ‘I thought you were writing this morning.’

  ‘I am writing,’ I said.

  In the kitchen, light twisted through the window, casting doubt over everything. I got up an hour early so I could write for longer. ‘What are you waiting for?’ my inner critic said. ‘Some of the other NaNoWriMo participants are half way.’ I flicked the jug on and took the milk out of the fridge. While I waited for the jug to boil I made breakfast. Two weetabix, two sugars: four words. Outside, it was raining. That’s why the rain had crept into the writing. ‘Your work is too autobiographical,’ my inner critic said. I took a bite of weetabix. At least that lived up to expectations. After breakfast and coffee I felt intellectually frisked, ready for another instalment on the timer.

  I returned to my desk and sat down. My back ached. My eyes were tired. But there was a book inside me and it wanted to get out. The book whispered, ‘Forget about the word count. Just write what comes. Don’t censor it. It doesn’t matter if it’s autobiographical.’

  At least that’s what I think
it was whispering.

  In 2001, I stamped a reduced-price sticker on a book and stared out of the shop window at Stoke Newington High Street. I was 28-years-old and worked part-time in a bargain bookshop. Dust billowed before my eyes, swirling and falling onto the Wordsworth Classics display in the window. The display was covered in a fine layer of soot from the red double-decker buses that swept along the high street carrying the cargo of London on their worn backs.

  Since moving to London, I had already been fired from several jobs: I was an office temp who couldn’t type. I was a sandwich maker who abhorred tuna. And I was a bartender at a pub called The Purple Turtle the day the twin towers were bombed. On 9/11 I woke up next to a fellow employee who had given me a tab of ecstasy the night before. We sat on the couch and watched the twin towers burning. Smoke filled the sky. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said.

  I couldn’t believe it either.

  I had only been living in London for nine months but it felt like forever. The bargain bookstore was located next to a bank and a Wetherspoon’s. I worked alone. The books arrived every few days in boxes. I opened each delivery. My hopes for intellectual stimulation were often flattened by a shipment of thin scholastic workbooks. I wedged Dickens and Dostoevsky into alphabetical order. A row of spines needled each other for space on the Wordsworth Classics shelf. I was often challenged by The Idiot. It was a very fat book and took up a lot of room.

  Lined up in their blue jackets the Wordsworth Classics held the pungent aroma of the past. In between deliveries, I re-read the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales I had loved as a child. I related to the poverty of ‘The Little Match Girl’ and I was still scared of the three dogs in ‘The Tinderbox’.