Tinderbox Page 4

  The houses above the beach were white and unknown. They walked along the shore in bare feet, the sand swirled around their toes as dusk rushed in. He picked up a seashell. Specks of sand on his fingers, beneath his thumbnail. The wind whipping close enough to move the hairs on his wrists. The shell was a spiral, a unicorn’s horn. The turret had once housed a sea creature, something unknown and unseen, now long gone.

  A fat seagull rode the wind above their heads, zig-zagging on its currents.

  He gave the shell to her, she closed her palm around it and carried it along the beach. His arm loose around her shoulders. The stray cats darted in and out of the boats along the sand. One slept in the tarpaulin. She drew her jumper close around her neck as the wind picked up. The hem of the sea ran over her toes.

  He found a sand dune, protected from the wind. They put back on their shoes and socks. He took the bottle of wine out of his long coat and uncorked it. She set down two plastic cups.

  ‘A toast,’ he said.

  She raised her cup and held the hair back from her eyes.

  ‘To us,’ he said.

  Beads of sand on their lips as they drank. ‘Let’s stay up all night and talk about our childhoods,’ he said. One of their jokes.

  ‘You were flirting with the waitress tonight.’

  He poked her. ‘Don’t be jellybags.’

  The seagull was gone now, but they could hear its sharpened cries in the skies above. The sea rushing and hushing, charging, then dissolving, a wedding train evaporating on the sand.

  She set her plastic cup down in the cold, dense dune.

  ‘I don’t want to go back home tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’ His shadow stretched over hers. Their teeth clinked like glasses in a fumbled toast. His lips tasted of wine, the scratch of his chin against her face. Rough. The desolation of love swept through her. Then an image of Frank Sinatra crooning in the square.

  Sometimes love doesn’t return from a Ryanair holiday. In the morning Julie slipped the seashells into her ears and heard waves breaking. Their flight accelerated along the tarmac and she remembered the seagull, wings extended, just riding the fluctuations in the current.

  In 1966 in the cutting room on the set of Pinewood studios film editor Thom Noble superimposed Julie Christie’s face over Oskar’s using a 24 second dissolve. On screen Oscar’s nightmare had climaxed. The pixels evaporated. One face into the next. It was another Hitchcock reference, this time to The Wrong Man.

  The timer went off.

  Day 14. I got up at 6.30am and set the timer on my iPhone. Word count: 9,905. I could do it. I could still finish NaNoWriMo. I just had to stay focused. When I was with Mickey I had been sent to an anxiety workshop at Homerton hospital. During the workshop I had been given a list of the different types of change that can happen to a person in a year. I had to circle the types of change that had happened to me. I stared at the list and then at the fire hydrant fixed to the hospital wall, its black nozzle awaiting a hypothetical emergency.

  I closed my eyes and imagined Julie Christie on the set of Truffaut’s Fahrenhiet 451. She was all dressed up with nowhere to go. I started to type. Linda took the tube into the city, got out and entered a tall mirrored high rise. She rode the elevator to the thirteenth floor – ping – walked out along the corridor and opened an innocuous office door. She seemed to know where she was going which was good because I wasn’t sure. We were way off Truffaut’s script and in unchartered territory that had never even been covered in Bradbury’s novel.

  ‘I’m concerned, Linda.’ The psychiatrist office swung around in his swivel chair, holding a list in one hand and a stress ball in the other. The stress ball was merchandised to look like a golden snitch.

  ‘I just need my special pills,’ Linda said.

  In my mind she looked like a desperate housewife. On the set of Fahrenhiet 451, Truffaut had requested she was styled like Carole Lombard. Whoever the hell Carole Lombard was.†

  ‘Are you going to give me a new prescription or not?’ my Linda demanded.

  I decided my Linda didn’t like men in power; maybe, like me, she’d even worked briefly (but memorably) in the sex industry, as a receptionist answering the phones at a ‘high-class’ massage parlour. ‘Femme Fatale Linda speaking. How can I help?’ It was impossible to say what her backstory was as neither Bradbury or Truffaut had ever said it. All the embers were burning.

  ‘I’m beginning to wonder if the pills aren’t masking the real problem?’ The psychiatrist said. He might have looked like the counseller who took the class at Homerton Hospital, if only I could remember him as clearly as the fire hydrant.

  Of course they were masking the real problem! That’s why she needed more.

  ‘I think we should talk about your husband,’ he said.

  Linda looked at the paperweight of the Twin Towers on his desk.

  ‘My husband thinks I watch too much TV.’ She got out of her seat and walked over to the window. Outside, the real towers shimmered in the late afternoon sunshine or perhaps they glistened in the early morning rain. She thought briefly about history; fires that had burned and fires that had been put out. And where there was fire: smoke. I decided her overdose had been an accident. Her husband was working late so she’d popped a pill and watched TV. Popped a pill. Her house, filled with canned laughter. So what if she wore seashells to help her sleep? When her music washed up on the pillow her husband told her it sounded like tinnitus. He never asked what she listened to. Never asked what she watched on TV. Never asked about her family.

  ‘It can be hard to keep emotionally present in a relationship over time,’ the psychiatrist said. He passed Linda the list.

  She stared at it and then at the fire hydrant fixed to the wall, its black nozzle awaiting a hypothetical emergency.

  ‘Would you like to hold the stress ball?’

  Linda nodded. The ball was soft and warm. She squeezed it.

  ‘How’s your sex life?’ he asked.

  The timer went off.

  Day 15. In the evening I lay on the couch drinking red wine and reading Fahrenheit 451. Word count: totally wasted. My boyfriend careened around a corner in Grand Theft Auto and crashed into a pedestrian.

  ‘Shit,’ I put the book down.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Clarisse is killed in a car accident.’

  ‘Who’s Clarisse?’

  ‘How could I have missed such an important detail?’

  ‘Do you want a refill?’ My boyfriend held up the bottle of red.

  Truffaut had changed the ending. In the film Clarisse escapes society and is reunited with Montag when he flees the city to live among the book people. But Ray Bradbury killed Clarisse – and even mentioned her death in the introduction to Fahrenheit 451. He said that Truffaut’s film gave her a longer life – which, at the time, he considered a mistake.

  Later, Bradbury had a change of heart. When he wrote Fahrenheit 451 for the theatre (he was nothing if not prolific) he let Clarisse live. Although he never agreed with Truffaut’s decision to make her a grown woman instead of a teenager. His Clarisse represented innocence. She taught Montag, the fireman, what it meant to be free. Yeah. Free of his wife, I thought. Bradbury wrote about Clarisse as though her innocence could be maintained across a life time. But innocence has a use-by date like everything else.

  I’d read this introduction several times yet I’d completely glossed over Clarisse’s death. Too much wine.

  The next morning I sat back down at my desk. I’d come to a hole in the story. The narrative arc was unravelling. I was sweating. I wiped my forehead. Letters pooled on my fingertips like alphabet soup. Clarisse was a composition made out of thin air. Her story was a loose thread. If I let go she’d disappear.

  I turned to SparkNotes and had a crack at another essay question. What was the importance of Clarisse in Bradbury’s novel? For me: zilch. However, the importance of Julie Christie playing the part of Clarisse seemed increasingly critical.

&n
bsp; Writing for the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther deemed her portrayal of Clarisse ‘a bleakly defeminized version’ of the ‘elegant, sexy wife who doesn’t care beans for reading and gets all her information from watching the wall-to-wall television screen.’

  Bosley was right. At best Christie’s Clarisse deserved a B minus. But at least her haircut was always an A plus.

  In 1965 Christie was in Madrid finishing up on the set of Doctor Zhivago. The producer Lewis M. Allen and Truffaut flew out to visit her.

  Originally Truffaut asked her to play one part in Fahrenheit 451.

  Julie said, ‘Oui.’

  The financing for the film came together quickly. In The Making of Fahrenheit 451 the film’s producer Lewis Allen confessed the financing wasn’t due to the director or even the script. Julie had just won an Academy Award for her work in Darling. She was hot shit.

  ‘The parts weren’t very good individually,’ Lewis said on the documentary.. He had a patient smile. Truffaut hadn’t bought into Bradbury’s vision of a heroine and a villainess. He thought instead of Clarisse and Mildred as two aspects of the same person. So Allen suggested Julie Christie play both parts. Eureka! Truffaut was stoked. Problem sorted.

  But then Christie’s ex-lover Terence Stamp pulled out of the role of Montag: Jellybags.

  And Julie was exhausted after finishing Doctor Zhivago. (I was not surprised. I was exhausted after watching it. It was very long. And the wolves!)

  The doctor prescribed bed rest. Julie arrived on set two weeks later than scheduled.

  The day she finally started the trouble with Oskar began.

  During their first meeting Oskar wanted to tell Christie how to play her part: mansplaining. Truffaut apparently liked working with Christie because she didn’t ask what her motivation was. With a face like Christie’s, you don’t have to ask.

  In one early scene Oskar felt that Christie, dressed as Clarisse, should turn and touch him.

  ‘No,’ Francois said. No touchy.

  Oskar pouted. He wasn’t happy and he’d try and get back at Truffaut later, using – of all things – his haircut as a weapon.

  Truffaut’s film wasn’t about a love affair between a man and a woman; it was about a love affair with books.

  I remembered a coffee mug I’d seen online recently which said ‘Reading is sexy.’ I wasn’t sure Truffaut agreed.

  The timer went off.

  Day 16, Day 17, Day 18.

  Sooty made her pilgrimage to work at Ogle. The retail giant tempted its employees with flexible working conditions and staff discounts. The building was shaped like an igloo. Every revolving door was an entrance or an exit. Customers flowed in and out. The eyelash in the electronic sign above the door winked. Ogle was open seven days a week until 11pm. Ogle: eyes a-goggle. Sooty arrived at work and checked the daily roster. She was stationed behind the main information desk. The mechanical hound stood next to the desk and emitted a soft internal whirring. It was recharging.

  A couple approached, holding a pair of Grande lattes.

  ‘What’s that?’ The man pointed at the hound.

  ‘It’s a Tinderbox,’ Sooty said. ‘A brand of e-reader preloaded with every Classic from the twentieth century.’

  The wife put her latte down on the main information desk. ‘Is it an antique?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sooty smiled. ‘It comes with a reading light.’

  ‘It has such big eyes. It looks a little freaky,’ her husband said.

  ‘The hound has five vocal options. It can read “Go The Fuck To Sleep” in the voice of Samuel L Jackson.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s appropriate,’ he replied.

  ‘I don’t think the price is appropriate either,’ his wife inspected the sales ticket. The husband laughed. ‘Not unless we win the lottery.’

  The wife handed Sooty her coffee cup and the couple headed off in the direction of the toilets.

  The mechanical hound turned and quoted Dostoevsky:

  ‘Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ Sooty said. ‘You just inserted that quote for the word count.’

  The timer went off.

  At Borders Islington I wrote down my preferred sections on a piece of paper and submitted it to management.

  Fiction.

  Art.

  Film/TV.

  I was put in charge of computers, maths and science. My worst subjects in high school.

  The timer went off.

  Each day at Borders resembled the next. The daily roster was divided into one- and two-hour blocks. Section. Tills. Main Info. Staff consulted the roster each hour and changed squares.

  ‘Do you have The Story of Pee?’ a young woman asked.

  I stood before the computer at the main information desk. ‘Do you know the author’s name?’

  ‘No, but it just won a prize.’

  ‘Do you mean The Life of Pi?’

  ‘That’s it!’

  I picked up a copy of Yann Martel’s novel from the stack behind the main information desk and handed it to her.

  ‘Thanks. It’s a present for my mother.’

  I thought briefly of the girl’s mother soon to be united with Yann Martel’s novel. A union that never would have happened had the novel not won the 2003 Booker Prize. I wondered how long Martel had spent selecting the title. I imagined The Life of Pi was more than just a summary of the novel’s activity, of Pi’s life, that the sound of each syllable was mysteriously complete to Martel. Yet, I also saw how the title had left the novel open to misinterpretation. The Story of Pee could have been a potted history of the customer toilets at Borders Islington.

  The toilets were located on the ground floor between the start of Fiction and True Crime. The security gates beeped if a ‘tagged’ book passed through the entrance to the toilets. Most thieves had the presence of mind to check the inside covers of books for the white tags or ‘chicklets’ that set the security gates off. But not all books were tagged.

  The toilets overflowed with criminal activity. Teenagers took great delight in stuffing the bowls with wadded toilet paper. Then they graffitied the doors and walls, often with their own blood and shit. Junkies left used needles lying on the floor like broken fountain pens, and the tails of used tampons dangled from the stuffed mouths of the sanitary bins.

  The code for the toilet door was distributed by the staff member at the main information desk.

  ‘The toilets are disgusting,’ customers often told me.

  I reserved my judgment. My threshold for disgust was high.

  In 2005 the Borders Islington management team finally instigated a new toilet policy: customers had to obtain an in-store receipt to gain access to the toilets. The code for the toilets printed out at the bottom of the receipt. No purchase, no toilet. This strategy was a deterrent intended to keep out the illegitimate: bums, teenagers and drug addicts. It also kept out Jon Ronson. The author who wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats was not a man happy to produce a receipt to use a customer toilet. In his Guardian column he complained about the new customer toilets regime. He also complained about the staff member who policed the use of the toilets from the main information desk.

  Customers crossed Borders Islington in currents. I collected up the driftwood once the tide had gone out and the store had closed. At Borders re-shelving was called recovery. Occasionally customers solicited my opinion. ‘Is this any good?’ ‘Have you read this?’ A book picked up, its cover turned to greet me like the face of an old friend. I gave stock answers. ‘It’s been very popular.’ ‘That’s one of our bestsellers.’ ‘I haven’t got around to that one yet, but it’s on my list.’ Sometimes I was honest. ‘I don’t know.’ But my ambiguity was a repellent. Customers rarely chose a book that I could not fully endorse. Yet, how could I have read every title? How could I have been attracted to every cover? I had my own interests, my own preoccupations.

  In Fiction I found an il
lustrated novel about the adventures of an existential cat. I spent half an hour flicking through the book instead of shelving the nearby cart of recovery. The cat was just a wistful stranger struggling to assemble the intellectual jigsaw of life. When I went relooking for the book after payday it had disappeared. Sold? Surely not. The existential cat wasn’t Dan Brown. I tried countless times to relocate it to no avail. Borders was a maze. The book could have been misshelved anywhere. To make matters worse, I couldn’t remember the title or the author’s name. I was my own worst nightmare. A customer. I didn’t even have enough information to find it on Amazon.

  During my tenure at Borders I grew to hate the bestsellers. A new Jodi Picoult felt about as sincere as a cheeseburger. Take off the wrapper and the moral dilemma lay in the centre like a gherkin, ready to be digested. Then what were you hungry for? Borders revolved around the seasons. I filled Valentine’s Day displays to the brim with Purple Ronnie mini books and sex cheques. Easter: a line of fluffy chicks from Paperchase. I liked to decorate the tables with gift cards and other items of quirk. The shopper is a magpie. Mother’s Day: more pink, more pastels, more chick lit, more Jodi (is there any occasion Jodi cannot rise to?). Father’s Day: men and their sheds, a book of knitted socks, Dita Von Teese’s Burlesque and the Art of the Teese. Halloween, then stocking fillers:

  Eats, Shoots, and Leaves

  Why Don’t Penguins Feet Freeze?

  Victorian Do’s and Don’ts for Wives (and Husbands)

  The tills chimed. Santa came. Then he went.

  Sex: always over stimulated. Paper cut-outs from the pop-up Karma Sutra torn asunder. The Story of O my god, why is this section such a fucking mess? One day I caught a rare glimpse of some customers browsing the sex section. A group of teenage boys flicked to a large graphic image and asked, ‘Have you done this?’