Tinderbox Page 5

  I didn’t reply. But I had.

  The timer went off.

  Each writing day resembled the next. I got up, checked my NaNoWriMo word count, opened my laptop – ping! – and typed: a fireman twirled down the pole as gracefully as a stripper. He alighted and tipped his hat.

  ‘You’re awake. How do you feel?’

  The blonde teenager in my Word document sat up. ‘Where am I?’ she asked, her pulse quickening.

  On the wall above her head was the fireman’s motto. ‘We burn, so that you don’t have to.’

  ‘You’re a clever girl, aren’t you?’ The fire chief stood by her single bed. (I wondered if he was Captain Beatty, although he looked a bit like the Irish manager at Borders Islington.)

  ‘I’m not that bright. My math is terrible,’ the blonde said. (I wondered if she was Clarisse although her outline felt a little… sketchy.)

  The fire chief produced a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘Do you recognise this?’

  She shook her head. ‘Am I under arrest?’

  ‘Liar,’ he scoffed. ‘I believe you’ve been given access to the world of literature, I believe you’re writing your own story and that’s why I had to bring you in to the station – to reel you in.’

  The blonde swung her legs over the edge of the bed, it was just a cot really. The room was lined with hooks that she assumed must be for fire retardant uniforms. And for the hard shiny helmets the firemen wore on their heads. A table stood in the corner of the room, in its centre an empty ashtray and a packet of Redheads.

  ‘Is it true?’ The chief struck a match and lit up a cigarette.

  ‘What difference does it make if I am?’ she said, noticing a calander of firemen on the wall, open on Mr November. He brandished a long hose in his hands.

  The chief gave her a sideways grin. ‘Your prioritisation of your self is not unique. You seem to think you are special. And specialness is something we have to stub out. Our lives are waste not want not. What have you got to say that hasn’t been said before? We have to recycle before we can create. That’s the logic of our lives now. There are already millions of stories, and of course there are only really seven plots.’

  ‘I thought there was only one plot.’ The blonde got off the bed. Her face wasn’t fragile like milk crystal and her white dress didn’t whisper because she was wearing jeans.

  ‘Ha!’ The chief laughed again. ‘Only one story and what would that be?’

  ‘The fall from grace.’

  She chopped him in the nuts. Those after-school Judo lessons had finally paid off.

  Day 19, 1966. On the set of Pinewood studios the fire engine sailed past the window of the cutting room. The engine was designed to look like a child’s toy. Its arrival on screen was accompanied by the dinky tinkle of xylophones.

  Thom Noble would never think about the xylophone the same way again. He wasn’t just the film’s editor, he was also Truffaut’s go-between. And Bernard Herrmann was not the kind of composer who welcomed second-hand instructions. Especially, ‘No xylophones!’‡

  Noble turned and looked at Truffaut. Another day, another problem to be resolved.

  Francois flicked his fingers: the movement still wasn’t fluid enough.

  On screen, Oskar clumsily donned the asbestos helmet and gloves. He looked like a bee keeper. Someone who could get down on someone else’s buzz. He took the flame thrower and gingerly aimed it at the small pile of books tossed on a wire rack, as though it was a BBQ. The cast of extras gathered around the pyre.

  Francois bit his thumbnail. Oskar should have mentioned he was afraid of fire before he accepted the part. The man was an ass. His success on Ship of Fools had ruined him.

  ‘Francois,’ Thom queued the new take in reverse motion.

  The director watched.

  This time the movements were deft, smooth, assured. The helmet slipped over the actor’s head. Good. The last thing Truffaut needed to see was Oskar’s smiling mug. Then the gloves. The actor gripped the flamethrower: fire blazed from the hole, the books were engulfed.

  ‘I reversed the film,’ Thom said.

  Truffaut clasped his shoulder. Their bromance was smouldering. So were the books.

  ‘And it’s another reference,’ Thom told him.

  Francois raised an eyebrow.

  ‘To Cocteau,’ Thom said. The French director Jean Cocteau had used the technique to good effect in his films.§ In Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946) one character walks up to a fire and appears to pluck a piece of paper straight out of it.

  ‘Tres bein.’ Truffaut smiled in the dark. Sparks were flying.

  The timer went off.

  One night shift at Borders Islington the alarm on the ground floor went off just after 8pm and a bum stumbled out of the fire doors in a brown corduroy suit.

  ‘What were you doing?’ I asked. ‘That area is for staff only.’

  ‘I need the bathroom.’ His eyes spiralled around the store. He was shit faced. I could have lit his breathe with a match.

  ‘The toilets are over there.’ I pointed at the large prominent sign nearby.

  He shambled off towards it. I shook my head.

  Time stilled on the night shift.

  Downstairs in the staff room, I waited for my ready meal to heat. The plate span around inside the microwave drawn by its centrifugal pull.

  I poked at my teabag with a teaspoon; it turned over in the Borders mugs like a stray water-wing.

  Music seeped through the tinny speaker in the staff room.

  I blew on the tea; the tanned water rippled. The table in the staff room was covered with old Heat magazines. Brad Pitt had left Jennifer Aniston.

  ‘Poor Jen,’ Pawla the Polish bookseller sat opposite me, stirring her tea.

  ‘Do you really think he’s having an affair with Angelina Jolie?’

  ‘Of course.’ Pawla had long spiral hair like a gypsy. When it came to matters of the heart her advice was never less than sage.

  We inspected the photographs of Brad and Angelina on the set of their latest film. They leaned over a railing between takes, smiling. The borders of love can easily be breached.

  A drip grew on the gnarled lip of the tap above the kitchen sink like a bungee jumper, finally let go and plunged over the edge.

  The microwave beeped. I got up and peeled the shrink-wrap off.

  Over the in-store tannoy the new Irish general manager announced the latest in-store specials: ‘Please ask a member of staff for more details.’

  ‘I like his accent,’ I said.

  Pawla raised an eyebrow. ‘I bet you do.’

  ‘What happens next in your book?’ she asked.

  ‘The lead character has an affair with the boss,’ I said.

  Pawla laughed.

  After dinner, I chose a grey V-cart from the line up along the staff corridor. I glanced at the map which depicted the staff assembly point in case of fire. Cartoon flames gushed from the square that represented Borders Islington. I had drawn the map. But there were no fires at Borders Islington in the time I worked there. Instead, the toilets in the cinema above the store often overflowed and water dripped through the ceiling tiles. Books damaged by flood rather than fire.

  I steered my empty V-cart towards the sort room.

  A poster of a romance novel cover adorned one wall: Touch Not The Cat. A mountain cat sat in the centre of the poster. A man in a kilt with Fabio-flung hair rested one gentle hand on the cat – the one that was not to be touched. The book was written by Tracey Fobes, I doubted any of the staff had ever read it, but it was a talisman of great personal amusement to us. The author’s vision of the world was undoubtedly more smouldering than mine.

  The lift doors opened on the first floor. Computers was located in the corner. Its one highlight: a vertical window that looked out over Sainsbury’s and a small stretch of road. I shelved, pausing every now and then to stare at the red-bricked wall of Sainsbury’s or to follow that short stretch of road into the black volume of ano
ther London night. On the back of each book was a binc sticker that contained a code for the section. I consulted the code, then placed the book into its approximate order in the bay. Shelving produced a deep state of intellectual fatigue. In the Mind Body Spirit section the books bore titles like: Who am I? How did I get here? Where am I going to? In Computers the books bore titles like Dreamweaver 5 and Java SE7 Programming.

  I plugged away at the V-cart. An abandoned Verde Grande Starbucks coffee cup lay tipped over on an empty shelf. Milk had dried onto the wooden veneer; a trace of someone else’s orgasmic day.

  At the end of the shift a buzz came through on my walkie talkie.

  ‘Megan, meet me out the back of the fire doors on the ground floor,’ the manager said. But it wasn’t a lover’s trist that awaited me.

  ‘What is it?’ I arrived on the scene.

  ‘Look.’ The manager pointed at the steaming pile of shit on the floor.

  I covered my mouth. ‘I know who did this.’

  The timer went off.

  Day 20. I woke up at 6.30am. Opened my MacBook Air. Checked my word count. Checked my emails. Logged into Facebook. Paused to check Twitter.

  ‘You’re not Facebooking again, are you?’ my boyfriend asked.

  ‘It’s not a crime,’ I said.

  There was so much of Fahrenheit 451 left. The sand was falling through the sieve but I still hadn’t moved beyond ‘The Hearth and the Salamander.’

  ‘What about the false logic of Montag’s boss, Captain Beatty?’ my inner critic asked. ‘And the old world values of Professor Faber? You haven’t attempted to address either of these important characters yet.’

  I knew Faber’s character was named after the publishing house. But I hadn’t known that Montag was named after a paper-manufacturing company. I’d read every entry on Clarisse and Mildred in SparkNotes, but I hadn’t paid any attention to the male character summaries.

  I turned to the in-depth analysis of Captain Beatty. Beatty was described as a complex character full of contradictions. In Bradbury’s novel Beatty was the chief of the fire station. The upshot: no one ever likes the boss. I had worked under several Borders general managers and they were all fatally flawed as well. Borders Islington in particular had a reputation for burning general managers out.

  The first GM went on sick leave and never came back. My predominant memory is watching him frenetically shuffle the edges of the 3-for-2 tables. The second general manager was a rogue Irishman¶ who’d once appeared on a British Reality TV show about his sex life. He didn’t last.

  In early 2005, his replacement, a high performing lesbian, stood in the lift with me, stroking her upper lip. ‘You’re either with me or you’re against me.’

  Her laser-eyes scanned the length of my V-cart.

  I clutched the handle. ‘I’m just trying to get this overstock out.’

  My days at Borders Islington were numbered. I had to get out. Starting with the lift. The doors pinged open and I wheeled the wobbly V-cart round the corner to the cage, swiped my staff card and sat inside, surrounded by huge rows of DVD’s and CD’s. The cage was black. Windowless. Discreet. Several trollies and V-carts of loose DVD and CD keepers waited nearby. The plastic keepers needed to be attached to each item of stock before it was put on the shop floor. And the DVD and CD box sets that didn’t fit inside the keepers needed to be shrink-wrapped. The heat gun sat on the desk waiting for me to fire it up. There were a number of tasks I could have been doing. How could the general manager prove I was doing none of them?

  I put on a Cat Stevens CD and sat in the dark eating a Starbucks chocolate muffin and crying. Out on the shop floor the shrinkage was shrinking. The clock ticking. The tills beeping.

  Later I found out that she had the cage under 24-hour surveillance. One morning the police arrived and arrested two staff members from the multimedia section who had been stealing DVD’s and CD’s. The staff had removed the chicklet security tags and keepers in the cage, smuggled the stock out of the store and sold it on Ebay.

  At the time, I was the multimedia supervisor.

  The timer went off.

  SPARKNOTES ESS AY QUESTION:

  Why does Captain Beatty hate books?

  Day 21. I logged into NaNoWriMo and checked my word count against the collective word count of the pack. Shit. I turned back to the first page of Bradbury’s novel.

  It was a pleasure to shrink-wrap.

  It was a special pleasure to see things enveloped, packaged and changed. With the plastic heat gun in her grip, with this feisty salamander licking its warm tongue upon the world, the Starbucks Latte gurgled in her stomach, and her hands were the hands of some fantastical fireman extinguishing all the shrinkage in all the stores in the company’s brief but memorable history. With her symbolic lanyard labelled ‘Happy to Help’ dangling around her neck, and her eyes all woozy with the thought of what came next, she flicked the switch and the plastic polymer shrivelled tight around the corners of the DVD boxset and clung to it like processed cheese. She worked in a funnel of fumes. She wanted above all to consolidate the bottom line, so that she got that promotion and the tiny raise it represented. Clunk. Holes burst in the plastic like craters and ripples cascaded across the cover of the boxset.

  Sooty frowned the demonic frown of all retailers singed and driven mad by shrink-wrap.

  She’d held the heat gun too close, screwed up again. Later, going to sleep in her apartment next to the whirring air vents of the shop next door, she would feel that frown gripped by her forehead muscles in the dark. It never went away, as long as she remembered.

  The timer went off.

  Day 22. In the morning I woke from surly dreams I couldn’t remember, plunged the coffee and walked to my desk. It felt as though Bradbury and Truffaut were standing behind me, each with a hand on my shoulder. I checked my NaNoWriMo word count: 14,403.

  In my word document Bradbury’s character Clarisse was now dressed in a white suit and a neck ruff. I typed: The wh23aqWQite clown picked up the light blue belt in her dressing room and regarded it as though it was a????

  ‘Merde,’ Truffaut said. In one of his scenes he’d used actress and stunt woman Gillian Aldam to fell a male opponent using Judo. The footage only lasted seconds; Christie and Werner watched the judo match on TV in their living room. I stared out the window of my study at the light sparkling on the waves in the harbour. The Pacific rolled in and out. A cruise ship cut across my field of vision. Truffaut watched the ship, ‘je ne comprends pas?’

  Truffaut was also a man of the written word. He started out as a film critic for Cahiers du Cinema, a highbrow French language film magazine. Apparently his criticism could be lacerating. I had a feeling he’d get on with my father. I wasn’t so sure about Bradbury.

  In the opening scene of Truffaut’s F451 an old woman was set alight inside her library. The books in flames were handpicked by Truffaut. Cahiers du Cinema. A burning Spanish crossword puzzle book. Donleavey’s The Ginger Man. The flames licked the edges, flowing, never ceasing. The actress Bea Duffell raised her arms in the centre of the pyre and was consumed.

  I picked at my split ends.

  I realised I should be providing the unique salient details that would bring the world of my novel to life. Unfortunately I couldn’t be bothered. Did Truffaut or Bradbury ever have this problem?

  I checked BrainyQuotes.

  ‘Film lovers are sick people,’ said Truffaut.

  True. I did feel a bit sick, but it could just be the coffee.

  In The Making of F451 the producer Lewis Allen said they were asked to check the copyright of all the books burned in this scene and get permission from the publishers, but they never did.

  I hadn’t asked for permission to use Fahrenheit 451 either. I wasn’t going to sweat the small stuff.

  Besides, didn’t Bradbury say there were worse crimes than burning books?

  Fahrenheit 451 was still lying on my desk. Unread. Although at least I’d watched the movie.

&
nbsp; Leaves danced in front of my eyes like tears. Why was I trying to rewrite a classic I couldn’t even be bothered to read? ‘Life has more imagination than we do.’ It was Truffaut. He pressed his hand down on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze, that’s when I realised it wasn’t Truffaut or even Bradbury’s advice I needed to hear. I wanted to know what BrainyQuote my own father would say to me.

  ‘What were you doing when you were my age?’ I asked Dad, after I moved back to New Zealand.

  ‘I suppose I was doing much the same thing as you.’

  His two Russian wolfhounds lay on opposing couches and looked at us. They had long elegant snouts. In his thirties Dad used to drive cross-country selling books to libraries.

  After Borders UK collapsed in December 2009 I had returned to Wellington to be close to Dad. His house is a jenga stack of books opposite the beach at Lyall Bay. Outside, seagulls watch the planes take off and land. At night the aluminium fence along the side of the house rattles back and forth. And the planes sound like they might crash and explode. Southerlies tear at the fence and sand beaches itself in dunes down the length of his brick driveway.

  Dad has spent hours sweeping the sand from the drive. He sometimes fills a wheelbarrow and returns the sand to the beach, but it always comes back, swept in from the sea. The seagulls strut back and forth on the sea wall. The wind slices between their feathers, turns their white necks into ruffs.

  I hadn’t grown up with Dad, but I had spent holidays at Lyall Bay. When I opened each book I could smell time, like a dried flower, pressed between the pages. Many of Dad’s books were second-hand. Their spines clothed in jackets long since faded from fashion. Tall hardbacks, buckled paperbacks, their pages well-thumbed. I used to wonder how Dad could have read so many books. Yet Dad was always reading, his nose like the prow of a ship setting out to sea. He’s not like stereotypical Kiwi fathers who watch rugby and drink beer on weekends. Dad’s colours were blue and grey and his silences were this colour too, because with reading there’s always silence.