Tinderbox Page 6

  Dad would sit on the floor, a mug of tea at his side. Every now and then his arm would extend towards the cup and he would lift it to his lips and sip without his eyes ever leaving the page. Sunlight fell across the carpet, while I lay on the floor with the cat and watched dust rain through the air like confetti.

  Each book was a porthole into another world and I imagined what it would be like to be one of the characters trapped inside.

  One school holiday I wrote a short story called The Forgotten Child. It was about a waif waiting for a train at the station. I illustrated the story with forlorn drawings of the waif in ballpoint pen. She looked a bit like the Little Match Girl.

  I showed the story to Dad.

  His verdict: ‘Melodramatic.’

  I was 11-years-old. The waif was roughly the same age. I snuffed the memory of the Little Match Girl out. And I was alone again. Just a woman in a room trying to write. The past flickered, burned.

  The timer went off.

  * To work out your own porn name combine the name of your first pet and your mother’s maiden name – e.g., Sooty was a little grey kitten I owned when I was ten.

  † Lombard obviously weighted more heavily in the male psyche of the era than she does now. Julie Christie however… that hair!

  ‡ Truffaut thought Herrmann’s use of the xylophone was ‘too jokey’. But in the end Herrmann won out. The xylophones stayed and add to the childish tone of peril.

  § Although you can have too much of a good thing: critics were later to complain that the use of reverse motion had become endemic in Cocteau’s work; an auteur’s tic. Poor Jean. Shamed like the beast.

  ¶ He had a cameo in The Borders of Love as my character Sooty’s love interest, but he didn’t last long in that role either.

  The Borders of Love

  They browsed the long afternoon through while the cold November rain fell from the sky on the roof of the store. The rain fell, the pages turned and the Starbucks coffee machine frothed. It felt as though the browsing would never stop.

  They sat on red vinyl chairs and footstools in the aisles. Grande and Vente piles of magazines beside them. Countless rims of coffee buckled the pages of Heat. Ruffled Women’s Days were evacuated at the end of each shift only to be reshelved. Celebrities’ faces puckered with spilt milk.

  It was Borders policy to allow the customers to read freely and read freely they did. Toddlers flew across the galaxy carpet in the children’s section and shook books from the Mr Men spinner while baby buggies blocked the aisles and hardbacks swung ajar from their spines. The picture book section was scratched and sniffed, its pop ups decanted onto the floor.

  ‘Do you have another copy?’ The customer at the till mooed at me. I wondered who she thought had destroyed the existing copy. It was never the staff. It was the browsers.

  After the closure of Borders US, one customer lamented in a newspaper article that it was the best place for meeting friends and grazing the written word.

  In the 1970s Tom and Louis Borders opened the first store in Ann Arbour, Michigan. The brothers began by selling second-hand textbooks but quickly branched into new stock. After short stays in other downtown locations they moved into a two-story, 10,000-square-foot storefront – a former men’s clothing store that dated back to the nineteenth century – on State Street. Borders Store 1 remained at this address until it was liquidated. Tom managed the store and in the age before personal computers Louis Borders pioneered an inventory system on three-inch punch cards. His approach grew into a separate business: Book Inventory Systems. Sexy.

  Borders was originally founded on range. Staff knew their shit. They managed their own sections. They bought their own stock. It was a really big bookstore. And it was good.

  The second store popped up in the mid-80s in Birmingham, Michigan, about an hour’s drive from Ann Arbour. Then the third in Atlanta, and the fourth in Indianapolis. Apparently Store 1’s long time manager Joe Gable used to toast the staff on New Year’s Eve with champagne. The good times were flowing.

  By the time the Borders Brothers sold the chain to Kmart in 1992 there were twenty-one Borders stores. Borders spread to the UK, Australasia and Singapore. At its peak the Borders Group operated over 1,200 stores worldwide. When I started at Store 505 in 2002 Borders had a deal with Amazon. If a book was unavailable at Borders we recommended the customer purchase it direct from Amazon. Jeff Bezos was building an online empire he’d started in a garage in Seattle. It was all a matter of adopting the right long-term strategy.

  By 2002, the Borders brand had eroded. It no longer meant quality and range. Now it just meant the middle of the road.

  Bestsellers:

  CD: Norah Jones.

  QP: The Da Vinci Code.

  DVD: Lost in Translation.

  ‘There was no better place for grazing the written word and for meeting the best of friends.’

  Tom is now an investor based in Austin, Texas. Louis, who founded the dot-com firm Webvan, is based in northern California.

  The timer went off.

  In the second section of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 – ‘The Sieve and the Sand’ – Montag makes Mildred sit on the floor while he recites quotations from literature. Forced reading is never pleasant.

  ‘The Sieve and the Sand’ also refers to Montag’s childhood memory of trying to fill a sieve with sand on the beach – to earn a dime from a cousin – and crying at the futility of the task. Montag compares this memory to his attempt to read the Bible as fast as possible on the subway in the hope that, if he reads fast enough, some of the material will stay in his memory.

  I was by now speeding through Fahrenheit 451 as fast as possible. It wasn’t staying in my memory either. Every time I turned back to the novel I was surprised by how alien it seemed. If the book was written now there’d be questions about why Mildred didn’t leave Montag earlier, but as it was written in the 1950s I assumed economic stability played a strong part in her decision. Who else but her husband could buy her that second wall screen?

  Part of me felt sorry for Mildred. Why? I’m a passionate – nay an ardent reader – yet, as my experience of re-reading Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 deepened, I realised I was rooting for the villain. I blamed the film, and Truffaut. To gaze at Julie Christie playing Linda, dressed in her creamy white twin set, was to project onto a shallow screen. I imagined myself as Linda, looking like Julie, crouched on the kitchen floor, listening to my husband reading aloud. Linda’s biggest crime was watching Reality TV.

  I put down the book and started to type.

  ‘Women lure you in with sex but then the sex dries up,’ I wrote, attributing the quote to Montag. It seemed like something he might have said. Or maybe it just seemed like something Julie Christie might have heard, on the set of Truffaut’s Fahrenhiet 451. Or perhaps it was said to her by a disgruntled partner as it was once said to me.

  I picked up my copy of Bradbury’s book and checked how ‘The Sieve and the Sand’ began again. I had to keep my facts straight, right? In the first sentence it was November and it was raining. I was instantly reminded me of the Guns n’ Roses song ‘November Rain’. Axl Rose, like Bradbury, was American. Maybe it really did rain a lot there in November?

  As a bookseller, reader and writer I knew I should share Bradbury’s point of view that books are the highest form of art. Yet I was seriously considering the counter argument. Maybe my life would have been better off without books? I don’t know if Axl Rose has read many novels, yet I defy anyone who has watched the ‘November Rain’ video to say life hasn’t moved him deeply. Life and Stephanie Seymour. Of course it was easy to mock the aspirations of ‘November Rain’ from the safe distance of adulthood – but I still understood that Seymour’s long tanned legs occupied a terrain at once sexually and spirtiually moving.

  I bet Bradbury’s Mildred also longed for a life that was epic. And for a man that had loved her as passionately as Axl had loved Stephanie.

  Axl’s ballad stirred my emotions. Bradb
ury thought books were the one true form of expression. But what about music? Songs contained words but they were more than words too. In ‘November Rain’ the music was torrential, the violins flashed, the symphony swept over me.

  I leaned over my laptop, thinking about Bradbury. Did he ever lean over his typewriter thinking about me – not as Megan Dunn of course – or even as a New Zealander, although Americans often reach for New Zealand as some kind of hinterland on the edge of what is possible* – but as some abstract future reader? As he scratched his balls – it gets sweaty down there when you’re cramped in a chair writing up against the timer, your bag of change growing slimmer, those dimes dying quick deaths with each spurt of sentences and paragraphs – did he ever think, hey, maybe one day someone will summarise my novel into handy bite sized chunks to aid intellectual digestion?

  SPARKNOTES ESSAY QUESTION:

  How plausible is the future envisioned in this novel?

  The filming for Fahrenheit 451 took place in three locations outside Pinewood studios:

  The woods where the book people are found at the end of the film.

  A row of modernist houses in Roehampton.

  The monorail outside Chateauneuf, south of Paris.

  The suspended monorail was designed by French Bridge builder Lucien Chadenson in 1947. The track was a test site that ran for half a mile. It was a vision of the future that never took off.

  On July 7th 2005, I stood at a bus stop on Stoke Newington Church Street and thought: the winds of change are coming. A sheet of newspaper scuttled down the street to punctuate the thought. Whether it was the winds of change ruffling the paper or just a strong gust was hard to say. I had reached a point in my marriage where something had to happen. Either things were going to get better or worse.

  I had applied to do my masters in creative writing at the University of East Anglia and Borders were opening a new store in Norwich. If I got a place on the masters, I could transfer to the new store and keep my job. Mickey had applied to do an acting course in London. We were both waiting to see which way the wind would blow us.

  I stood in the cold, drinking my takeaway latte and waiting for the Number 73 bus. The bus stop was opposite the public library. ‘Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future,’ Ray Bradbury said. I agreed. I had written my first published short story in the Stoke Newington library. The story consisted of some things that had happened to me and some things that hadn’t happened to me. ‘Most importantly the story was alive and you were very much in evidence in it,’ Dad said. I printed out his email and kept it next to my desk.

  It was still two years before the first Kindle would be released onto the market and seven years before Zadie Smith would publish ‘North West London Blues’, an essay about the fate of the Willesden Green Library in particular and the uncertain future of public libraries in general. ‘What kind of a problem is a library?’ Zadie Smith asks in that essay. ‘At the extreme pole of this view is the technocrat’s total faith: with every book in the world online, what need could there be for the physical reality?’

  The physical reality was still firmly in place that morning. I stood at the bus stop, preparing myself for another day of book selling as opposed to book writing. I was sipping my latte at 8.50am when the first bomb went off on the Circle Line, eight minutes out of Kings Cross Station, travelling eastbound between Liverpool Street and Aldgate. The second bomb detonated less than fifty seconds later; then the third.

  Calls began to come through on mobiles.

  ‘A bomb’s gone off on the tube.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Which tube?’

  The news was not official. We were just a bunch of commuters waiting to go to work. ‘Do you know what’s happening?’ ‘Is there any more news?’

  I called Mickey. At home in bed with a hangover. Safe.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said.

  The Number 73 pulled up. I stepped on board and held on to the rail that ran along the ceiling. The passengers wobbled like skittles as the bus lurched around corners. The 73 finally pulled up in Islington, a few metres shy of the Angel Tube station. The entrance was thick with commuters flowing out on to the street. I stepped off the bus.

  ‘Another bomb’s gone off,’ a passenger said.

  I crossed the road, feeling a sense of dread. The threat of terrorism that had hovered over London since 9/11 was in the process of being realised. I joined the other Borders supervisors and managers downstairs in the staff office. We began to phone the team on the late shift to tell them not to come in and to make sure everyone was safe. The networks had flooded. All the mobile lines were down. No one could get through.

  In 1966 Oskar, Julie, Truffaut and cinematographer Nicholas Rogue journeyed to France to shoot the exterior shots of the monorail. The shoot took only two days. It was enough.

  The wind blew Julie’s skirt around her knees.

  ‘Cut!’ Truffaut smiled.

  She smiled back. Francois seemed troubled and she wanted to get him something. A gift. But what?

  Oskar kept botching his line.

  ‘What’s that number on your shoulder?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh this?’

  His Germanic accent lent the role of Montag a certain frisson.

  He explained that Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper catches fire. It was an expoistory line of dialogue for the benefit of the audience and Oskar’s delivery of it was perfunctory. Julie tried to keep her stride light, breezy as she walked beside him. The role of Clarisse was hard to get to grips with. At least she had the wife down pat. Maybe it was the costume? Truffaut was so specific. The wife was to be dressed like Carole Lombard.

  In between takes she watched Nicholas Rogue shoot extra footage of the track from below, its curving rail like the spine of a giant centipede. The takes on the train would be blue screened in later.

  ‘Did you know we’ve been using the escape hatch,’ Oskar said.

  He looked pointedly at the stairs that opened from the floor of the monorail and led into the nearby paddock.

  ‘Yes,’ Julie replied. They’d been going up and down it all morning. And she was the one wearing a skirt.

  ‘Passengers would have only used the escape hatch in case of emergency.’

  ‘Maybe Francois thinks it adds to the vision of the future?’ Julie lit up a fresh cigarette.

  ‘But it’s incorrect,’ Oskar said.

  The timer went off.

  My favourite scenes in Truffaut’s film took place on the monorail. I like train journeys because there is never any pressure to improve yourself when you travel. You are in limbo. A body suspended over the tracks, clackety clack.

  In Truffaut’s film Clarisse and Montag met on the monorail. Julie watched Oskar, his black glove fastened to the rail. Strangers on a train. The rhythm of the track. Clarisse spoke to Montag. Clackety clack.

  I loved the dreamy music. The monorail scenes were especially romantic – the score is by Bernard Herrmann, who was going through a messy divorce when Truffaut hired him. He’d also just been fired from Torn Curtain by Hitchcock. Poor Herrmann. The music on the monorail was plaintive. I bet he was someone who enjoyed a good train ride. It would have given him time to think about his wife (and Hitchcock), to wonder if there was another way things could have turned out.

  Herrmann was also a book lover and a great friend of Ray Bradbury’s. The tracks kept connecting and interconnecting: Colchester, Manningtree, Needham Market, Stowmarket, Diss…

  In 2005 I sat in a booth staring at the pale outline of my own expression; I looked like an extra, someone who might not even feature in the official script. In the weeks after the July bombings, colour photocopies of Shahara Islam hung in the windows of the Cooperative Bank in Islington. Missing. Twenty-years-old. She’d worked as a teller in the bank. Fifty-two people died in the London bombings that day and Shahara Islam was one of them.

  She’d stepped on to the Number 30 bus en route t
o Hackney Wick as it pulled into Euston Bus station. Crowds of people evacuated from the tubes were boarding buses. Mickey and I had friends in Hackney Wick. I had taken the Number 30 many times. Shahara Islam took a seat downstairs at the back of the bus. Eighteen-year-old Hasib Hussain, the youngest suicide bomber, was sitting on the top deck at 9.47am. The timer went off.

  I watched London recede, stations and platforms scattered with strangers slid from view; the council estates gave way to green fields. This was the English countryside of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in The Willows. I gazed out the window half expecting to see Moley and Badger, or at least Tarka the Otter, peddling downstream.

  At the University of East Anglia, I sat in the waiting room trying to size up the competition. You can’t tell the quality of someone’s metaphor from the colour of their cardigan, or predict their gift with plot, based on the flash of their socks or their brand of shoes. I got talking to an Indian businessman, wearing a suit. He held a briefcase on his lap. He told me he was a short story writer with a long history of publication. I was convinced he was the next Salman Rushdie.

  He was interviewed first. I waited. I looked at the water cooler in the room as though it was a barometer of taste. Eventually it was my moment to perform. I was led along the carpet-tiled corridor of the English Department towards a small office. Outside the window, a line of large leafy trees waved back and forth.