Tinderbox Read online

  I had gotten the details about the tinderbox from Wikipedia:

  ‘In a book published in 1881 the author predicted that the tinderbox would remain common in households despite the advent of matches or Lucifers as they were then known.’

  That poor author. By the time their words were in print the tinderbox was already an antique. Strike one: you’re out.

  I watched some low-rent Ray Mears on YouTube demonstrate how to ignite a real tinderbox. It looked like hard work. No wonder it was obsolete. It occured to me for the first time that the little match girl in Andersen’s story was actually a minimum wage employee.

  In my rewrite of F451 books weren’t burned, they were outmoded. And the mechanical hound was just another item of merchandise. A gimmick.

  Now all I needed was a character to represent Jeff Bezos.

  Enter: Iggle Piggle.

  I was a supervisor at Borders Norwich when The Night Garden became big on TV. The programme was catnip for toddlers and quickly spawned a range of associated merchandise. Shipments of the show’s characters Iggle Piggle, Upsy Daisy and Maka Paka arrived on pallets. The stock was received through the swing doors at the back of the mall. Dale and Ade, the two middle aged men who worked in inventory, broke the pallets down in the sort room and arranged the stock onto trollies to be wheeled out on to the shop floor.

  Iggle Piggle had a soft blue head shaped like a kidney bean. He had squishy tubes for arms, a bell in his left foot, a squeaker in his tummy, and a rattle in his left hand. Iggle was a dreamer; apparently he left the end of each episode in a boat, for which his red blanket doubled as a sail. I couldn’t vouch for that as I had never watched the show.

  Maka Paka – small beige and round – was clearly an idiot. And Upsy Daisy looked like a Rastafarian.

  The day Iggle arrived I decided to pimp out an omni in his honour.

  An omni was a freestanding fixture on wheels. Why omni? I guess because it was an omnivorous display device. My art school degree reached the zenith of its expression in omni design. I smooshed together some blue crepe paper and arranged waves across the top shelf. Iggle set out to sea in a cardboard boat.

  The general manager walked past during the boat-making phase. Nicky was benevolent and well read: he could select a book to appeal to any staff member. (For me he recommended George Saunders The Brief And Frightening Reign of Phil.) His eyes narrowed as I taped together the cardboard prow. Later he confessed, ‘I did wonder how long you were going to spend on that omni.’

  Four hours. We outsold every other Borders UK store for In the Night Garden products. The toddlers wheeled around the shop recognised the characters and shouted out their names. I noticed that the children did not hold Upsy Daisy in low esteem. In the Night Garden was produced by the same team behind the Teletubbies. They knew what they were doing.

  The guy who played Iggle Piggle was an employee too. Inside that giant blue bean headed suit was a man named Nick Chee Ping Kellington. Where was Kellington now? Probably dressed in some other furry suit, cartwheeling across the screen in a set of make believe.

  I spent the rest of Day 24 searching for the monorail extras in the cast list of Fahrenheit 451 on IMBD.

  The only cast member listed was ‘Man on carriage.’

  What about ‘Woman who furtively strokes fox fur draped over her shoulder on carriage’?

  And ‘Girl who kisses own reflection in window on carriage’?

  Their performances had made a much deeper impression on me. Truffaut’s monorail scenes supposedly depicted a narcissistic society. Without books to light up their minds, each character had turned inward, towards their own reflection. I looked rather more charitably on the girl who kissed her own reflection in the carriage window. To me her kiss wasn’t necessarily aimed at herself, it was probably a practise run – just like that test track outside Chateauneuf, south of Paris.

  The interior scenes on the monorail had been bluescreened. The actors and extras were first filmed against a blue background. Then the editor, Thom Noble, dropped the view outside the monorail window into the final footage. Once upon a time, bluescreen was state of the art technology. Nowadays, it’s another antique. For me the clunky work of that primitive edit suite was as charmingly vintage as Julie Christie’s wardrobe and their modernist bungalow in the suburbs.

  In The Making of F451 Noble explained that Truffaut had intentionally scrambled the technology in the film. The sets included old telephones that were already obsolete in 1966. When Linda gave Montag a manual razor at the breakfast table she told him brightly, ‘It’s the latest thing!’

  Noble had also highlighted Truffaut’s snazzy use of optical effects. In Fahrenheit 451 he used a range of linear wipes that interrupt the illusion of the story, drawing attention to the film as a screen. At the fire station black circles closed in around mugshots of the back of Oskar Werner’s head. An auteur’s tic or a profound cinematic intervention?

  In another key scene the firemen arrived at a children’s playground and began to frisk the people in the park for paperbacks. A baby with a miniature book was gently chastised by Cyril Cusak, suited and booted, in his role as Captain Beatty. Cusak waggled his finger back and forth at the baby: Tsk. Tsk. Suddenly, Montag stopped a middle-aged man in an overcoat. Game on. A black wipe flashed across the screen like a curtain closing over the action. The music struck a solemn note. Go Herrmann!

  ‘That’s pure Truffaut!’ Noble said. ‘I’ve never seen that in a film before and I’ve never seen it again.’

  The blackness was the sweeping eye of the censor, the cinder on the hearth, a pocket turned inside out. Clunk.

  In the basement of the LA library Bradbury dropped another dime into the timer.

  At the end of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 busy flurries of snow fell down and coated the book people as they walked back and forth, reading the tomes they were committing to memory. The snow was just a lucky coincidence. April 14th. The last day of filming and it was Julie Christie’s birthday.

  ‘Bon Anniversaire, Julie!’

  ‘Ca va?’

  ‘Ca va bien!’

  Bradbury once likened plot to the footprints your characters leave in the snow after they’ve run away to incredible destinations.

  But maybe, like me, he was just remembering Truffaut’s movie?

  At the end of the university year, I put on my Nike Moon boots and waded to Borders Norwich through the snow. The tracks of my moon boots mingled with the soles of other people’s shoes. They may have been on their way to incredible destinations, but chances were, like me, many of them were simply going to work. I walked like an astronaut, my breath fogging the air.

  Mickey arrived for the weekend and I picked him up from the train station. We lay in the grim light of my rented bedroom. The mouldy old depressing stuff was upon us.

  ‘Let’s have sex,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Mickey replied.

  My stomached clenched.

  ‘Then maybe we should split up,’ I said.

  Unclench.

  Divorce was an exciting plot development. We got up and walked the cobbled streets of Norwich. The day was nondescript. Feelings filled the space between us like static. We watched two movies back to back. In Bradbury’s novel Montag can’t remember where he met Mildred, and she doesn’t seem to care. I couldn’t remember exactly where I met Mickey either. Like Mildred I was self-interested, absorbed in my own private Idaho, the TVs orbit.

  We sat down in a café. My tears came down involuntarily. I was dimly aware of a shaven-headed man sitting at a table in the background. The sole witness to the end of our visa marriage, our five-year relationship.

  I wiped my tears away and pulled the sugar bowl towards me.

  ‘You’ve been my family to me here,’ I told Mickey.

  It was true. I looked at his face, hungry for its familiarity.

  ‘Years from now, if I get the call that something has happened to you, I’ll still be floored,’ I said.


  ‘Same here, honey.’

  ‘Are you going to move back to New Zealand?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  The shaven-headed man in the background was still alone. Single?

  I played with the sugar in the bowl. Scooping it out, letting it fall from the teaspoon.

  ‘What if you become a really famous actor and end up going out with Angelina Jolie?’

  Mickey laughed. ‘The same thing could happen with you and your book.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave here, then regret not having said everything I wanted to say.’

  The shaven-headed man in the background blurred.

  I pushed the sugar away.

  FIN: the credits rolled up and off screen.

  In the evening, I sat in the lounge, drinking red.

  Truffaut’s film had lain waste to me again. Either that or the wine. Both were deep and penetrating. Depression seemed like an intrinsic part of the bouquet, one of the acquired tastes of adulthood.

  What was my word count? Again, I was off track. I thought about Montag’s flight from the city, pursued by the firemen after burning down his own house. A row of doors opened on a modernist estate in Roehampton. His death became a staged event on TV.

  Oskar Werner hid in a boat at the water’s edge. Then a close up: a man’s fingers reached out and pulled across the tarpaulin. The firemen buzzed past overhead like fireflies, powered by turbo packs that looked like green fire extinguishers. Apparently, Truffaut was so pissed off with Werner by this stage that he got the extra with the most nicotine stained fingers to act as his hand double.

  Take that, Oskar. Werner had ruined all the continuity shots by turning up for the final scene of the film with a new haircut.

  The word Fin appearing on screen was also deeply significant. The opening credits to F451 were spoken over a montage of TV aerials; no words appeared on screen until the very end. Progress at last?

  The snow struck me as equally metaphoric. Each flake drifted down like a comma or a full stop. The end of someone else’s sentence.

  Film editor Thom Noble said he found the scene of the book people at the finale of the film a bit cringey and pretentious. He was right. In their tattered rags the book people recited the classics like children learning by rote. A bunch of extras introduced themselves to Montag as books. Tweedledee and Tweedledum were Alice in Wonderland volumes one and two. A gingernut appeared as Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. And Montag chose Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination to learn by heart. But what about the women authors?

  Where was The Mill on the Floss?

  To the Lighthouse?

  Orlando?

  Bradbury didn’t quote any famous female authors in Fahrenheit 451. And even Truffaut had focused on male authors. In one scene Oskar Werner stayed up late reading Dickens by the white glare of the TV.

  If the film was remade now they’d at least have to include Harry Potter.

  The timer went off.

  * In Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) Robert De Niro’s character – a professional thief – tells his girlfriend, ‘We’ll move to New Zealand’. New Zealand is offered as an escape route, a safe haven beyond the borders of America.

  † Michele Roberts also had one of the best pieces of advice for me as an amateur writer: ‘Play with your shit.’

  The White Clown

  Lights flicked on and shops stayed open late throughout Chapelfield Mall to cash in on the crowds for the latest Harry Potter book launch.

  ‘You know that footage of the Beatles getting off a plane and there are thousands of people screaming?’ our general manager told The Guardian. ‘Well. It’s going to be like that later. But worse.’

  Borders Norwich was open until midnight: the witching hour when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows would be released from strict embargo. The tills were ready for fistfuls of cash, the books had been stacked on trollies in the sortroom like a fleet of mail delivery owls, ready to carry J.K. Rowling’s letters into the hands of transported readers. The fate of Harry, Hermonie and Ron would at last be known. I assumed Voldemort would be overthrown.

  The queue slithered around the store from late afternoon. Families tossed gnomes in the aisles. The crowd was pumped up on cauldrons of Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans. Outside Chapelfield Mall, dementors on stilts terrified the queue. A 3-year-old won the fancy dress costume then ran amongst the dementors yelling ‘Expecto patronum!’

  The spell had worked, at least for J.K. Rowling. Amazon had 2.2m orders and Bloomsbury was releasing the book in ninety-three countries. The final Harry Potter story was a global book-selling occasion. Borders UK had been preparing for weeks. A holiday blackout had been issued. The team on the night shift were as excited as the customers. Bob from the children’s section had dressed up as the boy wizard, Potter’s lightening bolt scar etched across his forehead in eyeliner. (Glasses: his own.) Our operations manager Eva donned her old school uniform and swanned about as a sexy Hermione. Nicky Boardman, our general manager, was well-suited to his role as captain of the Griffindor Quidditch team. Nicky was benevolent and funny, a good manager. A character you could believe in.

  A generic black hat sat on my head like a turret. My cape trailed behind me like a sarcastic comment. ‘I’m a miscellaneous witch,’ I told Nicky.

  Finally, the clock struck midnight. The staff wheeled out the trollies. The crowd squealed. The scanners beeped. The tills rang. I flicked straight to the end; I read about the happy marriages of Harry and Ginny, Ron and Hermione. I tried and failed to suspend my disbelief. My degree was over. So was my marriage.

  I had nothing against J.K. Rowling’s success. I just wished that a novel would come to me with the same crystalline purity that Harry Potter came to J.K. Rowling. She had a vision of Harry as she sat on a crowded train delayed for four hours between Manchester and London. She looked up and saw his scar. Ideas for a seven book series began to swarm in her head. Rowling didn’t even have a pen on her.

  In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury imagined a future where books were burned, not mass marketed and turned into multi-million dollar films and merchandise. Bradbury wrote ‘The Fireman’ in 1950 and completed the final draft of Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, during the second red scare of the McCarthy era. His uncle was a fireman. His distant ancestor Mary Perkins Bradbury was tried, convicted and sentenced to hang as a witch in Salem in 1692. Her alleged crimes included assuming animal forms, notably a blue boar.

  ‘The Fireman’ was originally published by Hugh Hefner in Playboy.

  SparkNotes said that Bradbury was sensitive to attempts to restrict his free speech and that he had objected to letters he’d received suggesting that he revise his treatment of female or black characters. He saw these interventions as the first step on the road to book burning.

  SparkNotes weren’t kidding. I’ve never burned a book literally, but I was about to find out exactly how sensitive the Bradbury estate could be about his intellectual property. In Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury portrays Mildred as shallow because she watches Reality TV. This seems like another reductive form of censorship to me. Shallowness is not prized as a redeeming quality. Hence the snobbery around popular fiction and romance novels. This is a snobbery I have often been part of – e.g., I have never read Jodi Picoult but I have not let that stand in the way of judging her. Jodi writes books the way other people bake muffins. There’s always a new batch on the way. Still, she also has the best advice for writers. You can’t edit an empty page.

  The timer went off.

  Day 25: I woke up and set the timer on my iPhone. Monday. Only five days left to nail NaNoWriMo. I sat at my desk and made a list of topics that still needed to be addressed:

  The White Clown – significance of?

  The Sea of Faith.

  The end of the world – but make it funny.

  Amazon opening a physical bookstore but make it…

  I was approaching the novel as though it was work. Trying to squeeze out a chapter felt like trying
to lose five kgs. Technically it was possible to lose a kg a week. Tehnically it was possible to write a chapter a week. Maybe even two. If I went to the gym I usually felt better about myself afterwards. If I wrote I usually felt better about myself too. It was just a matter of showing up.

  But I was showing up. That was the problem. I’d turned Mildred into a pale – better looking – fascimile of myself. That wasn’t fair on her or Julie Christie. Let alone Ray Bradbury. I wasn’t honouring his authorial intentions. Instead I was revealing my achilles heel. One of the first things many great fiction writers seem keen to point out is that they are not writing about themselves. Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize in 2013 and in one of her interviews she said she plans to never write a book about someone writing a book. I felt a shiver of self-revulsion. To write about yourself is to be self-interested. The ‘I’ is often equated with triviality.

  Reality TV is also abhorred for its pettiness. Like many liberal people I instantly hated the idea of Big Brother, then found myself able to watch loads of it. Even readers with the vaguest literary affilations to George Orwell were sure he would despise 1984 being coopted in such a commercial, morally reprehensible way. ‘Poor Orwell must be turning in his grave,’ we said. Yet millions participated in the weekly votes for Big Brother UK selecting the candidate they wanted evicted by phone or text message. I hated the concept of Reality TV because I objected to cheap banality. But in the end it was the cheap banality that most captivated me. I liked watching the Big Brother contestants sitting on the couch doing nothing as the digitial clock appeared in the corner of the screen and a disembodied voice intoned the day and the hour. In night vision the contestant’s sheets wriggled with anonymous limbs, their eyes blinked, mint green.

  My own threshold for Reality TV was high. So who was I to judge? When ex-Big Brother contestant Jade Goody was diagnosed with cancer I thought it was a marketing stunt. Sometimes it’s hard not to read illness as a metaphor. Goody was diagnosed with cervical cancer a year after bullying the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty in the Celebrity Five Big Brother House. Goody referred to the actress as ‘Shilpa Poppadom’. At the time Goody was supporting an anti-bullying charity, her first autobiography was on the market, as well as her first perfume, Shh. By the time Goody was voted out of Celebrity Big Brother in 2007, Channel 4 had recieved 54,000 complaints about the bullying. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Goody. She was originally prized for her ignorance. She thought Rio de Janeiro was a person and Norwich was in East Angula. Goody was given the diagnosis of her cancer in the diary room of the Indian Big Brother Bigg Boss. She died on 22 March 2009. Her funeral was of course broadcast live on Sky News, but her death also helped raise awareness of cervical cancer amongst a demographic the NHS struggles to reach – the young and the less well-educated.