Tinderbox Read online

  ‘Focus on the list,’ my inner critic said.

  ‘Tick the bullet points off one by one.’

  The whiteface is the oldest of the clown archetypes. When whitefaces perform with other clowns, they usually function as the straight man, ‘top banana’ or the leader of the group.

  I had been putting off tackling The White Clown in Fahrenheit 451, partly because Bradbury hadn’t give me much to go on. All I knew was that Mildred’s favourite TV show featured clowns chopping each other’s limbs off to the sound of what I presumed was canned laughter. Was it a metaphor for Reality TV? I hoped so. Because I didn’t want to respond to The White Clown literally. Half the enjoyment of reading literature was collecting the symbols like charms on a bracelet then holding them up to the light. Even SparkNotes didn’t seem to have a point of view on The White Clown.

  In Bradbury’s book Mildred was ecstatic when her friends come over to watch her favourite show. But her husband spoilt it by reading poetry. To be fair, having your favourite TV series interrupted is annoying. Even when the poem’s as good as Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. Poor Arnold wrote ‘Dover Beach’ in the late nineteeth century, never knowing that it would be used to bore Mildred shitless in the twentieth cenutry. The scene marked a turning point in the novel. Mildred can’t ignore Montag’s flagrant disregard of the law anymore. He’s not only smuggling books into their house and hiding them. He’s also reading them. Aloud! To her! And her friends!

  Bradbury depicted Mildred and her friends in Fahrenheit 451 as stooges, punctuated by exclamation marks. Their general knowledge was as rubbish as Jade Goody’s. Their moral crimes included elective c-sections and getting over husbands who died in wars. They didn’t like children. They were selfish. Vain. Self-serving. The wives were owners of condos on the river denial. In hindsight, it didn’t seem like such a bad place to own a property.

  I tried to rewrite the scene from Mildred’s perspective.

  In my draft Mrs Phelps and Mrs Bowles arrive early to watch The White Clown. They play cards together, do lines of coke and drink white wine and then red wine when the white wine runs out.

  ‘How long do we have?’ one asks.

  ‘Long enough for me to finish this line.’

  Outside, the moon was only a sliver away from full. A metaphor leapt onto the tip of my tongue. I felt it tap-tap-tapping, but it wouldn’t come.

  I got Mildred up from her chair to pour a Martini – a sly reference to Bradbury’s wife Maggie, who was allegedly partial to one or two.

  A disembodied voice intoned, ‘Day 21, 9pm.’

  The cameras rolled. The theme song to The White Clown began. I dressed Mrs Bowles as a harlequin. No one would be able to tell by the litheness of her checkered leotard that she’d had two children at all. Mrs Phelps was a hobo, she toyed with the ratty buttons on her dead husband’s military jacket, pressed a button and water shot out of the plastic flower on the lapel. And Mildred was the white clown; she sat immobile in her silk outfit and said nothing at all.

  Bradbury had many talents but dialogue wasn’t one of them. If I opened Mildred’s mouth she had to say the words he had written for her – and that was a problem, because the Mildred in my head just didn’t sound that stupid.

  A symbol crashed.

  I turned back to Truffaut’s film to see how the auteur had handled the same material. Julie Christie looked especially superb in this scene. I loved the creaminess of her long silken dress, cinched at the waist, so fluid to watch. Christie’s on-screen prescene was as luminous as the dress. Surely, its paleness was no accident? The dress was a slice of the moon in all its loveliness, its swoon. At one point in this scene Christie reaches up and touches her bangs. (She bangs, she bangs.) Her blonde hair – every bit as redolent as Nabokov’s Pale Fire and much quicker to read.

  The costume designer on the set of Fahrenheit 451 was Tony Walton. Clearly the man was a genius. He was married to Julie Andrews, his childhood sweetheart, when he worked on F451. He fell in love with Andrews after watching her play an egg in a stage production of Humpty Dumpty. I loved that he wanted to hump Humpty. It was about the sweetest thing I’d ever heard.

  In Truffaut’s F451 Tony’s choice of costume metaphorically associated Christie with the white clown. I like to think that’s because Walton understood Humpty’s peril, knew what it was to play the egg. I thought of Pierrot, the white clown, who graced so many little girls bedrooms in the 1980s with that sweet sentimental stare, pierced by one agile tear. I had once owned a Pierrot beachtowel. I freaking loved that towel. What had happened to it?

  I still loved Pierrot. The way I still loved the moon. I wanted to write about such things without shame or further adieu, the way Bradbury had gorged on his own metaphors. He claimed he had no idea what the word metaphor even meant when he wrote Fahrenheit 451. I loved reading him even when his imagery seemed too inflated, too hopped up on its own helium. At the beginning of Fahrenheit 451 Clarisse tells Montag to taste the rain. She twirls a dandelion under his chin and talks to him about the man in the moon. But how could she be so sure it was a man up there? What about Pierrot? Her acrobatic legs swung over the waning crescent, her fabulous neck ruff ruffled. Ready to merchandise her heart out.

  The sales managers of Borders UK gathered in a small flourscent lit room on the edge of London. It might as well have been Staines. A motivational speaker who looked like David Brent had been hired to help us think outside the box. ‘What if?’ he asked. It was the storyteller’s weapon. What if we didn’t promote the next Dan Brown book? What if we offered customers the chance to trade in their copies of The Da Vinci Code instead? They could choose other better books that were not written by Dan Brown. At the time, I was jazzed up on the idea. Radical! What if we stopped selling Jodi Picoult next? The David Brent lookalike encouraged us to dig deep. What did our customers really want?

  We thought outside the box then we crossed the street to the local Westfield shopping centre and thought inside it. Our task was to compare field notes on our experiences as customers. Why was Apple so successful? Because it produced outstanding products? No! Because it had geniuses on the shop floor providing customer focused retail experiences.

  As we journeyed back to our respective Borders stores, Christmas appeared like a mirage on the horizon.

  I made an extra effort to talk to customers.

  ‘What made you choose this title?’ I asked the little old lady across from the till from me.

  ‘No one does men like Georgette Heyer.’

  ‘You have to read this,’ a male customer told me.

  ‘What is it about that book?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s her. Lisbeth Salander.’ He exited away with a dreamy smile. Clearly, the girl with the dragon tattoo was smoking.

  One day as I replenished the large 3-for-2 table in the front of store, a woman held up Kate Atkinson’s latest novel: When Will there Be Good News?

  ‘How’s this doing?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s one of our bestsellers,’ I replied. ‘It’s been very popular.’

  She slapped the book back down on the table.

  ‘Well, I read it from front to back and there wasn’t any good news in it.’

  The timer went off.

  ‘Amazon is not happening to bookselling, the future is happening to bookselling,’ Jeff Bezos told correspondant Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes in 2013. I agree. But it is easier to make that statement when you’re the CEO of Amazon and have set up your own company – Blue Origin – to lower the cost of domestic spaceflight for future generations, so that everyone can afford to explore the solar system.

  According to Brad Stone, the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Bezos dismantled his own crib with a screwdriver when he was three years old. Blimey. The future happens to all of us. Some sleep in cribs. Others lower the cost of space-flight. As the global recession swung into action, I could hear the distant whirr of a screw driver. The final bolts began to fall out of the Bor
ders business model.

  Our in-store CD sales plummeted as the music industry adapted not to illegal downloading, Apple and the iPod, but to the future. Ditto, DVD’s. Borders last made a profit in 2006. The original Borders founders Tom and Louis had long since sold out to Kmart, and now the American Mothership was casting off the international arms of its operation. Borders UK was sold to Luke Johnson’s Capital Risk Partners in Autumn 2007. Borders Australia, New Zealand and Singapore were sold in 2008 to Pacific Equity Partners, then on to RedGroup Retail.

  In the UK stores the Borders uniform was introduced: a short sleeved shirt and a sweatshirt. The colour: fire engine red.

  Our stock began to flow. One way. Out the door.

  Deliveries stalled.

  In 2008 Borders UK dismantled its central warehouse in favour of direct supply to shops from publishers and wholesalers in order to aid efficiency. At the same time, Waterstones – our competition – introduced a centralised warehouse instead of direct supply to shops from publishers and wholesalers in order to aid efficiency.

  Nicky relocated to Borders Islington, then on to Apple.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’ I said.

  ‘Like you want to kill me.’

  We relocated humour and installed several bays of beige office stationary on the ground floor. Stationary = high margins.

  Fridges gurgled at till points. Borders had branched into bottled water and confectionary. Browsing is thirsty work.

  ‘What will I do if Borders goes under?’ I asked the new general manager.

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s a good question.’

  I took a promotion and relocated to Borders Kingston-Upon-Thames – one of the five worst performing stores in the company.

  The general manager sat in his windowless office and told me he was leading from the back. True. He was also planning his wedding. A team of booksellers told me everything that was wrong with the store. The staff felt short-changed. I promised change. I was leading from the front. I was also rearranging the sidelines in the till queue.

  ‘This ship is sinking fast,’ the unofficial matriarch of the store told me.

  I was merchandising a table in the front of store at the time. I may as well have been rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

  At Borders head office on Charing Cross Road, I was introduced to the new head of marketing. He proudly showed me the new logo he’d been working on. The strapline featured the image of a butterfly made from the pages of a book. The new catchphrase: Let’s Escape.

  The problem with Borders UK was not our lack of stock or inability to compete on pricing – it was our branding.

  The marketing team were leading from the back.

  The CEO visited and asked where the extra shelving units had gone. I told him I had removed them in order to tighten up the remaining stock. He told me that the absent units compromised the integrity of the store. Integrity?

  In the mornings I gave up-beat team briefings.

  ‘What would motivate you?’ I asked.

  ‘Gin,’ the matriarch replied.

  I set the sales target for the day and promised the team a bottle of gin if they reached it.

  At another shift meeting the matriarch looked me over and sneered, ‘You’re a bit corporate, aren’t you?’

  My anger erupted into flames. I had paid for the gin from my own pocket.

  The basement flooded. Once. Twice. Again. Oil from the resturant next door kept clogging the drains. The staff and I swept water back and forth over the carpet tiles. I cordoned off the basement. It didn’t matter. There was no stock in the multimedia fixtures anymore. Just dust. The carpet retained the stink of the drains even after the cleaners had been and gone. The basement smelt fetid. Rank. There was only one thing left to do.

  Day 26. On the set of Pinewood studios in 1966, Thom Noble swivelled back and forth in his chair in the cutting room. The clock was ticking. He had to finish the film.

  He ran the dailies once more just to watch her performance again.

  Extraordinary. She lifted the whole scene. Oskar Werner’s reading of the poem was sufficent but it wasn’t moving. Ann Bell made it work. And who was she? No one really. A bit part. One of the wife’s friends. Noble had spent all afternoon trying to get the cut right. Her face was tentative at first, then as the words took their toll, she began to weep. Not at once. Just softly. Softly. Her tears as spontaneous as snow, little eddies drifting down. She alone captured the vulnearabilty of the scene, she made the poetry plausible. The powder blue dress she wore on screen just laid an extra claim to her sadness.

  Noble had been on set so long. He blinked. His mouth tasted of tea. He closed his eyes. Hours swilled. No one else would ever know her peformance this intimately. Second by second. Frame by frame.

  Truffaut knocked on the door.

  ‘C’est merveilleux,’ the director agreed. ‘Mais trop long.’

  The few seconds that remained showed Ann in her blue dress, dabbing at the corners of her eyes. Poetry has affected her cruelly.

  ‘Have-a-g-ood-weekend.’ Truffaut smiled and waved.

  Noble knew Bell’s performance was something special. He hoped her career would bear it out. For now the footage was gone, the magic lost.

  He’d learned his first major lesson as editor. By cutting something too much you simply lose it. It falls through the cracks and it’s gone.

  Day 27. In the public library, I opened my MacBook Air and watched my word count graph spike towards the finish line. Some of the other participants were already there. The clock was ticking. The collective word count sprinting towards victory. Bradbury said that Fahrenheit 451 had contained a paradox. My book also contained a paradox. I just didn’t know what it was.

  Bradbury’s narrative arc was crystal clear. After watching The White Clown, Mildred dobs Montag into the firemen. Captain Beatty arrives at their house in his jaunty salamander. Montag and Beatty prepare to face off. Freedom of speech must win the day. Mildred clutches her baggage and exits in a beetle-taxi – not knowing that Bradbury plans to kill her off in an atomic bomb blast for the finale.

  I followed Bradbury’s lead, but I had something extra up my sleeve. Lucky Strikes. Also an upgrade to the driver’s seat.

  I wrote: Mildred burned through the streets like a criminal in Grand Theft Auto, a cigarette hung from her lower lip. 80s pop songs sizzled past billboards on the fritz; the rain was programmed to fall and it did. She headed away from nature, into the city – that’s where the action was. It was a relief to shuck off the suburbs and all the mouldy old depressing stuff. Let’s escape!

  Across my laptop screen she followed a road beside a train track that looped through a forest of automated trees. In Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 nature is a sanctuary, a place to hide from the city. But that was just because Bradbury hadn’t forseen 3D printing. Nature can be manufactured just like everything else.

  I wrote: The trees along the side of the highway stood still as totem poles. Their leaves and branches embossed the sky. The mechanical forest was modelled in the form of oak and pine trees. The trees had originally worked on timers; set inside each trunk was a cuckoo clock and the leaves had once turned like the hands, indicating the time of day. The forest had been someone’s great idea for the future, but like most great ideas it didn’t work. The trees had lost their wiring, the cuckoos in their trunks had sprung their springs and time had unwound. No one came to the mechanical forest to be close to nature.

  A bullet train shot over the track. Cuckoo.

  I looked up and watched a librarian wheel a trolley of books past. A copy of an old Julie Christie biography sat on the desk beside my MacBook. Research. The book was an old hardback, with a turquoise cover, its laminate coming undone. I had only read the chapter on Fahrenheit 451. The train I was writing about could have been on route to the nearest station to Pinewood studios. Cuckoo. Or it could have been a test track like the Chanteneuf south of Par
is. Cuckoo. Or it could have even been the antique model train set that Julie Christie gave Truffaut as a gift on the set of Fahrenheit 451. Cuckoo.

  The librarian turned another aisle and began plugging the books back into their order on the shelf. Time to accelerate:

  A flash of ash across the page – Mildred swerved, and the beetle span around 180 degrees. The tyres released the scent of rubber. In the rear vision mirror, a flash of mint green.

  The hound lay on its side. She opened the door. One of them was panting. The rain lashed its tail again. She walked towards the hound, her stilettos lit green.

  Cipher and machine regarded one another.

  It was a touching moment so I wrote: Mildred held her hand over her heart. Still running.

  The hound scanned the side of the road as though wishing it could run into the safety of the trees. Mildred admired the ingenuity in its manufacturing. Heat rose from its hard drive. She bent down in her pencil skirt and held out her hand.