hurt like . . . You wouldn’t think, would you, it being only twelve days and all? I mean still no sweat or anything, but . . . well . . . damn, man. Ow, you know?) But sleep – falling asleep – I’ve got used to it. Easy to see why you lot go for it in such a big way, though why you choose to do it at night, the best part of the day, is a mystery to me.
But this dreaming – whoa. It was one of Gunn’s. (Yes, I’m afraid so: on top of the drab threads and tiny todge I’m saddled with a good deal of the subconscious fluff, too.) Now as you all know, other people’s dreams are superlatively boring unless you yourself are in them, so I won’t burden you with the details. (‘I had the most amazing dream last night,’ says Peter. ‘Was I in it?’ asks Jane? ‘No,’ says Peter. ‘Me and Skip were in this forest, you see, and . . .’ etc. Jane’s not listening – and who can blame her? Pretended interest in your partner’s dreams is one of the half-dozen glues holding the pitiful airfix of monogamy together.) It’s a dream Gunn’s only had once or twice before. An older, bearded man comes to take his mother to the pictures. It’s not a lover. (For the record, it’s a queen whose partner cancer’s recently chomped its way through, on whom Angela’s taken pity.) Wee Gunn knows it’s not a lover – but he can’t or won’t trust this old fruit. ‘I’m just your mother’s friend,’ the bewhiskered lips keep telling him. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m not taking her away from you. You can trust me. You know you can trust me.’ (But tight-shouldered Gunn’s a compact little thunderstorm. His face is piping hot and his chest is busy with naked feelings still waiting for their language hats and coats. His mother’s friend is sitting on the couch, Gunn standing in front of him holding in his left hand the new matchbox Mini Cooper in electric green with opening boot, bonnet and doors – the price of his mother’s company, he assumes. The babysitter is heating spaghetti hoops in the kitchen. Gunn hears the bhup then steady exhalation of the gas ring. With all his ineffectual might (when his mother’s back is turned for a final mirror check: beige mack, mauve chiffon scarf, coppery curls, green eyeshadow) he balls his sweaty fist and clocks Mr Harmless a wild hook in the bearded chops. He thinks, little Gunn, all ablaze with pride and shame, that something big, some paradigm shift must follow. But the man on the couch just grins, without lifting his palms from their rest on his kneecaps. ‘No need for that, my friend,’ he whispers, rising, ruffling Gunn’s warm hair. Then to Angela: ‘Your carriage awaits.’ Angela kisses our cheek and leaves a lipstick print. It’s a thing between them. He’s allowed to go to bed without washing it off. Her lips are warm and sticky. At the doorway she turns and blows him another kiss. The bearded man waves and winks. Gunn waves back as the corridor stretches and the doorway recedes, slowly. He waves, and smiles, and thinks: I hate you, I hate you, I hate you . . .
I was mumbling some untranslated version of this when I woke. Terribly hot and bothered. Had the Ritz’s costly linens all tangled around my legs. Struggled up into consciousness with a lot of undignified lurching and warbling. Then sat up puffing and blowing, astonished at the simple endurance of the waking world: the room, the braying traffic, the weather. Called down for a pot of Columbian full roast and a half-dozen wee snifters with a tender – I’m tempted to say humble – thankfulness that it was all still here. Incredible. And you lot have to deal with this sort of thing night after night. Must take some getting used to . . .
Out of mischief, really, I went to see Gunn’s agent, Betsy Galvez. Do you know, I’ve found it so difficult to stick to my fourteen scenes. This writing malarkey should come with a health warning: MAY CAUSE INCESSANT DEVIATION FROM ORIGINAL INTENTION. AND DROWSINESS. Obviously I’ve got a lot of the script down – the big scenes, so to speak, and Trent already thinks I’m God – but do you think I can stick to the task in hand? I turn on Gunn’s PC, I sit through the tedious powering-up, the brief arrival of Penelope’s gently smiling mug as his desktop wallpaper, and am forced to acknowledge the presence of an untitled file alongside ‘Lucifer Screenplay’ that’s been variously titled Some, Anyway, Last Words, Wherefore I Know Not, and Paradise Fucked, and which has thus far proven a terrible distraction from my contractual obligations. You know what’s in it, don’t you? You’ve been reading it, haven’t you? I wouldn’t mind if it was just the narrative version of the blockbusting movie – the ‘novelization’ as such things are barbarously called – but as you know, it’s worse than that. I seem to be continuously struggling against the temptation to write about Declan Gunn.
I was just going to post it to Betsy, anonymously (I’m tempted to deprive Gunn of credit for this bit of graft; I’m tempted – oh I know I’m silly – to keep this as something I’ve done for me, you know?) but then it occurred to me (it’s becoming annoying, this business of things occurring to me, this habit I’ve developed in Gunn’s skin of not knowing everything ahead of time) that there was a good chance it would end up on a slush pile, or in the secretary’s Deal With it Later file, or worse, ignominiously in the bin. So I went to see her. Gunn generally rings and makes an appointment. I didn’t.
This weather . . . Humans, how do you avoid spending all your time just experiencing the weather? I walked from Clerkenwell to Covent Garden in very mild, very slightly moving air that touched the exposed bits of me like the petals of cool roses. The sky (even I’ve got to take my hat off to Himself when it comes to summer skies) was high and beaten thin, the low sun softly exploding pale oranges and watery greens into the upper margins of lilac and blue. The whole thing had a distant, bleached quality to it that made me in Gunn’s body feel small and lonesome, not unlike the way he himself used to feel as a child, when his mother would treat him to an extortionately priced helium balloon which would invariably slip from his wet grasp and go sailing up into the vast and lonely distance, until Gunn, nauseated by his relationship to something now so remote, would begin to feel dizzy and afraid. (I’ve resigned myself, as you can see, to bits of Gunn’s life intruding. Manifestly, the longer I’m here the more susceptible I am. Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels’ recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche’s ghostly script?)
The good old world smelled good and old and worldly: fruity drains, diesel, caramelized nuts, fried onions, heatrotted litter, tyres, minty and decidedly unminty breath. A suddenly opened pub door let a scent-bubble of beerflavoured carpet and fagsmoke out into the fresh air. I inhaled (burped booze and bar snacks in there, too) as I passed through, smiling. Women had touched themselves up – cosmetically, thank you – and their features glowed and gleamed: mouths like scimitars in claret, plum, sienna, mimosa, pearl, burgundy and puce, smokily shadowed eyes with diamond hints and sapphire glints, flecks of emerald and fragments of jade. Easy there, Luce, easy. This is what they see every day. Doesn’t mean anything to them. I know. I can’t help it. Like your man Rumi, I find myself ‘drenched in being here, rambling drunk . . .’ You don’t know what it is to me, this leisure (no priest in the taxi, no rabbi on the stairs), Gunn’s sensory quintet working overtime. One after another: the wind’s sudden swerve; someone’s cinnamonish aftershave; the flooded gutter’s ribbon of sky; teen bodyheat on a rammed Tube; marmalade breath and perfumed wrists. Wears man’s smudge and share’s man’s smell, as dear old Hopkins lamented. You don’t find me lamenting it, do you? Eh? I say, Missus, you don’t find me lamenting it.
It used to give Gunn tremendous pleasure to visit Betsy, in her Covent Garden office. It was the sort of office he’d always imagined a literary agent would have: gargantuan oak desk, wafer-thin Persian rug in sky-blue and gold, fat oxblood leather couch, books everywhere – simply everywhere – and, of course, manuscripts. Betsy, who, at fifty-six has a well-lined face and sunken cheeks, chain-smoked Dunhills and had shorthand or private language conversations on the phone that always made Gunn feel like part of the select world of Literature, even though he hadn’t a clue what she was on about. (It was of course the select world of Publishing, but Gunn was a hopeless romantic.) Over the years our Betsy’s perfected a very slightly sexually flirtatious persona for her young male writers, one that’s based on her knowing that she’s not physically attractive but that she is socially and professionally powerful. Her eyes are a pellucid blue, and are occasionally to be observed lingering a fraction longer than necessary on the lineaments of her ‘boys’. (She doesn’t have young women writers because she doesn’t like young women.) She’s had three long lunches with Gunn at the end of which he’s had the feeling – the odd double entendre, nothing disgusting – she might be about to offer him money to fuck her – and he can’t say the thought doesn’t stimulate him. He imagines broad, deflated breasts with wine gum nipples, old-woman flesh in the armpits, an arsehole with a history . . . Since becoming ‘a writer’ Gunn believes such warped or distended liaisons are within his scope (he’s going to love Harriet), are part of his duty, in fact, along with bowling around the West End drunk at four in the morning and wearing overcoats that reek of Oxfam.
Then, God help him, A Grace of Storms.
‘I think you’re making it awfully hard for yourself with a book this long,’ she said to him, at their last protracted but emphatically unerotic lunch after she’d read the monstrous tome.
‘Yeah,’ Gunn said, ‘but when a book’s good you want it
