The Killing Circle

Two lives. It just happens. Except I’m still here.”

He shakes. Zips. Leaves without washing his hands.

By the time I made it back to our table, Ivan is ordering another round. I told the waitress one was enough for me.

“I’ll see you around then,” I said to him. But Ivan’s eyes remained fixed on the slippery doings onstage.

A few strides on I turned to wave (a gesture I hoped would communicate my need to rush on to some other appointment) but he was still sitting there, looking not, I noticed, at the dancer, but at the ceiling, at nothing at all. His hands hanging cold and white at his sides.

Len, the only one I’d given my home number to, called once. Asked if I wanted to get together to “talk shop”, and for some reason I accepted. Perhaps I was lonelier than I thought.

I arranged to meet him at the Starbucks around the corner. As soon as the lumbering kid pushed his way through the doors I knew it was a mistake. Not that things went badly. We spoke of his efforts to give up on horror and “go legit” with his writing. He’d been sending his stories to university journals and magazines, and was heartened by “some pretty good rejection letters”.

It was over the same coffee that Len shared the gossip about Petra. Her ex-husband, Leonard Dunn, had been arrested for a whack of fraud schemes, blackmail, and extortion. More than this, reports had suggested that Mr Dunn had close connections to organized crime. Len and I joked about Petra’s Rosedale mansion standing on the foundations of laundered money, but I kept to myself my last glimpse of Petra outside Grossman’s, stepping into a black Lincoln she seemed reluctant to enter.

That was about it. Neither of us mentioned William or Angela or any of the others (I had not yet learned of the car accident outside Whitley). Even the apparent end to the Sandman’s career was mentioned only in passing. It struck me that Len was as unsure of the police’s presumption that we would never hear of him again as I was.

Afterwards, standing outside, Len and I agreed to get together again sometime soon. I think both of us recognized this as a promise best unkept. And as it turned out, it was only some years later, and under circumstances that had nothing to do with fostering a tentative friendship, that we saw each other again.

In interviews, I have repeatedly stated that I only started writing The Sandman after my severance pay from the National Star had run out, but this is not exactly true. If writing is at least partly a task undertaken in the mind alone, well away from pens or keyboards, then I had started filling in the spaces in Angela’s story from the last night I saw her.

Even after the circle and the long, worried days that followed, even as the bank started sending its notices of arrears followed by their lawyers’ announcements of foreclosure, some part of my mind was occupied in teasing out possible pasts and futures for the orphan girl, Jacob, Edra, and the terrible man who does terrible things.

It wasn’t that these considerations were a comfort. It would be more accurate to say that I returned to Angela’s story because I needed it to survive. To be present for my son, I required a fictional tale of horror to visit as an alternative to the real horrors that kept coming at us. I had Sam—but I was alone. We’d already lost Tamara. Now here goes the house. Here go Daddy’s marbles. And I couldn’t tell Sam about any of it.

This is how I thought The Sandman could save me. It gave me somewhere to go, something that was mine.

But I was wrong. It was never mine. And it could never save me.

The Sandman had plans of its own. All it needed me for was to set it free.

15

I admit to stealing Angela’s story. Even so, it still wasn’t a novel. While I used her characters, premise, setting, mimicked her tone, even copied whole pages from her recorded readings, viewed strictly on the basis of a word count, the bulk of The Sandman could technically be described as mine.

There was much I needed to add to give it the necessary weight of a book. Whatever it took to roll out what I already had with a minimum of actual creating, so that the result had been thinned to cover a couple hundred pages. But what the book still needed was the very thing Angela’s story didn’t provide. An ending.

After long months of scratching ideas on to index cards and dropping most of them into the recycling box, I managed to wring out a few concluding turns of the screw of my own, though there’s little point in going into that here.

Let’s just say I decided to make it a ghost story. I knew it was plagiarism. There wasn’t a moment I thought enough of The Sandman was invented that it could be truly considered my own. What relieved me of the crime was that I was only playing around. It was a distraction and nothing else. A kind of therapy during those hours when Sam was asleep, the TV spewed its usual rot, the sentences of my favourite books swam unreadably before my eyes.

Even when it was done, I still had no plans to present it as though I was its sole author. This was partly because I wasn’t. But there was another reason.

I always saw the writing of the book as a kind of communication, an exchange between Angela and myself. I have read dozens of interviews with real writers who say that, throughout the process, they have in mind an audience of one for their work, an ideal reader who fully understands their intentions. For me, that’s who Angela was. The extra set of eyes looking over my shoulder as the words crept down the screen. As I wrote our ghost story, Angela was the one phantom who was with me the whole time.

And then I started wondering if it might not be good. Our book. Angela’s and mine. Except Angela was dead now.

What would someone else think of what we’d made together?

But even this self-deceiving line of thought wasn’t my undoing. My real mistake was printing it out, buying envelopes to slip it into, and telling myself I’m just curious as I dropped them in the mail addressed to the biggest literary agents in New York.

That was a mistake.

16

I say now what all those in my position say in response to the most commonly asked question of the after- reading Q&A: I had always wanted to be a writer. But in my case, this answer is not precisely true. I had wanted to write, yes, but more primary than this, I had always wanted to be an author. Nothing counted unless you were published. I longed to be an embossed name on a spine, to belong to the knighthood of those selected to stand alongside their alphabetical neighbours on bookshop and library shelves. The great and nearly so, the famous and wrongly overlooked. The living and the dead.

But now, all I wanted was to be out of it.

What had seemed so important then now struck me as a contrivance, an invention whose purpose was to