that, it’s a first edition he keeps for himself.
And he kept his talent to himself, as well. He wasn’t sure why exactly, but he sensed it was for the best. The parade of harried teachers never knew; he turned in bland, uninspired fiction during all the Tests, making sure he was never streamed off to the Factory. His plan was non-existent, but he had the distinct impression that the Factory would seek to kill whatever it was he had inside him.
They finally cornered him when he was sixteen: caught red-handed, passing a note he’d written to a girl on the table across from him. Her name was Kay, and he was very much in love with her. The note had no warning, but it contained explicit content. He hadn’t written it while he was making love to her, but he’d done it from memory almost immediately afterwards: it was certainly good enough to have made her come in the middle of History. But in fact – history records – that particular pleasure went to Mr Cremin, who intercepted the note, confiscated it, and then wished that he hadn’t. The boy’s locker was raided, his parents were called in and serious discussions were entered into regarding his future.
And that was that. Within a week, he’d been transferred to the Factory. He remembered the principal talking to him on the day before he left, adding emphasis with his hands:
‘You’ve got talent, boy – raw ability. Nobody I’ve ever met can describe things like you. And now all you need is discipline and focus.’
But as far as the boy was concerned, he had discipline – and he had focus, too. He’d kept up his practice. Sometimes he’d write for three or four hours a night, taking his pad and pen up into the woods, or catching these puff-a-billy trams out into the countryside with Kay. One weekend, he broke into the stairwell of a block of flats and managed to get onto the roof: thirty storeys above the street – just him and the pigeons, and the tv aerials humming away. He spent ten straight hours writing up there. He knew what he was doing. He was testing his gift and searching for limits, for a direction that was right for him. Of course, what the principal meant was that he needed their direction and their focus. He needed to learn things like plot and character, so that he could make some money.
It was destined to end in tears.
‘Jim knew the boy was special to begin with,’ Steph said, grinding out the end of her cigarette, blowing the last of the smoke out from the corner of her mouth.
‘But listen – he was just this fucked up kid with too many high ideals. He was a kid who could write, sure, but he wasn’t structured or disciplined. He had no work ethic. The way he was, he had no bestsellers in him.’
I finished the end of my whisky and poured myself another.
‘Jim was a teacher there? At the Factory?’
‘Uh-huh.’ She glanced back at Thornton, who had collapsed over his glass again: a husk of a shell of a man. He was a meta-fuck-up.
‘You wouldn’t know it from looking at him now, but that man there used to be one of the best businessmen in the business.’
The Factory’s where they teach you to write. It’s all they do, day in and day out: nearly five hundred children at any one time, all aged between eleven and eighteen, housed under one long roof and under the nine-to-five tutelage of those who have gone before them. Prospective students are picked out by the Tests at as early an age as possible and then taught the trappings of plot, character and sentence structure before graduating: turned loose into the world as novelists of potential note, standing and bank balance.
He never stood a chance, of course. He couldn’t do plot and character: he just couldn’t abstract things in that way. Didn’t even want to. What he did was take a snapshot of an event and put it in your head. When he tried to put strings of events together, or create characters, it just didn’t work; the law of ever-decreasing returns applied, and each successive scene became duller and duller. The longer and longer he spent at the Factory, the emptier he felt. His time there was hollowing him out – turning him into a shell they could fill – and pointing him, by force, in a direction he just didn’t want to go.
It was never going to last.
Things came to a head four months after he’d arrived, but by that time he’d had a whole bunch of run-ins with the staff and was just waiting for an excuse. It came during James Thornton’s Commercial Viability class, in which the man explained the rules of publishing to a class of twenty enthralled would-be writers, and him.
‘Writing is purely and simply a business,’ Thornton repeated.
In fact, Thornton simply couldn’t stress that enough, and he hated the man more every time he said it. Not for him, it wasn’t. Not ever.
‘A business. That’s all. You have to approach it in that manner, or you’ll fail. You’ll be a nobody. Nothing. Not a writer, anyway – that’s for damn sure.’
Thornton had a moustache and the kind of confidence you get from a string of successful relationship novels, but he couldn’t swear for shit. He said
He went on.
The gist of it was this. Fiction is business, and publishing houses aren’t always likely to risk investment on an untried, untested author. Even if they did, and you got your book published, there was no guarantee that you’d actually sell. A stamp of approval from the Factory gets you halfway in life; marketing takes you that little bit further; but smarts get you the rest.
‘Once you’ve got your foot in the door,’ Thornton said, leaning on the desk in front of him with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, ‘act quick. And act smart. Your book is out. What do you do? What you do is approach your bank and take out a business loan, and then you scour. You scour the country from end to end, and you buy up every copy of the book you can find.’
He stood up, staring at a few of them in turn.
‘And that’s it. The publishing company says “Wow”, and offers you a contract on the spot. Hundreds of thousands of pounds flutter down into your pockets as if by magic. As much goddamn dental work as your mouth can cope with. And when they put your second book out, they market it so hard you don’t even have time to breathe. You’re in.’
A boy at the front had his arm up straight as a flag pole. ‘Is that what you did, Mr Thornton?’
Thornton leant on the desk again and showed the boy his teeth: perfect and white.
‘We’ve all done it, son,’ he said. ‘We’ve all done it.’
Two weekends after that, he went back home and saw Kay, who he missed now he no longer sat next to her in class. He was slightly relieved to see that she missed him right back. They made love a couple of times, and he took her for drinks in the cafe they’d had their first date in, which felt like an age ago. It was a sunny day, and he took his notepad and jotted down descriptions of the trees, the people and the lake, surprising her with them as they walked – giving her little linguistic trinkets to remember him by. She folded each one up carefully and placed it in the pocket of her jeans, giving him a secret smile in exchange. The Factory had never felt so irrelevant and far away.
They talked about their future together and, as they did, he could feel it solidifying. The prospect felt far more real and important than anything he’d ever write down in a notebook, or sell for a million.
And he was thinking – as they crossed the road, with her a little ahead of him, dragging him by the hand – and then she was just suddenly taken away. His right arm jolting, and he lurched: spun a little. The side of a truck flashed in front of him; a strong waft of air; a screech of tyres. Then, the truck was past, skidding to a halt, and he was left standing there, staring at the other side of the sunny street, his arm beginning to throb. The face of a woman standing beneath a green plastic canopy opposite slowly contorted into a scream of shock, and he blinked at her.
In his left hand, he was still holding his notebook. His right was empty.
They start to put the girl’s body into bin bags, and Long Tall Jack heads off for a shower. He’s coated with blood from his knees to his abdomen, and from his neck to his nose, so he really needs one. They’ll blast down the shower later. Of course, he’s worn gloves the whole time – they all have – but they’ll wipe the place for prints, as well.
He holds his right hand at the wrist and cracks it gently. Then, he flexes his fingers and thumb, working the cramp out of them. One of the crew pulls the girl off the bed by her arm, and her dead eye tracks the ceiling before the rest of her follows.
He looks away.
