May 1, 2015

WELSH RAIN GODS PISS onto the roofs, festival tents, and umbrellas of Hay-on-Wye and also on Crispin Hershey, as he strides along a gutter-noisy lane, into the Old Cinema Bookshop and makes his way down to its deepest bowel, where he rips this week’s Piccadilly Review to confetti. Who on God’s festering Earth does that six-foot-wide, corduroy-clad, pubic-bearded, rectal probe Richard Cheeseman think he is? I shut my eyes but the words of his review slide by like the breaking news: “I tried my utmost to find something, anything, in Crispin Hershey’s long-awaited novel to dilute its trepanning godawfulness.” How dare that inflatable semen-stained Bagpuss write that after cosying up to me at the Royal Society of Literature bashes? “In my salad days at Cambridge, I got into a fistfight defending the honor of Hershey’s early masterpiece Desiccated Embryos and to this day I wear the scar on my ear as a badge of honor.” Who sponsored Richard Cheeseman’s application for Pen UK? I did. I did! And how does he thank me? “To dub Echo Must Die ‘infantile, flatulent, ghastly drivel’ would be an insult to infants, to flatulence, and to ghasts alike.” I stamp on the magazine’s shredded remains, panting and gasping …

TRULY, DEAR READER, I could weep. Kingsley Amis boasted how a bad review might spoil his breakfast, but it bloody wasn’t going to spoil his lunch. Kingsley Amis lived in the pre-Twitter age, when reviewers actually read proofs and thought independently. Nowadays they just Google for a preexisting opinion and, thanks to Richard Cheeseman’s chainsaw massacre, what they’ll read about my comeback novel is: “So why is Echo Must Die such a decomposing hog? One: Hershey is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: The fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?” Richard Cheeseman has hung a KICK ME sign around Echo Must Die’s neck, at the very time I need a commercial renaissance. It isn’t the 1990s, when my agent, Hal “the Hyena” Grundy, could pluck a £500K book deal as easily as a plug of mucus from his giant honker. Now is the official Decade of the Death of the Book. I’m hemorrhaging £40K a year on school fees for the girls, and the little pied-à-terre in Montreal’s well-heeled Outremont neighborhood may have put a smile back on Zoë’s face but the expense has rendered me financially mortal for the first time since Hal the Hyena got me my book deal for Desiccated Embryos. My iPhone trills. Speak of the devil, it’s a message from Hal.

gig kicks off 45mins o brother where art thou?

The Hyenas are howling. The show must go on.

MAEVE MUNRO, SALTY captain of BBC2’s flagship arts show, gives a let’s-roll nod to the stage manager. I’m waiting in the wings, miked up. Publicity Girl scrolls through her messages. Stage Manager asks me to check that my mobile is switched off. I check, and find two new messages: one from Qantas air miles and one about garbage collection. In our marital halcyon days, Mrs. Zoë Legrange-Hershey would send Knock ’em dead, Genius–type texts before my gigs, but these days she doesn’t even ask what country I’m going to. Nothing from the girls, even. Juno will be playing remotely with her schoolfriends—or perverts pretending to be schoolfriends—on Tunnel Town or whatever the latest app is, while Anaïs will be reading a Michael Morpurgo book. Why don’t I write kids’ books about lonely children forging bonds with animals? Because I’ve spent two decades being the Wild Child of British literature, that’s sodding why. In publishing it’s easier to change your body than it is to switch genre.

House lights dim, stage lights brighten, and the audience falls silent. Maeve Munro’s telegenic face shines and her trademark Orcadian lilt fills the tent. “Good evening, I’m Maeve Munro, broadcasting live from the Hay Festival, 2015. Ever since his debut novel Wanda in Oils, published while its author was still an undergraduate, Crispin Hershey has earned his stripes as a master stylist and a laser-sharp chronicler of our times. Our most lusted-after gong, the Brittan Prize, has—scandalously—eluded his grasp so far, but many believe that 2015 could finally be his year. With no further ado, reading from Echo Must Die, his first novel in five years, please join me and our very proud sponsors FutureNow Bank in welcoming—Crispin Hershey!”

Solid applause. I approach the lectern. A full house. Sodding well ought to be—they already moved me from the six-hundred seater PowerGen Venue to this “more intimate setting.” Editor Oliver sits in the front row with Hyena Hal and his newest client and the Next Hot Young American Thing, Nick Greek. Let silence fall. Rain drums on the marquee roof. Most writers would now thank the audience for coming out on such a bad night, but Hershey treats ’em mean to keep ’em keen and opens Echo Must Die at page one.

I clear my throat. “I’ll jump straight in …”

… my last line dispatched, I return to my chair. Swing high, sweet clap-o-meter; not bad for a contingent of securely pensioned metropolitans stuffed with artisanal fudge and organic cider. They guffawed as my protagonist Trevor Upward got duct-taped to the roof of the Eurostar; squirmed when Titus Hurt found a human finger in his Cornish pastie; and thrummed at my dénouement in the Cambridge pub, which flowers into Audenesque rhyme when spoken aloud at festivals. Maeve Munro gives me a cheerful that-went-well face; I give her a why-wouldn’t-it? face back. Hershey spent his boyhood among thesps, and Dad’s habit of ridiculing my brother and me for garbled diction has borne plump fruit. Dad’s last words, as my memoir recounts, were “It’s ‘whom,’ you baboon, not ‘who’ …”

“To kick off the Q and A,” Maeve Munro addresses the tent, “I have some questions of my own. Then we’ll turn it over to our roving mikes. So, Crispin, on last Friday’s Newsnight Review, eminent critic Aphra Booth described Echo Must Die as ‘a classic male midlife crisis novel.’ Any response?”

“Oh, I’d say she’s hit the nail on the head,” I take a slow sip of water, “if, like Aphra Booth, your notion of ‘reading’ is to skim the back jacket in the green-room loo a minute before going on air.”

My quip earns a fake smile from Maeve Munro, who is often seen wining and whining with Aphra Booth at the Mistletoe Club. “Right … And as for Richard Cheeseman’s rather lackluster review—”

“What christening is complete without a jealous fairy’s curse?”

Laughter; gasps; Twitterstorm ahoy. The Telegraph will report the line on page one of their arts section; Richard Cheeseman will get his gay-rights group to give me the Bigot of the Year Award; Hyena Hal will be thinking Publi$ity, while Nick Greek, bless, looks puzzled. American writers are so sodding nice to each other, hanging out in their Brooklyn lofts and writing each other’s references for professorial chairs. “Let’s move on,” says Maeve Munro, her fluty trill flattening, “while we’re ahead.”

“What makes you think you’re ‘ahead,’ Maeve?”

Little smile: “Echo Must Die’s protagonist is, like yourself, a novelist, yet in your memoir To Be Continued you dub novels about novelists ‘incestuous.’ Is Trevor Upward a U-turn, or is incest now a more attractive proposition?”

I lean back, smiling, while my interviewer’s fan base expends its gur-hurs. “While I’d never lecture a native of the Orkney Islands, Maeve, on the subject of incest, I would maintain that without shifts in viewpoint, a writer could only write the same novel ad infinitum. Or end up teaching uncreative writing at a college for the privileged in upstate New York.”

“Yet”—Maeve Munro is duly stung—“a politician who changes his or her mind is called a flip-flopper.”

“F. W. de Klerk changed his mind about Nelson Mandela being a terrorist,” I riff. “Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley changed their minds about violence in Ulster. I say, ‘Let’s hear it for the flip-floppers.’ ”

“Let me ask you this. To what degree is Trevor Upward, whose morality is decidedly elastic, modeled upon his maker?”

“Trevor Upward is a misogynist prick who gets exactly what he deserves on the final page. How, dear Maeve, could a royal arse like Trevor Upward”—I flash a smile of mock innocence—“possibly be modeled on a man like Crispin Hershey?”

SMUDGED WOODS AND Herefordshire hills rear up into a misty twilight. The moist air dabs my brow like a face flannel in business class. I, the Festival Elf, Publicity Girl, and Editor Oliver traverse the wooden walkways over the sodden sod past booths selling gluten-free cupcakes, solar panels, natural sponges, porcelain mermaids, wind chimes tuned to your own chi aura, biodegradable trays of GM-free green curry, eReaders, and hand-stitched Hawaiian quilts. Hershey dons his mask of contempt to ward off unwanted approaches, but a tiny voice is singing in his soul: They know you, they recognize you, you’re back, you never went away … When we reach the signing tables at the bookshop tent, the four of us stop in astonishment. “Hell’s bells, Crispin,” says Editor Oliver, slapping my back.

Festival Elf declares, “Not even Tony Blair got a turnout like this.”

Publicity Girl says, “Wayhay and hurrahs!”

The place is pullulant with punters, cordoned by festival heavies into a snaking queue of Crispin Hershey faithful. Look on my works, Richard Cheeseman, and despair! They’ll be reprinting Echo Must Die by the weekend and a V2 of money is headed straight for the House of Hershey! Victoriously, I gain my table, sit down, knock back the glass of white wine served by the Festival Elf, unsheathe the Sharpie …

… and realize that all these people are here not for me, God sod it, but for a woman sitting at a table ten feet away. My own queue numbers fifteen. Or ten. More frumpet than crumpet. Editor Oliver has turned the color of elderly chicken slices, so I scowl at Publicity Girl for an explanation. “That’s, um, Holly Sykes.”

Oliver’s color returns. “That’s Holly Sykes? Jesus.”

I growl, “Who in the name of buggery is Holey Spikes?”

“Holly Sykes,” says Publicity Girl, falling down the sar-chasm. “She’s written a spiritual memoir called The Radio People. On I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! Prudence Hanson—the artist—was caught reading it, and sales spiraled into hyperspace. The Hay director arranged a last-minute gig and every seat in the Future-Bank Venue was sold out in forty minutes.”

“Three cheers for the Woodstock of the Mind.” I assess the Sykes woman: skinny, earnest, lined; midforties, black hair, with silvery outriders. She’s kind to her punters: Each one gets a friendly word, which only proves how few books she’s ever signed. Envious? No. If she believes her mystic-mumbo she’s a deluded idiot. If she’s cooked it all up, she’s a snake-oil merchant. What’s to envy?

Publicity Girl asks if I’m ready to start signing. I nod. Festival Elf asks if I want a drink. “No,” I tell him. I won’t be here long. My first punter approaches the table. His crumpled brown suit belonged to his dead father and his teeth are the color of caramel. “I’m your biggest, biggest, biggest fan, Mr. Hershey, and my late mother—”

Kill me now. “A G-and-T,” I tell Festival Elf. “More G than T.”

MY LAST PUNTER, a Volumnia from Coventry, treated me to her book group’s thoughts on Red Monkey, which they “quite liked” but found the repetition of the adjectives “sodding” and “buggering” tiresome. Dear reader, Hershey missed not a beat: “So why choose the buggering book in the first sodding place?” A trio of dealers then descended, wanting a stack of first edition Desiccated Embryos signed, thereby increasing their value by five hundred pounds a pop. I asked, “Why should I?” One of the dealers gave me a sob story about driving up from Exeter “special, like, mate, and it’s not like scribbling your name costs you anything,” so I told him that if he paid me 50 percent of the markup on the nail, we’d have a deal. Mate. He vanished in a puff of poverty. Next stop is the first-night party at the BritFone Pavilion, where I am to endure a brief audience with Lord and Lady Roger and Suze Brittan. I stand up—and feel … a sniper’s tracer on my forehead. Who’s that? I look around and see Holly Sykes, watching me. She’s probably curious about real writers. I click my fingers at Publicity Girl. “I’m a celebrity. Get me out of here.”

On our way to the BritFone Pavilion, we pass the smoking tent, sponsored by Win²Win: Europe’s premier facilitator of ethically sourced organs for medical transplant. I tell my minders I’ll be along soon, and although Editor Oliver offers to join me I warn him there’s a two-hundred-pound fine for nonsmokers who don’t light up, and he takes the hint. Publicity Girl checks mumsily that I have my lanyard for getting past the bouncers.

I produce the plastic tag I refuse to wear around my neck. “If I get lost,” I tell her, “I’ll just follow the sound of knives sinking into vertebrae.” Inside the Win²Win tent, fellow initiates of the Order of Nicotine sit on barstools chatting, reading, or gazing hollow-eyed at smartphones, fingers busy. We are relics from the days when smoking in cinemas, airplanes, and trains was the natural order; when the Hollywood hero was identified by his cigarette. Nowadays not even the villains smoke. Now smoking really is an expression of the rebel spirit—it’s virtually sodding illegal! Yet what are we without our addictions? Insipid. Flavorless. Careerless! Dad was addicted to the hurly-burly of getting a film made. Zoë’s addictions are fad diets, one-sided comparisons between London and Montreal, and obsessing over Juno and Anaïs’s vitamin intake.

I light up, fumigate my alveolar sacs, and think dark thoughts about Richard Cheeseman. Someone needs to skewer his reputation; jeopardize his livelihood; see if he shrugs it off with an “I bloody well won’t let it spoil my lunch.” When I stub out my cigarette, I imagine it’s into Cheeseman’s fatuous eye.

“Mr. Hershey?” A short fat boy in glasses and a maroon Burberry jacket interrupts my revenge fantasy. His head is shaved and he’s doughy and ill-looking, like Piggy in Lord of the Flies.

“My signing session’s over. I’ll be back in about five years.”

“No, I wish to give you a book.” The boy is a girl, with a soft American accent. She’s Asian American, or semi–Asian American.

“And I wish to smoke. It’s been a most exhausting few years.”

Ignoring the hint, the girl proffers a thin volume. “My poetry.” A self-funded volume, plainly. “Soul Carnivores, by Soleil Moore.”

“I don’t look at unsolicited manuscripts.”

“Humanity asks you to make an exception.”

“Please don’t think me rude, Miss Moore, but I’d rather perform root-canal surgery on myself, or wake up next to Aphra Booth in the breeding pen of an alien menagerie, or take six shots in the heart at close range than ever read your poems. Do you understand?”

Soleil Moore flaunts her lunatic’s credentials by staying calm. “Nobody wanted William Blake’s work, either.”

“William Blake had the merit of being William Blake.”

“Mr. Hershey, if you don’t read this and act, you’ll be complicit in animacide.” She places Soul Carnivores by the ashtray, wanting me to ask what that made-up word means. “You’re in the Script,” she says, as if that settles everything, before finally buggering off, as if she’s just delivered a killer argument. I take a few more puffs, sifting a conversation nearby: “She said, ‘Hershey’: I thought it was him”; “Nah, can’t be, Crispin Hershey’s not that old”; “Ask him”; “No, you ask him.” Cover blown, I crumple up my death-stick and flee my smoker’s Eden.

THE BRITFONE PAVILION was designed by an eminent architect I’ve never heard of and “quotes” Hadrian’s Wall, the Tower of London, a Tudor manor, postwar public housing, Wembley Stadium, and a Docklands skyscraper. What a sicked-up fry-up it is. A holographic flag of the BritNet logo flutters from its pinnacle and you ingress through a double-sized replica of 10 Downing Street’s famous black door. The security men are dressed as Beefeaters, and one asks for my VIP lanyard. I check my jacket; my trousers; my jacket again. “Oh, sod a dog, I put it down somewhere—look, I’m Crispin Hershey.”

“Sorry, sir,” says the Beefeater. “No ID, no entry.”

“Check your little list. Crispin Hershey. The writer.”

The Beefeater shakes his head. “I got my orders.”

“But I did a sodding event here only an hour ago.”

A second Beefeater comes over, eyes ashine with fan-glow: “You’re never—are you really … him? Oh, my God, you are …”

“Yes, I am.” I glare at the first. “Thank you.”

The Worthy Beefeater walks me through the small lobby where lesser mortals are patted down and have their bags checked. “Sorry about that, sir. The Afghan president’s here tonight so we’re on amber alert. My colleague back there’s not au fait with contemporary fiction. And, to be fair, you do look older on your author photos.”

I double-check this pleasing sentence. “Do I?”

“If I weren’t such a fan, sir, I wouldn’t have recognized you.” We enter the pavilion proper, where hundreds are mingling, but the Worthy Beefeater has a favor to beg: “Look, sir, I shouldn’t ask, but …” he produces a book from inside his ridiculous uniform, “… your new book’s the best thing you’ve ever written. I went to bed with it and read right through to dawn. My fiancée’s mother’s a huge fan too, and, well, for premarital Brownie points, would you mind?”

I produce my fountain pen and the Beefeater hands me his book, already turned to the title page. Only when nib touches paper do I notice I am signing a novel called Best Kept Secret by Jeffrey Archer. I look up at the Beefeater to see if he’s taking the piss, but no: “Would you write ‘To Bridie on your Sixtieth Birthday from Lord Archer’?”

A famous columnist from The Times is standing three feet away.

Dedication written, I tell the bouncer, “So glad you enjoyed it.”

The pavilion contains enough celebrity wattage to power a small sun: I spy two Rolling Stones, a Monty Python; a teenage fifty-something presenter of Top Gear joshing with a disgraced American cyclist; an ex–U.S. secretary of state; an ex–football manager who writes an autobiography every five years; an ex-head of MI6 who cranks out a third-rate thriller annually; and a lush-lipped TV astronomer who writes, at least, about astronomy. We’re all here for the same reason: We have books to flog. “I spy with my little eye the rarest of sights,” an old codger purrs in my ear by the champagne bar, “a literary writer at a literary festival. How’s life, Crispin?”

The stranger absorbs Hershey’s withering stare like a man in his prime with nothing to fear, notwithstanding the damage that Time the Vandal has done to his face. The clawed lines, the whisky nose, the sagging pouches, the droopy eyelids. A silk handkerchief pokes up from his jacket pocket and he wears an elegant fedora, but Sodding Hell. How can the incurably elderly stand it? “And you are?”

“I’m your near future, my boy.” He swivels his once-handsome face. “Take a good, long look. What do you think?”

What I think is that tonight is the Night of the Fruitcakes. “What I think is that I’m no fan of cryptic crosswords.”

“No? I enjoy them. I am Levon Frankland.”

I take the proffered champagne flute and make an underimpressed face. “No bells are going ‘dong,’ I must confess.”

“I’m an old mucker of your father’s from another time. We were both contemporaries at the Finisterre Club in Soho.”

I maintain my underimpressed face. “I heard it finally closed down.”

“The end of the end of an era. My era. We met,” Levon Frankland tilts his glass my way, “at a party at your house in Pembridge Place in, ooh, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, around the time of the Gethsemane jazzamaroo. Amongst the various pies into which I had thrust my sticky fingers was artist management, and your father hoped that an avant-folk combo I represented would work on music for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The plan came to nought, but I remember you, dressed up as a cowboy. You had not long mastered the art of bowel control and social intercourse was still years away, but I’ve followed your career with an avuncular interest, and read your memoir about your dad with relish. Do you know, every few months, I get it into my head to call him and arrange lunch? I clean forget he’s gone! I do so miss the old contrarian. He was sinfully proud of you.”

“Yeah? He did a sodding good job of hiding it.”

“Anthony Hershey was an upper middle class Englishman born before the war. Fathers didn’t do emotions. The sixties loosened things up, and Tony’s films were a part of that loosening, but some of us were better than others at … deprogramming. Crispin, bury that hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself. Believe me. I know of what I speak.”

A hand clasps my shoulder and I spin around to find Hyena Hal smiling like a giant mink. “Crispin! How was the signing?”

“I’ll live. But let me introd—” When I turn back to Levon Frankland, he’s been swept away by the party. “Yeah, the signing was fine. Despite half a million women wanting to touch the hem of some crank who writes about angels.”

“I can spot twenty publishers from here who’ll regret not snapping up Holly Sykes until their dying days. Anyway, Sir Roger and Lady Suze Brittan await the Wild Child of British Letters.”

Suddenly I’m wilting. “Must I, Hal?”

Hyena Hal’s smile dims. “The shortlist.”

Lord Roger Brittan: onetime car dealer; budget hotelier in the 1970s; founder of Brittan Computers in 1983, briefly the U.K.’s leading maker of shitty word processors; acquirer of a mobile phone license after bankrolling New Labour’s 1997 landslide, and setter-upper of the BritFone telecom network that still bears his name, after a fashion. Since 2004 he’s been known to millions via Out on Your Arse!, the business reality show where a clutch of wazzocks humiliate themselves for the “prize” of a £100K job in Lord Brittan’s business empire. Last year Sir Roger shocked the arts world by purchasing the U.K.’s foremost literary prize, renaming it after himself and trebling the pot to £150,000. Bloggers suggest that his acquisition was prompted by his latest wife, Suze Brittan, whose CV includes a stint as a soap star, face of TV’s book show The Unput-downables, and now chairperson of the Brittan Prize’s panel of uncorruptible judges. But we arrive at the canopied corner only to find Lord Roger and Lady Suze speaking with Nick Greek: “I hear what you’re saying about Slaughterhouse-Five, Lord Brittan.” Nick Greek possesses American self-assurance, Byronic good looks, and I already detest him. “But if I were forced at gunpoint to pick the twentieth-century war novel, I’d opt for Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. It’s—”

“I knew you’d say that!” Suze Brittan performs a little victory jig. “I adore it. The only war novel to really ‘get’ trench warfare from the German point of view.”

“I wonder, Lady Suze,” Nick Greek treads delicately, “if you’re thinking of All Quiet on the Western—”

“What German ‘point of view’?” huffs Lord Roger Brittan. “Apart from ‘Totally bloody wrong twice in thirty bloody years’?”

Suze crooks her little finger through her black pearls. “That’s why The Naked and the Dead is so important, Rog—ordinary people on the wrong side suffer too. Right, Nick?”

“To put the shoe on the other foot is the novel’s chief strength, Lady Suze,” says the tactful American.

“Bloody shoddy product branding,” says Lord Roger. “The Naked and the Dead? Sounds like a necrophilia manual.”

Hyena Hal steps in: “Lord Roger, Lady Suze, Nick. Introductions are hardly necessary, but before Crispin leaves—”

“Crispin Hershey!” Lady Suze holds up both hands as if I’m the sun god Ra. “Your event was totes amazeballs! As they say.”

I manage to lift the corners of my mouth. “Thank you.”

“I’m honored,” brownnoses Nick Greek. “In Brooklyn there’s, like, a whole bunch of us, we literally worship Desiccated Embryos.”

“Literally”? “Worship”? I have to shake Nick Greek’s hand, wondering if his compliment is a camouflaged insult—“Everything you’ve done since Embryos is a crock of crap”—or a prelude to a blurb request—“Dear Crispin, totally awesome to hang out with you at Hay last year, would you dash off a few words of advance praise for my new effort?” “Don’t let me interrupt,” I tell the trio, “your erudite insights about Norman Mailer.” I bowl a second googly at the young Turk: “Though for my money, the granddaddy of firsthand war accounts has to be Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.”

“I didn’t read that,” Nick Greek admits, “because—”

“So many books, so little time, I know,” I drain the fat glass of red that elves placed in my hand, “but Crane remains unsurpassed.”

“—because Stephen Crane was born in 1871,” counters Nick Greek, “after the Civil War ended. So can’t really be firsthand. But if Crispin Hershey esteems it,” he whips out an eReader, “I’ll download it right now.”

My gammon lunch repeats on me. “Nick’s novel,” Suze Brittan tells me, “is set in the Afghanistani war. Richard Cheeseman raved about it, and he’s interviewing Nick on my program next week.”

“Oh? I’ll be glued to the set. I heard about it, actually. What’s it called? Highway 66?”

“Route 605.” Nick Greek’s fingertips dance on the screen. “Named after the highway in Helmand Province.”

“Were your sources any more firsthand than Stephen Crane’s?” Obviously not: The closest this pallid boy ever came to armed combat was group feedback on his creative writing MA. “Unless, of course, you were a literate marine in an ex-life?”

“No, but that’s a fair description of my brother. Route 605 wouldn’t exist without Kyle.”

A small crowd, I notice, is now watching us, like tennis spectators. “I hope you don’t feel overly indebted to your brother, or that he doesn’t feel you’ve exploited his hard-won experiences.”

“Kyle died two years ago.” Nick Greek stays calm. “On Route 605, defusing a mine. My novel’s his memorial, of sorts.”

Oh, great. Why didn’t Publicity Girl warn me that Nick Greek’s a sodding saint? Lady Suze is looking like a Corgi just shat me out, while Lord Roger gives Nick Greek a fatherly squeeze on the biceps: “Nick, son, I don’t know yer, and Afghanistan’s a total bloody cock-up. But your brother’d be proud of yer—and I know what I’m on about, ’cause I lost my brother when I was ten. Drowned at sea. Suze was saying—weren’t you Suze?—that Route 605 is my sort of book. So yer know what? I’ll read it over the weekend”—he clicks his fingers at an aide, who taps a smartphone—“and when Roger Brittan gives his word, he bloody well keeps it.” Bodies come between me and the haloed ones—it’s as if I’m being towed away on casters. The last familiar face is that of Editor Oliver, cheered by the future angle of Route 605’s sales graph. I need a drink.

HERSHEY IS not going to vomit. Did Hershey not pass this broken gate earlier? A hunchback tree, a brook that won’t shut up, the puddle reflecting the BritFone holo-logo, the acid reek of cowshit. Hershey is not drunk. Just well oiled. Why am I here? “So far up his own arse he can see daylight.” Gulp it down. The pavilion was a bottomless pit. The mascarpone trifle was ill-advised. “That wasn’t Crispin Hershey, was it?” My shortcut across the car park back to my comfy room at the Coach and Horses has trapped me in a Möbius loop of Land Rovers, Touaregs, and slurping hoofed-up mud. I thought I saw Archbishop Desmond Tutu and I followed him to ask about something that seemed important at the time but it turned out not to be him anyway. So why am I here, dear reader? Because I need to keep my author profile high. Because the £500,000 advance that Hyena Hal extracted for Echo Must Die is gone—half to the Inland Revenue, a quarter to the mortgage, a quarter to negative equity. Because if I’m not a writer, what am I? “Anything new in the pipeline, Mr. Hershey? My wife and I adored Desiccated Embryos.” Because of Nick sodding Greek and the Young Ones, eyeing my place in the throne room of English Literature. Oh, rum, sodomy, and the lash: Mount Vomit is ready to erupt; let us now kneel before the Lord of the Gastric Spasm and all pay homage …

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 596