Mo sucked dolly noodles from a tupperware bowl. She talked about the journey, talked about the city. Gravy dripped from her chin as she twisted the controls on the hob. I flicked crumbs into the blue flame.

“Are these mum’s chairs?” Mo said, “They’re creaky now.”

“They’re old now,” I said.

“We’re all old now,” she said, “But some of us don’t creak.”

Ageing is something this city inflicts. Mo’s eyes had grown black.  Deep lines on either side of her nose held her mouth like chopsticks.

She had given up being alone, she said. I could see that. People make their mark on you. They make you laugh or cry. They keep you awake at night or help you feel safe while you sleep. There had been both kinds in Mo’s life.

I liked quiet nights in the creaky chair. The house felt hollow. No one’s shadow fell on me. No empty words or promises of love.

“Are there any more of these?” she said, tapping her bowl with a fork.

“In the cupboard,” I said.

She opened it. There was soy sauce and vegetable bouillon and a whole shelf of instant noodles. Packets blue and pink and green. Cartoon shrimp and chicken and fish with Disney eyes, anthropomorphised. Characters in a language I could not read.

“Put the kettle on,” she said.

Ramshackle thought is blistering the surface of his brain. His voice breaks and spits in highly pitched discord; unfinished sentences, tongue-stuffed with nursery cadences. This all deceives.

Too much study, they said. A Phd candidate, once. Mathematics.  I hear the gossip, guess and embellish.

“One pint,” he demands. No more. The lace of froth from the last still clings to the glass. I have to refuse. I step close to whisper it.

He snorts. Pudgy, toy features become more pink. His head tips back and round and back and he looks me through the eye.

I’m sorry. He shakes his head, puckered mouth and nostrils wide. Indignation’s parody. They will serve him elsewhere, he says. Everybody knows David. He jabs a pointed finger at the stippled ceiling, trips over untied laces and leaves.

No one speaks. It thickens. A man with yellow hair, curled tight, counts the minutes in gulps. Stan is his name.

“It’s dodgy,” says Stan, ordering more beer, “Someone like him could just turn, couldn’t he?”

He could. He could turn back.

I look past Stan and the metal mesh on the window as David approaches the stoop. Face tight around his teeth, eyes winking, unable to synchronise. He slams through the outer door and spins into the foyer.

There is a square of reinforced glass in the interior door. Through it, I see him pace and turn. I see him shadow box and spit and get red. And while I watch, I forget that I am eating crisps. I forget to chew and swallow. The paste dries in my mouth.

I look back and he’s been waiting. Waiting for me to look. He kicks the door open and stamps straight, or what passes for straight, to the bar.

“Are you going to serve me or what?”
I must stay calm. I quietly refuse. His arm springs horizontal. A fist forms at its end as furious as the child it’s connected to.

“I’m normal! Normal, normal the baker’s son.”

I don’t doubt it. Once. Twice. I don’t know the numbers or the formula. I know about the trust placed in me, the canyon behind his eyes, the salty taste in my mouth.

I have my instructions.

When Brod croaked, he left the existential treasures to his secretary, who left them in turn to her own daughters. And that’s why, technically, ownership of Kafka’s remaining works is now in the hands of people with only the most tenuous link to the writer.

Ah! But there’s a dissenting voice. The government of Israel says that Kafka’s works are part of their cultural heritage and is claiming them as its own. You know, because Kafka was Jewish.

The secretary’s daughters already have a buyer lined up; the German government. IRONIC! And no one seems to have bothered asking the Czechoslovakian state what they think about all this…

It would be tempting to observe that this plot is like something out of Kafka, but it’s not really. While the labyrinthine bureaucracy of state versus individual is reminiscent of the writer’s work, it’s far too epic to be truly Kafkaesque. If anything, it reminds me much more of Vonnegut… Which really spoils the end of this post.

Anyway – read more at the BBC news website.

UPDATE

The Guardian’s Comment is Free section has a more detailed reflection of the events surrounding the unseemly grab for Kafka’s assets, with more background on Israel’s justification for its claim. No one is coming off well here…

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I’m not putting too much stock in this. It also told me I write like James Joyce and Stephen King.

http://www.viruscomix.com/page523.html

Perhaps I was naive: the chapter contained a time-lapse mirror, a mystical stream that animals refused to cross and a fob-watch made by Da Vinci.

I don’t read fantasy novels at all. Never have. The Hobbit was read to me at school, but I gave up 20 pages into the Lord of the Rings. I’ve never read Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams. When I’m in proximity to an adult reading JK Rowling, I become queasy.

I’ve always been aware of fantasy fiction. As a teenager I read lots of sci fi. I would buy yellowing short story anthologies from a long gone second hand book shop. It introduced me to authors I still love; Philip K. Dick, Tom Disch, Alfred Bester – even Borges and Ballard. I liked the multiverse narratives and time travel paradoxes. I loved soft, psychological science fiction. Speculative fiction, Harlan Ellison campaigned to have it re-labeled.

But, in all that time, I never knowingly made it more than a few pages into a bona-fide fantasy story. Or, perhaps I mean Fantasy – big, capital F – with their flutey names and fairytale-written-large world building.

The assumption that the novel I’m writing is Fantasy, with a big F, seems to come from the fact that it has magical and metaphysical elements. But, this in turn is simply a reflection of a wider interest I have in the nature of perception. I have, for example, a novel idea in the bank about deception and cons. Another (which I’m intending to write before I finish the larger project I’m currently working on) has a theme running through that explores the disconnection between the real self, the self people project and the self people perceive.

I am interested in fiction that has magical or metaphysical elements. But did Marquez or Calvino write fantasy? What about John Collier? Is Will Self’s Dorian a fantasy novel? Or Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow? Or Iain Banks’s The Bridge? Or Chuck Pahlahniuk’s Lullaby?  All have fantastic elements and other-worldly devices. All are considered contemporary fiction.

I’m not quite arrogant enough to put myself in the same league – but I’m aiming in that direction, rather than in the direction of, say, Raymond E. Feist or Robin Hobb.

Does that make me a snob?

I’m not sure. One thing I do know is, I’m not keen to have that label put on my work so early. Not because I categorically don’t think that it’s fantasy. It’s possible that you might find enough points of similarity to prove that it is. But, it’s also other things.

I’m keen to avoid the label because genre writing is a ghetto. Fantasy, horror, sci-fi… they have smart and loyal fans. If my work’s good enough, they’ll find it anyway. But, do mainstream readers venture into the section of Waterstones full of Harry Potter, Discworld and Twilight? Can you cross the other way?

The more I think about it, the concept of a mystical stream that animals refuse to cross seems plausible.

So the agent says “OK, I’ll indulge you, how does it go?”

“Well, my wife, my twelve year old daughter, her four year old brother and I come onto the stage. In a loud clear voice I announce ‘My wife and I are in favour of a feudal system of subsistence in which we own the means of production, paying a downtrodden proletariat labour force minimum wage to work long hours in our factory while we ponce around in the countryside chasing foxes on horseback’. Then we send the kids to boarding school on the proceeds, spending the rest on big dinner parties, antique furniture and fine wines”.

The agent looks at the guy for a minute and says, “That’s quite an act you got there, what do you call it?”

And the guy says “The Aristocrats!”.

—

P.S. Go here if you didn’t get it.

On the blue Formica top a gallon canister of used vegetable oil glugged its contents into a bucket. To filter out burnt crumbs, she covered its mouth with an old pair of pants. Knickers, her mum used to call them. Everything these days is so Americanised, she would say.

Bag check. There was water in a Coke bottle and bread wrapped in newspaper.  There was an adjustable spanner and a screwdriver; tools on a good day, potential weapons on another. And in the bottom, in the blue light from a wind-up torch, a few sticking plasters, some ibuprofen and a cluster of sherbert lemons.

The pail brimming, she began unlocking the kitchen door. Dead-lock first, top bolt, bottom bolt, Yale. She looked out through the crack, the width of half a face, down the path and through the weeds. She’d need to take care of those. Back towards the garden – the communal garden she used to share with old Mary upstairs, that she now shared with the street – the potatoes were through and would need digging in again. No sign of carrots yet. She pulled the door closed for a moment, leaving a peardrop ghost of breath outside. She undid the chain and heaved the bucket through with two hands.

The funnel was where she’d left it; fixed with a length of hairy string, pendulum swinging from the passenger side wing mirror. She unlocked the old Volvo’s diesel cap, decanted the oil. It smelled like chips in a tray and plastic forks. The memory of them.

As she tipped fuel into the car she heard her name called hoarsely. Over her shoulder, a netball’s throw down the street, was Cecil Lumus. When she spelled his name in her head, it was See-sill. He had been jogging, trying to catch up with her, yellow vest patchy with sweat. Now he was resting, panting, palms on his cords. He waved.

“Rosie,” he said, with too little breath to say it, too quiet for her to hear. He had a bandage on his right hand trailing a grey tail, a stain like jam on the back. She put down the bucket.

“Cecil,” she said, “What you running for?”

“I didn’t. Want. To miss you,” he said, fat chest spreading, contracting and spreading. He put a hand in his pocket, pulled out a blue inhaler, clicked the cartridge and sucked. It was empty.
“You haven’t missed me. What’s the fuss?” she patted his back, his scratchy jacket.
“It’s Dor,” he said, hands still on his knees, “She’s not right yet,”
“You need me to get some medicine?”
“No. No,” he said, standing and stretching, “Ben. He’s looking out for her”.

Ben had done two years at medical school. Rosie remembered him from the Copywriter’s Arms; haircut like pineapple fronds and a posh voice that carried over the jukebox. His quiz team had always come second. Still did.

“Dor has a sister in Camden. My phone’s not working,”
“No one’s phone works any more Mr. Lumus,” said Rosie.
He took out an envelope, purple, smelling of lavender.
“You want me to take this to her?”
Cecil nodded. He took off his little grey trilby and fanned himself with it.
“No problem,” she said, “It’s already on its way,”

She put the note in her satchel and took Cecil’s hand. He was breathing more easily.

“Do you want a lift to the end of the street?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” said Cecil, “I want to sit for a while,”

The Volvo started on the third try, burping cobalt smoke from the exhaust as Rosie drove along South Terrace towards Bedford Road, past the park, past Alexandra Palace, slow enough to look long and hard at London through the black trees. Everything was the same as it had always been.

A bit of a cheat this one… first draft was done in 15 minutes – but polishing doubled the word count. Not so much fast as medium paced, then.

I turned the brass doorknob, bigger than my hand. Mr Crampton was waiting, trumpet poised, turning pages.  A Sugarloaf Mountain silhouette against arched, white-out windows, he inspects crotchets and minims, quavers and semitones, with half moon glasses.

There were two chairs. High, wooden and as brown as burning butter. Seats of brittle leather and horsehair stuffing were squashed into inverted buttock shapes. Mr. Crampton’s and mine.

I heaved the torn, brown case onto the desk and popped the clasps. Inside, a soprano cornet; a nest of tarnished tubes, like pipes in a cellar.

Mr. Crampton settled on a page, bent the spine of the book over his bristly knee. Rattling valves, the mouthpiece held close to his lips; a thin bow accented by a circumflex of moustache.

“Au Clair de la Lune, Mr. Bradley,” he said.

The mouthpiece, unwrapped, would not find its way into the instrument. A thin metal cuff, worn from replacement and removal, refused penetration.

Mr. Crampton remained still, fingers in first position.

I sat and raised the assembled cornet to my puckered lips. The taste, like an old teaspoon.

“Au Clair de la Lune, Mr. Bradley,” said Mr. Crampton.

Starting on G – four crotchets, two minims. Another bar of crotchets, a dotted minim. The music rests for half a note. It stops for a breath and…

“No, no, no,” said Mr. Crampton, “Has this instrument been cleaned?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Open the water valve,”

I blew through the open cornet. Nothing but a pipe, now. A meagre dribble from morning practice leaked from the hole.

“Again,” he said.

One, two, three, four. Three. Four. One, two, three, four, one…

“Stop!” he said, “The minim is dotted, then a rest. Da da, DA da, daa… then wait,”

In the silence, Mr. Crampton’s amphibian eyes rolled white and skywards.

“Have you practiced?” he asked.

“Yes,”

“Every day?”

“Yes.”

He slapped down his hair, greased into a flap, short white bristles at the back and at the sides.

“Again. Two, three, four,”

And this time I only played two bars. Just eight beats.

“No!” he cried, slapping the book. The music stand teetered, wobbled and righted itself. He covered his eyes, inhaling long through congested nostrils, whistling a perfect C.

“I should be selling snow to Eskimos!” he said, mist popping from thin lips trained to spit air, “I may as well with all… this!”

He gestured towards me, my borrowed cornet, the mothballed room. My chair rocked back on two legs creaking.

“I ask you to practice, you don’t practice. I ask you to clean your instrument and it is filthy. It is filthy!”

His face was red. Red pushing at the walls of his veins and his body, escaping. And he trembled. A shiver and a twitch that pulsed accelerated in his pink hands and pounded inside his waistcoat.

“It is filthy like you. Filthy like all of you!” he spat, the valve now fully open. No music – just a tangle of pipes. And this time, when he hit the book, it flapped and clattered across the room along with the stand and the notes and the song about the moonlight.

Then I spoke. He did not hear me.  I could not hear myself over the sting. I was wet. My face and my new school trousers. I was filthy. My mum would kill me.

I said:

“I did practice,”

Though he did not hear, he looked. His face became soft, jowls quivering like an old dog’s. The blood drained away and he fussed in his pockets.

“Oh, my dear boy,” he said, “Blow your nose”.

He handed me a paper tissue. I wiped my face and blew my nose. I offered the tissue back.

“No, no, put it away. Save it for later,” he said.

I did as I was told.

“There’s no need for tears now,” he said, “It’s only a tune,”

I nodded. Held my cornet hard on my lap, hooks and collars catching my fingers. He picked up the book and the stand. Tears still came, swelling inside me and silently bursting through. One drip. Another.

“Here,” he said, holding out a brown mint in a cellophane wrapper, “There’s no need for all this. No need for anyone to know. We know how to play this, don’t we? You and I?”

I nodded. The humbug was buttery.

“What’s the first note?”

I looked. The dots and lines meant nothing.  Sticks and scratches, now. Doodles on a page.

“What are the notes on the stave. How do we remember?” said Mr. Crampton. He placed his hand on the back of my head.

“Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” I said.

“That’s good,” said Mr. Crampton, “So the first note is?”

“G,” I said.

“That’s good,” said Mr. Crampton, “That’s very good”.

A year was missed out.

The Booker’s archivist, Peter Straus, is resurrecting the lost prize, with a long list drawn from the best novels of 1970.

The intriguing thing about this exercise is just how packed the list is with names you actually know, rather than reading room debutantes you’d usually have to Google.

Giants like Iris Murdoch, Christy Brown, Joe Orton, Shiva Naipaul and H.E. Bates. It’s like a greatest hits list. There’s also more than a little nod in the direction of populism with Melvyn Bragg, David Lodge, Ruth Rendell and Len Deighton appearing.  Christ, Brian Aldiss is even on there.

Brian W. Aldiss. The Science Fiction author who wrote the critically acclaimed “Barefoot in the Head”.  Imagine Iain Banks getting on the list now?

This stellar list is possible because, ironically, Straus stuck to Booker rules. All the novels in this re-run competition are still in print.

A couple of thoughts bubble up. The first is, what incredible work may we have missed due to the absence of the Booker that year? Which first time novelist, in an alternate reality, parlayed the attention they received into an entire career?

Of course, we could have missed some awful dross too.

This is a Darwinian Booker list. There may have been more novels eligible for the list in 1970, but perhaps the lack of demand for them 40 years on says something about their quality. This list has been chosen by time. By survival.  And so,  for once, it’s a Booker long list that you might actually want on your bookshelf.