Your name here, p.13
Your Name Here, page 13
ENNUI.
Too bad! Better luck next time!
Or rather, perhaps I would look at the post.
The post had started to arrive on my third day, and I had already won six free car insurance policies, 20 free trips with no strings attached and 80 free home employment opportunities.
Today I won a free cash prize which I could claim by signing up for health insurance within the next seven days, and another free cash prize which I could claim by joining a book club, and a free car, and a free trip to Florida, and a free semi-detached house, and a free week in Majorca, and I was one of only 10,000 people who had made it to the second round in a draw for a £1,000,000 jackpot and all I had to do was complete the enclosed application form for disability insurance and return it within seven days to qualify for a free prize which I had already won.
Under about thirty envelopes was a small envelope with an actual stamp in one corner and G. de Benedetti in the other.
0940 HOURS.
ECSTASY.
Congratulations! Only 1,500 out of 5,000,000 won genuine Ecstasy in the latest draw. Remember, a pharmaceutical-induced mental state is not genuine! It’s worth waiting for the real thing! The best of British luck to you!
I tore it open.
Dear Ephraim if that is really your name which I doubt, for all I know you are a cunningly disguised serial-axe-murdering millionaire and have buried the dismembered corpse of a student named Ephraim and are now helping yourself to his name,
I hope you are OK. Give me a call.
Gabriela
There was a phone number and an address.
I couldn’t believe my luck.
I did not want to seem too eager so I decided to let a decent interval elapse before calling.
0945 HOURS
ECSTASY.
Congratulations!
Five minutes struck me as a pretty decent interval, all things considered. I called the number and got Gaby’s office.
This is Ephraim, I said.
Who? said Gaby.
You know, I said. I got your letter today.
Oh, right, said Gaby. Is that really your name?
Sadly yes, I said.
I don’t think I believe you, said Gaby. Why should I believe a word you say? I think I’ll call you Alias.
It has a nice ring to it, I said. Would you like to come to my housewarming party?
When is it? said Gaby.
I was thinking maybe tonight, I said.
Who else is coming?
You’re the only one I’ve asked so far, I said. I’m working on a very limited budget. I can only afford one guest.
I think I’m doing something tonight, said Gaby.
I realise it’s very short notice, I said. But I can be flexible about the date.
I’m not sure, said Gaby.
It doesn’t have to be at my place, I said. I mean, I could be anyone. What about an alibi party? We can meet somewhere else at the time of the alleged housewarming party and have a coffee. You don’t want to take chances.
Oh, that’s all right, said Gaby. I’ll come over tomorrow after work.
5
The Ice Queen Cometh
Liebe predigen setzt in denen an die man sich da wendet bereits eine anderen Charakter Struktur voraus,
To preach love already assumes another structure of character in those one addresses
denn die Menschen die man lieben soll, sind ihr selber so, dass sie nicht lieben können, and darum keineswegs so liebenswert.
for the people one should love are themselves such that they cannot love, and so are in no way lovable
Theodor Adorno, Education After Auschwitz
Phone Death
1
The phone rings. The phone rings.
There are people who can’t adjust to the fact that Woody Allen is a morose workaholic. There are people who think John Cleese is a bumbling British twit. There are people who think Steve Coogan is Alan Partridge. There is a type of person (and this is why the misanthropy of the average workaholic comic writer grows more savage with the passing years) who tells the masturbation joke to Woody Allen, the dead parrot joke to Cleese, the knowing-me-knowing-you line to Coogan, laughing heartily the while; who launches into a spirited rendition of “Springtime for Hitler” upon meeting Mel Brooks.
Noszaly was one of these. Having acquired a phone number he seemed to think he must use it. It seemed not to occur to him that I could have called him any time in the previous year, had our last conversation inclined me to do so. A year had gone by, there was no new book, perhaps a deal should be done, if it could have been done without further telephone conversations perhaps I would have done it.
Perhaps you have had this experience. You go to see Good Will Hunting, the film that launched Damon and Affleck. The film is about a working-class genius (Damon) who is psychologically disturbed. He is sent for counselling to Robin Williams. You fear the worst. Williams wins the boy’s trust; the boy was beaten by his father, still has a scarred back. They hug, the boy weeps, Williams will always be there for him. Scene follows scene. The boy returns to Williams’ office; Williams is packing up! What’s going on? Williams explains that he is going to be sailing around the world—but he will be checking his messages. He can always be reached.
This is a scene of unsurpassed pricelessness. You howl. Suddenly you realise that you are the only one laughing.
Comic writers live in a cold hell. They see pricelessness where the warmhearted dimwitted see something to warm the cockles of a myopic heart. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. What did Albright say when she sent fifty peacekeepers to Rwanda? We want to show the seriousness of our intentions.
Noszaly sent e-mails saying he wanted to do something fun for a change. It’s a funny book, he said. If it’s not fun, what’s the point? He was forty-something, a pampered baby boomer, he did not talk about the erosion of student funding in Britain under Thatcher, Major, Blair, he did not talk about galloping fee and degree inflation in America, he did not talk about
Don’t tell me about the future. Tell me about the past.
1.1 = ١.١
once upon a time = 1999 = ١٩٩٩
a kingdom far far away = England
It started well. It went wrong.
First things first. Be paranoid, be very paranoid.
If you go online to www.perseus.tufts.edu you will find the Perseus Digital Library, which includes a wide selection of classical texts both in the original Greek and Latin and in translation. There are online dictionaries and commentaries, and if you click on a word you can get the dictionary entry and grammatical information. This is a good thing since you can be in, as it might be, Kathmandu or Palatka and have access to texts unlikely to be available locally. There are, however, a few gnats in the Coppertone. In the first place, the translations and commentaries seem to have been chosen because they are out of copyright, which means they date back to the 19th or early 20th century; the unwary surfer has no access to modern scholarship. The texts themselves, moreover, lack information that all reputable publishers provide as a matter of course: an account of the manuscript tradition and an apparatus criticus (a list of important manuscript variants, normally placed at the bottom of the page). Third and worst, the site does not alert the user to these omissions. The smartass DIYer has no way of knowing the gap between what is on offer and the requirements of serious scholarship. The Digital Library is free; a single modern commentary from Oxford University Press could set you back a cool £50 or so; if you didn’t already know what serious scholarship looks like you wouldn’t know that you didn’t know.
Take paranoia for a quick gallop. Say you visit the Institut du monde arabe in Paris and pick up the Dictionnaire des écrivains palestiniens; you know some French and some Arabic and it has no English-language equivalent, so you pay the 20 euros in a mood of optimism. The entries are in both French and Arabic; you have a look at Ihsan Abbas. The Arabic tells you he translated Theocritus, Virgil, Sidney’s Arcadia, Wordsworth, Shelley. The French tells you he translated Theocritus, Virgil and Shelley. The Arabic tells you he translated Moby-Dick. The French passes this over in silence. But. A. Translating Moby-Dick, isn’t that pretty impressive? Is this really a trifle to be shrugged aside? And B. Isn’t this in fact a significant undertaking? Does it really take such a leap of the imagination to see what a Palestinian might see in Moby-Dick, and why he might think it should be available to Arab readers? But if the French you happened to look at has these gaps, how can you trust any of the other entries?
In other words, you always need to know enough to know when you’re being lied to. A youthful smartass needs only one or two examples to see getting a degree as a good idea. If degrees came as cheap as the Digital Library this would not have caused problems.
So. Late afternoon, late October. Costa Coffee, George Street, Oxford. There were 45 messages on the mobile phone. The phone might have been in a library so it was turned off.
The body sat in a semicircular tan leatherette chair. The brain picked up Czech and Croatian the way a radio picks up scraps of distant broadcasts amid angry static. It liked a Glaswegian accent across the room. There was much more English in the air but the brain was trying to screen it out.
By a complicated procedure 12 years of education by tombola had been cosmetically enhanced to functionality. It would not fool a stickler for detail, no. It was not the sort of thing an openminded Oxford college gung-ho on widening access would congratulate itself on being prepared to overlook. No. But it bore a family resemblance to the sort of thing an openminded Oxford college gung-ho on widening access would congratulate itself on being prepared to overlook. This had sufficed to win admission to read Literae Humaniores at a college which had best remain nameless, given what is to follow. Admission to read Lit. Hum. (Greek and Latin literature plus or minus Greek and Roman history, Greek and Austro-Anglo-American philosophy) brought with it open access to all university lectures, many attached to courses for which no amount of cosmetic enhancement could have achieved mimicry of an eligible candidate.
Religious fanaticism hit Oxford 500 years ago; it’s a pretty place now. It seemed I would not be in this pretty place much longer.
The mother had read History at Bristol in the late 70s when a maintenance grant was provided for natives. This handsome provision had survived in folk memory through twenty years of reform by Thatcher, Major, Blair. No one in the kinship system had wanted to believe that money must now be found. Conversations had relayed the unwelcome fact; documentary evidence had supported the claim and been ignored. Each stepparent encouraged parsimony in the relevant bloodparent, each step had suggestions for fundraising: the opposite blood, the opposite step, the bloods of the opposite blood. Or what about casting the net wider? What about France? Austria? Germany? Australia?
The college wanted £1,270 for nine weeks’ rent at £95/week and a standing charge.
That is the short story, but the story was not short because so many people had so many things they needed to say.
I had once had credit cards in the names of W B Latimer, J J Kapur, D K M Beardsley, T R Doyle, A J Courakis, S T Lloyd, Jaakko Niinistö and D N Eriksen. A member of the kinship system had found them and confiscated them when I was 16. I now had a WWF Visa and an Amnesty Mastercard in the name of A J P Ffoulkes, and a CapitalOne Visa and Greenpeace Mastercard in the name of P K Sanghera. What if I took a £1000 cash advance off two cards? I could use a cashpoint, where no photo ID was required. I could pay the college and live on the balance, keeping enough cash in reserve to make minimum payments on the cards until a member of the kinship system sent a cheque. Yes.
There would be more time for cash to flow. Yes.
It was not that it could not be done, no. But sooner or later it would be necessary to talk affectionately to people who did not want to be loved for their money.
The nominal cardholders were both persons worth seducing to debt with clock-radios, gym bags and six months’ interest-free credit on balance transfers. If the statements had been coming to me I could have gone on indefinitely transferring the balance from one card to another. Unfortunately they were all going to an address in Boca Raton, the only one I knew that was uninhabited, and I could not see a way of repatriating them. I was living in college, collecting post from a pigeonhole.
There were seven or eight people at the next table. There was a turquoise wool coat with a belted waist. There was a 50s cotton sateen frock of olive green, brown and black cocktail glasses on a white ground with two bows at the waist; there were red Dr Scholls. There was a blue Andean jumper with a pattern of brown and white llamas. I tried to follow some Croatian two tables away but there was quite a lot of English interference from the turquoise wool coat, finally I said Look Dad, I’ve taken three fucking gap years, and he said Well, if that’s the way you want it, Siobhan, and he became quite embittered. So then his girlfriend told me she had written for Black Lace cause it was quite a feminist thing to do in the 80s and she showed me this story about a Russian aristocrat taken captive by the savage leader of a Cossack tribe and she said if I could do it it was an easy thousand squid.
The brain was at its eavesdropping. It can eavesdrop in twenty languages, more or less (graph to come); it picks up not just grammatical information and vocabulary but registers of class, sex, age, profession, others for which an obtuse world has developed no classification. It analyses the logical structure of each incoming message; it identifies primate signalling patterns. All speech comes loaded with information, most unknown to the speaker. Direct speech is difficult because the brain must construct a person out of linguistic phenomena; it must also assemble linguistic phenomena into a speaking self.
In a work of fiction someone who is driven berserk by certain aspects of social life is accommodated by family and school (see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time). In the world it’s different. It’s dangerous to tell people that something drives you berserk: something inside wants to see what happens. If you make an effort people think you can always make an effort, so they go on requiring you to make the effort until you crack up. But if you do then jump off a cliff or disappear they either think it is exhibitionism or start talking about electro-shock therapy.
That is why the mobile phone was off only when it could be in a library or lecture. It is necessary to maintain a mobile phone if forms are to be filled to a deadline, if cheques are to be sent, these things don’t just happen, but possession of the instrument does mean that one can be perceived to be uncontactable and the worst assumed.
I was still trying to glean some Croatian but the mind was drawn to the easy thousand, it wanted to know if she had done the deed and meanwhile there was more interference, a boy’s father had read The Big Deal about a man who turned professional poker player he wanted to leave my mum but he was skint so he played poker online instead and at one point he was £20,000 up but then he lost £20,000 and another £20,000 so I went to the bursary and they basically told me to piss off.
People made sympathetic noises, and then everyone had a story, everyone had something to say.
The sad stories were no different from the ones that circulate the kinship system, but an eavesdropper is not taxed for sympathy. An eavesdropper can leave at any time.
Siobhan says whenever she has to ask for money she buys a scratchcard first, because if she won £100,000 she would not have to ask. Everyone at the table says they do that too, if they have to ask their parents for money they always buy a scratchcard because of the incredible hassle, and then they say, Or there’s always the novel, and everyone laughs.
1.1.1 = ١.١.١
My father had sent an e-mail announcing a brief visit to London for the bar-mitzvah of the son of a close friend. He would be staying at Claridge’s and proposed lunch. I bought a scratchcard at the newsagent on Gloucester Green, a £100,000 parent-avoidance opportunity for the price of £1 (Just Scratch and Match 3 Numbers and Claim Your Prize!!!!).
£1
£100,000
£20
£50
£1
£10,000
£100,000
£10
£50
Too bad, better luck next time. I bought a student period return to London on the Oxford Tube for £8.
Barak and Arafat had signed a new peace agreement on 3 September in Sharm el-Sheikh, a glamorous Egyptian resort. My father was not one to discuss politics. There would be brownie points for attending the bar mitzvah, which was to take place at a grand synagogue in Portland Place. One wears a posh frock and a hat. It was not unlikely that he had given the boy a cheque for £1000. I made a telephone call to propose, arrange. My father’s mother was an Iranian Jew; my father’s father had died when he was 12; my grandmother was not on speaking terms with her family, but my father had made a point of pushing for the rite of passage, seeing the potential in it. He would welcome posh frocked and hatted support for a friendship that had merited a special trip to London. Yes.
I had a cream crepe de chine pleated dress with a dropped waist, a cream straw cloche with a black silk rose on the brim and cream grosgrain shoes with a large bow over the instep, the sort of Merchant-Ivory ensemble for which my father was always happy to foot bills. I went to Gloucester Green at 7.30 am Saturday morning. There was a bus at 7.50. I bought a scratchcard which revealed the sums:
£25
£10,000
£2
£50
£2
£100
£100,000
£10
£100,000
The Oxford Tube puffed and sighed. The body took its costume to the upper deck. It opened Selby-Bigge’s edition of Hume’s Enquiry into Human Understanding and the mind sucked up the words of the peacock philosopher, the words which had roused Kant from his dogmatic slumbers.
