‘I don’t know. You tell me.’ She levels her gaze at me like a challenge.
‘It’s interestingly metafictional—’ I begin.
‘But only in the context of this situation,’ she interrupts. ‘But then doesn’t that make it even more metafictional?’
I think about how to answer. ‘Metafiction isn’t one of my specialist areas,’ I say. ‘But we do have a PhD student doing research on it. I’m just wondering if it gets a bit Grand Guignol?’
‘But nothing happens,’ she says, taking hold of her ponytail, drawing it over her shoulder. ‘It’s all implied. Nothing happens on stage, as it were.’
‘But if it were to happen, as implied, wouldn’t it be a bit Grand Guignol?’
She looks at my bookcase. If she looks hard enough she will see my small collection devoted to Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty. She might even spot my copy of Richard J. Hand’s Grand-Guignoclass="underline" The French Theatre of Horror. She might wonder why I’ve implied that Grand Guignol is a bad thing.
‘Are you a bit creeped out by the thought of me walking down your street and checking out your place?’ she asks.
‘That would be a very predictable response.’
‘You wouldn’t want to be thought of as predictable.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Did I at least get the commas in the right place?’ she asks with her head on one side.
I smile. ‘It’s a good story,’ I say. ‘It’s publishable.’
‘Where could I send it?’
‘I keep a list of magazines up to date on my machine. An increasingly short list. I’ll email that to you with one or two suggestions.’
‘Thanks. Maybe there’s one that specialises in Grand Guignol?’
I don’t take my eyes from her.
‘What about you?’ she asks. ‘What are you working on?’ Once again, she has been very direct.
‘Bits and pieces.’
‘A novel?’
‘Maybe. Bits of journalism. Restaurant reviews.’
‘Cool.’
She looks away again. I am not sure whether I should say what is in my mind. Either I say it or I don’t. Either it turns out to be the wrong thing to say, or it leads to something. I wonder if she really has read my novel, as suggested by her story.
‘I’m writing about south Manchester, too,’ I say. ‘Using real places, actual locations.’
‘Really?’ That she doesn’t look back at me immediately as she says this tells me she is more interested than she appears.
‘Well, it’s very early stages. I’m not really writing, just researching.’
‘How do you research?’ she asks, finally turning back towards me.
‘I hang around the airport, watch the planes, talk to pilots. Drive around Cheadle and Heald Green at night. I find it very fertile ground. Stories grow there. Industrial areas that change character after dark. Business parks with one or two poorly paid security guards nodding off over their screens and car parks full of Mercedes and Audis.’
‘Sounds fascinating,’ she says, deadpan.
I try out a little laugh and she smiles.
‘I’d best be off,’ she says.
At the door, she turns and says, ‘Maybe I should check out Cheadle? Get more of a sense of place.’
I wait. We both know I can’t be the one to suggest it.
‘I could go with you,’ she says at last.
‘Good idea,’ I say. ‘I’ll email you.’
After she has gone I return to my desk and pick up Helen’s typescript. I put it back on the pile of papers next to the PC and leaf through what’s there. There are several cuttings from the Guardian. More writers’ rooms. Here’s Michael Frayn’s. Some reference books on the desk, a German dictionary. The same one I have at home, I see. The same typeface on the thick spine. I wonder what he uses his for. I remember buying Michael Frayn novels for Veronica after she had read and enjoyed Headlong. I had thought of him as a playwright, primarily, before Headlong came out and was shortlisted for a prize or won a prize, but then I would come across his earlier novels in second-hand bookshops while browsing to add to my Penguin shelves. I remember buying one novel in particular and giving it to Veronica and her saying, ‘I’ve read this one. You bought me this one in hardback,’ and I remembered I had picked up an ex-library edition, very cheap, somewhere. Perhaps in a library.
I carry on through the pile of cuttings. Sarah Waters. Not a book in sight. Instead she has a map of the world and a poster on the wall with a wartime motto: ‘KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON’. Hilary Mantel’s room is also book-free. She writes in the main room of her flat in a converted Victorian asylum in Surrey. There’s no stuff or clutter. She has the same desk as Andrew O’Hagan and Antonia Fraser. A. S. Byatt’s room looks more like my own with its ‘purposeful disorder’, a glass case of large insects and another German dictionary. There’s a row of books on the window ledge, where they will spoil in the sun, their titles only half visible.
I sit at my desk in my study at the top of the house. The laptop is open but I am not writing. I had been looking at websites of office furniture suppliers, but the screen has gone dark through lack of use. I am actually looking at the seven pieces of red moulded plastic lined up on the desk next to it. These came out of the mound of rubble and crap in the back garden. They are all obviously from the same source, originally part of some coherent object that has been broken apart. The temptation is to try to fit them together, as if they were part of a jigsaw puzzle, but I have tried and it is clear that many pieces are missing. Three of the seven fragments I have are flat, four are curved. There are no markings or patterns, no scraps of any other material present. I have washed them in warm soapy water to remove any trace of the various other substances found in the landfill.
‘What do you think, Cleo?’ I ask the cat curled up in the armchair behind me. ‘What do these come from? What are they? Eh?’
I pick up the biggest piece and slot my thumb into its curved hollow. I get up and move away from the desk. Cleo stirs, but remains where she is.
‘What about you, Mr Fox?’ I look at the stuffed fox’s head as I stroke the red plastic with the pads of my fingers. ‘What do you think? What do you have to say?’
I remember being in the back of a car, my parents’ car. It was late, dark outside. My father was driving slowly, then speeding up, then slowing down again. He was leaning across my mother to see out of her window. They were trying to read house numbers in the darkness, looking for a particular address. He would slow down, they would both rake their eyes over the porches and doorsteps and brick walls and pebbledash and either see a number or not see one, and the car would roll slowly forwards, then my father would step on the accelerator once more, always a second or two before returning his gaze to the road ahead.
I saw it first. The golden flank, white underparts, face turned towards the oncoming car. Imprinted on the Kodak paper of the suburban night by flashgun headlamps. And then my father put his foot down again. I cried out, too late. The impact rocked the car, my father standing on the brake pedal. He got out and picked the animal up and laid it across my mother’s lap. Her face was white. I watched in rapt silence as a trickle of dark blood escaped from the corner of the fox’s mouth.
I knew the animal was dead, but the gentle motion of the car gave it the illusion of life.
And then, every time my father turned a corner, the fox’s head lolled and swung on its broken neck.
A week later, my father presented me with the fox’s head on a mahogany mount. I called him Mr Fox.