It was out of despair that it started. But I became, gradually, as I applied myself to the task, more positive. Even, at times, enthusiastic. This was a project I could proceed with methodically. It was practical, measurable. I could use index cards and cork boards and diagrams. I could structure my plot like an architect designs a house. A small, functional, unlovely house, but a house nonetheless. My enthusiasm excited me.
But it started in despair. Why should anyone be surprised about where it ends?
I steeled myself. I adopted cynicism. I did my best to dampen the excitement. Stay cynical, stay in control.
Not a children’s book, and not fantasy. I could not be that cynical. I have no feeling for either genre, and no aptitude for the brazen sort of manipulation it would take to fake it. Which is too bad.
Memoir, perhaps. My own name, my Staffordshire childhood, Cambridge, the years in Mexico and Peru, the accident, the affair, my disastrous marriage. But I knew that it didn’t amount to very much. And so it would turn to fiction, and I would be back where I had already been, forging pointless middle-class dramas out of self-importance and idleness.
A thriller, then. A thriller. Death in the best sense. I would take my depressive tendency and use it as a weapon. A dark foreboding thriller in which death comes and tickles us, and sets us a puzzle and lets us escape. It would need to be sharp, succinct; an irresistible one page pitch — and perhaps two or three sample chapters — and I would need to get it to Stanley as quickly as I could. Then he could do his thing. Sell it. To the highest bidder. Sell the film rights. Sell the serial rights. Sell. Sell. Sell.
The poplar tree swayed and shattered the setting sun, and the black clouds marched westwards, and the air was brittle, ready for anything. From below there was music, a compressed ticking and click, like a cartoon bomb in a matchbox, while over my head footsteps sounded in short inscrutable patterns, like chess moves, expressions of thought, punctuation, a code.
I made notes. I thought about death. I thought about deception and hiding and method. But I was distracted by the end result. I wrote out lists of potential pseudonyms for myself. Lists of possible names for my hero. I thought about Rosemary. She has a friend — Mandy or Melinda or something — whose partner is a Metropolitan police officer called Child. The name had stayed with me, though I’d never met him. It could be arranged, I supposed. At some stage I would need access to the lexicon and procedures of the murder squad. Or whatever they’re called.
But I was treading water, fog bound, unsure what it was I should do. The way ahead did not seem, now that I was looking for it, as obvious as I had hoped. But then Will McArdle spoke to me. And he blew a gust of wind in my direction and the mists cleared, and I not only knew which way to go but I was certain too of my destination and of what I needed to do to get there and of the reward that awaited me. Cynicism was replaced by conviction, and I believed with the certainty of a true believer, and I doubted not my place in paradise.
Will McArdle is an Irishman who lives near me in Crouch End. Almost Crouch End. I am on the Archway side, he is on the Turnpike Lane side. He, like me, rents a flat. He, like me, is recently separated. In his case, there are children. He writes for television. We met years ago at some sort of publisher’s party, and formed a casual, maudlin sort of friendship. We used to meet, not very often, in odd little bars to drink and to complain about our respective partners. Rosemary followed me once, convinced I was meeting a woman. I didn’t notice. She told me about it later. By that time of course, the fact that I hadn’t been meeting another woman, and had, exactly as I’d told her, gone out for a drink with a friend, was a cause for derision. It was pathetic. Juvenile. Hanging around getting drunk with my low-life Irish writing buddy. She supposed we had talked about books.
Since first Will, and then I, had left our partners, and had, without knowing it, rented small flats in the same neighbourhood, we had become slightly embarrassed about the coincidences, and had seen less of each other. But one day I simply bumped into him, in Crouch End proper, as he was coming out of Prospero’s Books with a study of Brecht. He asked me to go for a pint. And as I had been stalled all day, trying to decide whether I could start with the serial killer instead of the detective, and wondering then whether women or children would make better victims, I decided to join him. We went to The King’s Head. When we thought we should eat something we got sandwiches from Budgen’s and ate them at a bench on the green while big rain clouds rushed by towards engagements elsewhere. Then we went to The Harringay Arms. We got very drunk.
At closing time we stumbled back to Will’s place, where he had a bottle of Highland Park. We talked mostly about women, generally and specifically. We talked as well about books, about writing, about work. He explained what was wrong with television, and I explained what was wrong with publishing. He confided that he was finally going to do something worthwhile. That he was sick of the shit he wrote, that he was going to write the plays he’d always wanted to write, that the theatre was all he cared about. That it was time for pure art. I resisted the temptation to tell him what I was doing. I said only, I think, that there was a new project, and that I was hooked by it. But I did ask him about Ireland. I think I was, in drink, conducting research. What, I suddenly wanted to know, had Will seen of The Troubles? What could he tell me about horrible murders? Abductions. Torture. Random sectarian killings. The horrible ones. The details. I wanted to know the physical details. I was sure that out of thirty years of carnage there was bound to be something I could salvage.
But Will was really only interested in politics.
— Don’t get me started! he shouted, long after he had started. Killers, he kept on saying. Killers, the lot of them. He seemed to be speaking about public figures. There were some names I recognized, but I am not … my knowledge of Northern Irish politics is somewhat sketchy. And I was very drunk. Had he known any of these men? I wanted to know. Had he known any killers?
— I knew some men. Serious fuckers, some of them. RUC men, mostly. And other letters too, sometimes. Tough bastards. Tough fucking bastards Clive, I grant you. I grant you that. But they were up against something Clive. Up against something that you’ll never … that no one here will ever understand. Dark. Insidious. Organized. Amoral. Intelligent. Evil.
I said nothing for a while. But Will said nothing either, and I wanted to hear more about amoral, intelligent evil.
— Evil?
— Evil, he snapped. It’s the only word as fits. They’re rehabilitated now of course. They have the suits now and the cars and the drivers and the offices and all that shite. And that’s better than having the fields and the guns and the bombs. That’s progress, I grant you. But evil … I don’t think that’s inaccurate, Clive. People here on the mainland, you forget it. You forget what it was like. Not that you ever knew what it was like. But now you’ve forgotten that you … that you never knew what it was like … now you don’t know … what it was like. The terror.