anyway, I was lying in bed, still feeling a little strange but mostly just silly about the phone call, and allowing myself to relax into this deep, nostalgic haze, when an idea came to me for a script I’d been struggling with for months.
That’s how I made my living, you see. I wrote stories and scripts. I know what you’re thinking, but no, we’re not talking movies and we’re not talking novels. The manuscripts for my last two novels were neatly stored in manila envelopes at the bottom of the linen box at the end of the bed. My agent hadn’t been able to convince anyone to publish either one of them after the lukewarm performance of The Qwerty Machinegun, and so – after years of plodding on regardless – I got up from my desk one ordinary afternoon and in the midst of a long struggle with a particularly tricky passage, I just turned the computer off.
Click – and that was that.
When I say I made my living writing stories and scripts, what I mean is that I made a pretty poor living, and that I wrote digital, downloadable short stories and audio scripts for existing intellectual properties. I created what the industry calls auxiliaries, or officially licensed story products, or, in language an actual, real person might use, tie-in material.
For some admirers of Dr Stanley Quinn, this was an unthinkable, abhorrent thing. It made me the tone-deaf kid who’d jump on stage and belt out ‘Ten Green Bottles’ at the end of a virtuoso piano recital. These people always got the same look in their eyes when they heard what I did for a living. For the love of God, it said, if you can’t do it properly, don’t do it at all. Don’t you know who your father was? It hurt me, of course. It hurt me every time. It still does, though mostly in a dull, itchy-scar-tissue sort of a way, as the years have rolled on by. Truth is, I’m not so bothered any more. These people are not the gatekeepers, judges and tastemakers I once saw them as. They’re refugees from my father’s time, a bunch of ageing Bruce Willises from The Sixth Sense, who can’t see that their whole world has ended, and who don’t have the first clue about the world we’re living in now.
Here’s a question: how many writers do you think spend their days working with new stories, with new characters and new plots? My guess is: a tiny number, compared to how many are working with the old ones. And that’s not just the case at the bottom of the food chain where I make my living; it’s the same at the very top – think about those big brand writers creating big brand book sequels – more James Bond, more Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And it’s the same story times a million in the film industry – a whole generation of filmmakers working on Star Wars, Captain America and Batman. A whole raft of us – at every level you can imagine – are investing our writing lives into the continuation of stories that were new when we were kids, or when our parents were kids, instead of creating new worlds of our own. And these stories tend to be children’s stories; you’ve noticed that, right? Now don’t get me wrong; I’m no snob. I might love Herman Melville and B.S. Johnson, but I also love Star Wars and Harry Potter. Of course I do, we all do, so we roll up our sleeves and we service the IPs. I’m certainly not complaining, and even if I was complaining, there’s really no point burying your head in the sand and hoping that any of it will go away, because – let me tell you – it absolutely won’t. It’s a hard rule of late-stage capitalism – big, established brands dominate, and start-ups find it harder and harder to get a foothold in the market. There’s no changing it. This is our world, and it’s a world of sequels, prequels, remakes, remakquels. This is our age, and it’s the age of the hyperlink and the shared universe, where all the stories are interconnected and everyone takes a turn at being the author of everything.
I don’t let it keep me awake at night.
Not that anyone has ever asked me to write Star Wars.
On the night of the answerphone message, I was thirty-three years old, married but temporarily living alone in our small flat in East London, and in dire need of a shave and some natural sunlight. I’d published one book seven years earlier, written two more that nobody wanted, and thereby managed to pull off the impressive feat of having a failed literary career in my mid-twenties.
And, you know, that is what it is.
I had written new adventures for Thunderbirds, Stingray, Doctor Who, Sapphire and Steel, He-Man, The Tripods, Thundercats. . . I took these projects seriously, and though I wasn’t the best writer in the field, and I certainly wasn’t the quickest, I was quietly proud of several of the audio plays I’d helped to create. By and large, I enjoyed the work, and the fans of the old shows generally liked my stories more than they hated them – which is a bigger deal than you might perhaps imagine.
And now I had an idea for the Captain Scarlett script that’d stumped me for months, a genuinely good idea, the first good idea, in fact, in God knew how long. I jumped up, jotted down an enthusiastic page of notes, then climbed back into bed and turned off the light.
I lay there for a while, listening to the distant traffic and the hum of the city.
‘Why knocks an angel in Bethlehem?’
What does that even mean? I thought. Why knocks an angel? It’s nonsense. It’s nonsense and that’s probably because it isn’t what the voice was even saying.
Alone in the dark, I shuffled across to Imogen’s side of the bed.
Don’t worry about it. Just let it go. Tomorrow’s another day.
Imogen’s pillow felt icy cold and had stopped smelling of her a long time ago, but I pressed my face against it anyway, eyes shut tight, waiting for unconsciousness to rise up like dark water.
5
Imogen in Green
Ten hours later, on the morning of the following day, I was one of 927 people watching my wife sleep.
If that seems like a very specific number to be quoting, it’s because the website had a viewer counter under every camera window, so I could always see just how many people had clicked through. If the number was a big one – and 900-plus was pretty big – I’d make a note on a Post-it.
I’d been watching Imogen sleep for most of the morning, through the fuzzy green night vision of Dorm Cam Two. All that time, she’d been lying on her side, facing out, with the duvet pulled up under her chin. That’s how she always slept, although when she slept like that at home, she’d usually do it turned away from me, facing the wall. This meant that by watching Imogen on a computer screen and from 8,383 miles away, I’d learned more about how my wife looked sleeping than I ever did from lying next to her in bed. Something about that made me think of the trouble scientists have studying very small things in laboratories.
I drained my ‘I ♥ coffee’ mug and glanced across at the answerphone on the desk.
It just sat there being quiet and unremarkable.
I set the mug down and scrubbed my fingers through my hair.
On-screen, the duvet rising and falling with my wife’s breathing and a slight digital fuzzing were the only things to give the image away as a live feed and not a flat, dead picture. And, as none of the webcams had sound, the scene was utterly silent too.
In every traditional sense, nothing at all happened.
The counter clicked up to 945 viewers.
I crossed out the old number on the Post-it, added the new one, and then pinned it up on the board.
It’s both compelling and reassuring to watch a person living in real time. The long pauses. The stillness. Sleeping, staring, thinking, reading – all played out in their vast and blank entireties. Putting those familiar little islands of talking, arguing and laughing that we always think of as what people do into wide, empty oceans of context. And then, at the other end of the scale, the opposite of those stillnesses – the rare, powerful, private things – the truthful, the revelatory, the sexual.