Thanks Peter God – Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

-in which our protagonist reminisces about parrots, pretentions, prizes and panic

Odd Man Out

Peter Godfrey was the only person who did not really believe he was a writer. To everyone else who knew him it was obvious. They had not given it any thought before he had start doing it but once he had it seemed such a natural thing. Announcing to his friends that he had written a book (back when he had) had been like coming out of the closet. Friends and relatives simply acknowledged the fact and went on with life; it was no surprise to them. It was something they realised they had known all along.

Peter remembered when he had attended his first literary event. He had had a short story accepted and shortlisted in a competition run by a local University’s literature festival. He had been invited to the prize giving, not knowing whether he would win one of the three main prizes. He was really not concerned with winning; he was just extremely pleased to have been shortlisted. It had only been the third competition he had entered and that seemed like a good result to him.

He had been so nervous that he had bought a pack of cigarettes, for the first time in over nine months. That was the night that those nine months of wonderful effort had gone out of the window and stayed there for a long time; he wouldn’t give up again until he had met Anita and realised that he had to be healthy and strong to keep a relationship working. On that night he bought a pack of Menthol Superkings and despite the first one making him feel like retching in the streets of a town he had never been to before, five minutes before reaching the ceremony.

He’d attended alone, having been single at the time and unable to take his writing buddy with him (a friend who was also in the midst of writing a novel; they’d get together and just sit in his living room and write). He’d wanted to take her along for support and because she was always good company; he’d also wanted to take along a girl he was interested in but she was busy that night and he would have been too scared to ask her to come along anyway, At least the fact that she genuinely couldn’t come along hid from Peter the fact that he would have been too scared to ask her anyway.

Luckily he had bumped into a friend of a friend at the prize giving, a writer of short films who had been plugging away for years but still had to maintain a day job. She was not someone he knew well, more someone he had been introduced to at some event years ago and had maybe one or two conversations with, but it was a great relief to have someone there that he recognised and that recognised him. They had sat together and chatted; she had immediately started regaling him with stories of the many prizes her latest short film had won. He had not been interested. He was nervous to be there and had started drinking as soon as he had gotten through the door. He drank and drank whilst she talked and talked. Like many of the screenplay writers he had know years before she had a habit of trying to make herself sound much more impressive and successful than she actually was and he found this odd. He had never been one for self aggrandizing so found it hard to stomach in others. It was too near to lying for his liking; Peter found it difficult to tell lies, it made him too nervous and it felt intrinsically wrong to do it, a mix of ethical pride and childish fear. He didn’t mind telling outrageous lies for entertainment value – that was fiction, which was fine, but actual lies, to mislead others, to hurt them? He could not quite grasp why anyone thought that was a good idea.

The prizes were eventually given out, three places for short stories, three for poetry, Peter did not place in either list. He was pleased to learn however that his short piece would be published in the literature festival’s anthology the next year. This seemed enough for him. He would be a published fiction author. Then the winners of the main prize were invited to read from their works. First up was a middle aged woman with one of the strangest shaped heads Peter had ever seen in his life. It was like an upside down pyramid with a strange little face stuck onto the front and Frankenstein monster hair on top. No, he had thought, that’s not quite accurate (he was always striving for the most accurate way to describe the way he saw people and things), she was more like an atypical grey alien, like the one in the infamous autopsy video. She was more fictional than her own work which was a morbid little poem that he could not pay attention to because he was too busy studying her head. She was frightening and intense. Next was a pensioner who had won one of the short story prizes, a grandmotherly woman who delivered a chilling reading of a piece about an aborted child kept in a cupboard for decades. Peter found that much more interesting and could see why she had won.

It was the guy who had won first prize in the short story section that had pissed him off. He had spotted him earlier when he first entered the bar where the event was being held. He’d been early and there were few others in the room so this guy had stood out for him. He had a scruffy beard not often seen outside of film footage of the late sixties or films that satirized that era, one that looked like it was deliberately unkempt, as if an effort was required to keep it in that particular shape, a shape like the fractal edges of a map. The guy had looked sheepish and worried and it seemed obvious to Peter that he must be one of the shortlisted potential prize winners. Peter was glad to see someone more nervous than himself, having been on his own right at that moment.

Sitting now at his desk, thinking back on that night, Peter Godfrey couldn’t summon up the guy’s name. He would have thought “I can’t think of that man’s name” except he did not think of him as a man, more between child and something else indeterminate, so “guy” was appropriate.

So Peter was a little drunk when the final prize winner, the scruffy looking guy, took to the stage to read an extract of his work, but he was also feeling okay with not winning and quite comfortable with the woman he knew who had at least stopped talking whilst other people read. What was her name, Peter thinks now, I can’t remember hers either. Peter is not being honest; he’d just rather not put her name down in print lest she read this and be angry or upset. Let’s call her Flo. The scruffy guy coughed a couple of times and took out his piece of paper, looking even more sheepish and nervous that earlier. Then he started reading.

“So I’m there, yeah, in this pet shop, yeah, and there’s this parrot, yeah!”

Peter sat up a little.

“And this woman in the pet shop is talking to me, yeah, and the parrot starts up yelling, yeah, and then the parrot is on my shoulder, yeah!”

The guy was gesticulating with his free hand, his body rolling about as he read, his face contorted.

“Then this fucking parrot is on my shoulder, yeah, and it’s shouting in my ear and the woman’s talking and I can’t hear her and this parrot, man, this fucking parrot is yelling, yeah!”

Peter burst out laughing. It wasn’t a derisive laugh, it wasn’t mocking, it was a laugh of surprise and puzzlement, a sharp outburst. He looked sideways at Flo and asked:

“Why is he doing that?”

Peter had never seen this behavior outside of films that satirized artistic people as geniuses with eccentric behavior. The guy was acting like he was in one of those films, he was being a character, but it seemed forced and weird and wrong and just funny. It also struck Peter as dishonest. Flo didn’t answer Peter and had a look of slight dismay on her face. Peter grew embarrassed and wondered if anyone had heard him laugh; certainly it had not interrupted the guy up on stage who was still going on about that fucking parrot with vehement energy. Peter went from embarrassed to puzzled again, thinking how the hell has this guy won first prize with this amateurish, clichéd drivel? He didn’t feel angry that this piece had won over his, he felt sort of relieved that he had not been chosen if that’s what the judges thought was the best piece of work they had received. He decided at that point that it was perhaps not best to go over and try and mingle with the judges after the prize giving. Peter was not very good at feigning interest in things he was not truly interested in, or praising things he was not truly impressed by and the last thing he wanted to do was appear phony and desperate if he tried to ingratiate himself.

Instead he had remained seated with Flo, chatting and then watching an awful performance piece by a singularly unfunny female cellist decked out in a basque and petticoats. She seemed to think that a few very lame, middle class arty and bawdy jokes amidst some average cello playing made her sophisticated and witty. Peter felt embarrassed for her and then wondered how it was so easy for some people to make a living not being very good at what they did whilst he slaved away in his call centre job, forcing himself to write on evenings.

After a couple of more similarly dull acts had performed he was relieved when Flo said that she had to catch the train back and Peter eagerly agreed to join her, hoping she wouldn’t take it the wrong way and think he was trying to come on to her. He wasn’t; she was far too frail, over enthusiastic and needy for him to be interested in. They made their way to the train station with Peter drunkenly laughing about the bad performances and the hammy readings, all the while thinking maybe he should keep his mouth shut in case she told other people that he was an obnoxious, ungrateful bore. Drink won out over this fear and he rambled on.

At the train station he was initially aghast to find the scruffy guy waiting for the same train. Flo pointed him out to Peter and then they had no choice but to introduce themselves to him and give mock congratulations. The guy, let’s call him Ben for ease, was shy and self-effacing but Peter could not help but distrust him. They got a clumsy conversation going and then sat around a table on the train when it arrived. Around this table the talk turned to writing, as they had little in common with each other but this. Flo repeated, almost word for word, her tales of the prizes her short film had won and then when things had gone a little quiet and awkward she had started sighing and complaining about how difficult it had been that afternoon for her as she had sat down to write a sex scene for her new feature film script. Peter wondered silently how likely the odds were of that feature film ever being made.

That turned the ensuing conversation into one about the difficulty of writing. It turned out during this that Ben was a lecturer at a local university; not only that but a lecturer in creative writing.

“You actually teach creative writing?” Peter had said, blurting it out in disbelief but Ben seemed to take it as a compliment.

“Yeah,” said Ben, “I know I look a little young for it.”

That hadn’t been Peter’s thought. Peter’s thought had been one of surprise and a mild revulsion. If the teacher was that lousy how did the students stand a chance? He then felt grateful that he had never enrolled for a creative writing class if that was the standard of the teaching staff. Flo started up about her sex scene again.

“I find it so hard,” she said, “like, when I’m writing a screenplay I simply can’t watch any film or television or go to the theatre and when I’m writing prose I can’t read anybody else’s work or I’m afraid I’ll just absorb it too much and parrot their style.”

Peter flinched at the mention of a parrot.

“Yeah,” said Ben, nervously fingering the fractals of his beard, “It can be so difficult like that. I love writing, I love teaching my students but honestly, it’s absolute torture wrenching those words from inside me.”

“Hmm,” said Peter, under the impression that this was just a genuine conversation about writing techniques and habits, “I find it really easy. I just don’t write for a few days and then it all comes flooding out, it’s so enjoyable and great when it does. I mean I’m really undisciplined, I have to force myself to sit down and start but once I do, woosh! There it goes. I don’t think I could do it at all if it felt like torture.”

Then there was silence. Neither Ben nor Flo would look Peter in the eye. Peter realised then that he really hadn’t spent much time in the presence of others who wrote or regarded themselves as writers. He had just committed a colossal literary faux pas, bringing into question their perceived notion of themselves as gifted geniuses struggling with their art. Peter wondered then if he thought of writing as art at all, maybe he thought of it as craft. Or maybe he just didn’t subscribe to the idea of the tortured genius in the same way they did. This was one of the reasons that Peter had failed to continue making art after his Fine Art degree had finished; he found that he could not stomach the pretensions of other “artists”. He had stopped attending the numerous gallery openings he used to because of the continued disappointment in the work and because he loathed to see others laud the artists that in his view were underwhelming under performing in their chosen field. They seemed to think that simply being an artist and making work was good enough. Peter though that the only thing that was genuinely good about making art was striving to communicate worthwhile ideas, trying to provoke new thinking and understanding. And trying to do it well. In the Fine Art world it had seemed to him that you were deliberately confining yourself to only communicating with those who already knew and shared your ideas. He felt that caused people’s practice to become lazy and uninspired. Why make an effort when you know that you’ll be understood no matter what? Or someone will at least pretend to understand.

Peter let the silence ride. He contemplated speaking the truth and arguing his point, he contemplated telling Ben just how pretentious and uninventive his writing had seemed when he took the stage, he contemplated telling Flo that it was dishonest to portray herself as simply a writer when he knew for a fact that she worked virtually full time in a regular, dull, day job. Instead Peter decided to keep quiet and let them enjoy their delusions; let them think they are extraordinarily gifted geniuses, let them labour under their misapprehensions if it made them feel good to do so. He was smart enough to realise that everyone in the world lived in their own reality, with their own rules and their own way of seeing themselves and the world. We are all little universes to ourselves, he thought, there’s nothing I can really do to try and bridge the gap between my world and anybody else’s. There is no way of telling, he thought, if someone else is seeing the same colour as I do when I tell them I see the colour red. Maybe they see what I see as blue but to them that is red. Let these two see whatever colour they want, Peter though, I have no way of knowing that what I know is anymore right than what they do.

The conversation carried on and Peter made only sporadic and guarded remarks from there on in. He was weighing up in his mind now whether to spend anymore time with other “writers” at all. He had of course spent time with his writing buddy, Laura, but that had been normal and pleasant as well as incredibly helpful as she seemed not to harbour any pretensions about herself and her writing, much in the same way Peter hoped he did not either. But this was a different level, these people were writers who had been paid to write (though not to do nothing else but write) and maybe that was where the difference lay. They had been garnered with plaudits by their peers, told that they were doing something special or even that they were good enough to tell other people how to do the same thing; surely that must go to your head.. He made another decision right then, sat there on the train looking across at these two self-deluding individuals; he needed a bullshit detector, someone he could rely on to snap him out of it if they thought he was approaching the same state. He resolved to make a list as soon as he got in (he wouldn’t – he was far too drunk and would just look at Facebook and watch a couple of episodes of Snog, Marry, Avoid before passing out) and he took out his moleskin notebook and wrote “bullshit detector. Urgent” on the next clean page.

Peter now sits remembering that night and he takes out his old notebook (he keeps them arranged in strict date order on a clumsily made wooden shelf above his computer) and finds the page with “bullshit detector. Urgent” written on it. He looks at that and then he looks at the line in front of him on the computer screen. It says:

Peter Stone, thirty-eight years old, lean and mercenary, single and predatory, numb as a dead limb, lonely and happy.

This is all the writing he has done so far on his second novel. He remembers now his words to Flo and Ben on the train, what must have seemed so boastful, words pouring out of his head, the absolute joy of being able to write so easily. Not so now. Now his head was jammed with worry and fear, stuffed full all day every day with Anita Powell and the sheer terror that he would not be good enough, not be strong enough and that he would lose her.