Thanks Peter God – Chapter One
Chapter One
- in which we meet our first protagonist, a cowardly sort who would rather stay in and read books than venture out into the world and grasp life’s bounties in fullness.
Only Fools And Sweethearts
Peter Godfrey, forty-one years old, balding, spreading through the middle, engaged to be married, unable to get past the first line. Peter’s first book had been a minor hit, popular amongst people who knew too much about authors and very little about writing. He had struggled to write it for 6 years and it had felt during that time like it would never be finished. In fact he had dreaded finishing it; fearing any change Peter attached special significance to the ending of his novel. He was half convinced that it may herald his death, that after what seemed like such a long time he would relax in relief as he typed the last words and that at the same time his body would just give up and allow disease to take it over, thinking that all was finished in life. A practising hypochondriac for most of his life Peter was terrified of disease and death and more terrified that he would be the cause of his own sickness. This fear had led to some minor compulsive behaviour patterns such as brushing his teeth in a certain way for the past thirty years and making sure his shoes were perfectly aligned at the end of his bed before he went to sleep. He also ate sweets in odd numbers only. He feared disease and death but more than this he suspected that his continual fear of them actually kept them at bay. The popular medical perception was that stress could lead to developing an illness – Peter had convinced himself that his own stress and fear may be the only thing keeping disease from consuming him. He even half believed his body to be full of tumours that stopped growing just before a critical point. If he allowed himself to truly relax and not be afraid of disease and impending death then these tumours would bloom into malignant action. His neurotic tension kept his body in an awkward but life saving balance, or so he thought.
This way his first novel stretched itself out over 6 long miserable years. Those years were long and lonely as Peter inflicted his neuroses on himself so heavily that he used them as an excuse to cut himself off from much of the rest of the world. Months would pass without him writing a single word, then chapters would come pouring out from him, filled with his own particular strain of bitter, self-pitying melancholy. Despite all his efforts he managed to get laid several times during these wilderness years. As he got older, more afraid and felt worse about himself, the age of the girls he ended up sleeping up grew smaller. As he crept through mid to late thirties only girls in their early to mid twenties seemed interested. He soon came to realise this was not the good thing it may have sounded; the girls were emotionally immature and damaged in some way. He could not quite figure out the reason they gravitated to him for comfort. He felt weak and useless himself yet seemed a magnet for those who should be seeking someone strong enough to help them. Maybe like was just finding like.
So he spent 6 years, mostly alone, almost always convinced he was about to die, smoking, drinking, insomniac, convinced that no one could or would ever love him, despondent, miserable and the author of his own gloom. Brief periods of respite would normally see a complete halt to writing; there was one whole year and a nearly successful relationship which was finally brought low by his paranoia. The breakdown of any semblance of happy life usually provided fuel for a few more good chapters. He’d have to spend a couple of tearful weeks feeling very sorry for himself before cheering up and pouring more self-pity and scorn onto the page. These chapters excelled, they caught him at exactly the right time, clear minded enough to know that what he was writing was good and deep enough into his own mire of misery to channel the right amount of emotion into his thinly veiled leading character.
Eventually that scariest of times came and he was just two chapters away from finishing. He had written the ending shortly after the beginning so it just seemed a matter of knitting substance to fit between the gaps in the narrative. He was relationship free at the time, voluntarily having ditched a potentially long-term partner some months ago. He was going through a period that seemed almost hopeful. He had been feeling better about himself and his empty life and had even given up smoking and started to exercise. The year was coming to a close and the novel with it. Having promised himself three years running that this would be the year that the book would be finished he now found himself able to fulfil his own promise. He felt a balance coming through to him, a hopeful tension that allayed his fears about finishing. He felt if he could keep that tension there, not feeling too relieved to finish, not too frightened to finish, then he would be spared the slow painful death that may have otherwise ensued.
The last two chapters spilled out of him in one session. It felt complete, but complete in the right way, the whole of the book had become one living organism. He grinned as he saved the file and then caught himself; no, he could not relax now as he had to go through and proof the thing, spell check, grammar check. Then there was the work that would have to go into preparing it for submission to publishers… it was okay, he could tense up again, he could still be afraid and everything would carry on as it would. The relaxation and final fear did not have to go away just yet, that final relief would just have to wait.
He remembered distinctly the three things that had finally and clearly marked the true end of that long, nightmarish period of his life, the three events spread over the very last of his wilderness years. First was the letter from Triptizol Publishing advising him that yes, they were interested in publishing his book, the second was walking into Waterstones and picking the solitary copy up off the shelf. He’d had to order it in himself to get it there and six months later it had still been there, unsold, but still. Thirdly and strangely most thrilling, was the brief mention he’d been given by a guest on Radio 4′s Front Row. He didn’t get the name of the person who’d name checked him and only remembered a week later than he could have replayed it on the iPlayer but that didn’t matter. Someone real, someone out there in that world where things got done, decisions got made and substantial people talked about substantial things and actually made an impact, out there someone had spoken his name, made him more real than he had ever been. At the same time he was now truly made fictional; now his name was something more than he was himself. For the few thousand people who bought that first novel he had become something more than a person. His name was now more than just something called out in a doctor’s office or written on an envelope containing a gas bill. It was an entity in itself, a whole where previously there had been two separate pieces. For the book he had shortened his surname to just “God”; his publisher had suggested it and Peter couldn’t resist accepting the suggestion. It at once appealed to his vanity and it also distanced him from his future fictional self. Now that fictional self had arrived. There was an entity separate from him, out there in the world, in people’s minds. He was Peter, but there was also now Peter God.
For many years Peter Godfrey, the non-fictional, pre-name checked on Radio Four entity, had been keeping a tally on all the versions of himself that he could find. This consisted of two parts; firstly there was the business of naming the different parts of himself that he discovered as he entered into different situations and interactions with others. For example when he began a job and found himself having to act in a professional business like manner as he administered educational conferences he found that he changed into the necessary person to accomplish that job. The way he acted and spoke needed to be quite different to how he normally was – if plain Peter Godfrey had addressed a large group of people he knew were much more intelligent than himself then he would have been a whispering, mumbling halfwit. He did this task nonetheless and decided that the person who took over him was an aspect of his personality that he had not met before. He called him Edward Machine. The name Edward was a hard sounding name, Machine was indicative of performing a task in a straight forward, business like manner and the whole thing together could be reduced to Mr E Machine – Mystery Machine. This was accurate for the new personality in that Peter had not expected to find more than one of himself inside him.
The list expanded slowly over the years; Todd Slagermann, a belligerent argumentative type for standing up to bullies, Ansty Cowfold, an expert on spiritual matters, Woody Smith, the artist that did most of his work for him on his art degree and many others. By the time he had finished writing Only Fools and Sweethearts, that first novel, Peter had counted and named 13 parts of himself. He was by no means suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder or any other mental health condition; this wasn’t a matter of personalities taking him over and controlling him or making him do anything he wouldn’t normally do. It was simply that, unlike most people, Peter had single out all the different aspects of himself and put them in an order he could understand. Peter felt a great need to understand and the easiest place to begin understanding is with yourself.
The second aspect of this came with the growing realisation that there were copies of himself all around. Well, to him they were copies, to themselves they were… well, themselves, he guessed. On the second year of his art degree he had been surprised to see a new student on the year below that resembled him to such a degree that all his friends had immediately started to remark on the matter. This slightly younger version of himself looked very similar physically, including features and build and he dressed almost identically. Shortly Peter and his friends were referring to this other student as his clone and it stayed like that for a year until he ended up talking to the clone and finding out that he had done the exact same thing and had also been referring to Peter the same way. They both laughed about it but Peter went away from the meeting with a feeling of insecurity. How could he tell which one he was? Clone or original?
He was, of course, neither, he was just a person and the “clone” was just another person and Peter knew this very well. Peter had a gift for holding two contradictory concepts in his mind at one time though and whilst knowing full well the reality of the situation, or non-situation, he brooded about it. As he brooded he started taking note of what seemed like more and more people who were his “clones”, or copies of him. He would say to friends, oh, I saw another one of me in town today and they would laugh about it. Whether his constant attention to the matter influenced friends or not he was unsure of but they started to see other versions of him too. At times friends would admonish him for not replying to them when they’d seen him, or for not waving back across a road. When questioned on when and where they had seen him he would simply have to tell them that it wasn’t him they had seen. This wasn’t just casual acquaintances, this was close friends seeing people that they were convinced had been Peter.
One night shortly after finishing his novel Peter had reluctantly gone out with some friends to a bar in town. He had been feeling tense and drank a lot to compensate for this. This was not a good decision; he was a light weight when it came to drink and if over tired would be sent spinning by just a couple of drinks. He was very over tired on this night out, having spent several nights awake writing and several daytimes sleeping.
So the drink tonight had rushed to his head and he was starting to feel more stoned than drunk. Or how he imagined stoned to be to most people, having never experienced the paranoia that everyone else he knew described feeling at least occasionally from marijuana. He never felt that with weed, only with booze. He begged a cigarette off a friend and went outside and smoked. When he came in he felt light headed, sick, paranoid and as if he did not belong in the world.
He had steadied himself on a shelf, knocking several beer bottles over and he had scrambled to stop them hitting the floor. As he had straightened up from this he had looked over into the far corner of the bar, the corner crammed full of pinball machines and video games. Lent against one of the pinball machines had been himself from ten years earlier. He had stared hard at this person standing there. They didn’t look vaguely like him, or mostly like him, they looked exactly like him. It was a Peter Godfrey from a decade before though, and the Peter Godfrey who had gone out to bars wearing a styled nineteen seventies wig and calling himself Woody Smith.
He could excuse it away now as being the booze, the smoke, the lack of sleep but at the time Peter Godfrey knew exactly what was weird about the situation. As he had stared at this person it had felt hard to concentrate. It had felt like he was being slightly physically repelled by the other person’s presence, as if they could not exist in the same space at the same time. As he had stared and stared at this person fear had crept up him, right from the back of his feet up to the top of his head and as this person had turned and looked directly at him Peter could have sworn that this other person had shimmered and shaken as though he was a bad special effect.
Peter left the bar and carried on drinking and soon forgot for the rest of that night. Waking the next morning he had remembered almost immediately and rushed to grab one of his many pads to write down everything he could remember about it. What he wrote hadn’t made mush sense and hadn’t made him feel any better. With time he forgot the event. Other things were happening to him now and it wasn’t long after that he had submitted his first draft to Triptizol and within weeks he had back a hopeful email asking to see more material. Slowly he had felt his own life shimmering and changing.
Within a week of the Radio Four programme that had seen him name checked Peter God has his own Facebook fan page, started by a young woman who turned out to live locally. It filled to a couple of hundred fans within a couple of weeks and at that point his publisher cajoled him into creating a Twitter account which fared about as well. The young woman who had started the Facebook page began to message him. Her name was Anita Powell, she had just turned thirty and worked for the library service. She was active in several different local book groups and helped co-ordinate a minor, local literature festival. She was quite ordinary but also organised, ambitious and busy. She seemed thrilled to be communicating with Peter and it turned out that she had been the one to finally buy that one copy Waterstones had still had on their shelf. She had bought it on a whim after hearing the book mentioned on Radio Four, had read it in two days and then she had read it again. Then she had started the fan page on Facebook, at first too shy to add Peter as a friend, despite finding him through a mutual acquaintance’s profile. Once Peter was on Twitter she had been the first to start following him and a conversation had started on there, jumped over to Facebook and then shifted into the real world.
On meeting new women who seemed likely to appreciate him in return Peter always made sure he made very clear what a loser he was; or rather what a loser he imagined himself to be. At the first meeting he would invariably drink a bit too much and blurt out all major points of his life so far; parentage, siblings, ex-wife, failed jobs, art degree, depression, heartbreak and the misery of his wilderness years. This usually had the opposite effect than he imagined it would, every single time he did it. It made him sound interesting because he’d squeezed the major points of four decades into a couple of hours of conversation and because he was naturally, whether he liked to believe it or not, a writer, a storyteller. He was not really disclosing details of his life or confessing his weaknesses; he was telling a tale and telling it well.
This is of course what he did when he met with Anita Powell and being a woman who lived almost exclusively for storytelling it won her over. She fell for Peter quickly and he, being spineless and indecisive but always appreciative of any woman offering sex and affection, let her fall.
