Here is a Lit Spoof I wrote during my Creative Writing MA. Thought I'd share it on Post Man Booker Shortlist Annunciation Day. Dedicating it to all writers, everywhere. (BTW: topicality alert- this is a Generic Send-up, not a spoof of any of the books on the list, which I haven't read. Still trying to catch up with the 2005 shortlist, to be honest.)
THE CONCEIT OF CLONES
Fentimore Ballantyne, a man little used to women, walks
along the Rue de Rivoli, twirling his cane. Only twenty years since Armageddon,
and he is on his seventh face. He
strolls towards what was once Montparnasse ,
and is now a bowling alley for the underclass. This week he is Alexander the
Great – his symmetry is on an epic scale. He has cruel, flat eyes – his present
physiognomy is inspired by carvings. His
lips are full, protruding over white, parading teeth. Perhaps the lips are not
quite right? He purses them, uneasy. He
can afford another transplant. He can
afford any number of transplants. He invested in armaments when the credit
crunch came. Fentimore Ballantyne is a
rich man, and his face is his only extravagance.
Where am I? Clarissa Dalloway wakes up, stretches. A man in her bed – oh yes! The launch party of that silky little volume
of journalistic musings. Never fails, a slim book, with large spaces around the
words. She didn’t even write it. She just told the author to make it shorter.
Keep them guessing. The man is from a
broadsheet. Married, of course. They’re
so much easier to pull. She gets up,
slips into her Betty Jackson slacks. Slakes her thirst with last night’s
vintage champagne. How to deal with this one?
He is snoring, one arm dangling over the bed-edge, like a baby lion
dozing on a branch. Nice
skin. Hmm. She hasn’t skinned one for a while.
The bleak cloud remnants are resting on the lid of the
moor. A man’s figure appears, against
the huddle of wind-moulded rocks on the black edge of land. He is alone. His
silhouette is motionless. Deliberate as
ritual, he begins to climb the hunks of stone. His movements are fast and
strong. Behind him, the sky is fading
into invisible monoxide. A single kite
turns on its wing in the vastness, breathing in polluted air, watching. It sees
a moor frog, crouching by a stone. Falls earthwards, grabs with dinosaur talons
and the frog is gone.
It takes Clarissa one
hour and nine minutes to cycle from her flat in Stockwell to the offices of
Dalloway and Vixen, the most feared author’s agency in WCI. When she gets to
work, Septimus has got there first. With
a pretence of solicitude, he has left a skinny latte by her Apple Mac. Next to
it, an Apple Danish. Septimus has a congratulatory First from Piers Plowman
college, Oxford
“Thanks, Sep,” she says, wiping her
feet on the slush pile.
“Good evening?” asks Septimus.
“Marvellous, thank you.” She tosses
the Danish into the bin.
“Seemed to be getting very cosy with
Brian Easton-Ellis.”
“With whom?”
“That Guardian chap.”
She gives him her basilisk stare,
and turns to the latest bright young novel. Post apocalyptic plastic surgery.
Sooo predictable.
If one is a parent.
Sometimes… It’s like A and E.
You, as an infant. Tugging the milk out of me, stronger than
any lover. We lay in bed, tumbled
together, days merging into night. My child. My lost boy. No one has read my
book yet, and that makes me very angry. Because. As a writer, I write. You came into my life,
and the very, very short sentences still flowed out of me. In small bursts.
Like breast milk. Now, you tug on skunk. My pure, clear toddler is dead to me.
He started smoking when things were bad between his father
and me. I don’t want to say too much
about that now. It’s in very early draft form. An image – his ruffled little
head, keep it visual. My boy, I know him.
He lies. He tells the truth. He is talented. I pay him for his poems,
which are very fine. We are pinned to
each other with words. Even the house has had its own book. The rabbit is
next. It’s salt lick is addictive.
Clarissa wipes her
lips, delicately. The aspiring writer perspires
gently into her alfalfa consommé . Over forty, up from the south coast. Two books, neither of them did much. Now she is marked by Bookscan, hunted down, a
failure exactly measured in an absence of transactions.
“The thing is…” says Clarissa.
“Yes?”
“You’re not… how shall I put this?”
“Selling enough?”
Clarissa sighs. “It’s not as simple
as that.”
“Isn’t it?”
“The thing is, you’re neither one
thing, nor another.”
“I’m not?
God, this is hard work, thinks
Clarissa. (If she wasn’t a serial killer, she has no idea how she would hold it
all together.)
“Look,” she says, finally, pouring
the rest of the half bottle of Chardonnay into her own glass. “You’re not
commercial enough, and you’re not literary enough. And you’ve got form.
Okay?”
