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Authors: Glen Duncan
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aremade in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the
conditions
for writing: I resolve on the one story I’ve never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other place will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer’s, invokes occult necessities. The damp rooms are high-ceilinged and largely bare. Furniture, such as it is, is miscellaneous and secondhand: a cream seventies vinyl couch; a Formica dining table; a sagging bed into the mattress of which something’s burrowed with what looks like sexual fury. Everything’s been gnawed, nibbled, bored, colonised, webbed. Last night three foxes came up from the cellar and sat nearby on the floor, concussed by my authority. (Dog family. Anything canine succumbs. There are beautiful women in Manhattan who would have married me on the spot for the charm I had over their mutts. Wow, he normally
hates
guys. I’ve never
seen
him like this. Do you live around here?) The central heating works, though after my first night I drove into Zennor and bought wood for the fires. HQ is the lounge. I’m stocked up with Camels, Scotch, mini-market basics. No TV, no Internet, no radio, no books. Nothing to aid procrastination. Procrastination, it turns out, does well enough without aid: This is the third night I’ve managed not to write what I’ve come here to write. Hours have gone fire-gazing or staring out to sea or merely lying in a whiskied doze warmed by the foxes’ mute kinship.
Surveillance has followed as planned. I did some token fancy footwork en route to Paddington but made at least three WOCOP agents still with me on the Penzance train. If they didn’t have cars waiting they might have lost me in St. Ives, but by midnight the dark said they’d found me again. Not a comfy gig for them. You’re staking out the world’s last living werewolf but most of the time you’re thinking about your thermos, your chilblains, your frozen butt, the heaven of getting out of the snow and back into the van. I considered inviting them in. Rejected it: more procrastination. The dial went up a notch on Day Two; I think Ellis arrived. Grainer, my gut tells me, is keeping his distance, doesn’t want the tension spoiled. We’re like Connie and Mellors at the end of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, apart, chaste, happily purifying ourselves in honour of the coming consummation.
Very well. Night has drawn in. The foxes are out hunting. There’s fire in the hearth and Glenlivet in my glass.
But a cigarette, surely, to gather my thoughts.
As if they’re not already gathered. As if they haven’t
been
gathered, in a raw-eyed mob, for a hundred and sixty-seven years.
10
New, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full, waning gibbous, second quarter, waning crescent, new. In the summer of 1842 I didn’t know the names of the phases of the moon. I didn’t know that a complete cycle is a
lunation
, or that the full moon is full for one night only (though it might appear so for two or three) or that the phrase “once in a blue moon” derives from the occurrence of two full moons in a single month, a phenomenon you can expect once every 2.7 years. I did know, courtesy of a wasted classical education, that to the Greeks the moon was Selene (later Artemis and Hecate), sister of Helius, who fell in love with handsome young swain Endymion, had fifty daughters by him, couldn’t stand the thought of him dying so cast him instead into an eternal sleep. As an Oxfordshire gentleman my country lore came via my tenants, who assured me that if the horns of the moon pointed slightly upwards the month would be fine, and that if the outline of the moon could be seen there was rain ahead. A mopey scullery maid I had reciprocal oral sex with three or four times in my late teens believed that bowing to the new moon and turning over any coins you had in your pockets would double your money within the month. The only thing I knew about the
conditions
for writing: I resolve on the one story I’ve never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other place will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer’s, invokes occult necessities. The damp rooms are high-ceilinged and largely bare. Furniture, such as it is, is miscellaneous and secondhand: a cream seventies vinyl couch; a Formica dining table; a sagging bed into the mattress of which something’s burrowed with what looks like sexual fury. Everything’s been gnawed, nibbled, bored, colonised, webbed. Last night three foxes came up from the cellar and sat nearby on the floor, concussed by my authority. (Dog family. Anything canine succumbs. There are beautiful women in Manhattan who would have married me on the spot for the charm I had over their mutts. Wow, he normally
hates
guys. I’ve never
seen
him like this. Do you live around here?) The central heating works, though after my first night I drove into Zennor and bought wood for the fires. HQ is the lounge. I’m stocked up with Camels, Scotch, mini-market basics. No TV, no Internet, no radio, no books. Nothing to aid procrastination. Procrastination, it turns out, does well enough without aid: This is the third night I’ve managed not to write what I’ve come here to write. Hours have gone fire-gazing or staring out to sea or merely lying in a whiskied doze warmed by the foxes’ mute kinship.
Surveillance has followed as planned. I did some token fancy footwork en route to Paddington but made at least three WOCOP agents still with me on the Penzance train. If they didn’t have cars waiting they might have lost me in St. Ives, but by midnight the dark said they’d found me again. Not a comfy gig for them. You’re staking out the world’s last living werewolf but most of the time you’re thinking about your thermos, your chilblains, your frozen butt, the heaven of getting out of the snow and back into the van. I considered inviting them in. Rejected it: more procrastination. The dial went up a notch on Day Two; I think Ellis arrived. Grainer, my gut tells me, is keeping his distance, doesn’t want the tension spoiled. We’re like Connie and Mellors at the end of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, apart, chaste, happily purifying ourselves in honour of the coming consummation.
Very well. Night has drawn in. The foxes are out hunting. There’s fire in the hearth and Glenlivet in my glass.
But a cigarette, surely, to gather my thoughts.
As if they’re not already gathered. As if they haven’t
been
gathered, in a raw-eyed mob, for a hundred and sixty-seven years.
10
New, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full, waning gibbous, second quarter, waning crescent, new. In the summer of 1842 I didn’t know the names of the phases of the moon. I didn’t know that a complete cycle is a
lunation
, or that the full moon is full for one night only (though it might appear so for two or three) or that the phrase “once in a blue moon” derives from the occurrence of two full moons in a single month, a phenomenon you can expect once every 2.7 years. I did know, courtesy of a wasted classical education, that to the Greeks the moon was Selene (later Artemis and Hecate), sister of Helius, who fell in love with handsome young swain Endymion, had fifty daughters by him, couldn’t stand the thought of him dying so cast him instead into an eternal sleep. As an Oxfordshire gentleman my country lore came via my tenants, who assured me that if the horns of the moon pointed slightly upwards the month would be fine, and that if the outline of the moon could be seen there was rain ahead. A mopey scullery maid I had reciprocal oral sex with three or four times in my late teens believed that bowing to the new moon and turning over any coins you had in your pockets would double your money within the month. The only thing I knew about the
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