These days, it’s what I do to look attentive in meetings I’ve lost interest in. I hold my nice leather-bound agency notebook just so to keep its pages out of sight, and put a thoughtful (I think) look on my face and begin. I hold onto the belief that it makes me appear diligent and absorbed.
In a way it does, as it masks irritating distractions, such as a client on a cell phone or a colleague playing the harp with her hair. It’s not as though drawing makes one deaf, so if I hear anything I feel needs my comment, I can contribute with conviction. And more often than not, my scribblings bear on the meeting I'm party to. Just as they did in Standard 2.
I never know what will appear on the page when I do this. I don’t think the results are Freudian or Jungian or anything particularly meaningful, given that there’s a rather limited repertoire of what I can actually draw (which is sort of what one would expect from a colour-blind copywriter, and as you'd be able to tell from the pic above).
Today, what appeared on the page was an image of a tribal-looking man with his back to me, wielding what turned out to be a long and evil-looking spear with some dingleberries at the blunt end. It ended up looking as if he was stabbing something to his right, and because all that was there was white space, I drew Mickey Mouse taking fright. Wide eyes, tiny terrified pupils, and white-gloved hands flinging into the air (the meeting was drawing to a close and I didn’t have time to do something quite as anatomically incorrect or as scratchy and laboured as the tribal guy).
Unusually, I put my notebook down without closing it, and of course my doodlings were spotted by a colleague. “Fuck me,” she said, eyebrows arched, “why on earth is he stabbing Mickey?”
He wasn’t actually stabbing Mickey. He was simply standing there with his spear raised in both hands and leaning towards the area where Mickey wasn’t until I drew him in the blank space. On second viewing, tribal man may as well have been chewing on the shaft of his spear – perhaps he was; perhaps that was what Mickey had found so surprising. Who knows. You put characters out there and they develop ideas and motivations of their own.
It was too complicated to explain to said colleague. “He’s not stabbing anyone,” I said, and drew a vertical line between the two characters. “See? It’s two different drawings.” She frowned at the images and realised that she couldn’t argue. But she did look at me in a strange way, as if I’d set fire to her cat or eaten a small child for breakfast. And when I saw her later in the day she gave me the same fearful glance.
I’ve had this many times. “Who’s that?” people often ask when I’ve drawn a face. “I don’t know,” I say, and they look at me as if I’m lying. “Who’s dog is that?” “Is she someone you know?” “Why is he standing at the edge of a building looking at his toes?”
It’s not the edge of a building. It’s the edge of a swimming pool. And he’s actually looking at the shark I couldn’t draw because I ran out of notebook.
It got worse after the publication of An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Absolutely Everything.
People who knew me well would ask why I’d portrayed my wife in such a dreadful light. “Tracy is not my wife,” I’d explain. “Michelle is my wife. She has been for almost twenty years. Michelle is real. She is really married to me. Tracy is fictional. She is fictionally married to the fictional Chris.” And then that look, that disbelieving glaze, ripe with unspoken accusations about how I could have turned my Michelle into a selfish, materialistic bitch.
Acquaintances would remark that they didn’t know I had a son. “I don’t,” I’d say. “I have two daughters. You’re thinking of the fictional Chris’s fictional son Gabriel.” And then the look, as if I might have a secret son locked in the basement, or that I might somehow have transcended the divide between the parallel universes of fact and fiction and fathered a son with the fictional Tracy.
People who didn't know me and found out that I was the author of Theory tended to glance down at my legs. That’s because the fictional Chris Hayes is missing one fictional leg. Once they'd realised that I had both my legs, they'd look at me as if I were a fraud. When they asked me where I studied architecture, I'd point out that Chris was the one with the fictional architectural degree, not me.
My favourite: “But what happened to Chris after the end of the book?”
“I don’t know,” I said. This time the questioner’s vexation was too much to contain. “But but but,” she sputtered and shot off a cloud of italics. “You wrote him. You have to know what happened next. Tell me! I have to know!”
But I couldn’t tell her. I don’t know what happened to Chris, and I’m not obliged to know. Chris Hayes lived a truncated and fictional life over a brief 225 pages, and while he doesn’t actually die in the book, his story ended when the book did. Ceased. Shut down. Just as hairdryers and lawnmowers and toaster do, three days out of warranty.
“Are you at least writing a sequel?” the distraught woman asked. “Nope,” I said, “Chris has no more story to tell.” And then the disbelieving look, amplified, as if I’d also locked Chris in the basement along with his son, until a time where I might no longer be able to help myself and one day let them out into the world again.
Why is this? What do people not understand about a mediocre ability to draw faces that don’t belong to anyone? What don’t they understand about “fiction”? We all accept that some people can do ballet really well, or play the trombone or juggle chainsaws, so why is it so difficult to accept that others can tell stories that never happened, or create characters who have never existed?
Yet another reader – Jane, let’s call her – whom I’d known long ago and hadn’t seen for the better part of 25 years, contacted me after reading Theory. She wanted to let me know that, for days after finishing the book, she’d found herself wondering whether Chris had been the architect whenever she passed a construction site. And that she'd been disappointed to read in some newspaper that a firm other than Chris’s had won a lucrative tender. Still laughing at herself, she wished me the best with the next one.
Jane had paid me a great compliment.
While it’s gratifying to have your characters believed for the right reasons, she’d made me realise that it’s equally as gratifying to have them believed for the wrong ones.
So when Wasted is launched in August and people ask me exactly what events in my life led to the story of Nathan Lucius, or who the nymphomaniac widow really is, I think I’ll just serve up a little more fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment