It’s surprising how going to a book club can really get you into drinking. The pub my book club meets in serves this strong, cloudy cider and whereas Stella Artois is nicknamed ‘wife beater’, this cider is known as the ‘opinion beater’ among my drinking buddies. The idea of having licence to drink it on a Wednesday evening and talk rubbish to total strangers really motivates me to read whatever book is chosen every month. Even if it’s so boring you can’t even be bothered to turn the page, or you have to reread the same sentence fifty times because you’ve been daydreaming about cauliflower cheese.
And last month’s book had been a real challenge, stretching my boredom to its absolute limit. The pages were like the nooks on the side of Everest, the words my depleting oxygen while my eyes searched desperately for the quickest way through without losing my grasp of the story. But at last I made it and was ecstatic with relief. And so it was in an exhausted but delirious frame of mind that I headed down to the pub last Wednesday, hilarious put-downs of the story and characters dancing manically on the tip of my tongue.
I quickly found the table on which were stacked 10 copies of the book in question, politely smiled at the small gathering before heading straight for the bar. One of the strangers who I knew a little better as I’d seen her at a few other meetings, approached me with an expression of terror on her face. My heart sank to my guts and I wished I hadn’t had that coffee before I came out. She came up close, as if the bar was crowded and she was trying to get in on my order.
“She’s here!” she hissed in my ear. “The author, she’s sitting with us at the table.” She didn’t even wait for my reaction and sank back towards the group like a dog that’s just been told off for shitting on the carpet. Oh total twattage. The sweet promise of a pleasant evening turned into a stinking mess in a nanosecond. You see the book was based in Brixton and so the author had probably thought how interesting it’d be to turn up at the Brixton Book Club when they were all going to be talking about it. Plus she probably had nothing better to do, and like us, was a borderline alcoholic.
I went over to the table and, suddenly, like an axe to the head I caught the big voice. It hit me over the head repeatedly giving me a hangover before I’d even had a sip of my cider. My eyes followed it to the big hair, vibrant ethnic top and strong New Zealand accent, bastardised by South London. There she was. Standing out as much from the people around that table as she had done among the insipid characters in her book.
As I sat down she said she was ‘nervous as hell’, before loudly introducing herself as a white middle-class lesbian woman who’d grown up on a council estate in an Afro-Caribbean community, is now married to a Jewish-Indian lady and practices Buddhism. Yeah, that’s what I call nervous. Glad she wasn’t feeling over-confident for Christ’s sake. I mean, someone get the poor woman a drink, it’s obvious her nerves are holding her back (not a pint of the opinion-beater though, obviously). She then talked in detail about her life for a long 10 minutes, justifying the indulgence with the comment that parts of the book were based on it. Had someone told her that this was the night for her one-woman show? I just thanked my lucky stars she hadn’t written the Vagina Monologues.
I started to wonder how she was managing to drain so many glasses of wine, seeing as there was a constant flow of shit coming out of her mouth and therefore surely no chance for any shit to go in. And in that moment with a head full of cloudy cider I had the clearly alarming thought that perhaps the world is made up from those who are writers and those who are readers; those who speak and those who listen. That you’re either a performer or a watcher. So was I destined to be just a reader and listener, was that my fate? I guess my stars weren’t so lucky after all. You see around this table the gap couldn’t have been more obvious. Talk about light years of difference, there was a freaking wormhole between her and us.
“Oh, please be honest when you talk about the book!” she exclaimed excitedly, gulping down her Chenin Blanc, the white wine that turned her face redder and redder with inebriation. I was then witness to perhaps the first silence ever in a pub. The clearing of throats slowly followed it and furtive glances that darted around the table like dispersed snooker balls. I bonded more with these strangers in that brief pause than colleagues I’ve sat next to at work for years. In the glaring eyes, the clasped lips and chomping of the insides of cheeks, we shared a moment, an understanding. We all thought the book was shit.
She’d bewailed that not getting the Orange Prize for Fiction had been so frustrating, but hey, maybe not as frustrating as being sat there unable to tell her what we really thought of her damned book, those hilarious put-downs still break-dancing manically on my tongue. Yet the silence was trounced by 50-odd year old Jan who revealed herself as the author’s greatest fan and a lesbian. She’d read 7 of her books. 7!!! The writer beamed at this news and I swear her head began to grow bigger, stretching her face and smile out until she looked like a deformed Buddha.
Serenity and peace didn’t follow though because after everyone had had a few more drinks the politeness eased and half-truths began to slip out, until a competitive game of ping-pong had begun, where opinions pinged and ponged back between writer and reader. ‘Urgh!’ went the author as she smashed someone’s point into the table. Again and again. The scoreboard wasn’t looking good for the readers and I realised that the cider had let me, no all of us down.
Then Jan her greatest fan performed an unsuspecting drop shot. In a quiet, gentle voice, she said that it had been strange reading a book describing the streets and the people she saw everyday of her life. And this made the book quite ordinary. And because nothing actually really happened and it just plodded along, it was a little, well, disappointing. She’d been waiting for something to happen, waiting for a shock. The author’s face went from looking like Buddha to like she was being buggered in a matter of seconds. At this point we all detected friction between Jan the greatest fan and the writer. So much resistance had developed in fact, that they’d both become stuck for words. They sat there staring at each other across the table. Jan the small, unassuming lesbian (ex greatest fan) on one side and the larger than life, (yet apparently not big enough for fiction judging from that elusive Orange prize), overconfident lesbian on the other. Reader against writer.
The author weakened first by saying that nothing really happened in the book because she had wanted it to be like a real-life documentary. And in reality, nothing so out of the ordinary does happen in Brixton. At least not often. The tension was eased by another round of drinks being delivered to the table, yet the author quickly necked hers while telling us that her wife had texted her to say she needed her at home (probably to open a jar of pickles or something). Her ability to down her drink and use the corner of her mouth to speak, looking not dissimilar to a Dover Sole, was possibly her greatest talent.
Now that she was gone, the conversation really started. Jan said into her pint glass that it’s a shame when you’ve liked a writer for years and finally meet her only to discover that you really don’t like her as a person. Ha! I’ll say that was worth 53 hundred points at least to the readers.
She went on to say in her soft and gentle voice that, personally, her novel about Brixton would be one based on rape and violence. Because Jan, who has lived here for over 25 years then told us that she’d been raped in her own flat 10 years ago. She had wanted a shock from the book, yet ended up giving all of us one instead. After it happened she went away for a while but came back to the same flat and still lives there now. That’s how much she loves Brixton, needs Brixton. We all had more drinks and each of us strangers shared our own stories about Brixton, none as shocking or upsetting as Jan’s, they were heart-warming, funny and touching. And there at last were the real stories, the real characters. It was a shame the writer had missed us. But that was because she’d been too busy talking about herself.
It was enough to put me off wanting to be a writer, but then through my cloudy cider-addled head the clearest thought of the evening emerged. I thought of Bukowski, DBC Pierre and Hunter S and remembered that the best writers are the readers, the watchers and the listeners because they can see that something out of the ordinary does happen everyday, especially somewhere like Brixton.
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