Transit(19)

The Chair looked at his watch and said we should probably be making a move. In the corridor outside he fell into step with me while Julian and Louis walked ahead.

‘Does it make you nervous,’ he said, ‘doing things like this?’ He paused while some people passed coming the other way and then fell into step with me again. ‘I find I’m delighted when they ask me,’ he added, ‘but then I’m very glad when it’s over.’

We reached the end of the corridor and opened the door: beyond it the geometrical shapes of formal gardens lay in darkness. The rain fell in great ragged sheets over the rectangular lawns. Some hundred yards away stood a large floodlit marquee. The Chair said it looked like we’d have to run for it. We set off into the dark and the rain, down the straight gravelled path that led to the entrance to the tent. The others ran ahead, Julian shrieking and holding his suit jacket over his head. It was further than it looked and the rain unleashed itself with a sudden burst of intensity while we ran. The Chair kept looking behind at me to make sure I was keeping up. When we reached the other side all of us were breathless and dripping. Louis’s hair hung in sodden rat’s tails around his face. Julian’s shirt had dark patches of water on the shoulders and back. The Chair’s stiff, springy hair had little clear trembling beads in it, which he shook away like an animal shaking its pelt. We were met in the entrance by a man with a clipboard, who asked the Chair quizzically why he hadn’t taken us along the covered walkway. He pointed at it with his pen, a canopied boardwalk behind us that ran along the side of the gardens directly to the place where we now stood. The Chair laughed embarrassedly and said that he hadn’t known it was there; no one had told him. The man listened to this explanation in silence. Obviously, he said, the festival didn’t expect the general public – let alone the participants – to arrive at an event soaking wet. Unfortunately there was nothing he could do at this point. The audience was already seated and we were late as it was. We would have to go in – he looked at the red-faced, wet-haired, dishevelled group – as we were.

He led us through a black-curtained entrance to the back of a makeshift stage. The murmur of conversation could be heard from the audience on the other side. From the back the stage was a raw structure of planks and scaffolding poles but at the front the platform was sleek and white and well lit. Four chairs had been arranged in a conversational pattern around four microphones. There was a small table beside each one with a bottle of water and a glass. We walked on to the platform and the audience fell silent. The lights were dimmed so that they quickly disappeared into darkness and the brightness on stage seemed to intensify.

‘Have we come to the right place?’ Julian said, speaking into the darkness and looking around himself with pantomimed confusion. ‘We’re looking for the wet T-shirt competition. We were told it was here.’

The audience immediately laughed. Julian shook out his jacket and made a face as he gingerly put it back on.

‘Wet writers are a lot more fun than dry ones. I promise,’ he added, above a second wave of laughter. From the darkness came the sound of them settling into their seats.

Julian had sat in the first seat and Louis had taken the one next to him. The Chair sat in the seat after that. I sat at the end of the row. The Chair was laughing at Julian’s remarks along with everyone else, his legs crossed tightly at the knee, his costive eyes darting around the interior of the marquee. He had a notepad on his lap and he opened it. I could see handwriting on the open page. Louis was watching Julian with his brown teeth slightly bared.

‘I’m told that sometimes I can be a bit forward,’ Julian said to the audience. ‘I don’t always know when I’m doing it – I have to be told. Some writers pretend to be shy, but not me. I say it’s the quiet ones you want to watch, the tortured souls, the artists, the ones who say they hate all the attention. Like Louis,’ he said, and the audience laughed. Louis laughed too, baring his teeth even more, his pale blue eyes with their yellowed whites fixed on Julian’s face. ‘Louis’s the sort who actually claims to enjoy the writing process,’ Julian said. ‘Like those people who say they enjoyed school. Me, I hate writing. I have to sit there with someone massaging my shoulders and a hot-water bottle in my lap. I only do it for the attention I’ll get afterwards – I’m like a dog waiting for a treat.’

The Chair was looking at his notes with studied nonchalance. It was apparent that he had missed the opportunity to intervene: the event had set off like a train without him. Water dripped from my hair down the back of my neck.

All writers, Julian went on, are attention seekers: why else would we be sitting up here on this stage? The fact is, he said, no one took enough notice of us when we were small and now we’re making them pay for it. Any writer who denied the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar. Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you wanted the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.

‘When I told my mother I’d written a book,’ he said, ‘the first thing she said was, “You always were a difficult child.”’

The audience laughed.

For a long time she had refused to discuss it, the writing; she felt he’d stolen something from her, not so much the facts of their shared story as the ownership of it.