The Clippings
I'll level with you right now, before I even begin to tell this story: I'm a compulsive liar. It's not something I can help myself from doing, it just happens before I know it. Mind you, it never got me into any trouble, nor did it make trouble for other people. Sooner the other way around. They're white lies. Most of them anyway. I'm only telling you this to help you interpret this story correctly. It's a true enough story. It happened exactly in the way I will tell you. Well, in basic outline. The facts are all there. But let's be honest here, most writers are liars. It's a fact of life. Most writers lie through their teeth whenever they open their mouth, or take up their pen. Never trust a writer is what I say and I can know: I am a writer myself. A pretty famous one, I dare say, at least in the area where I live. Simon Author they call me here. It's not my last name of course, but most people don't know my real last name. So in fact, I have become Simon Author, shaped by the people who know me.
Those same people also think I am arrogant, but before you start believing them, I need to tell you something about where I live. I don't live in a city, not even in a town or large village. I live in a small, almost tiny, speck on the map. The name of the place is not important. It never was in the course of its history, and it isn't important in any way now. The truth that you need to know is that I live in a small village in the North. The reason why I'm telling you whereabouts it is is important to come to an understanding of the people. All the stereotypes you have heard about the people in the North are true. Or rather, it's a lot worse in real life than the stereotypes try to suggest. They believe I am arrogant, but they also think that people who know how to spell 'spaghetti' are intelligent by default. Mind you, there is some truth in what they say about me being arrogant. These tags don't drop out of thin air (though it comes close enough to that, having sprouted from their heads), but they sometimes mistake arrogance for having a goal in life. For knowing what you want and going after it. In my case it was pursuing a career in writing, which until now has proven to be quite successful.
A critic from the Guardian once praised me for my "...sharp sense of observation, carefully piercing the balloon of society with a hot needle, leaving the balloon intact for a while only to blow it up afterwards. With a ton of TNT." I still have the clipping, hung it on the wall opposite my writer's desk when it was sent to me by someone who admired my work. I'm using the verb in the past tense because things have changed a little since then. As a matter of fact, they changed drastically, only shortly after she sent me the clipping. And the story that I am about to tell you is all about what happened in between.
I received the clipping about a year ago now, a few weeks after my first novel was published. Because I was a brand new author and because my publisher had great faith in its strength, a small reception was given to celebrate the new star on their horizon. It wasn't anything fancy, just me, my agent, some important people and a few celebrity writers who were attached to the same publisher attended it, but during it I had my first encounter with the girl who would later sent me the clipping. She was attached to one of the celebrity writers. His daughter or niece or something like that and we got talking after all the formalities had ended. The first thing I noticed about her was that she was, like me, a great fan of red wine. I admit that people liking red wine are quite common, especially in the so-called literary circles, but please don't forget I'm from Lagerland and to meet someone just like that who liked red wine was quite a pleasant surprise.
Although the reception only lasted for a short amount of time, it was long enough for me not to be able to catch a train back to where I live. I knew this beforehand, but as I was having such a nice conversation I didn�t want to break it up for the sake of a train, so I let it pass and hoped that I would be able to get a lift home or, since none of the people present lived even remotely near to where I live, a place to stay. And if that would fail there was always an hotel nearby, so I wasn�t too worried about it all. However, as the reception drew to a close and everyone started disappearing I discovered I had taken no money with me. Ironically enough, I had been given an advance cheque by my publisher that night, but I wouldn�t be able to cash it until the next morning. So, in short, it became imperative that I would stay the night somewhere. This was a tricky business for me simply because I didn�t know anyone well enough to warrant asking them to have a place to sleep for me and so the only shot I had was with the girl I had been talking to, but whose name I still hadn�t asked and, as a result, also didn�t know. Now, to be perfectly honest with you, despite being from the North, I never was impudent enough to just ask people something and still I am not, and I felt my heart racing at the realisation I had the simple choice between asking her or sleeping on the streets, the latter of which started sounding less and less bad as time went by.
To cut a long story short, I didn�t ask her and she left, together with the celebrity writer she had come with and so I too walked off into the night. Rich, but without a penny to spend. I can�t say I felt safe with the cheque on me, nor with the fancy clothes I had rented (�118, plus �50 retainer), walking through what could best be described as the kind of neighbourhood Jack the Ripper would have felt comfortable in. Cobblestones, unevenly laid with streaks of stones springing up as if a giant mole had burrowed underneath them. The sidewalk consisted simply of two strips of different stone on each side of the street, but it was no use trying to walk on either of them, as they were filled with bins, soda cans, hamburger boxes and the like. The houses on this street were seemingly made of black brick, though closer inspection revealed the brick had once been red, but was blackened through years of smog. The same went for the windows, of which there were only a few to be seen and even fewer still unbroken or not boarded up. To make matters worse I had no clue as to the direction I was walking, nor where to go because of the fact that I had never been to this city before in my life. One thing I knew for certain and that was that I should not have walked into this neighbourhood and, to be perfectly honest, that I should have asked the girl for a place to sleep. Walking through this neighbourhood might still not be that bad, but where would I sleep here? I came to the conclusion that I would do best to walk either towards the train station, or towards the centre, wherever either one might be.
Now, you might wonder how come I didn�t know my way around, as I had come to the reception without any apparent difficulty, but this is simply because I was taken there by car from the station and didn�t think to look out of the window to be able to find my way back. What did you expect me to do? Leave a trail of bread crumbs? I make no secret of the fact that I am a geographical idiot. I have no sense of direction and most of the time I get lost, even with a street map, and this time was no exception to the rule. It was very plain to me that I was lost and that unless I would find some kind of recognisable landmark or something similar to guide me it was very unlikely I would be able to get out of here until the next day. If ever. Back then those thoughts also crossed my mind continually and it didn�t comfort me in the least, as you can well imagine.
Suddenly I found myself facing a streetsign with, hallelujah, a map attached to it. Despite the darkness I was able to discern where I was and where I should go to re-enter the civilised world. As it turned out, I wasn�t too far from it, being merely two streets away from the centre of the city and I quickly made my way in the direction indicated. The neighbourhood quickly improved as I walked on and it made me feel slightly better, though I still realised I had no place to go until the first trains homeward would start running again, which wouldn�t be for at least 6 hours from now. I also started feeling tired now as the wine stopped having an uplifting effect on me and as a result of that I started talking to myself in order to keep awake and I wondered how long I would be able to keep that up without too many people staring at me. As it was I was still safe since there was no-one around, but I was aware that would quickly change as soon as I would get to the centre, which would be especially busy right now, it being a Friday night.
As it turned out to be, it was a lucky night for me because as soon as I turned the corner to finally get me into the city centre I was nearly hit by a passing car. I admit that in itself that isn�t exactly what you would call good luck, and at first I was very angry with the driver of the vehicle, but great was my surprise when the driver turned out to be the celebrity writer who had brought his daughter or niece along. They had been hungry after they had left the reception and had stopped at a fastfood place to get something to eat and were just about to make their way back home when they (almost literally) ran into me. Her father, or uncle (I still don�t know how she was related to him, but one thing is for sure, she wasn�t his girlfriend or wife, simply because he was way too boring and ugly to be that, but for the sake of the story she�ll be his niece) didn�t appear all too pleased to see me at first. This wasn�t a great wonder; I had spilled wine all over his jacket when walking to the stage to give a little pre-prepared acceptance speech for the cheque I was still carrying in my pocket. But Louise (I�ll call her by a name as of now to make things slightly easier, naturally it�s not her real name) seemed pleased enough, or in any case wanted to know what I was doing walking the streets at this time of night. As I started to tell her the story she encouraged her uncle to take me in the car and offer me a place to stay for the night. Her uncle relucantly agreed, and so I got in the car and was taken to his home: a large villa a little to the South with enough room to house a orphanage. In any case, Louise stayed there as well. I don�t know whether she actually lived there or not, but that�s not important for the rest of the story.
The room I was given was almost twice as big as the little flat I lived in in its entirety and comprised of the following things: A large double bed, a sink with new toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and towels, suggesting that he must have guests over on a regular basis, a shelf with books, mainly in French and thus totally useless to me, a trunk at the base of the bed, completely empty and smelling quite stale, a large mirror placed against the North wall so that at all times light would fall on it in a pleasant way, especially since the windows (which didn�t open, no matter how hard I tried) were facing South. Next to the mirror was another shelf of books. Gifts, by the look of it, since none of them seemed to have ever been read. Closer examination revealed that these books were not only ordered chronologically, but also that they were all by one and the same publisher - the same publisher as mine and the celebrity writer�s. I squatted down to the more recent publications and spotted my book among them as well. Unread, of course. Now let me tell you something about the book I wrote. It�s all nice to know I wrote a book, but as long as you don�t know what it was I wrote it would be a totally useless piece of information. To me at least, and I think you will agree with me.
The title is The Clown�s Son. I am aware of the fact it isn�t the most beautiful or fanciest of titles, but the sad fact is that I am not very good at thinking up any titles. I am, in fact, so bad at it that I ask other people to name it for me. This title was suggested to me by my mother and I couldn�t not use it, since she thought it was such a good one. The Clown�s Son it was then. The blurb on the back was written by my agent, who was also my editor, and it reads: "Life isn�t easy for Daniel: his parents are divorced, his mother abuses him, his father is a clown and the only friends he has are 21 well-trained white mice, rescued from a laboratory lab. So he escapes inside his mind and imagines himself to be the ringmaster of a large circus with as their main attraction: 21 White Mice and a clown, until his father rescues him from his mother and they escape to a real circus." I admit it sounds quite silly as it stands, but I can assure you there�s a lot more to it than this little summary on the back.