Real still from The Shining
Real still from The Shining

BooksOctober 12, 2016

The shining, sort of thing: Steve Braunias meets Stephen King

Real still from The Shining
Real still from The Shining

One of the year’s best books is End of Watch, by the great master of readable fiction, Stephen King. Steve Braunias recalls an appointment with the author in London.

Then there was the time I saw a ghost. It was Stephen King. It happened 10 years ago, in London, at this time of year – winter was around the corner, and so was my daughter. I had the ultrascan pinned to the wall of my room in Oxford: a fuzzy little image of something shaped like a bean. Thoughts of birth and new life and parenthood followed every step I took in the three months I was in England on a fellowship to Oxford University while my real life – the one with Emily, pregnant with Minka – was on the other side of the world, in Auckland. But one day I sat down opposite Stephen King, and thought about death, also life after death.

He gave a press conference. It was for a new novel. I didn’t actually read it; I just wanted to meet him. I didn’t really meet him; I just looked at him, and saw a ghost.

As the best-selling author of various assorted mayhems and inexplicable horrors set in the American suburbs, Stephen King has always looked exactly like Stephen King should look – weird. His face was always his best PR. The large flat face with the big flat forehead and the dark eyebrows was exactly the right face for a great modern master of horror. It was a scary face. It was a face that took up a lot of room. It was a face that loomed. It didn’t float; it was more like a hard piece of rock, implacable.

That was the face on the book jackets. He didn’t have that face on a day in late autumn in 2006 in London. The address was Award House, 7–11 St Matthew Street, Westminster, between Buckingham Palace and the Thames. The venue was the rooms of the Foreign Press Association. I was a foreigner, along with press from Italy, Poland, Canada, India, Hong Kong, Spain. We sat in rows in a small room. India was to my right, Canada to my left. I wanted to say to India: “My girlfriend is having our baby in a few months!” I wanted to say to Canada: “We’re going to call her Minka.” But no one talked. No one said a word. Poland had a cold; when she coughed, it sounded like, “Coughovic.” There was dust on the windowsills. The carpet had been trampled to threads. We waited for Stephen King in an atmosphere which kind of resembled suspense, but really it was just the English disease – reserve. It acted like a drug on the hacks of many lands.

But even our state of suspended animation was livelier than Stephen King, He creaked into the room and collapsed into a chair. It was the mid-morning of the living dead. I was in the presence of genius, but it lacked distinct physical form. His skin was pale, waxy, chalky. The line of his mouth was small and vaguely defined. A widow’s peak raced back across his head – this was the only real sign of life, of motion. He was tall, upright, as stiff as a stiff, on its way to keep an appointment with a good London embalmer.

Stephen King looking stoked to receive an award in 2014 (Photo by Leigh Vogel/WireImage)
Stephen King looking stoked to receive an award in 2014 (Photo by Leigh Vogel/WireImage)

He was 59 years of age but carbon dating might have revealed he was actually 159. Perhaps it was the years of drug and alcohol abuse; it was no secret he’d been a fiend for beer and cocaine. Perhaps it was the road accident he suffered in 1999; a lunatic sideswiped him while he was taking a walk, and left him with 25 broken bones. Perhaps it went further back than that, to when his mother was pregnant, and had a craving for tar; she raked it off the road, chowed it down, the gunk slipping into the baby’s bloodstream.

Italy asked, “Are you still the world’s biggest-selling author?”

A faint voice replied, “I’ve been eclipsed, left behind by … I can’t remember who. Probably they can.”

Poland coughed, “Coughovic.”

Canada asked, “What is the scariest thing in the world?”

King said, “George W Bush.” Correct answer – Bush was President, busily arranging the killing fields in Iraq – and it showed that someone was definitely home; it was just that King’s lights were out. There was further talk about scary things and horror and such, but it was impossible to imagine anything making King jump out of his skin. He’d already jumped. He was Mr Bones, a bare, stark presence rattling on the trampled carpet.

He quoted from Philip Roth’s novel, Everyman: “Amateurs wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” And then he said, “I don’t think reading should be an intellectual affair.

“I think it can be, and I think it’s possible for literature to be enjoyed on an intellectual plane, and if you want to read Henry James or Edith Wharton, that’s absolutely fine. But I just do what I do, which is assaulting people, mugging them, emotionally. You know, my job is to forget you had a date. My job is to make you burn dinner. My job is to make you get on the airplane in London, and actually be sorry when the plane gets to New York. That’s my job. That’s what I want to do. If you read one of my books, and you turn off the light, and you’re afraid something’s under the bed – good. I win.”

Where were all these words coming from? I stared closely at that large piece of chalk on his shoulders. It was as though his lips didn’t move. But more words came out. He told a story about his wife deciding to redecorate their house while he was in hospital with pneumonia.

Real still from The Shining
Real still from The Shining

“When I finally got home, my wife said, `I wouldn’t go into your office. It’s disturbing in there.’ I did go in, and it was disturbing. The books were off the shelves, the furniture was gone because she’d taken it out to get reupholstered, the rugs were rolled up and standing in the corner. I could hear my footfalls echo back, the place was so empty.

“I thought, this is what it will look like when I die. My wife will be faced with that job of cleaning out my office.”

I asked, “But aren’t you already dead? I mean – Jesus fucken Christ, man, you look terrible! You look like a ghost, something spectral. Certainly you’re as white as a sheet and quite immobile. Every word you say sounds like one word: ‘Boo!’ So are you dead? Is this a séance? Or one of those interviews with a vampire? The other thing I’d like to ask is, do you have any kind of otherworldly contact with prenatal children? Is there a plane where the souls of the undead commune with the unborn? And if so, could you pass on a message to Minka?”

But he’d already gone. I was talking to myself. The dust lay a little thicker on the windowsill; the heavy curtain was parted, and a wan autumn light crept into the room. Poland had fled, so had Italy, Spain, Hong Kong, Canada. India was putting on her make-up and her coat at the door. I turned and looked back at the rows of chairs, the desk where Stephen King had sat. I could hear my footfalls echo back, the place was so empty. I thought: will I live to see my child?

Keep going!
You may be visited by this cat or a different cat (Image: Ashleigh Young)
You may be visited by this cat or a different cat (Image: Ashleigh Young)

BooksOctober 10, 2016

The Monday Surrey Hotel Writers Residency Award Report: Ashleigh Young meets SJD, talks to a cat, and the cat talks back

You may be visited by this cat or a different cat (Image: Ashleigh Young)
You may be visited by this cat or a different cat (Image: Ashleigh Young)

Kelly Dennett, winner of the 2016 The Surrey Hotel Steve Braunias Memorial Writers Residency in Association with The Spinoff Award,  wrote 30,000 words during her week at the Grey Lynn hotel. Runner-up Antony Millen wrote 28,000 words. Second runner-up, Wellington poet Ashleigh Young, managed to write approximately 43 words. But she met a nice cat.

On my first day of my writing residency at the Surrey Hotel I came across a dusty little black cat – one of those cats that immediately drops to the ground and wriggles around luxuriously when you approach – in the carpark. I assumed it must be the famous Surrey Hotel Cat, so I lured it back to my room, where it went straight to sleep on a big red armchair. Writing cat installed, I made a start on a poem. The first lines were “I wished someone would write a song for me, then someone did / but it was called ‘Actually Ashleigh’ / and I think of the cruelty of songwriters …” I got the feeling I was in for a rough ride, even though I had all the right tools: laptop, beer, cat, patch of sun in a place to myself, and time. Time. Time, like the occasional passerby for the stray. Maybe a few pats today, maybe a slice of ham tomorrow.

My writing residency was for four days. One of those days would be spent in Hamilton at the Wintec Press Club “free lunch extravaganza”, where poet Hera Lindsay Bird would be delivering the keynote address to a room full of journalists, and because Hera is a VUP author and I work at VUP, it seemed silly to not go, even though I found the idea of a room full of journalists extremely daunting and was starting to think I shouldn’t go. Realistically, I would spend at least one of my other days writing through a hangover. So my writing time would be piecemeal. But I was used to that. My difficulty was something else.

Among working writers – that is, the writer who works fulltime and writes around the edges – a lot is made of the difficulty of finding time to write. I’m not sure I completely subscribe to that difficulty, in and of itself, anymore. Whenever I’m excited about writing something, time miraculously opens up to me and other priorities fall away, as if like lemmings they’ve driven themselves over a cliff. The difficulty for me is more the need to distract myself from the fact of my writing time’s brevity. “The end of the time is coming,” I say to myself. “I must make something before it gets here.” But time is time. Constantly reminding yourself it’s nearly over is like putting on all your clothes before diving into the sea. Longer writing residencies, where you can try out a life that has writing as its centre, give you the time to get used to the idea of having time. A sort of insulation around the time itself. My Surrey residency had no such insulation. It was just cold, bare, bony time. And yet: a gift.

I hacked away at my poem for a couple more hours, then, frustrated, took a few selfies of myself “being a writer”– which, it turns out, look exactly like ordinary selfies – and then went to explore the Surrey, leaving the cat there as a placeholder for the writing life.

 

Within the Surrey Hotel (Image: Supplied)
Portrait of the author as a selfie (Image: Supplied)

I was interested in the pool and also the gym, because I work best when I can alternate between two extremes – motionless in pyjamas at a desk, or thrashing around in shorts. Next to the bar, the gym was tiny and crammed with equipment. It reminded me of my grandfather’s shed full of ancient farming machinery. And the pool – although it had a big mural of a city, a yacht, and some penguins – didn’t look comfortably swimmable; it would take you five seconds to swim a full length, so essentially you’d be doing forward rolls back and forth. It was as if the Surrey, ever sensible, was saying to me, “You’re not here for that.” I knew it was right.

The hotel cat slept on my bed that night and in the morning demanded food, of which I had none, so I put it outside, where it immediately dropped to the ground and wriggled around luxuriously. “This is how you should approach your writing,” the cat seemed to be advising me. “Each moment is filled with the joyous possibility of sustenance.” I shut the  door on the cat, brewed some tea and buckled down.

Later that day I was meeting the musician SJD at a café down the road to talk about putting some poems to music. I was nervous about meeting SJD. I’m prone to starstruckness and knew I’d probably flip out a bit. How would I stay cool? When he arrived, a nice-looking, friendly-faced man with his head slightly ducked as if trying to not be too conspicuous about being one of the greatest songwriters of all time, a memory of trying and failing to watch one of his early music videos on dial-up internet flashed across my mind – how powerless I’d felt! Then SJD was shaking my hand and eating a muffin, and we were having a nice conversation. Maybe I was dreaming that part and in reality I was overturning tables and screaming with excitement. Afterwards, I went back to the Surrey to recover, and grimly tried to get another poem moving, a love poem, this one beginning with the lines: “What will we do? / Bump into each other blindly, like foam noodles in a wintering pool?” Not for the first time, I wondered if I was cut out for the writing life.

That night I wandered around the car park making chirruping noises, hoping to lure the hotel cat back, but it didn’t come, and so I just stared at my stupid poems while eating takeaways, then gave up and wrote some work emails instead. In the back of my mind was the Wintec Press Club Luncheon and the possibility of backing out. But the next morning I woke up to find myself getting off a bus in Hamilton. Too late.

I went down to the river to steel my nerves. From a few hundred metres away I saw the telltale shimmer of my boss Fergus’s hair. There he was, sitting alone on a bench down by the river, like a figure in a piece of café art. I didn’t want to interrupt the scene so I walked further down the riverbank and found a long jetty. I walked to the end of it and lay down in the sun, and thought about the impending social situation, and decided I was definitely dreading it. A man walked out on to the jetty and asked if I was having a good rest – did he think I was considering throwing myself into the river? – and then I stood up and faced the task at hand.

I want to briefly defend the role of the party in the writing life. Even though going to a party is the opposite of sitting down to write, the party can be like the last deep breath a free-diver takes, before going down. It’s painful, but sustaining. Without it you won’t last long in the depths of your solitude before starting to go odd. Or maybe I’m making excuses for not doing any writing at all that day, except for a couple of tweets. “How can we make poetry cool again?”, Hera asked in her speech, and I thought of how my poetry efforts over the last few days were hindering progress, but that it didn’t matter right now, because there was all of this wine and the river was rolling past outside and everything was wonderful and there were so many famous people here. Tomorrow I was going to do the best writing of my life.

Saturday. My last full writing day. I went for a walk to Western Springs and stretched out on my jacket in the sun, and woke up some time later, puffy and morbid, surrounded by pigeons. That night, tapping desultorily at my laptop, I heard an urgent squalling outside my door. I rushed to open it. The cat. The cat had come back. I scooped it up before it had a chance to collapse to the ground wriggling. With the cat snoring once more on my bed, I felt somehow free, and finally I finished the poem I’d started on Wednesday.

 

surrey2
Someone else’s cat (Image: Supplied)

Then, in an idle moment, I went to the Surrey Hotel website to see if there was any information about the cat. I noticed that the description of GM was accompanied by a picture of some other cat – a delicate grey-and-white thing. It looked like it had never bared its belly to anyone before. I looked from that picture, to the little black cat asleep on my bed, and back again. So. The truth. My cat was a nobody. Or, I had stolen the cat. Probably both.

But, like any writer, I’ll take what I can get. And besides, we’d already bonded. I gave it some of those little hotel thimbles of milk the next morning and then we said goodbye, one of those stilted goodbyes where one party doesn’t realise they’re supposed to be sad and instead they’re delighted by all the attention and then they decide they’ve had enough and abruptly go and sit on top of someone’s parked car.