A failing writer makes contact with a long departed author - by radio!

The Corridor of CP Snow

“If you don’t sell a book before Easter, I’ll leave you,” Martin’s wife called up the stairs.

How did it come to this? He dreamt once of a miraculous facility which enabled him to shower a voracious readership with fast-selling novels. But this old word processor held no literary genie. Having written a book which sold well, he’d been mortified by the rejection of his second which ‘needed major surgery’ (though they didn’t say where he should make the first incision). Now, to fill the winter days, he wrote short stories; they dragged him into Stygian depths of introspection — and no one wanted stories which lacked a happy ending.

“Nought out of ten again,” he muttered. “Never count your bloody chickens.”

He stared out of his attic workroom window. The view was not one to stimulate the imagination: unkempt turf and a decaying football stand. It was hard not to be negative in this environment. To convince Miranda that he was a real writer, Martin started work at nine. On this Monday, however, he was late. The cursor flashed. His story’s title appeared on the genie-less screen.

The Corridor, he had typed, by Lewis Eliot.

Days had passed since he scribbled the outline of this story. Its theme was ‘power corrupts’; it told of feuding politicians and was aimed at a left-wing magazine which liked his work, paid peanuts but came to the notice of influential people. Martin’s characters came alive in the early hours as he lay awake beside Miranda’s warm body. In his first book, he’d given his wife’s dark good looks to an adorable heroine; more recently, however, Miranda was the model for a cynical dictator: the Maggie Thatcher of a menacing regime. His latest characters had become increasingly abstract: disembodied voices from a dismal future.

But all weekend those voices had been drowned by Miranda’s complaints.

She thumped about downstairs on her half-term holiday, unused to household chores. A full-time teacher again, she left such things to Martin in term-time. That was the deal. He prided himself in completing them at top speed. Women, he’d once told her, are poor organisers. On Saturday he’d made the mistake of saying that it was her turn to do the cleaning. As soon as the words left his mouth he knew he’d lit a fuse. The explosion came at nine when the urge to work on his story was at its height. Miranda drew her husband into a bitter argument over money. He fled to the attic pursued by a fireball of abuse.

I stopped the taxi in Street Seven. My wife and I had the habit of being obsessively punctual.

Martin stared at the cursor which begged him to go on. Miranda repeated her threat from the landing. Moments later came the drone of the Dyson.

“Do you want coffee?” she shouted over it. She knew he hated his voices to be disturbed but it seemed that — as had happened several times in the past month — she’d thought twice about the implications of a divorce from a penniless man.

Martin stamped furiously from the room, attack being the best form of defence.

“How can I work with that racket going on?” he bawled. “I’ve a deadline to meet, for God’s sake.” Nevertheless, he went to the kitchen and made the coffee.

Argument resumed from where it left off. Miranda gulped down half her coffee as she prepared to go shopping. After the front door had slammed, Martin recovered by doing the crossword. An hour passed before he returned to the word processor.

For a second time he slumped at his desk staring at the rotting stadium, the cursor flashing in the corner of his eye. The house was silent but for the hiss of the radio.

It was his habit to set the alarm on his transistor so that the news came on at eleven: his usual coffee time. Unlike his wife, Martin was a methodical person — mechanical, a critic once wrote. After working on Sunday, he’d keyed in a vacant short-wave frequency: he didn’t want Miranda to think he spent the day listening to the radio. The alarm had activated while he was downstairs. When he reached out to press the off button, the cursor caught his eye again.

It had moved.

Eliot stopped the taxi in Great North Street not Street Seven, Martin read.

Had Miranda tampered with his word processor during the time he thought she was in the bathroom? What a childish way to vent her anger!

He deleted the line but the cursor didn’t stop when he released the key.

You cannot be Lewis Eliot because I am, it wrote.

Martin deleted the words but they reappeared in a flash.

The word processor had failed before. Gobbledegook was not uncommon. Sometimes in cold weather, the text froze. Once, Martin lost half a story. This fault, however, was different.

The cursor moved again.

I am Charles Percy Snow. I based my fictional character Lewis Eliot upon myself. Many of my characters are based on real people. Why do you write in my name?

No, Martin told himself, this isn’t a supernatural experience. The author C.P.Snow died years ago and the dead can’t contact the living; there’s no such thing as a ghost nor is there a literary genie in this word processor. Extra-sensory perception isn’t practicable even through the internet; what is possible, however, is the addition of hallucinogenic drugs to coffee — especially if the coffee comes from the staff room of a school targeted by dealers in Angel Dust. Yes, that was the answer: Snow’s name had been dragged up from his subconscious — The Corridor was reminiscent of Snow’s book title The Corridors of Power.

C.P.SNOW IS DEAD, he typed.