1.

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
–Benjamin Franklin

 

“Delivery for Mr O’Brien.”

“Yeah? I wasn’t expecting anything.” His eyes fall on the large cardboard box in my hands and his face contorts in confusion.

I can’t stop myself from saying, rather ominously, “No — you weren’t, were you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Er, nothing — sir, can I get your signature on this form and then I’ll be on my way?”

I produce said form.

Spotting a cloud high over my shoulder in an otherwise unspoiled sky, he asks, “Have you got a pen?”

“Here, wait, it’s in my back pocket.”

When he reaches for it, stretching distractedly, I lower the box to the floor and quickly slip one end of a plastic zip restraint over his hand and onto his wrist — I’d have never guessed that he was a lefty — and then I swing his arm behind his back in a move I learnt off YouTube applying just enough pressure to keep it in a tight lock. It all happens in seconds. He makes a guttural noise in pain and fright — ugh! — as I would have expected, but it’s nothing like loud enough to alert any of his neighbours over the distant hedges in their own stately piles — nor his wife (upstairs, I imagine, getting ready for the perfect day she has all planned out for herself). Wouldn’t it have been so much more in keeping with the contours of genre fiction to have applied a chloroformed rag over his open mouth to bring this chapter to a close? But no, because if I had taken that course of action he’d have struggled and roared and fought back and perhaps even fought me off — and chloroform only takes effect after — what? — five, six, maybe seven minutes or so, and who has that sort of time when incapacitating a fully-grown man?

Whatever — who needs chloroform when you have benzodiazepine and a syringe to hand?

I jab it in his arm and soon I’m cradling him in my arms, lowering him softly to the ground like a baby into a cot.

“Sleep,” I whisper, softly. “Sleep.”

 

*          *          *

 

His wife is a completely different kettle of fish.

“Who was that at the door — Alistair!” she screams, her voice finally bouncing up in fright. Someone’s bound to hear her screech over the distant hedges, and god does that voice of hers put my teeth on edge. “Christ in fuck, what happened to you, Alistair?!” Having paused mid-flight in shock, she comes stomping down the stairs in her dressing gown and slippers, her wet hair flapping about like seaweed over the side of a North Sea trawler. I’ve seen her online, but never in the flesh, and this sight of her unmade face, for reasons I can’t put my finger on, gives me a sudden chill. She finishes the final stairs in a leap and careers towards us. “Who’re you and what in fuck are you doing inside my home?” The large box I’d placed in the hallway gets a second of her attention before her eyes return to the odd sight of me looming over her husband. “What the hell just happened to my husband?”

A tense hand rakes through her wet hair.

“I-I-I don’t know,” I splutter in a state of disbelief.

I’m standing over him, having just closed the door behind me, and I’ve shown the presence of mind to buy time, to feign a state of nervous shock, as if witness to an accident rather than the committer of a crime. I don’t know isn’t going to cut it for long as an answer and so a touch more textual detail is required, which I add, for verisimilitude, in a convincingly nervous staccato rhythm:

“He collapsed in front of me, uh, while signing for the box — c’mon, we need to call an ambulance — have you got a phone?” Her mobile is in her hand; some people are led by theirs like it’s a goddamn divining rod. “I can get us right through to the local services,” I say, like it’s a lifeline being thrown to her rather than a net being thrown over her. “Save us some time.”

“You can?”

I nod, and motion for her to hand it over with my beckoning fingers, which she does unthinkingly, being so preoccupied by her husband all curled up on the floor.

“What the fuck happened to you, Alistair?” She gets down on her haunches to tend to him. “You were fine just seconds ago! I heard you singing — when do you ever sing?!”

Out comes the benzodiazepine and, gawd bless her, she barely reacts to my needle as I jab it in.

“Make it easy on yourself: don’t scream, just breath,” I whisper, her eyes bulging out at me in surprise at first and then in fear, while I take her weight in mine and lower her gently to the ground beside her husband.

I get to my feet, straighten my back, rotate the deltoids.

“Well — that wasn’t so hard now was it.”

 

*          *          *

 

Ashley Park, Walton on Thames, is the sort of place where you stand out like a blot on the landscape if you’re not appallingly rich or in transit on a clearly defined service economy task. Amazing homes roll back for miles and miles in Ashley Park. Every house has its own inimitable style and to each there’s a garden which might pass for a royal park and a front yard which might fit a score of cars and an ice cream van on a good day, and yet here I am, little old me, the king of another man’s castle.

Moving along the corridor away from the front door and the cold stone flooring on which my two kidnappees are currently taking an impromptu nap, into the main entrance hall, I note how the walls are busy with pictures of inspirational protest figures of the twentieth and twenty-first century — ugh, cringe! — and then up in the corners there are electric candles, switched on, one imagines, to banish any crevice-crawling daytime shadows, and there’s a boot room to the left and some artfully hidden coat storage on the right. No sign of the safe room though. That’s a shame. Across the hallway is the kitchen-cum-family entertainment area. An impressively spacious room expands around you as you enter to include a Victorian-style lounge with its own natural fire — unlit, and probably just for show, but homely nonetheless — which is on the right, while a ten-seater dining table lies directly in front of you, and an open-plan kitchen area dominated by a shiny granite worktop lies to your left. At the opposite end of the room are several windows offering as much natural light as any man could ask for, but it’ll be vitamin D deficiency for me: I pull down the blinds wherever I see them, check the patio doors are locked — yup — before returning to the entrance in order to drag the wife’s body along the floor and into the lounge.

(Still no sign of that safe room.)

 

*          *          *

 

I find Alistair’s study a short walk along the first-floor landing and, inside, what strikes me first is the shelf on my left all bright and busy with celebrity awards, gleaming trophies, so many gaudy baubles of unearned professional status. In the centre of the study is a large writing desk of black marble held up on two silver-coloured, X-shaped legs. There’s a modest collection of stationery on the desk’s glossy surface and a copy of Alistair’s novel which I turn over to avoid meeting the faux-intense gaze of his dustjacket picture. Behind the desk, the back wall is consumed by two pictures of eagles soaring, one in a gold leaf and the second in silver, both of which shine and glimmer against a black backdrop. The natural light pouring in through the two large windows undoes some of the gloominess of the dark-hued interior, and so I won’t be pulling down the blinds in here, I’d rather let them be for now.

I pour myself out a neat bourbon from a small drinks cabinet tucked into a corner and down it like the medicine I so need it to be.

Outside, a well-maintained sea-green lawn rolls back until interrupted by a distant copse.

Nice.

Here I am, after all the planning and the doubts and the indecision, here I am inside Ally O’Brien’s very own home, his castle, his world, looking out across his land.

I pour myself out another, stiffer than before.

And then, when I’m ready, and the spirits are sufficiently rallied, I drag his catatonic body up the stairs one bump at a time into the study, almost putting my back out in so doing.

 

*          *          *

 

Alistair is lying in what is known as the recovery position on the study floor beside his shelf of trophies. That means he’s on his side, facing me, with his topmost arm draped over his chest to allow for his hand to cushion his head from the cold hard floor. His top knee should be bent, I’m informed, to stop his body from rolling over onto his stomach. I don’t know why I’ve placed him in this position. It’s not like the fucker’s had any CPR of late. I guess, for want of a better reason, it seemed like a vaguely medical thing to do and what with all the time I’ve had to mull things over, my conscience must have crept up on me and compelled me to do something on his behalf. I’d had him propped up in a seated position against the wall beforehand. However, eyes closed or not, that had involved his famous boatrace facing mine and after a while it started giving me the creeps: the idea that at any moment his eyes might flick open and then he’d be glaring at me in red-hot accusation like a killer doll from an old video-nasty.

But I’ve got it all wrong, as it isn’t the eyes that show any signs of life, it’s the mouth:

There’s a noise!

In one excitable flurry of words, I gasp, “Was that a heavy breath or are you trying to speak?”

I unknot the red satin shirt sleeve tied over his mouth and remove the football sock I’d stuffed underneath it.

“Where?”

“That was no breath, that was definitely a word, or at least there was a word in there, and so you’re coming to and not before bloody time, Alistair, because you’ve no idea what it’s been like waiting this out. Not that I’m in a position to ask for your empathy of course, what with all the knocking out I’ve been up to.”

“Whar…”

“Granted, that one was much more like a breath; I had to lean in to even hear it. You’re at home and you’re safe and you’re sound and you’re as snug as a bug in a rug. But you’ve been out for a while, Alistair, far longer than I’d anticipated you’d be. You had me worried that I’d administered a too large dose. You see even in our Information Age it’s difficult to get any good advice on rendering a man unconscious, especially on the fly — it’s not like you can trust Google when researching the correct way to knock out a stranger. Reddit, maybe.”

“Ghhhh…”

“I’m looking to carry out a general anesthesic in a rush, asking for a friend, any ideas? No, it doesn’t work like that, does it — and what would I have done if I’d snuffed you out by mistake, hey? Call 999 for an ambulance? Can you imagine the mess I might get myself into: Ally O’Brien has fallen down a flight of the stairs and is in urgent need of an ambulance,” I’d say, breathlessly, headfirst into the web of deceit, ignorant of its stickiness: “Uh-huh, that’s right, the famous one, the radio show host and first-time author — WHO am I to him? Well, I’m a nobody, I’m simply a passerby, that’s all — WHERE am I now? Well, I’m here, standing outside his home: which is 15 Ashley Park, and if you’d be so kind as to send an ambulance for him — uh-huh, yeah, I guess it is kinda nice around there, and, well, yeah, I suppose it would take an intuitive pair of ears to know that he’d fallen down his stairs if I’m just a stranger passing by — cheerio!  I’d have come up with something sharper than that of course, I’m not a complete idiot, and be rest assured I’d have left a note for the emergency services about the benzo I’d shipped into your veins. I’d have done you and your better half that much, Alistair — hey, hey! —  you are coming to, aren’t you? You’re not still under the influence — you’re not drifting back off to sleep again, are you? You are! Oh, you selfish fucking arsehole, Alistair! This is truly beyond the pale!”

 

*          *          *

 

Her voice goes off, suddenly, like a bomb in a glass factory. Perhaps she’d made a few weaker cries for help in the slow build up to this one; cries which, my being ensconced upstairs, I may have missed and which if I had heard would certainly have saved me from the terrific jump scare I receive from this, the very shrillest of banshee shrieks.

“HELP!”

Well, whatever — I wasn’t prepared for it and the bitch scared me shitless.

I leave Alistair in his study to sprint downstairs to find her wriggling about like an epileptic earthworm on the floor. The zip restraints are still reassuringly tight around her wrists and ankles but the satin shirt sleeve is hanging loose around her neck and a yo-yo of saliva is hanging from her mouth where my football sock should have been. “Who the fuck are you and where’s my fucking husband, you, you creep!” she screams, her voice somehow maintaining a constant eleven on the amp. “What the hell have you done with him? Wait — no, don’t do that! I’ll be quiet, I promise, please don’t stick that in me!”

“Sounds like your wedding night all over.”

That was a pretty wretched thing to say, and, immediately, I wish I could take it all back. It’s the last thing she’ll have ringing in her ears, my grubby little innuendo, as the benzo kicks in and nudges her off the cliff of consciousness into another deep and dark and smothering sleep.

 

*          *          *

 

Distant, faint, and yet distinct enough for me to discern all at once, I hear the word (water) tucked away in a whisper and jump up from behind his writing table — gnnh! — hitting my knees on the table’s edge in the process and grimacing to hide the pain. “Ally — are you awake?” I say, through gritted teeth.

“I’m dry like sandpaper…”

“Water — I hadn’t thought of that.” I’m too quick in my reply, and, in shooting off a flurry of sycophantic words, sound like an ingratiating waiter going the extra mile for his tips: “Of course you do, and I’ll get you some, toot sweet — I’ll be right back.” I swallow any temptation to say Don’t go anywhere, and hobble out of the study, rubbing my smarting knees, before cantering downstairs to the kitchen to fetch him a glass of tap water, which will have to do, there being no time to check the fridge for anything fancier, and I rush back upstairs, spilling some of the contents about me on his carpet en route.

“Do you have a headache?” I ask, propping him up against a wall and putting the glass up to his mouth, tilting it slightly for him to sip from. Why I asked him a question before filling his mouth with a drink of water is beyond me.

“What happened — who are you?”

“I’m sorry if you’re feeling a bit off.”

I’d loaded him up with a perilously strong soporific, far stronger than the one I’d administered his wife, and I can barely struggle to hide my relief at seeing him finally come to his senses, so this ‘feeling a bit off’ line may be putting it a touch mildly. I fill his mouth with another drink before he can pull me up on the anxious phrasing. “Who are you?” he says, spluttering water, his full voice then making a sudden and strident return to full volume. “I can’t move — I’m, I’m, tied up — who are you? — hey, wait, I remember, it was you who tied me up, wasn’t it — it’s all coming back: you’re that delivery man, the one who started wrestling with me by the front door — what are you doing here in my house? Get this shit off my wrists now, you stupid fucking clown!”

He very quickly finds his articulacy as well as his full voice and I’m not too proud to say that I’m a little taken aback by the level of vitriol I have aimed at me. His eyes were resting on my tangerine-coloured chinos when he discharged the first pejorative, or maybe it was the pinstripe blazer or burgundy brogues, but whatever, I’m far too long in the tooth to be feeling ill at ease over matters sartorial.

“Move your arms, your legs — is everything working okay? I hope everything is working okay, especially your hands and fingers: we’re going to need those for what I have in mind.”

My shredded nerves are showing; I need to get my head together, sound calmer, saner.

“What are you talking about, you fucking lunatic? Where’s Harry?”

“You mean Harriet?”

What was I thinking — of course he meant Harriet; I’d take this gaff back quicker than my hands-and-fingers blunder: I’d sooner he thought me a lunatic than an idiot.

“HARRY!”

“Don’t do that, please don’t shout.”

“HARRY!”

“No one will hear you even if you—”

“HARRY!”

“She’s downstairs. She’s safe.”

“WHERE’S MY FUCKING WIFE?”

“I just told you. She’s downstairs. Now calm yourself, you’ll give yourself an aneurism.”

“I don’t believe you; I’m going to kill you if anything’s happened to her—”

“You’re hardly in a position to be issuing threats.”

“What have you done?”

“To you? Plastic zip restraints on the wrists and ankles; a thick cellophane around the forearms and knees.” I raise my palms and pat the air down in a mellowing motion. “You’ll no doubt be disorientated, confused, nay, even a little scared; don’t be.”

“Nay? Are you fucking mad? Who speaks like that?” Shuffling about in a temper, he begins to lose his place against the wall and slides across it. “If this is a robbery,” he says, as I return him with a gentle push to a more civilised right-angle, “why are you still here, hanging about?”

“I am no thief, be rest assured.”

“Rest assured?”

“Nothing of yours will be taken. You have nothing to fear.”

“You have nothing to fear — honestly, who speaks like that? I tell you what, pal, you will have plenty to fucking fear when I get myself free!” He struggles against his bondage in a fit of anger and rolls over, this time onto his face and I, rather than maintaining any high-minded equanimity, can’t help myself, I have to stifle a nervous laugh — it’s bereft of snarky schadenfreude mind, no, this one, it’s more like a return of the tummy jellies I used to feel years and years ago in my headmaster’s office, once upon a teen crime, as I suffered under his accusatory glare, back when the urge to laugh under such intense pressure built up within me volcanically, and the pain I felt in trying to subdue it so often got the better of me.

“Get this shit off my wrists — now!” he shouts, his cheek pressed against the floor.

“I really can’t, Alistair.”

“No — you really fucking can and you really fucking must — now!”

Keeping my arms fully outstretched to avoid the gnashing snap of his teeth or any of his frantic spittle, I return him to his position, upright, his back firm against the wall.

“That wouldn’t appear to be the wisest option available to me.”

“Who speaks like that, you contrived cunt?!”

“Sticks and stones, Alistair, sticks and stones.”

“What I’d fucking do for some of your sticks and stones in these cold hands right now — and you can guess where I’d be sticking your sticks and stones!” He doesn’t follow through with any explicit detail, thankfully, instead there’s a gap in the vitriol, elliptical, the briefest of respites, and for want of anything better to say I let the balmy silence seep into it and take a restoratively deep and nasal breath. “Harry had better be alright or [he begins shaking his head for emphasis] so help me god, you’ve no idea what I’ll do to you,” he whispers to himself.

His tone is ruminative, brooding; I reach for a placatory tone to keep him this way.

“She’s fine, like I told you.”

“SET ME FREE!” he explodes, the pensive tone gone in a finger snap, swapped for a sudden and stormy torrent of abuse: “You pretentious clown-clothed prick — let me go!”

Stung harder by this latest volley — no, hurt; the alliteration making his barb somehow sharper, crueller — I lunge at him, re-forcing my old footy sock down his unsuspecting gob, which I manage to do all at once while he gargles away in anger, and then, after I’ve re-wrapped my old red satin shirt sleeve around his open, incredulous mouth , knotting it tightly behind his head for good measure, I leave the room shaking my head in dismay at this, the most insufferable of temper tantrums — what an absolute motormouth! — I’d barely managed to get a word in edgeways! This is going to be harder than I thought.

 

*          *          *

 

A word to the wise: If you ever try shouting in rage with a sock wedged in your mouth you’ll come off sounding like a performing seal; so if you want to keep any of your dignity about you, don’t. I imagine Alistair must have missed this memo because I have an angry muffled noise to put up with on my return, that, plus a glare that could burn through wood. Entering his study, I shake my head and snort in derision at all the ire in the air and blow me if this doesn’t wind him up even more. He’s still as I’d left him: on the floor, bound, but on seeing me he takes to rocking his top half about like a paraplegic metalhead.

Enough.

It’s time to show him my hand.

I, crossing the room slowly, anticipating the terrified look I’m about to receive (and yes, relish) bring his headbanging momentum to a suddenly handbraked halt; his eyes bulge in horror as I place my Smith & Wesson on the surface of his writing table and spin the Model 29’s iconic barrel around so that he’s staring straight down into its Stygian eye. There’s a neat contrast here between the glow and shine of the gun’s outer shell and the demonic blackness lurking within that suggests a dichotomy of sorts — a literary one, I think — which I do so wish I could note down before distraction steals it away, but alas.

His eyes are swollen in shock and horror, and all the angry rocking is locked in the past tense because he’s shaking his head desperately, dissuasively, sensing an imminent death, the lights going out, and I feel for him, I really do, but this isn’t just an important step, it’s a hurdle that needs to be leapt, for though I may be able to control the world within these four walls, the world without will need a very credible reason to stay away from us for what I have in mind.

I clear my throat to gather his attention.

“To misquote Marx, you have nothing to lose except your brains — and by that, of course, I mean you’ll have them splattered against the wall if you don’t do exactly as you’re told.”

He’s still shaking his head in desperation.

“I pull the trigger and then it’s splat! as your mucky brains are reduced to a Jackson Pollock brush stroke against this study wall.”

Why the pseudo-Tarantino talk?

Dressed as nattily as I am in trouser, blazer and brogue he’s sure to have come up with one or two unhelpful conclusions about who I am and whence I came: I get it — the clothes and loquacious way with words are signs of a civilian life, an empathisable one of fitting in — not to his crowd, but to a crowd nonetheless — and that may have emboldened him and, well, no — I won’t have it. Scared, yes; emboldened, no. On the backfoot, yes; front-footed, no.

Hence his need for jitters.

An agreeable dash of tough guy talk along with a soupçon of crazy should remind him of my monopoly on violence and of my intent to bloody well use it.

“I’m going to remove your gag.” I unwind the shirtsleeve from his face and extract my sock from his mouth and before he can as much as utter another obscenity, I say, “Let’s get down to the specifics: I’m going to need a great deal of your time.”

“My time?”

“Yes, and your commitment…to a project.”

“A project?”

I leave this idea hanging in the air, enigmatically, and I show him his phone; I let a few seconds of silence go by before issuing him a hardboiled imperative: “Unlock it, now.”

Out of instinct he casts his eyes down towards his wrists bound and hidden behind his back to suggest his inability to do as bidden but there’s no suggestion of sarcasm, the gun having put paid to any of his earlier sass.

“The pin’s 1440,” he says, re-gathering his wits, before adding in a nervy fuss of unnecessary words, “There’s no need for face recognition or finger sensors or anything.”

“Wasn’t that about the time of the Gutenberg?”

“The what?”

He looks confused.

“Isn’t that why you chose 1440?”

“It’s a f-f-fucking random number!”

I’m about to offer for argument’s sake that nothing’s fully random in this old world and maybe pull him up on the profanity too when suddenly I’m sidetracked by the sight of a lifeless phone screen in my hand. Christ — I hadn’t thought to check on the bloody thing being alive, I mean, who has theirs turned off this early in the morning? It’s as dead as a freethinking president and now I’m in an awkward limbo, nervily avoiding any of his eye contact while I wait for it to come back on, not wanting to give away any of my anxiety, until — Peep-Peep-Peep! — and it’s alive again, and in goes his pin and — gulp! — I swallow so hard it must be audible as all the missed calls and unread messages begin arriving one after another like a vengeful cavalcade.

Dammit!

I’d been using his phone as a bellwether, a measure of the depth of the hole I was digging for myself, the depth of la merde profonde I was getting myself into, and like an idiot I’d taken encouragement out of its lack of activity.

Well, anyway.

Ten deep breaths and all of that.

It’s time to reclaim my cool.

His colleagues, fretting over his nonappearance, have been sending messages all morning, Whatsapping and whatnot, and so if we don’t get a credible answer out to them toot sweet explaining his absence from work prying eyes may soon be paying us a visit.

“You’re a popular boy,” I say coolly. I put the mobile’s screen in front of his face briefly to make all his incoming messages and missed calls known to him. “Producers and suchlike checking in after you failed to turn up for work, I imagine.”

“Uh?”

Maybe his mind is frazzled, or it’s the stress of the dangerous predicament I’ve put him in, or maybe he simply didn’t see the screen — I did rather flash it past him — because he misses my point entirely.

“You have lots of unread messages,” I say, presenting the screen for him a second time; I scroll down to the missed calls. “And one very persistent caller.”

He starts nodding.

“You’re right — you’re on the money — that’ll be my producer checking in on me.”

While a man’s staring down the barrel of a gun isn’t the best time to try and get any sort of read on him, I get that, but he does come across as less than sincere.

“At some point this morning when your head is in the right place, and I know I can trust you, you’re going to be speaking on this phone to your employer, and you’re going to need to sound as convincing as hell in excusing yourself from work for a week, or I’m going to splatter the walls of your study in scarlet.”

My reference to Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock was a happy accident, to me if not to him, but I leave it without further comment, holding my tongue as his mouth falls open in shock to reveal his. It wasn’t my hardboiled imagery that took the wind out of his sails though, no, it was the idea of a week locked up in his crib with me, and I nod to affirm his worst fears.

He was holding out for the briefest of hold-ups, the merest of smash and grabs, something fleeting that could have been talked up afterwards as a character-building trauma in the green room in amongst his celebrity chums.

“What the hell do you want with us for a week?”

Both of his eyes swell in terror.

“Us?”

“My wife and I.”

Oh, I’d almost forgotten about the wife; I really should go down and check on her.

Going back to his original question, I say, “You and I are going to collaborate on a project.”

“A project?”

“Imagine if you will, Alistair, a raffish writer who can’t be published in this our Cringe New World and he decides to innovate, to kidnap a newly published first-time author (rich, well-connected, Oxbridge naturally) and down the barrel of a gun he forces this first-time author to collaborate on a piece of kidnap writing that not only captures the loco of the situation as it unfolds in the author’s home, in real time, but the public’s imagination with it, and more broadly the craziness of the modern Englishman’s lot in our terribly wayward world.”

“This is a joke right — you are kidding me? You’re a wannabe writer and you’re going to force me to write with you, about my being kidnapped — by you?”

“There’s nothing ‘wannabe’ about me, Alistair.”

“This has to be a joke.”

“Do I look like a joker.”

He gives me the once over and acts as if to say, “Well…?”, but promptly swallows his sarcasm and begins shaking his head instead as if to shoo away the idea of our creative collaboration as an absurdity that shouldn’t bear any further thought.

I took too long in my justification of the kidnap and got carried away in affecting such a grandstanding tone, when exposition, the good stuff, is smuggled into a piece of dialogue where it should never draw attention to itself.

So he doesn’t quite believe me.

My bad.

”Look — [he wants to say my name, but stammers, realising he doesn’t have it yet] you can take whatever you want — anything you want, okay — just leave us the hell alone!”

“Excepting for your time, I won’t be stealing anything of yours.”

“What are you doing here?”

“For the foreseeable future, you may think of me as writer in your residence.”

He’s shaking his head, still refusing to confront the reality of the situation, until:

“You want me to believe that you broke in, drugged us, tied us up,” and here he pauses, pauses to snort in the most abject derision. “In order to write about it?”

“That is what I want you to believe, Alistair, yes.”

“And you’re going to keep us here trapped in our own home for a week, while you write it all up?”

“Yes, a week, give or take.”

“That is the craziest fucking thing I have ever heard, ever.”

“Is it? Really? The world took away from me my right to write and to be read, widely,” I lean against the wall and casually cross my arms. “But in doing so it didn’t take away mere opportunities, it took away my existence: scribo ergo sum; I write therefore I am. And when they take that away from a man, Alistair, they’ve taken away his reason to be. A man will go to extreme lengths to defend his right to be — as you’re finding out. Now don’t call this crazy. Enough of that. There is nothing crazy about what I’m doing: it’s the world that’s lost its marbles and it’s pretty damn difficult for a man to stay upright, to retain any of his dignity, his pluck, when so many a damn marble is running maverick on the floor.”

“I hear the words, you have a way with them — they’re superficially smart, I’ll give you that — but you definitely need help, pal, because you’re fucking insane.”

This is getting under my skin.

How rational and articulate does a man have to be before he’ll be taken seriously?

I uncross my arms and unpeel myself from the wall.

“I’m prepared for all manner of pejorative and label,” I say, hiding the tender wound behind a wan smile. “And yet — in another world, a not-too-distant one to ours, I’d be so awfully orthodox. I write a few books, my little cadre of followers keeps me happy and my publisher solvent, and life ticks on in its own humdrum way. But that won’t work in this day and age, will it. So, as I say, I have to adapt — and adapt I will. Yes, I am ready for all manner of label; the right one of course is Visionary.” I change tack, taking it down a gear to lighten the mood with a touch of levity. “Just think,” I titter, “what if Blake had been born today, you might have had him in your room instead of me.”

I affect a bright and disarming a smile in the hope that it’ll be reciprocated — alas, he’s having none of it.

“You’re fucking batshit, pal!”

His words hit me like a hammer blow, and the disarming smile, all the levity, are gone in a flash.

Have it your way, Alistair.

Violence it is.

I skip over to his desk to where my laptop is sitting open, and I close it with a firm touch.

Then I slide my fingers underneath it, readying it for its most un-literary of endeavours.

He has no idea of what’s coming.

(In an odd way, neither do I.)

Finally, I swing the laptop around at him, scything it through the air whither it connects with his smug and entitled face like a gentleman’s glove — take that, sir! — yes, a gentleman’s glove from a far better age where had I been alive and similarly insulted I’d have demanded my satisfaction from him, though, given all the blood and gore I bring about, perhaps in a less brutish manner than the one we had here.