Bright Young Things (2 page)
Bright Young Things
is my own favourite of my early novels. Like
The End of Mr. Y
, it came out of a definite, passionate feeling that I had to express or otherwise go mad. I am often asked to what extent my writing is autobiographical. Every writer knows how hard this question is to answer honestly, and how difficult it can be to differentiate between authenticity on the one hand and autobiography on the other. I have never written people I know into my books, except very slightly. But my books are full of me: my feelings, experiences, memories. Almost every ‘true story’ narrated by the characters in
Bright Young Things
is something that really happened to me. Reading it again now, twelve years on, I am astonished by the details of my own life that I remembered in 1999 that I do not remember now. Or are those the bits I made up? I have no idea.
Scarlett Thomas
Deal, Autumn 2012
Bright Young Things
Bright Young Things wanted for big project.
SAE to PO Box 2300 Edinburgh.
The room contains a desk, a woman and two large stacks of paper.
On the right-hand side of the desk, in a uniform pile, are the blank application forms, ready to be sent out. On the other are the stamped addressed envelopes, a haphazard stack, sent in by people wanting further information about the Bright Young Things job. The woman, Jackie, doesn’t look at the handwriting on each envelope, except to note the colour. She has been instructed to put application forms only into those envelopes addressed in blue or black. The ones with the small red capitals, the big green swirls, they go in the corner of the room: Discard Pile A. The colour thing doesn’t strike her as odd. All her jobs have some weird aspect to them. She just does what she’s told.
Jackie is a professional envelope-filler. Occasionally she works from home, but with the kids screaming and chewing up all the envelopes, it isn’t ideal. More often she takes jobs like this, in a small room in a damp, empty block. All she has to do is put the forms in the envelopes and note how many she has done. Everything is provided for her; she just has to turn up and do what a machine can’t do. You need a brain for this, and eyes, and hands. Some of the envelopes have no stamps; some are already stuck down. These must be discarded.
She’s up to number 105, and in a good rhythm now. Like a robot, her left hand pulls an envelope from the stack, scans the colour and either retains or throws it. A discarded envelope is dealt with in two seconds – look and discard, no need to waste time on those. The ones with blue or black writing are opened and filled with a form from the pile. A right-handed movement – into the envelope, tear off the strip and seal. This takes a total of five seconds. The envelopes without strips – the licking ones – Jackie throws on to a pile she’s invented: Discard Pile B. For three-sixty an hour she’s not going to lick anything. People should think about that when they send SAEs.
In a minute she averages forty-five envelopes. In an hour she can do 2,700. By the end of the day she’ll have processed over fifteen thousand.
When the envelopes are stuffed, she will go home and forget about them. Almost thirty per cent of the people who sent off their SAEs will send back the application form, to a different address this time. A man will sit in his office and read them all. And from the two thousand or so he reads, he will select six.
The 747 lurches in the sky. One more time, and Anne’s going to be sick.
‘Is it supposed to do this?’ she asks the man next to her.
‘This is nothing,’ he says. ‘One time I was on a flight and the plane just dropped two thousand feet.’
‘Two thousand?’ Anne tries to remain composed.
‘Uh-huh. They have to keep on either odd or even numbers depending on which way they’re going. You can’t drop just one thousand in case you have a head-on with a plane going the other way.’
Anne processes this information. On the large screen at the front of the cabin is a map showing the plane’s progress. Anne finds the little graphics of the world and the plane comforting. They abstract the whole experience. Right now the pretend-plane is somewhere over the Atlantic, a couple of hours from Heathrow. After it lands, she’s never flying again, Anne decides.
‘She sat on a rescue boat for eleven hours,’ says the woman on Anne’s other side.
‘Who?’
‘My mother.’
‘Sorry?’
‘When she was rescued from the
Titanic
, dear.’
On the runway at LA, Anne had mentioned to her neighbours that she was a nervous passenger. The old woman said her mother had been afraid of flying. Then Anne said she was OK on boats, and the old woman had started telling her about the
Titanic
. The woman has slept for most of the flight, but every hour or so she wakes up and continues the conversation.
‘I inherited the gift from her.’
‘The gift?’
‘For reading cards.’
‘What, Tarot?’
‘Yes, dear. Her cards told her it was a bad week for travelling.’
She nods back off to sleep and Anne opens her book again. She can’t get into it. Picking up her walkman from the fold-down table, she inserts the small headphones in her ears. She’s on her third REM tape, doing what she always does: fixating on one track and playing it over and over again. For take-off at LA it was ‘Losing my Religion’. For a few hours over the Atlantic it was ‘Tongue’. Now it’s ‘Daysleeper’. Over and over again. Her mother would call it obsessive.
As a child, Anne never did anything in half-measures. At Sunday School, some girl once told her that if she ever lied she would go to hell. For a month Anne didn’t speak, because she was afraid she would lie by accident. She couldn’t even answer a question like
Where are the cornflakes?
with a simple
I don’t know
, because maybe she did know and had just forgotten. In Anne’s six-year-old mind, the devil would count that as a lie. So she just stopped speaking.
Her mother took her to a child psychologist who had bad breath and wet armpits. Anne continued with her silence, but blushed as he asked her increasingly embarrassing questions about ‘inappropriate behaviour’, and whether anyone she knew had touched her in ways that had made her feel uncomfortable. The trip to see him did cure her silence in the end, especially when Anne was told she’d have to go back again unless there was an improvement. Between the psychologist and the devil, she chose the devil.
After that, words became Anne’s only friends. Diary after diary explained why she couldn’t fit in at school; why the other kids thought she was weird. Eventually her parents sent her to a special school, complaining relentlessly about the expense. Once there, Anne was told she was too clever and was sent to a room to read Judy Blume books by herself, to try and bring her down to the level of the other children. She was twelve.
Teen fiction soon became an obsession. Anne read every Judy Blume (her favourite was
Forever
), and then started on Paul Zindel, feasting on his seminal
Pigman
and then
The Pigman’s Legacy
. After that it was anything she could get her hands on. American kids – fat or lonely or abused, she had to know more about them. Anne could have been an agony aunt. She knew about
issues
. About bullying, suicide, divorce, pregnancy and sex. Any time one of the other kids had a problem, she knew what to do. Any time one of the other kids was depressed, she lent them her copy of
Are You There God? It’s Me
,
Margaret.
There were no rules at the special school, and no homework. When she was twelve and a half, Anne started writing poetry. The poems helped her through what the school called ‘learning time’, which consisted of non-compulsory lessons. At break times she held court in the playground or in an unused classroom, talking about contraception or religion, firing off rounds of teen angst to bewildered pre-teens who would never quite allow her into their group. Out of school she spent her time at the library. She was a loner, and although no one would have called her a well-adjusted child, she wasn’t unhappy.
During her four years at the special school she wrote seven hundred poems and attended no classes. The school thought she would get bored eventually, but she never did. The policy of boring a child into submission had worked on every other pupil who had ever attended, each one drifting into the non-compulsory lessons eventually. But it didn’t work on Anne. She simply never got bored.
There didn’t seem to be much point in Anne sitting her GCSEs, since she had never attended a class, but the school registered her anyway, hoping for at least a pass in English. She started with the biology exam. The first question was about contraception; the second was about the menstrual cycle. Since these subjects had been more than adequately covered in Anne’s teen fiction, she got an A. She also got As in English Language, History, Geography, Religious Studies and Art, for which she just turned up in the exam room and drew an abstract of a penis – not that she’d ever seen one. These marks were enough to get her into a grammer school for her A levels, and finally to Sussex University to read English and Philosophy.
Her parents paid for her flat on Brighton seafront, and for her car, although she hadn’t asked them to. They also provided her with a generous allowance, which she spent on books, magazines and sushi, the only food she would eat. Anne’s first year was spent thinking about nothing, and her resulting dissertation – on the subject of zero – won her acclaim from everyone except her parents, who decided at the beginning of Anne’s second year to withdraw the flat and the car and the allowance, feeling that she had been overindulged.
They had hoped that Anne would be forced into student life, but not being one to be forced into anything, Anne found a bed-sit, worked as a cleaner and read Sartre for a year. At the end of the year she staged her own suicide. Her thesis was a dossier of papers relating to her death: a diary of events leading up to it and the suicide note itself. Her stunt made national news. Her parents reinstated the flat, the car and the allowance, and organised therapy.
In her third year, Anne read Baudrillard and listened to Radiohead. She’d never been into indie music before, preferring saccharine pop and seventies disco, but this was the year she discovered MTV. The new groups fascinated her, and their lyrics were like a kind of poetry: surreal, bubblegum poetry, as meaningless and alienating as anything she’d ever encountered. For her third year project Anne invented a videogame called ‘Life’. She graduated with a First.
Anne has never had a best friend or a boyfriend. She’s still a virgin.
The trip to America was a last-ditch attempt by her parents to encourage her to get a life. But all she has done in the last two months is think about the end of the world. The aunt she was staying with had to go up to San Francisco to see a sick friend, so Anne was left in the house on her own. She ate lots of potato chips, cheese and alfalfa sandwiches and microwaveable french fries. She discovered chat shows: Geraldo, Ricki, Sally Jesse Raphael, Jerry Springer. And she didn’t leave the house – except to visit the twenty-four-hour supermarket – at all during the two months she was there.
The atmosphere on the plane changes as land appears below. The turbulence has gone and everyone’s relaxed.