We Are Now Beginning Our Descent Read Free

incorrectly thriving garden. It came, and his conscience would have to budge up to make room for it. He was beaten. The great words were not in reach and he would rather be popular than obscurely wise. He didn’t delude himself that it would be simple to write a best-seller, to write a novel whose first characteristic was that it would appeal to the largest possible audience. Out there in London were hundreds of writers who believed they could easily write commercial novels if they wished, but chose not to. This false notion was the only barrier standing between themand the rolling floodwaters of despair. Kellas knew it would be hard. It could not be thought of as a lowering, or a coarsening. He would need to learn to be content in the new medium, not merely study it. The next day he bought five fat paperback thrillers with their titles and their authors’ names on the front in embossed gold lettering two inches high.
    In the September of 2001, after Kellas had made his notes and laid out his plot strands diagrammatically on large sheets of cartridge paper, using different coloured pens for each strand, a group of young men hijacked four airliners and flew them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York, causing thousands of deaths and great destruction. Kellas hadn’t talked about his new book at work and when his colleagues at The Citizen saw him that day, staring at the TV monitors, chewing his lip, gripping the back of a chair, teeny fireballs popping in his eyes, they were awed at how hard he seemed to be taking it, as if he knew he had a friend trapped on the high floors. He didn’t. He was watching a scenario almost identical to the one he had planned, in the secrecy of his study, as the climax for his novel.
    He’d known the thriller market was crowded. He’d allowed for the danger that he might have to compete with a book with the same plot as his. But he had not foreseen the extent to which naïve idealists, with no understanding of human nature, no sympathy with the Other and a childlike faith in the use of violence to produce happy outcomes might persuade real people to act out their lousy plots in the real world. Kellas had worked hard to make his terrorist mastermind a one-sided figure of evil, when the character he had been looking for was a frustrated novelist who did not know he was one. It hadn’t occurred to Kellas that men might find it easier to sell their thrilling, unlikely narratives to the masses by asking armies of believers to perform them than to vend their imaginations at airport bookstalls in the accepted fashion.
    A few days later, the woman he’d been sleeping with for six months, Melissa Monk-Hopton, a columnist on The Daily Express ,broke up with him, saying the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington had made her reassess her life choices. Those were the words she used. Kellas asked her how many other men and women she supposed had used the actions of a group of suicidal religious fanatics to rationalise their break-ups that week. She responded in her column next day, proclaiming an end to her ‘shameful fraternization with the pusillanimous quislings of the liberal left’. He had desired her on the basest grounds. But even though, while she referred to him as ‘my boyfriend’, he referred to her out of her hearing as ‘a woman I’ve been seeing’, he’d been hurt by the manner of her leaving. It seemed curious to him that he put such a value on knowing women, on understanding women, and boasted to anyone about how much he enjoyed the company of women, yet had never been happy with a woman for more than a few months. He took some days off work and tried to drink but couldn’t bring himself to do more than sniff the whisky before he poured it down the drain. He lay on the sofa for hours, cycling his way through the TV channels at two-second intervals, and ordered chicken kormas and calzones from the local takeaways. Salty juices dripped onto his clothes and