Bill didn’t know what you were supposed to do with books you’d written yourself. He didn’t know any publishers. He didn’t know any literary agents. And he didn’t know whether you could just heave a four-hundred-page manuscript at friends and colleagues and ask them to lug it home and then provide a kind but honest – but above all kind – assessment of your worth as a novelist and therefore as a human being since this book was the closest he’d ever come to pure self-expression. There weren’t that many friends and colleagues he could ask. Diary of a Soho Boy wasn’t for the faint of heart, he could see that: he’d written the kind of book he wanted to read, and he’d told what he knew to be the truth about men like him. He hadn’t described what went where, but neither had he made it all so opaque that nobody would be able to tell what was going on. He didn’t even know whether it was publishable. The kind of love he had described was still illegal, so did that make the descriptions illegal too?
In the end he decided to tell Tony he’d finished, just to see what happened next.
‘Can I read it?’
‘What do you want to read it for?’
‘Because I want to read everything you write, you twerp.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know that.’
‘What if you hate it?’
‘I wouldn’t tell you.’
‘So what’s the point of reading it?’
‘What’s the point of reading anything? I wouldn’t tell Graham Greene I didn’t like his last book either.’
‘But presumably you don’t write comedy scripts with Graham Greene.’
‘All the more reason not to tell you if I don’t like it.’
‘So you’re just going to tell me I’m a genius?’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘Can we start again, then?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Tony, will you read my book? And tell me what you think of it?’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Before, you asked me. Now I’m asking you. As a favour.’
‘I’m not Vernon Whitfield. I couldn’t tell you what’s wrong with it. Not that there will be anything wrong with it.’
‘I don’t want Vernon Whitfield stuff. Just tell me it reads like a book. Whether there are boring bits. Whether I should put it in the bin or show it to someone else. Whether I’ll get arrested.’
‘I’m not a legal person either.’
‘All right, whether I’ll get fired from the BBC. Thrown out of pubs. That sort of thing.’
‘Gotcha.’
‘And …’
‘I’ll just read it,’ said Tony.
‘How long will it take you, do you think?’
‘How long is a piece of string?’
‘Do you mean how long is my book?’
‘I suppose I do, yes.’
‘Four hundred pages. Double-spaced.’
‘And how boring is it?’
‘Fuck off.’
Tony read it twice in the next three days, while telling Bill that he hadn’t had time to start it yet. He read it so quickly the first time that he could think of nothing to say, except that he had taken himself off to the bedroom after the baby had gone to sleep, and was still there when June switched the TV off and came in to get undressed.
‘What’s it like?’ she said.
‘It’s … Well. Blimey. I dunno.’
‘If I may state the obvious, you’re finding it impossible to put down.’
‘Yeah, but he’s my best friend.’
‘I’ve read lots of scripts by best friends. I’ve put a lot of them down. And scripts are short.’
‘OK, then. It’s good. But blimey.’
‘What’s the blimey bit?’
‘It’s … Well. Bloody hell.’
‘Whatever job you decide to do when you get older, make sure it doesn’t involve the English language.’
‘It’s … I haven’t read anything like it before.’
‘Is it well written?’
‘I dunno. It’s just … him.’
‘So he has a voice.’
‘Well, if that’s a voice, everyone’s got one.’
‘No, not everyone’s got one. Most people can’t get it out on to the page. I had a go once and I sounded like an A-level literature student being strangled while writing an essay about Jane Austen. So he’s more than halfway there. I want to know about the blimeys and the bloody hells.’
‘The, you know. All that. It’s pretty steamy stuff. D’you know what? I don’t think I do go both ways.’
‘So it’s a handbook as well.’
‘I don’t know about the hand bit. It didn’t do much for me.’
June rolled her eyes.
‘Sorry,’ said Tony. ‘It isn’t half going to cause a fuss, though, if he can find someone to publish it.’
‘It’s that … honest?’
‘It’s not like Lady Chatterley, or Fanny Hill. But it’s still blokes kissing blokes.’
‘So what are you going to tell him?’
‘I’m going to tell him what I told him I was going to tell him: it’s a work of genius.’
‘Fuck off,’ said Bill.
‘I mean it.’
‘A work of genius like who? Dickens? Tolstoy?’
‘It’s different from them.’