Doctor Criminale Read Online Free PDF Page A

would never give CD time to I cannot understand.
    So I made my way, the aspiring journo in the age of literary confusion. I did, I think, all the right things. I took a flat in Camden (Islington) in a basement so modest it was actually
underneath another basement. I lived off fast-food outlets and bought myself a microwave oven and a mountain bike. I had girlfriends who wanted to take out joint mortgages on Docklands apartments
with me; I explained I want to remain a person of temporariness not permanence, journey not arrival. I wrote, but not books (far too monumental). I wrote fragments, in fact I wrote everything:
solemn pieces for the
Times Literary Supplement
, essays on South American fiction for the
London Review of Books
, lyrics for pop songs, scripts for radio commercials. I reviewed and I
columnized, picking up titbits about authors that would make your ears crinkle. I interviewed, I opined. I freelanced, I free-styled, I free-loaded, I freebied. I also worked part-time in a winebar
in Covent Garden, and sold gossip to
New Musical Express
. And so I made my way, till the night of the Booker, when my life quite seriously changed.
    By now, back in our
mise-en-scène
at the Guildhall, the room was full of folk and noise. An MC appeared, gavelled for silence, and asked us all to proceed into the Banqueting Hall
beyond. In a great restive flock the authors round me surged off, herded here and there by their various Fionas. I jostled my way through the elegant diners pushing for the trough to find the table
plan, to see what good company had been picked for me in the prime part of the evening. I saw I had not been placed on the top table, where all the places had been assigned to people somewhat
better known than myself: an ex-Prime Minister, the leader of the opposition, two Nobel prizewinners, a French new novelist, now very old, and the chairman of the judges, a former Labour politician
rumoured to read books. Nor, for that matter, was I on any of the other tables either. ‘I hope you don’t think they’ll let you eat with the big people,’ said someone at my
side, taking the spare glass of champagne from my hand, ‘There’s a pressroom at the back where you can eat your sandwiches. If you remembered to bring them.’ I turned, and there
was the girl in the thong-tied dress again, cuddling her clipboard and very frankly looking me over.
    ‘Ah, it’s you,’ I said. ‘And it’s also you,’ she said. ‘You know who I am,’ I said, ‘I don’t know who . . .’ ‘I’m
Ros,’ said the girl, ‘Short for Diana.’ ‘How did you like the interview?’ I asked. ‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘I was good?’ I asked. ‘You
were terrible,’ she said, ‘Worse than Howard Jacobson.’ ‘Come on, nobody at the Booker’s ever been worse than Howard Jacobson,’ I said. ‘They have
now,’ she said. ‘Okay, what was wrong with it?’ I asked. ‘You were mean, crappy and selfish,’ said Ros. ‘Well, I’m young,’ I said. ‘I’ll
say,’ said Ros, ‘Do you want to come to the scanner and watch it go out?’ ‘Go out?’ I asked, ‘You mean it’s bad but you’re still going to use
it?’ ‘I mean it’s so bad we’d be crazy not to use it,’ said Ros. ‘Now look,’ I said, ‘If it’s bad we ought to think about this.’
‘We have,’ she said, ‘It’s right at the top of the programme. It’s so bad it’s brilliant. You’d love it, at least you would if it weren’t you. Are
you coming or not? If so, grab one of those champagne bottles from the waitress, before she takes them away.’
    So Ros and I stepped out of the Guildhall, leaving behind the bright lights and the glitz of the great and the good, and started walking in wind and driving rain through the City of London, its
great financial towers, the pride of the economic Eighties, rising high above. We walked through the land of fiscal wizardry, turned down a mean sidestreet, and entered an unmarked green van,