I am trying to tell a story.

This is a dire situation. Sentences of the most offensively clichéd kind flow from my fingers and appear on the computer screen like the result of some infernal magic. It feels like a curse: the curse of the first-time successful author. Glowing reviews (yawn), fawning interviewers and ludicrously complimentary profiles in ‘serious’ newspapers. And then, to top it all like the cherry on a particularly glutinous, saccharine confection, an award! Two, in fact. Two nails in my coffin would be a more accurate description. And now a publisher up my arse and an agent who rarely lets 24 hours pass without a palpitation-inducing phone call of the ‘hello-how-are-you-great-how’s-the-book-mustn’t-keep-the-public-waiting-and-I-want-that-holiday-home-by-next-Christmas’ kind. The weasel will get ten per cent for what? Badgering me to suicide, probably.

Committed. Creative. Curious.. Words I typed and printed out in 72pt Helvetica and taped up around my computer before the circus got started. When it was just me and the screen and occasionally, when I could bear it and my skin felt of a suitable armour-like thickness, the ‘South Leighs Writer’s Group’. A misnomer. People who attend writer’s groups are rarely writers. They are normally directionless, delusional dilettantes with a cold-eyed fuhrer who sets pointless writing tasks and leads the ‘discussion’ (read mauling and/or flabby praise) on the work of whichever idiot volunteered to be dragged over the coals that week. My first meeting witnessed a bravura performance from the group’s ‘leading light’, a local journalist who fancied himself as Martin Amis but with all his own teeth. His literary credentials consisted of writing for the free rag that was pushed through people’s doors once a week, little more than a collection of adverts for discount sofas and DIY stores but which qualified him, by the group’s standards, with Rushdie-like eminence.

I turned up, heart in mouth and my first chapter clutched in sweaty palms (God, I was wimp), and faced a group of seven or eight badly-dressed, mostly middle-aged men and women, arranged in a circle and resembling a group of hyenas looking forward to their next meal. But before I even had a chance to introduce myself, the suit-wearing skinny guy I had seen smoking outside, (smoking in an ostentatious way as if drawing on the cigarette was the only thing that stood between him and some terrible act of violence), laughed abruptly and said in a strangled London whine ‘Well mate, if you want to take a vote on it …’ The sentence was left dangling like a threat. The hyenas swivelled their eyes to feast on a stand-off between the Amis-wannabee and the group’s leader, a bitter retired school teacher with a sarcastic drawl no doubt perfected in front of generations of unimpressed teenagers. I didn’t know them but the power struggle was obvious: the old King unwilling to cede his authority to the young, virile prince, straining at the leash and headstrong with pride and folly. Fantastic, I thought, the human drama played out for those most able to appreciate it. I looked at the others, expecting the same recognition on their faces, but only saw blood-lust and, on some, the sphincter-tightening of social embarrassment.

The school teacher, backed into a corner and now the centre of attention, pursed his lips and shrugged. No Lear-like tempest ravings for him, though I doubt they would have had the same emotional resonance in a musty-smelling, strip-lighted community centre. ‘I don’t see why a vote is out of the question.’ He turned to us, a false look of calm on his face floating like a slick of oil on water. ‘Should we take turns in leading the group, or should it always be me? Or, possibly’ he gestured away, like fending off an attack of gnats, ‘Marcus?’ The question hung like a faecal odour we were all too embarrassed to mention. And then idiotically, in a pathetic bid to ingratiate myself, I suggested the two of them should leave the room while the rest of us debated. After quarter of an hour of sentences all ending in ‘but’, it was agreed that members would take turns in leading the group, but could nominate another member if they did not want to do it. That is, Marcus or John would do it, depending on whose crony was supposed to do it that week. Ah, democracy. A veil of modesty to cover the reeking maw of lust and malevolence that is humanity’s true face.

I’m not sure why I went to the group in the first place. To ease my loneliness perhaps. Or something more constructive, to gain helpful criticism from like minds in a mutually supportive atmosphere? Hah! I’d already committed the unpardonable sin of being able to write, believe it or not. There might not be much evidence of it now but then, after years of apprenticing myself to the masters, picking apart the intricate mechanisms of Tolstoy and James and then Carver, Greene and anyone else who could paint a picture with words so vivid that they glowed for days in my mind, I had learned an art. Even better, I enjoyed it. I didn’t write in order to became famous or rich, although I had the naïve belief that both those things followed if you were any good. I wrote because I believed that it brought me closer to my fellow human beings; because the unexamined life wasn’t worth living; because by writing I was a small link in a vast chain that stretched back into the past, past Shakespeare and the Greeks and back to when stories were told rather than written, wisdom passed from generation to generation. I even believed that the chain stretched into the future, but all I see now is an endless tunnel with the faces of X-Factor winners and footballers’ girlfriends, whirling round in stygian darkness.

There is nothing like the failure of the successful. Did you know that fame, for a writer, is a VIP pass to articulated idiocy and eloquent inanity? The egoism goes without saying. You could talk your vocal chords into shreds with the number of interviews and guest appearances and panel shows you are invited on. Fame seems to qualify you to talk about anything and everything, all at a producer’s whim. I was shoehorned into discussions about Internet dating, fines for not reusing carrier bags, gardening being the new sex, knitting being the new sex, interior design being the new sex, plastic surgery for pets and once, only once, writing as a career choice. I burbled and pontificated and vilified and mocked with the best of them. And when I came home, wrung out like someone’s dirty old washing, I had no words left. Nothing to say. The screen remained as blank as my mind, unless I typed ‘agdahjllyjklj’, row after row, down the page. The spines of my books, lined up respectfully, seemed to turn their backs on me in despair. At random I flicked through ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and read a sentence. ‘She smiled and smiled, and we met; but by this time it was all done in a silence flagrantly ominous.’ Perfection. And now I knew how flagrantly ominous silence could be.

And now this story, this awful sub-Dickensian tale I am attempting to write for an anthology in aid of sick children, is the last straw. What do I know about sick children? What do I know about being a child prostitute in Victorian England? Whatever made me say yes? Ah, of course, the agent and his yen for a cottage in Tuscany. The agent whose name, in a bizarre little joke of the kind the universe sometimes likes to play, is Marcus John. Success has brought me a constant reminder of envious, mean-minded failure. To give him his credit, there was a hint of Brutus about old John, a gift for borrowing something of the bard’s glory as he skulked through everyday life in his corduroy trousers and baggy cardigan. About a year after I’d stopped going to the group, barely a week after my award and my face appearing on newspaper supplements and on TV, we ran into each other outside Tesco. With a bland smile and a magnanimous gesture as if welcoming back the prodigal son, he invited me to the writer’s group next meeting.

‘Well I’m a bit too busy for writing at the moment,’ I said, hoping that a vague excuse would be taken as modesty rather than arrogance.

‘Oh, such a shame’ he said in that soft, sarcastic drawl. ‘You wrote so nicely. It would be a pity to give up.’

The old bastard’s knife was a quick and clean as an assassin’s. John, I salute you. I had needlessly hardened my heart to the criticism of serious reviewers, yet one sentence – no, one word, from a bitter old man, had fatally wounded me. ‘Nicely’. I would not even patronize a six-year-old by calling their writing ‘nice’. And yet I couldn’t shake off the feeling that he was right: my writing was nice. I was a nice writer. My book was about nice characters who overcame some not-nice things in order to live a nice life, happily ever after. And now I can’t write about child prostitution because, well, it wasn’t nice, was it?

Nice: Milky tea with two sugars. Round-eyed puppies on greeting cards. Rose-covered cottages on boxes of fudge. A long, hot bath at the end of a cold winter’s day. Nice? I can do endless, trivial stories about nice. But Henry James didn’t do nice, and neither did Tolstoy and Shakespeare probably didn’t even have the word in his vocabulary, and he invented half the bloody language. Not in one of my reviews was the word used. Not one. And that’s when I realised that they were all probably written by half-drunk cretins who had read the blurb and skim-read the first few chapters, then flicked to the end. Because it was screamingly obvious to me that without that particular adjective, it was impossible to say anything about my book at all. The judges for the awards were no better: academics with their own books to plug, a couple of celebrities who had last read something about Janet and John, and a grumpy old newspaper editor who probably couldn’t get reading glasses strong enough to see the damn thing.

So where do I go from here? Do I tell Marcus John that the labour of some other fool will have to help him with the holiday home, and go back to 9-5 and dreaming of other kinds of glory? Or I could burrow into obscurity, becoming the eccentric recluse of a little seaside village, writing a masterpiece that won’t get published until after my death. Maybe posthumous success is more palatable, I ponder. The phone rings. Surprise, surprise, it’s Marcus with his daily sugar-coated pill of avarice.

‘Actually, Marcus, I’m thinking of taking a break. This story isn’t really - well, truth is I don’t really know that much about deprivation and exploitation.’

‘Of course, of course. You should have said so before! All writers need to do a bit of research, nothing to be embarrassed about. I’ll have Jenny put together an itinerary – maybe India, Afghanistan, Brazil and those wonderful photogenic favelas – that should give you a start. Maybe think of a few newspaper articles, My Life-changing Journey etc etc.’

‘That wasn’t quite what I had in mind. And rather out of my budget I’m afraid.’

‘All on expenses, of course.’

‘Ah.’

Ah. Success beckons with a fleshy finger; what’s wrong with nice if it’s what people want? Isn’t my job to make people’s lives better, make this brief stay on the mortal coil more pleasurable? I take down the atlas and trace a route from London to Delhi. One flight, one lifetime away. I imagine a man, maybe in his late 30s, fleeing a stagnant marriage and unsatisfying career. On a whim he books a flight to India, where he meets a poor but feisty street kid who unwittingly shows him the real value of love and friendship. Perfect. I slam the atlas shut and start typing.