The Transformation of Rupert Sweet

The Transformation of Rupert Sweet

a short story by

John Simes

‘Snow blanketed the landscape, it muffled sound and hid the roads.’  Rupert Sweet stared bleakly at the sentence. Same old crap. Of course, the sodding snow muffled sound and hid the sodding roads. What else would it sodding well do? Always the same. Amanda Tempest (aka Lavinia Stoate) always started her nauseatingly sanctimonious so-called novels with the same kind of opening sentence. If it wasn't snow, it would be a row of benighted willow trees, tossing their branches balefully at the moon, or scudding clouds sliding across the sky and revealing the stars shining on the chic outline of Stoate’s latest twenty something heroin, for whom love was always a perilous trek through the bleak tundra of Lavinia’s empty intellect.

Rupert was not sure how much more of this he could take. This was the fourteenth novel by Lavinia Stoate that he was expected to edit. Not that the permanently sozzled chick-lit diva of Ilfracombe ever showed any appreciation of his work. Indeed, Rupert was convinced that once he had submitted his edits, the manuscript was swiftly conveyed to the publishers for them to sort out the trivial business of typesetting, marketing and inducing other desperate authors to provide ridiculously flattering reviews.

And desperation was the shared sickness of the publishing industry. People wanting to be someone, to be noticed, flattered, even loved, by readers they would never meet from countries they would never go to. Or appear at literary festivals, and be the subject of a gushing introduction, before reading their deathless prose or poetry to ranks of people perched on uncomfortable plastic chairs, who were really wondering whether Tesco's would still be open.

Had Stoate ever read the edited versions of her novels? After her books were launched, she would appear on one of those night-time chat shows, swathed in a feather boa and  crimson fedora and, as far as Rupert could tell, as pissed as a fart. Or one of those morning cultural programmes on Radio 4, when Amanda - ‘Call me Mandy’ - would talk in deep tones about her mission to get her readers to release their inner weasel. But Rupert knew the truth of it. Lavinia was simply an addict of her own ideas and could not contemplate anything else. Without the stream she would be lost and knew it.

Rupert read on. Symphony Probert, the latest heroin, was lighting a Gauloise and puffing a smoke plume in the direction of the soon to be rejected Roger. “You mean, you mean you're going to throw me over to spend your life with a small-town bank manager with an Austin 7. How could you?” Rupert reflected that Roger was well out of it, and the bank manager was heading for a good fleecing.

“I'm sorry Roger. I just can't bear a man who cannot drive. It is something that I would expect a man who was remotely capable - and potent - to be able to do. Don't you agree?” And Roger, clad in a white Alpine jacket and ski pants had promptly sunk to his knees and wept. Rupert smiled.

Rupert glanced across his study, its desk cluttered, computer screens covered in dust and the bin overflowing. There was a gilt framed mirror above his desk. A present from his mother.  Rupert wondered if she had only given it to him in the hope that he would really begin to see how utterly ineffectual he really was. Every time he saw his image it quietly enraged him. The face was benign beneath a thinning mat of fair hair - Rupert had encouraged one curl to loop coyly across his brow - but his face always seemed to evince a sense of surprise at his own image. In fact, a sense of surprise at everything. The people he met, and Rupert himself, lived in a permanent state of uncertainty that undermined his sense of resolve. Those cheekbones would never be heroic, the chin never jutting and assertive, the lips too thin to be passionate, the eyes too hesitant and darting to ever command the stage. No, Rupert had a sense that unless he did something to break the spell of his own confinement, he would always be in thrall to those in the grip of their urgent fantasies.

He looked back at the opening line once again. He knew that Stoate would want him to travel to her tedious feline-filled seaside bungalow for another dictation session. Lavinia would still be in bed, propped up by a bolster and cushions, attired in a silk dressing gown and jewelled beanie, her make-up mis-applied to startling effect. Rupert would weave his way through a labyrinth of dangling paper butterflies before perching on a creaking IKEA chair; then, laptop on knees, his fingers would dance at astonishing speed to keep pace with Lavinia's stream of literary effluent.

Rupert’s gaze moved to the bookshelf above his desk, and his own modest works. Rupert’s Rural Rambles, Gorgeous Gorge ~ The Joys of Cheddar, Garlic and the Human Condition, Britain’s Greatest Garden Railways. These were not grandiloquent epics in the canon of Dostoyevsky or Pasternak. But Rupert was convinced that there was more human understanding and empathy in just one of these books then any of Lavinia Stoate’s sordid forays into the swamp of middle-class angst.

Well, if Roger was to be rejected by Symphony, and Stoate did not even bother to read his edits, perhaps the time had come. Rupert had an idea. A devilish one. It was time to act. He drew his chair up to his desk, feeling a fresh energy. If snow was to blanket the sodding landscape, perhaps it was time Rupert went a little off-piste. Hmm. Suppose Symphony was tragically run over by an errant snow plough, driven by a jilted Roger, at the end of chapter one. A truly finished Symphony. Satisfying. Roger could then go on the run! A plot at last! Rupert began to sense the snowmelt on the road to freedom.

He started to type.