The Halls of Meh

Every profession has its own Valhalla. The cops and the firefighters have clubbable halls, where there is much back-slapping and drinking. A lot of reminiscing. Eventually, these people will fade into oblivion, but their full stop is gentle. It’s pleasing. 

There is no heaven or hell, but purgatory is cosmically vast. The rules, however, are earth-bound in their petty-mindedness. 

Supermarket workers have an enormous, well-stocked hypermarket where they enjoy a permanent tea break. Lawyers engage in endless rounds of effortless litigation where all their cases are won. Happy ghosts. 

And so it goes on, until you get to the Failed Writer's building. It is a long, low Nissan hut of corrugated steel. We are not allowed outside but that’s understandable. We are all dead and fresh air is not a necessity. At the end is a canteen. We don’t need comestibles either, but it is a diversion during our sentient periods. 

How did we get here? Easy. We are all unpublished. Not one of us has secured an agent. No one has won a writing competition. No one has profited by a single penny by the products of their labour. And for this we are punished. 

Why? That’s a little harder to define but let me try. You see, failed writers could have done something else with their lives. They didn’t have to toil away, with the TV on in the background, smoking cigarettes until their fingers were yellow and their teeth fell out from too much sweet tea and wine.

Failed writers didn’t have to ignore their families for days on end, or tell a long line of employers to "fuck off" because they always knew they were destined for better things. The great novel on the horizon. 

Failed writers were not poverty-stricken through bad luck but through mismanagement. And when they die, those who can afford it have grave stones which read:

A PLOT

AT LAST!

And still no one cares. They don’t get the joke or the dead soul who commissioned it. It’s not even an original line.  Plus ça change. 

But mostly, failed writers didn’t have to be so mean with the praise that was due when someone else won a competition or got an agent. But we are mean, because most of us are thin-skinned and all of us think our writing is better than anyone else’s. 

In short, most failed writers deserve this long, gloomy hut at the end of the line. 

Here’s how it works. 

When a failed writer dies, we are assigned another writer who is still alive. We have no choice in this process. We have to be whatever they write. We don’t move, of course. It’s all in our heads, but so is depression. It’s just as real. 

Some people get lucky. That guy in the canteen wearing the pea jacket? His author writes detective novels, and he’s the protagonist. The Big Dick. His existence is one of action and results. He always solves the case, and he only occasionally gets shot. And it’s always a flesh wound. 

He is beginning to fade, and here’s why. 

What everyone seeks here, including the cops and the firefighters, is oblivion. People like them just have to wait a little while, drinking and carousing. There are no rules imposed on them. Oblivion is like nirvana. It isn’t heaven, or a ‘better place.’ It is simply nothing; the human equivalent of falling into a black hole. Trust me. It is what you will eventually crave if you find yourself here. 

Some people crave it on earth. 

To achieve oblivion as a failed writer, your writer has to achieve certain goals. 

1. Win twenty-five writing competitions. 

2. Earn more than £50,000 from their literary output.

3. Win the Booker, the Pulitzer, or the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Those are the mains ones. The third goal, the one hardly anyone gets here, is THE literal END. Instant oblivion. Other failed writers just start to fade when goals 1 or 2 start rolling. When an objective is met, in either category, it’s also oblivion. It’s just a longer route.  

And you can see where luck comes into it. Pea jacket man’s writer is well on his way to 50K. Consequently he is fading away, and because we are a hut full of small-minded failed writers, we all hate him for it. Being here does not disabuse us of our faults. 

There is a woman in the corner whose writer has won three competitions. If you look closely, you can see a faint absence of form. The process is beginning, but she has a long way to go. 

I, on the other hand, remain rudely corporeal. And this is because I have a writer who is ineluctably meh. 

Her desire to write coincided with my death, so it is my misfortune to be bound to a woman of late middle-age who’s only just learned how to send a document electronically.  She tries very hard to be wry and inscrutable, but what emerges is contrived and unfathomable. You can get away with it if you’re a working-class socialist miner, but she is not. 

In the three months since my death, I have been an effete dropper of the bon mot, a British Prime Minister, the wife of a serial killer, and various wispy, angst-driven mortals in-between. She is rather fond of flash fiction, which she is marginally better at. It means fewer words, a single, concentrated, non-meandering plot line and a little twist at the end.

But really, it’s just shades of meh. 

She writes poetry too, but failed writers are exempt from that. Poets have their own special place in purgatory. 

There are positives. She does’t seem to like action narratives. I am unlikely to be shot, or to find myself hanging over a cliff with a roaring waterfall behind me. I don’t think she’ll murder me, but who knows. She is quite prolific and there are only so many ambiguous narratives she can write before she is staled by it. Perhaps I will find myself roped to a railway line one day, but it’s a long way off. 

She also doesn’t seem to do romance very much, which I am grateful for. We have this in common, although I, of course, was a better writer than her. Unlike the lady in the corner, I spend most of my active duties swanning around in a moronic landscape of my writer’s own creation. I will not be harmed, but nor will I be amused. 

The lady in the corner has been ridiculously unlucky. Her writer is a precocious, entitled teenager, so she spends most of her duties being tongued by a spotty youth, or joy-riding at dangerous speeds. I should consider myself lucky but really, I don’t. 

Occasionally, when a writer signs off for a short period, to make a cup of tea or to pay attention to their children, another failed writer gets a simultaneous break. At these times, we exchange sympathetic glances. If the writer disappears for longer periods, we are allowed to relax. None of us know what happens during our unconscious absences. I can only imagine it is like being in an opium den. I don’t think any of us are dreaming stories, however. We have been cured of that particular futility. 

It’s safe to say that all of us in the Halls of Meh are glad when our writers aren’t writing. 

I wonder off to the canteen for a shepherd’s pie. It’s always the same every day, unless your writer wins something, in which case they add something else to the menu. There is a rumour that the failed poets get wine. 

Bastards. 

I have friends here, of course. People like me who haven’t started to fade, and probably never will. We are only released from our writers when they themselves die, and so it’s a horrible thing to say, but those of us saddled with no-hopers hope they do. We might get someone more promising in the next selection. 

Eternity is a drag. When every good deed or word is lost and forgotten in an ocean of time, it can bring out the worst in you. And some of us were never that nice to begin with. 

 Ron is at a table with his shepherds pie, so I sit next to him. I feel sorry for Ron. His previous writer was going places. He’d earned 40K from a series of novels concerning a mild-mannered sleuth, something in the manner of Holmes or Ellery Queen, and he’d just started his next one when he fell down the stairs and died. So Ron's back at square one, with a horror writer. 10K away from oblivion and now, depending on the protagonist, he is either a psycho slasher, a mad clown, a swamp creature or a ventriloquist. Or his dummy. 

Meeting with violence doesn’t hurt, but the anticipation of it does. That’s something that doesn’t fade away. Consequently, Ron has gone from being a rather fanciable urbane character to a quivering, nervous wreck. Furthermore, his choice of menu has been reduced to shepherd’s pie, which he doesn’t even like. 

After a long harangue about his writer, he said, ‘What has your writer been doing today?’ 

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She must be going through a thinking phase. I haven’t been required to do anything yet.’ 

‘Odd,’ he said.

‘I expect they’ll knock me out after lunch if she doesn’t get back to it,’ I said. ‘Perhaps she’s slipped into a coma or something. I don’t what what the protocol is there —’

‘Just be careful what you wish for,’ said Ron. 

I was still awake when the next batch of dead failed writers entered the hut. Of course, the steady stream of incomers always exceeds the number of lucky leavers, and at these times the hut just expands to accommodate them. 

They all wear the same expression when they arrive: shock, outrage and then contempt. Because they always think they are better writers than us, even though they also won squat. And it is absorbing to watch the process of allocation, because I am usually being written at these times, or I am in my ‘opium den’. So I settle down to watch with the wisdom of an old-timer. 

A very old man, jowled and stooped, is given a writer who bases his short stories in old people’s homes. They are little, gentle dialogue-driven pieces about the good old days. They do try to match the failed writers with their living counterparts where possible, a fact I don’t dwell on in my case. 

Because that would make me an erratic, lazy, plotless, clueless dilettante, when clearly I was none of those things. 

The job of allocating writers is performed by a woman I call the Gauleiter. It’s unkind of me because I’m sure she’s a very nice woman. I hear rumours that she has been disappointed countless times; that many of her writers have almost met the requirements before either giving up or passing away. For this eternal torment, patiently endured, she is awarded a specific function and a Hugo Boss uniform. Presumably when she has doled out enough allocations, they will grant her oblivion. 

Broadly speaking, I wish her well. 

The rest of the afternoon was spent at my desk, twiddling my thumbs. The other failed writers were in various stages of plot. The lady with the teenage writer was moaning and shouting ‘Faster!’ ‘Harder!’ Ron was cackling. The pea jacket man was sleuthing. He appeared to have faded some more. Maybe the sales figures had come in. Maybe he was just the cost of a bar bill away from oblivion. 

And maybe there was something wrong here. If my writer isn’t writing, I shouldn't be so aware of it. A tea break's fine. That's allowed. But for hours?  

Maybe I should sue. 

I went back to the canteen. Had another portion of shepherd’s pie. There were always people being written because of the hemispheres and the time differences, but plenty were switched off for the day now. My cutlery was audibly making a scraping sound on the plate, and it occurred to me that if I was still alive, I’d be embarrassed by that sound. I felt lonely. For the first time ever, I missed my writer. And as I was worrying about the concept of eternal loneliness, the Gauleiter placed a very large glass of wine on my table. 

‘She didn’t win a competition did she?’ I asked. 

‘No,’ said the Gauleiter. 

I snorted. ‘Well, she hasn’t won the Pulitzer, that much I know!’

‘No. She hasn’t. She hasn’t won anything.’ 

And then I looked at the wine and wondered whether she’d broken into the failed poet’s hut, but before I could ask, her face broke into a charming, sunny smile. 

‘Congratulations! You’ve got your oblivion!’ 

‘What? How? She hasn’t won anything. I’m not even fading. She’s crap!’

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said the Gauleiter. ‘But she has managed to do what no one else has done before. In fact, the odds are astronomical — ’

Ron ambled up, released for the day. ‘What’s going on?’

So I told him and although I anticipated him pulling up a chair, listening to the rest of the story - the explanation - the denouement - and then hugging me in a great burst of congratulatory excitement, what he actually did should not have surprised me. He turned his back on me. Put his hand in the air. The universal sign for shut up. 

He was a failed writer, after all.

‘Rule No. 4’ said the Gauleiter. 

‘I don’t know that one.’

‘Nor did I,’ she said. 'Rule No. 4 comes into play when your writer rumbles you.’

‘Huh?’

She leaned forward. ‘What do you think you’ve been doing today?’ she asked. 

‘Well just nothing,’ I said. In fact I was going to ask — ’

‘She’s been writing for hours. She’s just finishing up now, in fact.’

‘Nope. Still don’t understand.’

‘Then let me explain. Your writer has written this story. She has imagined you. She has imagined the low, badly-lit Nissan hut. She has imagined the shepherd’s pie, the rules, Ron, the pea jacket man, the woman who keeps having orgasms and screaming in fast cars. She has imagined your thoughts. All this time when you assumed you were doing nothing, you were being written.’

‘So this is her latest story?’

‘Yep. You couldn’t make it up ….’

She stood up and looked down at me. ‘Don’t overthink it,’ she said. ‘There’s no point now. Finish your wine, and let me know when you’re ready. Your time here is done.’ 

*****

As the failed writer ceased to exist, the writer closed her laptop and stroked her patient dog’s ear. ‘Let’s see how this one goes, eh Poochie? C'mon. Let's take you for a walk.'