Read Online I Hate Martin Amis et al. by Peter Barry - Free Book Online

– or my mother at least – to believe there’s some hope.
    â€˜That’s wonderful. How exciting. Would that mean you’d go to Hollywood?’
    â€˜I’d definitely like to write the screenplay. I’ve no desire to hand control over to someone else.’
    â€˜But would you know how to do it?’
    â€˜Easy. Writing the book, that’s the hard part. Anyone can write a screenplay once they’ve got an idea.’
    My mother doesn’t seem to understand my desire to write, despite the fact she reads so much and loves books so much. Once she did. But now I feel as though she’s betrayed the dreams we shared, like she’s given up on me. All she’s keen on now is for me to settle to something she perceives as a proper job – oh yes, and marry Bridgette and have a family. ‘Your father never held down a job for long. I blame all the upsets he’s had in his life. He has a good brain, only he’s never done anything with it. I wish I had half his education.’ Now she thinks she sees me going the same way.
    Neither of them really understands what I want to do, what I want to be. I’m separate from them, outside of them, beyond their comprehension. Even though writing has always been what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world, they couldn’t grasp that. It was completely alien to them.

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    T he apartment in which I’m now writing this is in a block of six in the suburb of Grbavica. It’s the same room Santo brought me to the day after I arrived in camp. ‘It is a good place to start,’ he said, as if he were dropping me off at some department in a company headquarters on my first day at work. It’s also the apartment from which I failed to shoot that publisher’s reader.
    Grbavica was seized by the Serbs at the very beginning of the war, in May 1992. The suburb penetrates the belly of the town like the nodule on a piece from a jigsaw puzzle, stretching down from the steep lower slopes of Mount Trebevic to the south bank of the river. It’s the only part of Sarajevo they’ve managed to capture, and it’s scarcely a good advertisement for Serb rule. It’s a shell, a ruin, a mass of twisted, tortured, tilted steel and concrete. The only glass is underfoot. Any surface that’s still vertical is pitted with shrapnel and bullet holes. Personal belongings – crockery, books, children’s toys, articles of clothing, smashed furniture – lie scattered in the streets. Garbage spills out of ripped bags, the pulped, liquefied, stinking mess licked and picked at by both skeletal dogs and humans. Great mounds of masonry block many of the roads. At night there are bursts of manic laughter, screams, shouts, gunfire, running footsteps and smashing bottles. People flit from doorway to doorway like ghosts. Tanks rumble in the distance. I wonder briefly which is the more desirable suburb: Grbavica or across the river in the city. The six apartment blocks are down by the river. Three run east-west, and lie directly one behind the other. I’m in the front building, on the twelfth and top floor, facing the Miljacka River. The centre of the city lies at about two o’clock to my position, across the reddish, tumbling waters of the narrow river. The buildings are ordinary, what I would call Eastern European trash. Behind them are many more apartment blocks, more of the same, but with fewer floors. That’s their only redeeming feature: fewer floors. They’re concrete rectangles, like dominoes lying on their sides, with flat roofs and row upon row of small windows. The walls are dotted with gaping holes as if someone had come along with a sledgehammer and added a few extra windows. It’s a dangerous place to hang around, yet some families still skulk in the basements of the rear apartments, which are linked together by fetid, rubble-strewn, almost pitch-black corridors. These are