Pulp Fiction
by
Marilyn Francis 
...It was a miserable March 21st. Daylight seeped in through the dirty window
blinds like a cinema usherette’s torchlight. Only this was no movie; this was
for real. A madman was playing chopsticks on an oil drum behind my eyes.
I waited while another endless army of sluggish minutes dragged by, lit a
cigarette and reached in the drawer for the whiskey. Guess I wasn’t top
of anyone’s visiting list today...
The staccato clickety-clack of typing echoed along the dusty corridors of bookcases. It slowed then stopped. She leaned back in the wrecked Lloyd Loom armchair and listened to the rain battering the roof. The motley collection of moochers, browsers, derelicts and occasional cash buyers who populated this barn of a second-hand bookshop were out of sight, presumably sheltering among the mazy deeps of the book stacks. She could swear that some of them never found their way out again. Maybe one day she would find their corpses mouldering in the Crime Fiction aisle. She yawned, stretched, and read the words she’d typed on the old Olympia manual typewriter. It wasn’t exactly the literary work she’d hoped for. Ever since she discovered the discarded Olympia at the back of the storeroom her mind seemed to have been hi-jacked by a slick talking, hardboiled, Chandleresque private eye. She was obsessed. Her fingers strayed back to the keys.
...I poured a large jolt of the whiskey, swallowed it and reached for another.
The mad drummer decided to give it a rest for a while, and I was about to quit
for the day when the office door pushed open and in she walked – a spent piece
of jet trash from the wrong side of the tracks...
The rain had stopped now and she could hear the voices of sheltering book-lovers drifting up from the ceiling-high stacks of mouldering volumes. She’d never quite got used to the peculiar acoustics and was startled to hear a loud and exasperated male voice gradually spiral out of control.
‘God’s sake how do you manage it? Every time you drag me in here it’s the same old story. One minute I see you and the next it’s like you’ve been vaporized. I’ve been looking for you for hours!’
There was a pause and she had to strain her ears to catch the languid voice that finally answered.
‘Oh I’ve been here all the time. Anyway, it was you that wanted to come. I thought you said you enjoyed a good read.’
‘No’ he raged, ‘I wanted to go to the pub. You wanted to come here. I only agreed on condition that you promised not to wander off. It’s like the Hampton Court maze in here only instead of bushes there’s piles of decaying paper. It’s all just a pose anyhow; you’re not the reincarnation of Virginia Woolf you know. The way you stand there peering into that book with your glasses on the end of your nose - you look more like a short-sighted stork!’
...'Mr. Farlowe?’ she murmured in a husky bar-room voice.
‘Sure’ I said, ‘that’s me, Bill Farlowe, Private Investigator. What can I do for
you?’
She sat down, smoothed her skirt over a pair of legs that were, as far as I
could make out, not painful to look at. I leaned back in the chair and waited,
I’d come across dames like her before and they always spelled trouble.
‘Mr. Farlowe’ she repeated. ‘I want you should find my sister. I’m so worried,
I haven’t heard from her in weeks. She’s disappeared. I checked the college,
her rooming house, everywhere. Zilch.’
‘How old is she, this sister?’
'She’s twenty-two. Yeah, I know, I know, she’s not a kid. She’s at UCLA
studying English Literature, majoring in some British lesbo writer - Virginia
Woolf or something.’
I could tell she knew as much about literature as I did about running a hot dog
stand, but I was getting curious about the sister.
‘So what makes you so sure she’s disappeared? Maybe she’s just taking a
vacation and forgot to mention it.’
‘No, Frieda just wouldn’t do a thing like that. She calls me every week, besides
she only has the money I send. Last time she called she sounded so happy,
said she’d met this English guy, Dave Lawrence, at Chen Li’s bookstore on
San Pedro Street. You know the one? Great warren of a place, I went in there
once, nearly didn’t find my way out again!’
'Yeah, I know it’. I was more surprised that she did.
‘Go on.’
She slowly re-crossed her legs and continued...
Good grief she thought, where is this stuff coming from? She’d hoped for something literary not pulp fiction, and surely this was the very pulpiest of pulp. Maybe she should ditch the Olympia and try a fountain pen and yellow paper, or a quill and the finest parchment perhaps a biro and a pile of exercise books? It was now late afternoon and the rain had stopped long ago. A faint hum of distant voices could still be heard. Did none of these people have lives to lead; homes to go to? The venomously one-sided argument that had earlier rattled the stacks seemed to have died down; the weight of words soaked into the collective memory of all the piled up volumes. She thought she should maybe go and investigate, but once again, her fingers began, maddeningly, to stray towards the keyboard.
...‘This Dave Lawrence, he wanted for Frieda to go with him to New Mexico
and start a literary commune for god’s sake! The guy’s a freak. She said she
was meeting him at Chen Li’s the next day to talk about it and I haven’t heard
from her since. Do you think he’s kidnapped her Mr. Farlowe?’
The smart thing for me to do right now was to take another drink and forget
the whole mess. That being the obviously smart thing to do, I told her that I’d
check it out starting with Chen Li. That’s how smart I was...
She ripped the page out of the typewriter, shredded it into tiny pieces, and hurled them into the wastepaper basket. Way down in the stacks she could hear a voice rise to an alarming pitch. She looked up and saw a bookcase begin to sway drunkenly to and fro before finally toppling on to its neighbouring stack. Rooted to the spot, she watched aghast while, like dominos or toy soldiers, one by one the ceiling-high stacks crashed down the length of the room. There was a sudden upsurge of dust then eerie silence. She edged her way from behind the desk and tiptoed out of the building carefully locking the door behind her. She felt sick and ashamed. No writer worth their salt would abandon their characters in the middle of an unresolved plot; ends left untied no sting-in-the-tail. It was unbearable. She would buy a fountain pen, a pile of red notebooks, move into a Bloomsbury garret and maybe write a novel about a woman who shops and gives parties – real Literature!
... That evening I drove out to San Pedro Street, thought maybe I’d check out
Chen Li’s position on missing UCLA sophomores and bearded Englishmen
with freaky accents. I needn’t have bothered. The cops got there first, and
they were jumping all over like fleas off a dead cat. Later I found out that
Chen Li had skipped, locking the doors after him. The shelves in the
bookstore had collapsed. Anyone inside must have been buried under an
avalanche of books, flattened beneath some of the finest literary works in
the world. What a way to go! I never did find out what happened to Frieda
and Dave Lawrence either. That’s the trouble with Literature, you get to the
end and you’re still none the wiser. Give me a good old-fashioned thriller, they
never disappoint, and you always get to know whodunit.
About Marilyn Francis