 My new novel, Lazarus is Dead, is due out on August 18. That’s seven years since Dry Bones. What have I been doing? The non-fiction, the stories, the living. But it’s not living that eats up the time, it’s writing novels.
In 2004, when Dry Bones came out, Harvill Secker was Secker and Warburg, and I didn’t have a website. This time round there are suddenly things to do. I should add something about Lazarus to the books pages here, and I will. I should keep track of what Harvill Secker are doing over at Vauxhall Bridge Road.
This is what they’re doing first. The publication of Lazarus is seven weeks away, and once a week until then the Vintage website will post a short reading from Lazarus is Dead as a countdown to publication day. Seven is a significant number in the story of Lazarus, and so it is in Lazarus is Dead. I’ve always been a fan of number-plots, ever since X 20, and the gospel of John, in which the story of Lazarus is first told, has a plot that calibrates to the number seven. There are seven miracles, seven signs that measure the journey of Jesus from provincial carpenter to capital Messiah.
Seven is a great number. In fact, god himself is a fan, the creator of the seven-day week and the seven pillars of wisdom, the seven branches of the menorah, the seven archangels and the seven vengeances of the murder of Cain. God’s deputy, Shakespeare, has seven ages of man because seven is a number for stories, for the seven voyages of Sinbad and the seven wives of Bluebeard (no relation). Unfortunately, seven is a rounded number, and should always be approached with caution. There are seven sins for every seven virtues, and only rarely seven brides for each of the seven brothers.
And psychologically, seven is approximately the number of different thoughts we can hold in our short-time memories at any one time, a fact I owe to the addictive Book of Numbers (1997) by the IM chess-player William Hartston. Which means I’ve now forgotten everything except where I started, which is that Random House are counting down here from the number seven. Six more weeks to go.
 'Let's Google him.' There aren’t many upsides to being a regular visitor to hospital, especially if you work there. This is the message I sometimes received from the nurses last year when I was in the Oxford JR to have my knee sewn back together.
This year, I ensured my regular summer bed on Ward 2A by breaking apart the other knee. I thought after a year of economic stagnation the situation might have deteriorated. Maybe the curtains hadn’t been washed since last July (my enduring memory of a year 2000 birth at RUH Bath was of bloodstains on the curtain. Not the one round the bed. The one at the window).
In fact the John Radcliffe Trauma Ward had been restaffing in Portugal and Ireland. Both nurses (one male, one female) were lovely and young and, I felt, wonderfully kind because they knew no better. Whatever has stood still in the UK over the last year, the equivalent has been going backwards fast in Portugal and Ireland – they’ve been manufacturing nurses they can’t afford to employ. The UK is taking advantage, especially as the UK salary of a first-year nurse is less than the same nurse receives in training while over the Irish Sea.
Staring at the clean curtains, and then the view towards North Oxfordshire and Chipping Mordor, I was mostly in sombre mood. Back so soon a second time, I wondered if there was something I hadn’t learned properly the first time. It might have been the inadvisability of applying logic to surgical situations. Calculating, for example, that every surgeon has his first solo job.
So thank god for anaesthetists, who take away all responsibility for rational thought. They apply the heavy medicine, and then make smalltalk until the anvil falls.
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a writer.’
‘Are you famous?’
I have a stock answer to this not unfamiliar question. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Especially among people who know who I am.’ This has the advantage of being both clever and true, and avoids the embarrassment of getting into actual numbers. (‘Hundreds? Thousands? Have you been on the telly?’)
But no, on this occasion oblivion was imminent and I thought blow it. I’m about to go under the knife, I may never wake up, so what is the value of elegant deflection at a time like this?
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Yes I am.’
Which were, probably, my last words, and contented I fell asleep.
Two hours later, when I woke up, the anaesthetist made a point of coming over.
‘We googled you while you were under,’ she said, and not in an unimpressed kind of way. I smiled. Probably the soulful morphine, but also because I did learn something the second time round. Self-deprecation is rubbish.
 but with cricket pads on Eleven months ago, I jumped high into the air to catch a cricket ball. When I landed, without the ball in my hand, I ruptured the patella tendon in my right knee. This meant that the top half of my leg was no longer connected, in any active sense of the word, to the bottom half.
I had an operation, and wore a leg brace for twelve weeks, but as a keen sportsman I know the strength to be gained from cliché. It’s how you bounce back. I could return stronger than I ever was.
Yes and no. After Christmas I got myself fit – a bit of running, a spot of cycling. I started the cricket season at the end of May and have been averaging a mundane but not unsatisfactory 30 or so. Yesterday, towards the end of the innings, I set off at a fair clip for my 45th run of the afternoon.
I ruptured the patella tendon in my left knee.
It was no consolation to recognise the drill: the ambulance on the field, the friendly paramedic called Kirsty, the ins and outs of Accident and Emergency before the taxi home at eleven pm after six hours on a trolley with a copy of Grazia magazine.
Rupturing a patella tendon, so the doctors and nurses said (again), is a very rare injury. In seven years the registrar hadn’t seen a single instance, until yesterday when he saw two in the same pair of legs. There is no accepted reason for the snap to happen, so inevitably the brain scrambles for connections – coffee not tea before the match; the ball I should have hit differently in the over before; the greater disaster from which this providential injury, in ways that I can never hope to comprehend, saves me. In six hours, Grazia long finished and forgotten, I imagined many alternate universes.
The over-powering feeling, ultimately, is the dread. Not because of what happened last year, but what would have happened tens of thousands of years ago. My heart knows this (although my brain picked it up from an episode of Timewatch) – the weak and injured will slip to the back of the herd, and are the first to be eyed by panthers.
I’ve seen programmes solving the puzzle of Neolithic skeletons, young in the bone and dying with no obvious sign of violence. With modern forensics, the cause always turns out to be the teeth or the joints. The teeth are bad so the creature couldn’t eat (this also applies to dinosaurs). Look – the knee joint has wasted away. The nomadic tribe does not wait for the injured.
The lions, the tigers, they know. They see me slipping to the back. All they need do is wait, and sometimes they don’t even do that.
 The Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans (phew, there’s a lot of them about) History Month takes place every year in February, and in 2011 Dru and I will be doing our bit. We like to be part of the history. At 6pm on the evening of Friday 25th February we will therefore be reading from Becoming Drusilla, and answering questions, at Bristol Central Library.
However, to prove our commitment to the cause we’re going to do an extra reading outside the constraints of History Month, at 7.30 on Friday 18th March at the Central Library in Plymouth. This is part of Plymouth Out Fest, and in these threatened times is another demonstration of the virtuous uses to which libraries can be put.
The banner above is from a new website, Being Drusilla, which cleverly sheds three letters from the book to reflect what the site is all about. It was one thing to become Drusilla. It’s another altogether to be Drusilla, day after day.
Dru has done most of the writing so far, but the site will be updated by us both, and is designed as a resource for anyone unexpectedly involved in a transgender story. This means friends and families as well as the main protagonists. Everything is explained once you get there. Unlike the experience itself.
 look left When Clint Eastwood’s film Invictus opened in the UK earlier this year , I was asked to review the rugby angle for the Daily Telegraph. The results, in my opinion, were not pretty. I go on, at some length, to describe why the Invictus rugby action is about as believable as a Brian Moore apology.
However, I was cleaning up my office this week and came across the press notes. A PR person handed me these (while offering me a beer) when I went to the screening at the Warner HQ in London. I stuffed the notes in my case and promptly forgot them. For anyone not familiar with these documents, I have 32 single-spaced A4 pages explaining that Mandela and Eastwood are what any sane person would call a half-decent tag team. And apartheid was a hell of a bad thing.
When I saw the film it was my job to report on whether the rugby action worked. The answer is no. Now I know why.
Gulp. I wrote this:
“I can see just enough to make out that Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky is having a bad day with the boot. He can’t punt a rugby ball, and his incompetence is so striking (in a Test Match, Brian!) that I want to see immediate replays of his flawed technique.’
 look right In the press notes I come across this:
“Scott Eastwood, another rugby novice, played the role of Springbok member Joel Stransky, who was responsible for all of the points scored by the team in the World Cup Final.”
Scott is Clint’s son. He had to be the number 10.
Having said that, Clint started off with the right idea about rugby: ‘It’s a very tough game, and the guys who play it are a special breed of cat.’
Right on, daddio. Which is what Scott might have muttered, head-wound bleeding, as he emerged from the bottom of a ruck wondering why not Westerns?
The notes contained one other interesting piece of information. Now that synthetic shirts have taken over the game, the 1995 South Africa jerseys had to be ‘specially knitted’ in cotton. However, the Springbok logo of today faces in the opposite direction from the logo of 1995. Cock-up or carefully considered decision? Will we ever know?
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and Director of The National Academy of Writing in London. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed above. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below. I'll get back to you.
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My new novel, Lazarus is Dead, is due out on August 18. That’s seven years since Dry Bones. What have I been doing? The non-fiction, the stories, the living. But it’s not living that eats up the time, it’s writing novels.
