Darren had dropped out of art school after just six weeks, but he still insisted on referring to everything as his “practice”. Right now his practice involved sending fan letters to alt-lit writers.

“They’re outside the Cathedral,” he said. “Like me.” Given what I knew about Darren’s family, I doubted that.

I met Darren while working in a sex shop called “Double Dildo”. It sold everything except dildos which always annoyed me. I got tired of explaining this to frustrated customers. “Look, I just fucking work here,” I told one angry businessman looking for something to surprise his wife. “I didn’t fucking name the place.”

Rumour had it the shop was owned by organised crime and none of us worried about crap like customer service. Nobody ever complained.

“Look at these fucking perverts,” Darren would say, brazenly smoking while sat on the counter beside the till. He’d say it loud enough that some of them would quietly put down the magazines they’d been looking at for 30 minutes and leave.

We assumed the shop was a front for money laundering. We both stole from the till and the thought that I might wake up one morning with a horse’s head on my pillow thrilled me. I needed the cash, but it was the danger that kept me going. Darren didn’t need the money. He just did it for fun. His family paid his rent.

“Look,” Darren said. He shoved his phone in my face, too close. I hated when he did that. I took it from his hands.

“What am I looking at?”

“The email. The fucking email,” he said. “He replied.”

“Who?” I was tired and hungover. Darren was pissing me off today and I had hoped to escape him at lunch.

He named someone I’d never heard of.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Exactly!” Darren said. “You don’t know. He’s outside the Cathedral. Like me.”

I lit a cigarette and exhaled. “Isn’t that the dildo guy?” I said. Darren turned in the direction I was looking. The businessman from the other week was going into a doorway with the sign “MODEL” above it.

“I don’t know, probably. These suits all look the same to me. Can I -?” Without waiting for my answer he took one of my cigarettes. He’d been doing it all morning. That was pissing me off too.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What do you think?”

“I think his wife didn’t like the dildo.”

“About Tom’s email.”

“Oh. Yeah. It seemed - polite.”

“He replied,” Darren said. “Don’t you see? It’s not what he said that matters. It’s the act of replying. And now I’ve got his details.”

I exhaled smoke slowly, blowing it deliberately at his face. He didn’t notice, or care.

“This is where it starts to get weird,” Darren said. Then he laughed.

He didn’t say any more. I wanted to resist asking what he meant but finally I couldn’t hold it in any more.

“Weird how?” I said.

“Now I’m going to pretend to be him.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t sound like a good idea,” I said.

“My family has a lawyer,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Come on. Let’s go for a quick one. We have time.”

He talked about his idea all the way there. It did not make much sense to me.

I groaned when he asked the barman for the darts along with the drinks but since he was paying I went along. He trounced me as always. Bam, bam, bam, Each dart hit home exactly where he wanted it. I struggled to hit the board. At least it meant we could talk about something else for a moment.

 

I hated to say it but the first story was actually pretty good. “Darren, you should submit this under your own name,” I said.

“No. You don’t get it,” he said. He sounded angry. “It’s not about the writing.”

I didn’t get it. He was right.

The story was set in the shop and involved a pornographically intense scene between a poly couple who came in to buy a flogger and “Mark” who was clearly a thinly veiled portrait of Clark, the fat guy who worked the evening shift. Clark was the least sexual person I’d ever met and totally unsuited to the job. He had a day job. It did not cover the rent. Imagining him naked and on all fours offering his flabby butt for two strangers to try out different instruments of erotic pain made the piece very funny, but I wondered if it would work as well if you hadn’t met “Mark”.

Darren had set up an email address therealtomtimbers@yahoo.com and had pasted in the actual email signature from Timbers’ polite reply.

“Genius, right? What’s real?” He took another of my cigarettes and lit it with my lighter.

“I’m not sure about this,” I said. But how could it hurt. They’d just ignore it like they ignored most submissions. Darren would find another obsession. No harm done.

They accepted it.

“That’s amazing,” I said. I’d been pitching my stories for six months without a bite. I’d stayed up night after night working on them. Tormented myself over every tiny choice of diction and punctuation - that Oscar Wilde quip is totally on point. I’d spent days trying to get that perfect tone of casual professionalism in my cover letters. My one line bio had taken a week. And this art-school dropout had knocked something up in an afternoon, with two thumbs, on his phone, giggling to himself as he left me to handle the customers, and had it accepted instantly.

The second, third and fourth acceptance emails left me reeling. Bam, bam, bam. Bullseye every time. Effortless.

The third story was very similar to one of mine I’d shown him.

“Buy your own damn cigarettes!” I said.

He did. And he bought me a carton to replace the ones he’d smoked. And a new disposable lighter. And a six pack.

We got a good buzz going over lunch and that afternoon was like old times, tricking the most anxious looking customers, one of us secretly swapping the cheesecake magazine they’d finally purchased - a fucking comic you could buy in any high-street newsagent - for hardcore gay porn as we bagged the purchase, while the other rang it up and distracted them by offering two-for-one on cock rings. We giggled like teenage girls as we imagined their disappointed faces. “Maybe they’ll learn something surprising about themselves,” Darren said.

I was working on a new story but I couldn’t get it to gel.

Darren had stopped writing now and kept dragging me off to go drinking with him. He talked obsessively about “his work” as the sharp metal points drove deep into the cork one after the other.

I was seething but I knew it couldn’t last.

I thought about quitting the job, finding something else, getting away from him. But I couldn’t.

It didn’t take long before the alarmed emails started turning up. I was relieved. “We regret to inform you that we have taken the difficult decision of withdrawing your piece, The Typewriter Has Been Drinking (Not Me), from our August edition over concerns about your identity.”

“Phase two,” Darren grinned. Then he took another of my cigarettes. He forgot to return the lighter.

The real Tom Timbers (sic) took to social media in anger at his name being used, so Darren created a sock puppet and accused Timbers of being the real fake.

I wondered if they would sue. “My family has a lawyer,” Darren reminded me.

He started writing to the magazines that had published Timbers in the past, demanding they retract the work.

“Isn’t it time to drop the joke?” I said.

“It’s not a fucking joke,” he said. “I thought you got it.”

He didn’t speak to me all afternoon. Just busied himself with the shelves, sorting the smut: the works without pictures they called “readers”. The two of us used to chuckle at the illiteracy at first. Maybe I should have been submitting these instead of my own stories.

I’d abandoned the piece and started a new one.

Clark, the fat guy who worked evenings, was found beaten half to death in the alley beside the shop. “They caught him dipping,” Darren said over lunch, squinting as the smoke wafted into his eye. He wouldn’t explain how he knew.

I had four more stories rejected. It was getting chilly in the park at lunch.

All of Darren’s stories had been taken down now and the alt account banned. It was starting to take its toll on him. He seemed to be at an impasse. He did not know what to do next.

We went out on payday and ended up in an illegal bar you entered by pushing through the beaded curtain of a doorway at the back of a neighbouring adult bookstore. The bar was a door propped on crates. The beers were the same as those we bought at lunch, from the same store, but with a heavy markup. I’d spent most of my pay already that night and was getting ready to be angry with myself. I wasn’t sure I could make rent now but I’d worry about that in the morning. I was behind on it already. I’d just have to dip the till a bit more. It was dangerous - but what choice did I have?

I was watching a collector and gallerist dancing with a rent boy in the corner. I wonder if his equally famous wife knew or cared. An older guy was sniffing poppers while the woman with him tried to stop him. “For fucks sake you’ve just had a fucking heart attack, you cunt. Do you want to have another?” Two other rent boys were playing darts, throwing glances at their peer, ready to replace him if the collector looked bored.

“I’m going to burn it down,” Darren said, playing with the lighter. We were out of cigarettes. He had torn up a prostitute card and was burning the strips.

“What?” I said.

“The Cathedral. I’m going to burn it fucking down.”

He got up. He dropped the lighter. I could barely stand but he seemed steady. He walked over to the art collector. I was too drunk to follow, too far to hear.

I didn’t want to end up in the alley. Maybe Darren could spot me. His family were rich. I don’t even know why he bothered working.

They were talking. The collector was laughing. They seemed like old friends. They were shaking hands. Bam, bam, bam. The rent boy pouted silently beside them.

 

Tom Timbers was a hit. The show opened in New York before moving to London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, then back home. The real Tom Timbers settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Darren was made an honourary lecturer at the school he hadn’t graduated. We lost touch.

I found work in another shop, one that sold dildos. I stopped writing stories.

I heard he’d been fired, something about inappropriate behaviour. His career died overnight.

 

This morning I woke to an email from thisistomtimbers@gmail.com.

“What’s up, pussycat?” it said. I deleted it, but didn’t empty the trash.

It was my first day at art school tomorrow. I had a long drive ahead of me, and I did not want to be distracted. I was going to last more than six weeks. I wasn’t going to live outside the Cathedral forever. I hadn’t had my first class yet, but I already knew what I was going to call my final show. You’ll know if you get it. Darren. Isn’t it fucking obvious? Bam.