20.9

Later, around the fire, Max slowly began to relax.

“So,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s all about… being a writer.”
“That’s it!”
“So Dave,” Max said with a mischievous smile – his first for some time. “Tell us about your novel.”

Dave returned the smile with an ironic twist –

“No… I’d prefer not to. It’s completely irrelevant now, thank God, we were all spared that misery!”
“Maybe, of course but… won’t you just a tell us a bit… just for fun?”

They knew each other quite well, too well. They knew that beneath the wobbly façade, David Brown was actually dying to open up about his novel. He was a writer, after all, at heart just another writer, starved for attention.

“Come on Dave. We know you put a lot of work into it… a lot of heart…”

The façade of unwillingness was easily cracked.

“… And none of us have ever read it?”
“Mmm.”
“It was never published was it, even after all those years?”
“No, not really… not properly.”
“I’m just curious. Why not?”
“Essentialy… no one was willing to take the risk.”
“Risk? Why was it such a risk to publish your novel?”

David Brown smiled, that same ironic grin, a half-smile at most, prompted by a bitter memory – the chase for publication.

“My vision of 2020 was pretty bleak.”
“Bleak! In what way?”
“Very bleak indeed.” David brown shook his head. “My vision was nothing like the sweet little picture we have found ourselves in here at all, with this nice guy Hunter Stirling in some kind of control and everything going relatively smoothly. My vision of 2020 was…”
“Come on – out with it.”

Max was enjoying this.

“Well…” David Brown sighed. “In the beginning it was just, more or less a continuation of the past… more of the same gradual degeneration that had been happening for years but, I was only looking at the dark side… and then in my book it suddenly became much worse, much…worse.”

Dave was not only sounding a bit bleak, he was looking it!

“And?“
“Come on…” Pierre was fully involved now.
“My 2020 was possibly the bleakest time this planet ever experienced… at least, save for Nuclear War… I resisted the bomb, thank God…”
“Mmm.”
“But I did have the next worst thing…”

He paused, still the frustrated writer.

“I introduced a plague!”
“A plague!… Oh my God!”
“Really… like the Plague? That wiped out fifty million people?”