In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Mike is Scottish, which is something else we have in common.
The other thing? His way with words. Of course. And then there’s his way with money.
I am not bankrupt – not yet – but on top of everything else that the coronavirus pandemic has brought me, there is the almost complete ruin of my finances which are now, to use a technical term, completely screwed. In the words of the brilliant country singer Brandy Clark: If we had a penny we sure couldn’t spare it / Sitting on the porch drinking generic Coke / We’re broke.
I am in rent arrears for the first time in my life. I owe thousands of pounds to family and friends. My credit card is maxed out as I’ve missed too many minimum payments. Direct debits bounce from my bank account like an orgy on a trampoline. Every time I go to the supermarket, which is not as often as it should be, I prepare my “bemused and slightly irate” face in the event of my card being declined. When the card isn’t declined, I conceal my teary relief behind a mask of nonchalance. After All This is over, I’ll have a credit score worse than Venezuela’s.
As much as I am grateful for the revival of the lost art of the telephone call, the renewed connection with old friends, the opportunity to make amends and put past enmities behind me, and the discovery of my heretofore unexplored talent to cook eggs eight ways, I nevertheless find myself sceptical of the cost-benefit analysis. After marvelling that I’ve found eggs to cook with, I mean.
My finances BC (before Covid-19) were already something of a fragile ecosystem. I left a career in journalism – or perhaps it left me, it’s hard to say – to become a scriptwriter. It was going OK: after three years as a storyliner on Coronation Street and Emmerdale, I got my first script commission in 2017. Since then, I’ve been beavering away on various projects, and scraping a living. But that was the deal. I knew that from the get-go. I accepted that, at least for a while, I’d have a lemonade lifestyle on a lemonade wage.
I was almost, nearly, just about managing – not least because there was hope. Hope that a show I’ve written – about the teenage children of the super-rich, ironically enough – might get a green light. Hope that other ideas might get put into development somewhere. Hope that I might get into a writers’ room on someone else’s show. Hope that a play I’ve written might catch the eye of a theatre. Now though, TV production and theatre are in short supply. Hope is in short supply. They say that it’s the hope that kills you in the end. I’d say that despair is also pretty lethal. Just when you’re making ends meet, someone moves the ends.
These are not unfamiliar circumstances for me. I grew up in the 1980s in a single-parent household with very little money. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of my mum having to choose what to buy with what was left of her family allowance (as it was then). A pint of milk or a loaf of bread? My feelings now are similar to my feelings then when I knew that my friends were much better off than we were. Embarrassment, envy, anger and sadness. Having no money is humiliating, frustrating, infantilising. It erodes your self-worth in a very particular way. It is stealthy and vicious. I feel pathetic and I feel ashamed. And it makes me feel sick – actually physically nauseous – writing all this down.
But shame is why I’m writing this. (That and the fee I’ll get for it, because I don’t want to borrow, I want to earn.) Shame thrives in silence, in secrecy. So I am trying to own the shame lest the shame own me. Let’s see how that goes, shall we? I know I’m not alone in such dire straits, and yet … it feels incredibly lonely. So, go figure. If you’re good with numbers. I myself am better at other things. I hope there’s a certain poetry in me trying to monetise my penury like this. It’d be some comfort in lieu of a fortune. Because comfort is to be found, and in the oddest places. I found some recently in Aeschylus: He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
While I’ve been writing this, the gas bill has arrived. It remains unopened. Unexploded. A landmine on the hall carpet.
• Gareth McLean is a scriptwriter and journalist
• This article was amended on 9 June 2020 to make clear in the picture caption that the poster artwork depicted was designed by Mark Titchner.
