Rebecca
‘I HAVE WONDERFUL NEWS.’ It was Dorothy, my editor. ‘You are on the shortlist for the Great Romantic Read of the Year!’
Coco immediately began to practise his acceptance speech.
Judges, sponsors, Ladies and Gentlemen, losers, I stand before you the winner of this prestigious award. Obviously, less prestige and more money would have worked just as well, if not better, but …
Shut up, Coco.
I phoned Maggie Jacobs to ask, ‘What should I wear?’
‘Not black.’
‘Really? I want to feel comfortable, and anyway I don’t want to look like a cliché romantic novelist.’
‘Nor would you want to look like a romantic novelist trying hard not to look like a cliché romantic novelist.’
Antonia Lavender would not have had this problem, I thought, being a six foot three rugby player whose real name was Reg.
My agent phoned to congratulate me.
‘This should spur you on to finish the new novel,’ Gemma said. ‘How is it going, anyway?’
‘Not well.’
‘That’ll change now, you’ll see.’
And for a few days it seemed that she had been right. The monochrome winter that had ruled my soul for months gave way to colourful spring. I woke in the morning smiling before I had even worked out I had something to smile about. I sang as I made my breakfast. I sat at my desk for hours. I even played the piano, Liszt; it went with high spirits.
On the fifth day I read through the pages that I’d written. They were terrible. On the sixth day I reread my collection of books on writing, not for tips or instruction, as most of them were aimed at beginners, but because they were the nearest thing to a chat around the office water cooler that a person, stuck alone in a room for three hundred and thirty-two days a year, could get.
Right now the talk around the cooler went like this:
Rebecca: Hemingway shot himself when he could no longer write.
Writing book: If I were to give you only one piece of advice it would be to keep writing. That’s the difference between a real writer and an amateur: a real writer writes.
Rebecca: What if you have nothing to say any more?
Coco: It never stopped you before.
Writing book: Ignore the clown. Just keep exercising that writing muscle and something will take shape.
I had turned the gas fire on earlier as the evening had felt raw but now the room was airless and far too hot. Instead of rising from my chair, turning the fire off and opening a window, I stayed where I was, getting some kind of sick pleasure from the throbbing of my head and my dry throat. It was a relief to have my body finally catch up with the discomfort of my mind.
I looked at the blank screen and then I told myself that I could either kill myself like Hemingway or I could write. Coco wanted to know if he would live on when I was gone.
Don’t be ridiculous, I told him. I mean how could you? You’re just a figment of my imagination.
He appeared above the desk, floating on a white feather.
The soul goes on, he said.
Very possibly, but only if there’s a soul in the first place; so trust me, if I go, you go.
Coco gave me a reproachful look as he dropped to the floor.
I leafed through my notebooks, one for each of the novels I’d written, searching for inspiration. If I had done it six times then surely I could do it again. Maybe if I revisited the embryonic characters, the quotes and research, the suggestions for plot lines. I would unearth an idea. Maybe I would find something I hadn’t noticed before amidst the scribbles I had produced at night, those thoughts that appeared in that halfway-house between wakefulness and sleep, masquerading as the musings of a genius.
But the notebooks seemed to belong to someone altogether different, someone who wilfully and illogically still believed in happy endings, someone most definitely not me.
I had to leave that person behind and, by two in the morning, by persevering, sticking with it, just NOT GIVING UP, I had the first page of a new novel:
The Stream
I shop. After work. On Saturday mornings. And when Sunday comes I
parcel up my two small children, although they
come with no receipt and cannot be returned. We brave summer heat
and autumn storm and winter snow and we forgo the healing touch of
spring sunshine to worship at our temple. Our temple is a drive
away. As you approach, burger fat and deep-fried chips beckon you
like incense. We evacuate our vehicle, having parked and paid and
displayed our law-abiding compliance with a small, white,
black-printed square left on the window.
A human tide, rootless, faith-divided, streams along the dirt-stamped walkways, past altars heavy with gaudy sacrifice.
I follow, a true pilgrim, with my little ones at my side, closing my mind’s eye to pictures of pleasures past: swings and skipping ropes, sandcastles and hide-and-seek and air and sun and rain. These were answers then to different questions asked. We burrow deeper into a hive of colourful necessities, for the home, our haven, the things we cannot go another day without: a slow-cook pot for busy days, six tall glasses for lazy afternoons, a tower of colourful boxes to store the things I thought, just yesterday, that I could not get through another day without. And on the refrigerator, adhering magnetically, are lists of further wishes reminding you that however much you have you will always need more, more to silence the cacophony of questions: Why? What for? What then?
Exhausted yet exhilarated, I went to open a bottle of wine. I brought a glass back with me to the study and read my new pages. Perched on my shoulder, like Long John Silver’s parrot, Coco laughed and then he cried and then he paused to ask which response I thought was most becoming.
Sad happy, happy sad, sad happy … puke?
You’re right, I said, and pressed the delete key.
Like a spurned lover gazing at the object of her affections, I stared at my laptop with longing and resentment and an ache for how things used to be.