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Creative Writing Fiction |
I say something as they come towards me. I can’t remember what I say but they take exception to it. I ask them for money and they start to taunt me. One of them, maybe she feels bad for me, I don’t know, sticks her hand in her pocket and pulls out a fiver. As I go to take it, she pulls it away, so I snatch it and the others start pushing me and pulling me, trying to get the fiver back, but I’m not going to let go of it. I bury it deep in a pocket and back away from these idiots. I feel a push and suddenly I’m falling, falling, falling.
Thursday morning. I am running a workshop at the university. Just over half of the two dozen students who should be present have actually turned up. My eyes flick from face to face as I see who is there and try to work out who is not and whether they are persistent absentees who need to be sent a formal letter. Grace is there. I wonder if she has remembered what she wanted to ask me.
‘I’d like you to write a short scene,’ I say. ‘No more than a page. Pick something memorable that has happened to you in the past week involving at least two people and write about it from a point of view other than your own. It can be that of someone else present, but it doesn’t have to be. Be as imaginative as you like.’
‘What if,’ asks a boy with fixed braces called Iain, ‘nothing memorable has happened to us in the past week?’
There is a ripple of laughter.
‘Then write about the most interesting dream you have had in the past week, and the rule remains the same. Switch the POV.’
Another student starts to ask a question, but I cut him off. ‘If nothing memorable has happened to you and you can’t remember any of your dreams or they weren’t interesting, just make something up. And change the POV from yours to that of someone – or something – else. You’ve got fifteen minutes. And please,’ I add, ‘don’t write your name on it.’
Amid much sucking of pens and scratching of heads, the students slowly settle into their own thinking space. At the end of fifteen minutes I ask them to finish the sentence they’re writing and I walk around and collect up the sheets. I shuffle them and redistribute them. If anyone ends up with their own piece back again, they don’t say so. I ask Iain to read out the piece he has in front of him. It’s about a confrontation in a nightclub in town. I ask Grace to read out what she has been dealt. She reads a piece about an argument with a ticket inspector on a train that turns into a river running between high, snow-capped mountains. I ask a boy whose name I can’t remember if he will read out what he’s got. He reads out an account of an attack on a tramp, from the tramp’s point of view.
I realise I am going to have to check out the path down to the dismantled railway line, after all, and, worst case, go through all of Overcoat Man’s many, many pockets.
Late afternoon. Wednesday. I am standing at the window looking out at the back gardens of my neighbours and the rear elevations of the houses in the next street. Behind me, my study. Built-in bookshelves cover two walls, floor to ceiling. Fiction, film, biography – each has a different section. Short story anthologies, literary journals in magazine files. Books are ordered alphabetically, little magazines chronologically. Perched on the four-drawer filing cabinet looking down at my desk is a head-and-shoulders mannequin, female; standing in the corner close to the anthologies and magazines, a full-size tailor’s dummy.
My desk is as tidy as that in my office at the university. Laptop, empty mug (on coaster), pile of scripts for marking, A4 wallet-style folder marked ‘Writers’ Rooms’. On the wall over the desk, a number of pictures of aeroplanes – some cut out of newspapers and magazines, others printed at home on photographic paper – pinned to a small corkboard. Against the fourth wall under the window is a long free-standing bookcase. On top of this at the left-hand end is a pile of books, first novels – Fermentation by Angelica Jacob, Pharricide by Vincent De Swarte, Glass People by Tom Darling. John Banville’s Nightspawn, Philip N Pullman’s The Haunted Storm. Among others. At the right-hand end, a pile of six identical trade paperbacks. Orange spine, black type.
To the left of the rear gardens that I can see from the window, the main road climbs gently over the trackbed of a dismantled railway line. I can see Overcoat Man making his way slowly up the incline. Overcoat Man is one of numerous instantly recognisable characters that I see around the village, such as Laundry Bag Man, Umbrella Lady, Polling Station Man and Dog Man. Overcoat Man wears several overcoats one on top of the other. All of them are filthy, his trousers likewise. His shoes are coming apart, which perhaps accounts for his shuffling gait and extremely slow progress. His features mostly hidden behind unkempt grey hair and a long reddish beard, he is inscrutable. Often he can be heard muttering to himself and occasionally he will ask passers-by for money or utter an offensive remark.
As he reaches the point towards the top of the hump-back bridge where a path leads down to the trackbed of the former railway line, he turns to confront an approaching crowd of rowdy young people. Maybe he asks them for money or growls unintelligibly at them, but something prompts them to gather around him. I am unable for a few moments to see clearly what is happening, but soon I realise that he is being jostled. He seems to try to edge away from the group down the path to the old railway line and either loses his footing or is pushed and falls over. He rolls once or twice and then I can no longer see him.
In what resembles the protective gesture of a threatened organism, the group of young people closes in. They form a huddle, from which one and then two members abruptly break out, leaving the group. Others depart and soon there’s only one person standing at the head of the path, peering down into the undergrowth. After a moment, this person also leaves.
During the incident, which is over in less than a minute, no one else has crossed the bridge. A dog trots by off its lead, but there is no sign of its owner.
I continue to watch the road and the hump-back bridge, but there is no sign of Overcoat Man emerging from the bushes that border the path.
I look at the backs of the houses in the next street. A light has come on in one of the flats. A man fills a kettle at a sink in a first-floor kitchen.
I continue to stand at the window as the sky above the houses turns a deeper blue and the lights in the windows glow more brightly and the gardens below fall into deeper and deeper shadow.
Tuesday morning, just after 11 o’clock. I am sitting in my office at the university. None of my three colleagues is in. This is deliberate. We choose our office hours so that they do not overlap. It is not good to be talking to a student about his or her creative writing while a colleague sits listening – trying not to perhaps, but listening all the same – just the other side of the room divider. It is not good from the student’s point of view, as writing can be a personal thing, and nor is it good from your own, since your colleagues might find it impossible not to judge your performance as a teacher.
On the desk in front of me is a PC, switched off. When I need a machine, I bring in my own. The PC is cumbersome, clunky, slow. I have moved the keyboard out of the way next to the printer, which is also redundant. These items of hardware occupy the left side of the desk. On the right-hand side are two books – Jane Solomon’s Hotel 167 and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, both first novels, which I am intending to read in the next few days, the latter for the first time – and a small, neat pile of newspaper cuttings.
There is nothing else on the desk, no clutter. I keep a tidy desk.
The newspaper cuttings are all single pages from the Review section of a national broadsheet. They are part of a series called Writers’ Rooms in which a half-page photograph of an author’s office, study or workroom is accompanied by a sidebar of copy written by the featured writer. I take the top one off the pile.
It is the turn of Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan. In the foreground is a comfortable-looking armchair, a newspaper draped over one arm. The position of the armchair traps an open door against the wall. Hanging on the door, on the side of the door that would be outside the room if the door were closed, is a blackboard. Both these details suggest the door is, in fact, never closed. Maybe any other members of the O’Hagan household are on instructions not to enter, since a comment – ‘The laptop is there for work but it’s not online because I hate the idea of some boring email popping up while I’m trying to fix a paragraph’ – suggests he does not like to be interrupted. On the blackboard is a chalked reminder: ‘Tuesday: Burns essays.’
I assume it’s a reminder rather than a piece of narration.
I picture him bent over a pile of manuscripts in a back garden somewhere in north London, striking a match.
There is a knock on the door – my door, the office door, not O’Hagan’s. I get up and walk around the desk, slip between two of the room dividers and cross the office to open the door, which cannot be opened from the outside unless you know the code.
‘Hello,’ I say to the student who is standing there.
Her name is Grace, I think. I see a lot of students, hear a lot of names.
‘Hiya.’ Her voice is slightly uncertain and her eyes look everywhere but at mine. With her dyed black hair and pale skin, she has the androgynous look of an emo kid or a goth. ‘It’s Grace. I’m in your First Novels class.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I remember. Come in.’
We sit with my desk between us, and she still doesn’t look at me, until I briefly turn away and then I am peripherally aware of her gaze momentarily settling on me.
‘What did you want to see me about, Grace?’ I ask.
‘The… er… First Novels class.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m having trouble finding copies of some of the books on the list.’
‘Maybe you weren’t at the introductory session,’ I say. ‘I explained then that a number of these titles are out of print but that in most cases secondhand copies are easily available from online booksellers or secondhand bookshops, where they still exist.’
‘Right,’ she says, looking at the two books on my desk. ‘I managed to find this actually,’ she adds, pointing to The Bell Jar. ‘But it looks different.’
‘This is an old copy,’ I tell her. ‘Secondhand. But The Bell Jar is in print. The Jane Solomon is not in print, but you can pick up copies online very cheaply.’
She nods, looking at the floor.
‘Was there anything else?’
‘I can’t remember,’ she says. ‘I mean, yes, there was, but I can’t remember what it was.’
‘Email me when you remember.’
‘My internet connection is down. Can I call you?’
‘Of course.’ I look at my Spartan desk. ‘I don’t have anything to write my number on.’
She rummages in her pockets and comes up empty-handed. From her bag she produces a dog-eared five pound note and a pen. I dictate the number and she writes it on the banknote.
I see her to the door. The cutting I had been looking at is still sitting in the middle of my desk. I pick it up again.
O’Hagan’s desk is old, square, solid, four drawers either side, two in the middle. He claims it came from a Victorian lawyers’ office in Doughty Street, next door to Dickens’ house, and it may well have done but it looks identical to that of Antonia Fraser, previously featured in the same slot. Behind the desk is a bookcase with glazed doors full of volumes the uniformity of which suggests they are copies of O’Hagan’s own titles. Between the armchair and the desk is a small three-shelf bookcase of the type that tips books at an angle, but the spines are too far away to be legible. Closer to the camera, an urn sits on the floor next to the armchair. Three books sit on top of it in a neat little pile, clearly the books O’Hagan was last looking at as he sat relaxing, but they cannot quite be made out. All I can say with any certainty is that none is a trade paperback with orange spine and black text.