are sacrosant in the lockdown era. War stopped in the desert for the Germans to grind beans and the Brits to boil up tea. So I break for my joe three times a day, drop all chores, the long-neglected DIY and writing pitches to boarded-up publishing houses.
getting through, they’re tiny malevolent meteorites against the motes of dust big as planets. My mask is for sanding, stripping down the construction timber I got for a tenner from the recycling shop. I’m shelving the study, making way for a second desk. The house is our ice station now, last fortress against the blizzard biting. I gaze out, wondering when the all-clear will sound. It could be Sep before the schools go back, could be later. I feel shoved online more than ever, yearn for the physical world. But the physical world is hostile, confinement means we must travel in the mind for a while. I’ve laid in my stores. I have millions of pages stockpiled, The Anatomy of Melancholy and The Golden Bough can take opening bat.
slopes close the door these days, with plague pressing at the city walls and no clear route ahead. A phoney war hiatus, with old friends elbow-bumping in the bars. But people are trying things, the cranes still go up. I make my pitches and send out notes, fledgling steps as I imagine a writing agency, my own Universal Exports of scribes for hire. All the answers and pathways are there to be crafted in the study.
am I, only watcher and sometime wanderer. I’ve never been much good at kicking the doors open, though I learned long ago that the cavalry is delayed, indefinitely. Living is waiting, or action, the world being under no obligation to lay out its ways and wares before you. The world only keeps rolling away from you, going about its business streaking through nothingness. Things come of things tried, new in shape and unexpected. And you have to try ten things to chance that one will spark the kindling and send out a first, hesitant flame to light your snow hole. Of all the accounts I’ve read of soldiers waiting alone along a winter line – and I’ve read a few – most end with the ragged defender coming to understand that the officer won’t be along after all, that he’s going to freeze solid long before dawn and that’s only if a snake-silent raiding party doesn’t reach him first. Then he moves, seeking out the Turbin’s fuggy rooms and the sharp crackle in his toes as life springs back into them before the hissing samovar. Or flagging down a Huey. Pelting along a communication trench to the artillery station. Swimming out to a MTB, the last ship off the beach. And if he doesn’t move…well, those are the short, hard stories that go unheard and uncelebrated. The sun finds a figure quiet and still, no part left to play in the planetary marble roll. Would anyone read a book of tales where the hero decided to wait, no action, no bold deed? I guess you could argue that’s bold too in its way. But it’s not Beowulf, is it? He heard talk of a monster, climbed into his ship and set sail to meet it. Always eager. You don’t see Nelson waiting at anchor, holding back the fleet. We have more modest choices in our day to day, but it’s still wait or do, strive or sofa. It’s a restless journey a life of trying, and only when you stretch out your old bones by the great hall hearth can you sift and weigh the memories. Until then you keep moving, riding your unlucky tram to never-seen corners and crossways. Roll on with your smile reflected in the window glass.
but how bad, let me tell you how I got it. I was working on another continent, lonely as it gets and young, think I was nineteen, in a job I really struggled with. And I was homesick and pining. But I stuck it and every week I took home my slip. I was saving to buy a car and drive around and see the sights, coast to coast. And I did it for a few months and had about enough for a solid runner, a VW Rabbit I’d seen in a garage that was being prepped for sale. Then one night this spooked-looking guy knocked on the door of the apartment I was renting, he was a friend of my landlord. And this twitchy guy said he had debts, bad debts, and he’d heard I was a guitarist from the landlord and he wondered if I wanted to buy his guitar. He needed the money right then. And he fetched the case in and I played his guitar for maybe ten minutes and that was it, I was all in, I bought the guitar with every bit of my savings. So no road movie for me then, the guitar had other plans for me. I came home, joined a band and moved to London. And all those curves and blaring halls, meetings and driftings, all from the knock on my door. That’s what you get when you lay your money down.
woke me at three, cat jumping on my face. The wind blew the doors open downstairs and he had the run of the house. I carried him down in the dark, gave him some food, returned to the Morpheus slab. But the dreams didn’t come, I was packing too many cares and the wind was crashing around the flat roof over my pillowed head, lifting the zinc panels and quivering them like wobble boards in the hands of over-eager stage techs. And I know metal can snap. Metals let you down if you ask too much of them, whether gold, silver, brass or iron. Everything has its breaking point.
and a projection of authority, ever ready to stand by your words. If you were truly broken you wouldn’t write a word. And if the words aren’t worth anything why read them? Oh, and it has to be fresh, even ancient wisdom has to come over as fresh. Herodotus is fresh as a bell. Cicero is sitting at your elbow, whispering. Those are the three things you need, he tells me, if you want to write. And it doesn’t hurt to have something to say. At that he throws his head back and starts to hoot and gurgle, screwing his left eye tight in the laugh spasm and rolling the other wide and scary to the ceiling. He slaps his chest and stretches a paw to the chunk of glass on the worktop. I hear the rim chime as he pours and taps the bottle. I’ve been in colleges and among the cannibals, says Riverman. And found each in the other.
Stealing lines again, I tell him.
Borrow and make better, he answers, with a smile.
on the second floor, a single room just up in the troposphere. The wind starts prowling when you’re forty feet high, reclining at chimney pot altitude. It curls in around the roofline and finds whistle-runs, moaning and humming, a constant choir. The sound of motorbikes racing the ring road is my Gorky wolf cry. Night trains judder the Meadow-side track and the Brize Norton transport’s cloud-wanderings over the town add extra howls. But these restless purrings are a fine backdrop to my page-turning, strange and muted enough to go unnoticed if the text is worth its ink. I slip back into my green pool of light, free for a few hours of this city of walls, traders, grant grapsers and knowledge chasers, all its lost causes.
as they stroll by the info board, off for a baguette or a finger of java at Brew? There’s a record player by the window there, an arcane, first-spotted device for some sippers, I imagine. The paint-peeling board strikes me as some similar totem from the past, its local councillor missive, lost cat plea, windows cleaned cards, all inked and scrawled. Like the book, its old design must still work, and it’s a voice for the last hold-outs and mavericks that shun the screens. So there are moves too to stop the cash-only hipster outlets, lest it bars the bankless. I still gaze at the info boards. I still try to write and draw, when I get the chance. But the gulf between worlds grows wider.
but these mortice locks have been around for centuries. This one I’ve untombed might be 40 years or older, and sophisticated enough for me to flip the latch bolt and move it to another door. Energy stored and released for decades in a spring. I add my mark to the lever numbers and other trade codes. A process revealed, age pulls the curtain back on some things. In the last run of fiction I read I sensed what was at work, picked out a moment when I knew I was hooked and understood how the writer had done it. I’ve been at it so long I can see the levers. But those are the scam books, the entertainments and adventures, no disgrace there but no contest with lived experience. Some books offer more. Those you can’t open up like my lock, you go to turn the fastening screw and the whole device vanishes under your fingers. They’re not put together with springs and levers. And I’m no closer to unravelling their magic weft than I was when I first turned a page.
