I made something up. “I want to write a novel, just one novel in my lifetime, that everyone will read and that will change lives.”
They looked at me. Luckily, I’d heard enough from Timon and our Mandy to substantiate this wild claim as my own ambition. They encouraged me. But they also said what a precarious ambition that must be, being a paperback writer. I was told to expect lots of rejection letters. That I must be prepared to fund my ambitions by taking all kinds of ordinary day-jobs, but that would be what would teach me about life, about people, about the World of Work.
“I once thought about writing a book,” said Janice, the woman with the earrings.
One of the older men perked up. “They say everyone’s got a book in them.”
“That’s right, Derek,” she said. “And I’ve got good life experience. That’s what it’s all about. Experience.”
The group looked at me then, and I felt about six years old.
One of the other older men, Douggie, started telling us about the novel he’d written at weekends ten years ago. He had two photostatted copies in his desk at home. “It was about my experience of the Sixties. Paralleled with my father’s being tortured by the Japanese in the Second World War. He wouldn’t talk about it usually, but I interviewed him for hours. I tried to get a publisher. I said it was about father-son conflict. When I was made redundant I thought, this is my chance to make a success of myself. I read the thing again. And it was hopeless. I realised I couldn’t even string a sentence together. It looked like a bairn had written it.”
The only other woman, Sandra, said she’d written off to Mills and Boon once, to get the tape of instructions they sent out to prospective writers of romance. “It was so complicated, though. You’re not allowed to get inside the man’s head, which was all right by me, because how do I know how a man thinks?” She looked at the glum faces around her. “And they said you have to know all about your characters. You have to know them inside out. I thought it would have been a bit of pin money for me. I never got started. I wanted an exotic location, so I got a batch of brochures from Thomas Cook and pored over them for hours. I still have the tape somewhere, would you like it?”
They looked at me and I smiled. Janice, the woman in charge, said she hoped they’d been some help to me. And maybe I should look for jobs—perhaps in publishing—in the back pages of the Times Literary Supplement.
Walking home I wondered if I could get a job in a record shop. But David had said that in the interview they ask you about current bands and records and really, I knew nothing. I only knew the things I liked, and they were all old things, or things that weren’t popular.
I stood outside his Megastore and wondered if I should go in. I could pretend I was after a form for casual staff. It would be something to write on my slip for the DSS, to prove that I was making an effort. David might think I was chasing after him. Let him phone me instead.
I went next door to the Body Shop, where they had a vacancy for part-time work. It was like stepping into our Linda’s world, considering a job in a shop like that. I walked home, thinking dreamily about facial scrubs and eye gels.
All that week there was no phone call from David. He led a busy life, Wendy told herself. And so did she, she added.
In the Scarlet Empress one day she saw his friend Rab, sitting opposite his daschund, who got a chair to himself. Rab was writing in a notebook, barely stopping to tap out his cigarette ash. Wendy said hullo and broke his spell.
“I’ve had this sentence going on for almost twelve hours non-stop,” he said crossly. “Now I’ve lost its thread.”
Rab was, he explained, a master of convoluted sub-clauses. He wanted to write a book-length something, maybe a novel, that was all one sentence. Wendy rolled her eyes. Everyone was at it.
“You’re the girl from that night,” he said, staring at her. His eyes were still jerking left to right, she noticed. Wendy tried to see what he had written, but it looked like scrawl. “Dave’s wanted to phone you,” he said smugly. The daschund yapped at this, as if Rab was giving away secrets. “But he thought you had gone off him. You and your mate, the little queer fella, upped and left at the crack of dawn. Dave didn’t get out of bed till tea time.”
“I left him a nice note.”
Rab shrugged.
Wendy sighed. “Tell him I don’t hate him. Tell him to phone me.”
“You phone him.” Rab was still wearing that tea cosy hat. She wondered if he was bald. “Listen,” said Rab. “He’s a nice fella. I’m only saying this because I know him and I don’t know you. He’s too nice for you to go messing him about.”
Wendy drew back. “I’ll phone him, all right?”
Rab nodded and went back to figuring out where his sentence was going.
It must be a city of words, thought Wendy, ordering herself some more coffee. A city where everybody wanted to be writing. The streets of the New Town seemed clear-cut and easily cryptic as a crossword, but the intrigues and the endlessly elastic sentences of the people who lived here ran any which
