Category Archives: Writing

X tells me he’s spent all day drinking himself into the place where he can think. Slowly. For despite his nerves he’s a slow man, he says, a man whose mind develops slowly but surely, like something ponderous moving through water, finding the right current.

I feel like I ever only talk about one thing, says X. I seem always to be circling around one thing. Or it’s circling around me, like a vulture.

I worked hard, he says, I did my best, I think. My conscience should be clear, but it’s not, it never is, why is that? The judgement is coming, he says, the terrible sword is being lowered, but slowly, infinitely slowly.

‘The pub’s empty apart from a young couple at one end. They’re looking down at their phones. She sits back and plays with her hair. He sips from his drink. I sit against the opposite wall and sip from my tepid ale. The publican stands behind the bar staring into space. A stupor settles on us all, uniting and dividing us. Don’t talk, let the silence spread like frost. The publican looks bored, he’s on the verge of talking. People should have the decency not to talk. Find another space, think of something else. No, don’t think, drink, take out the notepad and wait for the words. They come, the words, and I shape and lose them in the same breath. Swallow the dregs, order another. Stay calm. If I don’t talk they won’t. If they talk I won’t. I’ll listen only for the words that come to me, that appear in this grey space, that rise and disappear like smoke, if they don’t talk, if he doesn’t turn on the radio, in this space where I think and am thought, where I write and am written, where I can neither think nor write. Scribble, it doesn’t matter what anymore. Drink, it doesn’t matter what anymore. Now maybe I can talk, now that I’ve drunk and talked myself into this space where anything and nothing is possible. But no one talks, silence spreads like frost. The couple fiddle with their phones, the publican wipes the counter. I’ve made it clear perhaps that I’m not a talker, and isn’t that what I wanted…? Where was I? In the pub, where the publican was wiping the counter. The young couple are gone, only the publican remains and he’s fading too, out and away, along with the pub, into the pale orange sky, leaden now, grey now, nothing now, and I’m sitting in a chair in this nothing, in this grey space which is my room passing back into being around me, scribbling.’

‘I was just about able to go on. What did this “just about” amount to? An infinity, far beyond my comprehension, like a child’s first word.’

‘I seemed to avoid the hole. For a time. It helped to have moved to a pleasanter place. Being near the sea helped. My so-called inner life seemed less oppressive and boring when I looked out at my new town, when I knew I could walk down the street anytime and see nice white buildings and beautiful women and look out over the sea. But I knew it would get worse and I’d get ill again if I weren’t careful. No doubt there were lots of new things to do and people worth meeting, but they seemed distant, opaque. Easier to avoid the effort and sink into routine. I got up and waited for drinking time. If I had work I worked. Sometimes I tried to stretch out the pre-drinking time by walking or running along the seafront. Sometimes I had to do errands or meet someone. The extra pills I took made me tired, and I’d sleep deeply in the afternoon, which also passed the time. I was calm, numb, comfortable, bored. The sun moved from one end of the sky to the other, the wind picked up and died down. Trees grew and died, mountains eroded, seas flowed and ebbed, planets moved in their orbits. Vast inhuman cycles of activity: nothing to do with me. Inactivity or activity, what did it matter in the end? But it did matter, wasn’t that what I ought to have learned by now? I had to get a foothold in the everyday. I often thought about ways to recover a sense of possibility. And of the constant renewal it seemed to demand, a demand that itself seemed almost inhuman. But there was always a discovery to be made: of what was already there, with or without me, before and after me. Life’s splendour, lying in wait, waiting for no one. Sometimes all it took was a single ordinary act or encounter for it to reveal itself.’

‘I couldn’t earn or predict it. Sometimes I got lucky and things came together, sometimes the current beneath acts and events carried me with it. I lived on despite myself. You lived on with and without me, anonymously.’

‘So what did I want? I wanted to be in-between so I could be everywhere: neither outside nor inside, but stretched out between them until I broke open.’

‘I came from the depths, flopped onto the shore like a deep-sea creature. I came from far off, from the wastes, loped into the settlements like a starving animal. I wasn’t an exception, I wasn’t marked out for anything special, but I only understood people who’d come from the same depths and wastes. The others, almost all of them, seemed to speak a different language.’

‘Sometimes a small shift seemed to change everything like night to day. Some turn of direction or a modulation of frequencies. What was revealed then, what new view opened up? But it wasn’t quite a question of revelation, more like a possibility actuated and so trailing new possibilities behind it. I’d turn my head and see something I’d sensed all along, or it would see me. Those changes made a gentle mockery of me when I put myself in a position to receive them.’