Not writing

“Are you coming tonight?”

“Yes. Sure.”

George was accustomed to Jane’s temperament and familiar with this routine. She would not be coming, but he cared enough to try. She felt he teased her, and perhaps he did without trying to.

“Around eight?”

“Around eight.”

“See you later.”

“See you… Bye.”

She set the phone down, knowing he would have the more reliable Alice, Saïd and Lois for company and would be content with that. She resented the warmth and the façade of naivete in his voice whenever he called to ask her that question, but she could not help but love him for it when some time had passed. 

Sometimes she would go out, but never when she was at home and he had to call to ask. She did not know why this was the case, but once she was home in the evening she felt she could not leave. She did not like that it was the case, but it was. 

Tonight she was at home and she planned to begin writing her novel, as was customary for an empty night. She knew she would not write more than one sentence, but the enjoyment was in the aspiration.

Ned, her cat, began the evening in a volatile mood, bounding from one room to the next. He was small and all-black with deep green eyes and soft paws, a gift from her sister Jodie who could not take to him. Jane had fallen in love with the cat before he was hers and considered him a great writing companion.

It is a serious shame, she thought, that cats cannot write novels. They have the right temperament for it, the kind of temperament it takes people years and much luck to find. Anyway, Ned was warm as he calmed and curled in her lap, kneading at her sweater before falling asleep.

What to write about?

She was dogged by her abundance of ideas, always loose and impenetrable thoughts and concepts flying about in her mind. When one appealed, another would catch her eye and stake its claim to her attention. This process had gone on for many years. She had written some short stories, which she thought were fine, and poems she knew were terrible. The novel eluded her.

Unlike a cat, she was uncertain in all that she did, and confident of very little beyond the fact that her poems were bad. 

Why write? 

Because she wanted to. She was confident of that.

Write about what? 

She thought she was not interesting and so could not write about ‘what she knew’ because she knew nothing interesting. Perhaps she could imprint some of her own ideas about her life onto richer characters, but how could one write interesting people if they were not interesting and had barely lived? 

After an hour of not writing she caught sight of herself in the mirror above the washbasin beside the window. She did not like to look at herself but often did anyway. 

She was twenty-six now, with lips she did not like because they curled so slightly with the faintest underbite and blue eyes that struck one with such electricity that she loved them despite trying to convince herself otherwise. She wrote about people with underbites and blue eyes and thought it might mean something, thought it did not seem to.

When she sat at home on nights like this she wondered about what George and Alice and the others would be doing and loathed the melancholy she felt. 

She felt what they were doing could make a good story, but that you could not write a good story about something you did not live, just thought about in your box room. She knew she was being unfair, that people wrote about wilder things than that, but it stopped her anyway. 

Perhaps they were all wretchedly miserable and had fallen out forever, which would make another good story that she could not write.

Most of all she tried to force herself to want to be there with them doing whatever they were doing. She could not and never did, as much as not writing pained her. 

She thought of two characters, once married and long divorced, meeting by simple chance on holiday somewhere fantastic, maybe the desert or the tundra. If she could write one absolutely great conversation between those interesting people in that interesting place she might be set to write twenty chapters. If they had been driven apart by tensions, what tensions? She had not worked very long and in no good jobs, so not work. Maybe lifestyle, but her life-long jostling between the suburb and the city and the country was hardly worthy of adventurers in the desert.

It could make a good conversation, though, and from that she could build two people. She liked it for its simplicity, and she wanted to write simply. 

The husband would have been in favour of rural living in their twenties, the wife a traveller bounding between cities. If she could write about this and slowly unravel it so that they had both changed to understand the other's point of view and wanted to live like the other had, she may have a story. 

She had never had a conversation like that in her life and so, instead of writing, she thought about that and then played with the cat to stop thinking about it.

About midnight she wandered over to the window to look at the street below. A bitter gale was whipping through the birch trees that lined the road. The road was quiet as it usually was. Two boys, about twelve, bounced down the middle of the road. They dragged a long stick along the ground. 

She remembered a time about nine years ago when she and a friend had been on a boat on a lake in Italy. She had forgotten the name of the lake, and it took her a second to remember the name of the old friend. Beth.

She remembered the day vividly. The water was so clear as the be almost invisible but for the searing sunlight which cast a shimmer over its surface. She remembered its deep warmth and she ran a hand through it, long enough so that the skin pruned a little.

Two boys, about twelve, who fished on the lake together, were diving from their ramshackle canoe and smoking cigarettes. They swam for so long and so deeply that she and Beth could not believe it.

She would have liked to have been there now with friends and warm air. Maybe she could write about that day or write a novel about those boys. Anyway, not tonight. It was late and so she set the laptop aside and tried to sleep.