week when my turn came, I apologized and said I was unprepared.
The others in the class seemed not to suffer from my peculiar malady which was the complete inability to manufacture situations, and I envied the ease with which they drifted off into fantasies, for although they strained my credulity, their inventiveness seemed endless.
A second week went by, leaving me still at the end of Chapter One. A third week. Furlong questioned me kindly after class.
‘Are you losing interest, Judith?’
‘I think I’m losing my mind,’ I said. ‘I just can’t seem to get any ideas.’
He was understanding, fatherly. ‘It’ll come,’ he promised. ‘You’ll see.’
I waited but it didn’t come, and I began to lie awake at night, frightened by the emptiness in my head. In the small hours of the morning, with Martin asleep beside me, I several times crept out of bed, padded downstairs, made tea, sat at the kitchen table and felt myself overcome by vacancy, barrenness, by failure.
A Wednesday afternoon came when I phoned Furlong before class pleading a violent toothache and a sudden dental appointment. The following Wednesday I went one step further: I absented myself without excuse. I was in descent now, set on a not-too-painful decline. There were days when I seldom thought about the novel at all.
I went skiing. I had my hair restyled at a place called Rico’s of Rome and I shopped for new clothes. I painted the upstairs bathroom turquoise and joined a Keep Fit class. I went to the movies with Martin and Roger and Ruthie. I fringed and embroidered Richard’s jeans, wrote a long letter to my sister Charleen. Everyone was kind; no one said a word about my novel. No one inquired about the seminar I was attending. No one except Furlong.
He kept phoning me. ‘You made a brilliant start, Judith. Your first chapter showed real strength. Head and shoulders above the rest of the little brats.’
‘But I can’t seem to expand on that, Furlong. And not for want of trying.’
‘You say you really have been trying?’
‘I have rings under my eyes,’ I lied.
‘How about just letting your mind go free. Conduct a sort of private brainstorming. I sometimes find that helps.’
‘You mean you’ve felt like this too? Bereft? Not an idea in your head?’
‘If you only knew. The truth is, Judith, I can be sympathetic because I haven’t had a good idea in almost two years. And that, my old friend, is strictly entre-nous.’
‘And you’ve no solutions? No advice?’
‘Try coming back to class. I know you think you can’t face it at this point, but steel yourself. Most of what they write is garbage, but it’s stimulation of a sort.’
I promised, and I did actually go back for one or two sessions. And at home I forced myself to sit down and type out a paragraph every morning, but the effort was akin to suffering.
And then one day, just as Furlong had said, it came. In the middle of a dazzling winter morning, ten o’clock with the sun bold and fringed as a zinnia, it came. I would be able to save myself after all.
I would simply borrow the plot from John Spalding’s first abandoned and unpublished novel, the one I had so secretly consumed in Birmingham. Such a simple idea. What did it matter that his writing was banal, boyish, embarrassingly sincere; the plot had been not only clever – it had been astonishingly original. Otherwise I wouldn’t have remembered it, for like many rapid readers, I forget what I read the minute I close the covers. But John Spalding’s plot line, even after all these months, was surprisingly vivid.
What I couldn’t understand was why I hadn’t thought of it before now. It was so available; what a waste to leave it stuck in a buff folder on a dusty shelf in an obscure flat in Birmingham, England. A good idea should never be orphaned. Luxuriously, I allowed the details to circulate through my veins, marvelling that the solution to my dilemma had been so obvious, so right, so free for the taking; it had an aura of inevitability about it which made me wonder if it hadn’t been incubating in my blood all these months – germination, growth, now the burst of blossom.
I thought of the Renaissance painters, and happily, gleefully, drew parallels; the master painter often doing nothing but tracing in the lines, while his worthy but less gifted artisans filled in the colours. It had been a less arrogant age in which creativity had been shared; surely that was an ennobling precedent. For I didn’t intend anything as crude as stealing John Spalding’s plot outright. I already had my line-up of characters. My setting had been composed. All I needed to borrow was the underlying plot structure.
I woke the next day feeling spare, nimble, energetic, sinewy with health and muscle, confident, even omnipotent. I felt as though the blood had been drained out of me and replaced with cool-flowing Freon gas. My fingers were lively little machines exciting the keys; my eyes rotated mechanically, left to right, left to right; the carriage rocked with purpose. My brain ticked along, cleanly, accurately, uncluttered. The first day I wrote fifty pages.
I telephoned Furlong, shrilling, ‘I’ve finally got started.’
‘All you needed was an idea,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I tell you.’
The second day I wrote thirty pages. Somewhere I had lost my miraculous clarity; my idea had softened, lost shape; everything was blurring.
The third day I wrote ten pages and, for the first time, sat down to read what I had written.
Appalling, unbelievable, dull, dull. The bones of my stolen plot stuck out everywhere like great evil-gleaming knobs, accusing me, charging me. The action, such as it was, jerked along on dotted lines; there was no tissue to it. It was thin; worse than thin, it was skinny, a starved child.
Always when I had heard of writers destroying their manuscripts or painters shredding their canvases, I had considered it inexcusably theatrical, but now I could understand the desire to obliterate something that was shameful, infantile, degrading.
But I didn’t tear it up. Not me, not Judith Gill, not my mother’s daughter. I wrote a quick concluding chapter and retyped the whole thing before another Wednesday afternoon passed. I even made a special trip to Coles to buy a sky-blue binder with a special, newly patented steely jaw. And I carried it on the bus with me and delivered it to Furlong’s office.
‘But I don’t want to read it to the class,’ I told him firmly. ‘Just do me a favour and read it yourself. And let me know what you think.’
He nodded gravely. He consoled me with his tender smile. He understood. He would take it home with him. I got on the bus and came home and started cooking pork chops for our dinner. And it was then, with hot fat spattering from the pan and the pale meat turning brown that I lurched into truth.
Six-thirty; the hour held me like a hand. Doors slamming, water running, steam rising, the floor tiles under my feet squared off with reality. The clatter of cutlery, a knife pulling down on a wooden board, an onion halved showing rings of pearl; their distinct and separate clarity thrilled me. This was real.
I flew to the phone. My fingers caught in the dial so that twice I made a mistake. Please be home, please be home!
He was.
‘Furlong.
