the anticlimax of my trip to the bookshop, a cloud of gloom settles over me. I lie on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes the flat feels like a prison. We live in Camden, in a small street off Kentish Town Road. It’s as good a place as any to live in London, except perhaps on weekends, when millions of bargain-hunters invade the area in search of tatty afghan coats and PVC boots at the weekend markets. Our one-bedroom flat is in the basement of a converted terraced house. There’s a small garden, conveniently swathed in concrete. I live here; this is my home; but my name isn’t on the property deeds. We were advised that it might be best if the mortgage were taken out solely in Anna’s name. Building society managers, we were told, were a conservative lot. They might be reluctant to lend money to a writer with no meaningful income. Solicitors were a much safer bet. I was, in other words, a liability.
So, here I am, in my home which is not actually mine. I feel remote, deracinated. It is hard for me to share Anna’s enthusiasm for the place. When we venture out to the antique stalls of Camden Lock, she leads the charge. I do my best to muster some interest, trying to make an emotional investment, if not a financial one.
I clamber off the sofa and find Anna’s recording of the Ravel piano trio. I prise open the case. The compact disc, catching the winter sunlight and rainbowing promises into the room, glints like the polished blade of a killer’s knife. I put it into the machine and press play.
I listen as the violin paints its simple melody, elegant arcs of beauty hanging in the air. The cello weeps a rich, mournful echo. Each day I listen to this music, secretly, on my own. I have been beguiled, seduced. But even as I am hypnotised by the piece’s sorrowful beauty, a small voice in the back of my mind is whispering: what happened to those cheeky chappies in Westlife? Where is Anna’s Backstreet Boys CD now?
When the fourth movement of the piece draws to its electrifying conclusion, I stand up and open my saxophone case. I need to chase away the ghost of Ravel’s music, which lingers long after the notes themselves have died. I have a Weltklang tenor saxophone, a 1950s model. The bell of the horn is chipped in a hundred places. The bottom keys were broken off long ago when Ron accidentally trod on them after a gig, but I don’t mind. It’s mine, and I love it.
I begin my daily practice by playing some arpeggios in diminished fourths. Some I knock off easily; others I struggle with, going over them again and again, until I am satisfied or too bored to carry on. Gradually my mood lifts, as I concentrate on the patterns of notes. Gavin has written some new music for the rehearsal tomorrow. The tune is called ‘Urban Machinations – the Plight of the Zeitgeist’. I play it through a few times. It’s a gentle waltz, really quite pretty.
The tune reminds me of another waltz, the old Rodgers and Hammerstein tune ‘My Favourite Things’ – not the saccharine-heavy rendition by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, but John Coltrane’s interpretation, tinged with eastern mysticism and steeped in lyrical beauty. I have the music somewhere. I put down my saxophone and go into our bedroom. There I open one of the cupboards, humming quietly, looking for my folder of sheet music.
As I search, I find an old diving mask and snorkel gathering dust in a cardboard box. I pull them out and examine them. I remember these. When I was a young boy I wanted to be a scuba diver. Every night I took this mask and snorkel into the bath, and spent hours lying face down in the water, my face just submerged, staring at the plug. In my head I was exploring ship wrecks, inspecting coral, swimming through schools of exotic fish. In the end, though, my asthma thwarted me. I was told that I would never be able to dive with an aqualung, as my lungs weren’t strong enough. The mask, and my dreams, were abandoned.
I replace the mask and snorkel in the box and continue my search. When I find the folder of music, I take it back into the sitting room and spend an hour flicking through the yellowing sheets, playing old tunes.
My practice finished, I can procrastinate no longer. Cautiously I slide into the chair in front of my typewriter. (Proper writers use typewriters, by the way. No word processors for us. The soundtrack of creative genius is the clatter-clatter of crashing keys, not the soulless hum of the laptop.) I stare at my Olivetti for ten minutes, and then with my right index finger I wipe a layer of dust off the space key.
For this is my terrible secret: I am suffering from writer’s block – a heavy-duty, career-crippling dose of it, as unmoveable as the Alps. It weighs me down like an unforgiving yoke, pulverising my spirit. The longer I sit in front of my typewriter, the harder it is to begin. I am caught in a hellish downward spiral of petrified inactivity.
To complicate matters further, I have been less than forthright with Anna about my problem. She believes that my next novel is nearing completion. In fact, so far I have written only one sentence.
Here it is:
The moustachioed peasant rested his not inconsiderable weight on the swarthily crooked ash walking stick that he carried with him everywhere he went – Illic had never seen him without it somewhere on his corpulent body – and gazed up towards the towering clouds that were amassing ominously overhead in the sky above the terrain upon which they stood, side by side, and emitted a raspy breath before intoning in that authoritative voice that the boy loved and admired almost as much as the old man himself, ‘All I am saying, Illic my boy, is that we should give peace a chance.’
I’ve spent hundreds of hours crafting and reworking this, but it’s still very much a work in progress. For example, I’m having second thoughts about the ‘swarthily crooked’ walking stick. The image is almost too rich, too complex. I read my solitary sentence again. Is it, I wonder, too demanding, too majestic, for an opening paragraph?
This will be a rites-of-passage novel which uses, as a structural device, song titles of the Plastic Ono Band to establish the chronology of the narrative. It’s all rather complicated, and is lodged firmly in my head. The difficulty is getting it from my head on to a sheet of paper. At the moment it refuses to budge. Instead it just sits there, driving me mad with frustration and guilt.
After a few minutes I abandon my typewriter and prowl around the flat. A sea of champagne corks floats in a bowl on the coffee table. I pick up a cork and examine it. Around its neck Anna has written in black biro, ‘A’s BIRTHDAY. M, A, THERESA + AL’. This is one of Anna’s intransigent habits: every time we drink champagne, she keeps the cork and inscribes on it the details of the event and who was there to help us drink it. This bowl is an alcoholic documentary of our time together. If I delve deeply enough, I will find corks commemorating our engagement, the flat purchase, Anna’s qualification as a solicitor. These corks have always bewildered me. I have never been able to invest inanimate objects with particular emotive significance, but Anna loves to rummage through the bowl, sighing with memories. Her birthday was five months ago; I remember nothing about it. I certainly don’t remember drinking champagne with my sister-in-law Theresa and her idiotic husband Alistair. This bowl, so full of memories for Anna, is quite empty for me.
I walk into the bedroom and start sifting through the laundry basket. It’s Monday, so it’s whites. As I work, I ponder the fate of my novel. Given Neville’s aversion to advertising or marketing, perhaps it’s not surprising that the staff in the bookshop hadn’t heard of me. I put down the bundle of dirty clothes on the bed and open the top drawer of Anna’s dresser. I am confronted by her collection of exotic silk underwear. Beneath these alluring items lie prosaic white cotton stand-bys, and one or two more elaborate pieces, frilly things with lace panels and interesting quick-release gussets. I begin to dig, but I am not looking for saucy lingerie: this is where Anna hid the joint that we smoked on Saturday evening, before the launch party. I am hoping that she had more than one stashed away: I am suddenly craving a calming hit of marijuana. I’m not in the habit of smoking pot in the middle of the day, but after my book’s abject non-appearance in the bookshop, I need cheering up.
As I delve, my fingers
