My Writer
So then there was this writer I knew once though I didn’t know he was a writer when he first started coming in I thought he was a composer, only I seen a film about a composer once and he always sat like that when he was doing his composing his music, with his fingers on his forehead because he had nice long artistic fingers and a wig, and sometimes he would bounce his foot up and down, not the composer, this other guy. So anyway he always sat in the corner seat drinking his coffee and staring into space like he was deep in thought or composing or something or on drugs, and I would always serve him because that was my patch, the two tables next to the window on the right-hand side under the Humphry Bogarde poster and the first three the other side of the door between the potted fern and the coat-stand, so I got to see him close-up quite a few times before anything happened. He was always well-dressed and he had this blond crinkly hair like chips that always looked very smart, I like a well-groomed look on a man, and when I served him his coffee, that’s all he ever had, white coffee all the time, he must of been some sort of caffeine freak or cream freak or something, he always used to smile and say “Thanks, thank you very much.” Like that. Always very polite. I liked that. Some guys you get in they don’t say nothing or they just sort of mumble or try and touch you up accidentally-on-purpose sort of number, but this guy was different. I said to Judy, she’s my mate works behind the bar sometimes on a part-time basis, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when she’s not off doing an acting audition or modelling or something, “He looks romantic don’t he?” and Judy’s like “Yes he do” because I like romantic guys, Judy ain’t so fussy, she turns up to work sometimes with love bites all over her neck and this in the middle of the afternoon, but she agreed with me this guy looked quite romantic. Then one day he brings in these loads of sheafs of paper with writing on them and he sits there with a pen going through them and making little squiggles in the margins and that, and that’s how we had our first conversation really. He was sitting there squiggling away and when I brings him his coffee over to hm he turns round and goes “Oh do you think I could borrow a pen please cos mine’s ran out?” so I’m like “Oh we’re always losing our pens or they’re always running out or something” so I fetches him one from behind the bar and I’m like “Here you go” and he goes “Thanks, thank you very much” and he smiles at me in that way he had and when I gives him the pen he drops it on the floor and Judy goes “He fancies you” and I’m like “On your bike” and she goes “He was looking down your cleavage” and I’m like “Dirty mare, don’t be so crude” because he looked much too nice and intelligent not to be married or have a girlfriend or something or be gay, so I’m like “So anyway if he fancies me that much why don’t he ever try and chat me up or something?” and Judy goes “He must be shy” and I’m like “Intelligent people ain’t shy” and she goes “He’s looking at you mind” and I looks across at him and he’s looking at me in this funny way he had, though when he catches me looking he looks away again. So anyway Judy kept on ribbing me about it so next time he comes in with this great load of papers I turns round and says to him “Are you a writer or something then?” because I wanted to prove to Judy he weren’t shy and he says “Yes I am.” So I give Judy a sort of told-you-so-Miss-Clever-Smarty-Pants-Drawers sort of look but she just sticks her tongue out at me and goes on reading her Helen Fielding so I says to him “So what sort of things do you write then?” because I bet it wasn’t anything like Helen Fielding, probably more like the works of Shakespeare or something, and he says “Whatever they pays me to write” which I thought was a bit cold-blooded and cynical and not very artistic at all really. “At least I used to” he says, and then I realise he’s quite a bit older than I first thought because he’s got all these crinkles at the corners of his eyes and things and his shirt cuffs are a bit frayed, but I didn’t like to say nothing. So anyway after he’s settled up and everything he goes to give me this tip and his fingers sort of brush the palm of my hand and I smile at him because it tickles and he looks at me all shifty-like out of the corner of his eye and suddenly he comes out with “I like coming in here” and I says “Oh yes, why’s that then?” and he says “Because you are the living embodiment of the formal perfection I’ve been striving to capture in my work for the last twenty years” or something. Well luckily there was no one around or I wouldn’t of known where to put myself, but in the end I just laughs and tells him to pull the other one it’s got balls on and he don’t come in again for months after that. I thought maybe I’d offended him because writers are very sensitive people aren’t they, but all Judy said was “Don’t be daft, he was just trying it on. Living embodiment of what? He’s a nutter” and I said “Living embodiment of formal perfection for your information actually and why don’t you shut your fat gob?” because she can get on your tits sometimes, Judy. So anyway one morning he comes in all sort of out of the blue looking all excited and straight away I’m relieved and nervous at the same time because although I was glad there was no hard feelings or nothing I didn’t want him to embarrass me like that again in front of everybody. But luckily it’s a slow day and Judy was in the bog so when I takes him his coffee over I’m like “You’re looking well made up this morning, have you won the Lottery or something?” and he says “No, better than that, I’m going to have my play on at the Playhouse and I owe it all to you” and I’m like “Oh yes, how do you make that out then?” and he says “Because it’s all about us.” He says it like there’s some big thing going on between us or something and I’m like “Is that right? That’s nice” and he says “As you’ve been my inspiration would you care to accompany me to the opening night?” Well I’m no great theatre-goer but he looked so happy and artistic sitting there, little foot going like the clappers, so I’m like “Oh go on then, it’ll be a laugh” and he suddenly takes my hand and shakes it, right there in the middle of the afternoon, and I’m so surprised, I thought he was making a grab for my float at first. So anyway on the night he was pretty nervous I can tell you and we sat in the front row because he said they was privileged seats, but I don’t like sitting in the front row, you get a crick in your neck looking up all the time, I sat in the front row in the cinema once when it was full and all the characters looked about two feet high and about twenty feet across or something and it looked like you were looking up their noses all the time. So anyway this play, there was this one actor in it I recognised, he played the villain, because I seen him on TV a couple of times in The Bill or something and that advert for toilet cleaner and Casualty, and he was very good though I thought all the others were quite good too only not as good as him. I can’t remember much about what it was all about now but there was this painter and this model he was trying to paint and there was loads of long speeches and things and she took all her clothes off at one point which I thought was a bit unnecessary but the painter was trying to paint her or something at the time so I suppose that was all right really and a necessary part of the plot as they say. Only I think I might have enjoyed it more if this writer guy hadn’t been squirming in his seat all the time because sometimes he made these funny groaning noises in the back of his throat and sometimes he had his hands over his eyes, only I don’t know why because people was laughing at all the jokes and everything. My favourite bit was when the painter tried to stab the villain to death with this paintbrush because he was trying to get off with his model or something, and that got the biggest laugh of the night though I thought it was quite dramatic really with all the blood and everything, but as I say, bottom line, it seemed like a good time was had by all. So anyway afterwards this writer guy said he was supposed to go round the back and tell all the actors how good they were and everything but he said he didn’t want to and I’m like “Don’t you even want to say hello to that guy who’s been on TV?” and he says “No” which I thought was a bit of a bummer because I rather fancied him actually but I didn’t like to say nothing because by this time this writer guy was looking a bit green around the gills so I’m like “Are you all right?” and he didn’t say nothing, just said he wanted to go for a walk. Well I would rather have gone for a pint and a fag to be honest because they don’t let you smoke when you’re serving and I’d barely had one all day, we’d been rushed off our feet, and I don’t like smoking in the street, it looks slaggy, and I wanted to light up at this play but this writer guy said they don’t allow that so I had to go and have a quick one in the bogs. So anyway it was a nice night so we walks along the docks and that and he’s not saying much and I thought that was a bit rude actually and after about three hours of this I’m like “What’s up?” because my dress didn’t have no back to it and it may sound romantic walking along the docks at night with the author of this play you’ve just seen but it don’t make it any less cold if your dress don’t have no back to it. And he says nothing and he sits down on one of them benches they got along there in memory of certain local dignitaries and town councillors and mayors and things and puts his head in his hands and begins to cry. And I’m dead embarrassed I can tell you. But writers and people are meant to be a bit emotional aren’t they, so I sits beside him for a bit, patting him on the shoulder and things, and then he looks at me with his face all wet with tears and snot and stuff and his bow tie all skew-whiff and he says “I’ve let you down” and I’m like “Haven’t you got no tissue or nothing?” because frankly I thought he looked a bit of a mess but I didn’t like to say anything, and he says “I haven’t done you justice, I wanted it to be a monument to eternal truth and it’s just a piece of shit” and I says “Language” and he says “I haven’t got no talent, I want to die.” Well I didn’t know what to say to that, I mean I felt a bit embarrassed to tell you the truth, not to mention cold, so I leans across and kisses him on the forehead because he’s looking so miserable and all and that’s when it all kicked off really because suddenly he was all over me, on the bench out in the open and everything, and I tried to fend him off at first because I wasn’t prepared, hadn’t been expecting that sort of thing given how old and artistic he was and everything, but he breathed down my dress and that warmed me up a bit and besides he wasn’t really that old and he had invited me along to see his stupid play and all, so in the end I’m like “How about taking me home then?” because I didn’t want to be arrested for disturbing the peace or nothing and he said “Yes I’d like that” and he was pretty crap really but I expect he was a bit tired and emotional what with rehearsals and everything and I was thinking about the famous actor all the time anyway so one way or another we both got a bit of what we wanted up to a point a bit I suppose. So anyway I thought that would be the end of it actually because in the morning all he did was take one look at the papers what he had to go out and get specially, because I don’t have a paper delivered of a morning, and after he read them or only a bit of each one he locked himself in the bathroom, he didn’t even offer to make me a cup of coffee which I thought was a bit rude. So anyway that was on the Tuesday night, but blow me if all the rest of that week and the following one he don’t start coming into the café all hours of the day and night as if he owned the place, trying to talk to me. Well he didn’t always succeed because sometimes I was busy and sometimes he looked so scuzzy I didn’t want to talk to him at all really, and in the end I suppose he just got fed up because he stopped coming in and Judy’s like “Good riddance too, he was only after one thing” and I must say I was inclined to agree with her. So anyway the last time I seen this writer guy was just before Christmas when he comes in looking like a tramp or something. He was all thin and dirty-looking because he hadn’t shaved for weeks and his hair needed conditioning and he wasn’t looking very artistic or romantic at all. He sat in his usual corner while I was serving this other table but I could feel his eyes sort of boring into me all the time and finally when I goes over to him and says “You look terrible, what’s the matter?” all he said was “Are you completely without a soul? Don’t you feel anything?” which struck me as a bit of a cheek actually, I feel lots of things, so I said “What do you mean?” you know, all sarcastic like, and he said “You’re so beautiful, why does beauty always have to be born out of ugliness?” And he starts crying again all over the tablecloth and everything and honestly I didn’t know where to put myself I felt so embarrassed. I said “Stop it, I’ll have to clean there” and he looked at me all tear-stained and called me something I will not repeat. Well this pissed me off a bit actually, I mean having this writer guy turning up out of the blue looking like something the cat’s dragged in and without so much as a by or leave calling me names in front of all the customers and clientele and everyone. So I said “Nice thing for a playwright to call someone I must say, call yourself a writer, if that’s all you have to say I don’t know why you bothered coming back at all” and he didn’t say nothing for a while and then he said he was sorry and could I let him have a coffee and a meal on the house, just for old times sake, because he hadn’t eaten for three days and he was starving. Well I told him I couldn’t do that because Jim, that’s the guy who owns the place I used to go out with, though I stopped after a couple of weeks because he started fancying Judy instead though it wasn’t her fault and it didn’t last long and anyway he’s a bit of a slimeball, Jim, to be honest, so anyway, Jim don’t like us giving freebies to mates, “Not even if they’re famous authors” I says, you know, witty-like. Well at that he just looked at me for a moment, then he goes “Thanks, thank you very much” and he got up and went out and I never seen him again. Judy says he probably went off to Ibiza or Thailand or somewhere to write his scripts and have it off with actresses and that but I don’t know. He seemed quite intelligent when he first started coming in, but when I think of that last time I seen him I reckon he can’t of been all that intelligent really if he allowed himself to get into a state like that. I mean, not eating for three days ain’t very intelligent is it? Judy says writers aren’t meant to eat much anyway, they’re spiritual, but I don’t see nothing spiritual about a person who cries all over a tablecloth where someone else is supposed to clean and uses language in a public place. So anyway the next guy I went out with was a proper composer, he was a guitarist in a rock band and he was really talented, he could do it without music and everything. He didn’t ask me for free meals or say I was the living embodiment of nothing, and the first thing he did the morning after I stayed over at his place was he invited me on holiday with him and the band. To Ibiza! You should of seen Judy’s face, she looked like a smacked arse in a nappy commercial. In the end we never went though because we split up before we could go, but in a way I was glad because what if we’d run into this writer guy while we was out there? That would of been just too embarrassing.
1981
PS
At a low point in the early eighties, I used to spend a lot of mornings in a café drinking coffee I didn’t need and eating pancakes I didn’t want just to be close to some pretty waitresses I would never get to know. I would usually be scribbling in a pad in order to appear interesting. One day it occurred to me to write a story about what this might look like from the other side, and how ridiculous and pathetic the situation was.
I was also interested in the technical challenge of writing from a completely different perspective with a vocabulary and psychological attitude not only completely alien to mine but also as far removed as I could get from the narrative voice I usually adopt. Men and women obviously live in the same world and share many of the same experiences, but my work proofing novels by women has convinced me that there are major differences between the ways the sexes each process what they see and feel. Attitudes are not the same, so presumably mindsets and mentalities aren’t either.
I never fully resolved the question of how to format the prose. At first I tried a version with no punctuation at all, not even quote marks, as I felt they would have been beyond the capacity of the narrator, but since I’d already resolved to present the text in a single unbroken block, I decided complete stream of consciousness would be a complication too far for the reader. Make it sound authentic, yes, but at least make it easy to digest. Maybe only commas, and no full stops? Maybe in another draft. But I retained certain grammatical quirks which I thought would reflect a non-literary voice, like “would of” instead of “would have”, and “So anyway” like a kind of tic. (And when, parenthetically, did “So” come to replace “Well” as a throat-clearing habit at the start of an English person’s sentence? It’s very noticeable because it seems, to my ear, wrong. When not being used as part of a comparison, “So” as a conjunction means therefore or in order that; it is not, to my mind, an adequate substitute for the speaker engaging your ear while they momentarily gather their thoughts.)
At the time of writing there was also this strange usage “I’m like” meaning “I said”. I have no idea where this came from or even how it might have developed, and I don’t know whether it is still current at all, but even if it dates the piece, it at least sounds authentic as an obvious departure from the standard. The phrase “I turned round and said…” is very common in my part of the world too, though whether this usage is local or more widespread, I have no idea. It doesn’t matter for the purposes of the story.
The experiment also raised another interesting question that I have been pondering ever since. In first-person writing there seems to be an unspoken convention that however dull the central character is, the author still must write as well as they know how, however antithetical this might be to the abilities or ambitions of their adopted persona. I can understand the rationale for this: a dull mind would produce a very dull story, however interesting the individual events the protagonist is trying to convey. But is this not simply an instance of the author trying to have their cake and eat it? Are they not by this merely nudging and winking at the reader as if to say, “We know he’s a boor, but he can still write can’t he? That’s me, by the way, doing all the writing. I did that.” To counter this, I made sure the narrator makes the writer character sound exactly like her, making similar grammatical errors. In other words, she isn’t quoting him; she is imperfectly remembering their conversations, and conveying them in her own terms. The one sentence she can quote accurately – “Because you are the living embodiment of the formal perfection I’ve been striving to capture in my work for the last twenty years” – followed by the narrator’s face-saving “or something” is the one thing she remembers most clearly from the whole encounter, because in her own mind (I felt) she might have been genuinely touched by it and might even have got him to write it down for her at some point. At least, that’s what you’re supposed to think. This is also meant to be proof that this guy is a total bullshit artist, just in case you had been in any doubt before.
(When telling Evelyn Waugh what she thought of Brideshead Revisited, Nancy Mitford told the author that his first-person narrator Charles Ryder “seemed to me a tiny bit dim”. Waugh replied, “he is dim, but then he is telling the story and it is not his story.” I believe this defence only goes so far. Between you and me, I suspect Waugh had not anticipated such a reaction, and this was his first attempt to counteract or rationalise it. Indeed, Brideshead might not be Charles’s story, but any narrator should always try to be entertaining if only out of courtesy to their listeners – unless, as is the case with the narrator of My Writer, for instance, that narrator is so un-self-aware that such a thought would never even cross their mind. And, FWIW, I myself don’t find Charles dull, necessarily, just a bit smug – though I certainly don’t think the “fierce little human tragedy” in which he participates is likely to convert him to Catholicism either, that was just Waugh’s personal bias.)
It’s the same order of deception, I find, as the superbly idiomatic and nuanced English so frequently put into the mouths of foreigners in books and films. In life, anyone speaking a second language, unless they have been thoroughly immersed in the culture for years, is going to speak with an accent and make grammatical errors. But in fiction, not a bit of it. On the contrary, unless linguistic confusion is a plot point, fake foreigners always manage to make themselves thoroughly understood. But speaking from my own experience as a language student, I have to say it is hard enough to catch everything that’s said to you, let alone be able to respond, appropriately and immediately, in that language yourself. (It’s perfectly possible, of course, that I was a singularly crap language student, but I believe I speak for many of us in a similar boat.) And on the rare occasions one gets to see this from the other side, as it were, the case is made even more conclusively: an English actor or actress speaking a foreign language on screen (quick, name a fourth after Michael Fassbender, Kristin Scott Thomas or Charlotte Rampling) will invariably have well-nigh faultless grammar, but only because their lines were written for them by a native speaker. Even after nearly fifty years of speaking French and German, I will still always read the subtitles of any foreign film, recognise, belatedly, what the person actually said, and invariably think to myself, “See, I wouldn’t have said it like that…” (Out of front-line practice, I will unfailingly fall into the amateur trap of trying to translate the words, instead of the thought.)
I have fond memories of the brilliant Clement and La Frenais comedy drama series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, where a bunch of brickies from the northeast go to work on a building site in Germany. I occasionally needed subtitles myself; no way were a bunch of Düsseldorf site workers able to keep up with the likes of Oz and Dennis in full spate in their own dialect. It could not happen in real life. It’s called the willing suspension of disbelief. Art is not life, it only reflects it, or evokes it, or recalls it, so maybe you can only go so far in the pursuit of absolute realism.
In the event, I probably wasn’t very fair to my narrator here, but then the would-be artist she got involved with didn’t come off much better. Maybe it was just my subconscious telling me it was time to stop ogling waitresses in cafés and get on with finding some purpose in my life.