Emotionally Weird(50)

Anyway, she concluded with a somewhat rueful sigh, the outcome of all this had been a return to urban living accompanied by (sadly) a divorce on account of the playwright’s rampant adultery, but also (happily) Martha’s first collection of poetry, Chicken Spirits , ‘Critically acclaimed, but hardly a bestseller. But then which would you rather have, after all?’

‘A bestseller?’ Andrea suggested.

Martha was planning to break out of the ghetto of poetry. She had, she claimed, an unwritten novel, which seemed like a contradiction in terms to me (like the unspoken word). Martha’s novel was about a female author getting over her writer’s block by discovering that in a former life she had been Pliny the Elder – so probably not a bestseller.

‘They say everyone has a novel inside them, don’t they?’ Janice Rand suddenly piped up.

‘Not everyone can write it though, Janice,’ Martha admonished gravely.

There was some kind of commotion going on outside, every so often a shout of ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ went up and I wondered if the protesters knew he was dead, and if that made any difference. Martha glanced out of the window and frowned at what she saw.

I tried the words in a different order – trowel , vilifies , bracteate – but this didn’t result in any inspiration. Martha was always urging us to ‘Write what you know,’ (how boring books would be if everyone adhered to that principle!) but although vilifies was a word I felt comfortable with, my knowledge of bracteates and trowels was limited. Oh, for a good etymological dictionary to be carried on one’s person at all times.

Nora has no dictionary, there are no books on the island apart from the Bible by my bed. Nora appears to have banished books, except for the one she herself keeps, writing every day, her ‘diary’. But how can you keep a diary when nothing ever happens, except the weather?

~ Yes, but there’s so very much weather, Nora says.

The words didn’t help matters at all, prising themselves off the printed page and hanging around like bored flies, adding further to the instability of the phenomenal world. Terri, in the twilight world of the zombie, was writing the three words over and over again. She looked quite content.

Martha wandered over to the window and leant with her forehead on the glass as if she was trying to absorb daylight. (I was surprised we didn’t all have rickets.) Andrea used this opportunity to lean over and whisper to me that she thought a bracteate was a kind of animal, possibly a frog. Which sounded like wishful thinking to me. Nora, of course, believes that we all have a totem animal, a manifestation of our spiritual nature in the animal world. (‘Your mother sounds kind of cool,’ Andrea said. Misguidedly.)

Andrea whispered in my ear that she thought her spirit animal was a cat. How predictable. Why do girls always think of themselves as cats? I didn’t suppose Andrea would much enjoy ripping the insides out of tiny helpless mammals or licking her own nether regions or being chased by mad dogs or eating cat food without the help of cutlery.

Kevin’s glasses had slipped down his nose as he stared at bracteate , trowel and vilifies . If we were animals (which we are, I know), Kevin would be a sponge – a sea-cucumber perhaps or something rounder and squishier. But what I might be I did not know. ( I prefer monosyllables. They stick to the page better.)

‘Surely sponges aren’t animals?’ Andrea puzzled.

‘What do you think they are then?’

‘Vegetables?’ she hazarded.

This was a bit like playing ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ with Bob, or – worse – asking Bob general knowledge questions. (Question: ‘What is Formosa now called? Bob’s answer: ‘Cheese?’)

Andrea gave up and started colouring the words in instead.

‘Right,’ Martha said suddenly, ‘ten minutes are up.’ Only ten minutes had passed? What a nightmare. How long would it take before the hour was up? I calculated miserably – nearly three thousand words at this rate, more than ten pages. Time for some omission and reduction. Surely no-one would miss, for example, nine sentences on the theme of ‘The man vilifies the bracteate trowel .’ And so on.

‘I didn’t say a sentence,’ Martha reprimanded irritably, ‘I asked for a paragraph. I asked for text . Do you understand what text is?’ You could tell that she wanted to slip the word ‘morons’ into this sentence somewhere.

‘Well, according to Proust,’ Professor Cousins said helpfully, ‘it’s a web.’ Professor Cousins hadn’t even managed a sentence, despite all his diagrams.

‘Does this mean,’ he asked Martha plaintively, ‘that I should abandon all hope of becoming a writer?’