The presenter this evening asked me how I was artistically processing my loss. The thing about talking on telly is that you find yourself babbling in public and you don’t realize it. The lights blind you into thinking you and the presenter are alone on stage. You forget about the crew, the sound guys, and even the lovely makeup lady that helped you get your pearls just right before the show. There is you, the lights, and an affable man (or woman). I find myself spilling the beans more with the men. Silly of me really. I take pride in the fact that this handsome lad is interesting in what I have to say, after all these years. He called me the founder of modern dystopia. I had my line ready, the one I had rehearsed in the shower. Billy told me it was a good one and I should write an article on that. I told him that I left the articles and the politics to him, I’ve got my stories. The presenter asked me what I thought of the world these days.
I replied that I liked dystopia more when it didn’t sound like the news.
The line went down well, the presenter laughed and complimented my everlasting wit. It sounded strange as if I should be happy that my wit will last forever, and not me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am. That’s what being an author is all about, sending a letter to the future, a testament for the next generations. But it made me think of Billy. His wit was always better than mine. He had us crumpled up with laughter on the couch, gasping for breath, with his antics. He could have been a stand-up comedian if he hadn’t been so concerned with being too many things at the same time. After all, being an artist is not about the wit or the panache or even the good ideas, it’s about the toiling hours in front of the white page, the white canvas, the lonely stage. The craft is in the making, everyone can be a genius for five minutes but it takes more to make an artist. We are no racehorses, we are more like the steady cart horses you see in old films, the ones that used to take stagecoaches through dark woods in the rain.
Anyway, I digress. What I mean is you can have the art without the craft and the craft without the art but in both cases, it doesn’t make you an artist. Not really. In the first case you are a comet trailblazing through the sky, beautiful, unreachable, but burning on your collision route. The second means you are a craftsman, you can pull together a story or a painting or a play, but you only know how to do that one character perfectly, because after all, at heart you really are that playful romantic girl in the first act of Romeo and Juliet. Or you only paint that one view of the rooftops from your terrace to the detail, even the stripy cat always makes it into your creations.
The kind presenter seemed interested enough by all my warbling on about arts and crafts but at a certain point, he cut me short. And, made another preposterous declaration that got me quite chuffed. He said I was a precursor of feminism. He declared I was a feminist before it was something cool. I liked that, but it was slightly misleading so I tried to put him right. You see, when I was young, it wasn’t seen as something important for a girl of my social class to work. And well initially, I was fine with that, I was actually glad. I could stay in the tree-house and write or read all day long. It was only when I finally decided I was going to be bored to death if I stayed in my hometown my whole life, that I ever considered working, or the fact that some jobs were closed to women. The presenter was smiling a bit too hard at this point, his eyes had gone from warm to flinty, so I decided to round it up in good measure. Well, I’m only saying that to put things straight historically, obviously, my lack of interest in the women’s plight at the time was entirely due to a coveted childhood and lack of education.
Billy, I know our childhood was not coveted in many ways, but I had to make amends somehow and I’m sure you will understand. It’s funny like after fifty years of marriage the critical voice in my head is always yours. I couldn’t just say, yes well I was young too, and not being cool in the present sometimes is more important than being cool in the future. The problem is, I really want to end up in one of those books for kids. ‘Inspiring woman of the last century’ or ‘women scientists’, that’s a new one, not long until they do an ‘authors’ one! Nothing would make me happier to see a distorted comic picture of myself with a label reading: an iconic feminist novelist. I don’t really remember in what order I said all that, but you get the picture.
The presenter shuffled his papers, looking slightly panic-stricken. That’s when he pounced on me with that terrible question. He asked about you, Billy. So I told him about the day I was washing up the blue china, the one with the little white flowers we got on my book tour in Japan. I was thinking about a new story. Warm water, soap, and greasy plates are the best recipe for lack of inspiration, the mechanics of it just gets your wheels turning. I had the first image: a boy in a prisoner’s uniform steps into a cubicle and is transported to another world, one that looks like the past but it’s actually the future. We had eaten curry for lunch and you were dozing off on the porch, it was the last of the warm weather before the winter, the maple tree in the back garden had started to turn bright yellow. In my mind, I traced the steps of the young boy in this new world, up the steps to a large rumbling mansion covered in moss, my hands deep in soapy water. I brushed against the vegetable knife in the sink and my thumb stung, surprising me. Hands still soapy and dripping I hobbled to you on the porch, holding out my bleeding thumb.
But you had already left. You were still physically sitting there, asleep in the breeze, but I knew the moment I saw you that you had left me alone. And I was so angry. Angry like when you miss the train. Why didn’t you call to me? We could have hopped on the wagon together. Whatever made you think that you could leave me here. I have nothing left to do here without you. It was like when you retired and you had that big silly party with your office. We were both nervous, and I spent most of the evening propped against the wall of the kitchen serving and drinking punch. I remember you cracked a joke with a pretty colleague on how I would never retire since my stories would probably never stop. I overacted, the punch playing an important role in my bitter reply. I can’t remember what I said but I remember lashing out because I felt excluded, held at an arm’s length. You and your colleagues, a club I couldn’t be part of. With my lazy mornings writing in my nightdress with a cup of tea and my late nights tapping on my laptop when I couldn’t sleep, far from the nine to five routine of your office hours. How dare you exclude me again? Or maybe you couldn’t call for me, maybe you could hear me washing up and humming slightly and couldn’t move.
The doctor said it happened very quickly, you were probably sleeping. He said this while he bandaged my thumb and set a cup of tea before me. I called the family doctor as if you had caught the flu or a cold. At least you didn’t worry about leaving me, at least your face was peaceful. The anger went away, eventually, the emptiness followed. Then Lucy arrived, she came over with the little one, she was due to give birth a few weeks later and Bastien was overseas. You didn’t manage to see Adele, Billy. She is a lovely baby. One evening, Lucy left her in my arms exhausted, a screaming purple-red bundle looking hardly human, to go and help Timmy on the potty. I looked down at that thrashing little bundle, it’s anger and frustration of being pulled from the blank ether into this crazy world, and as I juggled and coed I felt the emptiness being chewed away. Fingers of warmth cradling my heart and a fierce love for that helpless bundle. I knew I would throw myself under a bus for that baby. I finally have a reason to stay. A reason to catch the next train, Billy. But please, wait for me at the station when I get there.
The presenter handed me a tissue, he then asked me with a croaky voice if I was working on a new novel. I replied, of course, artists never retire.
Disclaimer: The prompts for ‘A story a month’ are from Neil Gaiman’s project A Calendar of Tales (in collaboration with BlackBerry), but the content is totally mine.
Crafty Poulette 