My hand unknots from the barrel of Jack’s pen. I stare at the lake. Morning again. The sun is a stain of yellow in shades of grey. The days are relentless. They come at me like cars on a blind bend, their details sharp for a moment, before they speed away into the past. This business of writing has become as necessary to me as it once was to Jack. As words form on the paper, my grip on the day grows stronger.
I asked Jack once what he wrote in his endless blue notebooks. ‘Just details,’ he said, ‘the exact way things are. If I do that accurately enough, then I find that everything else is somehow revealed.’ I keep that in mind, but it isn’t the same for me. No pattern emerges, no system of cause and effect. Everything remains blurred and meaningless. A sprawling mess of events tumbles towards this futureless flat. To make it into a story I would have to invent, which I could do, of course, with worrying ease. But I’ve already spent too much of my life in the Land of Makebelieve.
I get up from my desk and wander into the bedroom. For the last few days I’ve been wearing pyjamas, a self-pitying cardigan and my overcoat. It’s cold and damp in this flat because I can’t work out how to turn the central heating up. I need to go down and speak to the concierge, but even that level of human contact would be too much.
I brush my hair, pull on jeans and a jumper. This flat is bland and functional, but luxurious compared to most places I’ve lived. White light shines in through picture windows onto pale walls and parquet floors. The smell is of floor wax and new paint. In the sitting room, I step over suitcases, crates, piles of books. A dismantled wardrobe and some pictures are propped against the wall.
I pull my coat on again and go out to buy some food from the mini-supermarket at the corner. After Moscow, the lights in the shops here seem garish, and the music is an assault on my ears. I can’t get used to the fact that there’s no queue. The efficiency is offensive, the abundance vulgar. One whole wall is covered with chocolate bars. I hurry away as soon as I’ve made my purchases. When I get to the flat, I eat a bread roll and some tinned soup, then sit down at the table again.
I think back to that conversation with Jack. All that talk about detail – was that really what he thought? It was impossible to know. He said different things at different times. Once he even said that he considered writing to be a bad habit, and that he would have hoped, by his age, to have given it up. But when I accused him of being contradictory he wouldn’t allow me that. He just said that any intelligent person should be capable of holding two or three conflicting ideas in their mind at any one time.
And then there was that day, not long after we first met. Nervous and brash, I stumbled into the café, full of clever and interesting things to say. But then, when I saw Jack, all the sentences drained from my head, and so I stood there with my mouth opening and shutting like a fish. Finally I pointed to his notebook and said, ‘So what are you writing?’ He said nothing. And nothing and nothing. Why didn’t the silence unnerve him? My mouth opened and shut. ‘A love story perhaps?’ As soon as the words were out, I curled up inside, wondering how I could have said them.
But Jack took the suggestion seriously. ‘No. I wouldn’t write a love story. In the modern age I’m not sure that such stories can really be made to work.’
‘No, perhaps not.’
‘Anyway, I’ve always thought those stories were the wrong way around. Love comes at the end, when really it’s a beginning.’ A bottle of water was open on the table and he motioned to me to sit down, and poured me a glass. He turned his head to one side, thinking. ‘I suppose love stories used to rely on obstacles. Obstructive fathers, barriers of class, or race, or religion. But none of that exists any more. The obstacles lie within ourselves. So when love fails it’s just a grubby tragedy of people’s smallness.’
‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ I said. ‘No one wants to read about that.’
‘No. Not if it is like that. But of course, it wouldn’t have to be, would it?’
His fingers were clasped around my glass of water and he looked at me intently before he pushed it towards me. The sides of the glass were wet. I took care that our fingers didn’t touch. He raised his glass to me, as though it contained champagne. I stared down at the black plastic surface of the table. But I moved my fingers on the glass, placing my thumb exactly where his thumb had been.