5. The Afternoon after the Morning before....

Monday 5th December 2005: 12.33 pm

¦and here I was with Monday half over before it had even started. A whole morning ' gone. I could have written an article or part of a short story. Made another crack at the first scene of that play. Sketched out a novel, even. All those ideas that were flying around in my head, like benzedrine butterflies, goading me to catch them and pin them down. All those agents that could have been ringing me up with the latest on the bidding war¦

"You know the figure I gave you last time, Al?
"Yeah.
"Are you sitting down?
"Lying, mate. Supine.
"Got your waterproof underwear on?
"Wetsuit, mate. Snorkel and fuckin' flippers.
"That's good. 'Cos you wanna know what Sceptre have offered?
"Go on.
"And this is global rights, mind.
"Right.
"Well, how does this sound¦.

Publishers slobbering at my feet like spaniels. Queues around the block from Broadway to the Bronx. A party invite from Harvey Weinstein. Viewers clamouring for the latest trailer. E-mails from Stephen King (Care, Al. Love your stuff. Stevie). Yarning with George Clooney between takes. Pacino giving me a high-five. Scarlett seeking my 'older male' counsel. Everyone after the exclusive. The interview. The low-down.

"Mr Benefit? I'm calling from the Daily Mail.
"Really? Well, you can go fuck a camel.

All that stuff. All there waiting. All of it mine¦ if I hadn't got pissed and overslept and let it sail off on the tide of my dreams. Like always.

So. It was back to reality. Back to the task at hand. Back to trying to sort out my shit and get myself on track. First, I needed something to get me going.

There's a pulley system that runs across the Square between my balcony and Sherlock's. Two supermarket trolley wheels, several washing lines tied together, a tin box with a handle attached and a little tinkly bell. Very useful for conveying odd bits and pieces between us and saving us having to use all those stairs. So I scribbled a note on a fag paper and sent it across, requesting a tea-bag and some smoke. It duly came back with said items (baccy rolled in my note, bless him!), plus a note of his own on a sheet of bog roll:

Staying in today.
Totally fucked.
S

underneath which I wrote

Ditto.
Thanks for supplies.
Glad you didn't fill your note, too.
Al

and returned it.

I boiled the kettle and made my tea ' black, with a couple of sweeteners I found in the cupboard. Then I sat at the desk with it and lit up.

Hmmm¦.
Just look at it. How can anyone live like it ' never mind create great art? And me, too. What a state to be in. Undernourished. Heavy-drinking. Heavy-smoking. Skint. No guaranteed income. No prospects. No pension scheme. No need for one, the way I was going. Pathetic.

It was no good. It was time to turn it around¦

I finished my smoke and my tea, and then I began. Armed with a bin bag and my old knackered Hoover upright, I invaded. Tidying, straightening, vacuuming, chucking. All the cans and ashtrays and dust and shit ' cleared. I cleaned the windows: the light level rose about three notches. I started to see carpet for the first time in ages. Pretty soon the crash site was clear, the traffic able to move again.

Then it was my turn. I ran the bath, shucked off my clothes and got in. It wasn't hot ' I hadn't got the tank on ' but it was enough. The suds lapped around my navel. The old chap bobbed there like a dead fish on a bed of seaweed. I bent my legs and slid my body down, just far enough to get my chin wet. I could feel the water leeching the pain out of me ' like a poultice drawing poison. Afterwards ' a towel around my waist as the water belched down the plughole ' I shaved with my least blunt razor. Beard and moustache ' off they came, in an agony of ripped follicles. It was like cutting bread with a dinner knife. I rubbed my chin when I'd finished. I could probably have struck a match on it. But it was still like having a new face. The face I needed to have now. I rinsed the iron filings out of the basin and pulled the chain. A clean start all around.

In the food cupboard I found a tin of vegetable soup, which I heated on the stove. I crumbled in the remainder of the loaf to thicken it up. Then I sat at the desk with it and turned on the computer. I needed to get a few things down. Some facts and figures. See where I stood. Between spoonfuls of soup, I typed:

ALAN BENEFIT: THE STORY SO FAR
Years alive: 39 and 7 months
Months alive: 475
Days alive: 14,448
(accounting for leap years)
Hours alive (approx.): 346,752
Minutes alive (approx.): 21,885,120
Seconds alive (approx.): 1,313,107,200
Hours spent asleep (approx.): 115,000
Hours watching TV (approx.): 30,000
Hours spent masturbating: incalculable
Fags smoked (very approx.): 146,000
End-to-end length of
fags smoked (very approx.): 657,000 inches
or 10 ¼ miles
Coffees drunk (very approx.): 44,000
Alcohol units consumed: 80,000
(very very approx.)
Women been out with: 500
(approx.)
Women had sex with: 11
(precisely)
Average relationship: 5 months
Years in education: 10
(not accounting for truancy
and sick days ' much of each)
Qualifications: CSE English (Grade 3)
Addresses (including squats): 29
Jobs held: 27
Average time per job: 7 months
Average net annual income: £6,304.35
Current status: unemployed freelance writer
Current income: sporadic
Savings: none

I never did get to grips with calculus. But on the basis of my list I seemed to add up to a middle-aged, semi-educated, penniless, itinerant recluse with an overdraft, a tired liver, an established cough, a frustrating sex life and a general difficulty with commitment of any kind. Like a lot of people, probably.

My social-demographic? Dispossessed-marginal.

What else could I add? Anything positive? Assets? Hm¦ assets¦. Aforesaid chattels. A six-year-old PC running Windows Me (interesting it shares a name with a disease). An old stereo. About 300 paperbacks. And a desk drawer full of my masterpieces, in various stages of rewrite or incompletion: stories, poems, bits of novels and plays, articles. Testimony to my greatest asset (and, probably, my greatest liability): my imagination. In the last 3 months, I'd made precisely £230 from writing: a third prize in a local poetry competition, and a short feature in a women's magazine on¦ how to make money from writing. Well, there you go.

I sat there with the drawer open, looking at it. The thick bundles of dog-eared, yellowing pages ' crammed in so tight that the drawer was barrelled. I prised a wedge out, thick as a Large Print Bible, held together with a loop of string, like a lawyer's bundle. You could hear the wood sigh with relief.

Dead Letter Day
a novel
by
Alan Benefit

I turned down the title page. I'd forgotten how this one began.

Chapter 1
Sitting behind his desk at the front of the class, Trevor Nelhams surveyed the upturned, stunned faces of his adolescent charges. No one dared to speak. Not now. With a slam of his chalk-whitened hand on the cluttered wooden desk-top, he'd made them realise who was in charge. Him. Their teacher. And never once, in all his 12 years in the job, had he had to do what he now had to do. But he had to do it. Of that there was no doubt in anyone's mind. Theirs or his¦

I folded it back down and dropped the bundle on the floor. I pulled out more bundles ' some crumbly with age, greasy with fingering.

The Allotment Shed
a play in 3 acts
by
A. Benefit

Only one act of which existed. A three act play in one act. Maybe that was it's unique feature. Christ knows, it wanted one. It had all been going fine, until a minor character ' a mild-mannered rose-grower with a blight problem ' suddenly, and for no apparent reason, went berserk with a scythe. The grim reaper, indeed. Grim alright. Another one for the bonfire pile.

What else?

The Harbour Master's Cousin
a salty tale
by
Alan E. Benefit

and

For Whom the Ball Rolls
a novel of sex, death
and snooker
by
A. E. Benefit

and

Crap Craft:
100 useful things
to make from
rubbish
by
A. Edward Benefit

- the most useful of which had been an ashtray made out of a beer can.

And on and on it went¦ until the entire drawer was empty. Then I bulldozered the whole lot into a black sack, tied it up and heaved it over to the door. There'd be signal fires on the foreshore later.

If it worked for Hemingway, it could work for me.