4. Away with Words (i)

I slept fitfully and had some strange dreams. Anxiety dreams, like I often had. I'd no doubt they were linked to what Sherlock and I had been discussing. Not the end of the universe - the other stuff. Getting older. Wondering where it had gone, and what might be left ahead. What that narrowing future might bring, with the hour-glass sands falling faster and faster as they closed in on the neck.

In one dream, I was sitting at a typewriter, surrounded by piles of paper, typing away like a man possessed, page after page after page, with the piles around me getting bigger and bigger. And then suddenly there was a massive gust of wind and all the pages went flying, and I was rushing around trying to catch them. But they were all being sucked out of the window and up into the sky. And the ones I did manage to catch, I suddenly realised, were blank. I'd been typing nothing. Or the words had been sucked away, too.

I finally awoke from that one. It was early, but the emerging daylight showed the lines and edges of the room, like a Polaroid photograph developing. The sofa, the chair and table, the bookcases, the sideboard, the desk. The outlines of my life. I could hear the gulls screeching across the rooftops, a light rain pattering against the window. My mouth tasted like I'd sucked the insoles of a canteen cook's trainers. And I knew, without having to look, that I was out of paracetamol.

I shuffled into my day-befores, went and put the kettle on, shoved a couple of slices in the toaster. In spite of the hangover - not as bad as it could have been - I wanted to make the most of the day. There was stuff to do now. I thought about Sherlock's musings on his job: the spiritual cleansing he gained from it. That would be good. The money mum had left me was going down far too quickly, so I'd have to get another job soon. Maybe that would be the sort of thing. I didn't need much to live on. A little cleaning job would do nicely. I'd have a check and see what there was.

But there was a bit of spiritual cleansing I could do myself in the meantime. Tidy the place a bit. Put the vacuum around. Stick some washing on.

And then address the stuff under the bed.

It had always been there. Under the bed in this flat, in wardrobes or cupboards in others - building up over the years, only slowing with the advent of computers, hard drives, emails.

I slid out the four plastic storage boxes - long and narrow, almost coffin-shaped. That seemed appropriate, too, considering what they contained.

I pulled the lids off, and there they rested, like thick, rubber-banded wads of oversized banknotes. The corpses of my creative efforts - yellowing and dog-eared, patinated with damp spots and the whorls of oily finger prints. Stories, articles, poems, novels - or, at least, bits of novels. Beginnings. Some with middles. A couple with an end... of sorts, anyway. They'd all found their way out into the world at some time or other. And then, like faithful homing pigeons, they'd all found their way back again. Where they rested - beneath my head as I slept, but inside my head the whole time, every day, down through the years to now.

Not any longer. I decided there was no more room for sentimental attachment. The space needed clearing - the weight lifting. I had a couple of black bin-bags ready and had them filled in less than a minute - shovelling the bunches of pages in and shaking them down, trying not to look at what they were. The final one, though, caught me out. Almost the colour of parchment now - a rusty paper clip holding it together.

END OF TERM

by

Harry Chadwick

The memory came washing back. My first ever short story, written when I was nineteen. 1,948 words (individually counted), hammered out in double-spacing on my old Woolworth's Smith-Corona - all the capital letters with a black top and red bottom. First British Serial Rights offered. It was about a young lad on his last day at school. Not popular with the others, he gets set upon and roughed up. His blazer pockets are ripped off. He takes the bus home across London, getting off early to visit a cemetery - and his mother's grave. Then he walks the rest of the way through the back streets to the council flat he shares with his dad. His dad's out, so he opens himself a tin of vegetable soup for his dinner. As it's heating on the stove, his dad comes in - drunk, and with one of his women from the pub. The lad takes his bowl to his bedroom, listening to them making out as he eats. Then he goes to bed, and finally escapes into sleep.

Not being blessed with a natural instinct for marketing my wares, I'd sent it to Woman's Weekly and Woman's Own in turn - which is why it was there now, in my hands, the accompanying letters still attached:

Dear Mr Chadwick,

Thank you for letting us consider your fiction.

Unfortunately...

I sniffed. Then I dropped it in the bag with the others and knotted the top. It was all too much for my little shredder, and I wasn't going risk any of it being found. Up the far end of the beach, in the roughs under the cliffs, I knew there was an old oil drum that anglers often used as a brazier.

There'd be signal fires on the foreshore later.

Maybe a clean slate was what I needed to get things working again.

(continued) https://www.abctales.com/story/harryc/4-away-words-ii