Graham's Study

He hadn't been in his study for some time. He had always loved being
in there. It was his own space - somewhere where he could empty his
mind of all the wonders his imagination furnished him with. A room for
thought in a world where there is little room at all for thought, with
the phenomenal boom in mass and personal communication. It was his room
to be alone. No telephone, no fax, no Internet, nobody. The world did
not impinge on Graham's study, yet he gave the world some of its most
inventive fiction from within it, to which the volumes of his works
that lined the bookcases on two of the walls bore silent witness.
Although it had been three months nearly, since he had last stood in
the room, nothing had changed. The clock on the wall slowly beat out
the rhythm of the day the way it always had done. He remembered how the
sound of that clock used to invade his mind when the muse had taken
flight. How he used to sing to himself in strict tempo with it. The
songs were random thoughts that couldn't find their way onto the pages
that he wrote and so they would fly gracefully into existence by
escaping his vocal chords into the freedom of the still air of the
room. If he had been able to capture those thoughts and mould them into
a book it would not have made for very interesting reading, but the
process of setting them free that way made room in his head for more
substantial ideas to blossom and flourish.
It was in this room that Graham felt most at home and he always loved
to walk in there and breathe in its atmosphere the very minute he
returned from field trips that he had taken in order to research
whichever bestseller he was working on at the time.
The success that Graham enjoyed as one of the world's foremost authors
of dramatic fiction had always been a source of great pride and
amusement to him. As a scholar he had been second to just about
everyone and was never able to concentrate on his lessons for very
long, because of his overactive imagination. His teachers were either
unwilling or unable to detect the genius that he displayed as a
creative writer. Maybe he was ahead of his time. Maybe eight year olds
are not supposed to be able to write such graphic action thrillers.
Maybe that is why Graham was constantly in trouble with the headmaster
for submitting homework that could only have been written by his big
brother or possibly his father. Perhaps the Booker Prize he won at the
age of twenty-eight went a long way to making his old headmaster eat
his words when he said that Graham would never amount to
anything.
The desk had belonged to his uncle. The same uncle that Graham had been
named after nearly fifty-six years ago. The same uncle who had written
travel books about every far-flung corner of planet earth, which sort
of inspired Graham to write about them too, but Graham peopled those
far-flung places with characters who left the reader breathless;
adventurers who constantly cheated death in pursuit of their
goals.
Graham's goals were not always as easy to define as those of his heroic
creations. He thought his goal was to become a first rate motor
mechanic like his father and take over the family business when the
time came, but this was obviously not the case as he showed no interest
in the internal combustion engine whatsoever. His days as an apprentice
in his father's garage were filled with flights of fanciful imaginings
that saw him behind the wheel of a fast sports car outrunning drug
barons intent on killing him. He drifted from job to job, never really
fitting in to any of them and then he met Helen. She was the wittiest
woman that he had ever met. She made his soul sing with laughter as
they talked together in the early days. He knew that he could never let
this rare treasure escape him and they were married within the year and
he swore to her that he would make something of his life. He told her
that he would settle down in a job and work hard for them both. Helen,
being Helen, would have none of it. She got herself a well paid job,
bought him the old typewriter that still sat on his desk thirty years
later and told him she wanted to be married to a best-selling author.
Clearly Helen's goal was the one that Graham should have set himself in
the first place - and she achieved it.
Graham studied Helen as she stood at his desk in his study. She had not
been expecting him back and so had not seen him enter the room. He
looked at her with such love in his heart that he wanted to reach out
and touch her gently on the face, but held back for fear of startling
her. Her hair still hung to her shoulders and the dark brown richness
of it was starting to yield to the silver strands that graced her head
with a dignity that became her. She had stood by him in the early years
of constant rejection when publishers were unaware of the artistry in
his words and let him slip through their fingers. She was there to
offer words of encouragement when his muse failed him and he sank to
the depths of despair and frustration that can only be experienced by
writers who know their worth but can't convince others of it. And she
was there too in his moments of triumph, proud of her man who had
persevered and shared his unique talent with the world and made it a
richer place. He moved closer to her, not wanting to alarm her, but
needing to touch her.
As he placed his hands on her shoulders and whispered I love you in her
ear, a single tear caressed her cheek before falling gently on the
black ribbon draped across Graham's photograph - the last one taken
before his tragic accident almost three months earlier.