I still can’t believe I am so, so lucky. I stay up late drinking and carousing with Duckfish, then wake up without an alarm clock sometime around 9.00am, find any old clothes sans underwear, grab a cup of tea and settle in front of the computer.
I read journals, articles and beautiful hard cover novels. I watch documentary films about drug addicts, Yehudi Menuhin’s sister and French farm workers. I find obscure and secret information on the internet that no-one knows is there (did you know that search engines like Google can only find less than 10% of the information available on the internet).
I write things too. At the moment I don’t feel like I write very well. I have a nagging worry that I am a fake. But I keep trying, deleting paragraphs and then trying again. I wrote this as an exercise in my narrative writing class, and it is more about me than the person I was inventing …
As the guests drifted away, stuffing their battered suitcases into the lift, she settled back into the area of the desk she had staked out as her own. As far away from the phones and computer monitors as was possible, she had built a miniature fort of personal items stacked in neat piles.
There were hardcover novels interspersed with dog-eared dirty paperbacks, a spiral bound notebook and a well-used yellow legal pad covered in unusually legible handwriting. If you looked more closely you would see she hadn’t been hurriedly scribbling notes, but crafting long flowing sentences in large meaty paragraphs. The block of black letters on the page almost obscured the yellow paper underneath.
If you could somehow tiptoe up to the counter without the noise of your shoes on the white tiles disturbing her concentration, you might be able to catch her unawares. If you were to ask her what she was writing in those stolen moments between demanding guests, she would look up at you with the embarrassment of a naughty school girl caught wagging class, wave her hand dismissively and declare that she only wrote nonsense. Not as silly as vampire tales or frivolous love stories, but babble and blather and bunk.
She wouldn’t tell you what she was really doing because she had never told anyone. The closest she had come to speaking of it out loud was in those last moments before sleep when she sighed unintelligible noises of longing.
She was looking for the words. Not just any words, but the perfect words that lay just beyond her reach. Her real job was not to deliver tired guests to welcoming beds but to stalk and hunt and search for the hidden words that demanded to be written. They flittered past her consciousness like tiny electric blue butterflies but as soon as she turned to look at them, they dissolved into nothingness.
This was her quest and it had already taken her to the other side of the world. In the ancient halls of the University of Glasgow she had sought answers from the scholars of English literature and inspiration from the artisans of music but her quest had been in vain. The words continued to haunt her and she knew that until she was able to summon them, capture them, and name them she would be compelled to spend every free moment filling legal pads with what would always be nonsense.