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All the characters and events depicted in the novels NUNC and TUNC are fictional. No resemblance is intended to any real person. Even where characters are based on real life events in the author's life, the people are fictional. No resemblance is intended between any fictional characters in NUNC or TUNC and any person.
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ONE Last night. I'll begin with last night.
Last night. I'll begin with last night. Saturday, last day of May.
Nigel was there after all. Dear God.
"Lots of advanced royalties?"
"No. He's one of those publishers who lives on black tea
and toast. Wanted me to advance money on the printing."
"Dont tell me what kind of contract you signed.
Please."
"No royalties on the first two hundred copies. That was
one of the better clauses."
"And it isn't going to sell two hundred copies?"
"Probably not."
I had a low-lying feeling that I had just returned to a cafe that I had left five minutes before instead of four weeks before. Jean dumped a beer down in front of me and shook my hand - he hadn't even asked me if it was a beer I wanted. It was a return to the familiar in a city which is not mine, never will be mine: second date with a girl you have just fallen in love with - the second date is the best.
"So what does one do now?"
"One writes another novel."
"About what?"
"About the next three months."
The beer was cold. Munich marvellous. I didn't hear Nigel's question.
"I asked, obviously, what do you mean - the next three months?"
"I am going to write a novel about whatever happens in the next three months."
Beautiful girls were walking both ways in front of the cafe just to make me happy.
Nigel ordered another coffee.
"But monsieur has not finished his first coffee!"
Jean moved out into the street and looked forlornly at the beautiful girls.
Nigel gulped down the last of his now cold coffee.
"Who are going to be the characters of your factual novel?"
Factual? The use of certain words sometimes freezes my blood. Grit moved under my soleless shoe.
"You, you... I mean you, myself, Odile, Wally, Frieda, Jean, maybe those horrendous women that keep turning up in your flat. I don't know, Odile's family, anyone I meet."
"Will we all allow ourselves to be subject matter for one of your novels?"
I finished my beer. The sun was still clinging to the spire of Saint Germain des Prés.
"I am going to write a novel which is impossible to publish. Once finished I burn it.".
Expatiate, peasant, expatiate."
"I'm interested in the experience of writing a novel that no one will read."
"Yes. You're a hypocrite - that's Frieda's idea as well."
I said something nasty about Frieda. Then:
"I did it once before."
"Did what?"
"Burnt everything I'd written."
I'd been so happy ten minutes before, now panic was stirring.
"Not everything."
"When I pulled out of University. The lot."
"You kept something, you liar."
(True, I didn't burn everything - I kept my poetry. But then I never write poetry to be published. I must ponder that.)
There was a long silence here. I wake at night, sometimes, and find myself in that back garden under the rain in Melbourne. The paper is wet and refuses to turn to ashes; I ruin my tennis shoes prodding the reluctant pages back into the soggy, smoky mess. The memory always gives me unease. So Nigel's voice made me jump.
"You're talking about a diary, Shannon."
(Writing this conversation is bringing the panic back, no doubt about it!)
"It's a novel, a novel. But I eliminate one element of invention: the stuff it's made of. I don't invent the plot, it invents itself; I don't invent the characters, they're here. But much more important than that: I've eliminated the possible reader - the nightmare of all writers."
All evening Nigel was lifting his arm in the direction of Jean, all evening Jean managed not to notice.
"Magritte and Escher."
"Sorry?"
"Magritte and Escher. The writing of the novel becomes a fact in your novel. Borges does that kind of stuff. You've discovered America. Well, South America."
Don't get the idea, gentle non-existent reader, that I know why I want to write this book. I just know that I desperately want to write it. That's all. It's not an exercise in reducing risk. It's just another kind of risk. I've never liked Borges.
(A couple of years of constant thinking jammed into that last paragraph! A kind of personal black hole!)
At a certain point Jean noticed that my beer was finished. I began to drink the second.
"So what's new in Paris?"
Nigel still had no second coffee.
"I paint from nine to one. Same old routine."
"In other words you don't know what's going on."
"Whoever does? I've seen both Odile and Frieda several times."
He was watching me examine the soles of my shoes.
"Yes. You do well, my friend. Forget your silly novel, examine your shoes instead. Frieda says they are all beautiful Italian design above and stinking rottenness below."
The very sound of Frieda's name... She has become another person in my mind over the past two months. Love, the great distorter. Like art.
"I forgot to put cardboard in my shoes. Now I've got holes in my socks as well."
"Funny. Odile was talking about your shoes, too, last time I saw her. Marvellous girl that! You'll never find another Odile."
Another Odile! Sometimes two words together throw me into a small state of ecstasy. Another Odile! The very pith and marrow of absurdity! Words and magic - they walk hand in hand. Odile is your typical Parisian girl. And totally unique.
"I might point out she's engaged to somebody else."
"One would never guess it."
How infinitely little others know about our relationships! Odile, when she is with me, is definitely engaged to someone else. I once gave her private lessons for four or five months. Since then we meet, as friends, so that she can practise her English. But five minutes after we meet we begin to speak French. Her French is a thing of great beauty; her English is academic, accurate, text-book stuff - it just about tears my heart out. Yes, we speak French.
"We don't even hold hands."
"Yes. A very dangerous sign. She says you know French literature better than she does."
"Odile was always over-impressed by the fact that I know the Bateau ivre by heart."
"What is the Bateau ivre?"
There are moments when Nigel absolutely does not exist. Nigel Bowen Hart, from somewhere in Kent. His English accent neither rises nor falls. There is a motionless image sitting in my eye. But there is no man out there feeding that image. Bowen Hart, Nigel. Like a name in a telephone directory. Nothing else.
Jean exists though. He puts a third beer down in front of me. The image in my eye comes to life.
"Get me a bloody coffee, you quintessence of non-waiter."
Nigel sometimes shouts at Jean in English. Jean gets mad. Nigel waited another half hour for that coffee.
"The bastard."
Would Nigel use this cafe at all if he didn't enjoy his tussles with Jean so much?
"He's just had his fifth child."
"A girl?"
"Yes. Fifth girl. Give Jean a lot of space in your novel. He gave me a two- or three-hour harangue on his washing machine last night. This new monster, he explained in harrowing detail, washes perfectly but tears everything to ribbons."
"I'll get Jean in, don't worry."
Another silence. I sat there staring at him. He knows this but doesn't glance at me. Why are some people always there in our lives? This individual - I don't even know if I like him - is my contrary: never has money problems, paints every day of his life, has a perfect face, a perfect physique, was a perfect public school boy; never knows doubt or despair; walked out of Oxford with cold indifference. I think of the tortures I went through when I left Melbourne University after three years. My opposite. I hate him.
He knew he was the object of my thoughts, I'm sure of it, the creep.
"Frieda was telling me that she thinks you are the ugliest man in Paris."
Another thing: he does everything in his power to drag me away from my adored fraulein.
"She's no epitome -"
"A bag of stones on two poles with a hedgehog sitting on top - that's how she sees you."
"Doesn't sound like Frieda to me."
"No. There was another, more detailed, version. Let's see if I can remember it: you are a freckled skin, haphazardly filled with bones, the only thing static about your appearance being your forehead and nose which, she says, form one ugly immovable protrusion to dwarf your little blue eyes."
Oh yes, oh yes, that sounds more like Frieda - telling the world how clever she is with foreign syntax and foreign vocabulary. To dwarf? I would have been very impressed by that when I was teaching. But then, does my love, my dove, my sweet, my one and only joy, think of me when I am not there?
(I've been determined all my life to get that line into a novel!)
"What else?"
"Lots of things. She's a real bitch, that woman."
We are a hundred different people to a hundred different people. (Did I invent this or did I read it somewhere? Who cares? It's the kind of line I edit out anyway). There is Nigel's carping Frieda; and there is my laughing Frieda - a completely different person.
"She says your hair looks and feels like barbed wire. Your Australian accent irritates her beyond endurance. She prefers your inaccurate German."
Inaccurate? I hate people criticizing the way I speak foreign languages. Nigel was musing on.
"Mind you, I put in a word or two in defense of your bony body - called it an unfinished sculpture, stuff like that. Frieda wasn't impressed."
"I'm not either. Her description is good."
"It was the other things she said about you that were unrelieved bitchery."
Nigel was talking on, but I hardly listened. I've heard it all before. She has contempt for what she calls my weakness. She despises all people who attach themselves to persons, things, places or beliefs. I could hear her laughing, ridiculing voice telling Nigel of my scandalized fascination at her unfaltering carelessness, of my infatuation with her Germanic joy, her northern femininity, her golden hair, her warm skin, and of the fear that her conscienceless cruising over the sacredness, tragedy and beauty of life creates in my soul. And the questions all this torments me with. As I write these words I wonder at them, because they are all so true, so pugnaciously true; they fall into my image of her with such violent, clamping accuracy.
Nigel went on for a long time uselessly - I had stopped listening. Why does one choose to live in a country which is not one's own? I am in love with Paris, but really that is neither here not there. I sat in our cafe last night is a state of total bliss. Why? Not belonging seems to be the thing. Your life is lived in a cloud of incense, the past is pushed aside, the future somehow irrelevant, the present moment, the nunc, is everything. Is this what I am trying to do? Chase the running nunc?
Wally dropped into a chair in front of us.
"Want to make love, Shannon?"
She always says this. I have a suspicion that if I said yes she would take me literally. There are lots of theories about why she is called Wally. Her real name is Mary Townsend. A town's end is a wall; so wall, then Wally: that's Nigel's theory. Someone else told me that she was once dubbed the Walkyrie, which became Wal, then Wally. Anyway she's a girl. Definitely. There are lots of stories floating around about her. One is that she is very rich; if she is, she certainly doesn't flout her wealth, she lives in a miserable hotel and dresses like a clochard, a very erudite clochard I hasten to add. Nigel intimidates her - probably the only person in the world who does - and the general idea is that she is in love with him. She organizes art exhibitions, sells paintings, promotes song writers, young composers - at least that's another one of the stories. She's Nigel's agent, at least that is no myth.
She was laughing her husky, harsh, American laugh. Her long straight fair hair looked unwashed, it clung stickily to her definitely unwashed pullover. A big girl she makes very little effort to appear attractive. I see her almost every day. Amazing that I know so little about her.
"I need a drink. A real drink."
She banged the table with a brightly covered book. It was Mickey Spillane. She was reading and rereading Beowulf, in the so-called original, last time I saw her.
"Greatest writer ever to emerge from America.
The strong hard beat of the American pulse."
"Quoting the blurbs again?"
Nigel is always aggressive with Wally.
"You would have some fun finding one for Sean's next novel. It's going to be about us."
"Sean?"
"Shannon does have a first name, darling."
Her eyebrows were raised and I saw complicated lines in her forehead. Like veins in a leaf. (Strange the things you remember when you set about recreating a conversation you've actually had! A lot of vicious editing goes on as well, I'm finding.)
"I never dreamt - I figured Shannon was his first name."
"Wouldn't that make him a girl?"
There followed one of those inane conversations our group seems to find irresistible. What does Nigel really think of her? I've never heard him say a kind word about her but they spend a lot of time together.
Yes, we think of ourselves as members of a group. But who is in this group and who isn't? I sometimes wonder if we are even friends. As I sit here late at night - it's still quite hot, by the way - I realize that there is no group, just a bunch of individuals who, by sheer accident, have run into one another.(I've sat here for half an hour trying to find one hook we all hang on. There is none. Mind you, Wally says we are all swimmers against the Ghost-tide, which is her, rather clever, transmogrification of the Zeitgeist. Or possibly someone else's. Could be Joyce of course, I'm not likely to know; I only read Joyce during Lent. Anyway I love that word: Ghost-tide. I also like her theory: swimmers against the Ghost-tide. But it convinces not.)
Wally drinks her whisky neat, without ice.
"So you're Sean Shannon. Very alliterative parents you have! You never did tell me about your first novel. What's it about?"
Do other writers hate to be asked this question, too? A novel is written around an image and the only description of the image is the novel. I find it an infuriating question.
"Well, you see, my dear, it opens with this Russian spy involved in a Chinese plot in the Spanish quarter of modern Cairo."
"Are you sure there is a Spanish quarter in modern Cairo?"
"We dwell on it at length in all our brochures. Now..."
I've done this before: occasionally in my life someone challenges me to invent a story or write a poem on the spur of the moment and it suddenly appears. Both Nigel and Wally were impressed.
"Come on, Shannon, write it - almost as good as Spillane."
Nigel was standing.
"A lot better than the original really."
He once glanced at the first page - that's his total knowledge of the original. Nigel likes to give the impression that he never reads books but every so often he throws a name or reference into a conversation. Maybe he's just repeating something he's heard. But then maybe he isn't.
They bought me a meal, a very good one, my last for a long time I imagine. I was rather distracted however; I thought I was going to go home and start this novel. I also thought a lot about Frieda and Paris and Odile. Nigel and Frieda were in great form and ignored me. (Yes, it's getting late, almost three o'clock in the morning - notice the absence of subordination! Time for a complex period before I go to bed:)
What Frieda, and Paris, and Odile, are to me tormented me, as I sat and half-listened to Wally and Nigel's banter, as I walked back along empty, narrow streets to my room, this chambre de bonne here in rue des Saints Pères, and as I sat for hours gazing at the night light on the million tiles that make up the whole of my window's view - I'm gazing at them now as I write - and gradually decided that I would begin to write to-night and not last night as I had decided, an unusual decision for me, for, thought I am undisciplined in all other areas of my life, in my writing some kind of iron hand pushes and pushes and pushes.
Frieda, Paris, Odile. A three-word ode to my gliding nunc.
Frieda. As I say, I haven't seen her for two months. She spent a month in Greece with somebody before I went to London. With whom? Not a question conspicuous by its absence. There are times when I tell myself I don't even remember what she looks like. And there are times when I see her as sharply as a perfectly-focused photograph. Torture either way. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. In thought or deed, my son? Thought, Father, thought. Faute de mieux. We have a date. Eight o'clock tomorrow night. We fixed it two months ago. Eight o'clock: a beacon light; or steps up the scaffold. It's been both for two months.
Paris. No link with my past. Probably no link with my future. I came to Europe on a ship. Being in Paris to me is like being on that ship - I was somewhere and nowhere at the same time. But my being in Paris and my being a writer are two very closely-linked facts in my mind. One is as valid, or non-valid, as the other. Do other non-published writers have moments of sheer panic? I sometimes stop at the ugly traffic lights here in Paris, see a Tabac sign, or a Metro station, or a Paris clochard - especially when I see a Paris clochard - and panic strikes.
Odile. Lovely, twice-or-thrice lovely, pragmatic, poetry-reading Odile, the darling of our group, though she would hate to be thought of as belonging to our group. She has written to me every week. Elegant, very carefully-phrased letters from a girl who is engaged to someone else. But somehow full of gentle fun. I shall see her on Tuesday evening, or Wednesday evening, or... (Three dots! My favourite punctuation marks!) She was very worried about my novel. She has every right to be - she typed the last version, poor girl. To practise her English, she claimed. The first version, typed by my inaccurate self, was full of cancellations, changes incised with a pen, and much battered after twelve months of rejections. Odile's version was immaculate. She is very worried about me always. A kind of minor miracle in my life. She phoned me this afternoon. A happy, laughing telephone call. Why in the name of God didn't I answer her letters?
(This is just an aside here: all evening, as I pour ink onto paper - yes, I always write with my old fountain pen - a line of poetry has been coming back and back into my head. I don't know who wrote it, and I don't know why it's there. But as it is such a stubborn line I shall use it to end the chapter. I have to end anyway; it's four o'clock and I'm back in that damn tourist agency tomorrow, or today, or whatever. Here's the irrelevant line of poetry:
© Patrick Hanrahan and Heretic Press 2005
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