Under an auspicious sky

A few weeks ago, I run to meet a friend. This friend, I’m always running to meet him. We always meet quickly and we always have somewhere else to go and we never ask each other where that is; it’s just me and him and whatever drink he’s ordered before I arrive because I’m always late although for a long time, I tried to convince myself I arrive exactly on time. That evening, the Jubilee Line’s also running late, and the trains before that too, and it took me six hours to get in from the coast, and I only have ten minutes to change and run out the door again. Sometimes, I would like to know what it’s like to not always be running. He tells me to get off the train at Westminster, although he’s wrong, Waterloo would’ve been best, and I am running down embankment, the hearts on the covid wall worn and year stained, and there is no moon. Just venus. Just stars punching the dark. Later, after I leave him and after the show, I will be walking across another bridge, Houses of Parliament lit on one side, the London Eye on the other and it will seem as if I have banished the moon, will seem impossible that the stars and planets should be so clear and it, so invisible. Some collision of something.

A chaotic sky in a month that became a strange sort of weather phenomenon, only observable in its aftermath. Tonight, the sky is the same. Venus. Stars. No moon. The kind of sky I like. I like Plath’s verdict about the moon; light borrower. I like it so much I gave that line to a character of my own. I have never trusted the moon, it only ever made me lonely, showed me how big the world is, how far away people I loved were. It’s a feeling that sticks.

Five years to the day since my literary agent sent my first book on submission. Ostensibly not an auspicious sky as covid crept before becoming a wild fire; who wants to acquire a book about living in end times when you’re living in the end times, but an auspicious sky all the same, in retrospect, when the weather system becomes observable. Five years to the day later, and my screen agent is sending my first screenplay out to producers whose work I admire so much that this vote of confidence makes me want to cry a bit, run away a lot. Instead, I work through it. That’s the thing about work, it’s always there.

I’ve suspected for a long time that art is a type of snake in the grass. This is not an original thought, it is one expressed in Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, which itself is not an original book but a reworking of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir. I have recently become obsessed with the idea of reworkings, and how writers exist at a certain disadvantage, not being able to make something sound different. I felt for as long as I read that book as if someone had taken a tin opener to the top of my head and was writing down what they saw. Art requires not only total devotion but a kind of hollowing. I worry an artist is never a fully complete person, not to begin with and certainly not when they’ve been at it for some time, because the pursuit both hollows you and leaves you hollow. You do not have the same kind of life as people around you. I hear people talking about children’s activities and spouse’s parties and hobbies and holidays and these things sound foreign to me, because as much as they sound like things I would like to do, they also sound like things I can’t if I’m to do this as well as I need to. I think here of Leila Slimani’s The Scent of Flowers at Night, where she talks about how you have to say no so often the phone doesn’t ring any more. Recently, I have dropped the threads of my life. I have a mountain of emails, messages, texts, I have not replied to and likely by the time I remember to, the sender will have forgotten who I am, or it’ll just be too late and look too weird. The same is true with the laundry pile.

A year ago today, I met my screen agent to talk to her about the project I wanted to do and thought I’d messed up by not doing, and during this meeting, I fully committed to it. Over the year, I holed myself up at every opportunity, spent time in friend’s flats when they were on holiday, telling no one I was in town. All my worst voices in my head telling me I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t switch this lens, I couldn’t see the way I needed to. I paced. I cried. I gave up every second hour, re-committed in the ones between. I drank so much coffee I could see my own heart race beneath my skin. I forgot to eat. I forgot how to dress. I even managed to get on a train to Scotland fevered with appendicitis because it was the only time I had to do the research I needed to. This is not to be recommended. You will receive a stern talking to from a doctor when you land in A&E days later.

I have said no so many times I’ve forgotten nearly how to say yes to anything else, and this has its own hollowing effect. I am a person without hobbies or the ability to relax. I have ruined all the things I used to love. I can guess the ending of a film by about 15 minutes in now. The same is true with TV. Thank God my brother is so talented musically there was none left over for me, music is the one thing left I have not, will not, spoil.

I could have written my next manuscript. Between times, I am writing my next manuscript, but it would’ve been written more quickly if I’d taken the safe option and stuck to that. But then it would’ve made more sense to write another memoir after starting my career with memoir and not writing a novel. But I’ve never made any sense. Perhaps that’s why I like plot so much, adhering to it gives the impression I have never once strayed or lost the plot. Easier to hide behind the mechanics of structure, to believe in a tidy beginning, middle and end, than face the chaos of reality. To write the way I do, is I suppose a risk. A gamble. I do not think of myself as a gambling type. Although this afternoon when I found myself in the arcades playing the 2p machines and getting very excited, evidence might point to the contrary.

Is this run of no moon, many planets, lucky? I don’t know. Time will tell. Screen’s a long game but it’s one I love. This last year, I fell in love with writing again. I stopped caring about what it took away, started to love what it gives me. Those moments, alone, pacing up and down in a top floor flat on the hottest days of the year, wearing just an old shirt, my hair pulled back and greasy; those days are what it’s given me, those days when it feels like you’re flying, when nothing else matters other than the puzzle you’re solving in your head, all the battle is between you and the page and every minute you lose, every second you win - that’s what this snake gives me; the poison, the apple; the only things I need.