He had carefully chosen his chair because it was hard and wooden and high, and it looked to him like the kind of chair you would sit on to write. But as he sat, staring carefully at the grained surface of his wooden desk, Nick was aware only of the hardness of his seat and its proximity to the writing surface. The young man tapped his pen with neat, careful precision against the wood, feeling the springs compress inside the little plastic rubberised cylinder as the nib shot out, and then the moment of release as the metal tip was drawn back inside. There was the stiffness of the chair, and the careful metronomic clicking of the pen and the noise of people down in the shop. The syrupy late afternoon light came in obliquely through the window and poured warm into his eye, leaving little kaleidoscopic, geometric after-images in his vision when he blinked, which he could avoid only by lifting his head to a specific angle, focusing out onto the damp-stained off-white back wall of the bedroom, which hurt his neck, leaving the dull sensation of pain in his sternomastoid muscles, and the light and the clicking and the hard wooden chair. Nick was a writer. And, as of the last three months, he had been resident at the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris.
The shop was small and famous, and was patronised mainly by tourists who had seen Midnight in Paris and who had once heard of Hemingway. Its dusty shelves were weighed down under bulky loads of books, and the dreary plodding noise of an out-of-tune piano seemed constantly to float from some upstairs room, muffled by the ceiling. When it rained, the drops beat down on a little exposed skylight, filling the whole shop with the soft, warm murmur of falling water. And at Shakespeare and Co., one could gain residence for free on the basis that one was a writer; Nick was living there without paying a penny, so ipso facto… that proved it. But what exactly did he write? He had been carrying a notebook for months, carefully labelled “Writing Journal”, and its pages were filled with a thick, curlicue-saturated scrawl, outlining in bright blue ink his most ephemeral and ingenious thoughts before they escaped his mental grasp, collapsing into little heaps of psychic dust. The latest page was entitled “thoughts on dough”. The first line read “the stuff of life – bread, its progenitor. Also – money. Money = basis for life? Elaborate…” The rest of the page was a To-Do list, half ticked off and a brief shopping list.
The week before, a famous writer, who had become famous by writing salacious, thinly disguised autobiography, had been in-store doing a promotional reading of her latest salacious, thinly disguised work. At the end of the salacious reading, Nick meekly approached her, proffering his recently purchased copy of her book to be signed, and announced in a proud, barely-cracking baritone
-“I’m a writer”.
-“Great”, she replied.
-“I’m Nick”.
-“Hi, Nick”.
On another occasion, Nick had been helping a customer with a purchase, searching the top over-stock shelves for a last copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. From the height of his ladder, he could see another store volunteer talking, with overflowing, animated gesticulations, to a woman, wearing a green turtleneck sweater and entirely round tortoiseshell glasses. Nick abandoned the book and the waiting customer, and approached the woman, hearing hints of conversation – hints that suggested that she was a publisher, a publisher “always on the look-out for new writing”. And here he was, a writer, in Shakespeare in Co, standing amongst these heaps of literature; to his left lay the Beat generation, cosily tucked to the side of the entrance, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, ready for easy discovery and subsequent purchase – to his right was a display of David Foster Wallace, framed by Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers. And there, in the middle of it all, was Nick – all parcelled up and ready to be found. And so he approached her – he was a writer he announced, looking for a publisher. Send her some of his stuff she suggested. Well, I will then. Well, I look forward to it. Likewise.
And Nick sat, too high up against his desk, so his thighs were pinched slightly by the interior of the desk surface, carefully constructing a narrative, with a detailed and complex character development, each imbued with an individual, rich interiority, drawing from his many pages of notes. As each idea came to him, he vividly imagined it read and discussed in excited A-level classrooms or in Booker prize judging rooms, followed by grave and dignified nods. The book sat out on the desk in front of him, held open, pinned down by an empty plant pot and a half-full pack of Camel Blues, torn slightly at the edge. And Nick stared blankly at the page, aware only of the light hitting his eye, and the pain spreading across his neck and down his back and of his carefully chosen chair and the fact that he was writing.
