Mat's Moleskine (or something)

[thoke]

This is my first serious attempt in years to write a story. I don't know where it's going or if it's going anywhere at all. I just felt the need to write something meatier and more complicated than my poems tend to be. I've stopped at about a thousand words (this took me all afternoon). Please let me know what you think, and any ideas you have about how I could improve this and finish it. I'll comment on other people's prose after I've rested a bit.


He kept a large moleskine notebook full of poems either abandoned or intended to be in-progress. Lots of them began as freeform prose permitted to be awful for the first draft at least, then he would whittle them down somehow; he used to try to copy William Burroughs without knowing the full details of his cut-up technique but that never had good results, so these days he tended just to omit unnecessary words or all the pronouns or write the whole thing out backwards and see what happened. He was inspired by his own unpolished writings; generally he was able to improve his own work but whether he could bring it up to a level that made it worth anybody else’s time to read it was definitely unknown to him. He occasionally wrote stories, mostly sewn-together pieces of anecdotes, mostly quite mundane but sometimes less so if he fictionalised them a little bit. Most of these stories were abandoned after a few paragraphs. He sometimes wrote down quotations from Peter Cook and John Lennon and other mid-twentieth century figures of pop culture that he tended to admire. These quotations were usually idiosyncratic and lengthy. Here is one of his favourites:

[tab][/tab]Peter Cook on Jesus:
[tab][/tab][tab][/tab]…he never really got it right in the end. I mean, not as if he was pronounced dead on the cross and then flew up and flapped his wings and said ‘hello boys.’ He did it in rather a complicated way, had to be put in a cave, a boulder put in front of it. I mean, Paul Daniels could do that.

His notebook doubled up as a diary of sorts; he would scribble in the date sometimes after looking it up on his computer, then he would map out the hours of the day and what he would be filling them with. Sometimes he just filled them up with stickmen in funny poses. If he needed to calculate something he would flip the book over and write upside down in the back. He’d do this when he was calculating his income and expenses to find out whether he needed to sell any of his belongings or stop drinking coffee. Sometimes he would write down a shopping list on the right side of a page and try to tear out just that half so that he didn’t do any damage to the spine of the book.

There was a pharmacy in his local supermarket so his shopping list tended to consist of various food and household items and one or two prescribed medications that he needed to re-order, such as antidepressants, acid blockers and calcium supplements. It took a fistful of chemicals each morning to get his body functioning properly. He had to plan his meals around his meds and he sometimes found himself thinking of food as if it were medication or of pills as if they were antipasti or after dinner mints.

There was a pocket inside the back cover of the notebook which contained a postcard with a realistic painting of a farm in winter with frost in the grass and ice in the mud. The message on the reverse consisted of two large, slanted words in almost-illegible handwriting:

[tab][/tab][tab][/tab]yes please

The stamp was an oversized festive design with Mr Christmas being pulled along by deer.

Clues pointing to the author of the postcard were scattered around the book in the form of poetry or attempted poetry or fictionalised unfinished bits of stories or coded notes to self. There were references to a daughter with brown eyes who appeared to be in her teens.

Looking at the postcard invariably produced an overwhelming feeling of guilt, but Mat never missed an opportunity to subject himself to this feeling (probably it had other more positive feelings mixed into it like bits of sweet corn). After a brief session of scribbling things down and staring longingly at the postcard he made his way to the bedroom where his wife of twelve years lay unconscious on her front. He crept into the dark room, undressed to his underpants and cuddled up to his wife. She stirred, tried to offer him his fair share of the duvet, and started clinging on to him before he had a chance to take it. He fell asleep an hour later with his left arm trapped and tingling.

Mat rose before dawn, after hitting the snooze button a few times on his alarm clock and bracing himself for the cold world that lay outside the bed. He tried to get dressed in the dark without waking Gabriel. He managed to throw on about four or five layers of clothing including jumpers, shirts, t-shirts, two pairs of trousers and a set of thermal underwear. He waddled towards the crack of light coming under the bedroom door and made his exit. He walked downstairs toward the glowing light of his computer screen and listened to its high pitched hum mixed with birdsong and fridge noises. He went into the kitchen and flicked a couple of switches, lit a couple of lights and heard the boiler start warming up. He turned on the main light, surveyed the complex of appliances, teas, oils and vinegars on the sideboard and set about making himself a black coffee.

Ten minutes later in the bathroom Mat examined his dry red eyes and his white and purple face. He had been asleep for less than four hours. He scratched his scalp and moulded his short, oily hair with his fingers. While assessing the length of his patchy stubble he noticed a few cuts to his lip and remembered dreaming about being bitten during sex.

[David]

Ben, I don't want to sound like sort of thicko who only likes books and films with lots of explosions in them, but I think there's too much uneventful third-person commentary here at the moment. Individually the paragraphs are pretty well written, but as a mass so far it's a bit inert for me.

This comes with my usual 100% subjectiveness guarantee. Opinions may vary. I hope they do.

Cheers

David