‘You know, I do believe I was,’ continued Moira. ‘I’ve not had a bad day at all, not at all.’
‘You ate nearly all of that chicken broth I made you this evening, didn’t you, Mum?’
‘I did, dear. And, do you know, I really enjoyed it.’
Kelly felt his shoulders tensing. He wasn’t sure how much of this he could listen to. It was the same every time. The imminence of Moira’s death was never mentioned, and to Kelly the scene around her bed all too often resembled a cross between a Brian Rix farce and something out of Alan Bennett. If it weren’t so fucking tragic, it really would be funny, he thought.
It was as if they all had parts in a play and were acting out their specific roles. Only Kelly wasn’t very good at his. He sometimes thought he might do better if he were allowed to talk properly to Moira about her illness, about the death which was not far away and about how she felt, knowing that she would not be around for much longer. That was what he wanted to do, deep inside, but Moira had made it quite clear that was not her way. And in any case, if she suddenly did start to talk to him in that manner, he suspected he wouldn’t be able to cope with that either. After all, Kelly was just as much of an ostrich as all of them. Worse really, he supposed. He did not even want to be in the same room as poor sick Moira, let alone make inconsequential small talk.
Moira squeezed his hand.
‘So, come on, John, tell us how the book’s going. What sort of day have you had?’
Kelly looked at her blankly. Once again, the truth did not seem quite the reply to make. What sort of day had he had? As seemed to be his habit, he had failed to write a single word. He had then gone to a pub, even though he dared not even have a beer, ostensibly to think, and more likely in a deliberate subconscious ploy both to avoid attempting to write and to evade seeing Moira. In the pub, he had met a frightened young man who had told him that he feared for his life. The young man had, however, been very drunk. None the less, a little later Kelly had watched his dead body being loaded into an ambulance, and his veteran reporter’s brain had promptly begun to jerk into gear to such an extent that he had been able to shift his promised visit to Moira from the back of his mind straight out of his head altogether.
That was the sort of day he’d had.
‘Pretty good, really,’ he said. ‘Another couple of thousand words done and dusted.’
Four
The next morning Kelly felt absolutely terrible. The alarm clock woke him at six and he managed to force himself out of bed within half an hour of being disturbed by its insistent shrill bleeping, which was pretty good for Kelly, who was not a man who had ever enjoyed mornings.
Whenever he had writing of any kind to do, he found that making an early start, before his brain became clogged up with other things, was the best and most efficient way to undertake the task. But lately, his enforced early rising had been a waste of energy and the pain inflicted had led absolutely nowhere, because Kelly seemed incapable of putting words onto paper whatever time he hauled himself out of bed, and early starts just made him feel tired and irritable throughout the day, more often than not.
Resolutely, he made his way downstairs to the kitchen and brewed himself a strong pot of English Breakfast tea. The steaming, hot, dark brown liquid, into which he ladled his customary three spoonfuls of sugar, hit the back of his throat like a blast of pure adrenaline. By God, sweet tea was the best reviver invented by mankind, he thought. Although, of course, it would never again taste quite so good to Kelly as it had during the many years when he had relied on it to cope with his regular morning hangovers. There was among certain people, nondrinkers, Kelly suspected, a theory that alcoholics didn’t have hangovers. From extensive personal experience, Kelly did not agree with that. In fact, looking back, his drinking days had been more or less one long hangover, punctuated only by moments of total oblivion.
He put pot, milk bottle and sugar bowl, along with the mug of tea he had already poured and a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits, onto a tray and carried the lot upstairs to his third and smallest bedroom, which he used as an office. Sitting down on his swivel-action black leather chair, he tried to make his body and mind relax as he switched on his computer. Perhaps this would be the morning, the morning when he would finally get it all together, when he would start to write at once and the words would continue to flow effortlessly and smoothly throughout the day.
Kelly took another long drink of the sweet, dark brown tea and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Writing, of course, was never like that. Not for John Kelly, anyway. It was instead a long drawn-out torture of inactivity. Kelly continued to find that his biggest problem in attempting to write a book was that he found the task ahead of him so overwhelmingly daunting that he barely saw the point in beginning it.
The screen before him shimmered into life and Kelly reached for his mouse, darting the cursor between the various icons before him. The documents containing the little of his book he had so far managed to compile were each called ‘Untitled’. Kelly had never been very good at titles.
He moved the cursor until it settled neatly pointing at ‘Untitled Chapter Three’, and allowed it to rest there for a while. Kelly had written ‘Untitled Chapter One’ in one big glorious rush, within days of quitting his job on the Argus four months previously. Filled with enthusiasm for his chosen new career, he’d found that the words had really flowed.
But that seemed like a lifetime ago. His flow had quickly slowed to a dribble. He had struggled through a rough draft of chapter two and then stopped altogether, although only he knew that was as far as he had got. ‘Untitled Chapter Three’ had remained a totally blank new document in his computer for almost three months now. And this was seriously bad news, not least because his bank balance was beginning to look extremely thin.
Kelly had been able to take advantage of a voluntary redundancy scheme operated by the Argus, when he had decided he had had enough of journalism. And he had calculated that the money, quite a generous amount for a local paper to offer, could, if he was careful, last him the best part of a year, and that that would, of course, be plenty of time in which to complete his first novel. Which would be an instant best seller. Well, Kelly was too realistic about writing to have ever thought that, but he had been confident enough of his own ability as a professional scribe to believe that he would eventually acquire a publisher for almost any sort of writing that he put his hand to.
Kelly was, however, not naturally careful with money. And although he did not consider himself in any way extravagant, and he probably wasn’t, he seemed to be getting through his pay-off at an alarming rate. Certainly, much faster than he had anticipated. Unfortunately, the speed of his writing achievement was not keeping pace at all with his spending. Indeed, not only did it look as if his money was not going to last a year, neither did it look as if a year was going to be nearly long enough for him to complete even the first draft of his novel.
‘Fuck it,’ muttered Kelly.
He flicked the cursor from ‘Untitled Chapter Three’ onto games, selected backgammon, his favourite, and began to play. Situation normal. He dreaded to think how many days of his life he’d totally wasted during these last four months playing computer games.
In the first game, Kelly achieved a shut-out with no less than two of his mechanical opponents’ men on the bar. But he still managed to lose. He played three more games and lost all of them, too. Kelly was a good backgammon player, and well aware that one constant of playing against a computer is that there is always, as with anything automated and preprogrammed, a predictability factor. One way and another Kelly reckoned to beat his computer, at its highest level, something like seventy per cent of the time. Not today, it seemed. This really was not turning out to be a good morning.