Obelisk — Alex Keegan

he first time he had seen her she was the writer – he didn’t know – of a story he’d already chosen as winner in a competition. He was aware of her but not seeing her – was her hair pulled back? Was there grey in it? Did she wear light-framed spectacles? He wasn’t seeing her because one of the students in the class was a nightmare, a conference classic, a bitter wannabe who couldn’t write, would never write – you need a soul to write – but could talk forever about conspiracies and rip-offs, and all those editors – no doubt including himself – who couldn’t understand.

He began by trying to be nice, but this monster was eating class time, moved to sarcasm – wasted, completely wasted – eventually had to call foul, suggest a meeting at another time, the class needed to get in some work.

Later, coffee, biscuits, the winner – her pseudonym was Obelisk – leaned in close, not for intimacy but for group-sustaining politeness (but she just had to say this), and he, not for intimacy either, but the feeling was intimate, dropped an ear closer.

"You were," she said. Her voice was sweet, almost English, almost something else; "Incredibly kind to the old bat."

He tried to be casual but somehow this confidence was like a warm hand on his neck. He answered honestly.

"I didn’t feel kind. I’ll bet she writes cat stories."

Obelisk laughed, "She does, she does!"

He made small-talk over coffee. Someone had cried off sick, was stuck in France and he had a second short-story competition to judge – only an old debt to repay made him torture himself like this, still in recovery from the other competition, more shorts, more so-fucking-what stories, five funerals, thirteen triangles, this year’s crop of child-abuse, a spray of angels – one was an alien, and a dozen twist-endings so gross (the wheelchair, the narrator a cat; It was me! I killed her, I killed her!), the rest an exercise in filling paper.

He looked up once, she saw into him. He said:

"Why do people waste so much fucking time?"

She could have answered straight away but paused, her eyes fixed as if she was making deep decisions. Then, he guessed this later, she went for the easy answer, left as a question.

"Because the pottery class was full?"

At that moment he took his first look, not quite groaning, at the manuscript which would win the second competition, right now hating what some people thought was "the short story".

On Friday night, in that brief time, neither light nor dark, when everything is suspended in grey haze, two young women sit on the subway with their backs to the window. They have just had their nails done. Their hands are carefully laid along their thighs and they keep glancing down at them.

With them is a young man with a boy’s tender beard. His smile is soft, his eyes red-rimmed. His gaze wavers, but somehow he manages to keep his eyes on one of the girls who tosses her hair and smiles.

Cups clinked, someone moved, and a part of him recognised it was time to go back into class. He stopped himself. To the woman who had whispered to him – Obelisk, he said: "Write three openings, no more than a hundred words each. Tell the others, would you?"

"Any openings?"

"No," he said, trying not to look down, "The cues are Pink, Friday, and Darkness. I’d like you to create three totally different moods, different voices."

"How long will you be?"

"Oh, no time at all," he said, "Just get started and I’ll be there."

"Pink, Friday, and Darkness. You sure?"

"Pink, Friday, and Darkness’ll do," he said.

They rose, shuffled away. The bitter one coughed but he managed to ignore her. The room thinned and he read again. She is telling him about a friend who cut her hair this short –

He is in the workshop within fifteen minutes. The nails story is very short and he reads it only twice to know it’s in the prizes. When he enters, the bitter one puts up her hand and he grunts.

"Do you really want three openings?" she asks, and with a surge of gut-deep relief he says, that in her case – if she thinks it’s more useful – she can just concentrate on one. When he glances up at Obelisk she is smiling but working, writing in what he now imagines will be a long, lazy, sensuous hand. For the sheer hell of it he shouts, "We all done Pink?"

The workshop doesn’t go that well but it goes. Some of the group – they are all women and he doesn’t like the dynamic – are serious, some want to write for women’s magazines, one is a novelist but couldn’t get in that class, one liked his books and wanted to sit in.

He reads some of his own work, stops and asks what this did, why that word, and one woman listening to one of his hits, "The Keys", begins to cry at the back, trying not to make a noise. He tells the class this is what they should be aiming for. He thinks he wishes his aim was that good more often but he’s dancing now and only one in the class sees through him. Once he called himself a frightened rabbit masquerading as a baboon. Obelisk can see that, but if he had to guess he’d say she wasn’t interested in baboons and would say the only good rabbit came in a pie.

He feels flip-flop, carrying the class, all bar one, utterly transparent to the one. The feeling both shakes and thrills him and he recognises the trap he has fallen into throughout his pathetic life where he cannot distinguish between the thing of minds, the thrill of pheromones. He knows he confuses intellect and heart, always has. Proximity and intensity for him begets attachment, infatuation, when what he has is a deep need to be intense. Love gives him intensity, but it is taking a while to learn that intensity does not mean love.

It’s the afternoon of the first workshop, when he tells the group he has judged two competitions, the results are posted. Did they enter stories, did they want to tell him their pseudonyms? He isn’t surprised when the woman with the grey hair tied back turns out to be Obelisk, not surprised she’s a double-winner even if he would not have said the two stories came from one writer. He can’t tell her she has won but he offers two titles as questions.

Yes they are hers.

"Good work," he says.

She nods and for the rest of the day their exchanges are charged. But he’s older, wiser, fractionally more in control than once upon a time. His confusions are just as potent, but now he stands aside, recognising them as confusions, and mostly transient. When later they drink wine, when there’s a reading, all intensity, then a late heavy room, a guitar, the soft smell of spliff, women displayed on kitchen surfaces, knees up to their chins, nodding sagely, night slipping over their shoulders like a wrap, the windows mirrors, his aches – he chooses sleep and leaves for his bed, alone.

***

Maybe a year later he writes a story. Henry James Munro falls down a well.

Her name was Louise Joan Peters, a librarian, quite tall he remembered, but somehow small, and, he thought, yes, fragile, with her quiet, gentle, whispered librarian's voice. She was forty-three, (Henry was forty-seven then) and he had looked into her soft eyes one dusty-libraried five o'clock and said, (meaning history of course), "May I order the Wistfully of Wallpaper?"

And something happened to Henry Munro's solitary, celibate life at that moment. He developed a beautiful lisp and a desire to write poetry. He also found that the colours he began to choose, always pastel of course, always subtle, now took on the colour of his librarian's eyes.

This amuses him. He isn’t sure what it means, but didn’t he teach Dorothea Brande – access to the unconscious is writing – find out why, and when you know why, you know what, the writing will be you.

But why he should imagine his double-winner, his whisperer (she’d gone on to better things while he trod water) like this, after so much time, he didn’t know. Confusing intensities, he guessed didn’t have to have a time-limit.

Louise, Louise; it was strange how now, looking again, from here, from here where he could see so clearly what he had failed to quite feel then, had failed to follow through, how obvious everything now was. Henry had died believing he had never known love. But perhaps he had, once.

The way her hair was pulled back, tied into a long slack pony-tail of dark blonde - once she had bent to pick up a fallen note and he had seen a silver hair-clasp with romping puppies on it - and the way her smile came in two steps, a quick half-smile and then, a fuller, tooth-filled one of confession, offered vulnerability; but it was the eyes that had held him, though only now did he actually know this, how the aquamarine, the turquoise, the blue-green-to-grey, the soft, faint blurs of those windows to her aching, half-empty heart had shone, not gold but opal, muted diamonds, her.

Oh, he thought, Louise, Louise, Louise, and he remembered how, on that last Friday - remembered - how it had ended when it had yet to begin, how Miss L. J. Peters had slipped away before he knew he needed her.

But what fascinates him when he reads his story – it won a small prize, saw daylight in a small press – what surprises him is how chaste the memory has become. He knows his confusions don’t only mix intensities, he knows of his mistakes, back when he still buzzed madly, how he grabbed infatuations and went too far, driven by his own passion, his single-mindedness. The difference, he decides, is simply that he is older, and when he looks at his story (which he thinks deserves a bigger audience), and he reads a little more, his chaste love mutates into sacrifice:

Now he sees a librarian's eyes, turquoise, and in them the soft-sea sweetness of hope, sees her funny two-stage smile, and he thinks about when he met her, how briefly he had felt softer, and the world not quite so brutal.

Still asleep, Frank rolls over, his thick fingers reaching for his wife. In the dark, Louise dreams too. She senses a man called Henry James Munro, and as rough hands, faintly less harsh, move on her, she imagines a softness, a little delicacy, and though, as she floats nearer to consciousness she knows her faint pleasure is only a dream, she determines to try one last time, to try and make things gentler. And his sense is almost righteousness, a satisfaction.

***

He is fifty-seven but he is older. He lives now in a small Berkshire town, a river, a canal, flows through. He has a small place on the edge of a forest bought with royalties from his one big hit.

When the telephone rings and he answers, it is a woman, an accent. She says her name is Jenny West. "Do I – ?" he asks, croaking like an old man.

"Obelisk," she says. She’ll be passing through. Coffee?

Obelisk, he thinks, Painted Nails and, and – there was a story, a boy, his crippled sister, a fire. Oh yes.

"I judged a story."

"Yes. I haven’t long. I’m on my way to London, but if you have time?"

He suggests a pleasant small cafe. They could meet there but it’s a nice day, they could walk along the canal, it’s very pretty. He also says she should take him as she finds him. One eccentricity he insists on is his tights, runners’ clothing. He finds it so comfortable he wears little else except when he has to at awards dinners and so on – not that he wins things now.

They arrange to meet at high noon.

Her hair is all silver now, though she is barely fifty, her face a little harder, but of course she is Obelisk, the promising writer, the double-winner, the –

As they walk the canal, past newly-painted barges with flower-displays, he is conscious, almost self-conscious of his dress. Perhaps he’s a little old to prance about in Lycra. He still runs four miles a day, but now he is a leisure runner, no longer competitive.

Jenny talks pleasantly, full. She has won things, then a big prize in Canada, the collection of shorts. Yes, Nails is in there and Jake’s Barn, then the novel and her short-list for the Governor General’s Prize (No, Alice Munro again).

And how is he?

He answers, as truthfully as he can. He still teaches, he says, but everything is still so-fucking-what, there is no soul, no heart, no sex. No-one bleeds. Perhaps he’s sounding bitter, but it isn’t bitterness he feels, more waste. In the past ten years he has watched the world become yet more glib, the Booker panel filled by celebrities, new short-story writers slick girls and pretty boys. Then suddenly he remembers the bitter old witch, the wannabe conspiracy theorist. Did Jenny know the old bat had fallen down some stairs and sued the college?

"You were so kind to her," Jenny says. "I thought you were a saint."

He stops as she walks ahead. "Oh, God no," he says.