The Writer (2 page)

Old Man Hudson had grown so
tired of the twins and not knowing who is who that he would
threaten to grab one and with an erasable black marker pen put a
dirty big “K” on the forehead of one of them. He had a fifty-fifty
chance of being right. He lived next door and kept to himself; a
hermit who used every space of his property, and several rooms of
his house, to grow vegetables and then complain about them.
Although Susan had warned him that she would call Sheriff
Handisides if he made any further threatening noises against the
twins, he was only echoing the general thought of the town towards
them.

Sophie saw them busy in
conversation under the impressive veranda that decorated the front
of the house. It had four comfortable seats, each one with a
different design. Another veranda sat on the other side of the
house, but it was only half the size and nobody really liked to sit
there since it was always in the shade and caught the wind when it
was cold.

The boy’s clothes were dirty
and their hands were dark with soil, and the last person they
wanted to see while in such a state was their mother. They were
pleased to see it was Sophie and not Susan.

“Hi, guys,” she greeted.
What are you two up to now?”

“We’re making Walks,” either
Kerry or Jerry answered.

“Don’t tell me,” Sophie said
with a knowing laugh. “You’re ripping the wings off flies? No one
thinks you’re funny, doing that, you know. It’s just cruel. If you
were a fly, how would you feel if some giant boy came along and
took your wings off? Not so good? It’s not like they grow back. I
don’t think they do, anyway. It would be like someone ripping your
legs off, and then laughing at your agony.”

“We’re inventing tracks
through the forest for tourists to follow,” said the other
one.

“Nature walks,” said the
first.

“For the scenery too,” said
the other.

“Not flies?” she asked,
feeling ridiculous.

“Why would people want to
look at flies?” asked the first.

“We could tell them they’re
special flies, to get more people,” said the other.

“I’ll tell your mother how
funny you are,” said Sophie. “Couple of comedians in the family, I
see?”

“No, we’re serious,” said
Kerry or Jerry. “Gendry needs more tourists, if we’re to develop as
a community.”

“Keep up with the times,”
said the other one.

“Gendry has done all right
without hordes of tourists dropping in,” said Sophie.

“But if we’re to avoid
falling victim to the economic climate, we need to be
reactive—“

“Proactive,” corrected the
other.

“Proactive, to thwart
becoming a ghost town.”

“To keep with the
times.”

“Although some would argue
the rot had already set in.”

“And once it sets in, that’s
it for the town.”

“Are you guys serious?” she
asked.

“But would you think of it
if it was a real
ghost
town,” Kerry or Jerry said to his
brother with delight.

“With real ghosts,” the
other agreed.

“How cool would that be?”
said the first, his mind running at the thought of being chased by
scary things, and how much fun that would be.

Sophie relaxed a little,
seeing that they were indeed still children. “Hey, I think I see
some ghosts over there,” she said as she pointed at a nest of
trees.

They jumped off the veranda
and charged away to the trees, yelling for the ghosts to stop so
they can grab one, and shrieked with voices so high-pitched that
any real ghost would be scared off. Sophie thought that when she
was a child she would have run the opposite direction.

The car was on the right
side of the road, then it was on the left, then it didn’t know
where it wanted to be. So quick it changed lanes that had there
been any other traffic in either direction no one would have been
able to avoid a collision. A certain letterbox that always sat too
close to the road was struck hard and bounced off the front of the
car. It landed against a tree three houses away. If the driver had
known what he caused then he would have laughed hysterically and
probably tired to hit more. Everything was funny to him at that
moment. It was late and dark and there was nobody around, so what
difference did it make if he bumped off a few things? What would it
matter if a few people woke to find tread marks through their
manicured front lawn? Or a mangled carcass of one of those pesky
stray cats that haunted the town? The streets were straight and
wide and no one was ever out this late. He could take both hands
off the wheel, or shut his eyes, or take another mouthful of that
whiskey, or all three at once, and it wouldn’t matter. Or go as
fast as he could, and no one would notice. They would all hear him,
and do nothing more than turn up their televisions, or roll over in
their beds and push their pillow over their ears. No one liked to
complain much in Gendry.

He completed a circuit of
the town and decided that the only way it could be better was if he
did it all again faster. After the second lap he knew he could take
a good minute off his time if he really tried. The third time
around didn’t go so well, with a couple of corners misjudged, so he
tried to go even faster the next time. Then he came across another
car, right in his way, maybe not even noticing him. From the looks
of it a local, since it was going slow, obeying the local speed
rules, in no hurry at all. He tooted, then nearly rammed it, then
went around it, still tooting his displeasure. He glimpsed the
frightened faces of two elderly people, terrified at even the
thought of being harassed, and it made him roar with laughter. It
was a good night he was having.

In his younger days they
called him Maximum Velocity. The way Max Marshall could bang out a
finished article faster than anyone in the newsroom could believe,
made him a legend. He never made errors. No typos or spelling
mistakes. His facts always faultless. As he approached middle age
he slowed just a fraction and the only addition to his style was a
weary cynicism. He assumed that he would work until he chose the
day to retire, but his departure from city’s number three newspaper
came without warning. When he was included in a group who were no
longer required to work at the paper, his name disappeared from the
public arena. His legend became a myth suitable only for idle
discussion at the coffee machine, and with it went his desire to
write. He could still drop a sentence and form a paragraph without
blinking, or summon a fact without really thinking too long about
it, but the passion was gone.

They told him he was good
and they hated to lose him. They told him how they had no choice,
that the money just wasn’t there anymore, that losing him was like
losing a member of the family. They could only keep one and five
had to pay the price. They wished there was some way around it and
they had looked long and hard at all the possibilities, but in the
end they thought it just wasn’t fair to keep people stringing
along. So, it was goodbye and hope you do well in the future in
your new home, wherever that will be, and it sure isn’t
here.

They told him all the kinds
of nice stuff meant to encourage him, that meant nothing when they
also told him that he can no longer work for them. He had heard of
others who barely got a farewell handshake, or learnt about it by
email. Nobody came wishing them good luck for the future, so he
should count himself lucky. He could not help but wonder that if he
was that good then why throw him away? If he was that good then are
they not worried he’d get snapped up by the competition? Perhaps he
wasn’t that good at all. That was his conclusion. As the weeks
turned to months without work it was all he could think
about.

He tried the other papers,
of course, but they were not immune from the cost cutting and they
weren’t thinking of hiring. If they were hiring, of course, it was
doubtful they’d consider a reject from the third-best paper in
town. No one said that to him but he knew they were thinking it.
The only work Max could find was in editing internet articles; work
he could do in his sleep, and it was almost an insult to even
consider it. But he lowered himself, swallowed his dignity, and
took the job, and tried to suck it up. Even then, amongst the lower
standards, he found himself rewriting more than reading, amazed
over the lack of professionalism. When he challenged the authors,
asking them to use better English, he always got the same response:
It was just the internet. If it was “just” the internet, he
thought, then why was he working on it?

The frustration caused him
to start his own website, www.maxmarshall.com, where he could put
up anything he wanted, free from newspaper restrictions. When he
first started he chuckled at the thought of it becoming a flagship
for well written articles, but it did not take long to realise that
people were interested in content over style. That was when he
realised that internet writing was a whole other ballgame from
print media; not really better or worse, just different. If he
wanted his site to be successful then he needed to be relevant and
spontaneous. He also needed to have other people helping him, since
if it wasn’t updated then it looked dead, and if it looked dead
then no one would ever come back to for a second visit.

He wasn’t exactly sure of
the identity of all twelve of his contributors, except they were
young, continually irritable, had massive chips on their shoulders,
and they liked to vent their disapproval of the government no
matter what the government did. The result was his site received
good traffic. The controversial articles that were not necessarily
the opinions of the webmaster Max Marshall, as he made sure he let
everyone know. He made a hundred dollars a week from the
advertising kickbacks, and that was better than most other
amateurs. He had his groove back.

It also proved useful in
letting the public see his first three novels. His first effort,
which was his personal favourite,
Anger Angel
, was a strange
supernatural hodgepodge of chance-meetings between over-worldly
beings and everyone who read it hated it. The next effort,
Grovel Grove
, a throwback story involving life in a small
town, based on his own childhood, was deliberately written in a
sleepy style, to appeal to the kind of reader who liked that kind
of thing. He received good reviews from the odd visitor to his
website, and that gave him hope to continue to promote it. Until he
realised the reviews were all coming from his wife Jill who was
just trying to encourage him. She didn’t understand his annoyed
reaction to her help, since she had expected some kind of thanks
for at least trying.

Max’s third book,
The
Liberation of Cats
, hit the jackpot, when he felt confident
enough to post links on various free online book sites, leading to
a book contract from an actual real-life publisher. A seemingly
simple tale of a handicapped but ambitious young man named Albert
Fangus who set about trying to find his birth-mother, leading to
him meeting a series of complex yet likeably wacky individuals who
all had a key to his secret past, that he was really a government
experiment gone wrong. The fact that Max could not figure out an
ending and so didn’t bother to include one, didn’t affect the
overall story, or its popularity. It was fast-paced and ludicrous,
and had a good chance of being developed into a movie. Everyone was
happy, especially Jill. He was given a deal to produce three more
books, all based on the same concept and, if he wanted, the same
characters. He was free to call it “The Liberation” of any kind of
animal he wanted. The Marshall household had never been
happier.

Doing a repeat story, or
trying to continue with the character of Albert Fangus, wasn’t one
bit appealing to Max. He considered himself an author of
originality, not repetition, and he wanted his next book to be
entirely different. This drive to be different and original caused
him to be not able to produce a single new word in over three
months of trying. What made this dry spell worse was news from his
publisher that his book wasn’t selling. Everyone liked his book,
except people who showed up to the stores. The publisher wanted him
to promote it more on his website, which they thought needed
jazzing up so they recommended a few specialists, at a small fee.
Max refused their offer, seeing it as interference into his
creativity, and took his website down in protest. His twelve
irritable and well-read contributors then set up their own site and
Max didn’t make any more money.

At first Jill said nothing,
knowing that he worked better if she didn’t try to help. But as the
days of non-writing drifted into months she struggled to hide her
frustration. She wanted him to either write something that sells or
get a real job. They had been married fifteen years and were happy
to have no children. Jill had a strong dislike of anyone under the
age of twenty and the thought of kids running around in her house
was repulsive, like screaming lizards or something equally alien.
Her own school days were a bit trying as she wanted to befriend the
teachers and not her classmates. Her favourite joke was to tell her
friends that Max was the only child she could put up with, and they
agreed with her. He knew that her friends despised him, more than
they let her know. When she gave them a copy of his book about
Albert Fangus they spent hours laughing over what they disliked
about it, all without Jill’s knowledge.