Happiness of Fish Read Online Free Page B

work boots and cords under old tweed or leather sports jackets or the sailorish, vinyl-shouldered donkey jacket he’d bought in the UK after university. He bought a salt-and-pepper cap and wore it. They had a gypsy air as they walked to and from the bus stops of the east-end. Gerry has an old picture of them in an album Pat sent back when everybody had divorced and remarried and settled into amiability. In the picture they look as though they might be about to break into some sort of street performance at any moment.
    All we needed was a tambourine and a dancing bear.
    Gerry is being good today. He actually turns on the computer and transcribes bits of stuff and looks at old scenes he’s written. Often he doesn’t get that far and curls up with a book on the couch.
    â€œI don’t know what you do all day, “Vivian will say. “I wish I had time to just sit and read.”
    â€œIf you don’t read, you can’t write,” Gerry retorts, but with his fingers slightly crossed. You do have to stop reading at some point to start writing. As it is, he works enough odd hours and relief shifts in radio to find excuses for not doing much personal writing. That, and the fact he usually has supper on the table when Vivian gets home, save him from being accused of being lazy, a major sin in Vivian’s world.
    â€œPeople like you enjoy painting stones white in the army,” Gerry says, only half-teasing.
    â€œSo what?” says Vivian. In fact there is a ring of small white-painted beach rocks around a tree in their backyard.
    Gerry has tried to trick or coerce himself into putting something substantial down on paper, to jump-start his creativity. Some time ago he joined a writing workshop, although he doubted that it would do anything about the real problem of sitting down long enough to put the bits together.
    At first the workshop felt slightly odd, with a home-and-school-meeting flavour to the cups of coffee and the homemade muffins, notebooks and journals. Then it became the first day at the nude beach. People tended to look over each other’s shoulders, obliquely at the walls, or at the pattern in the carpet and wonder if everyone else was doing the same. Then came the old dressing room cliché, the sideways comparative glances. People began to learn either to pay polite attention to each other’s naughty bits or to forget about them entirely.
    As the writing sessions went on, Gerry watched his group-mates.
    There was the woman who always arrived at the last minute dressed in running gear. Her name was Pamela and she had a slightly explosive look. Gerry would wonder if she was going to read or break dishes or burst into tears. She had a full knuckle of wedding and engagement rings, but talked about having been dropped off by her boyfriend. She seemed to be doing the workshop either as therapy or as a form of martial arts training in preparation for some great retributive war.
    â€œMy ex would kill me if he knew I was going to write a book,” she said. Then she asked, “You can’t get sued if you change the names, right?”
    Pamela seemed to be deputizing the group to be on guard for prowling former husbands or their spies. She wrote and read angrilyand fast in the first person. She didn’t seem to understand any discussion of synthesis in fiction and made no bones about being her own protagonist, in fact, her own heroine.
    Walking home on nice nights, or driving on miserable ones, Gerry would wonder if he was his own hero in his writing. Mostly he felt he was only the stage things were acted out on. He felt littered by bits and pieces of other people, like the traffic jam of corpses at the end of
Hamlet
.
    As an assignment Gerry tried to write about himself and Patricia in their early days. He called them George and Paula.
    â€œHey hey, Paula,” he hummed as he wrote.
    Fragment: Streets
    It seems to him that they spent a lot of time on the streets then.