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rattling down the conduits. I’ve always seen the mind as neatly compartmentalised, a bunch of different-coloured rooms jammed together. Green for my dreams, red for the work-room, lemon for love. And my ideas-room? Kaleidoscopic, I suppose, all shape and blur and moments of extraordinary brightness.
    Which sounds nice, very comforting. Trouble is, at the moment, the ideas-room is cold and grey-white — the noncolour of negatives — and I feel like I should follow my mother-in-law’s tart advice to ‘go get a real job’. Emphasise real .
    Nevertheless, today is broad and bright and the air sears my lungs. Maybe I will ring Stu later and say to him, ‘We’re on, O Agent Fair Foul. We’re back! We’re live! We’re happening, baby!’
    I can imagine the conversation. Stu, poor unfortunate Stu, has this habit of introducing LA trash-talk into his business dealings. People become ‘commodities’ (‘And you are a commode,’ I told him once, angry about some rather pertinent criticism of my work. ‘I’d like to shit in you.’) Books transform into ‘units’ and the idea that has left me sleep-deprived and emotionally rabid for months is a ‘product’. People who read books are ‘the market-face’. And — I swear this is true — for a while he did develop the grating habit of calling everyone ‘baby’. It coincided with his Bret Easton Ellis phase. He wangled an invite to a publishing junket in NY and met BEE at a CP where the cocktails were gratis and the chicks all had BTs and QT asses.
    â€˜Arses, Stu — not asses. In Australia, we cleverly broaden the pronunciation to reflect the shape of the noun.’
    He wasn’t listening.
    â€˜Bret E.E. was a great guy, baby’ he told me, arching his eyebrows impressively. ‘Very feet-on-the-ground. Definitely in-for-the-long-haul. Not at all what I expected.’
    â€˜Stu,’ I said, ‘is that mascara on your eyebrows?’
    He looked momentarily hurt.
    â€˜Um … no. Actually it’s kohl. Look, everybody’s doing it. It’s the major vibe in the States.’
    I shrank in disgust. Everybody’s doing it — the ultimate cop-out justification. Stu would try ovine necrophilia if he thought that everybody was doing it.
    If I write something today, if I ring Stu and tell him that the dam is broken, the Muse smiling and the words flowing like shit from a Bondi drain-pipe, he’ll say, ‘What sort of product are we talking here? How many units do we envisage? How’s the market-face going to react?’ Whereas I want someone who’ll say, ‘Cool bananas, Vincey boy. You write anything you like, anything at all — and I’ll get it published for you. That’s my faith in you, man, that’s my promise to your talent.’
    All of which begs the question: Why do I keep Stu?
    He’s cheap, that’s why. A meagre ten per cent of any royalties and free representation until we crack another contract. Can’t ask for cheaper than that — and I can’t get near a publisher without an agent. Especially when the only book I’ve ever published is called Pears Amid Paradisio: An Allegory By Vincent Daley and no one I know has read it, and people I don’t know who have read it haven’t liked it, and the one critical review it received, courtesy of the Coastal Daily, denounced it as unintentionally hilarious and pretentiously stylised (thank you J.S.Cooper of ‘Weekly Book Review’ fame).
    Which begs another, more fundamental question: Why be a writer? Why not something simpler, like President of an African nation, or something more profitable, like insider trading? Well, truth be known, in former lives I was, albeit briefly:
    i)  a public servant
    ii)  a shoe salesman
    iii) and a teacher.
    Or, as I like to think of them:
    i)  alone and bored shitless amidst