Slow Hand Read Online Free Page B

never-to-be-published story and was sunk in a kind of slime of incapacity. What I lack is confidence. Much good it does to know what’s lacking. I’ve written quite a lot: short stories and articles for magazines, most of them published. Looked at from the outside, the writing’s going quite well. I’ve made a small but significant reputation with a number of editors, and it’s only a matter of time now, before I attempt The Novel that will, I hope, fulfill the promise I’ve shown.
    If that sounds like an efficient piece of PR, it is, because I know, in that place where you really
know
things, that I can’t write at all. That fact, that I have produced decent stuff to murmurs of quiet appreciation, doesn’t affect this knowledge I have about myself. Something to do with my childhood, I suppose. Anyway, although things turn out more or less all right in the end, it doesn’t change anything, and I face every blank piece of paper in a state of panic. This time, I know for sure, they’ll find me out.
    Things could be worse. That bone-deep knowledge of my own inability doesn’t, as it might, pervade my entire life. Not any more. At least it’s contained in the writing department, realizing, I suppose, that there is where I’ve decided I can live. I see this now as part of my internal structure; just as there is a language center in the brain, so I have a worry center which fills with anxiety and has to find something to worry about. It used to attach itself to anything available: money, sex, shopping, the daily news, the condition of my flat. For no reason connected with anything that was happening, anxiety would erupt. Suddenly, it would occur to me that there was dry rot under the floorboards, or perhaps, since I didn’t know one from the other, it was damp rot; and the gnawing worry would infest the day. No matter what sensible things I told myself, that it probably wasn’t true, or, if it was, so what, or I could dosomething about it, the ache would thrum away, coloring the day with anxiety.
    The damp/dry rot was
desperate
all of a sudden, festering and rotting the fabric of my flat. I would go about my business, efficiently enough, but accompanied always in some small space inside me by my fears. By the following morning, the certain knowledge of rotting floorboards beneath my feet would have faded, but something else would take its place, filling up the worry gap before I had a chance to be relieved. A bank statement would arrive, and now the money situation, no different from the situation a day or a week before, would be terrifying, and I’d spend every free moment listing and relisting my income and outgoings, coming up each time with the same answer, forgetting almost what the problem was, but knowing there was some solution it was essential to arrive at. Sometimes, it made life very difficult to live.
    All the time, even in the midst of the panics, I knew it to be free-floating anxiety, its source a well of terror in me that had nothing to do with my chosen concerns. But this information wasn’t much help. And sometimes, exhausted by it all, I wanted someone around who would tell me none of it was real, and take away from me the problems that seemed, now and then, to threaten my sanity. But, in fact, I managed, and things have improved. The anxiety is contained.
    Now, as I say, since I decided that writing is the only route I’ve got through life, the worry had latched on to that, like a cattle tick, and gains sustenance from my fears.
    What I’ve learned about this is to ignore it. Most of the time, I write through a miasma of terror, and something decent comes out the other end. I don’t know how. I think of it as “The Process” and leave it at that. It’s like swimming in mud; not pleasant, but you get to the other side if you just keep going.
    Usually, I can live with the discomfort. Why should things be easy? But occasionally I get exhausted by it, with having to contain my insecurity and