The dust blowing in from the Sahara was turning everything orange. Joe could barely see the tops of the hills from his little window, and the gold of the dust shimmered as the sun crept up behind the houses. The colour reminded him of a traffic light’s glow, the warning one, the one that meant put your foot down. But here in this remote place there were no traffic lights and no need to hurry. Here life was lazy, slow. This he knew, so he didn’t put his food down and instead turned away from the light. But his fingers were clenching and an urgency pushed at him as he filled the kettle and put the toast on.
In the distance he heard the putt-putt-putt of a fishing boat coming in and wondered how long it would take her to get home, how long before the toast started to burn, the tea to stew. He could hear the sound of voices drifting up from the shore, but he couldn’t see the people. He couldn’t see the man lifting crates of dead fish onto the quai. He couldn’t see her jump out of the boat and turn away from the boat, the man and the crates. But he thought he could picture them in his head, her, the captain and Mattia. Mattia. Tall and narrow, classic Roman nose, receding hairline hidden under a grubby beany. His large hands are worn and crabbed, his voice mumbly and infrequent. He walks ramrod straight, muscular, intimidating. He fascinates Joe.
Joe had only met this man a few times, but each time he had studied him carefully. He was to be Joe’s model for the romantic hero in Rock of Sorrows, Joe’s novel. An engimatic Italian speaking English with a lazy accent, waving his hands with every phrase, sucking on his cigarette. Seductive beyond the random scowls and silences. But getting this man onto the page was proving harder than Joe had expected. He wasn’t sure where to start. Joe was having the same problem writing his main character’s love interest, he just couldn’t find the thread. The plot and narrative arc were also more of a challenge than Joe had anticipated, so the writerly journey was going very slowly. Sometimes he couldn’t even spell.
Joe suppressed the nagging sense that maybe he wasn’t a writer after all, that it was just a vanity. He heard the door bang and called to Cathy “How was it?” He poured the tea and buttered the toast as she kicked off her sandals and threw her jacket onto the little chair by the door. Warm air drifted in as she tossed a couple of red mullets into the sink. They narrowly missed a bowl half filled with the dank remnants of yesterday’s washing up. They floated sadly on greasy grey water.
“Oh it was as lovely as usual, although the sea was a bit choppier than I like”. Cathy smiled up at Joe, open eyed, loving and gave his arm a little squeeze. But Joe had drifted off thinking again of what he could do about his novel, how to make his version of Mattia a bit more talkative, more friendly. He aimed a sincere smile at Cathy, and almost made it. “He’s an interesting guy, that Mattia”. In life Mattia wasn’t particularly interesting, he was just quiet. Joe was sure he ought to be mysterious and sexy in the book, but how to achieve it? Joe handed Cathy a mug of tea, watching as she slid into her chair and blew gently at the steam. It wasn’t really tea weather, not really a tea climate even but, being English, tea was always the answer no matter the question. The question was hovering but it hadn’t yet arrived.
“Did you manage to get anything written last night?” she said conversationally. She really did want to know, want to hear that his book was progressing. Joe considered a small fib, a couple of details to give Cathy reassurance, but not necessarily the whole story. There was no story to tell. “I’ve got the structure outlined, I think”. An easy lie. Structure was something someone had said was important for a novel. He wanted to understand it so much, but writing Chapter 1 at the top of one sheet of paper and The End at the bottom of another surely didn’t count. Cathy’s late night fishing trips gave him extra time and space to write. The emptiness of night, the silence and aloneness, it was all supposed to create the perfect writerly atmosphere. And for Cathy it was wonderful to be out on the sea in the dark, waves slopping at the boat, creaking sounds and random splashes, silent fishermen.
When Joe and Cathy had first asked Mattia and his father if she might come out on the boat with them, the two men had been baffled. They couldn’t understand if they had misunderstood and if they hadn’t, why she would want to. “It’s very late at night, we go”. Mattia’s father had said with each hand holding fingers to thumbs and his wrists rising up and down. “What you want to do in the dark, on a stinking fishing boat?” Cathy earnest and intense was hard to resist. “Sometimes I want to be out on the sea in the dark and quiet and we don’t have a boat of our own. I won’t be any trouble. We have Euros for the fuel”.
Joe had stayed in the background during the curious negotiations, pondering the idea of including the father in his book as well as Mattia. He gave a little cough and expanding on what Cathy had said, gave it a sort of patriarchal stamp of approval. “Yes, we’re happy to help defer any additional expense you might incur”, he concluded, smug and superior in his excellent use of the English language. The two Italians looked at him for a moment, and recognising a fellow male, but not entirely understanding what he had said, nodded. “Okay, we do this. You come tonight at three, we go. €50. Okay?”. And they returned to their boat, muttering and gesticulating with the occasional glance over their shoulders at Cathy, waving and beaming over her shoulder as she and Joe walked away.
That was two months ago and not much of Rock of Sorrows had made it onto the page, not even a structure. But he was pleased that Cathy gave him those extra hours to work in, flattered that she made sure he had a fully charged laptop and phone, pencils and notebooks. He had been content to sit there with an oil lamp casting gentle light over his random notes and sentence scraps. But there weren’t many more words now than there had been at the start of the experiment. And the struggle was getting too much, despite the online forums with other writers in other time zones working on similarly tricky dilemmas. Those conversations had started out being very stimulating, with story prompts, advice about narration and how to make the show-don’t-tell thing work. But it hadn’t been as easy as Joe thought to put any of it into practise. Instead he was getting bored with listening to people whinge about the costs of self-publishing, the impossibility of finding an agent, artificial intelligence and recalcitrant characters and dialogue.
“Let’s see where you are? Can I read what you’ve got so far?”. Cathy bright eyed and caffeinated was searching the desk, fingering notebooks and looking at him expectantly. Silence. Joe turned away, went to the window and opened wide the shutters. He saw the orange dust shrouding the tops of the hills as he let in the broadening day. He put the notebooks and his pencils in a drawer, smiled a rueful smile and gently pushed down the lid of his laptop.
