Projects

It is his day off work so he decides to do some writing. He goes into the library with a fair idea of what it is he is going to write, and a fair idea that it is going to be quite good by his standards. He sits down at a computer and in less than half an hour he has written a short story. The story is about a solipsistic curtain. He reads it back to himself and it is not what he expected. He feels no ownership. It is not that he doesn’t like the story, he just feels entirely apart from it, as if he hadn’t actually written it. It contains words, whole phrases that simply don’t fit in with his way of thinking. There is a literary device that he would never normally use. Notwithstanding this he decides to print off a few copies under a nom de plume that he makes up on the spot – Robert Rosario. He photocopies a diamond-shaped art nouveau print of some chestnut leaves to use as a front cover for the story, and he leaves a copy in the library, under the London Review of Books on the magazine shelf. He takes another copy up the hill to the museum and art gallery, where there is an exhibition of paintings inspired by the sea. He leaves Robert Rosario’s story on the backless chairs in the middle of the gallery. Walking home he thinks about the past, about how five years ago he had plans, and would never have used a pen name. About how he and his then-girlfriend had planned to move to Bath where he would have done a masters degree in creative writing and she would have continued her childcare studies, and he would have been a modestly successful novelist and they would have collaborated on critical and practical studies of Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner. He realises that all of his friends, at least the ones with any emotional or intellectual connection with him, have either gone back to university or had children, while he has a low-paid job in the local council. He thinks about going back and knows it is only a thought, and he will go on filtering the stories of Robert Rosario into his home town.