There are just a few blank pages left in the middle of this notebook, which I’d like to fill with a quick sketch that happens to be true:
There was once a woman with no name who wrote pointless stories. Why? She didn’t ever ask herself this question, which would almost certainly have killed her interest and destroyed her life. So let’s say: to pass the time and keep her head and hands busy.
The woman wrote about her family, her friends, herself, her real and imagined sexual history, her colleagues (all under unguessable pseudonyms), the places she lived, the weather, the books she read, the films she watched, strangers she observed, and so on. They were often false rags to riches stories, and in various ways they were to do with movement and stasis.
The woman moved around a lot, usually between old ladies’ cheap spare rooms. She liked staying in dusty, tattered rooms, ideally with a rickety little desk standing in front of a rattling window. In the evenings, she scribbled her pointless little stories at these desks. She wrote in A5 ruled notebooks that she bought in packs of three. Even though she had very small handwriting, which I’ve only been able to decipher with the help of my granny’s glasses, she normally got through all three notebooks within a week or so. If the old ladies asked (and not all of them did) the woman would give her sister’s name, and say she was called Olivia Smith.
The woman known to some old ladies as Olivia Smith also liked to write at coffee shops. She would write in the same coffee shop for a few days at a time, until she started to become familiar, both to herself and the staff (and sometimes, god forbid, other customers). When someone started talking to her, asking polite questions about where she was from and what she was up to, she knew it was time to leave. Then she moved to a different coffee shop. When she’d exhausted all of the town’s coffee shops, she told the old lady she was staying with that she had a family emergency, sorry, but she needed to leave. Then she packed up her notebooks and moved somewhere else.
She sometimes laughed to think that one function of her pointless stories was to exhaust the places she ended up living, as well as herself and her hands. She also laughed one evening when a man who looked just like Jacques Lacan sat across from her at a cafe. He had a plastic bag stuffed with several loose bits of scrap paper and clippings from various magazines, which he laid out and started arranging into a kind of puzzle or collage. The woman didn’t look up, and carried on writing. After a while the man leaned forward and peered at her.
‘Young lady,’ he said, ‘what are you up to?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘You?’
‘I’m working on a full inventory and floor plan of Ikea. I’m considering living there, and I’d like to know what I’m getting into.’
Otherwise, beyond what was necessary, the woman didn’t make a habit of meeting people. She preferred to interact with the family of notebook writers (her real family) whose books she carted about with her: Kafka, of course, as well as Robert Walser, Daniil Kharms, and various others I’d list if I wasn’t close to filling the couple of pages left in this notebook.
She liked to copy her family and get close to them. For example, in the notebook I have to hand, the woman has copied out three stories by Walser, and then written one of her own, called ‘Success.’ It describes a man walking up and down a high street in a seaside town, looking for a flat he’s recently rented, but which he can’t find. Eventually he gives up, takes a seat on a bench, and enjoys the sunshine, losing himself in pleasant, abstract thoughts. It takes him a while to realise that he’s in his father’s front room and that the sun is in fact a television. He feels warm, and starts thinking about what he’ll have for dinner that evening. Then he goes to sleep.
Lots of her stories were like this. If I had space, I’d copy them all up here, or at least summarise them. But as an alternative and accurate summary of both these stories and her life, I can say: the woman wrote and lived like this for years, and for the most part she was happy.
Naturally, there were some difficulties. Occasionally the old ladies turfed her out of their spare rooms with no notice, muttering vague words about health and financial complications. Sometimes she received letters from her sister, which were full of complete rubbish, mostly incoherent threats and accusations, written in extremely neat handwriting. (She didn’t take these letters seriously, but she did wonder how her sister had found out where she lived). But these were minor difficulties, irritations rather than catastrophes.
The lowest moment she can remember was when she fell one morning on the way to the office (she tended to work in temporary secretarial jobs) and broke her wrist. For three months, she couldn’t write her pointless stories. It made her feel ill. She started sleeping badly, and had panic attacks that made her think she was going to die. She tried to write with her left hand, but it was tricky. She could only write very slowly, with misshapen letters. Then she tried to talk to the computer, but she didn’t like it: her voice had nothing to do with these stories, and talking didn’t keep her head and hands busy at all.
Still, during this period, she did manage to write one of her favourite stories, which she copied out on the last page of this notebook with her left hand. It’s the only one that she considered to be finished. She read the story to me one evening (I remember her voice was a croaky whisper). She was lying in bed in my granny’s spare room. It was the evening she realised that she’d become an old lady herself, and wasn’t sure if she could get up and go anywhere else.
The story reads:
There was once a woman with no name who wrote pointless stories, who came from nothing and ended up nowhere.
The story has two titles, both of which have been crossed out: ‘Olivia’s dream’ and ‘Notes on an old lady.’ So really it has no title.
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