A Writer's Sentence

ast night now seemed like a lifetime away." Weinelgrummer sighed a deep shuddering sigh and chewed aggressively on the end of his ragged Cuban cigar, focussing his small green pig-like eyes on the screen of his powerful wordprocessor. Had he really written that? He slumped back into his high- backed black leather chair and passed his hand across the front of his eyes. What an inane sentence! "Last night now seemed like a lifetime away"?? Holy cats! Like something out of a Mills and Boon. He'd have to take himself in hand, severely, that much was obvious.

No more using the autopilot for fiction for a start. That had been adequate when he was just writing to make money, when the publishers had gobbled up his formulaic stories, and the gullible public had paid first to read them and then to watch them on television. He'd grown rich on the variations of a single storyline. What did he care what the critics said? Slick! Crass! Nothing new! Rehash! hackneyed cliches! Oh yeah? Well, he was the one laughing all the way to the bank, to use one of his favourites. Favourite in more ways than one!

But that was then. Now was different. Last night had changed all that. The light had dawned. He caught himself thinking these thoughts and alarm bells rang in his mind. He realised that clilches were no longer merely the vehicle of his expression, they had become the language of his thought processes.

Had he gone over the edge, trapped forever in cliche-land? The abominable sentence on the screen seemed to indicate as much. Beads of cold sweat broke out on his clammy forehead. He turned to the drinks cabinet for consolation and found it in the whiskey bottle. He tossed the whiskey down his throat, clenched and unclenched his fists, then saw what he was doing in the ornately framed mirror and gasped. My God! Now he was living his cliches! Life imitating art! Oh no! He was even using cliches to reflect on living his cliches! Would the dizzying spiral ever stop?? How could he arrest this rampant creeping chicheism?

His mind spinning, he reached for the keyboard, determined to obliterate the offending sentence, but he never made it. He collapsed in a mangle of metaphors, babbling incoherently, and eventually sobbed himself into fitful slumber. He slid gently off his chair onto the thickly carpeted floor. His carefully toupeed head came to rest against the pedestal of his carved oak desk and the soles of his upturned shoes gazed somnolently at the splendid harbour views of his seventeenth storey studio.

And that's where his agent found him, some two hours later. She had an office on the same floor and had been puzzled by his failure to answer the phone that morning. She decided to pop in on her way out to lunch with a promising young ethnic writer. Then it would be late lunch with a woman who claimed she was a Russian princess and wanted to sell her story.

The agent was having trouble keeping her weight down since she had started having two lunches a day, but it was the only way she could maintain links with a sufficient number of established and budding authors. She was not the kind to let an opportunity slip by, and her generous nature saw potential in all but the most rank of intending writers. She was haunted by stories of agents who had let the big one slip through their fingers and she was determined it wouldn't happen to her.

Weinelgrummer was proof positive of her strategy. Under her coaching he had stopped taking himself seriously and hit the big time in a big way.

But he'd shown alarming signs lately of wanting to take himself seriously again. She could tell by the books he was reading - Conrad, James, Hemingway. She knew he admired them, wanted to be one of them. Last week she'd seen him standing forlornly in a bookshop, looking at the rows of his own books, which were selling well enough, then sighing dejectedly before shuffling to the next bay and purchasing another classic - D.H. Lawrence, heaven help us! It would only need a spark to set his arid imagination ablaze, she thought, and last night it must have happened.

He'd called and left a message on her answering machine. She was out to dinner with a brilliant young male writer with enormous potential. The message was brief - "Maggie, I'm starting work on my masterpiece tomorrow. Don't call me, I'll call you. Kurt." This sounded serious.

She had started ringing his studio as soon as she arrived that morning - a bit late, due to breakfast with a brilliant young female writer with enormous potential - but he wasn't answering. Perhaps he'd locked himself away started work already. She must stop him! Continue to channel his creative energies profitably. He'd been so happy with his cliches and his money. Why had he turned morose and sullen? Had success soured him?

She tripped daintily along the corridor to his studio, her body-fat rippling through her cheeks, upper arms, bosom, belly, buttocks, thighs and calves. She'd invite him to lunch, she decided, tomorrow. She was supposed to be having lunch with a new playwright who needed only an ounce of luck to achieve the greatness of which he was obviously capable, but Kurt would have to take precedence. Randolfo's Carverie or Seafood Follies? The choice would be his.

It was only much later, after she had raised the alarm and they had taken the body away, that she saw the sentence on the screen. His processor had a screensaver which had blacked out his current work long before she arrived. The sentence became visible when she bumped the keyboard with a rolling hip and it sprang to live on the screen. She read it. "Last night now seemed a lifetime away." It was, she thought, it was.