There are 17 people seated at a long walnut table in the Georgian room which looks out over Dean Street. At the head of the table is the writing tutor. On either side of the long table, her students. It’s Wednesday, half way through the week-long course. The course contains many writing exercises: dialogue and its framing; the historical novel; the use of images as a writing prompt; etcetera. For this session the chosen topic is time. How the writer conveys time within their writing. The tutor hands out a postcard to each of us. The exercise will be to write a brief piece which incorporates two timelines, one of which could be a memory. We will be given approximately ten minutes to write.
My postcard is a photograph of a man, cut off at the waist, wearing walking boots, striding down a road. I turn the postcard over and discover that the postcard is promotional material for a shop called the Natural Shoe Store. A shop which is five minutes walk from where we are. Down the stairs, onto Dean Street, turn left at Old Compton Street, cross Shaftesbury Avenue, take the street that leads to Seven Dials, then walk up Neal Street. I know this because I used to work in the Natural Shoe Store. For the best part of a year. Over twenty years ago. The summer of the Italy World Cup; the summer when Annie Lennox and Pavarotti and that bloke from Eastenders and a hundred others came through the shop. When I met Arita and Steve. When Sedley and I began our shirt business. When I’d stay in Sedley’s father’s flat the other side of Oxford Street. A time when you could still drive into town and park round the back for free. All of that and a thousand other memories, stacking up, vertiginous.
I felt distress. I had no inclination to write but I felt as though I was obliged to write. I picked up my pen and wrote.
There’s a room full of people. They’re writing. They’re dispensing. Letter by letter, thought by thought. A youth walks through the room. In his hand he holds a pair of shoes. The morning light catches the wooden shelves. Neal Street dust flickers with its invisible energy. Daylight. The youth kneels. He holds out the shoes, black sandals, leather strapped, cork soled. He says: If you treat them well they will last you twenty years. Twenty years later he is one of the writers, whittling time like a stick. Marks on a page. Memories collapse in on him like an imploding house. Dust flies. Emptiness is all that is left. A blank space. The client looks at the youth. The client tells him: I don’t need to try them on. I know they fit. I’ll take them.
It didn’t take me long. I’d started after everyone else and finished first. I stared out of the window. Women in a third floor room on the other side of Dean Street were applying make-up to each other’s faces. They gazed at themselves in mirrors which I couldn’t see.
The tutor stopped the exercise. She asked people for their reactions. I wanted to share mine with the group. I made an attempt to speak. I used words like ‘weird’ and ‘freaky’. The tutor said the exercise had more to do with the image on the card than anything written on the back. I wanted to explain that I knew that but that the biographical connection of the card which she had given me in order to do an exercise about time was too strong to ignore. One of the other students, about my age, understood. The class moved on. Some people read their pieces out. I didn’t. Soon enough we would be given the next writing exercise to perform.
