The writers group

We met weekly, in the Tavistock Hotel. Dark, winter evenings after work. Exhausted, always, as I left my workstation and made my way through the cold streets; yet another day spent dealing with endless complaints. But approaching the hotel, seeing the yellow windows of the bar lit up in the night, a feeling of anticipation, of hope. There was always a sudden, strange sense of lightness, of buoyancy. There were six or seven of us at most, but usually only four or five would turn up.

Elisa, I think, perhaps begrudged me my freedom on those Tuesday nights. If she had her way, I am sure, I would head straight back to our room in Earls Court for yet another dinner of chicken, cooked in the dirty pans of the communal kitchen. But this is unfair. I do understand that she did not want to be alone in that old building, listening to the coughs and sobs of the others.

Stephen was the group’s leader. A tattered coat upon a stick, I thought, when I first saw him. Tall and blond, with a dishevelled air. Aristocratic, but as if he was on the run and had been for months. And as if beneath his coat there was not a body but skeletal poles, a frame, merely.

I meant to say. A feeling I always had, as well as the lightness, entering the hotel, of stepping out of time. Outside, the hotel bar, lit, its lights spilling out into the dark square. Outside, taxis speeding by. Inside, intimacy. The group. Stephen in the corner at the head of the tables we had pushed together. Those tables, made of formica. Yellow with a green border and green shades on the lamps on the wall, reminding me of the lamps in my grandfather’s house.

Lucy was a regular. Young, with a pale, oval face and reddish hair cut into a bob. Green eyes, and metallic insect green eyeshadow. Strange clothes. As if, unable to decide what to wear, she had simply chosen everything available. A skirt over jeans, a sweater, a blouse over the sweater etc. An alcoholic, I think, as most of us were. Green bottles of Hooch multiplying on the table as the evening wore on.

Sally was a librarian, an archivist. She had that air. An atmosphere of dust, of stale silence. Her eyes protruded somewhat from her round face. The pages she handed out each week smelled of cigarette smoke, of ash. She wrote about detectives.

David, a retired city worker — an ex-chief executive. Authoritative, although he deferred to Stephen in matters pertaining to the group. Who should read next, etc. He was writing about a hotel. A comedy, although it was not funny.

There was Sumira, too. Thin, with dark, beautiful eyes. She was very quiet. One week she read out a story that disturbed us all. An endless stream of bats flying from the mouth of a cadaver in a morgue. We sat in silence afterwards as Sumira stared at the table.

Perhaps Tymon, the engineer, was the only one of us with any talent. He was not a regular member, and, if he did turn up, was frequently late. He was an engineer somewhere on the outskirts of the city. Raynes Park, I think he said. He took pages from his briefcase and handed them out. Those stories were always unsettling, uncanny, although this was not their primary quality. Their primary quality, evident only afterwards, was one of a strange kind of truth. He wrote about travelling salesmen, severed toes, stolen shoes. Characters whose legs refused to do as they were bid. A man, frozen to the spot in Wimpole Street as a telephone rang interminably in the telephone box next to the subterranean carpark.

What else is there to say? We met each week on those dark nights. Yellow light spilling out, dissipating in the autumnal darkness. We read our stories to one another and listened to comments about the nature of their specific hopelessness. And then each of us, afterwards, headed our separate ways. In my case, usually, I would stop off to buy a bottle of white wine from the convenience store. I would share the wine with Elisa. This was years ago. A moment in time. I do not know what became of any of the others. Elisa and I drank the wine, ate our chicken, and lay down on the dusty floor to sleep.