Dialogue: Blank screen's silent scream

By JOE BENNETT

'Murder your darlings," advised Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, but I didn't have to. Meridian Energy murdered mine.

Sir Arthur was writing about writing, an activity that's always kept a herd of charlatans in business. Bookshops abound in books explaining how to write a best-selling novel, most of them written by people who haven't written a best-selling novel.

But still they sell to the wistful, like home-exercise gear to the fat and the lonely.

Sir Arthur's advice is sound but he didn't follow it. His wrote prose so purple you could paper a brothel with it. And anyway the idea wasn't his. He cribbed it from Doctor Sam Johnson.

"Read over your compositions," wrote the warty dyspeptic old Doc, "and wherever you meet with a passage that you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

Wise counsel, but "Murder your darlings" is neater.

So there I was this afternoon knocking out darlings at a rate of knots, prose so exquisite that it curled my toes, when Meridian Energy pulled the plug.

The desk lamp died. The computer screen fizzled up itself in half a second and lay dead. The dishwasher stopped. The bloodshot eye of the answerphone extinguished. The house, which I would have described as silent, fell silent. The clock on the oven was blank. Time was in abeyance. Only the weak autumn sun kept at it.

I couldn't work. No one could email me. Though the phone on my desk was dead, the one in my bedroom, for reasons I can't even guess at, worked.

I rang Meridian and got, to my astonishment, a human voice, a voice belonging to a customer services operative most promisingly called YouarespeakingwithBeckyhowcanIhelpyou.

But it transpired after a brief chat that she couldn't. Yes, she said, she was aware there was an outage. I bit my tongue. No, she said, they didn't at this moment in time know the cause of the outage.

I bit it harder. No, she said, she couldn't tell me at this moment in time when power would be restored. I tasted the metallic tang of blood.

"OK?" she said cheerfully.

I felt the weight of futility. "OK," I said, "in fact just dandy."

"Thank you," she said "for calling Meridian."

And that was that. I had been tossed back a couple of centuries, to a world of rushlights and open fires which I didn't have and bed at dusk which I soon would.

So I did what I always do when stuck and took the dog out.

Stopping at a cafe en route for a flat white necessity, I met a sad woman fleeing like me a powerless home. She told me she had been doing her accounts on computer when suddenly all the numbers disappeared.

She asked what I had been doing. I said I had been breathing life into darlings, darlings that made my toes curl, but I don't think she was listening.

I left her mourning her figures into a short black and went up the hill with coffee and dog to sit for a bit on a rock with thoughts, then back down again to the silent house and a strange sense of impotence.

I couldn't type; I couldn't cook the bacon sandwiches I'd planned for dinner. I had perhaps two hours of fading light, 800 words to write and a body to feed.

And the world seemed simpler. That is all. The chickens out the back still strutted, and the dog curled undisturbed by the gas fire that, by a magnificent piece of design, won't work without electricity.

The house seemed to exhale and relax. Fewer things could intrude on me. The news I didn't need to know would be less able to reach me.

I sat and read and then as the light thickened I simply sat.

Fizz and wallop. Lights came on. The dishwasher reignited. The phone rang. I made coffee and booted the computer into life. The screen was blank.

Meridian had murdered my darlings. Gone, all gone. I hadn't even heard them scream. I bet that never happened to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

The livid green letters of the oven-clock were blinking HELP.