Dialogue: Honest silence under the threat of the executioner's axe

By JOE BENNETT

"I just love writing," she said. "Don't you just love it, Joe?"

"No," I didn't say, "love is not the verb I'd use, my chickadee."

"And if there's one thing we writers need," she said, "it's feedback, isn't it?"

"If there is one thing we need," I didn't say, "it's feeding. Big, juicy feeding with dripping hunks of meat and roasted vegetables in gravy thick and warm as blood."

But while I didn't say all that, I could see what was coming as clearly as the wench roped to the railway tracks can see the looming cow-catcher and hear the rumbling wheels and smell the whiff of fate and her kohl-darkened eyes grow wide as side-plates, as soup plates, as an entire dinner set, and she writhes and shrieks and squirms in an orgasm of terror so delicious and so vulnerable that you just know the hero of the day will come galloping out of nowhere and - but where was my hero?

I had no hero. I was alone and doomed. This woman's wheels would slice me into rashers. I was done for.

"So I was wondering, Joe, if you would care to ... " and here she paused, the executioner's axe catching the sun at the moment of stillness at the top of the swing, and she smiled a smile which no doubt she thought of as beguiling and which I did not consider beguiling, "if you would care to cast an eye over a little something I've written."

"Why of course," I didn't say, "and at the same time would I care to take a pair of knitting needles heated over a bunsen burner to the point of incandescence and slide them slowly up my nostrils before tapping them home with a cabinet-maker's hammer? Would I care to? Oh God."

"Well," I said.

"I always read your column, Joe, and I've got one of your books, so, well, you know."

"Oh yes, I know," I didn't say, "I know exactly what you mean. I recognise your iron logic, the same logic that decrees that every time I buy a packet of frozen peas I can summon Mr Wattie round to dig my vege garden. Yes, how reasonable. Yes, of course, right."

"What sort of writing?" I said.

"Oh Joe," she said, "it isn't any sort of writing. It's just writing, you know, it just comes as it is, don't you find that? That it flows, and I really don't know where it comes from."

"No," I said, "I don't find that at all. I find it hard."

"I do think," she said, "writing ought to be spontaneous, don't you?"

"Yes, yes, of course," I didn't say. "In much the same way as I think the designing of an aircraft carrier should be spontaneous or the building of walls or ... "

"I think it might amuse you, Joe."

"All right," I said, kneeling and sweeping the hair I haven't got to one side and laying my neck upon the block.

"I'll have a look at it."

"And don't spare me," she said, "I want you to be ruthless. Tell me what you honestly think or else say nothing."

"I'll tell you what I think or else say nothing," I said and rose to go.

"Oh, can't you read it now," she said, "here and now? It wouldn't take a minute."

I took it home. I take a lot of stuff home. I don't know why.

By which of course I mean I know exactly why. I lack the courage to say no.

And besides I know why people write.

Words are common property. They're all we have to wring a little meaning from the world, to get some sort of grasp on what and how and why. We want to say things. We are too much alone. We want to understand and, perhaps even more, to be understood.

And so we write. It does us good. It acts as therapy. It is the keeping of a diary. It is an exercise in thought.

Momentarily it stills the endless whirling of a random world and pins a private bit of it down.

From private to public seems such a tiny and obvious step. The diary is words on paper. The book is words on paper.

What's the diff? The diff is, well, I took her writing home and laid it on my desk and shunned it for as long as I could shun it - and then late the other night I picked it up and read it and made myself a cup of coffee and read it again. And then I put it in an envelope and posted it back to her.

She rang me up. "But Joe," she said, "you didn't say a thing."

And I could think of nothing to say but sorry.