creative writing for losers

Our creative writing class was full of the usual kind of beatific-faced losers. Most of them elderly. There was one girl with brown hair and bad skin—which made her kind of sexier, if you know what I mean—I’d shag. That was it.  The grey woman in the chair next to me specs slid down her nose as she slept. She wrote the kind of poetry you’d expect, rhyme-a-line-ding-dime, about fucking butterflies and nature. Others in the class clapped. Fucking clapped. Would you believe it?

Val, our teacher, wore dark coloured nylon slacks and nylon blouses buttoned tight around her throat. Comfortable, stretchy, clothing, easy to wipe as the classroom chairs.  She’d long shiny black hair, but  was a fat-faced fuck, the kind that smiled a lot because she’d poetry published in some journal, nobody read,  and she’d need to wake her up soon, so the old-dear could go to the toilet before everybody left the techie college and the janitor locked her in. I stabbed the desk with my biro and tried to work out if that’d be a good or a bad thing.

I’d sat through another two hour-and-a half hours of hell, wondering what it is I’d done to deserve it, what I was doing here, with a pen pressed into my hand and an A4 pad containing notes on my novel that the teacher really must read. I was in the wrong life and should be at my book launch, somewhere in New York—I’d never been in New York, never been outside Glasgow, much—and signing copies, handing them out to an appreciative audience.

I doodled creatively as the other losers file out one at a time. My classmate woke with a jerk of her chest onto her flabby chest. She smiled into the pearl buttons of her blouse. Her lips made smacking noises. ‘Did I miss anything?

I yawned. Waking up like that can cause a distorted reality between sleeping and dreaming. Answers to questions that long deluded you.  I was quick to reassure her, we were back to normal.

‘Fuck all,’ I shook my head. ‘The usual shite.’  

‘I don’t know why you’re so rude,’ she frowned.

‘Social realism demands it,’ I drawled.

Val had been standing at the door chatting to those that had left in dribs and drabs. Our seats were at the window looking out into the dark corners of the empty car park. It gave me something to look at.  But she hurried over as quickly as a morbidly obese woman can, like a nightclub bouncer moving through different, drunken, time zones and stood over me, tight lipped.

Val had a smile for Mrs McCafferty. ‘You’re poem about raw chaos was really lovely,’ she said.

Mrs Cafferty stood up. Her hand came out to help her balance as she gathered up her green folder and pens. Her fingers rubbed lightly at the skin on the top of arm as if in consolation. I wore a white vest and denims, because the classroom always stunk like a geriatric ward and was always stifling with antiquated radiators making huffing noises. Nobody much had liked what I’d read out. But I expected that. I folded my arms over chest and let all their shite wash over me. Pretty soon they’d realise how wrong they were and they’d be telling other folk they’d met that they knew me. They knew Frank Reid. They’d been in the same class, but not in the same class, obviously, fucking losers.

You needed to expect the unexpected. The best was yet to come. In one of my first attempts, a 500-worder, my classmates made appreciative noises with their clacking false teeth.

‘It’s about this cunt,’ I’d explained. ‘And everybody was trying to kill him, even before he was born?’

‘Language,’ said Val, but she wasn’t Val then, she wasn’t our pal. She was the creative-writing teacher giving guru-type feedback. So I’d toned it down a bit.

 ‘So the big man, kills all the first-born children, to get at him.’

Val got it right away, ‘Like Jesus,’ she me one of her goofy smiles, like she’d did to others, the equivalent of handing liquorice sticks to shut yapping kids up. ‘And King Herod?’

‘Aye, but instead of stables, the cunts born in a swamp surrounded by crocodiles and big Amazonian snakes.’

‘Language,’ she said again. ‘I’ll need to ask you to leave your colloquial language on the streets.’

‘Fuck-aye,’ I held my hands up. ‘I get it.’

Me and the teacher really didn’t get on after that. Her specialist subject, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – what a lot of shite. But she was a stepping stone. Even fat cunts like her needed a job. At twenty-one she was probably sitting here too, I guessed, giving her teacher a hard time? Maybe even she wasn’t as fat as fuck then.  I supposed I’d let her give me a blow-job, if I was hard up.

She’d probably got to that stage, when she was really old, about thirty-five , when she’d realised with a numbed resignation that there was nothing for it, she’d be a fucking loser too and she’d just let herself go to fuck. She’d probably read Romeo and Juliet and thought it applied to her. Fucking stupid cow.

I’d been to her house, took some photographs of her things with a single-lens-reflex camera. The carpet was worn in front of her bookshelves, Fiction A-Z in order. I took three books and slipped them into my bag.

They sat on my pit-marked desk. I wasn’t much of a reader and haven’t got around to opening them yet. Mrs McCafferty doddered past the teacher and toward the door and said something I didn’t quite catch. I picked up my rucksack and fiddled with the drawstring and stuffed in my A4 pad, beside my training kit and camera. I never had enough room for all I needed. Val lifted a book from the pile on my desk and a leather bookmark fell out. I should have taken a picture of the teacher’s mouth falling open.