Pay and Pay

Chapter 2

AFTER a balmy early spring day, the evening turned suddenly colder. Kevvin had received a rejection letter for his latest story the day before. He understood that publishers received hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts and must deal with them efficiently, but he still felt that with submissions of some promise, they should at least offer a more constructive comment than that the manuscript did not meet their needs at present. More practically, Kevvin realised that detailed criticism would not help him much in the end. Each and every story he wrote was different and there was no single magic formula a writer could apply just to please a publisher every time. He was annoyed, not disappointed.

He spent all of Saturday reworking the rejected story. The pages of the manuscript were now covered in blue annotations. He had started by improving vocabulary, but by lunch he was transposing sections and even excised a couple of paragraphs. After a sandwich and a bowl of soup for a late dinner, he put the pages aside and decided he would be able to start rewriting it the next morning.

In the meantime, he would take a break. Anyway, he needed to replenish his drained creative energies and he required some inspiration. As he walked out of his building and turned onto the sidewalk, he tried to maintain his habitual erect posture and deliberate and casual pace but the wind kept forcing him to hunch his shoulders and lower his chin. Whenever the wind died down, he would put his shoulders back and look out on the world from beneath his lowered eyelids.

Kevvin was heading to one of the local bars a few blocks away. It was quite different from the places he had begun to visit in his youth. In those days, many of them had been little more than ordinary taverns and the only thing that made them different was the changeover in their clientele after dark. Nowadays, particularly in his own neighbourhood, the bars served only one sort of customer and were surprisingly open about it, but it had never been the bars that had attracted him to the Village in the first place. It had been the artistic atmosphere that appealed to him in his youth. It had created a deep yearning in him to be with others like himself, and once he was able, he joined the ranks of others who shared his artistic values and outlook.

He considered that the bars—some of them quite flamboyant—were only to be expected in the Village. The bohemian nature of so many of the residents was untrammelled by the conventions of wider society. Their artistic sense not only guided their professional lives, it gave them the freedom to pursue their own personal proclivities, or so Kevvin imagined. At any rate, a touch of genius separated artists from the common herd and allowed them to make their own rules. The only thing that bothered him about it was that in recent years more and more people came to the area simply because of the bars, and that was a mixed blessing in his eyes. The whole atmosphere of the neighbourhood was in danger of being transformed.

The cold wind that kept forcing Kevvin's eyes down gave his occasional glances around an almost furtive look, and he was indeed on the lookout. As unlikely as it was that he might encounter anyone apart from the handful of people he knew by name in the neighbourhood, he wanted to see anyone he might know from elsewhere before they saw him. He had every right to be walking along the street just a few blocks from his home, but he had already created an explanation for his presence there at that hour if the need should arise. He would simply mention that he had run out of cigarettes—it always happened at the most inconvenient time, didn't it? Then he would casually add that he had been right in the middle of something terribly important in his writing, and what an aggravation it was to have to stop and run out before the stores closed.

In point of fact, Kevvin had never encountered anyone from his job in the ministry at any time of the day or night in the Village since he had moved into the neighbourhood. He was still careful, though, almost to the point of paranoia. He would allow nothing to cast the least doubt on the meticulously built-up character that he presented to the world. It was not that his image was only a façade that could not bear scrutiny; it was because it was really how he saw himself that made it so important to him.