Pay and Pay

Chapter 3

WHEN Kevvin woke up, the late May sunshine pouring through the window of his bedroom was a welcome change from his ordinary routine of rising in the morning twilight before leaving for his job. It was spring now, and the days of walking to work in the dark and returning home as the sun was dropping behind him were over for another year. He felt energised by the light and quickly made himself a cup of coffee and some toast. He took his light breakfast over to his writing table and resumed the work he had begun the night before. He was almost half-way through editing a story, and the pages piled in a neat stack to his left all bore at least two or three marks to indicate where corrections were needed.

He had finished typing the first draft of his latest short story a few days before, and after a light dinner on his way home, he had spent four hours on Friday night starting the unwelcome task of proofreading the manuscript. Proofreading was a stage of the writing process that was quite distinct from revision, but in Kevvin's opinion, his work was so meticulously planned that he seldom needed to revise his work. Nonetheless, even though he was a careful typist, he continued to be dismayed at the number of spelling and punctuation errors he encountered. He laid the blame squarely on being forced to work late into the evenings after an exhausting day at the office.

Kevvin had hoped to finish his first pass through the manuscript by lunch, but it was already past eleven and he still had a third of the story to go. He detested proofreading. More importantly, as the careful and sustained focus that the task required inevitably tired his mind, he found that he was beginning to slip into pausing and reflecting on changing a word here or the structure of an entire sentence there. He laid his red pencil down. He needed a break from making minor corrections.

He had tried farming out the job to university students, but after a few such experiences, he had decided that the process was more trouble than it was worth. Somehow, he had never been able to find anyone who knew the difference between a technical error—what Kevvin wanted identified—and an apparent error that was required by the style of the writing.

One young woman, a graduate student at that, had returned a manuscript to him with annotations of 'run on sentence' and 'sentence fragment' on almost every page, along with a few typos circled for him to note. On the last page, one line had even been underlined and a marginal note added: "This sentence does not make sense." Despite his annoyance, he had explained to the girl her mistake; she had not taken into account that his deliberate departures from the rules of prescriptive grammar served as devices to develop plot and character, and that the sentence she had not understood had served both to highlight the protagonist's state of mind and mark the climax of the entire story.

"Well, you asked me to check for spelling and grammar. That's what I did," was her excuse. He paid her the agreed amount and never called on her for her services again.

He needed to get his mind off his work. His normal routine had been interrupted by his burst of creativity. On a Saturday morning he would read through the local and national papers over coffee, then go out, pick up the New York Times and spend an hour or two in a local coffee house reading through that. Quite often, before settling down to that little luxury, he would window shop up and down the street or drop into a local bookstore with his copy of the Times under his arm. A visit to the bookshop would be nice diversion. He had not been there for almost a month because he had indulged himself with a quilted Edwardian smoking jacket he had found in a vintage clothing store that he had discovered in Kensington Market. He could still browse around, though.

The bookstore he visited once or twice a month occupied all three storeys of an old house. Every wall was lined with wooden shelves. On the first floor there were wheeled ladders attached to the tops of the shelves to allow access to books out of reach from the floor. Here and there there were old wooden step stools with a long wooden handle on one side to allow you to move them about to reach books just a little out of your reach. Kevvin spent most of his time on the first floor because that held the literature and philosophy sections. The second floor contained books on drama and art, and no visit was complete without at least a quick look around up there. He seldom went up the narrow creaking stairs to the third floor; the books on sports and popular entertainment in the old attic held little appeal for him.