What I Do With My Hands

They don’t burn books anymore. That’s what people don’t understand. Burning implies the thing still matters. What they do is quieter than that. A form. A reclassification. A gentle note from the Cultural Alignment Office informing you that your property has been assessed and redistributed for community benefit. You get a receipt. Very civilised.

I used to be a writer. I had forty years of notebooks. I got a receipt.

I don’t write now. I want to be clear about that, in case anyone is unclear. I am a retired man with a bad hip and a fondness for instant coffee and I don’t write. My hands are for opening tins and pointing at things on screens. That’s all.

What I do is remember. They haven’t found a form for that yet, though I understand a working group has been established.

I remember sentences the way other men remember football scores. Word for word, punctuation and all, lying there in the dark waiting to mean something. I have three chapters of a novel in my head that I will never put down anywhere. The protagonist is a woman who makes small fierce decisions in a world that has stopped noticing her. I know exactly what happens to her. I know the last line. It’s a good last line. It will die with me and that is the only ending available to it now.

My neighbour reported someone last month. Nice woman, my neighbour. Brings me soup when the weather turns. The man she reported, I don’t know his name, getting to know people is not advisable, lived three doors down. She’d seen him with a pen. Not writing with it. Just carrying it. But pens are Category Two now, and intent is a matter for the Office to determine, not you.

The young ones don’t remember how it felt to put a sentence together and feel it click. They’ve grown up speaking in the approved register and it fits them fine, like shoes you’ve never known to be too small.

I use my finger sometimes. In condensation on the window, in the mornings when nobody is out yet. A word. Sometimes two. Then I breathe on it and it’s gone before it ever was.

This is not writing. Let’s be very clear on that.

I’m not angry about any of this. Anger is also Category Two and would be subject to investigation by the Office. I just lie awake with all these words that belong to no page, and I think: someone should write them down.

But it won’t be me. I don’t write now. I want to be clear about that, in case anyone is unclear. I am a retired man with a bad hip and a fondness for instant coffee and I don’t write. My hands are for opening tins and pointing at things on screens. That’s all.

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