Misery

to the right of the Royal grew steadily taller. Before this strange experience, he had considered four pages a day to be his optimum output (on Fast Cars it had usually been three — and only two, on many days — before the final finishing sprint). But during this electric three-week period, which came to an end with the rainstorm of April 15th, Paul averaged twelve pages a day — seven in the morning, five more in an evening session. If anyone in his previous life (for so he had come to think of it, without even realizing it) had suggested he could work at such a pace, Paul would have laughed. When the rain began to fall, he had two hundred and sixty-seven pages of Misery’s Return — first-draft stuff, sure, but he had scanned through it and thought it amazingly clean for a first.
Part of the reason was that he was living an amazingly straight life. No long, muddled nights spent bar-hopping, followed by long, muddled days spent drinking coffee and orange juice and gobbling vitamin-B tablets (days when if his glance so much as happened upon his typewriter, he would turn away, shuddering). No more waking up next to a big blonde or redhead he had picked up somewhere the night before — a lass who usually looked like a queen at midnight and a goblin at ten the next morning. No more cigarettes. He had once asked for them in a timid and tentative voice, and she had given him a look of such utter darkness that he had told her at once to forget it. He was Mr Clean. No bad habits (except for his codeine jones, of course, still haven’t done anything about that, have we, Paul?), no distractions. Here I am, he thought once, the world’s only monastic druggie. Up at seven. Down two Novril with juice. At eight o’clock breakfast came, served at monsieur’s bedside. A single egg, poached or scrambled, three days a week. High-fiber cereal the other four days. Then into the wheelchair. Over to the window. Find the hole in the paper. Fall into the nineteenth century, when men were men and women wore bustles. Lunch. Afternoon nap. Up again, sometimes to edit, sometimes just to read. She had everything Somerset Maugham had ever written (once Paul found himself wondering dourly if she had John Fowles’s first novel on her shelves and decided it might be better not to ask), and Paul began to work his way through the twenty-odd volumes that comprised Maugham’s oeuvre, fascinated by the man’s canny grasp of story values. Over the years Paul had grown more and more resigned to the fact that he could not read stories as he had when he was a kid; by becoming a writer of them himself, he had condemned himself to a life of dissection. But Maugham first seduced him and then made him a child again, and that was wonderful. At five o’clock she would serve him a light supper, and at seven she would roll in the black-and-white television and they would watch M*A*S*H* and WKRP in Cincinnati. When these were over, Paul would write. When he was done, he would roll the wheelchair slowly (he could have gone much faster, but it was just as well that Annie should not know that) over to the bed. She would hear come in, and help him back into bed. More medication. Boom. Out like a light. And the next day would be just the same. And the next. And the next.
Being such a straight arrow was part of the reason for this amazing fecundity, but Annie herself was a bigger one. After all, it was her single hesitant suggestion about the bee-sting which had shaped the book and given it its urgency when Paul had firmly believed he could never feel urgent about Misery again.
He’d been sure of one thing from the start: there really was no Misery’s Retum. His attention had been focused only on finding a way to get the bitch out of her grave without cheating before Annie decided to inspire him by giving him an enema with a handful of Ginsu knives. Minor matters such as what the fucking book was supposed to be about would have to wait.
During the two days following Annie’s trip to town to pay her tax-bill, Paul tried to forget his failure to take advantage of what could have been a golden opportunity to escape and concentrated on getting Misery back to Mrs Ramage’s cottage instead. Taking her to Geoffrey’s home was no good. The servants — most notably Geoffrey’s gossipy butler, Tyler — would see and talk. Also, he needed to establish the total amnesia which had been caused by the shock of being buried alive. Amnesia? Shit, the chick could barely talk. Sort of a relief, given Misery’s usual burblings.
So — what next? The bitch was out of her grave, now where was the fucking story? Should Geoffrey and Mrs Ramage tell Ian that Misery was still alive? Paul didn’t think so but he wasn’t sure — not being sure of things, he knew, was a charmless corner of purgatory reserved for writers who were driving fast with no idea at all where they were