#WATTSOCCURRING? NO.6
A short story…
There’s a stylish woman in her 70s sitting next to me here in the cafe working on her computer. This is the short story I imagine she’s writing.
Angela had married young and badly.
Her only solace was smoking hand rolled cigarettes and writing prose.
She was determined not to conform in life or in literature and sought out the most Bohemian circles.
She adored the fantasy world of her childhood and tried to recreate it In her short stories.
Literature in the 1960s was a grey and unimaginative.
It didn’t live up to swinging reality.
She had a very low opinion of most contemporary writers.
She wanted to set the tone for the new generation of risk takers.
Writing for her was a compulsion.
Her ambition was to develop a voice that would be permanent and unmistakable.
She observed the wider culture and took influence from just about anywhere.
She believed writing to be her only route to freedom and glorious fantasy was a pool to be immersed in.
She blew a small inheritance from her aunt on a spontaneous trip to Tokyo.
She had decided to leave her husband.
She was hoping for anarchy.
She tried to turn the real world into her own carnival.
Within thirteen hours of her arrival she was staring at the ceiling in a Japanese ‘love hotel’. She and the lucky man had no language in common.
Later in a Tokyo Bar, full of gin and oriental semen, she caught the eye of Tyrone an American soldier of fortune...