The Scaf­foldist

‘The thing is,’ says Oscar, drain­ing his cof­fee, ‘is that the Brit­ish one pound coin is very thick, and around the edge it has some­thing writ­ten in Latin.’

‘Right,’ I say.

‘Or Welsh.’ He orders another latte. ‘One of those two. Which is the one with lots of ‘w’s?”

I’m not sure I should answer. There’s a short silence.

‘Doesn’t mat­ter. The point is it’s got some­thing writ­ten around it, and this is what you need.’

‘You want me to write some­thing in Welsh around my edge?’

Oscar looks des­pair­ingly around the café. ‘Let me go through it again.’

I’ve invited Oscar out to ask him about why I’ve gone three months without writ­ing any­thing new. He returned just last night after two weeks at a con­fer­ence in Lon­don, and although he says he’s had twelve hours sleep I can’t help but sus­pect the jet lag has not fully worn off.

For example, he’s about to say: ‘It hasn’t been three months for a start, it’s been eight.’

I blink at him. ‘No it hasn’t,’ I say, but a shadow is creep­ing through my mind and I don’t say it with much conviction.

Oscar’s latest cof­fee arrives. He points it at me. ‘When did you fin­ish your novel?’ he asks.

‘Feb­ru­ary.’

‘Right. And what have you writ­ten since then?’

‘Well, I star­ted work on a screen­play, for a while, and I’ve sort of begun plot­ting a second novel …’

‘So are we call­ing it eight months?’

‘Aren’t you here to help me?’

‘Cool your jets, we’ll get there. So, it’s fair to say things star­ted wind­ing down for you when you fin­ished The Last Monk, yes?’

I know he’s right, but instead I say, ‘Is it fair to say you’ve just increased the mag­nitude of my prob­lem by five months?’

He smiles and rum­mages about in his pocket. ‘And this,’ he says grandly, ‘is where this comes in.’ He pulls his hand out of the pocket and tri­umphantly thrusts a small, round object across the table towards me.

I look at it. ‘It’s a but­ton,’ I say.

‘I couldn’t find a quid,’ says Oscar. ‘Just ima­gine it’s a pound coin.’

‘It’s got fluff on it,’ I say.

‘It’s a bloody quid, alright?’ says Oscar, snatch­ing back the but­ton. He holds it up. ‘A pound coin, sym­bol of a proud nation and all it stands for, and so that no one ever for­gets it has stamped around its cir­cum­fer­ence its guid­ing prin­ciple in Latin.”

‘Or Welsh.’

‘Pos­sibly. And I don’t really know what it says, which sort of harms my argument.’

I decide to dis­creetly pay for the coffees.

‘But,’ says Oscar, run­ning his fin­ger around the edge of the but­ton, ‘it doesn’t mat­ter, because what this is is scaffolding.’

I decide I’ll pay for them now. The waiter is lurking.

‘You got up every morn­ing for six years and you knew what you were going to do that day, right? You were going to work on your novel, because that’s what you did. You had a pro­ject, a guid­ing principle.’

I wave the waiter away.

‘Now you get up every morn­ing and you could do abso­lutely any­thing. A screen­play? A short story? Another novel? Three hours at Office­works fond­ling the fluor­es­cent pens?’

‘How do you know about that?’

Oscar leans for­ward. ‘Your job isn’t like other jobs. Other people have bosses. They have reports to fill out, ditches to dig, sales to make. They have bosses. Dead­lines. Struc­ture.

‘Your job isn’t like that. No one tells you what to do, so with the entire world to choose from you flail about. ’Cause there’s no struc­ture. Every­one needs a struc­ture to work in, and it’s your job, pro­fes­sion­ally speak­ing, to build your own.

‘You can’t just be a nov­el­ist. First you have to be a scaffoldist.’

I look at him. I look at the but­ton. ‘Do you know where my dic­tion­ary of quo­ta­tions is?’ I ask.

Oscar pays for the coffees.