Free The Parasite Person by Celia Fremlin

becoming understandably impatient.
    “I’ll get out the full revised synopsis by the end of the month,” Martin had wildly promised only a fortnight ago; had, indeed, wildly pictured this actually happening, in the first flush of his triumphant move to Helen’s, where everything was going to be perfect for ever. But now it almost was the end of the month, and the synopsis had not been revised by so much as a syllable. Unless you counted the changing of the spelling of “vigour” to “vigor”, which he fancied looked a bit more—well—vigorous.
    “Vigour”. “Vigor”. Better change it in the carbon as well. There! At least he’d done something.
    He flipped through the typed pages. They looked good. Wide margins, clear headings and sub-headings, good spacing. A synopsis to be proud of. The only thing missing was a clear statement of what it was all about. The new, exciting idea that was to be the focal point of the whole thing, and was to put the name of Martin Lockwood well and thoroughly on the map, was still missing.
    *
    Why could he not think of any such idea? He’d always been able to in the past, without the smallest difficulty. No matter how hackneyed the subject—from “Death and Bereavement in the ExtendedFamily Circle” to “Incest and Pre-Pubertal Sex in Three Mining Villages”—Martin Lockwood could always be counted on to come up with something fresh and provocative, such as that sex is on the decline north of Birmingham, or that extended families are only tolerable when frequent bereavements are the norm. Something like that. It didn’t have to be true, or even likely; it just had to be startling, and backed up by one or two case-histories so remarkable and so atypical as to stick in the mind long after the unremarkable facts had faded into oblivion. It is the remarkable, not the unremarkable, that tends to get quoted, and anything once quoted begins automatically to take on a dim veneer of authenticity that is almost impossible to dispel.
    All that was needed, then, was a remarkable idea. Even the germ of a remarkable idea. What had happened to him that nothing came into his mind at all? Absolutely nothing?
    It had been so easy, once. How had he done it, in those days? Was it a trick, a sort of intellectual sleight-of-hand whose secret he had forgotten? A game of skill at which he had grown rusty? Or what?
    Martin closed his eyes, and tried to recapture the exact sensations of being that brilliant student twenty years ago: to re-live, inside his head, those magical intimations of approaching breakthrough , that sense of his brain beginning to stir and heave, with bubbles of thought beginning to rise in it, like marsh-gas, slowly at first, and then faster: thicker and thicker, faster and faster, until his whole skull was boiling and churning with novel and astonishing ideas, his heart thudding in his ears, his blood racing, his pen flying over the foolscap in a sort of madness of creation.
    Why wasn’t it happening now? Why? Why? What was wrong with him that all this peace, all this perfection, all these long, quiet uninterrupted hours, resulted in such a deadlock of the soul?
    *
    Getting started. That was always the worst part. Even in the good old days this had sometimes presented problems, he recalled. The important thing was to take a piece of paper and write something, and then, with any luck, your pen would carry you on from there. Pulling a little pile of clean, new typing paper towards him, hewrote, almost at random, one of the headings from his synopsis:
    “VARIETIES OF ENDOGENOUS DEPRESSION: A NEW SYNTHESIS” He underlined it neatly and carefully, using a ruler, and then sat clutching his biro, waiting for it to write something.
    *
    Through the wall, he could just hear Helen’s typewriter, patiently tap-tapping away at the Timberley interview. He was glad to hear her working on it, not because it was going to be much use to him—the whole thing was a dead loss, really, a