Andrew Pyper - The Killing Circle

And then today, walking along the sidewalk when I would have said "Nothing” if asked what was on my mind, it started again. Wet streaks freezing on my cheeks.

A rhyme pops into my head. An unconsoling sing-song that carries me home.

I’m not well

I’m not well

But who in the hell

Am I going to tell?

By the time I get through the door, Sam’s already finished his dinner and Emmie, the nanny, is drying him from his bath. Another irretrievable moment missed. I like bathtime with Sam more than any other part of the day. A little music. Epic sea battles waged with rubber ducks and old toothbrushes. All of it leading to bed. To stories.

"I’ll take him,” I tell Emmie, and she opens the towel she has wrapped around him. He rushes out of his cocoon and into my arms. A soapy angel.

I get him into pajamas. Open the book we’re working through. But before I start reading, he studies me for a moment. Places a palm against my forehead.

"What do you think, doc? Am I going to make it?"

"You’ll live,” he says.

"But it’s serious?"

"I’m not sure. Is it?"

"Nothing I can’t handle."

"I don’t want you to be sad."

"I miss your mom sometimes. That’s all. It’s normal."

"Normal."

"More or less."

Sam purses his lips. He’s not sure whether to buy my pinched grin or not. The thing is, he needs me to be okay. And for him, I’ll stay as okay as I can.

He yawns. Squirms in close, his head against my throat so that he can feel the vibrations of the words to come. Jabs his finger at the pages I hold open.

"Where were we?"

Once Sam is asleep it’s down to the basement office. What Tamara used to call the Crypt. Which is a little too accurate to be wholly amusing. A low-ceilinged room that was a winemaking cellar for the previous owner. Even now, I can catch whiffs of fermented grapes. It makes me think of feet.

This is where I watch the tapes. A notebook on my knee, remote control in my hand.

I’m just three minutes into the spider-eating bikini babes when I hit Pause. Dig out of my pocket the ad I clipped from today’s classifieds.

Tell the Story of Your Life

Open your soul. Bring your buried words to the page in this intensive workshop with Conrad White, published poet and novelist. Truly write. Write the truth .

I’ve never heard of Conrad White. Never attended a writers’ workshop, circle, night class or retreat. It’s been years since I’ve tried to write anything other than what I am contractually obliged to. But something about this day—about the taste of the air in this very room—has signalled that something is coming my way. Has already come.

I call the number at the bottom of the ad. When a voice at the other end asks me what he can do for me, I answer without hesitation.

"I want to write a book,” I say.

People read less today than they used to. You’ve seen the studies, you’ve got teenagers, you’ve been to the mall—you know this already. But here’s something you may not know:

The less people read , the more they want to write .

Creative writing workshops—within universities, libraries, night schools, mental hospitals, prisons—are the true growth industry in the inkbased sector. Not to mention the ad hoc circles of nervy aspirants, passing round their photocopied bundles. Each member claiming to seek feedback but secretly praying for a collective declaration of brilliance.

And now I’m one of them.

The address the voice on the phone gave me is in Kensington Market. Meetings to be held every Tuesday night for the next five Tuesdays. I was told I was the last to join the group. That is, I called it a group, and the voice corrected me.

"I prefer to think of it as a circle."

"Right. And how many will there be? In the circle?"

"Just seven. Any more, and I fear our focus may be lost."

After I hung up I realized that Conrad White—if that’s who answered the phone—never asked for my name. I also realized I’d forgotten to find out if I should bring anything along to the first meeting—a pen, notebook, cash for the donation plate. But when I dialled the number again, it rang ten times without anyone answering. I suppose that now the circle was complete, Mr White decided there was no point in picking up.

The next Tuesday, I walk up Spadina after work with my scarf turbaned around my ears. Despite the cold, most of the Chinatown grocers still have produce tables outside their doors. Frozen bok choy, starfruit, lemongrass. A dry powdering of snow over everything. At Dundas, nightfall arrives all at once. The giant screen atop the Dragon Mall casting a blue glow of advertising over the street.

I carry on another couple blocks north, past NO MSG noodle places and whole roast pigs hanging in butchers’ windows, their mouths gaping in surprise. Then dash across the four lanes of traffic into the narrow lanes of the market.

Kensington means different things to different people, but for me, a walk through its streets always gives rise to the same question: How long can it last? Already some of the buildings are being turned into "live/work loft alternatives", promising a new "urban lifestyle” for people who are seeking "The Kind of Excitement that Comes with Walking on the Edge". I take out the tiny dictaphone recorder I always carry around (to capture any especially biting phrases for the next day’s review) and read these words directly off the hoardings around the latest condo project. Some shoppers have also stopped to read the same come-hithers. But when they see me whispering into a tape recorder, they walk on. Another outpatient to be politely avoided.

On a bit, the old Portuguese fishmongers are lifting the slabs of cod and octopus off their beds of ice and waltzing them to the walk-ins for the night. The street still busy with safety-pinned punks and insane, year-round bicyclists, all dinnertime bargain hunting. Or simply congregating in one of the last places in the city where one can feel a resistance to the onslaught of generic upgrading, of globalized sameness, of money.

And then it strikes me, with an unsettling shiver, that some of the people bustling around me may be here for the same reason I am.

Some of them may be writers.

The address for the meeting brings me to a door next to The Fukhouse, a bar that, as far as I can see through the grimy window, has every wall, table surface, and both floor and ceiling painted in black gloss. Above the sign, on the second floor, stout candles flicker in the windows. If I wrote the number down right, it’s up there that the Kensington Circle is to gather.

"Anarchists,” a voice says behind me.

I turn to find a young woman in an oversized leather biker jacket. Her shoulders armoured with silver spikes. She doesn’t seem to notice the cold, though below the jacket all she wears is a threadbare girls’ school skirt and fishnets. And a raven tattooed over the back of her wrist.

"I’m sorry?"

"Just thought I’d warn you,” she says, gesturing toward The Fukhouse’s door. "That’s kind of an anarchist clubhouse. And anarchists often don’t take well to those not part of the revolution."

"I can imagine."

"Not that it matters. You’re here for the circle. Am I right?"

"How’d you guess?"

"You look nervous."

"I am nervous."

She squints into my face through the looping snow. I have the same feeling I get when the customs officer at the border slides my passport through the computer and I have to wait to see if I’ll be allowed through or placed under arrest.

"Evelyn,” she says finally.

"Patrick Rush. A pleasure to meet you."