by Jane Fallon
She starts walking again. ‘I appreciate you trying to make me feel better about this, Georgia, but there’s nothing you can do to help, OK? I’ll see you soon.’
‘Anne Marie …’ I say, hopelessly. ‘There must be something I can do.’
She turns back. ‘There isn’t. Please don’t follow me all the way home.’
CHAPTER 54
Wilbur book seven is finished, dashed off in a couple of manic days and delivered yesterday. He’s the same old Wilbur. His rhymes are as unsophisticated as they’ve always been. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ my mum said on the phone last night when I told her I wasn’t going to bow to Bibi’s pressure. Another one of her favourites. Joe has started doing a great – affectionate – impression of this one since she said it to him when he told her he was gay on the phone at Christmas. ‘What does that even mean in this context?’ he’d said to her through gasps of laughter. I could picture her chuckling along. My mum adores her grandkids. Bibi might not like it but I’m hoping that now he’s an award-winner she’ll have a sudden change of heart. And if she doesn’t, well, that’s just too bad.
I haven’t spoken to Anne Marie in days. That is, she’s replied to my texts, she hasn’t cut me dead, but they’re formal, polite replies. Answers to questions, not a conversation. Harry has been a sad presence in our house most evenings, heading home to the flat slightly earlier each night. He just can’t bear not to be there, whatever’s happened. He was buoyed up by the fact that Jez is leaving. Out of sight, out of mind. Anne Marie told him, not me. I’m keeping well out of it.
I throw myself into work on the drawings for my Igor book. When I showed them to Nick, he’d said – after exclaiming that he thought they were ‘fantastic’ – ‘Is Igor you in this situation’ and I’d suddenly realized that that was what I was doing. How had I not seen it? I was writing about myself as a child. The big outsider who all the others stared at. The one who was teased for being different. Sad doesn’t even come into it. But, in fact, once that became clear, it was obvious that that was what I needed to do. Write a book for all the kids like me who were being ostracized for being slightly outside the norm. I decided that the little girl – who I called Evie because, you know, creative genius – would be the friend I had never had to stand up for me. And she would fight Igor’s corner every time someone stared at him or pointed. She would be the sidekick every child deserves.
I’m excited to show it to Bibi. The illustrations are packed with details and bright vibrant colours. Turquoise-blue skies and lime-green grass. Butterscotch-yellow sunflowers and raspberry-red poppies. A heightened world. I’m stupidly proud of them. And the message – the celebration of difference – surely that will be right up her street? As if she can read my thoughts, my laptop buzzes with an email from her: Kate is going to call you to arrange a time for you to come in and discuss Wilbur 7. B. I pre-empt Kate’s call by ringing her first and fix a meeting for tomorrow.
‘Ultimately you’re the author, Georgia, but I can’t say I’m not disappointed. I thought we were on the same page.’
I was expecting this, obviously. In a weird way, hoping for it almost. It makes what I have to tell her easier. Bibi picks up the string of her teabag and swirls it round. ‘I know. I tried, I really did, but it didn’t work. Wilbur is who Wilbur is. I don’t think it’s right to try and shoehorn him into being someone else.’
‘I see. I was just hoping we could broaden out his fan base. I mean, the sales are good but they plateaued a couple of books ago …’
‘But he does have loyal readers. What’s the point of losing them in order to try and gain new ones?’
She nods slowly. ‘Are those the readers we want, though? Are those the readers that are going to propel us through the 2020s?’
I’m not going to get into an argument about whether Wilbur’s fans are the right kind of fans. There’s no point. ‘The thing is, this is going to be the last Wilbur. I’ve decided it’s time to move on to something new …’
A few days after the awards ceremony – a week ago now – my agent, Antoinette, called me to tell me that Bibi had been on the phone keen to discuss a contract for books eight and nine. It’s the call every author hopes for. It means you’re wanted, you have security for another two years. I had been about to tell her about Mummy, Why Is That Dog So Big? when she dropped her other bombshell.
‘Oh,’ she said in her clipped voice, just a hint of the South African accent she grew up with. ‘Thank you for sending Lydia to me, by the way. I think Game of Gnomes is going to be huge …’
‘You’re representing Lydia?’
‘Yes. Has she not told you?’ Antoinette had had to miss the awards ceremony because her little boy was sick but she’d called me first thing to congratulate me – I had been too wrapped up in Anne Marie and Harry to really register – and then sent over the flowers and champagne later in the day.
‘Um … no. I haven’t seen her …’ Thank you for sending her to me could only mean that Lydia had told her that I had. That she’d used my name to get a foot in the door.
‘Yes, isn’t it exciting? Phoenix have offered her a contract already …’
I didn’t hear the rest. I knew Bibi was interested in Lydia’s book, of course, but to have put a deal on the table already …? I was in the kitchen, in the middle of making a moussaka for that evening’s dinner, and I reached out a hand to steady myself on the counter.
‘Oh …’
I got off the phone as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to hear about Lydia’s success. Her using me as a stepping stone to propel herself up. That night I’d talked it through with Nick and come to a momentous decision. I needed to follow my passion, my heart. There was no point sitting around moaning that I had way more talent than I was showing the world, quietly seething as Lydia got recognition and praise. (‘It might never happen,’ Nick had said, trying to talk me down. ‘How many people get book deals and are never heard of again? Most of them, probably.’ I knew he was right but the possibility was eating me up.) I could either become one of those embittered bores who drone on about how they could have been a contender, or I could put my energies into trying to prove what I was worth.
Bibi raises her eyebrows at me. ‘Antoinette didn’t mention this …’
‘She doesn’t know. I haven’t had a chance to tell her.’ I scrabble round in my bag for the artwork for Mummy, Why Is That Dog So Big? ‘This is what I’m working on.’ I tell her the story – the giant awkward canine who hates how people react to him, and his feisty friend who teaches him that being different is OK. ‘I have more sketches. Here …’ I pull out my iPad and find the photos I took before I left home. Bibi studies them closely. I’m a bag of nerves. A defendant waiting for a verdict.
‘So, you see, it’s all about diversity. Embracing who you are.’
‘Yes,’ she says, peering at the drawings. ‘Yes, I see. I love this …’
My heart starts to race. Validation for your work never gets old. And nervousness, waiting for that validation, doesn’t either. ‘Oh, thank goodness.’
‘It’s very good,’ she says, scrolling backwards and forwards through the pages. ‘But the new contract offer is for the next two Wilbur books …’
At first I think I don’t hear her correctly. ‘It’s for …?’
‘The next two Wilbur books. Yes.’
I pick at a bit of fluff on my leg, anxiously. ‘It’s … um … it’s just for my two next books, isn’t it?’
‘On the understanding that they are Wilbur eight and nine.’
What? ‘I thought you didn’t even like Wilbur.’
‘It’s not really about what I like, Georgia. Wilbur is a franchise. If we can just get this latest one working then it would be crazy to stop producing them now.’
I lean forward in my chair. Outside there’s a view across the rooftops of Bloomsbury towards the Old Bailey and the Inns of Court. On a normal day I would be happy to gaze at it for hours. ‘But I don’t want t
o do more Wilbur. It’s time for something new. And you said you loved these,’ I add, indicating the drawings.
‘I do. But here’s the thing. We did some market research recently, and while Wilbur the Wallaby is a name a lot of people recognize, Georgia Shepherd isn’t really …’
‘That’s OK. It might take a couple of books to get a new series off the ground but it’s an investment in the future, right? I mean, you said yourself that Wilbur can’t go on forever.’
‘And we already have a franchise with a dog for that age group. You know Scaredy Dog?’
I do. They’re cute books about a nervous basset hound trying to negotiate going to school. Nothing like mine. ‘They’re very different …’
‘We’re not really in the market for another dog.’
‘What if it was a cat? Or a rabbit?’ I say, somewhat desperately.
‘Georgia, we love you at Phoenix,’ she says. ‘You’ll always have a home here.’
‘So long as I keep churning out Wilbur books?’ I know I should be trying to tell her what she wants to hear, at least just to get me through the meeting so I can call Antoinette and regroup, but I’ve spent the whole night psyching myself up for this. It’s not a decision I’ve taken lightly. And I know it’s the right one.
‘So long as the relationship works for both of us.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘I see.’
‘Have a think about it.’ She pushes my iPad and pages back across the desk towards me. ‘Meanwhile, let’s try and knock Wilbur seven into shape …’
‘Why didn’t you talk to me before you went in?’ Antoinette sighs.
I have to stop myself from saying: ‘Because you probably would have banged on about how brilliant your new client Lydia was.’ Instead, I mutter, ‘I don’t know …’
Bibi had spent the rest of our meeting taking apart every line of the new Wilbur book and telling me why it wasn’t 2020 enough. I had sat there, submissive, not fighting my corner. All my bravado gone. At one point I’d said, ‘What if I made the illustrations more complex?’ and she’d shaken her head. ‘The kids love the illustrations as they are. It’s the words that need to evolve.’
I let her do what she wanted. I was past caring. So what if Wilbur wanted to drink kombucha and take up holotropic breathing? I’m sure those things are huge with the three-to-fives. At least the ones Bibi’s friends have sired.
‘It’s going to make negotiating this deal harder now,’ Antoinette says. I’m lying on the sofa in my kitchen under a throw, Igor on the floor beside me. I almost went straight back to bed when I got in, but that seemed like a step too far at eleven thirty in the morning, so this is the next best thing.
‘I’m not doing another Wilbur,’ I say. ‘I don’t care if that means they withdraw the offer.’
‘You need to be absolutely sure because they probably will.’
I sit up. Igor stands to attention. ‘Really? Just like that?’
I can hear her bite into something. ‘Can’t you just keep on producing Wilbur books and I’ll try and sell this other one on the side?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
I can’t really afford to turn down a contract, obviously. We have a big mortgage. Nick earns well but I earn more. We’d be all right for a while but it’s not a decision to take lightly. What if I move on but no one is ever interested in anything I draw again and I just become ‘that woman who used to do Wilbur the Wallaby’?
What if it’s the end?
CHAPTER 55
Nick tells me I have to do what I need to do. We’ll manage. ‘You don’t want to end up like Rod Hull.’
‘I have no idea what that means,’ I say, laughing. I had been in a fug when he got home, having barely moved all afternoon, going over and over the decision in my head. It felt good to laugh.
‘Didn’t he hate the emu? I’m sure I read that somewhere.’
‘I think that was Keith Harris and Orville.’
‘Whoever. You know what I mean. Come here …’ He pulls me to my feet. I think he’s going to give me a hug but he leads me up the stairs and then up again to the first floor. Into my office. Igor pads along behind us. Nick points at a framed poster on the wall. Wilbur three. Wilbur Moves House.
‘Look at him. Look at his little face. Look how fucking cute he is.’
I look reluctantly. He is – Nick’s right. ‘I just wish he wasn’t so simplistic. I wish I’d pushed to do proper backgrounds in the first place. I can do so much more, Nick.’
‘I know that, but the thing is, Wilbur is as successful as he is because he’s exactly like he is. If you’d made him different in any way he might not have appealed to kids like he does. He’s perfect. And he’s bought us this …’ He waves his arm around, indicating the house.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘he got us a huge mortgage anyway.’
‘Yes. Bastard.’ Despite myself, I smile. ‘But you know what I mean. Whether you retire him or not no one can take that away from you.’
‘We’d have to move though.’
‘I can cover the mortgage till you get another publisher. If that’s what you want to do.’
I reach over and pull him towards me. ‘I love you.’
‘I should hope so,’ he says, laughing. ‘What’s not to love?’
I lie awake all night going over and over my options. Nick’s support has freed me up to make the decision I want to make, but I have no idea what that is. Anne Marie is the person I would always have talked it through with. Not Lydia. Lydia’s own agenda would always have got in the way. She would have said, ‘Have you any idea how lucky you are to have a publishing deal at all?’ and that would have been that.
But I can hardly go to Anne Marie and say, ‘Sorry your marriage is falling apart but can I talk to you about my own problems?’ Even if she would hear me out I don’t think it would go down too well. Yesterday Harry went straight home from work rather than hanging out at ours for a bit first. I hope that means that things are getting better.
In the morning I get a message from Antoinette: Let me know what you want to do x. I don’t look at my emails for the rest of the day. Put my phone on Do Not Disturb. I lose myself in the illustrations for Mummy, Why Is That Dog so Big?, trying out different styles, different versions of Igor. Bibi may not want to buy it but she definitely liked it. It’s worth pursuing.
In the late afternoon I put my trainers on, grab Igor and head out for a run. Pounding up and down the hill has become my therapy. I’ve practically worn a groove in the path. Today it’s dark, dingy, wet. More like a punishment. Igor is sulking, longing for the warmth of the wood burner and a snooze on his bed. He lags back so I unclip his lead and let him do his own thing.
Suddenly he hares past me at lightning speed. Squirrel, I assume. He’s never caught one – thank God – but he lives in hope. He races towards a lone figure sitting on a bench at the summit. It is most definitely not sitting-on-a-bench weather. He greets them enthusiastically and I see a hand reach out and pet his ears. For a second I wonder – irrationally – if it’s Lydia, but I know the awards do was her big finale. She must know that I will have heard her news from Bibi and from Antoinette. I’m thinking about turning back. It’s a bit creepy up here after dark in the mist, especially with Igor’s new friend, hood up, looming at the top.
I call him just as the figure unfurls. I see wisps of familiar blue hair.
‘Anne Marie?’ Why is she sitting up here alone? I stop in my tracks. I’m so happy to run into her but I doubt the feeling will be reciprocated.
‘Oh. Georgia,’ she says. ‘I was just …’ She waves a hand around as if that’ll tell me what I need to know. She looks frozen through. I feel a pang of anxiety that she and Harry might not be edging towards a reconciliation after all.
‘Are you OK?’
She gives me a half-smile. ‘Absolutely. Just getting some air. Clearing my head.’
‘Do you … I mean, would you like to come to mine for a coffee?
Dry off a bit?’ I have to try. To my surprise she accepts. We walk slowly back, her trailing behind, Igor running between us. We don’t say a word until we get through the front door. She hangs her coat over the banister.
‘Do you need a towel? Dry off a bit?’
She shakes her head. ‘I’m not too bad, actually.’
‘Come on down then.’ It’s a bit like inviting a vague acquaintance in, not one of my – former – best friends. We’re on eggshells around each other.
‘How are things?’ Usually Anne Marie will just flick the kettle on in my kitchen. Help herself. Today she leaves it to me. Flops into a chair by the radiator.
‘We’re OK,’ she says. ‘At least we will be. I don’t think he’s going to get over it any time soon, but you know Harry. He’s never going to get angry or make me feel bad. I don’t know what I did to deserve him really.’
‘Oh, thank God,’ I say, feeling tears forming. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’
‘You and me both.’ I look at her properly for the first time then and I’m overwhelmed with the urge to hug her. I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t accept it so I hold back.
‘You?’
I nod. ‘We’re good. I can’t quite believe it.’ I carry our coffees over. Sit opposite her.
‘Nick told Harry you were struggling. With a work thing,’ she says eventually and I actually burst into tears. I’ve been so desperate to talk to her about it. About anything. And the idea that she’s been thinking about me with everything she has going on kills me.
‘I’ve missed you,’ I sob.
‘I’ve missed you too,’ she says quietly. ‘I’m sorry I had a go at you …’ I start to protest but she carries on. ‘… when it was me who was in the wrong. No one else.’
‘And Lydia …’
‘OK. Yes, Lydia was a bitch. But I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. It was guilt. Panic.’
‘It’s OK,’ I say through tears. ‘Of course it’s OK.’
‘Tell me what’s going on. Harry said you might be giving up Wilbur.’
