by Cathy Kelly
Gavin.’
Briefly, Cari decided that Gavin was just messing with her – he wanted all the evidence of her work erased from the planet. If he could, he would recall all of John Steele’s books and have them pulped, just so he could remove the acknowledgement: ‘The best editor and friend in the world: Cari Brannigan, who believed in me when nobody else did.’
Typical Gavin: now that he had won, he was determined to rub her nose in it.
Caffeine might help.
She shoved back her chair and went to the tiny kitchenette, idly exchanging chat with Mo from sales who was there too, and looked grey in the face from three country trips in a row.
‘Decaff or full-blown caffeine alert?’ asked Cari, reaching for the cafetière as she knew that Mo liked French press coffee the way she did.
‘Full blown with nuclear capabilities,’ Mo answered. ‘Or is speed legal?’
‘Nah,’ said Cari. ‘Highly addictive, bad for you but apparently makes you thin, though, as well as keeping you awake for a looong time.’
‘So I can’t ask for it on my health insurance?’ Mo asked, wagging her mug.
‘No. But instead you can have number five blend, ultra strong French diner coffee instead. Guaranteed to keep you awake until at least lunchtime.’
‘Fine.’
Back in her office, with a cup of black-as-midnight coffee in front of her, the colour only vaguely softened by the application of milk, Cari took a sip and looked at Gavin’s email again.
What could she write?
‘Dear Gavin, No, you scum-sucking bottom-feeder, you may not have my email editorial notes because you will have to work out your own plan with John Steele. If you can.’
Or, better.
‘Gavin, did you not receive the Voodoo curse dolls, the sheep’s skull and the chicken blood in the post? I bubble-wrapped it twice so you could pop the bubbles if you are having a stressy day in the office. The smell’s not so bad – the lady who gave it to me said you get used to it. The curse only lasts one calendar year. Serious gris gris lasts longer but I am too broke for a lifelong curse. Toodles!’
Grinning evilly, Cari decided that laughing really was the best medicine.
‘Gavin,’ she wrote.
‘Don’t have the notes any more. Deleted them all when John was removed from my list of writers. Sure you understand.
Cari.’
It was childish, yes. Unprofessional, probably. But it felt good.
In West Cork, John Steele came out of his study with his hair standing on end and a look on his face that his wife, Mags, hadn’t seen for a long time.
‘You OK, honey?’ she asked, knowing damn well that he wasn’t anywhere near all right. He looked both miserable and defeated, not a tricky combination to pull off.
‘No,’ muttered her husband, heading for the window where he stared blankly into the garden where a team of workers were landscaping the entire acre and a half at a phenomenal cost.
Mags decided to keep his mind off what was worrying him by pointing out all the lovely new things the landscapers were doing.
Up until now, John hadn’t thought about the money it was costing: hadn’t thought much about money for a long time apart from his and Mags’s late-night ruminating on how lucky they had been. They’d gone through near bankruptcy years before, when the bottom had fallen out of expensive, hand-crafted kitchens, and suddenly, when all else seemed doomed, John’s obsession with his writing had succeeded where everything else had failed. Thanks to massive book sales all over the world, particularly in the US, they were rich. Sunday Times, Sydney Morning Herald and New York Times bestseller lists had all fallen to John Steele’s particular brilliance and his current book was still number two in New York.
But this book … this book was floundering like a fish that had found itself on a river bank, too far away to wriggle back into the water. Worse, his new editor, Gavin, seemed entirely clueless when it came to helping him.
Gavin had turned up in West Cork for a ‘brainstorming and editing session’, which was apparently Gavin’s code for drinking plenty of the nice claret he’d brought as he polished off Mags’s wild mushroom quiche and salad.
Instead of discussing plot issues, he’d wanted to talk about territories yet to be conquered, the touring schedule, and what did John feel about doing three events in one day and then flying out early the next morning to another location? It was gruelling but it worked. First Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia, then the US.
‘They wanted business class for you, John, but I said “for my author, it’s got to be first class!” Good, right?’
Gavin beamed.
‘We need to talk about where the book is going,’ John said firmly.
‘That was in the early days,’ Gavin said airily. ‘We trust you, John. You know how to do it. You supply the genius without any pesky editor niggling at you. I know Cari Brannigan likes to think she’s something special in the editing business, but you’re a pro, now. I loved that last draft of the first half, by the way. Loved it.’
And John Steele, who would always feel he was only faking it being a world-class author and was really a carpenter in disguise, felt the anxiety clutch about him but said nothing.
Yes, he was the author, not Cari not Gavin. It was up to him to get it right. It had always been up to him. Freddie had said editors have different styles and some held back, while some did hand-holding. Gavin was obviously one of the holding-back type and if John wasn’t OK with that, then it was his fault.
He was to blame.
Plus, he’d moved on from Cari – lovely, clever, wise Cari – to Gavin and he could hardly go back now. If he needed someone to discuss the finer plot points with, then he was just being unprofessional and was being a carpenter, not a writer. It was all up to him.
Mags put a hand on her husband’s arm as she admired the work going on in the garden.
‘Do you think we could do an indoor pool afterwards?’ she asked idly. ‘Only I was thinking how nice it would be …’
John thought of the half-unwritten book on his computer and felt indigestion or something acidic rattle around in his stomach.
‘Yeah, perhaps,’ he muttered.
The apartment was blissfully quiet. No sound of little mousy feet running around anywhere. Her father had come round the night before and checked the traps. He’d taken away all but two of them and, as requested, had not showed Cari what was in this batch or any of the previous hauls.
‘I thought you were tough,’ Mick teased his older daughter.
‘Tough in some ways but I draw the line at mice. They were mice right?’ She started at him with big anxious eyes. ‘Not rats?’
‘Little mice, micelets almost, they were so small,’ he consoled her, ‘and none tonight.’
After her father had gone, Cari fixed herself some dinner. That was one of the nice things about being on her own, she told herself.
She’d spent a lot of time since Barney had gone thinking about all the positives of living on her own: like being able to eat whatever she wanted or watch whatever she wanted or go out to a yoga class if she felt like it, or, even, set up her yoga mat in the middle of the floor in front of the television and do a full workout.
Not, Cari thought with a certain grimness, that she actually did do any yoga workouts. In fact, in the three years since Barney had left – it was easier to think of Barney leaving than remembering what had really happened – she hadn’t really done much yoga at all. Yoga was too contemplative.
She certainly ate what she want. No full meals with meat and major carbs and red meat three times a week. None of that stuff. She ate salads, quinoa, things Barney would have hated. But she also made use of the supermarket ready-meals. Far too much use.
She had also changed the apartment totally since he’d lived there. She’d sold a lot of the furniture and painted the flat white. It was literally a white canvas for her to begin again and she’d picked up bits and bobs all over the place, somet
imes planning to repaint furniture herself to make it pretty and unusual … but she had never got around to that, either.
Apart from the mounds of books, and manuscripts, and plants – because Cari, like her mother, loved plants – the apartment was a bit on the naked side. She opened the freezer, took out a low-cal microwaveable meal and jammed it in the microwave, then she made herself some green tea because Cambridge had recently published a book saying that green tea was the answer to all ills, and sat down at the kitchen table with her manuscripts.
Reading manuscripts was a very important part of an editor’s job and it was a part that Cari loved. Sometimes she could tell really quickly if the writer had promise or if they were simply writing with dollar signs in their eyes. There were people who read a successful book and thought that if they just recreated the story with different characters in a vaguely different plot, then they were onto a winner. Publishing didn’t really work like that.
Sure, when a certain type of book was successful, there were many similar books produced as publishers tried to leap on the bandwagon, because, after all, they were in business. But the follow-up books had to have merit, had to work within the genre, had to have something.
Some people wrote in with novels that had been lingering in drawers, novels that didn’t really have any merit and were quite unpublishable. There were always those would-be authors who felt that commas, full stops and spellings were for the editors to put in and certainly not for the actual authors to include.
Cari had once worked under a wonderfully eccentric but brilliant editor who called these people the ‘Leona Helmsley authors’ – ones who thought grammar was for the little people, in the same way that the famous New York socialite and businesswoman had thought tax was for the little people.
‘The Leonas should not be allowed publish books,’ Ivanka had said, flicking a white hair back into her purple, velvet turban with one deep carmine nail and drinking the Virgin Mary she kept at her desk from nine to noon. At noon, it was transformed into a Bloody Mary – apart from the enormous consumption of tomato juice, Ivanka liked to say that celery was the only vegetable she ate.
‘Oh, and olives in my Martinis,’ she might add naughtily.
Of course, those had been different times but fun times, Cari thought, wistfully. She missed Ivanka, who had been fun and would have told all the Random Capitals, jumping-on-the-latest-bandwagon and I-don’t-want-my-book-edited-at-all people to get stuffed. In that precise language.
Now she turned to the first manuscript. Whoever had sent it in had clearly followed all the publishing rules perfectly. It was neatly and beautifully printed on one side of A4 paper, double spaced in a decent-sized typeface.
A good start, Cari thought approvingly. She’d get the first few pages read as her dinner cooked.
She started to read but the microwave pinging, telling her that her meal was ready, went unheeded, because Cari Brannigan was lost in the world of another person’s mind. In this world, she was reading about a seventy-year-old woman looking back at a life full of events, and yet – due to something still hidden from the reader – she was still wondering what was the point of it all, and Cari felt the same thrill of excitement, the same sensation of the hairs standing up on the back of her neck, as she had when she read John Steele’s first novel.
She flicked back to the accompanying letter.
A.J. Sharkey was the name of the author. The letter didn’t imply whether the person was male or female, but Cari was sure this was written by a woman and she was just as sure that she was reading something very, very special.
It was the night of the dreaded dinner party at Jeff’s, so she could tell him tonight she decided.
She wondered should she wash her hair – she felt too tired to do so, but maybe she’d make a bit of an effort.
It would be rude not to.
At seven, Cari glumly rang the doorbell at Jeff and Anna’s house. She’d prefer to be going hang-gliding or even parachuting without a parachute at this exact moment. All she could think about was that she hated blind dates more than anything – with the possible exception of dates in general. She didn’t need a man. No woman did and why they thought they did …
The door opened at that moment and instead of it being Jeff with his normal hangdog, exhausted expression on his face, it was someone who looked absolutely nothing like Jeff. This door-opener dude was different and, Cari had to admit, hot.
While Jeff was tall and might have once been called rangy before he put on weight from too many energy drinks and chocolate bars in work to help him stay awake because of baby-induced sleep deprivation, this tall guy was rangy and positively sexy. He had stubble on a lean face that wasn’t metrosexual designer stubble; he looked as if his jeans were worn in all the right places because he’d worn them in rather than because some fashion shop had sold them to him that way; and he had slanting, assessing eyes that were taking every inch of her in with frank appreciation.
Cari felt momentarily jolted and wondered if she had come to the wrong house.
‘This is Jeff’s, isn’t it?’ she said almost rudely, thinking that Jeff could have moved and not mentioned it because he talked of nothing else but the baby. A burst water main or a gas explosion might have demolished his row of terraced houses, and Jeff might easily have forgotten to mention it what with the discussion over sleeping schedules and how an extra half an hour had somehow been added on to the baby’s sleep.
‘Yeah, this is Jeff’s,’ said the hunk in a deep voice that was not unlike Jeff’s but held more promise, more interest. ‘You must be Cari?’
He smiled a smile that she was sure normally worked magic and had women falling over to divest themselves of all their clothes, earrings and morals, but Cari was so not in the mood for any of his male hotness.
She had done the men thing. Men were shits. One had just messed up her career and one had left her at the altar.
She gave him her deadly glittering smile that said: ‘Watch it, sucker.’
If Jojo had been around, she would have recognised the smile. So would Cari’s boss, Jeff, but Mr Hotness merely smiled back, not realising for a moment the danger he was in.
‘Lovely to finally meet you,’ he said. ‘I’m Conal.’
Yup, Jeff’s brother. The allegedly nerdy scientist one. Jeff really had got that one wrong.
Cari decided it was time to let Mr Hot know there would be no games, morals-dropping or, indeed, clothes-dropping, going on around here. Despite all that, she was glad she’d washed her hair after all. She wasn’t dead.
‘I’m Cari, the work colleague who is supposed to take pity on you and show you around the sites of Dublin since you’ve been gone so long,’ she said, icily sarcastic.
‘Hello, lovely Cari,’ Conal said, opening the door wider and letting her in. ‘It’s lovely to meet new people and be insulted,’ he added, without a hint of having been insulted.
He sounded amused, to Cari’s utter annoyance. Why had she washed her hair? ‘I’m sorry we haven’t met before. I can’t account for that,’ he said.
‘I can,’ said Cari chirpily. ‘Jeff did keep saying he had this loser brother and I haven’t being dying to meet you, so that’s why we haven’t met before. I ran out of excuses …’
Jeff’s brother laughed and Cari scowled, finding it hard to hide how weirdly jolted she was by the sight of this extremely attractive man. She hadn’t liked the look of a man for years. Three to be exact.
And yet this … this flirtbag had grabbed her attention.
It was pure animal lust, she decided.
A woman’s needs and all that. And those needs must be kept under control.
Yet, she liked the way he wore his jeans and how his shirt fitted across broad shoulders. She even liked the way he’d batted her own rudeness nicely back to her and how he was still admiring her, despite her rudeness.
She mentally shook her head, told herself that all men were lying cheating scum and she must have lost contr
ol of her senses for a moment. Plus, he was Jeff’s brother and dating the boss’s siblings was probably on some ‘do not do’ list somewhere.
Jeff appeared with baby sick on his sweater shoulder, arms outstretched, a smile on his face and bags under his eyes.
‘You two have met, fabulous,’ he said. ‘Sorry I didn’t get the door but Jasmine was crying.’
‘Yes,’ said Cari gravely. ‘Conal and I have met and have taken full account of each other—’
‘And you were right, bro,’ said Conal. ‘She is fantastically marvellous and spiky and I’m not going to mention the fact that she was recently shafted at work.’
Jeff went puce, but Cari laughed. Mr Flirty didn’t disappoint.
‘I sort of like your brother already,’ she said to her boss. ‘He’s sort of like you but with a sharper, bitchier edge. Pity he’s not so good-looking, though, and such a loser as well as a nerd. I mean, blind dating …? Really? I thought the only reason Irish guys went to Paris was in order to have exquisite French chicks surgically attached to them.’
She thought she heard Conal snort as they all moved into the kitchen, him close behind her. Finally, he bent down and murmured into her ear. ‘I didn’t come here to be insulted, you know,’ he said in a voice that said so much more.
‘Oh no?’ whispered Cari back. ‘Where do you normally go to be insulted?’
‘I’ll show you later if you really want to know,’ Conal murmured. ‘My place. I’m still moving in but I’ve got a king-size bed so it’s a fabulous place for insults to be thrown.’
‘Hell will freeze over,’ murmured Cari back, still smiling at Jeff. ‘I assume the king-size bed is for the king-sized ego? Plus, I only date clever guys who read actual books instead of stare at petri dishes all day.’
‘You could make an exception for me,’ Conal said. ‘I’m house-trained.’ The slanting, assessing eyes were laughing now.
‘You big nerdy boys all say you’re house-trained, but you’re not,’ Cari shot back. ‘It’s simply not possible. Not enough brain cells directed towards the real world.’
