Since returning to Glasgow Willie had been staying gratis in a suite at an achingly hip boutique hotel, having called in a favour from the manager, a friend from the good old, bad old days. The hotel had been converted from a church, and was perched at the summit of one of the city's many hill streets. Willie had the top floor belfry suite. Jane had slept with him for the first time there, afterwards lying naked on the bed, staring over the city through the long picture window, listening to Willie in the shower belting out a passable rendition of ‘O Sole Mio’. Closing one eye, she traced the skyline with a finger. The sex had been good. She revised her assessment. Really good.
Willie moved into her flat the following month. His old friend's largesse having run out, it was either Jane's place or his old room in his mum's bungalow in the wasteland of the suburban Southside. Jane insisted he move in with her. It was only temporary, he said, while he waited for a cheque from LA. Aye, as soon as that big boy landed he'd be out of her hair. Her long, red, sweet-smelling hair. He fancied renting one of those penthouse apartments on the river; sure it wasn't Malibu, but it'd do him nicely. In the meantime the living arrangements would help both of them since she'd be right there when he needed to ask her a question about the adaptation.
Jane sat at her desk in the wide bay window, absorbed in the latest chapter of her new novel. Her fingers flew over the keys, propelling her protagonist, the spirited and resourceful Darsie Baird, to another dramatic climax in her conflict with the brutal Tony Douglas, mean-spirited owner of the umbrella factory. Darsie and Tony had been going at it like cat and dog for thirty-six chapters. Just one more to go, though even now Jane wasn't sure if finally they'd end up together, or killing each other.
A flurry of keystrokes and the penultimate chapter was done. She reread the last page. She could never trust her judgement when the ink was wet; somehow the words always shone when freshly summoned. They had to stand the morning after test before she knew if they were truly working. There was nothing more to do now but to push on. After a cup of tea. She closed the laptop lid and went to boil the kettle.
Willie's desk shared the space in the bay, arranged to face hers, their ends touching. It was a hulking Victorian thing in mahogany that he'd put in storage when he left for LA, and which she'd helped lug up two flights of stairs. She could still feel the twinge in her back. Its inlaid leather surface was crowned with an ancient typewriter—a Royal portable, like Hemingway's, he'd informed her as he stroked the burnished keys. Flanking the typewriter were two neat towers of paper about equal height; one of them pristine and blank, the other filled with his growing adaptation of Happy Ending.
Over the last couple of months Jane had observed Willie at work, seated upright in his button-backed Captain's chair, methodically feeding fresh pages into the mouth of his typewriter, filling them up to the accompaniment of its machine-gun clatter. When he made a mistake, instead of whiting out the error he would rip out the entire page and begin anew. If it doesn't come out right, he'd explained, then it was a clue to a deeper malaise. He was an automaton, as mechanically relentless as his choice of writing tool. Jane enjoyed the steady rattle and clank. It made her feel as if she was one of those feisty girl reporters in a 1940s New York newsroom, or in Paris, an Alice B. Toklas to his Old Man of the Sea.
For now the room was quiet. Willie had taken himself off for a run in Kelvingrove Park, which he did, regularly, every afternoon at three o'clock. Turned out he was something of a worshipper of the body beautiful, and a practitioner of some arcane martial art that sounded to her like Wang Chung, but which she knew couldn't be right since they were an ‘80s New Wave band. He had set up a punch-bag in the box room and the sound of whacking and grunting had become part of the background. To the neighbours it must have seemed like she'd installed an S&M dungeon, but apart from the occasional curious look on the stairwell no one complained.
On the wall above Willie's empty chair hung two framed film posters from projects he had written. Their design was similar: a montage of exploding cars, a square-jawed hero flanked by half-naked girls, framed by a pair of woman's bare legs in the foreground, akimbo over the scene. Sub-James Bond stuff. Jane had been staring at the posters for a week before she realised they were for the same movie; just that one of them was in French. Fatal Payback was Vengeance Fatale, a Kurt Salazar film. She hadn't heard of Kurt Salazar or seen either version, but that was OK since Willie had loads of DVDs.
She sat down with her cup of tea and flipped open the laptop. Inserting a break to make a fresh page, she typed the final chapter number.
37.
Endings were tricky. Even this late in the novel, with the weight of the preceding narrative pressing like dam-waters, she hesitated. A sip of tea always helped marshal her thoughts.
As she drank she reflected on the significance of the moment, for here she was on the threshold of finishing the novel. A spike of mischievous pleasure surged through her and she swiped her phone from where it lay on the desk next to the umbrella plant. It was a childish impulse, one she'd probably regret later, but right now the urge was irresistible. She scratched the itch and dialled.
‘Jane?’
He picked up on the first ring, she noted, taking undue pleasure in his surprised tone. He sounded uncertain, as well he should; they hadn't spoken for almost nine months. As part of a set of stipulations, she'd insisted that there be no contact between them while she wrote the new novel, though she had been surprised—and perhaps a little chagrined—when he'd caved in without so much as a ‘merde!’
‘I'm starting the final chapter,’ she said. ‘You'll have the manuscript by the end of next week.’
‘It's about bloody time.’
‘Ah, Tom, as ever my little ray of sunshine.’ She began to spin round in her swivel chair, free as a kid on a roundabout, delighted at the rise she was eliciting from him. ‘Well, moan all you like, I've never been this—-’
‘—-Annoying?’ he interrupted.
She brought her carefree circling to a sudden stop. He could still get to her. ‘Happy. You bastard. Happy.’
The line went quiet and for a moment she wondered if the call had dropped. She was about to ask if he was still there when his voice drawled from the phone again.
‘So, one more chapter …’ he began.
‘Yup.’
‘… And we never have to see each other again.’
Did she detect a note of regret? Not after all this time, surely. Most likely it was atmospheric conditions on the line. But he was right—there would be no reason for them to stay in touch.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Better get writing then. A bientôt, Jane.’
See you soon? Didn't he understand that this was far more final than his expression allowed. At some point next week she'd hit ‘Send’ and deposit the manuscript in his in-box and that would be that. Finis.
‘Au revoir, Tom.’
She stabbed a finger at the touch screen and ended the call. He was right about one thing—better get writing. She couldn't agree more.
She had begun writing the follow-up to Happy Ending with indecent haste, in the full knowledge that when she completed it she would have fulfilled her contract to Tristesse Books and be rid of Tom and his smug, bristly face. Forever. And this time she'd laid down conditions. She refused to have any communication with him during the writing period to discuss her progress. Moreover, she refused to let him give notes on the new novel once submitted. She had expected him to rebuff that one with particular venom, but instead he'd acquiesced at the first time of asking, conceding with a brusque, ‘Fine, whatever makes you happy.’
All she had to do was finish the damn thing.
As they'd talked on the phone an idea about how to launch into the final chapter had entered her head, but now as her fingers hovered over the keyboard the words wouldn't fall into place. She screwed up her face, chasing the feeling like she was swatting at butterflies. After a minute or two of increasingly frustrated attempts to re
member, she tapped down the lid and went to make another cup of tea.
The conversation with Tom had unsettled her. In retrospect it had been a mistake. There had been no need for them to talk at all, and she certainly wouldn't be calling him again. A second hot cup of tea joined the first, which was still gently steaming.
She wiggled her fingers, trying to transform irritation with Tom into creative calm. She was a virtuoso preparing to perform. An Olympian in the blocks. She could do this. She had done this—for thirty-six chapters straight, without a hitch. She didn't buy into all that crap about waiting for the Muse to strike. You showed up at your desk every day and trusted that she'd be there. For Jane writing was as simple as that old nugget of advice: apply posterior to chair.
The cursor winked on the blank page.
There was a force-field over the keyboard, that was it. What else could be preventing her from touching it? It wasn't as if she didn't know what to write. Right? So what happens next?
The cursor was a large, dark oblong. Like a freshly dug grave.
OK, this was ridiculous. Write your way into the chapter. Just write anything. First thing that comes into your head. Doesn't even have to make sense. As soon as you put something down you'll break this hoodoo. Don't talk about a hoodoo, you'll jinx yourself. Oh great, now she'd invoked a hoodoo and a jinx.
The cursor convulsed like a twitching eye.
Jane slammed down the laptop lid. The leaves on her umbrella plant trembled. She drummed her fingers on the desk. A walk. That's what she needed. What happens next? After a walk it would all be perfectly clear. Now who was it said ‘we think at walking-pace’? Someone very wise, she suspected, then remembered with a pang who had given her the sage advice. Dammit.
An hour later Jane found herself flicking idly through a rack of vintage clothes. Mini, midi, maxi. She was pretty sure that was the Latin phrase for ‘I came, I saw, I bought an inappropriate skirt.’ Despite what it looked like, she absolutely, definitely wasn't in her favourite store, avoiding work on her novel by embarking on a wholly unnecessary pursuit of a frivolous item of clothing. Ooh, nice jacket. Kind of a Nehru thing going on round the collar and the colour was amazing; it reminded her of a livid sunset over a wasteland of discarded shopping trolleys.
The jacket was the kind of thing Darsie Baird, the main character in her new novel, would wear, and she made a mental note to go back and find a place to insert it. But not now. She'd go back later. Right now there was some serious browsing to accomplish.
And it was an accomplishment. Hell, some people did this for a living: stylists, fashion writers, personal shoppers. This was work, dammit. OK, not for her, but someone in the store must be working and she was standing quite close to them.
Research! That's what this was. Writing was a lot like playing dolls’ houses. You got to design the rooms, populate them and dress everyone down to the last detail. Clothes could say a lot about your character and her world. There was the obvious stuff: a seamed stocking for a vamp or tweed for a country lady. But there was more to it than that. An undone button in anything written before 1920 spoke of seething passion. Awoman putting something in her pocket in an Austen novel was a big deal—it being her only truly private place outside of her head.
There was a rustle of clothing from the back of the store. Jane looked round to see a young woman emerge from the changing room. For a moment she wondered if the velvet curtains concealed a time machine, since the woman appeared to have walked straight out of 1950. She wore a full-skirted berry-red dress nipped in at the waist, a scarf tied movie-star style around her head and a pair of classic big-frame Dior sunglasses. She sashayed past, high heels clicking on the wooden floor.
‘Hi, Jane.’
‘Hi,’ replied Jane automatically. Very occasionally—OK, twice—readers would recognise her in the street and stop to tell her how much they liked her book, but this didn't feel like a fan encounter. For one thing, Red didn't stop to chat, but instead her heels carried her past the clothes racks and out of the shop. The bell sounded a merry ding as the door closed behind her. Jane frowned. Red looked so familiar, like a distant cousin she hadn't seen in years, but she couldn't place her. Great outfit, though. Maybe she'd put Darsie in that instead.
Tom punched his PIN into the cash machine. Internal mechanisms grumbled like a reluctant parent and the screen flashed its decision.
INSUFFICIENT FUNDS.
Letting rip with a sibilant French oath and thumping the keypad, he retrieved his useless card and, with as much dignity as he could muster, struck off past the line of people waiting to use the cash machine. Roddy tripped at his heels.
‘So, does this mean I'm buying the donuts again?’
Tom cast him a dark look and watched in puzzled silence as Roddy flipped up the furry hood on his coat so that it completely covered his head. It wasn't raining, for a change, and the city was experiencing that most unusual of phenomena, an actual season. Instead of the indistinguishable mush of weather that passed for a climate, the last week had been discernibly summery.
‘I don't get it,’ said Roddy's muffled voice from deep within the hood. ‘Jane Lockhart made you a small fortune. I don't know anyone who's blown as much money as you have in such a short time. And I know people at the Royal Bank of Scotland.’
Tom refused to engage with Roddy's leading remark, especially since he had a point. It had been more than a year since Happy Ending hit the bestseller charts. The sales numbers were strong, but not astronomical. After all, Jane Lockhart was ‘literary fiction’, not ‘vampire romance’. The book had been profitable, but to sell those big numbers the retailers had demanded huge discounts and marketing bungs, which had eaten into his share.
Then he'd taken the remainder of the money and gone on a spending spree, acquiring three debuts within the space of a month, one of them in a competitive auction against three multinational publishers with deep pockets. As soon as he submitted the winning bid he knew he'd paid too much. Ah well, there was always a chance that Earnest Shards would find an audience. Hey, who wouldn't love a star-crossed gay love story set in the world of stained-glassmaking in Renaissance Florence?
Tom could hold off no longer. He had to know. ‘Why do you have your hood up?’
‘I don't want to be recognised.’
That was not a reasonable answer. ‘You're an English supply teacher at a state-assisted secondary school in suburban Glasgow.’
Roddy grasped the cords that adjusted the hood and tugged them sharply, sealing himself inside. ‘Exactly.’
Tom's battered green Peugeot limped into a space on the crowded street outside Tristesse Books. The gearbox gave one last tortured whine and the engine shuddered into silence. He climbed out and slammed the door. The catch was broken and there was a knack to closing it properly. Which was to slam it. Repeatedly.
‘I can give you an hour of secretarial services,’ said Roddy emerging from the passenger side clutching a warm bag of Krispy Kremes, ‘then I've got Great Expectations in Maryhill.’
Even as the barbed quip formed on Tom's lips Roddy was raising a finger.
‘Don't,’ he wagged. ‘Just don't.’
There was a rumble of tyres against cobbles and the two men swivelled their heads to see the driverless Peugeot roll gently into the car in front. Bumper lay against bumper like a tired drunk resting his head on a friend.
‘You should probably get that fixed,’ said Roddy.
‘Yeah,’ said Tom with epic disinterest, already turning his back to punch the code into the door entry system.
‘I don't care what you think. I'm telling you, that's not an opening chapter, it's an ice age. C'est une époque!’
Tom's voice shook the thin office walls as he harangued Nicola Ball, flaying the latest draft of her novel while simultaneously sorting through the mail, making one pile for bills and another for final demands. If he was honest his foul mood was largely down to the parlous state of the company's finances rather than Nicola's inappro
priate semicolon on page eight.
Her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘You can't talk to me like that,’ she said, her voice quivering. ‘I was voted one of Scotland's foremost novelists under the age of thirty …’
He brandished the manuscript. ‘And that's why I won't allow this piece of crap to be published with your name on it.’
She pursed her lips and placed her hands on her hips. ‘You know what, Tom, you're even more of a bastard since you broke up with Jane Lockhart.’
Roddy stuck his head round the door and chimed in. ‘That's exactly what I said.’
‘Hey,’ Tom snapped. ‘We didn't split up. Because we were never together. It was a falling out. Got it? And, do we need to have another chat about your eavesdropping, Roddy?’
Roddy banged the wall. ‘Flimsy partition. Loud Frenchman.’ He sighed. ‘Now I am bound by the man-code to take your side in this, but what the hell, Tom? Seriously, what were you thinking? You changed the title of a book without consulting its author.’
‘You changed her title?!’ said Nicola, shaking her head in horrified disbelief.
‘I know,’ said Roddy. ‘Right?’
‘No wonder she dumped him.’
‘Uh. I am in the room. And she didn't dump me. Again, we were never together.’ He glowered at Roddy. ‘What about the man-code?’
‘Yes, yes, I know. I suppose we could put your behaviour down to an aberration—a temporary loss of faculties as a result of having sex on a regular basis with the luscious Jane.’
‘You think she's luscious?’ inquired Nicola.
‘Luscious, foxy, a little bit naughty.’
‘Oh.’
Tom watched Roddy slowly comprehend.
‘Not that I fancy her,’ said Roddy quickly. ‘Not my type. My type's much more like … um … really looking forward to your book launch, Nicola. Have you seen the venue? It's a bus garage in Bridgeton. It's going to be a swanky affair.’ He paused. ‘I'm pretty confident that's the first time “swanky” and “Bridgeton” have been used in the same sentence.’
Not Another Happy Ending Page 8
