The Glass Tower

by Gregg Dunnett

  "Well..." Becky seemed to think for a long time. "It's a little hard to explain. But I’ve been thinking that…" She hesitated, and Julia could almost see her, in that little kitchen, biting her lip. "What I was thinking was – I mean if it was okay with you – because I know how busy you are. Erm."

  "Go on," Julia encouraged her. She was beginning to see where this might be going.

  "Well, what I was thinking was… would it be possible – maybe? For you to, I don't know, kind of have a read through? Because I’m a little bit stuck with how to finish it."

  "Oh, Becky!"

  "I'm sorry. I know that's a silly idea. You're like a national bestselling author and I'm just a nobody..."

  "Becky I'd love to. I really would."

  Julia held the phone to her chest for a moment. Then she put it back to her ear.

  "Really. I'm touched that you'd ask me. And I'm so... so proud of you. I mean, you're so young!"

  Julia was tempted to ask if it was any good, but she thought quickly. Probably it wouldn't be – how could it be, the girl had no life experience – and she would have to break this to her gently, that becoming a novelist was a lifelong calling. But everyone had to start somewhere, and it was wonderful that she had managed to get something down at all.

  "How much do you have? How many words?"

  "Seventy-five thousand words."

  "Crumbs!" The Glass Tower was only eighty thousand.

  When Julia went on, the enthusiasm in her voice was tempered.

  "And how long have you been writing it?"

  "Oh. I started not that long after we met,” Becky replied, and Julia thought to herself, it must be incredibly rushed. It could be truly awful.

  “But,” Becky went on, interrupting her thoughts. "Like I say I am a little bit stuck with the ending."

  Julia smiled indulgently.

  "Well, that's okay. I mean that happens when you’re learning. It's definitely a 'thing'. If you’d like to you could send it over to me now? Perhaps I can help?" Julia said. She felt more generous and more magnanimous than she had for many months. The thought occurred to her that this was happening because of her. Because of her generosity in setting up the bursary. She should mention it to James. She could almost see the headlines in the Times Literary Supplement. Marion would be impressed, too. Here Julia was, literally inspiring the next generation.

  "Well... okay, but not just yet. I want to have another read through first. I want to make sure I've got it as good as I possibly can," Becky said. Julia could hear the gratitude running through the wires.

  "Okay. Well, take care Becky. Just send it through when you’re ready."

  "Thanks, Julia. That means a lot. It really does."

  "Of course." Julia could feel her face aching from how much she was smiling.

  "Oh, and say hi to Rob for me."

  Becky laughed lightly. "Yeah I will."

  The line went dead. After a few moments, Julia stood up and walked over to her window, and she smiled out at the rooftops and towers of East London, and the creative crowd who lived somewhere out there.

  Twenty-Eight

  The next day, at nine o'clock sharp, Julia sat in her new office and began typing her own new novel into her new laptop computer. It didn't go as badly as it had down in Dorset – there was no paper to screw up this time – and though by midday she still hadn't written a word of the actual book, she had begun to connect ideas together. There were notes, whole sentences in some cases, that suggested directions she could take. At one o’clock she stopped, and went out for lunch. After, she walked the streets, absorbing the energy and the creativity of the city. She walked until she was quite lost, and then followed the maps app on her phone to get home. By then she was tired, so she got a take-away, washed it down with four more Dramadol and a bottle of wine, and then climbed into her freestanding bath.

  The next day she did the same.

  And the day after that. And for all of the next ten days. Slowly, a plan began to emerge from the mists of her mind. She had her sense of place for her story – her imaginary forest – and this had developed nicely. Now she sensed how the wind rustled the leaves of the trees. How the light filtered down through the random, ever-changing patterns of the canopy. She could even hear, when she closed her eyes, how the twigs below her feet would snap as she moved around. But more importantly she was also finding the shape of the story. It was complex – like a tetrahedron (although, she realised once she decided this, that she would need to check what actual shape a tetrahedron was). The point was, everything that had come together when she finally began to make significant progress on The Glass Tower was happening again. And it was tremendously exciting.

  It was so exciting she forgot all about Marion Brown, and her stupid kids and stupid pilot husband, and all the hopes she had harboured about the two of them browsing second-hand book shops together, or drinking coffee with the hipsters and gossiping about the publishing world. She didn't want that – she never had. What Julia wanted, what was truly exciting, was the feeling of having a live project.

  So now, Julia positively bounded out of bed every day – as much as her back would allow. She'd breakfast on coffee and Dramadol, and arrive at her computer fresh and excited.

  Then, just as she was really building momentum in her new project, she received an email that she’d never expected.

  Twenty-Nine

  The subject line simply said:

  Hello

  Julia almost didn't even look at it, since she got so much junk email these days. But something about the simplicity of the subject line drew her eye, and then she nearly fell out of her chair. The email was from Deborah Gooding. The Booker Prize-winning literary author Deborah Gooding. Julia held her breath as she read on.

  Dear Julia,

  I do hope this doesn't interrupt you at a crucial time, but I bumped into James McArthur the other night, and he mentioned you had made the move to London. That must be very exciting, and I'm sure you're very busy, but I just wondered if you fancied meeting up for coffee sometime?

  Please don't hesitate to say no if it's not convenient. But I understand we're actually quite close to each other.

  Regards

  Deborah

  P.S. I've just thought you might not actually remember me but we did speak at the launch of your wonderful book in Dorset! I hope you do.

  Julia read the email, then had to read it again, thinking it might be some sort of bizarre fraud. But no, it didn't seem to be. It really was from Deborah Gooding. Julia had been about to construct a sentence about how the rain funnelled down the channels of bark on the tallest tree in the forest, but all thought of that had now disappeared. Deborah Gooding wanted to meet her for coffee!

  Julia had to resist the temptation to reply right away – that might look too keen. Instead she tried, and abjectly failed, to work for another half an hour before abandoning that for the day and starting upon a first draft of her reply. Some time later she was happy with what she'd written.

  Dear Deborah

  How lovely to hear from you! [It didn't take long to decide upon this opening, but she agonised over whether to include the exclamation mark. In the end she decided to use it, after all, Deborah herself had used one –quite possibly with a knowing nod as to how the English language was becoming enfeebled by modern communications such as email and texting. If that were the case, in using one herself Julia would be acknowledging Deborah’s message and replying in kind. And if it wasn’t a coded message, then it did add a tone of lightness to the line. It wasn’t like she was using an emoji, Julia thought with a shudder.]

  As it happens I am quite involved with a new project at the moment, but I'm always up for taking a break. [Technically this wasn't true; when Julia was deeply involved in a project she rather preferred to avoid all human contact, but she felt it important to stress to Deborah both that she was working at the moment, yet not scare her off by implying this was something that could not or should not be inter
rupted.]

  A coffee and a catch-up would be terrific. [This felt a very tiny risk, as while Deborah's email had clearly stated the offer of coffee, conversation itself was only implied.]

  Perhaps the most difficult part of writing the note was deciding whether to recommend a time and date. She didn't want to be presumptive and suggest somewhere, but at the same time, if she was too vague Deborah might be distracted before she replied, and then Julia would be left in the awkward position of needing to send a further email to prompt whether the meeting was going to happen at all. It was safer to suggest a date now, and hope against hope that Deborah was available on the day she picked.

  It was midnight when Julia was finally happy with her email. She printed it out, and read it aloud to check for errors, and then finally she hit ‘send’.

  The next day, over breakfast, Deborah replied.

  Great! See you there.

  :–)

  Thirty

  Julia had two days until her meeting with Deborah, and although she had intended, and supposed, that she would simply continue on the same pattern of working in the mornings and walking in the afternoons, she found her focus was now lost. It wasn't something that concerned her at this point, but it was an irritant. She did her best, forcing herself to sit in her chair, at least typing something into her computer, even if it made little sense even to her. Perhaps, she wondered at some point, her musings on leaves, and how they cycled nutrients around the circle of the forest could be re-purposed, as a collection of poems, once the novel itself was finished. She made a mental note to ask Geoffrey what he thought of this. Whenever she next saw him.

  Of the new novel itself there was still little actual sign. Her sense of place was now well-developed. She knew the setting – a forest – and she knew how that place felt. It was green. Soft and squishy underfoot. Light dappled through a canopy that was high above, and there was the noise of wind rustling leaves. However, large sections of the book were as yet undecided. She didn't know anything of the story, had no sense of the plot. And so far, there were no actual characters. She had made several attempts to bring into being a cabin in the woods upon which to pin the story. But whenever she did so, the cabins she pictured in her mind were simply clichés – almost as if she were merely describing the photographs of cabins in the woods that she had found when searching on the internet for inspiration. And thus she fought to push them aside.

  Perhaps, she wondered, she ought to rent a cabin, somewhere? In some woods. She envisaged a clearing in the woods, in Norway, or Canada, and turned back to her computer to see if such a place existed. There were many, and many that were actively marketed towards writers in need of inspiration, quietness and solitude. But this gave her further cause for concern. Might that not indicate that it wasn’t just the cabins she had so far imagined, but the entire sense that she had developed? The woods? The leaves? All of it?

  Julia had her first wobble about the idea. She ran a bath and soaked in it, listening to Radio Four and drinking warm white wine (because she had forgotten to put it in the fridge). She offset this particular irritant by deciding to up her dose of Dramadol again, and this helped her go to bed reasonably happy.

  But the next morning – the morning she was to meet Deborah Gooding – she put all this out of her mind. Instead, she concentrated on choosing just the right look, one that she hoped would suggest an easy style that had been achieved with minimal thought or effort.

  She had wanted to arrive late, as if she had been hard at work drawing prose from the deep well of creativity inside her, but she didn't have the nerve for that. The next best thing was to arrive early and bag a decent table, and appear to be set up as if she were a regular customer – with a beautiful notebook and a trusty fountain pen (no cheap ballpoints please). So that was what she did.

  Annoyingly, the Real Beans independent café which she had suggested for a venue, had chosen that morning to be playing music rather loudly. Although it wasn't the volume that Julia took issue with, it was the style of the music, which she assumed was probably called something like Garage Hip Hop – certainly it contained audible cursing. It was too late by then to suggest another meeting place, and Julia wasn't about to confront the barista about it, with his black apron and his goatee beard. So instead she frowned at her notepad – leather bound, and pre-filled with notes that morning – the best lines she had managed from her forest project so far – written in her neatest handwriting. She hoped Deborah wouldn’t notice the music.

  They were to meet at ten o'clock. It was now 10.03. Julia felt alarm climbing over her body, like an army of spiders. What if she didn’t turn up? Would she have to email her, asking what had gone wrong? No, she couldn’t. She’d have to avoid her. Forever.

  But then she saw Deborah enter the café and look around as if searching for a familiar face. The spiders fell away, replaced by a gentle nervousness. For a few seconds Julia pretended not to have noticed her, and then she dropped her head down to her notebook and wrote:

  Leaves are the epitome of the trees, and yet they continue to spasm with incongruous...

  "Deborah!" Julia called out. She didn't close the book, but turned it around a little to face the other seat at the table, and placed her fountain pen on top. She got to her feet.

  "Julia, how nice to see you!" The two women stood close, but didn't touch. Neither seemed to know what to say next.

  "I wasn't interrupting?" Deborah asked.

  "Oh, no," Julia replied. “I was just…just doodling something!" She waved her hand at the notebook hopefully, but Deborah was already looking around at the café.

  "Do you come to work here often?" She seemed to be appraising the location for how suitable it might be, perhaps for her own work.

  "No... Well, yes," Julia swung between picking one answer or the other. "Sometimes. When the muse takes me." She cursed herself. The muse – could she have picked a more obvious cliché? She forced herself to adopt a damage limitation smile.

  "I think it's lovely. I like to work in coffee shops as well. I like the energy it gives me." Deborah smiled.

  Julia smiled back, her heart warming fast.

  "Can I get you a coffee?" Julia asked.

  Following the disaster in Costa, Julia had given a lot of thought to how to provide the drinks this time around. She could have sat at her table without ordering – but this might look awkward, and in the worst-case scenario it could lead to her being asked to vacate the table so that actual paying clients could use it. So she would need to order her drink first. But that meant that when Deborah arrived, one of them would be forced to queue for her drink. Was it appropriate for Julia to go? Having arrived first and chosen the table? Or should Deborah go, since she was the one who had suggested they meet in the first place?

  A possible solution had been to ensure they met in an establishment that offered table service. But this had its own risks. Julia was consistently poor at attracting the attention of waiting staff in restaurants and cafés. It was a problem that compounded itself, in a vicious circle of poor service. Her very efforts to attract waiting staff were hampered by how tentative they were, in recognition of how little she expected them to work. As if, knowing that any attempt to signal to a waitress would be ignored, she deliberately kept them inconspicuous, so that other diners were less likely to notice her embarrassment. More importantly, she had yet to come across a suitably bohemian café that actually offered table service. She didn't want to make it look like she sat around in tea shops with old ladies.

  But in the event, it was all very simple.

  "Allow me," Deborah said. "Can I get you a top up?"

  There was no queue, so Deborah was only gone for a moment before she returned and sat down opposite Julia. Perhaps, Julia considered, she had rather over-thought the problem.

  There was no awkwardness either, and the two of them fell into easy conversation, as if this were a regular meet-up of friends and equals. Granted, they chatted almost exclusively about Deborah
– Julia learnt how she had moved to London, from the Midlands, following the success of her third book, which had gone on to Booker success. And she hinted at how her life in the city wasn't the non-stop parade of parties and social events that she had dreamed of. At several points in the conversation Deborah asked Julia how she was faring, and how her work was progressing, but somehow the conversation soon switched back to Deborah. They talked about her bad knee, her frustration with the reading public and how unadventurous they were. They bemoaned the demise of good independent bookshops.

  In the end, Julia was slightly relieved when it was time for them to part. Although she warmly agreed to meet up again, she made a mental note to force the conversation more onto her terms next time around. But in summary, Julia thought as she walked home along the busy streets, it had been a good meeting – exactly what she’d envisaged when moving to London.

  Finally, her new life in the city as a literary figure had begun.

  Thirty-One

  After her meeting with Deborah, Julia fell back into her writing. Except it still wasn't writing in the sense of linking words of a story together. She felt like events had knocked her backwards – so that she was back to sensing shapes and colours. That's not to say she didn't try. She tested out characters, building out both male and female personages, like empty shells. Starting sometimes from the top down, and other times from the bottom up – hair colour, shoe size. And, finally injecting a personality. But what these virtual figures would do, and how they would interact with each other, remained opaque. A mystery.

  For the first time, this concerned Julia. While she did remember there had been this stage with The Glass Tower, it certainly hadn't lasted this long. And perhaps it hadn't happened quite like this. The tower in her previous book had presupposed an inhabitant, in the way a forest didn't. In her mind she had always had the story of Rapunzel (though no critics had ever made the connection, and now she wouldn’t dare reveal such a prosaic origin).