by Jo Watson
“I mean, to be honest, it doesn’t really surprise me. I’ve been down this road before with other authors,” she said, all sharp-tongued.
“What road?” I asked.
She sighed. “It’s more common than you think.”
“What is?”
“The ‘one-hit wonder.’ The author who’s only good for one book. I suspected it, though; you didn’t strike me as someone who had a lot of stories in you. I guess it’s par for the course, really.”
“I beg your pardon?” My jaw almost hit the floor. She was confirming my worst fear out loud: my first book had been an accident and I didn’t have another one in me.
“I guess not everyone can be a Steve King—that reminds me . . . Natasha!” she called out loudly to one of her assistants and they came skidding in. “Please call Steve’s agent and remind her of our late luncheon tomorrow.” Natasha nodded and then skidded out the door again. Daphne turned back to me. “Now, Steve—he has a lot of stories in his head.”
“I . . . I . . . have a lot of stories in my head, too,” I stuttered defensively. It didn’t sound very convincing though.
She chuckled. It was very witch-around-a-caldron-y. “It doesn’t seem like it.” She was as acerbic as a sulphuric-acid-soaked lemon.
“I do. I have a lot of stories and I am not a one-hit wonder. I have more to tell, more to say, more to . . .” I stopped talking when she rolled her eyes. This gesture was like a hot knife into my buttery gut. Her disbelief in me was evident and she wasn’t even trying to hide it. Well, I was going to prove her wrong, I was going to . . . to . . .
And then her chuckle turned into a laugh.
“What?” I asked, stepping backwards as if she was about to thrust a toad at me and curse me for all eternity.
She shook her head. “I’m just having déjà vu.”
“Uh . . . why?” I asked.
“So many writers have stood there—” she pointed at the floor and I looked down—“and said the exact thing you’re saying now. Oh well, another one bites the dust, as they say.”
“What?”
“Of course, you’ll be liable to pay the advance back, not me. And I’ll still keep my fifteen percent, naturally,” she said.
“But, but . . . wait. There’s got to be a solution, a—”
“The only solution is you producing a book, which is clearly not going to happen.”
“It is!” I was frantic now, even though I didn’t believe what I was saying.
“Well, where is it, then?” she asked. “Where is this amazing bestseller that is going to take the world by storm?” Her eyes mocked me and judged me.
“I have it. I have it.” The lie tumbled out of me.
“Where?” And then she started doing something that sent me over the edge. Pushed me too far. She started flapping through the papers on her desk. “Where could it be?” She lifted some papers and pretended to look under them. “Nope. Nothing,” she said sarcastically. “What about here?” She flung open one of her drawers and looked inside. “Not there either!”
And then it hit me.
Hard! So damn hard.
A moment of pure clarity. Clarity so great I felt like I was standing on a beach looking into the depths of a tropical lagoon and seeing the tiniest shell on the bottom of the seabed. But this moment of clarity was also peppered with total and utter insanity. I folded my arms again and made eye contact with her.
“I actually am writing something.” I stared at her, trying to look as confident as possible, even though internally I was drowning in quicksand.
She pulled her small glasses down to the tip of her pointed nose and pursed her lips together. Wrinkles appeared around her mouth, making it look just like a puckered asshole.
“And dare I ask what that is?” she asked.
“It’s a book.” I said the only words I could think of at that moment, because I was disintegrating under her gaze.
She scoffed. A look of vague amusement mixed with something I can only guess was disdain caused the corners of her lips to
twitch.
“A book?” she repeated flatly.
I nodded. “A book.”
“What book?” she asked.
“It’s set in the 1940s, in South Africa.” I blurted it out before I had a moment to really think about what I was doing. “The apartheid law and mixed marriages law have just been passed by the national government. A young couple in love are ripped apart because one of them is white and the other is not. It’s Romeo and Juliet in apartheid South Africa.” I stopped talking abruptly and then almost slapped my hand over my mouth. Had I really just said that? Out loud?
Something washed over her face; I wasn’t sure what it was. She lowered herself into her chair once more and then placed her hands on the desk in front of her. I looked down at her nails, the kind of nails that could really rip an aorta out if you weren’t careful.
“Tell me more,” she said slowly, now tapping her fingers on the polished wood.
“More? Uh . . . yes,” I said nervously. “Our young couple have fallen in love during a tumultuous time.” My mind raced, trying to remember history class. “Tensions between white and non-white South Africans are mounting. But, amongst all this hate and animosity, and against all the odds, they’ve found each other. But they have to keep their love and relationship a secret from their parents, the police, society. Their story will be told through a series of intimate and beautiful love letters that they wrote each other.” I stopped talking and looked at her.
She stared straight back at me for a moment, and then her eyes flicked up, as if she was looking at something on the ceiling. I waited. She looked down at her desk again and drummed her fingers loudly. And then she looked up and started nodding.
“Have you written any of it yet?” she asked.
And then I too began to nod. I nodded before I’d even had a moment to process what I was about to do. “Yes,” I said feebly. I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of the letters.
“What is that?” She pointed her bony finger at the letter.
“I’ve been writing the letters on scraps of paper. Helps me connect with the characters more,” I said, hoping she bought this.
“I see.” She eyeballed me in a peculiar way. “Well, what are you waiting for? Read!”
I cleared my throat and looked down at the letter in my hand. A million thoughts tore through my mind. If she liked this idea, there was no taking it back. If she didn’t like it, then I still didn’t have a book. Something deep inside me started to throb.
I was about to jump straight over a line, here. A big line. But I couldn’t stop myself. There was just no holding me back. I jumped! I jumped and I ran so fast that, within seconds, I couldn’t even see the line anymore. The line was gone. The line was now a blurry smudge on the horizon of morality and sanity, and I was sprinting away from it.
CHAPTER 4
29 July, 1949
My love,
Last night, I dreamed of you again. I dreamed I was walking through an open field and I was looking for something. I didn’t know what it was, but I could sense how important it was that I found it. As if my life depended on it. I walked for hours, going round in circles, and then I saw you. The sun was illuminating your face, as if you were an angel, divine, and I knew, unequivocally, that you were what I’d been searching for. You smiled at me as I stood in the field, and suddenly it was night-time and you were the stars and the moon and everything that made the night sky bright and brilliant. And then everything started to go dim. The moonlight and stars lost their luster and started to fade, disappearing into the darkness.
I ran. I ran as fast as I could, chasing your light as it got further and further away from me. I reached out to grab it, the light, but it was gone. It disappeared into the blackness as if it had been swallowed up by a giant mouth. Suddenly, all your light had been extinguished and everything was dark. I walked around, bumping into things, falling down, scrambling back up to my fe
et as I tried to find you again . . . but it was pitch black and you weren’t there. And then I woke up into another nightmare.
I woke up to the news that our love has been made illegal, and now I am lost again in the darkness, even though the sun is shining. The whole day I’ve felt like I’ve been trying to catch you again. As if you are millions of grains of sand slipping through my fingers. I feel like I’ve let go of a balloon and I’m watching it soar up, disappearing into the sky and, no matter how much I run, or how high I climb, it is always just out of my reach. That’s how it feels today. It feels like I’m losing you, like you’re being pulled away from me by something that I cannot control. I cannot stop it.
Edith, I cannot lose you. You are the best thing in my life, you are my everything, and no one can tell me that loving you is wrong. Because loving you is the most right thing I have ever done. It is the only thing that has ever made sense to me. Because, without you, my life is senseless and dark and I am lost in a starless night and I will wander around forever looking for the thing that I need in order to breathe.
I hope we see each other soon. I miss you . . .
You, me, forever.
CHAPTER 5
I looked up after reading the letter and—oh my God—I took a step back. What the hell was that? What the hell was happening to her face? Was that a . . . a . . . I gasped in utter shock as a tear seemed to snake out of her eye and trickle down her cheek. It carved a white line in her too-orange foundation. The tear was watery in color and I was surprised to see she didn’t cry drops of blood harvested from her former clients. I heard a sniffle in the doorway and looked. Three of her meerkats were standing there, tears streaming down their faces.
PPPfffffgghhhhhh! One of Daphne’s assistants took out a tissue and blew her nose loudly.
“That is . . . That is—” she stumbled and stuttered over her words—“the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
The others all nodded in agreement.
“Read me a letter that she wrote to him,” my agent said, snapping her fingers at me.
“I . . . I . . . haven’t written any of those yet,” I lied again. As far as I could see, all these letters had been written by the same person—him.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Uh . . . I’m writing his story first, and then I’ll write hers,” I added, suddenly feeling terrible for what I had just done.
“Well, they better be as good as his,” she said.
I nodded. “They will be,” I assured her, with a confidence that I didn’t really have.
“Because if they are . . .” she trailed off and looked down at her desk again, deep in thought. “Yes! Yes!” She raised her head and started nodding. “I can see it. It’s clear. Million-copy seller! New York Times and USA Today lists. Goddammit, a fucking movie deal. Netflix, even. ‘Romeo and Juliet, set in South Africa.’? It will be more heart-wrenching and devastating than your first book. Becca Thorne is the queen of heartbreak. You will make the whole world weep. God, if your first book made you money, this one is going to make us a fuckload!”
I stared at my agent. Her face was red, flushed with a kind of feverish excitement. It was a strange, dangerous kind of excitement. The kind of excitement that told me there was trouble coming. And there was . . .
She snapped her fingers at one of her meerkats. “Get Lighthouse Books on the phone.”
“Wait. Wait!” I held my hands up in panic; the gravity of what I’d just done was starting to sink in. And then the guilt. This wasn’t my letter to read! “What are you doing?”
“I’m telling them what a bestseller you have on your hands. Maybe we can push them for more money. Foreign rights—this needs to be in all the languages; audio—”
“Wait!” I cut her off, a cactus of panic forming in my throat.
She looked at me blankly. “Wait, what?”
“Uh . . . well, don’t you think it’s a bit premature to call them . . . ? I mean, uh, I don’t even have . . . I mean, it’s not like I—”
She held her hand up and I stopped talking. “How many letters have you written?” she asked.
I shook my head frantically. “Not many.”
“Then why is your pocket bulging?” She pointed at my jean pocket, the one the note had come out of. “Or has your one hip gotten fat?” God, she was a bitch! “I want Lighthouse Books on the phone . . . now!” she called out again.
“Stop! Stop!” I yelled.
Her head whipped up and she glared at me like she’d never glared before. “What is wrong with you?”
“I can’t do this,” I blurted out. “It’s all wrong. I shouldn’t have done this. It was a terrible mistake and I regret it and . . . I . . .”
Suddenly the phone rang and we both looked down at it. She started reaching for the receiver, her taloned claw moving towards it as if in slow motion. I made my move for the phone too, as quickly as I could, but I was too late. She grabbed the receiver and lifted it to her lips, and then, I was sure, she snarled at me.
“Belinda, dahhling!” she gushed into the phone. Belinda was my editor. “I’ve got great news for you! Really great. Terrific!”
I threw myself into my apartment and straight down on to my couch. My body ached, all the way from my toes to the hair follicles on the top of my head. Since leaving my agent’s office, the enormity of the situation I now found myself in had been hitting me in steady waves. As I’d reached my building, the waves had picked up pace until a massive tidal wave almost knocked me off my feet. And by the time I was sticking my keys into my front door, the earth felt like it was shaking below my feet, as if a meteorite had crashed down. I was teetering on the precipice of total and utter mad catastrophe.
Shit! I was in such trouble.
Not “big trouble,” like when you wake up in your bed in the middle of the night, drenched in a layer of cold sweat and gasping from the stabbing pains in your chest. I’m talking about the kind of trouble where you wake up in a jail cell in the middle of the night, drenched in a layer of cold sweat and gasping from the stabbing pains in your chest. Because I was breaking the law. I was officially a law breaker and I was about to commit the worst crime in the publishing industry: plagiarism.
As a writer, you always worry about accidentally committing such an act. You fear that one of the lines you write might actually not be your own, that perhaps you’ve read it somewhere else and it sank in so deeply that you thought it was yours. But this was not like that. At all. In fact, this was like me saying that, just because my ass was four times larger than it should be, I looked like Kim Kardashian. Let me assure you at this point in our story together that I do not look like Kim Kardashian—or any Kardashian, for that matter. My pale European skin, given to me by an Irish grandmother, which boasts far too many freckles when the sun comes out, and my mop of bright red hair, given to me by a very gingery uncle named Teddy, were definitely testament to this. God, my brain was rambling, my thoughts were swirling and . . .
I needed a drink. What was I saying? I needed six. I cursed the fact that I didn’t consume alcohol, and wished I did in this moment.
I lay back on my couch and looked up at my ceiling. I had a real dilemma on my hands, literally. I was holding a dilemma in my sweaty, plagiarist paws right then. I raised my hands to my face and looked at the letters. What on earth was I meant to do now? The ball was rolling. Daphne (the second esquire) had made sure of that when she’d called my publisher and promised a literary masterpiece of epic, maybe even award-winning proportions. I’d wanted to throw up as she’d said that, but what was I meant to do? Psychically pry the phone from her claws? Tell them both I’d experienced a terrible lapse of sanity and that actually I was a liar and there was no book, and probably (definitely) wouldn’t be one?
Balls were rolling alright! Like a bowling ball skidding down a slippery alley, ready to collide with the pins at the bottom and send them flying. Well, I felt like one of those pins right now, and I was just waiting for the ball to
smash into me.
I sat up quickly on the couch and very shakily put the letters down on the coffee table in front of me. On my rose quartz coffee table, to be specific. Another expensive item I’d bought that I didn’t really bloody need. But I’d read a book about crystals, some “woo-woo hoo-hoo” thing about mystic energies and whatnot and so forth, etcetera. It had said that rose quartz was very calming and brought love, tranquility and peace into the home. At the time, I’d needed peace. I hadn’t gotten it, though. All I’d gotten was a massive dent in my credit card.
I began to fan the letters out, smoothing them down with my hands and running my fingers over them, taking in their textures, until . . .
My fingertips came into contact with something else entirely. Something smooth. I pulled it out and took a closer look. There, among all the worn and tattered letters, was a sealed envelope. I turned it over in my hands and looked at the back of it. I could see it had never been opened. I looked at the writing on the front; it was completely different to the other writing. This writing was more elaborate and feminine. Curly, calligraphic lettering and swirly hearts.
I tried to open it carefully, but my hands were sweating so profusely that I seemed to be leaving a wet, sticky stripe across it. I finally managed to open the envelope and delicately removed the letter inside. It was perfect. Like it had been trapped in a time capsule. Untouched, pristine. I unfolded it gently and looked at the frilly, cursive handwriting, and then started to read.
CHAPTER 6
20 September, 1949
Please ignore the letter I sent you last week. I didn’t mean anything I said in it. Father forced me to write it. I tried to refuse him, but couldn’t. He held me down at my desk for hours until I wrote it. It killed me to write those words. It pained me to say the things I said about our love and relationship, because none of it is true.
