by Marian Keyes
‘Louisa,’ he said loudly, ‘as we have you here, we can’t find Miranda England’s contract. Any ideas?’
‘Hmmm?’ Louisa smiled vaguely. ‘Miranda What?’
‘Miranda England. Remember the most recent contract she signed? Do you know where you filed it?’
Another vague smile. ‘No, no idea.’
And even less interest, Jojo realized.
Then in came Mark, and the cluster of women parted to make way for him. ‘Congratulations,’ he kissed Louisa and looked down. ‘I see she has her mother’s looks.’
‘Would you like to hold her?’
Mark gingerly took Stella and cradled her in the crook of his arm, then smiled at her and said softly, ‘Hello, beautiful.’
Ohmigod. The piece of cake which had been on its way to Jojo’s mouth, paused, then returned to the paper plate.
‘I’m in love,’ Mark cooed, stroking Stella’s face with his finger and Louisa laughed and said, ‘I hate to break this up, but I’d better go.’
‘What already?!’ Everyone asked in alarm.
‘I came on the bus so that I could breast-feed her but if I don’t go now I’ll get stuck in the rush-hour traffic and it’ll be all hours before I get her home.’
‘Stay a bit longer,’ Olga Fisher urged.
‘I really can’t.’
‘OK.’ Reluctantly they let her go and drifted back to their own offices.
Jojo gathered up all the gifts, walked Louisa to the lift and asked, just so that Louisa would ask her back, ‘Are you all right?’
Louisa did another of those beatific smiles and said, ‘Jojo, I’ve never been happier. I am totally blissed out.’
‘I’m still seeing Mark.’
‘He’s a lovely man. See how nice he was to Stella.’
Ah. OK. The connection Jojo wanted wasn’t going to happen, not today, anyway. It was as if Louisa wasn’t really Louisa at the moment; she was someone else, in thrall to a tiny bundle. Let’s face it, the whole time she was in the office the only person she’d really made eye-contact with was Stella, even though Stella could barely see.
She kissed her goodbye. ‘Stay in touch and see you in… when are you due back? June?’
‘Mmm, June. See you then.’
‘Well!’ Manoj spluttered at Jojo, when she returned. ‘Did you see that?’
‘What?’
‘When Mark Avery held the baby, all the women went, “Ahhhh!” Women hold babies all the time and no one says, “Ahhhh!” What’s that about?’
Jojo studied him. ‘You tell me?’ She was keen to know why the sight of Mark cooing over Stella had shut down her appetite for nice cake.
‘It’s obvious!’
‘Because he looked manly but gentle?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Because he’s the boss and they were sucking up to him.’
Four weeks later
‘Perhaps you should have a look at this.’ Pam handed Jojo a bundle of pages. ‘I think it’s a manuscript.’
‘You think?’
Yeah. It’s like emails and stuff.’
‘Non-fiction?’
‘Not exactly. And the person who wrote it isn’t the person who submitted it. The author is called Gemma Hogan, but her friend Susan is the one who sent it in.’
‘Sounds way off.’
Pam shrugged. ‘I recommend you take a look. I’m not sure but I think it might be great.’
LILY
Even though I made my choice, I shall never forgive myself. This sounds wildly melodramatic, I know, but I mean it simply as a statement of fact. There are many times – to this day – when I wish I had never met him. It’s the most dreadful thing I’ve ever done, and even now, though we’re together and have Ema, frequently I find myself in the middle of ordinary stuff, making Ema’s bottle or washing my hair or whatever, and realize that I’m still waiting for a catastrophe. Building one’s happiness on someone else’s misery is no foundation for long-term stability. Anton says I have Catholic guilt. But I wasn’t brought up Catholic – apparently I don’t have to be.
35
Journalists. In my short career as an interviewee I’d met two varieties. Those who displayed their ‘serious’ credentials by dressing like the homeless (a look I inadvertently favoured myself since becoming a mother). Or those who appeared to spend their entire lives attending functions at foreign embassies. The one now stepping over my threshold – Martha Hope Jones from the Daily Echo – was a foreign embassy merchant. She wore a red suit with gilt buttons and braided epaulettes on the shoulders, and high shoes the precise red of her suit. I wondered how she had managed that. Perhaps she’d gone to one of those wedding service places who dye the bridesmaids’ shoes the exact colour of the bridesmaids’ dresses. Not that I would know much about that.
‘Welcome to my humble abode,’ I said, and almost bit my tongue. I so did not want to draw her attention to how humble my abode actually was: a one-bedroomed ex-council flat, which housed Anton, Ema and me.
When Otalie, my publicist at Dalkin Emery, had set up this interview, I had begged to be permitted to meet Martha in a hotel, a bar, a bus shelter – anywhere but here. But as it was an ‘At home’ piece, I was left with little choice.
‘Delightful,’ Martha declared, poking her nose into the kitchen and taking in two clothes-horses laden with garments which were defiantly refusing to dry.
‘You weren’t supposed to go in there.’ I flushed. ‘Pretend you didn’t see.’
But Martha had reached into her (same red as her shoes) bag, taken out a notebook and scribbled something. I tried reading upside down and thought one of the words looked like ‘pigsty’.
I directed her into the living room which Anton – bless him – had tidied. Well, he’d herded forty or fifty of Ema’s squashy toys in a corner, then emptied a full can of peach air-freshener into the air in the hope of masking the smell of mildewing laundry.
Martha plonked herself on the sofa, yelped, ‘Jesus!’ and sprang to her feet again. We both looked at the small piece of Lego which was the cause of Martha’s painfully indented buttock.
‘Sorry, it’s my little girl’s…’
Martha scribbled something else in the notebook.
‘Don’t you use a tape recorder?’ I asked.
‘No, this is much more intimate.’ She brandished her pen with a smile. Yes, and she could misquote me till the cows came home.
‘Where is your little girl?’ She looked around the room.
‘At the playground with her dad.’ Where they would remain, hogging the swings, until I called them to say the coast was clear. I could not involve them in this.
Martha accepted tea, refused biscuits, then the interview began.
‘Well! You’ve done rather nicely for yourself, dear, haven’t you? Mmmm?’ Her eyes were a little like blue marbles, rather glassy and avid. ‘You and your Mimi’s Remedies.’
She made it sound as if I had pulled off a confidence trick on the gullible public. Nor did I know how to respond. ‘Yes, I have done rather nicely, thank you’? Would that seem arrogant? By the same token, if I shrugged, ‘It’s not as if I’ve invented time travel,’ would she snap her notebook closed and leave?
‘I’ve read part of your biog, but I’m sure you know that Martha Hope Jones’ profiles are quite different from the pieces regular hacks produce. I prefer to start with a clean slate, get to know who Lily actually is and really get under her skin.’
She made a burrowing motion with her hand and I nodded warily. I so did not want her under my skin.
‘You’ve not always been a writer, Lily?’
‘No. Until two years ago I worked in Public Relations.’
‘Did you?’ Her manifest surprise was insulting even though I knew I didn’t look like the archetypal PR person.
Snappy, quick-thinking, image builders, who go to bat for other people, ought to look like snappy, quick-thinking, image builders; suits, salon-perfect hair and professional-style maquillage. But e
ven at the height of my modest success my hems mysteriously unravelled and my long blonde hair fell out of its grips and into my coffee at important meetings. (This was the reason that my account manager stopped inviting me to get-to-knows with the clients. He lied to the client, usually saying I was having physiotherapy.)
‘What area of PR?’ Martha was intrigued. ‘One-hit-wonder singers? Soap stars on the slide?’
‘Nothing so worthy.’ And I was not trying to be funny.
PR’s image is one of attempting to get tacky, talentless singers/actors/models into the paper. If only. PR is also about selling powdered milk to penniless Africans, by insisting it’s better for their babies than breast milk. It’s a PR person in the pay of a tobacco company who informs susceptible governments that having a population of smokers is a good idea because it kills everyone off before they’re too old to need pensions and geriatric care. It’s a press release written by a talented PR person which convinces a community that it does not matter if their water system is being poisoned by a chemical corporation because the company is also bringing jobs to the area.
Advertising and bribes to politicians can only do so much. When push came to shove and the indefensible required defending, I came to the rescue by producing press releases.
My sympathy with those who were having a huge dump installed outside their town, or a motorway snaking through their back garden, was sincere. As a result my press releases carried conviction; to my shame, I was seriously good at my job and innumerable times I longed for a couple of singers with flagging careers.
‘So there you are working away in PR.’ Martha’s pen was doing overtime. ‘Where was this?’
‘Dublin, initially, then London.’
‘What were you doing in Ireland?’
‘My mum went to live there when I was twenty and I went with her.’
‘And now you’re back in the UK. What happened?’
‘Cutbacks. I was made redundant.’
My own fault. I had done such an effective job on two huge campaigns that both companies got what they wanted and we no longer had their lucrative retainers. It coincided with a shrinkage in jobs in Irish PR and I was unable to get another. Truth to tell, I was violently relieved. PR work was depressing the hell out of me.
‘My mum had moved back to the UK, so I did too. Did some freelancing…’ I stopped.
‘And then you got mugged,’ Martha prompted.
‘And then I got mugged.’
‘Could you bear to tell me a little about that?’ Martha asked, pressing her hand on mine, her tone suddenly soap-opera ‘caring’.
I nodded. Not that there was ever any doubt. If I held out on the only truly dramatic part of this story, there would be no interview, certainly no two-page colour spread in Britain’s fourth highest-selling daily. I told it quickly, leaving out as much as I could and rushed to the finish, the part where the bloke pushed me over and disappeared with my bag.
‘Then he left you for dead.’ Martha was scratching furiously at her page.
‘Um, no. I was conscious, I was well enough to walk home.’
Yes, but you could have been dead,’ Martha insisted. ‘He wasn’t to know.’
‘Perhaps.’ I shrugged reluctant approval.
‘And though gradually your physical wounds faded, the mental scars remained?’
I swallowed. ‘I was rather upset.’
‘Upset! You must have been devastated. Utterly traumatized! Yes?’
I nodded obediently – and a little wearily.
‘Post-traumatic stress disorder set in,’ Martha was scribbling faster and faster. ‘You couldn’t go to work?’
‘Well, I was freelancing at the time –’
‘You couldn’t leave the house –’
‘Yes, I cou –’
‘You stopped washing? Eating?’
‘But I –’
‘You simply couldn’t see the point in anything.’
A pause. An exhalation. ‘Sometimes. But doesn’t everyone feel lik –’
‘And in this dark, lonely place there came a tiny glimmer of light. A vision and you sat down and wrote Mimi’s Remedies.’
Another pause, then I gave in. ‘Go on then.’ She so did not need me here.
‘Then an agent took you on, she found you a publisher and hey presto – you’re an overnight success!’
‘Not exactly. I’d been writing for about five years in my spare time, and I’d actually finished a novel but no one would –’
‘How many copies of Mimi’s Remedies have been sold now?’
‘The latest figure is 150,000. At least that’s how many are in print.’
‘Well, well,’ Martha marvelled. ‘Almost a quarter of a million.’
‘No, it’s –’
‘Give or take.’ Martha’s shark smile permitted no argument. ‘And you wrote it in a month.’
‘Two months.’
‘Two?’ She seemed disappointed.
‘But that’s extremely fast! My first novel took me five years, and it’s still not published.’
‘And you’ve already got quite a devoted following, I hear. Is it true that some of your fans have formed reading groups in your honour, calling themselves “covens”?’
Well, one group of oddballs in Wiltshire, who had tired of pretending to be Druids, had. Probably hell trying to keep those white robes clean. But I nodded, yes, covens, that was correct.
Suddenly Lady in Red changed tack. ‘Although the critics haven’t always been kind, have they, Lily?’
She was doing that false sympathy thing again. I preferred being steamrollered.
‘Who cares what the critics say?’ I said, stoutly. Actually, I did. Immensely. I could recite large chunks of the savage reviews I had been getting since Mimi’s Remedies had begun to haemorrhage from bookshops on word-of-mouth sales. When the book had first come out and no one had expected it to sell more than two thousand copies, one consolation-prize review in the Irish Times had damned me with faint praise. But the commercial success had coincided with an outpouring of bile from the broadsheets. The Independent had called it –
‘Candy floss for the brain,’ Martha said.
‘Yes,’ I said humbly. I could go on. This debut novel is a preposterous by-product of the current touchy-feely sensibility. A ‘fable’, it tells of a white witch, the eponymous Mimi, who arrives unexpectedly in a picturesque village and sets up shop providing magic remedies for the townsfolk and their various neuroses.
‘And the Observer said it was…’
‘“Sweet enough to rot the readers’ teeth”,’ I finished for her. I knew. In fact, I could have gone on to recite the entire critique, chapter and verse. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘I only wrote the book to cheer myself up. I couldn’t have known that anyone would publish it. If it hadn’t been for Anton it would never have been sent to Jojo.’
Martha’s pen sped up again.
‘And how did you meet your husband, Anton?’
‘We’re not married yet.’ Journalists got so much wrong anyway, but I had to at least try to get the facts straight. I loathed reading interviews full of inaccurate details about me because I worried that people might think I was lying. (I never inhaled. I fought in Vietnam, etc.)
‘So how did you meet your fiancé, Anton?’
‘Partner,’ I said, just in case she asked me to produce a ring.
Martha looked at me sharply. ‘But you will marry?’
I made vaguely positive noises but in truth it made little difference to me whether or not we did. My parents, by contrast, are great believers in the institution of marriage. They love it so much that they keep on doing it; Mum has been married twice and Dad three times. I have so many half-siblings and step-siblings that a family get-together would resemble one of the later episodes of Dallas.
‘Where did you meet Anton?’ Martha asked again.
How ought I to answer this? ‘Through a mutual friend.’
‘Would that mutual friend like
to be named?’ She twinkled.
‘Um, no. Thank you.’ I don’t think so!
‘Oh. Are you quite sure?’
‘Quite. Thank you.’
Martha was alerted, she knew there was a story, and it was as though I had swallowed ice. I loathed, loathed, loathed doing these interviews. I was terrified of being found out and if this level of intrusion into my life continued, I would be.
But she let it go. For the moment, at least.
‘And what does Anton do?’
Another tricky question. ‘He and his partner, Mikey, run a media production company called Eye-Kon. They made L ast Man Standing for Sky Digital. A reality game show?’ I asked hopefully.
But she had never heard of it. Her and sixty million others.
‘And at the moment they’re in discussions with the BBC and Channel Five about a ninety-minute feature.’ (‘Ninety-minute feature’ meant made-for-TV movie. ‘Ninety-minute feature’ sounded a lot better.)
But Martha had no interest in the ups and downs of Anton’s career. Well, I had tried my best.
‘Righty-ho, I think I’ve got plenty here.’ She closed her notebook, then nipped to the loo. While she was out of the room I fretted over what I had said, what I had not said and whether or not there were clean towels in the bathroom.
I led her to the downstairs front door, past Mad Paddy in the ground-floor flat. I hoped he would not emerge, but of course he did, he missed nothing and craved diversion. But at least he was not aggressive and for this I gave thanks. Indeed he seemed quite jolly because he admired Martha in her crimson gladrags and declared, ‘Bedad, I feel a song coming on.’
‘“Lady in Red”.’ Martha shook her head good-naturedly. ‘I get this a lot.’
But instead Mad Paddy burst into, ‘You’d better watch OUT. You’d better not SHOUT. You’d better not cry, I’m TELLIN’ you why –’
Too late I recognized the song and, in my head, sang along. ‘SANTA Claus is coming to town.’
‘Ignore him,’ I smiled gamely and shook her hand. ‘Thank you for coming.’
‘He knows when you are SLEEPING…’
‘The picture desk will be in touch about a photo.’
