The Other Side of the Story

by Marian Keyes

  I was going to write a story where everyone lived happily ever after, in a fictional world where good things happened and people were kind. This vision of hope was not just for me. Much more importantly it was for my baby. I could not bring this little human being into the world, burdened with my desolation. This new life needed hope.

  So I started. I clattered away at the keyboard writing exactly what I wanted, past caring how sugary or sentimental it was. I had no thought of any other person reading it; this was for me and my baby. When it came to creating my protagonist, Mimi, I indulged myself utterly. She was wise, kind, earthy and magical – a mix of several people: she had my mum’s wisdom, Dad’s generosity, Dad’s second wife Viv’s warmth and Heather Graham’s hair.

  That night when Anton came home from a hard day not making films, he was so relieved to find me bright-eyed and enthusiastic that he happily sat and listened to what I had written. And every night thereafter, I read to him what I had written that day. It took almost eight weeks from start to finish and on the ultimate day, when Mimi had remedied all the woes in the village and had to leave, Anton wiped away a tear, then whooped with joy. ‘It’s fantastic! I love it. It’s going to be a best-seller.’

  ‘You like everything about me, you’re not what one might call impartial.’

  ‘I know. But I swear to God, I think it’s superb.’

  I shrugged. I was already feeling sad because I had finished it.

  ‘Get Irina to read it,’ he said. ‘She knows about books.’

  ‘She’ll savage it.’

  ‘She mightn’t.’

  So, because I was not yet ready to declare the experience over, I climbed the stairs, knocked on Irina’s door and said, ‘I’ve written a book. I was wondering if you would read it and give me your opinion.’

  She did none of that leaping about and yelping that most people do. You’ve written a BOOK. How amazing! She simply nodded, stuck out her hand for the pages and said, ‘I vill read.’

  ‘Just one thing, please be honest with me. Don’t be nice to spare my feelings.’

  She looked at me in astonishment and I turned away, wondering what kind of humiliation I was letting myself in for. And how long I would have to wait for it.

  But the following morning, to my surprise, she showed up, cigarette in hand. She gave me the bundle of pages. ‘I read it.’

  ‘Well?’ My heart thudded and my mouth was cottony.

  ‘I like,’ she pronounced. ‘A fairy tale where the world is good. Is not true,’ a long plume of smoke was exhaled ruminatively, ‘but I like.’

  ‘Well, if Irina likes,’ Anton said gleefully, ‘I really think we’re onto something.’

  38

  I needed an agent, Anton had said. Apparently, I could not send Mimi’s Remedies directly to publishing houses because they did not look at unsolicited work. He got in touch with one of his contacts (‘This game is all about contacts, baby.’) – an agent whom he had been trying to buy scripts from at rock bottom prices. With typical enthusiasm, he cross-examined the poor woman as though he was state prosecutor and she the defence’s star witness. Her advice was to get a literary agent. ‘But not her,’ Anton said, ‘she only does scripts. Pity. It would have been good synergy.’ (‘This business is all about synergy.’)

  So I wrote to the three agents who had read Crystal Clear, once again, they felt that Mimi’s Remedies was ‘not right for them at this time’ but urged me to contact them with my next book, just like the last time.

  Around the time of the third rejection letter I threw a little tantrum and announced I would have no more to do with the business of finding an agent; it was too soul-destroying. Anton responded by buying me a six-pack of mixed doughnuts and a copy of the National Enquirer and waited for me to calm down. Then he hoisted me back into the saddle by producing a copy of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook. ’ Every literary agent in the British Isles is in here.’ He brandished the thick red book gleefully. ‘We’ll go through each one until we nail an agent for you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes.’ He sounded surprised at my vehemence.

  ‘I’m not doing it. You can if you want.’

  ‘OK, I will, then,’ he said, a little sharply.

  ‘I don’t want to know about it.’

  ‘Fine!’

  Over the following three months or so, he tried to keep the rejections from me but each time the manuscript was returned and landed with a thump on the communal hall floor, I knew. I was like the princess and the pea, I could hear the whack from upstairs. Indeed I suspected I could have heard it from a street away.

  ‘That’s my book,’ I always said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Downstairs in the hall.’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

  Invariably, I was right. Except for the time when it was the delivery of the new Argos catalogue. And the other time when it was the Thompson White Pages. And that one other time when it was Mad Paddy’s Next catalogue. (Which, he admitted to Anton in a hallway man-to-man, he only got in order to look at the ladies in their underwear.)

  But every time the thump on the hall floor mat (or rather the place where a hall floor mat would have sat had we owned one) really did signal a rejection of my book, I gave Anton a wounded, passive-aggressive ‘I told you so’ look and my heart bled a little more. Anton, however, was undaunted and blithely chucked each kiss-off letter in the bin. Of course as soon as he was out of the way I rushed to fish them out again, and tortured myself with every cruel word, until he noticed. After that he took the letters with him and disposed of them at work.

  Unlike me, he wasted no time musing over the failings of Mimi’s Remedies. Ever forward facing, he simply consulted his guide for the next agent, once again wished the manuscript good luck and returned to the post office where he had developed a first-name-term relationship with the staff.

  At some stage I stopped hoping and almost managed to disassociate enough to regard all this messing about with Jiffy bags and postage as simply another one of Anton’s strange hobbies.

  Until the morning he wandered into the kitchen, a letter in his hand and remarked, ‘Don’t say I never do anything for you.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘An agent. You’ve got yourself an agent.’ He gave me the letter.

  I scanned it. All the letters seemed to be jumping about the page and I could not make sense of them, until I got to the line that said, ‘I would be happy to represent you.’

  ‘Look.’ My voice wobbled. ‘Look, she says she would be happy to represent me. Happy!’ Then I sobbed over the letter until the ink of Jojo’s signature ran.

  Anton and I went to see her in her office in Soho. It was less than a fortnight before I gave birth to Ema so getting me there was a huge undertaking, like crating and transporting a sick elephant. But I was glad I had gone. Lipman Haigh Literary Agents was a big, busy place that inspired excitement and the best part of all was Jojo Harvey. She was pretty damn fabulous. Full of energy and absolutely stunning, she welcomed us like long-lost friends. Immediately, both Anton and I developed a crush on her.

  She said how much she loved Mimi’s Remedies, how all the people in the office had loved it, what a sweet book it was… I glowed – until she stopped and said, ‘Here’s the deal. I’m going to be honest with you.’

  My heart dropped like a stone. I loathe people being honest with me. It’s always bad news.

  ‘It’s going to be tricky to sell because it feels like a children’s book but it’s got adult subject matter. So it’s hard to categorize and publishers don’t like that. They’re kinda chicken-shit, a little scared to boldly go.’

  She looked at our woebegone expressions and smiled. ‘Hey, cheer up. It’s definitely got something and I’ll be in touch.’

  But then came October the fourth and everything changed for ever. Priorities were immediately realigned; everything slipped down the list a place be
cause at Number One, in with a bullet, was Ema.

  I had never loved anyone the way I loved her and no one had ever loved me as much as she did; not even my own mother. My voice could stop her crying and her eyes sought my face, even before she could see properly.

  Everyone thinks their baby is the most gorgeous who ever lived, but Ema really was a beauty. Like Anton, she was olive-skinned and she emerged from the womb with a head of silky dark hair. There was no trace of fair, blue-eyed me in her at all. ‘Are you sure she’s yours?’ Anton asked solemnly.

  The person she looked most like was Anton’s mother, Zaga. As a nod to that, although we wanted to call her Emma, we decided to spell it the Yugoslavian way.

  She was a big smiler, sometimes she giggled in her sleep and she was the squeeziest creature ever. The creases in her thighs were irresistible. She smelt adorable, she felt adorable, she looked adorable and she sounded adorable.

  That was the plus side.

  On the minus… I could not recover from the shock of being a mother. Simply nothing had prepared me and I wouldn’t mind but, unusually for me, I had attended pre-natal and mothering classes in an attempt to be properly geared up. I may as well not have bothered, the impact was uncushionable.

  To be entirely responsible for this tiny powerful bundle of life scared me to death and I had never worked so hard or relentlessly. What I found most difficult was that there was no time off. Ever. Anton, at least, had a job in the outside world and got to leave the flat each day but for me, being a parent was twenty-four-seven.

  As for the breast-feeding; it looks adorably serene. (Except when women try to do it in public without anyone seeing their boob.) No one had warned me that it hurt, that it was, in fact, agony. And that was even before I contracted mastitis, first in one boob, then the other.

  At times Ema baffled us – we had fed, changed, burped and cuddled her and still she would not stop crying. At other times we baffled ourselves: we were usually desperate for her to go to sleep but if she slept too long we worried that she might have meningitis, so we had to wake her up.

  Our flat, never pristine even under optimum conditions, had become Martha Stewart’s worst nightmare. Huge plastic sacks of Pampers were scattered about the bedroom floor, ranks of drying babygros were draped on most surfaces, herds of cuddly toys crouched on the carpet stealthily waiting to trip me up and I had a permanent bruise on my shin because each time I passed through the hall I caught my leg on the brake of the buggy.

  Somewhere in amongst the blur of twenty-four-hour days, sleepless nights, cracked nipples and colicky screaming, news managed to get through: Jojo had sold Mimi’s Remedies to a big publishing house called Dalkin Emery! It was a two-book deal and they had offered an advance of four thousand pounds a book. I was out of my mind with the thrill of having got a publisher; at least I was as soon as I could summon up the energy. And four thousand pounds was an enormous sum of money, but it was not the life-changing amount that we had hoped for. It looked as if we were destined to remain poor, especially as Eye-Kon’s gameshow Last Man Standing had made almost no profit and most definitely had not generated a stampede of TV executives to shower Anton and Mikey with cash.

  A visit to Dalkin Emery to meet my editor Tania Teal followed. She was in her early thirties and brisk but pleasant. She said they would publish Mimi’s Remedies the following January.

  ‘Not until then?’ That was a year away but I felt in no condition to protest because not only did I know nothing about publishing but my boobs were leaking and I was afraid that Tania could see. I had not even had time to shower before the meeting and had to make do with a scrub down with a handful of nappy wipes, so I felt at a dreadful, unwashed disadvantage.

  ‘January’s a good time for debut books,’ she said. ‘Not much else is being published so your lovely book has a better chance of getting noticed.’

  ‘I see. Thank you.’

  For a long, long time, nothing happened. Not for about six months, then, out of the blue, I got a phone call from a man called Lee who wanted to know when he could take my photo for the cover of the book. I panicked, ‘I’ll call you back,’ and hung up the phone, wondering, Who am I? Who do I want people to think I am?

  ‘What?’ Anton asked.

  ‘Some bloke is coming to take my picture for the book. I need to do something with my hair! I’m not being funny, Anton, I really need to get the Burt Reynolds-style hair transplant. I should have done it months ago! And new clothes! I need new clothes. And nails, Anton, look at the state of my nails!’

  I went out and spent half a day and too much money getting my hair cut and coloured (but didn’t get a transplant, Anton talked me out of it), bought three new tops, a new pair of jeans, new boots and some face-stuff which was meant to give me a glow, but just made me look bafflingly shiny and oily in the practice run. And when I rubbed it off, I caught the corner of my lipstick, wiping half of it across my face, which rendered me like a care-in-the-community casualty.

  ‘This is a disaster,’ I moaned to Anton. ‘And I shouldn’t have bought the boots, they won’t even be in the shot.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, you’ll know they’re there, they’ll give you confidence. Hold on here, sweetheart, I’m going to get Irina.’

  He left and returned a few moments later with Irina in tow.

  ‘You’re a whizz with cosmetics,’ Anton told her. ‘You’ll fix Lily up for her photo, make her beautiful, won’t you?’

  ‘I kennot verk miracles. But I will do best.’

  ‘Thanks, Irina,’ I muttered.

  The morning of the shoot, she stopped by before she went to work, exfoliated my face like she was scrubbing a kitchen floor, plucked my eyebrows to non-existence, then covered me with frightening quantities of slap, so bright and thick that Ema stared in dismay.

  ‘It’s OK, sweetheart, it’s me, Mum,’ I coaxed.

  But that just prodded her to full-blown tears – who was this Aunt Sally clown with Mum’s voice?

  Irina, Anton and Ema left. Anton was taking Ema to work with him because the shoot was going to take hours and we had no one else to take care of her.

  Then Lee arrived. He was young and slept with lots of fit girls – I knew just by looking at him – and armed with a ton of equipment which Mad Paddy helped him carry up the stairs. I wished he would not, I was afraid he might ask Lee for money, but I got him out the door without too much fuss.

  Lee dumped several black cases on the floor and looked around. ‘Just us? No make-up artist?’

  ‘Um, no, my friend did my make-up for me but I didn’t realize…’

  ‘No? Everyone uses professional hair and make-up people. Author piccies are mega important. They go a long way to selling the book.’

  ‘But no… I mean, it depends on how good the book is, doesn’t it?’

  That made him chortle. ‘You’re a bit green. Think about it – only the good-looking authors get on telly. When an author is a dog, telly researchers won’t book her. Sometimes the publishers try to keep her off the publicity trail, they tell the media she’s a recluse.’

  That couldn’t be true. Could it?

  ‘Telling you,’ he insisted. ‘You, Lily, you’re not bad-looking, but you could use some help. That’s why I asked about the make-up artist. But I’ll air-brush as much as I can, I’ll do my best for you.’

  ‘Um, thank you.’

  He looked around at my living room, which I had tidied specially, sucked his teeth and laughed ruefully. ‘Not exactly a photographer’s dream, is it? Not much for me to work with?’

  ‘Er…’

  ‘Yeah,’ he sighed, ‘they wouldn’t OK the budget for a studio for you. Tell you what, we’ll do a couple of insurance shots here, then we’ll take it outside and try something different. We’re quite near to Hampstead Heath, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes.’ Big mistake. In the words of the fabulous Julia Roberts, big, huge mistake.

  It took him almost an hour to set up the equipment – umbrellas
and lightboxes and tripods – while I perched on the edge of my couch, trying to use the power of thought to stop my make-up from evaporating. Finally, we were ready to go.

  ‘Look sexy,’ he commanded.

  ‘Er…’

  ‘Think sex.’

  Sex? I had heard of it, I was nearly sure of it.

  ‘C’mon, gimme sex.’

  I smiled gamely but I was desperately intimidated by his youth, his lack of gayness and worst of all his dispassionate assessment of my appearance.

  ‘Lift the chin.’ Behind his camera he chuckled to himself. ‘More chins than the Hong Kong phone book.’ Then, ‘Relax! You look like you’re before a firing squad.’

  He kept changing lenses and checking light meters so that the ‘couple of insurance shots’ took as long as the equipment set-up, then I had to endure the fifteen-minute walk to the heath, hefting a tripod, trying to make conversation with him. I had had very little sleep the night before and talking was not my forte.

  ‘Have you done lots of authors?’

  ‘Oh yeah, shedloads. Christopher Bloind? Miranda England? Now she is fabulous. A dream to shoot. You couldn’t take a bad shot of her. They flew me to Monte Carlo to do her. First class to Nice, then helicopter.’ Of course he had to say this at the exact point where we were trudging over the graffiti-covered railway bridge and he had a good old laugh at the contrast. ‘One extreme to the other, right, Lily?’

  Out on Hampstead Heath, he looked around, narrowing his eyes, then he lit up. ‘OΚ, let’s have you climbing a tree.’

  I waited for the laugh. Because he was joking, wasn’t he?

  Actually no.

  He made a ‘chair’ out of his hands for me to hoist myself up on, then I had to stand on a branch about six feet off the ground and wrap my arm around the trunk. And smile.

  ‘Now look down to me, yeah, wind in your hair, yeah, lick those lips.’

  If I had had a double chin, sitting on my own couch, having my photo taken at eye-level, what on earth would I look like now being shot from below? A turkey. A toad. Jabba the fucking Hutt.