by Cathy Kelly
‘But I’m very bad at explaining where I get my ideas from,’ John said anxiously, thinking of how his close friends in West Cork teased him about listening in to their conversations and watching too much TV for his books.
‘Yeah, I steal it all from Criminal Minds and CSI,’ John would joke back, because how he actually created a book was such a complex thing that it was impossible to explain, and besides, he didn’t want to make himself different from his friends in the village. It had been strange enough when he’d got his first book deal and some people had looked at him differently.
‘Suppose you’ll be the big man now round these parts,’ a few grumpy old souls had muttered, and John had said he was still a carpenter and this was a bit of fun, because it was easier than saying writing was his first love but it was a temperamental, tricky love, like an exquisite girlfriend who was neurotic and you couldn’t explain to people why you adored her so much.
All this talk of interviews was giving him that acidy sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, the same one he sometimes got when he looked out at the garden, the landscaping of which was nearly finished and the bill for ninety per cent of which was already lying on his office desk, preventing him from doing much work. It stared at him, all the noughts, all the VAT added on. Who’d have thought that a fish pond could be that expensive? And what had they needed a fish pond for in the first place?
When John had been a kid, fish had lived in a goldfish bowl; now they lived in what appeared to be the Four Seasons of swimming pools with all manner of vegetation and other stuff. There was even a hard cover to stop Jake from falling into it. That he approved of, but the rest of it …?
Someone had mentioned koi, which were the aristocrats of the fish world and cost thousands. What if next door’s tribe of feral cats ate them in a sushi attack?
‘You’ll get the hang of the blog tour and the touring itself,’ said Gavin cheerily, who wasn’t the one who’d have to do any of it. ‘It’s really very easy. And I was thinking you could write maybe a couple of short stories and, most importantly, a Kindle single. Now, as you know, the Kindle single is a very important part of the market: maybe 10,000 words, short, snappy, designed to get people into reading your work. Priced at a couple of dollars max, they are really good for recruiting new readers.’
John had been silent.
‘Recruiting new readers’ – it made him think of the army recruiting new people to go to war or spy agencies recruiting young brilliant foreign language speakers from universities to spy for their countries. But recruiting new readers, this was a concept he hadn’t ever thought about before, which was stupid because, obviously, they needed new people to start reading his books. The way Gavin spoke about the world of publishing and the way Cari had spoken about it were as different as chalk and cheese. With Gavin, it was a military mission: shock, awe, destroy.
Cari had never spoken to him in this way. When they weren’t discussing the actual book in detail, they talked about practical parts of the book: the jacket copy, which was the wording on the back of the book and was really important because people only spent about six seconds reading it.
He could remember Cari explaining this to him in her own inimitable way: ‘I know,’ she’d said, ‘you spend years of your life working your fingers to the bone and your brain to breaking point with this precious book and someone has to translate it into a mere hundred highly polished words so that someone en route to a train can get excited and take it to the till … I know the very thought makes you want to vomit, but that’s what we have to do. We have to encapsulate the story so that people can grasp it quickly and decide they want to read it. Now of course, honey’ – she laughed – ‘with your name, they know they want to read it anyway. They love your books – you are brilliant. But we have to give them a clue as to what this one is about.’
Things had seemed different with Cari, more like she cared about the actual writing itself and how he, John, was dealing with it all. She was an editor, plot-analyser, plot-decoder when it was all going wrong, cheerleader, psychologist and main contact in the publishers all in one.
But Gavin was a different beast altogether. It was easy to see how Gavin was climbing up the ladder of publishing and would soon be running something big and wildly important because he had his eye on the main prize and that main prize was a combination of money and power. Making as much money as was humanly possible for the publishers, and himself into the bargain, and earning power along the way.
John felt left out of all of this, like an onlooker.
It was the first time in his career as a writer that he felt he didn’t matter.
He’d never felt this with Cari.
He could remember her sitting in his garden on a sunny day, sipping tea and explaining that even though there was a huge amount of teamwork in the business, there was nothing to sell, there was no book to write a blurb about, there was no book to have an amazing cover for if he did not write the book in the first place.
‘There’s a lot of magic in this business,’ she used to say, smiling. ‘One of my old bosses always said it was all magic, and black magic at that,’ and she’d laughed. ‘Ivanka Radisky-Clarke was her name. She was fabulous, you’d have loved her, John: Ivanka drank Virgin Marys all morning until noon and then she switched over to Bloody Marys. Marvellous woman, a bit nuts, but I think that helped. And yet when she talked about there being magic in the business, she was right: the magic is in the book, because if the book doesn’t work, if the book doesn’t touch people and light them up, then there is nothing to sell. There is nothing for the sales team, there is nothing for the marketing team, there is nothing for any team, there is nothing for me to edit. Always remember, you create the magic.’
John Steele looked now at his touring schedule, a schedule that would take him away from his beautiful West Cork haven for nearly five weeks, five weeks of strange hotels, of never being in the same place twice and more flights than he’d care to mention. Afterwards, he’d have enough air miles to go outside the Milky Way if required, but he might go mad into the bargain. And he had to do interviews over the phone and answer questions about his motivation and do blog tours beforehand … wow.
He couldn’t talk to Mags about it. She’d been worried when he’d said he was moving from being edited by Cari.
‘But you love her, she grounds you,’ Mags had said.
‘Freddie said it would be good for my career,’ John had pointed out, full of the new vision of himself as a publishing monolith, as proposed by his agent.
He could hardly go to either Freddie or Mags now and say he was full of anxiety, worried about the new book, even more worried about going insane on a five-week-long book tour where he would be wildly out of his comfort zone.
He would have to shut up and deal with it.
Cari couldn’t stop thinking about Conal. Four days had passed since their blind date at Jeff’s and he had been disturbing her daily – and nightly – ever since. And not a single phone call since that first one she’d ignored, which annoyed the hell out of her because she expected him to call and she’d planned to tell him, no she couldn’t possibly go out with him. All of which advance planning was wasted seeing as he didn’t call again.
She took to dropping into Jeff’s office more frequently than normal, ostensibly to talk to him about work but hoping he might mention that Conal had asked about her or was pining for her but didn’t have the courage to phone or something.
No joy. Not a word. Either Jeff was losing it – a possibility given his sleep deprivation issues – or Conal really hadn’t asked after her. Bummer.
Not only had she screwed up her career, three years out of the game meant she’d lost her ability with men.
She was at her computer, wearily working her way through her endless line of emails – why were there so many? Did they multiply like rabbits in the night? – when Jeff burst in and her first, wildly embarrassing, thought was: Conal has rung and says he must see me now!
>
Jeff threw his lanky body down onto one of Cari’s chairs.
‘I love this book, this A.J. Sharkey person. It’s brilliant. I love the narrative arc, that simplistic style that lulls you into a false sense of security and then, when you’re thinking one thing, another story comes out of nowhere.’
This was the one subject destined to cheer Cari up. She still felt the chill every time she picked the manuscript up. But she needed some sort of go-ahead from Jeff before approaching the author. She’d fought for it, told him how she loved it and so did everyone else in the team, but Jeff needed to be on board too.
‘It’s got to be a woman but sent in by an agent or unsolicited, remind me?’
Since she’d told him all of this already, Cari sighed quietly. ‘I agree, it’s got to be a woman but I don’t know for sure since they used initials. Also, no agent – off the slush pile. I found it, Declan loves it and so do Alice and Gloria. There aren’t many books we all love.’
‘Put me down in the “love it” column too, then,’ Jeff said, yawning. ‘We’ve got most of it, right? Ninety per cent. Has she/he written it all? Is there more? Have they sent it to anyone else …?’
That was always the fear – that the fabulous manuscript was on the desk of every editor in town.
‘I was waiting for you to get back to me. I’ll courier a response right now. There is no email, which is weird. I mean, who doesn’t have email, right?’
‘Yeah, get him, her or it in here soon. I just get that feeling when I read it—’
‘Me too!’ said Cari.
Jeff was clearly finished. He got up to go, then turned back to her.
‘Oh yeah, has Conal been talking to you?’
‘Er, no,’ said Cari, managing what she thought was Academy-Award-level acting in order to sound blasé.
‘He wants to take you out to dinner.’
‘Oh?’ Cari was proud of that ‘oh?’ Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren would have applauded.
‘He said he phoned you but I must have given him the wrong number.’ Jeff did some head scratching and Cari wanted to slap him, hard. ‘I can give him your home number and your mobile, the right one, OK? You wouldn’t mind?’
‘Sure, whatever,’ said Cari with another award-winning little shrug. ‘I’ll free up some time in my calendar.’
All afternoon, she had to control herself from slamming her direct dial office phone number on a bit of paper in front of Jeff, who was half asleep, and saying: ‘Give it to Conal, NOW.’
Jeff had her phone number, obviously, but he needed a spur. Or a lightning bolt to the head – one or the other.
By evening, she had dispatched a courier to the writer’s address with a plea to contact them, a paean of love for the story and the writing, and plenty of enthusiasm for what Cambridge could bring to its publication.
As she always did when she sent such letters or emails, she closed her eyes and said a brief prayer up into the sky and the divinity residing there, asking for help.
‘I would love to publish this book,’ she murmured, and suppressed the thought that she deserved some good karma after losing her star author, John Steele, so horribly. Karma and destiny were fickle things and one could not bargain one’s way into receiving either at a specific time.
Then, she cleared her zillion emails, tidied her desk, and finally made herself face into a second, lengthy explanation to one of the writers on her slush pile to explain that yes, when she said she’d originally emailed to say that she didn’t think the book was publishable partly due to the subject matter and certainly at its current length of approximately 4,000 pages, she’d meant it. She added, again, that autobiography was a tricky field.
‘As I said before, your life seems very interesting—’
Cari sighed as she wrote this because it really was a red rag to a bull, but then saying, ‘Like all of us, your life is a little on the ordinary side and if you want to write that sort of autobiography, then you have to be a fabulous writer and frankly, you’re not, my dear, so I don’t see this working …’ Such a comment would be hideously cruel and she simply couldn’t do it.
She was used to people at parties, when they heard what she did, regaling her with tales of their lives and exploits and delightedly telling her it would all make a fabulous book.
‘I’d want a lot of money for it, though!’ said one man, poking her in the ribs as he said this, as if he were a ball of fire with a story worth telling instead of being a perfectly nice but rather dull man from whom Cari had been stealthily moving away all evening.
‘You wouldn’t believe my life,’ was another variation on the theme, often followed by: ‘Do you have someone to do the words?’
‘Yes, the words can be hard,’ Cari would murmur. ‘I know you’re going to find this incredible but some people think the words are the hardest bit.’
‘Never?’
‘I know: amazing, isn’t it?’
Cari tried again with the 4,000-page autobiography person.
‘Many people write for themselves and not for publication. There is joy to be had in simply writing about your life for your own enjoyment. Think of how lovely it will be for your children to read this,’ she wrote, and then thought about the bits about all the lovers, and hoped they’d cut those segments out before handing the epic over to the next generation for posterity.
She signed off and hoped to high heaven that she would not hear from them again. There really was a lot to be said for the returned manuscript and the printed note bearing the legend: ‘Thank you for sending us your manuscript. I am afraid it is not suitable for our list. Wishing you the best of luck elsewhere.’
No, but thanks for thinking of us – to the point and polite, which was supposed to stop thwarted would-be writers from storming the place with pitchforks and a grudge.
It was half seven when she left the office and drove home, having decided that Conal had had no intention of phoning her and she must have imagined that white-hot heat of attraction between them. After all, it had been so long since she’d had anything to do with a man, she was bound to be rusty. That was a depressing thought – it was like having had a six-pack of belly muscles and finding out that overnight you were now the proud possessor of a flabby belly.
Well, she was going to stop that, she decided grimly, negotiating a traffic jam with unusual vigour: she was going to start dating again. She’d felt the wild thrill when she’d met Conal. She was still a woman, still a sexual being. Barney hadn’t killed off that part of her totally, although she’d certainly felt as if he had.
But no: Cari Brannigan was a woman in her prime.
And if Conal didn’t realise it, too bad for him. So there.
She pulled into her parking spot with slightly more speed than normal, slammed on the brakes and was giving herself empowering messages when her mobile phone rang.
It was an unknown number. The one she’d ignored before? This time, she’d clicked ‘answer’ and found herself breathlessly saying, ‘Yes, hello.’
‘I figured you were one of those people who didn’t answer unknown numbers on their mobile.’
Conal. Excitement rippled through her.
‘You could have just rung me at work,’ Cari said, and then cursed herself. What sort of cretinous thing was that to say? It implied she had been sitting waiting for him to phone her. ‘But this is fine,’ she added quickly.
‘Good,’ he said, clearly doing the man-of-few-words thing.
‘So,’ said Cari, wanting to regain the upper hand.
‘So yourself,’ said Conal.
‘You rang me for what exactly?’ she asked, getting cross. Was this a game? Not phoning for days and then fun and games when he did ring.
‘To ask you out.’
Cari’s heart literally skipped a beat. She didn’t know it could do that without one of Jeff’s energy drinks.
‘Oh, well, I mean … yes, er … what did you have in mind?’ she stammered, hating herself for sounding like a lov
e-struck fourteen-year-old.
‘Dinner, where we can get to know each other, because drinks can be code for sitting in a bar and getting through two bottles of wine and I hate that sort of thing,’ he said.
‘I thought you had just come from France where people like sitting in wine bars and drinking two bottles of wine?’
Good retort, Cari, she told herself.
‘Probably why I’m over it,’ he said, ‘and people don’t really drink two bottles of wine in wine bars in France, not couples. Four people perhaps, two – no.’
‘OK, dinner,’ said Cari.
She liked this man. She really liked him. She didn’t want to appear too eager, but she wanted to dispense with all the dating bullshit.
‘Where were you thinking?’ she said, as she pulled her diary out of her handbag, grateful that she was parked before the phone had rung and therefore she had a chance to check when she was free.
‘Tonight,’ he said.
‘Tonight?’ said Cari indignantly. ‘Tonight is not suitable. Why would you think I’d be free tonight? Am I the sort of woman who has no friends and—’
He cut her off before she really got into her stride.
‘No, I don’t think you are the sort of girl who has no friends, but I really want to see you soon, even though I have a work thing early tomorrow – I always have work things early,’ he added ruefully, ‘but I didn’t want to ring you in the office, and I don’t want to wait … and I wasn’t sure you wanted to go out with me since you never picked up the first call.’
He sounded unsure and that made Cari all the more keen. For all that he put on a good cool superstud act, this man was nice, really nice.
‘You rang?’ she said innocently lying. ‘There was no message.’
‘Yes, I rang. First thing next day. Because I wanted to ask you out quickly, before someone else snapped you up, Cari.’
‘Oh,’ she subsided, feeling undone and unable to talk properly. ‘My hair is a mess and it’s sort of late, so we couldn’t stay out too long because tomorrow is a work day,’ she said. ‘But yes, I’d love to go out tonight.’