by Anna Roberts
But it's still weird when she opens the door. "This place is fucking pimp, Hanna," she says. "When were you gonna tell us?"
The great room looks strangely empty. There are nothing but wires and wall-sockets where Crispian's plasma screens used to hang. His drawing board stands locked beside the floor-to-ceiling windows and most of his paintings and original movie posters are missing. Jesús is sitting cross legged on the big, white leather l-shaped couch, typing away on his laptop. I try not to notice that he's wearing red fishnet stockings and a garter belt under his cut-offs.
"I don't know what I was expecting," Kate says. "I guess I thought his place would be…I don’t know…I guess more man-childish than this, but this is amazing."
"What are you doing here?" I ask. "He's coming home tomorrow. You can't be here."
"Relax," says Kate, rummaging in her filthy hold-all. "We just wanted to see how the other half live. You won't even know we're here."
"But I have so much to do..."
"You don't. If you want to play Miss Stepford then just dust the empty spaces and cook up one of your filthy Midwestern soup casseroles. He probably loves all that Doritos and Cheez Whiz shit. Where's he from anyway?"
"Iowa," I say. "Originally. I think. He said the crack-whore was from Iowa."
Kate takes a bikini out of her bag and frowns. "I didn't know they had crack-whores in Iowa. Well, you live and learn. Jesús - you coming for a swim?"
"In a minute. I'm just finishing up this page."
A swim? "Is that the pool she was talking about on the phone?" I never realised Crispian had a swimming pool.
"No. That was a pool table," says Jesús, not looking up from the screen. "There's like a pool room with its own bar. It's pretty cool." He shifts on the couch and adjusts his cut-offs. "Although I'd have thought of all people he'd spring for better quality baize. I swear I got rug burns."
"I don't remember seeing that room," I murmur.
Jesús closes the laptop. "Well, it's a surprisingly large apartment."
"We didn't leave the bedroom much," I blush. "I think the only other rooms I saw were the kitchen and the Zen garden."
"The Zen garden?"
"Through the kitchen, up the small stairway."
"Which small stairway? The one that backs onto the aquarium?"
"There's an aquarium?"
"Yeah. Down the hall. Past the art gallery."
What? Holy crap. He's even richer than I thought he was. Or he was. Oh God. What's going to happen to us now that his business has been shut down? How is he going to pay the bills on this place? How are we going to afford to pay the pool cleaner? Or the fish-wrangler?
I walk down the hall and realise there is another room I have seen - one I didn't tell Jesús about. Before I know it my hand is on the brushed steel handle and memory comes flooding back. His hand on my ponytail, the slap on my rear, and then his heart-wrenching confession.
Yes, Hanna. I'm a Brony.
The Pink Room of Ponies gazes back at me - shelf upon shelf of My Little Ponys. How could I have forgotten this, this room where I lost my innocence, where I finally became a woman?
"I don't know," says Jesús, behind me. "If it were me I'd be scarred for fucking life."
I flush. "Oh crap. Was I...?"
"Narrating again? Yeah. Does your stream of consciousness always contain that many comma-splices?"
"Sometimes more."
"Shit. You should get that looked at."
I go into the bedroom. The sheets are still crumpled and beside the bed is a deflated helium balloon - Pinkie Pie. I take out the manuscript and begin to read. It sings to me of loneliness, of the deep, dark desolation that is my soul without him. I read until my eyes can't stay open any longer and fall headlong into my usual heavily symbolic dreams - I am a ghost, dressed in grubby pink, wearing cat-ears and living in dumpsters.
What can it mean?
Chapter Eight
Love and Smells
Unbeknown to Hanna - who was currently sleeping the heavily symbolic sleep of a poorly written fictional character - exciting events were unfolding in the publishing industry.
The buzz surrounding the hot new find/replaced bestseller was in fact the work of none other than Jessica Waters, aka Jesús Rivera. When Hanna had come home raving about the book, he’d taken to Twitter to bitch about it and although he only had two hundred followers it only took one well-connected follower for the gossip to explode and thus turn yet another repurposed fanfiction into a smoking hot property.
Of course, Jesús knew nothing about this because he’d been torn from his Twitter feed by the more pressing problem of anal lubrication and could he justify it artistically if the hive queens of Boobulon Thirteen were in the business of manufacturing KY jelly rather than royal jelly? Such are the problems of the Kindle porn author.
Meanwhile at RIP Publishing, Liz was fast beginning to suspect that Hanna was actually some kind of idiot savant when it came to sniffing gold out of slush piles. It was for this reason that late that night, Liz descended into the pitch black, insect crawling hellcaves deep below the office building.
She took a torch from the old rock wall and leaned back as it blazed into life. Roaches scuttled over her Birkenstocks and she shuddered, fighting the desire to scream. But no, no – she had barely started out but she knew there were even worse terrors than just cockroaches awaiting her down there, down in the The Hole where the Marketing Creatures lurked. No, she told herself, taking a deep breath. I must be brave. I won’t scream. Not even if they threaten me with a demographic survey. The future of the company depends on knowing if she is The One Who Knows.
One crunchy, rat-boned step at a time, Liz walked deeper into the stygian darkness…
So there was that, but hey – Hanna’s waking up so let’s cut back to her and hope that her boyfriend finally gets out of prison so that we can enjoy lots and lots of lovely circular conversations about what their relationship means to them both.
(help. me.)
I wake the next morning with my face half stuck to the deflated Pinkie Pie balloon. Ugh - drooled in my sleep. The manuscript is open on the bed beside me and for a moment I panic, disoriented. I can hear Jesús singing along to his iPod in the kitchen - something about bootys and the shaking of - and wonder what he's doing here. Holy crap - this book must be amazing for me to forget that Crispian is getting out of prison today.
Tidying my hair, I wander into the kitchen, where Kate is yawning into a cup of coffee and Jesús is making French toast. "You're up early," I mutter.
"Haven't been to bed yet," says Kate, through another yawn. "Jesús, do you still speak to that junior who used to sell that cheap ass speed? The one with the teeth?"
"Yeah, but he's stopped dealing it. It fucked his gums up so bad he ended up looking like that dude from The Pogues.”
"Shit. I've run out of caffeine pills." She glances over at the manuscript and reads the title. "Caught In His Sensual Music? Holy shit - they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel, huh?"
Jesús frowns. "Caught in that sensual music all neglect monuments of unageing intellect."
"Whu?"
"Sailing to Byzantium," he says. "It's a poem. A fucking good one. One that doesn't deserve to have its title bastardised for a book by...Vidalia Lorre." He pulls a face. "Girlfriend needs a new pseudonym because all I'm getting here is onions."
"You're so judgemental," I shoot back. "Actually Timothy and Liz gave it to me specifically because they think it could be the next big thing - and in fact, it's amazing. Absolutely amazing. It's...beautiful. You see, he's a billionaire concert pianist..."
"...and she's a skinny chick with no self-esteem," says Kate, adding another spoonful of coffee to the already thick Nescafe paste in her mug. "Yadda. Heard it."
"No, but it's more complicated than that. He's like..."
"...emotionally damaged in some way so that he has to cry all over her every time they fuck?"
Jeez. She couldn'
t have sneaked into my room and read it overnight, could she?
"Then they have long, boring conversations about their relationship even though there's no real conflict keeping them apart," says Jesús. "And then there's probably even more crying and some more unimaginative sex, right?"
"And nobody ever sixty-nines," adds Kate. "Am I right?"
"It's not like that," I mutter, defensively. "It's...deep."
"Man, everything's deep when you're shallow," says Jesús. "Like everything's clever when you're dumb."
"Pithy," says Kate. "You should embroider that on a pillow or something."
"What do you two know about publishing anyway?" I counter. "It's going to be a bestseller. I can feel it in my bones."
"Of course it'll be a bestseller," says Jesús. "It's like every other romance novel out there at the moment. People just read the same story over and over again. You can change it up with tentacle monsters and sasquatches and hive queens who have to fuck or die but ultimately they want a simple boy-thing meets girl-thing or other boy-thing or three other girl-things then they get horny, then they fuck each other and then they smoke cigarettes and either go their separate ways or fuck again."
"And that's that, is it?" I ask. "That's your entire take on modern literature?"
"Says Little Miss I-Never-Read-Anything-Later-Than-1950."
"Jesús, I can change my mind. I have grown, okay? I learn. I move on. You stay where you are, where you're comfortable, with your comma splices and your old poems that nobody's ever heard of."
He flips a charred lump of French toast onto a plate and sighs. "Dude, I'm pretty sure everyone's heard of W.B. Yeats."
I sigh and put the manuscript back into my bag. "I think you'll find it's pronounced 'yeets'," I whisper, and head out to work.
The day goes by so slowly. If it wasn't for Sensual Music I think I'd die of impatience. I wonder what time he is getting out, what he's doing, what he's wearing. I can't wait to see him again. I refresh my e-mail inbox over and over again, but there's nothing.
"Ease up on the F5 there, champ," says Timothy Grope. "You're only configured for internal e-mail."
"What?" I blink at him, puzzled.
He leans down and gives my shoulders an overfamiliar shake. "It's easy weasy peasy," he says, in a baby voice. "No boyfriend e-mails for you because you never do any fucking work otherwise. Got it?"
"No," I scowl, brushing away his hands. "You mean to say he can't e-mail me at work?"
"By George, she's got it! Yes."
I gape at him for a long moment. "But...that's not fair."
He rolls his eyes. "Come on, Hanna. Don't make me get all Goblin King on your ass. There's no way you could handle that kind of codpiece action anyway. Just conduct your stupid social life outside of office hours just like every other working person on the planet, okay? How is that unfair?"
I stare down at my hands and sigh.
"Don't look at your thumbs. They don't hold any solution to your self-perceived problems. Now, let's talk book."
“Okay.”
“You like it?”
“I love it. It’s beautiful. Beautiful and perfect and true.”
“It’s not,” he says. “It’s vacuous donkey-cock, but whatever.”
“Did you even read it?” The voice that comes out of my mouth seems to have nothing to do with me. For a moment I stare up into his blue eyes, my head fizzy with panic. He curls his lip and the brief flash of anger sustains me. I am right. I know I’m right.
“Skimmed it,” he snorts. “There’s no conflict, the plot’s thinner than an anorexic limbo-dancer, the characters are assholes and the author thinks Bach wrote operas.”
I frown. “Artistic licence,” I murmur.
“Hanna, the main character is supposed to be a concert pianist. It’d be like having a main character who’s an English Major but thinks Shakespeare wrote novels...” He catches my eye, trails off and sighs. “Yeah. You get the general idea. E-mail the author and print out a standard contract.”
“You’re going to publish it?” I gasp.
He shrugs. “Not my decision, but Liz has a theory.”
I print out the contract. Halfway through he comes over, dumps another manuscript on my desk and says “Read it. Report back tomorrow.” Jeez – how am I supposed to read a book by tomorrow?
“But Crispian’s coming home to...”
I don’t get any further. “Don’t care,” says Timothy Grope. “I don’t care if you’re expecting a house call from the Dalai fucking Lama. At work, I expect you to do your job. Is that so hard?”
Eesh. What is his problem? Still, at least he’s stopped sending me threatening text messages, although all that talk about codpieces could possibly be construed as sexual harassment. Did they have sexual harassment suits back in codpiece times?
Timothy Grope sends me out to lunch and I take the manuscript to the coffee shop. People are looking at me and obviously wondering what I’m reading – it’s not often you see people reading manuscripts in public these days. This reminds me that I must buy some floaty skirts for work – it’s very hard to look properly literary in jeans.
The new book is wonderful. It’s about a handsome billionaire with a dark past and the mousy-but-secretly-hot therapist who falls in love with him...
...blah blah blah.
- Oh. It’s you. Figures you’d show up when my life is going well.
I wouldn’t call this 'going well'.
- And what would you call it, pray tell?
I’d call it ‘reading the same romance novel over and over again in a infinite loop that spirals down into the bloodshot eye of madness itself’, but given that your bad days involve sitting catatonic on the sofa staring at your thumbs and producing various fluids, I can see how this would seem relatively enjoyable.
- For your information it’s not the same novel at all. Instead of Bach it has...smells.
Smells?
- She’s an aromatherapist. The previous heroine was a physiotherapist.
Oh. I see.
- It’s very evocative. Smells are powerful like that.
Yes. Apparently Marcel Proust thought so too. Are we going to talk about the elephant in the room or are you perhaps planning to ignore that the way you ignore people when they point out that getting married to someone you’ve known for about two weeks is a catastrophically stupid idea?
- You see, this is why we don’t talk any more. What elephant?
It’s a figure of speech. Specifically I’m talking about the strange, pudgy cat-girl shaped elephant that crawled out from behind a dumpster and hissed at you.
- Oh. That.
Well, don’t you think it’s important? You had a symbolic dream about it and everything. It might be a plot.
- I dream about a lot of things. In the last book I dreamed about a moth. That didn’t mean anything, did it?
It was a metaphor. Admittedly not a very good or original one, but it was a metaphor. Of course, it also served as a call-back to the time I was teasing you about Crispian Neigh tucking his giblets between his fleshy thighs and putting on his lipstick to Q-Lazzarus...
- ...yes. Thank you for that.
“Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me. I’d fuck me haaard.” Oh dear. Never gets old.
I ignore her and call Kate. If she and Jesús are going to insist on hanging around Crispian’s apartment then the least she can do is clean up a bit.
“Clean?” she snorts, as if I’ve made some obscene suggestion. “I wouldn’t know where to start. Besides, don’t fish tanks and swimming pools need specialised cleaning? I can’t very well get in there, drain the shark tank, clean all the algae and shit off the sides and then find out the fuckers are allergic to Windex, can I?”
“Then leave those bits,” I say, ducking down behind my monitor. Elizabeth is having an important looking conversation in her glass office and every so often she glances up in my general direction. “I’m not totally sure they even exist.”
�
��Of course they exist. The author just forgot to write them into book one. And while we’re on the subject there is no goddamn way I’m cleaning the leather or anything else in the sex dungeon.”
“The sex dungeon?”
“You didn’t know about the sex dungeon?”
“Um...no.” Tears prick my eyes. Did he have other women in there?
“Sure you do. It’s the red room with the leather couches and the big fuck-off St. Andrew’s cross nailed to one wall. Reeks of lube. You can’t miss it.”
I sniffle, determined not to cry. “Look, can you just rake the Zen garden and run a vacuum cleaner around the apartment?”
“Fine. Where does he keep the vacuum cleaner?”
“The broom closet.”
“Where’s the broom closet.”
Liz looks over at me again and I flush. “I don’t know,” I murmur.
Just then Liz opens the door and pokes her head out. The light on my desk phone is flashing.
“Your mother,” she says, brusquely.
I pick up the phone and start to cry into it. “It’s okay, honey,” says my mother’s voice. “How far along are you?”
“I’M NOT PREGNANT!” I screech. Everyone turns to stare at me, sitting there with a phone held to each ear and tears pouring down my face. Nobody rushes to my aid. In fact I hear someone murmur ‘mazeltov’ and something that sounds suspiciously like ‘drama llama’.
“Yeah, we established that,” says Kate, on the other phone. “Listen, I’ll call you back. I don’t know what room I’ve found now but it’s definitely not the broom closet...hey...hey, get away from me you little tanorexic fuck. Don’t you fucking push me. No, I don’t have a Golden Ticket – why would I have a...?” She cuts off the call abruptly.
“Hanna, what the hell is going on?” asks my mother.
“I’m getting married!” I wail.
“Not to...oh Hanna, no. I thought he was in prison?”
“He was in prison, but he’s coming out tonight and he loves me and I love him and that’s all there is to it. And I thought I was pregnant but I dropped the stick in a public restroom and Jesús says there could be any number of different pee samples floating about in there, but then I did another test and it said I wasn’t pregnant and now my period’s started anyway but maybe I was pregnant because it’s coming out bright red and it’s usually kind of brownish for the first couple of days. Perhaps I’m losing a baby I never even knew I haaaaad...” My voice breaks down into sobs. Everyone is staring at me. I can smell popcorn; one of the proof-readers has microwaved a bag.