by Jemma Harvey
The writer was a bespectacled guy with beautiful manners called Vijay Ramsingh (his editor had changed it to VJ, to recall VS) who looked much younger than his thirty-one years. PR had suppressed his middle-class origins to imply an inner-city background and an authentic Voice of the People (in these circumstances, it’s not the book that matters, it’s the image of the writer). He looked faintly bewildered, as authors often do when caught up in the publicity machine. ‘Congratulations,’ I told him, over a glass of Château Plonque in the carefully chosen party venue, an Islamic wine bar off the Edgware Road. Well, maybe not actually Islamic, but it looked it, with frescoes of camel trains on the walls and nibbles consisting of pounded-up chickpea and things wrapped in other things. ‘You must be very pleased,’ I went on. The party was well attended by the literary press; Georgie always knew how to create a buzz.
‘Will there be any other writers?’ Vijay asked innocently.
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ I said. ‘This party’s for you.’ Excess writers aren’t encouraged at launches, unless they happen to be critics as well, or so famous you can’t turn them away. A stray writer can be a loose cannon, especially if there’s booze available. With authors, two’s a crowd.
‘But . . . isn’t that Todd Jarman over there?’ A note of genuine excitement had crept into his voice.
‘Of course not,’ I insisted, looking round.
I was wrong.
My heart didn’t exactly plummet, but it did slither down a few notches. Todd Jarman is a thriller writer whose books are so classy that broad-minded critics have been known to hail them as Littritcha. A couple of years ago his stuff was adapted for television with a rising star in the role of his main detective, and Jarman promptly went mega. For the first eight books, his hardbacks just managed four-figure sales; now, they go straight into the Top Ten. Always difficult, he became virtually impossible to deal with, but an editor who’d been there practically from the beginning managed to cope, if only by barely altering a word. Then the editor took a career change and switched to being an agent, hassling the publishers instead of the writer. Long-suffering Laurence Buckle took over, lasting less than a year before Jarman dug his heels in, saying he didn’t want to be turned into another Jerry Beauman.
Guess who was co-opted next.
So far, we’d only spoken once, over the phone, when I’d been given the unenviable task of telling him his latest title was too long for the dust-jacket artwork. He’d expressed himself in the kind of language his hero reserved for the discovery of a particularly unpleasant corpse. I really, really didn’t want to meet him face-to-face unless I was fortified with Prozac and a gallon of Rescue Remedy.
‘What’s he doing here?’ I asked Lin in a panicked whisper.
‘Dragged here by his girlfriend, I think. She’s a human rights lawyer. Someone at Porgy sent her Vijay’s book for a quote, and apparently she adored it.’
The girlfriend was much in evidence, a sleek blonde whose mere profile exhibited steely intelligence, effortless competence, and designer grooming. I loathed her on sight. Beside her, Jarman was inspecting the crowd with the sort of dark, probing gaze that would have bored holes in woodwork. He looked grimly handsome, tight-lipped, even saturnine – but perhaps that was my fault. Put on the spot by the Art Department, who had themed his jackets over several books and knew a change could damage sales, I’d finally got him to knock three words off the overlong title, but he hadn’t been happy. Of course, it could have been sheer paranoia that made me imagine he was searching for me. Maybe he always looked murderous at launch parties.
‘Nobody tell him I’m here!’ I hissed.
I headed towards the bar for a refill, wishing I’d stayed at home. Mandy’s ice-green stare was menacing, but at least I’d never had to edit him. And with Nigel away I could have watched EastEnders . . .
There are mysterious currents that circulate at parties, sweeping people inexorably together – or apart. Skilled socialites know how to ride them, borne round the room in the mainstream, talking to all the most interesting guests, while someone like me invariably gets stuck in the boring little eddies round the edge. On this occasion, however, I was hoping for a boring little eddy at the bar. But those same currents which always divide you from that really attractive man glimpsed about ten people away can be still more malevolent, casting you in the path of the one person you wish to avoid. I got my drink, stepped backwards – and collided with Todd Jarman.
Aiming for the bar was probably a mistake.
I gasped: ‘Oh – er – hello.’ That was a mistake, too. If I’d said nothing and moved on he wouldn’t have spoken to me.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Which is worse – the red or the white?’
I was drinking red. ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘I haven’t tried the white.’
He took a glass of red and, instead of slipping back into the party mainstream, positioned himself beside me in conversational mode. Under other circumstances, I’d have been flattered. He’s famous (for a writer) and, more important, quite good-looking, if your taste runs to tall, dark, saturnine men. At that moment, mine didn’t. He has off-black hair and a rather long face with a hooky nose and the kind of lean cheeks that have a thin line running down from the jut of the cheekbone. Possibly a smile line, though most people who have them don’t seem to smile much. Romantic novelists of the fifties would have called him lantern-jawed, though that’s an image that has always baffled me. I’ve never seen anyone with a jaw that looked remotely like a lantern. I didn’t register eye colour, but I noticed he hadn’t bothered to shave.
‘Have you read Vijay’s book?’ I asked, desperate to evade the subject of his own.
‘God, no. Helen loved it.’ The girlfriend. ‘That was more than enough to put me off.’
‘Why?’ I said. He was annoying me already.
‘She likes earnest, well-meaning fiction that says something significant about society, preferably without any excitement getting in the way. I like a good story.’
‘White Fang,’ I said promptly. ‘Rattling good yarn. Never needed to read another.’ I was thinking of Radlett Senior in The Pursuit of Love, but I didn’t expect Jarman to recognise the allusion.
He did. I could see it in his face. His eyebrows went up at the outer edges, a good trick if you can do it. ‘Exactly. Have you read it?’
‘Well . . . yes.’ Actually, I’d sobbed my way through half a box of tissues in the last bit, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘I just don’t think it’s clever to sneer at your girlfriend, behind her back or to her face.’ I didn’t like her, but right now, I disliked him more. And I didn’t care if he knew it. ‘In fact, I think it’s pretty cheap.’
‘Ouch,’ he said. ‘Well done. The truth is, Helen cordially despises me for writing popular fiction, while I hugely admire her for defending the underdog in the courts of the overdog. My personality has become warped and bitter as a result. Sometimes it shows. I’m Todd Jarman, by the way. Will you introduce yourself, or do you want to leave it to our seconds?’
‘You’ll be much happier not knowing,’ I said, mislaying some of my former bravado.
‘Will I?’
‘I’m Emma Cook. My friends call me Cookie, but I don’t suppose you’re going to be one of them.’
‘Emma Cook . . .’ He was frowning. My name had evidently made no impression, but I was sure my work had.
‘I’m your . . . new . . . editor . . .’
This time, the inside edges of his eyebrows swooped abruptly down. Since they met already over the bridge of his nose (a sure sign of a werewolf, according to Angela Carter), this tangled them into a savage knot. Then they unknotted, soaring upward again. Irony. ‘So you’re the individual who thinks The Last Harlot of Lemontree Street has – what was it? – too many words.’ Why is it the term ‘individual’ can sound so offensive? ‘Too many words for the title – too many words for the dust jacket – too many words for the limited attention span of the reading public. We don�
��t want to distract from a pretty picture of a dismembered corpse, do we? We don’t want brain strain to set in before the morons who read me get to the first page. The Last Harlot is so much – snappier, didn’t you say? All ready to snap up the roving reader. Thus spake the voice of wisdom and experience!’
Cravenly, I opened my mouth to pass the buck on to the Art Department, but Todd didn’t give me the chance. Sarcasm, which had merely dripped before, now rushed over me in a torrent. He mocked my youth, my supposed arrogance, my literary talents, my artistic judgement. If I knew so much more about his job than he did, why wasn’t I writing books instead of editing them? (I had every intention of writing books one day.) What qualifications did I have to pick holes in an accredited bestseller? Oh, a degree, a degree in English. He, of course, had learnt his English on the streets. (Since his background was relatively middle-class, I wondered which streets he meant.) He wrote for the people, not for the intellectual snobs in the literati.
‘Exactly. Which is why the shorter title—’
The people weren’t the braindead fuckwits that most publishers seemed to believe. His own success was proof of that. The people were acute and discerning. They could understand words of more than two syllables, titles of more than three words. They didn’t judge a book by the bloodstains on the cover. I was a typical Oxbridge graduate, inflated with the conceit of education and privilege, hopelessly naïve about the real world. Who the hell did I think I was, teaching him how to write?
In a moment he would tell me my mother’s milk was still dribbling down my chin.
Only the advent of Helen Aucham stemmed the flood. Close to, she had the lean, athletic body of a greyhound, if you could imagine a greyhound in Nicole Farhi. Her face resembled a computer animation: the features moved but everything else was frozen into smoothness. She had evidently overdone the Botox. She flicked me a wary glance which faded into disinterest when Todd, still in ironic mode, began to introduce me. ‘This is the brilliant and talented Ms Cook, who believes she knows better than me what—’
‘Todd darling, we’re running late. We’re supposed to be at the Granthams’ for dinner, remember? God knows how long it’ll take to get a taxi.’
She swept him off, willy-nilly, while he threw dagger-looks over his shoulder in my direction. If there had been genuine steel in them, I would have ended up like a pincushion. I took a deep breath as he left the room, and an even deeper swig of Plonque. The customer may be always right but the writer is always wrong, at least according to most publishers. However, editorial diplomacy decrees that you should never say so. Now the tirade was over and I seemed to be still in one piece I felt suddenly light-hearted. I turned back to the bar for another refill and determined to enjoy the rest of the party.
Back home, several pints of red later, I curled up with a packet of tortilla chips (I couldn’t be bothered to cook), a tub of blue cheese dip, and the kind of romantic video on which Nigel would have poured scorn. In this case, You’ve Got Mail, which is all about booksellers, though I have never met one even a quarter – even an eighth – as charismatic as the hero, played by Tom Hanks.
In case you haven’t guessed, Nigel is a bookseller, of sorts. He and a friend run a small shop specialising in Left-Wing political stuff – everything from Das Kapital to biographies of Che Guevara and Tony Benn – and ecobooks on the breakdown of the ozone layer, getting close to the earth, and even witchcraft, which he calls Wicca. (I always visualise the witches in basketwork hats.) The fiction section is dominated by futuristic gloom and environmental fantasy. He also campaigns for the Green Party and is currently immersed in complex schemes to oust the present candidate and replace him, which seems rather a wasted effort, since he only got about fifty votes at the last election. But Nigel is very passionate and idealistic and always believes the world is just about to wake up and see the light, or perhaps the dark, and vote accordingly. That week he had gone to a convention on globalism (Corporate Power and the Self-Destruct Society: that sort of thing) so I could relax and stop taking life seriously for a while.
There’s a photo of us on the sideboard, his arm around my shoulders while I’m smiling up at him – though not far up because he isn’t much taller than me – and he’s smiling at the camera. He has about a tenth as much charisma as Tom Hanks, which is not bad for a real-life bookseller, particularly one with an ecoconscience. He’s rather skinny – behind our backs I know people talk about thin men who fancy fat women – and pretty in a little-boy way, with one of those faces that invariably looks fifteen even though he’s going on thirty. Women always want to cuddle and protect him: I know I did. At the same time, I saw courage in his high ideals, moral fibre in the warp and weft of his political convictions. I even tried to agree with them, sometimes. He hates football (‘the new opiate of the people’) and is never laddish or aggressively macho. Of course, on a scale of lamp to candle, if Todd Jarman is lantern-jawed, Nigel is pocket-torch-jawed, but then square jaws go with old-fashioned machismo, not New Age sensitivity. For the rest, he has beautiful blue-green eyes with very long eyelashes and dingy blond hair styled according to the Bob Geldof school of hairdressing. However, I have always held the unexpressed and probably sexist belief that straight men shouldn’t care how they look: male elegance denotes gays or poseurs. I expect it’s a reaction against my mother, who once dismissed a boyfriend of my sister’s with a sotto voce murmur of ‘polyester trousers’.
When I met him, Nigel was living in cramped conditions above the bookshop, with a single-bar radiator, camping gas, and a sleeping bag. Two weeks later he moved in with me. We’d been together nearly two years, and although he never mentioned marriage I hoped things were getting serious. After all, living together was halfway there, wasn’t it? (‘No,’ Georgie always said when confronted with this argument. ‘Living together just means one set of bills instead of two – and I’ll bet you pay them.’) I did love him, or so I told myself that night, mellow with wine and gazing at his beautiful eyes in the photograph, but it was rather pleasant to have an evening alone when I could love him from a distance without his high ideals getting in the way. I went to bed feeling sexy and tried to fantasise about him, but in the end I was forced to revert to Russell Crowe. It was my favourite fantasy of the time, where I was chained to a post in the arena in Ancient Rome, about to be devoured by slavering tigers. Sadistic handlers were slowly paying out their leashes, as they tore off my clothing without actually touching my flesh. Then Russell Crowe appeared, scantily clad in gladiator-grunge with ripped leather and rippling muscles. He fought off the tigers, wrenched my shackles free of the post, and we rolled over and over in the dust. I was all but naked, helpless and available, and he penetrated me immediately, casually, humping me like a tiger in front of a breathless audience and the cold gaze of the watching Caesar. To the resounding cheers of the entire Colosseum, I came.
You think that’s weird? I read an article recently where a woman admitted fantasising about having sex with an octopus. Compared to that, Russell Crowe and thousands of cheering Romans is pretty mundane.
Enough of me for a bit, time to fill you in on the real heroines of this story. On how beautiful Lin left her native Scotland and was swept down to the decadence and corruption of the south. There was a man in it, of course. She was nineteen, doing media studies at college, and a bewitched lecturer managed to get her placed on work experience at the local TV station. At that age she had the dewy, untouched look of an ethereal creature who has just crawled out of a new-opened flower and gazes in misty-eyed wonder at the big wide world. (I know: I’ve seen photographs.) Blasé TV executives were enchanted, and she was deputised to make coffee for special guests, where her mere appearance mellowed awkward stars into interview mode. Curiously, though, none of the visiting men asked for dates: she looked too pure to be the butt of sexy banter, or the other half of a quick roll in the hay.
And then along came Sean Corrigan. A soap-stud from the long-running, Liverpool-based Mandela Street, at th
at time his looks hadn’t been raddled by drink and drugs and he was still the clean-cut, dark-featured Irish lad who had recently scrambled to stardom. His hair was as black as the crow’s wing and his eyes as dark as peat and his moods as changeable as summer in Connaught – and all this despite the fact that he had grown up in Deptford and his English mother had named him Sean not because of his heritage but after her favourite film star. To him, Lin’s aura of unearthly purity was merely a novelty, a challenge, a hurdle to be taken in his stride. He took her for a drink after the interview, called her ‘acushla’ in his carefully cultivated brogue, told her, with a certain lack of originality: ‘I’ve never met anyone like you.’ Lin, inexperienced, hadn’t heard that line before, but she was instinctively wary.
‘How do you know?’ she said. ‘We’ve barely talked.’
‘I don’t have to talk to you, mavourneen. Your face tells me everything. It’s as open as the dawn. You couldn’t lie, or cheat, or let a man down, not if you tried.’
‘I haven’t tried,’ she admitted. And, with a glint of humour: ‘Not yet, anyway.’
He laughed. ‘You won’t need to, I promise you. The man doesn’t breathe who would deliberately do you harm. You are too young, too innocent . . .’