Late Breaking

by K. D. Miller

  At each airport, they have been met by a volunteer holding a sign with OFAFF NOMINEES printed on it, then shuttled in an OFAFF van to their hotel. Depending on the time of day, they have either been allowed to go to bed or have been given one hour to settle in before being picked up by the same van and transported to a lunch, a dinner, a reading, a panel discussion, or yet another onstage interview, followed by questions from the audience.

  “I suppose they expect us all to be fast friends by now,” Philip rumbled a day ago while they were waiting at the baggage carousel. They had just arrived in Vancouver from Saskatoon. They would have three days on the coast, culminating in the award presentation.

  “They’re probably imagining this great meeting of minds or something,” said Jaya. “Oh, there’s my baby!” She bent and reached for her hot pink rolling case with the panda sticker. Jill wondered if she could sense Philip’s old eyes resting fondly on her backside.

  “Nope. They think we hate each other’s guts.” This from Jason as he grabbed his camouflage-coloured knapsack. “They figure each of us is plotting how to kill off the rest and get the award by default.”

  “There we are, Philip,” Jill said, pointing to their identical blue cases, which always, eerily, emerged onto the carousel together. Then, as she stepped back to let the old man wrestle both bags over the barrier and onto the floor—something he insisted on doing—she said to Jason, “Do you really think they would give the award to the survivor? If one of us murdered the rest?” A common topic of conversation has been how much money they could each have made by now if they wrote mysteries, or some other genre that actually sells. “Because the winner must have been chosen a while ago, right? Philip, are you sure I can’t—oh, all right. Anyway, even with three of us dead, couldn’t one of the victims still get the award posthumously?” Just then Jaya spotted the OFAFF NOMINEES sign and they all obediently trooped toward it.

  They in fact were getting along quite well with each other. Jill’s only real fear at the start of the tour had been not about airports or public appearances or questions she would be expected to answer with intelligence and charm. No, it had been that old first-day-of-school fear. Strange faces. A group already formed and closed.

  It came from the constant moving during her childhood. By the time her father settled down, she had attended four different schools in six years. Her father came back from the war with medals, then failed at one thing after another before buying the frame shop on James Street in Hamilton. Up till then, every second year or so, there would be that morning of walking beside her mother through strange streets, each step bringing a new teacher and new classmates closer. Her mother—who took charge of every new community, starting book clubs, galvanizing the local little theatre—exhorted Jill to hold her head up and smile, to step forward and introduce herself, to make friends. But Jill stayed small and quiet as the new girl, earning a place for herself in the middle—neither leader nor loner, just helpful and pleasant and friendly enough.

  It was a relief to settle down finally in Hamilton, where she worked by her father’s side in the frame shop evenings and weekends through high school and university. The day after graduating from McMaster, she was back cutting mats and dusting moulding samples.

  “You could teach!” Her mother, as exasperated with her now as she had ever been with her father. “You could travel!”

  “I’m fine where I am.”

  Over the years the frame shop has done more than pay the bills and make it possible for her to write. Most of her friends are former clients—people who brought some cherished image to her to beautify, and left with a sense of having been cherished and beautified themselves. It is her niche. Her knack.

  *

  At the beginning of their tour, each candidate received an OFAFF swag bag made of royal blue canvas. Each bag contained an OFAFF pen, an OFAFF note pad, a name tag in a plastic case on a silken string, and a letter printed on thick, creamy Olympia Featherstone Foundation letterhead. The letter began by informing them that they had been nominated for the Olympia Featherstone Award For Fiction. (Jaya: “Makes me feel like I’m being accused of something.”) It went on to remind them that this was not only an extremely prestigious award, but the one that, of all the literary awards in the country, offered the largest purse. (Jason: “This week, maybe. Until the Biggar gets bigger.”) It admonished them to refer to the award both in writing and in speech neither as the Olympia, nor as the Featherstone, nor—horrors—as the OH-faff, but always and forever as the Olympia Featherstone Award For Fiction. (Philip: “See how even the bloody preposition is capitalized?”)

  Jill smiled at each of her colleagues’ comments, but made none of her own. She had noticed that, save for the hours they spent in the air or in their hotel rooms, they were never allowed to be alone. In the OFAFF vans, there was the OFAFF driver and volunteer, each potentially cocking an ear to their conversation. At every lunch or dinner given in their honour, they were never seated together, but were each allocated to a different table, where they were studied and questioned by assorted guests. These tended to be municipal politicians, an editor from a local paper or magazine, a high-ranking member of the Library Board, and sometimes even the owner of an independent book store, if any such still existed in that city. And of course, each table would have its assigned Olympia Featherstone Foundation employee seated next to the author. These people, Jill observed, tended to be young women, alarmingly thin, dressed and made up for maximum sparkle and apparently on the brink of nervous breakdown. They smiled till the cords of their necks stood out. They laughed too loud and greeted the most banal comment with “Oh, yes!” or “That’s so true!” And every one assigned to Jill had apparently not only read her book, but been deeply moved by it. Similar sparkling young things were perched at their respective tables beside Philip, Jaya, and Jason. The prettiest was inevitably put with Philip to endure his courtly lechery. Every minute or so, Jill observed, each of the sparklers would nervously check the time. They had to get their authors fed, toileted, and positioned backstage for the reading or the panel discussion or the onstage interview for which an audience was already gathering.

  Jill wonders if there have been minor disasters in years past. Authors drinking too much before a reading—she has noticed Philip’s sparklers monitoring his every raising of a glass to his lips—or locking themselves in a washroom cubicle and refusing to come out. She herself is aware of a lurking desire to sabotage the proceedings. She would never give in to it, and doubts any of the rest would. But she can tell they all want to believe Jason when he claims that, if he wins, he is not going to get up there and say he’s humbled by the award, and that any of the other three would have been equally deserving. “Nope. I’ll say that I won because I’m the best writer and I wrote the best book. Then I’ll grab the cheque, say, ‘So long, suckers!,’ and leave.”

  The cheque. Whether they admit it or not, their banter has to do with the fact that, in less than forty-eight hours, one of them will be wealthy, and the other three will be going home.

  For years, Cornelius (“Call me Corny”) Biggar—self-proclaimed ornamental sticker king of southern

  Ontario—enjoyed an ostensibly friendly rivalry with Olympia Featherstone—old Vancouver forestry money. Each offered a $50,000 annual prize for literary fiction.

  Then, three years ago, Corny Biggar called a press conference. He had, he said, decided that “fifty thou was peanuts. And if I was gonna do this culture thing, I’d better man up and do it.” And so it was that the purse for the Biggar Prize metastasized to $100,000.

  Olympia Featherstone, when informed of the development by a secretary who reads the newspapers on her behalf, rose to the challenge. Though she called no press conference, made no statement, she did attend a Board meeting of the Foundation that bears her name. There, she murmured a single directive. Later that year, just before the award presentation, she signed a cheque for double the usua
l amount.

  The following year, Corny Biggar again raised the stakes to $250,000. Once more, Olympia Featherstone matched it.

  This year, however, on the second of January, she stunned the cultural community by being pre-emptive. Through a Foundation spokesperson, she announced that the Olympia Featherstone Award For Fiction would henceforth come with a purse of $500,000. Corny Biggar, who for years had been investing heavily in oil, was not available for comment.

  Jill cannot imagine suddenly having $500,000. She can’t even understand what it would be for. Payment for having written Late Breaking? How could she be paid for such a thing? By the page? By the word?

  Maybe something karmic is going on and she’s being feted and fed and treated like royalty now because the universe wants to apologize for putting her through hell last year. But how could money—even five hundred thousand dollars—possibly pay for a broken heart? And if it is a case of poetic justice, why did she have to break her heart in the first place?

  It doesn’t even make sense on a simple level. She wrote a book. Dennis Little of Littlepress, based in Stoney Creek, published it. It got good reviews. All true. But she wrote five other books prior to Late Breaking, and they all got good reviews too. Critics routinely refer to her prose as transparent and to herself as consistently underrated. According to one young reviewer who adopted her as a personal cause and ended up having a breakdown, she has been tragically overlooked. She has never won a prize, never even been nominated for one. So why did she suddenly show up on the OFAFF radar screen?

  Unlike the Biggar Prize, which trumpets both its long and short lists to the press minutes after they are compiled, the Olympia Featherstone Award For Fiction eschews all publicity until one month before presentation. Its vetting process is a secret, and the identity of its apparently high-profile judges something they themselves are contracted to take to the grave. Rumour even has it that there are no judges, that the reclusive Olympia Featherstone vets the candidates herself and either chooses the winner, or, if she decides that no book meets her ever-evolving standards, withholds the prize money for another year.

  Something called “the Olympia effect” has been identified. Unlike “the Biggar effect,” (BE), which causes book-sale figures to balloon, the OE attacks authors like a psychological virus. It could be the month of constant travel and performance, or the faceless judging process, or the knowledge that at the end of it all you will either have more money than most people ever see, or nothing. Whatever the reason, nominees have been known to quit their day jobs in a manner that makes it impossible to come crawling back, abandon their spouses, drop their friends, and, in one case, enter a monastery. The most common reaction, for winners as well as losers, is to stop writing. But for all that, whether because of the prestige or the size of the purse, no one has ever turned down a nomination for the Olympia Featherstone Award For Fiction.

  Jill has decided that in her case, being up for the award is causing some erosion of her character. There is an attitude an author is expected to assume onstage while listening to colleagues read from their works. Alert. Appreciative. Verging at times on rapt. Laughter in the right places. A smile of delight over some clever phrase or original observation. For Jill, this masquerade has gotten increasingly difficult as she and the other nominees have flown together across the country, touching down to read the same passages over and over. Sometimes she is tempted to rummage in her purse while one of the other three is at the microphone, to wrestle a candy out of its crinkly wrapper then roll it loudly round her teeth, to study her shoe, lick her thumb, bend down and rub at a spot on the toe.

  She has no doubt the rest are as bored as she is. They have each admitted cheerfully to not having read the others’ books and doubting they ever will now, given that they’ve heard the best bits so many times over.

  The protagonist of Transit Bride (Arrivé, Montreal), by Jaya Ghosh, is a young East Indian immigrant named Parmindar who runs away from home to escape an arranged marriage to an elderly relative. The passage Jaya reads depicts Parmindar riding the Métro in the wedding dress she will wear to rags as she slowly comes to realize she is in fact a boy.

  Jason Rayburn’s self-published e-book, iMessiah, portrays a dystopian near future in which protagonist Jesse reaches out through social media to precariously employed millennials, winning their allegiance by assuring them they are not the tech-obsessed selfish brats everyone assumes they are. Meanwhile, Jesse’s alter ego, Creed, is leading a political party that, if elected, will have job-hoarding Baby Boomers disenfranchised and forced into Homes. Jason reads the scene where the two young men engage in a battle of tweets.

  Philip Phelps’s book, Michael (Mackenzie & Fraser, Toronto), is the latest version of the book he has been writing and rewriting all his life—a coming-of-age tale set in Cape Breton Island. He reads the scene in which young Michael, longing for a life beyond the fences of the ancestral farm, is persuaded by Liam, the aging, legless woodcarver who is his only friend, to be the first in his family to step onto the mainland and purchase a one-way bus ticket to Toronto.

  It has occurred to Jill more than once while listening to the others read that hers is the only protagonist who ends up dead. In Late Breaking (Littlepress, Stoney Creek), Meredith takes her first lover at the age of seventy-three. Jill originally made both characters octogenarians, but Dennis Little, who wanted them sixty-five at the oldest, compromised with seventy-three.

  (Jill: “I thought seventy was supposed to be the new forty or something.”

  Dennis: “Sure it is. When it comes to travel and golf and gourmet cooking and anything else you can put on the cover of a magazine for boomers. But not—”)

  Even her publisher had trouble getting over the idea of wrinkled bodies, greying pubic hair, two old people heaving together into mutual climax. So Jill, out of some perversity, always reads the defloration scene, which she managed to make both grisly and funny.

  It sprang fully formed into her mind two years ago, when she and Eliot Somers went to bed for the first time. She hadn’t had sex in almost a decade, and in the interim seemed to have dried up and shrunk—a case of estrogen-starved atrophy, according to her doctor. She lay there gritting her teeth, listening to Eliot’s running commentary—Interesting. I can feel all kinds of ridges. And your muscles seem to be trying to expel me. What would it be like, she found herself wondering, if an older woman was a virgin on top of all of this? Would she pass out?

  That was the inspiration for Late Breaking’s Meredith. When her lover goes back to his wife, Meredith loses her mind. She gives away her possessions, donates all her money to a feral cat-rescue mission and in the final scene walks naked through the streets of Hamilton to her death in a snowbank, completely unnoticed by bustling Christmas shoppers.

  It is usual for Jill to hear gasps from the audience while she reads, which may explain why she is never slated to go on first or last. The program starts with either the beautiful Jaya Ghosh or the wise-cracking Jason Rayburn. Then Jill goes up to the microphone, after which the audience is given a chance to get another drink. The second half starts with whichever of the young, attractive authors has not already read. Philip Phelps is always last. This allows time for his designated sparkler to get some coffee into him and walk him around a bit outside to sober him up.

  The Olympia Featherstone Award For Fiction, unlike the Biggar Prize, which all but calls for bets, has no acknowledged front runner. But there is a feeling in the air that the old man is going to win. He has survived one nomination for the OFAFF before this, and two for the Biggar. At every venue, he has teased his pretty young sparkler by pledging to do “some serious drinking” at the pre-presentation cocktail party, to continue “working at it” through dinner, then to get up onstage and deliver his acceptance speech whether his name is called or not. Whenever he weaves to a microphone to read, he clutches the podium like a drowning man clutching driftwood. He seldom looks at
his book, preferring to declaim from memory, his eyes searching the back rows as if for the faces of long-dead friends.

  *

  Don’t, Jill thinks, seconds after waking. But by then it’s too late. She has already started the searching, the tender probing for hurt. Yes. There. Still. Not as bad as before. But.

  For months, her first thought on waking, her last before shutting off her light, has been of Eliot Somers not there. Not warming her from his side of the bed. Not turning in his sleep and reaching an arm to hook round her and keep her close. At its worst, missing him has been a constant noise in her ears, a smell she cannot expel from her nostrils. Absence of Eliot. Now, at least, she can play with that phrase a little. It sounds like something she might have on hand in a spice rack or medicine chest. Cream of tartar. Oil of cloves. Absence of Eliot.

  Still in her nightie, she opens her purse and pulls out her phone. She’ll just check her messages, then get dressed. This day has been kept free for the nominees—no official meals or readings or interviews or panel discussions—to let them shore up strength for the award presentation the next night.

  Nothing from Abdul, not that she was expecting to hear from him. Before she left he told her firmly not to worry, that he could run things and would only get in touch if the frame shop was on fire. Jill often forgets how young Abdul is. His wide-spaced eyes and jowly features, which remind her of a Boston terrier, have something settled and middle-aged about them.