A Certain Chemistry (5 page)

With nearly twelve pounds burning a hole in my pocket, I meandered about, tried not to constantly think about Fiona’s stern breasts, and did a little shopping. I bought some food, thinking I’d make the tea tonight. (I was inured to Sara’s cooking by now, it’s just that sometimes you like to sit down to a meal that’s not quite so capricious. I got a frozen pizza and an M&S salad—in terms of steadiness, iconic, I thought.) By midafternoon I was back in my house with my laptop open upstairs in what I’m amusing enough to call my “den” and had four hundred words of a magazine feature written. It was on shipboard romances—I’ve never been in a dinghy, let alone a ship, of course, but I feel that being ludicrously exact about these things is best left to writers who already have new carpets in their houses.

I was pretty pleased with the raw material and was tapping away at the keyboard placidly when my mobile rang. I snatched it up from the table greedily. As I said earlier, my professional reputation is built on grim application—I’m the Deadline Kid—but this isn’t because I’m keen or anything. I am, for a writer, very self-disciplined and diligent, but I’m not some kind of freak. I’ll always invite distraction in if it turns up, but it’s doubly fatal if the intrusion happens to be my phone—I have a weakness for phones. Not just this particular mobile, though that would be understandable. It’s not a top-of-the-range phone, but I did try to justify the expense of buying it with the desperate standby of saying to Sara, “And then
you
can have my old phone!” which demonstrates quite how logically unsustainable the purchase was (especially as Sara already had her own phone and had no intention of changing it). A slim, silver body, its contours erotic to eye and hand, my phone is as pleasingly light as if it were made out of meringue. A tiny LED blinks—what am I talking about?
Winks
—at me coquettishly whenever it’s turned on. The instant a key is pressed, the display blooms into a liquid blue glow and all the buttons light up green from beneath. It’s extravagantly triband, hints at a wonderfully louche sexual ambiguity by having both a phone
and
a SIM memory, and teases me with voice-activated dialing: I can call anyone in my phone book by simply pressing a single, quick-key button on the side of the phone and then speaking his or her name. Obviously, I’d never do this in public—you might as well wear a hat with
TWAT
written on it—but, alone in the house, I’ll often caress the soft rubber nipple on the edge and command, “Amy” . . . a brief pause, then “Calling Amy . . .” appears on the display and I feel like Captain Picard on the bridge of the
Enterprise
. The fact that the phone vibrates too is simply sensual excess, and even before I evoked that feature, I’d already decided my mobile phone was alive, female, and called Natasha. Anyway, as I say, my telephone weakness isn’t isolated to this particular phone—and I wouldn’t want you to think I was
obsessed
with it or anything—but is more general and long-standing. I’ve always grabbed at ringing phones rapidly and instinctively. Perhaps because I have some vague feeling that it’s the sound of Fate, or Opportunity, or Hope, knocking on the door. Who knows who will be on the other end and what fabulous news they’ll have to impart—news that will change everything, forever. If there’s a better way of beginning a book than “The phone rang . . .” then I can’t even guess what it could be.

“Hello. Tom Cartwright.”

“Toooooooom!” Amy, being an agent, always gave good phone. Even though
she’d
rung
you,
she always sounded surprised yet delighted to discover you were the person on the other end of the line.

“Hi, Amy. How are things?”

“Things are in a champagne Jacuzzi, shagging like baboons, Tom.”

“I see.”

“I’ve just had a call from a guy called Paul Dugan.”

“Who’s he?”

“A wanker. London agent—so, a wanker, obviously—but we’ll turn a blind eye to his stupid estuary English and his ridiculous, self-important lunches at the Ivy, because he happens to be
Georgina Nye’s agent
!” She paused briefly for effect, and then elaborated. “Georgina . . . fucking . . .
Nyyyye
!”

A little tingle, I admit. Georgina Nye . . . this meant money. She played the part of Megan in
The Firth,
and Sara wasn’t the only one who liked that particular show. It was currently the top-rated soap (and thus, by infrangible laws of the universe, the top-rated show of any kind) on television, and Georgina Nye was the star of it—she probably had more lingering close-ups just as the closing music kicked in than the rest of the cast put together (I knew because I’d sit by Sara on the sofa while it was on, pointedly reading the international-politics section of the newspaper, but the damn program sucked you in so unstoppably that half the time I’d even forget to tut theatrically when it finished). She was not merely a TV star, though; she was the U.K.’s sweetheart. What’s more, because of Megan’s independence and her championing the rights of the women at the factory, she had become acknowledged—even in the broadsheets (though they protected themselves with the careful application of wryness)—as a working-class, postmodern, feminist icon. Women viewers loved her. The male viewers loved her too—both because she was undoubtedly a bit of a looker and also because she gave off the impression that, if it took her fancy, she could actually shag you to death. Full cross-gender appeal, then. If a book with Georgina Nye’s name stuck on the front of it was coming out, it would sell, everyone knew it would sell, and therefore the publishers would stump up an utterly obscene advance for it. And if Amy and I had anything to do with it, some of that advance would be heading right into our pockets.

“Georgina. Fucking.
Nyeee!
” she repeated.

“What’s she thinking of doing? Glitzy novel set against the backdrop of a fictional television soap opera or something?”

“Autobiography.”

“Oh, nice. What is she? About twenty-eight? And she’s been doing the same thing, three nights a week, for a decade of that.”

“So you’ll need to make up half of the length entirely with adjectives? So what? With the money we’re talking about here you’ll be able to buy a fucking
huge
thesaurus.”

“What money
are
we talking about, exactly?”

“McAllister and Campbell paid one and a half million pounds for this book. I’ll be after getting ten percent of that out of her agent, even if it means fighting the bastard in the car park.”

“One and a half million? Jesus.”

“Abso
lute
ly. And there were other publishers offering not far off that as well. Apparently, they went with M&C because of the Scottish connection. The overwhelming bulk of their business might be in London now—the tossers—but M&C have that ‘Edinburgh born and bred’ angle and actual offices still up here. The plan is to push the whole Scots thing, you see. Georgina Nye: Scots actress, in Scottish show, having her book published by a Scottish publisher. They want it to come out to coincide with the Edinburgh Festival too. I bet they even give it a tartan cover. Ha! Fuckers.”

“Mmmm . . . It’s going to be tight if they want it on the shelves for the festival. We’re halfway through May now.”

“Nah. A publisher can puke out a book in six weeks if they have the will, a budget, and somewhere to dispose of the bodies. You know that, Tom. The city will be stuffed with the media covering the biggest arts festival in the world, and M&C will be holding Georgina Nye’s autobiography. It’s a fantasy: Publicity Porn. But to make it work they need someone who—definitely, no scary doubts—will smack a completed manuscript down on their desk in about three weeks.”

I heard the fizz of a match, and her speech became cigarette-in-mouth-impaired.

“Dee tigh deadlinesh our aesh inna hole, Dom.”

Sucking breath. Whooshing exhalation.

“They can’t afford unforeseen delays,” she continued, “and you
are
Mr. Foreseen.”

“So, when do we sign?”

“Ahh, now, we haven’t quite got the bastards yet. Georgina Nye wants to meet you before she gives the go-ahead. Make sure she feels ‘comfortable’ with your being the person who tells the story of her life, under her name. Some kind of fucking hippie, clearly. Anyway, she’s staying in a hotel up here now, so, one
P.M
. tomorrow, by the Scott Monument. Be there, and be charming.”

“In the park? Couldn’t we have met over lunch or something?”

“
I
didn’t pick it, you bamstick. That’s where
she
wanted. Who the hell knows what she’s thinking? She’s an actress. You just go and meet her. Figure out what she’s looking for, then be that. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good. As soon as she’s given the final nod, I’ll set to work fucking over her agent.”

“Georgina Nye? Wow!”

“It’s still not certain I’ll get the contract, Sara. Don’t go ordering new kitchen cabinets just yet.”

I was very excited about the prospect of a commission of this size so, naturally, I was deeply keen to keep Sara from getting excited about the prospect of a commission of this size.

“I didn’t mean the money,” she said. “The money’s irrelevant . . . well, except that if I know you’ve just got a check for a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, I’m sure I’ll suddenly find you hugely attractive, sexually.”

“Pah. You find me hugely attractive, sexually, already. We both know it, so it’s foolish to pretend.”

“Not
a hundred and fifty thousand pounds
sexually attractive, though. Just sexually attractive at the level of . . . well, what have you got in your pocket right now?”

“A rocket.”

Sara raised her eyebrows and smiled mockingly.

“Aye, one of those that always explodes on the launchpad. No, really, Tom, I didn’t mean the money. I meant, ‘Wow!
Georgina Nye
.’ Do you think I’ll get to meet her?”

“I doubt it. She’ll probably want to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible. I reckon I’ll have one afternoon noting down the name of her first hamster, she’ll give me half a dozen photos of the ‘Here I am on the beach, aged six, little suspecting that . . .’ kind, some instructions to subtly rubbish a couple of her costars, and that’ll be it.”

“Och, she won’t have you rubbish anyone. She’s really nice.”

“How do
you
know?”

“I read it in
Heat
.”

We both laughed and Sara dropped back onto the sofa, kicking off her shoes; one bounced under the table, and the other landed in the magazine rack.

“Seriously, Tom, she supports campaigns to help working mothers and stuff like that, so she does. She’s a—”

“Feminist icon. I know. The title of chapter fourteen, I’m thinking there.”

“You’re cynical, that’s your trouble.”

“Not by nature, only by experience.”

I sat down beside her.

“Wow . . . Georgina Nye . . .” She was staring up through the ceiling into some magical, unfocused distance. “I’m really excited now.” Shuffling back a little, she put her head on my lap for stroking. “Do you love me so much that my very name tastes sweet on your tongue?” she asked.

“Yeah. Whatever.”

I wasn’t sure of my timing. It’s always the same with an important meeting, of course. There’s something innately submissive about being there first. Yet, while being early can look a little desperate, being late might smack of arrogance or ineptness. You can pull it off if
you’re
the important party (I imagine, I’ve never been that party) by playing the endearingly scatty card: “Sorry, I—
sorry
—phew! I just got caught up and—oh, don’t ask! Phew! What
am
I like?” But, as the person who is (let’s be honest) begging to be given a job, arriving late will never be a good move. Which leaves arriving
precisely
on time. Unutterably awful, that one, clearly. Might work if you’re asking to be employed as a proofreader or an accountant, but otherwise you’re going to look like a bit of a trainspotter—vaguely creepy, even. What I generally do—and I think this is the only thing you
can
do if you’re an adult who’s taken some time to consider all the issues and come up with a clearheaded course of action—is I arrive early, and then hide. I find somewhere close by and conceal myself: wait until I see the person arrive, pause for fifteen seconds, then march in—apologizing
profusely
for being late. Works every time. Well, except for those times when the person you’re meeting happens to walk up behind you while you’re crouching watchfully behind a low wall across from the meeting place; if that happens, you’re pretty much into “faking a seizure” territory, really.

So, bearing all this in mind, I took a taxi and got stuck in traffic.

I held out bravely for a long, creeping while, but at the bottom of Cockburn Street I finally decided that there was no point sticking with the cab any longer: I paid the driver and raced across the bridge towards the Scott Monument as fast as I could. As I neared the other end, I abruptly changed my flailing run into a brisk stroll (I thought that’d appear more businesslike if Nye caught sight of me).

However, when I got to the monument . . . no Nye. I walked around the seated Scott, oh, let’s say eleven times, trying to pick her out of the people there. Not that difficult, really—I knew she wasn’t male and I knew she wasn’t Japanese, so that narrowed it down to just two or three people each time I orbited. But with each fruitless revolution, I became one level of certainty more convinced that she’d waited a little while and then, when I hadn’t turned up, marched off in a colossal celebrity huff. I could get Amy to call her agent—“Terribly sorry, Tom was at the scene of a road accident, couldn’t leave the injured, or use his hands to phone without having to release the life-saving pressure he was applying to at least one person’s artery.” They obviously wouldn’t believe this, though—or even care. I’d lost the deal.
One hundred and fifty thousand fucking pounds
. I’d be kicking myself later, after Amy and Sara were both through kicking me.