Not Another Happy Ending (12 page)

‘Shut up.’ She took the glossy folder she had retrieved from her briefcase at the same time as the list of unprofitable novels and slid it across the table. ‘They're called Pandemic Media.’

An over-complicated logo was emblazoned on the front of the folder, the sort of thing that could only have been designed after going through three committees, a test audience and an in-depth consultation with the CEO's cleaner.

‘I can only assume they're run by a suicidal madman,’ Anna went on, ‘since they want to invest in you.’

He pushed away the folder. ‘You mean buy me out, move the company to London and let people called Jocasta and Strawberry cut half the authors from my list. Uh-uh. No way!’

‘You have to look at this, whether you like it or not.’ She tapped the folder sternly. ‘Pandemic Media want the edgy frisson a name like Tristesse Books would bring them. And trust me, you could really do with the cash.’

‘I don't need Pandemic Media. I have Jane Lockhart.’
He felt his confidence undercut by the yawning hole opening up beneath his feet. Oh god, his whole business, his whole life's work relied on that annoying woman. ‘This time she's going all the way!’ he declared with a forced smile.

Anna leant forward. ‘Are you sure? Because the trade is waiting. Two thousand bookshops have allocated shelf-space, a hundred thousand readers are stocking up on tissues, and if she doesn't deliver soon …’ She pronged the tomato with a fork. Juice oozed through the pierced skin. ‘… your tomato's looking like ketchup.’

Tom surveyed the perforated tomato and swallowed hard. ‘She called me on Monday, said she was starting the final chapter and I could expect it by the end of next week.’

Anna rolled her eyes. ‘And when in your experience has a writer ever finished a novel when she said she would?’

Tom conceded with a shrug, unhappy about where this conversation was leading.

‘Call her,’ Anna commanded. ‘Find out how close she
really
is to finishing.’

‘There's no point—when she sees it's me she won't even answer.’

Anna placed her own phone on the table. ‘I believe it's called a “workaround”.’

Tom stared at the phone like it was a revolver with one bullet in the chamber. He didn't want to speak to her. The
last time they'd spoken Jane had called him just to give him the brush-off. It was too painful to hear her voice. For a time after they'd broken up he'd sat in his office and played old voice-mail messages from her, just to hear what she sounded like when she wasn't angry with him. One day Roddy had caught him in the act and gently but firmly encouraged him to delete the messages. It was over.

Anna gave him a look like a python considering a plump mouse. Grumbling, he picked up her phone.

‘This is a waste of breath,’ he said, dialling Jane's number. ‘She'll deliver the novel. She may be a miserable pain in the arse, but when she's writing she's like a guided missile.’

Jane's hand was a blur as she whisked a bowl full of cake mixture to an elastic consistency. This wasn't a displacement activity. This was baking. Baking could hardly be counted a lesser activity than novel writing. Baking produced actual stuff. Stuff you could eat. Almost every time.

When she'd returned from her shopping expedition she had opened her laptop and tried to squeeze out a few words, but to no avail. Rather than squander the whole afternoon, she had cracked out the flour and butter. When the mixture looked just right she dipped in a finger and tasted. Frowning, she consulted an open recipe book.

‘
Tea
-spoon?’

She picked up a tablespoon and studied it accusingly. As she figured out if it was possible to rescue the cake, across the room her phone rang, vibrating against the lid of her laptop.

‘Willie,’ she called to him, ‘will you get that?’

Willie sat at his desk, eyes narrowed at the page cranking steadily through his typewriter. She called his name again, but it was obvious he couldn't hear her over the clacking of keys. With a frustrated puff she blew her fringe off her forehead, shoved the brimming cake tin into the hot oven and marched across the room.

The phone throbbed on the laptop like a pneumatic drill. From the lack of a caller ID it wasn't anyone in her contacts list and she didn't recognise the number. She snatched it up, bothered by a faint sensation that she'd missed something important.

‘Hello?’

‘Thursday or Friday for the manuscript?’

‘Grease-proof paper!’ She raced back to the kitchen to find the square of parchment that ought to be lining the cake-tin instead laid out on the counter-top. She stared at it mournfully.

‘You're certain it will be finished next week?’

She'd recognised his voice immediately, but her cake crisis had taken precedence. Well, she didn't have to tell him anything. He didn't have to know.

‘What are you doing?’ Tom probed.

‘Nothing,’ she said guiltily. She winced—why had she said anything? Hang up. Just hang up now!

‘Are you … baking?’

She killed the call and cringed. He knew. He knew what the baking meant.

Almost immediately the phone rang again. She jumped at the sound. It was him, of course, persistent as ever. The handset felt like a hot scone burning her palm. There was only one rational course of action. In one swift coordinated move she swung open the fridge, tossed the phone inside and slammed the door. The muffled ringtone continued through the insulated layers.

She looked round to discover Willie peering at her over his spectacles in bemusement. She wasn't sure how exactly to explain her actions without coming across as a complete nutcase. She smiled weakly. No. That didn't help.

Halfway across the city, in the café next to Tristesse Books, Tom stared at the phone in horror.

‘She's baking.’

Anna waved her hands in mock terror. ‘Oh no! It's a cake-tastrophe!’ Pleased at her pun, she was irritated when Tom didn't even crack a smile. ‘So, she's baking. What, you don't like her Victoria sandwich?’

‘You don't understand,’ he said solemnly. Catching a glimpse of himself in the window he saw he was sporting
an expression he'd only ever seen on newsreaders announcing natural disasters or the death of a much-loved Royal. He sighed and looked back at Anna.

‘Jane bakes when she's blocked.’

‘Sparkle in the Rain’, Simple Minds, 1984, Virgin

T
HREE DAYS LATER
, Jane was still baking. Four loaves of banana bread nestled under a tiered chocolate sponge. A constellation of cupcakes orbited beside a tray of millionaire's shortcake. The kitchen smelt of caramel and obsession.

She cleared a space on her desk, lowered a cake stand crowned with a freshly baked lemon sponge and flicked her eyes to Willie. As usual he was attacking his typewriter as if leading a cavalry charge. She'd discovered that nothing could distract him when he was in this mood. And she'd tried everything.

‘Slice of cake?’

Click-clack-click-clack.

‘Any laundry need doing?’

Click-clack-click-clack.

‘Blowjob?’

Ting!

Without looking up he swiped the carriage return lever
and began a new line. Abandoning her attempt to divert his attention, she admired the cake one last time and grudgingly opened her laptop. The blank page gaped like a wound. No, not a wound. It stood for the emptiness of the universe, she decided; the infinite nothingness which no amount of sponge cake could fill. Slowly she raised her eyes to peer at Willie over the top of the screen.

He continued to pound away, blithely unaware of the existential crisis taking place only a few feet from him. There was something inhuman about his energy. When he had first moved in she'd gawped at his work ethic, then found that her own increased, as if he was pulling her along in his wake, but lately when she eyed him across the valley of their desks she felt herself recoil. She remembered reading that the great Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope, famously schooled himself to write two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. Willie Scott farted more words. Jane imagined Willie flipping him the finger in his rear-view mirror as he eased past a furiously bicycling Trollope.

Willie added another completed page to his ever-increasing tower. Soon it would need scaffolding. Jane sighed in exasperation and—OK, she'd admit it—with envy. As he stacked up the pages she just stacked, circling forever over Chapter 37, waiting for permission to make her final approach.

She was stuck.

Blocked.

She tortured herself with idle speculation: perhaps she was fated not to finish this novel. She glanced at the ‘Jane’ trophy on her bookshelf. Perhaps this would be her
Sanditon
, Jane Austen's unfinished novel. She ramped up the anxiety daydream. Perhaps she'd die of consumption before completing it. She
did
feel a cough coming on. How bad would Tom feel about that? No, not Tom. Forget about Tom. She didn't care how he felt about anything.

She reached for her water-spray. Her hand closed around the familiar plastic bottle, index finger finding the trigger. Aiming it blindly she spritzed the umbrella plant.

‘You OK, Janey?’

She wasn't sure exactly when Willie had started calling her ‘Janey’. She knew he meant it fondly, so even though she disliked the moniker she hadn't corrected him right away. And now it was too late.

‘Yes. Fine. Just one more chapter.’

‘You not finished that yet?’

She felt her blood boil and imagined jumping out of her seat, reaching across the desk to grab a hank of his stupid wavy hair, pulling down hard and mashing his face repeatedly into his fucking typewriter. Click-clack-click-buggering-clack.

Ting!

In reality she remained fixed in her seat, smiled sweetly and said, ‘Nope. Not quite finished.’ Her trigger-finger spasmed and she drenched the plant once more.

‘Careful, or you're gonna kill that thing,’ he warned her before resuming his typing.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, her eyes suddenly murderous. ‘Yes I am.’

What was she doing? It wasn't Willie's fault she was stuck. With a long sigh she rested her head on the desk. The wood felt cool against her cheek. She glanced at the plant.

‘It was a birthday present from my dad. He gave it to me in the morning and walked out on us that night. I often wondered why I didn't just kill the thing. Chuck it in the bin. Now I think it's because I always hoped he'd come back.’ She stroked the leaves. ‘And that hope, like this ugly little plant, didn't die.’

As she struggled back from the memory she was dimly aware that the atmosphere in the room had shifted. Something significant had occurred.

Willie had stopped typing.

She lifted her head to see him staring thoughtfully into the middle distance. Grateful that her story had affected him so deeply she started to get up from her chair. She wanted to hold him. Kiss him. Thank him for understanding.

And then he said, ‘How many p's in “deprivation”?’

She laid her head back down on the desk. ‘One. One p.’

The novel may have stalled but her renewed relationship with her dad had taken its first faltering steps. It
had begun with an awkward cup of tea in a café on the Gallowgate, graduated to bowling in Bargeddie and then he'd suggested they go to the pub. He saw her face fall and immediately tried to reassure her. ‘A quiz,’ he'd said. ‘That's how well I'm doing. When I think of a pub these days it's all about the quiz. I'm even in a team. “Benny and the Jets”. I'd love you to come—meet the lads, watch your old dad answer a few brainteasers. What d'you say, darlin’?’

She'd said yes and it had quickly become a regular thing. The last couple of times Willie had come along too, but she sensed that her dad wasn't a fan. When she'd pressed him he'd confessed that while he had no right to judge, fatherly concern had been stirred by the revelation that Willie was a reformed drinker. He didn't like it. Not one bit. Didn't matter how long it was since you last took a drink, he'd said, it leaves its mark. Annoyingly, Benny displayed a far better rapport with Tom.

The two of them had met during the book tour. After her dad surprised her by showing up at the Waterstones signing in Glasgow he'd made a point of attending every subsequent event. Jane was touched by his support, but less thrilled when at the end of a talk in Stirling she'd found him and Tom at the back of the hall, thick as thieves. After a signing in Dundee she'd confronted her dad leaving the library laden with books.

‘Tom gave them to me,’ he'd said delightedly. ‘I love a freebie.’

She couldn't disguise her irritation. ‘So when did you become such a big reader?’

‘Oh, I'm no’,’ he'd said. ‘These aren't
stories
. See, I like facts. Stuff that really happened.’

She'd considered telling Tom to lay off her dad, but that would have involved talking to him herself—something she'd strenuously been avoiding since their last phone call. On that occasion she'd intended to wind
him
up, but the call had backfired and she suspected he'd guessed she was blocked.

Officially, the finished manuscript was due in today, but that wasn't going to happen. She'd work on it over the weekend. And maybe the first few days of next week. What the hell, she'd take the whole week. Really, what was another week? She'd start tomorrow. She certainly couldn't do anything more today, and tonight was quiz night.

The Sir Walter Scott pub stood in a gap-toothed block that had for the last fifty years stoically resisted all attempts at renovation, modernisation or, latterly, gentrification. As the rest of the city succumbed to the inevitable arrival of chorizo and avocado the Sir Walter Scott stood tall, a beacon of stubborn resistance held together by spit, sawdust, Sky (football on satellite TV being the only concession to the modern world) and the legendary Friday night quiz.

Not wanting to disturb her dad, Jane stood with Willie at the edge of the bar and watched as ‘Benny and the Jets’ conducted a practice session.

‘Largest planet in the solar system?’

‘Jupiter.’

Benny Lockhart was a still centre of concentration, deflecting questions with the liquid calm of a Jedi master as his quiz partners fired them at him from alternate flanks.