Not Another Happy Ending (29 page)

‘But you do, right? You like my ending, don't you?’

‘I …’

‘I know it's not the same as yours, but it's what people
want. You've got to trust me on this. I've never said it before, but your book is bloody depressing. No one wants the hero to die in the final chapter.’

She thumped a palm against her chest. ‘I want him to die. That's why I wrote it like that. And a hundred thousand satisfied readers agree.’

‘Yeah, but did you ever think that maybe a hundred thousand could have been a million,’ he was in her face now, ‘if you'd just written one more chapter—
he's not really dead!
Whammo! They walk off into the sunset.’

Then he said it. And in his expression she saw that he truly believed he was playing his trump card.

‘For god's sake, Janey, the book's even called
Happy Ending
.’

Willie moved out the following afternoon. There was no shouting, which in Jane's experience was always a sign that nothing was left worth fighting for. She was surprised at how little stuff he had to pack up since for most of the time he'd lived there it felt like he'd colonised her flat. He explained to her that he followed the philosophy of Al Pacino's character in the movie
Heat
, who boasted that he had so few ties he could walk away from his life in thirty seconds. Willie reckoned he had it down to about twelve minutes including tablewear, but it was a work in progress. What about his desk? she'd asked. Oh, shit. He'd forgotten about that. The desk was really going to mess up
his exit. He told her he'd send someone to collect it in a few days.

‘Where will you go?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Back to my mum's.’

‘Not Hollywood?’

‘Oh, yeah, of course. LA, baby! But, y'know, not now. When the time is right.’

He stood in the doorway, a cardboard box full of clothes, books, photos and his two film posters rolled up under one arm, his typewriter tucked beneath the other.

‘I don't understand how you can do this over a dumb ending.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You don't.’

He looked mystified and then shrugged. ‘Well, if it's any consolation I don't think it would've worked out with us. To be honest, Janey, I just don't get all that worshipping your pain stuff.’

She closed the door and listened to his footsteps recede down the stairs until they faded into the background hum of the day.

She resented his parting accusation; she didn't worship her pain. Of course in her writing she drew on her painful upbringing, but she didn't venerate it, whatever Willie believed. What did she care? She didn't have to answer his charge any more.

It was a pain dating men with opinions about her work. Her next boyfriend would be functionally illiterate, she decided. One of those men who never cracked open a
book unless it was a car manual. She'd read on Jezebel that the average woman used twenty thousand words a day and the average man just seven thousand. That was still too many. Next time she was aiming for a sub-thousand bloke—guttural, but with fastidious personal hygiene. During the day she'd labour in her study, alone, only to join him in the evening for dinner. He'd greet each new novel of hers with a bland ‘that's nice, dear’ and she'd be fascinated by his job in finance. She wouldn't dedicate a novel to him since he'd never bother to read the inscription. There was just one problem with this perfect picture.

It sounded lonely.

The following day Jane's dad helped her move Willie's desk out of the flat. By mid-afternoon the outline of four claw feet in the dust and a couple of brass drawing pins in the wall were the only reminders that he had ever been there. When they were done, Benny hugged her and said he could stay, if she wanted company. To her surprise she nodded and they sat and talked about nothing in particular until dinnertime. But it only postponed the inevitable moment when he did finally leave, and she was alone in the empty flat.

She wandered through the vacant rooms half-expecting to find Darsie lounging on the sofa drinking champagne to celebrate Willie's eviction, but her heroine was nowhere
to be found, which was a shame as it would have been nice to hear her voice.

Willie had even cleared all of his bottles from the bathroom cabinet—and gone off with her Sensodyne, she noted. She was about to leave when she noticed something poking out from under the bath. It was a page from her manuscript. Briefly she puzzled how it had got there and then guessed what had happened. Tom must have dropped it the night he stole the first three chapters and locked himself in here.

She knelt down. The page was marked up with notes in his familiar red pen, first impressions scratched out hurriedly as he read. But amongst them was something else. He'd written her name. There it was scrawled in the margin in his distinctive hand—just her first name. She tried to tie it to the paragraph opposite, looking for some significance, something to explain what it was doing there, but it seemed that in the midst of his reading he had simply felt the need to write out her name. When she read it she couldn't help but hear it in his voice.

She screwed up the page and felt the cold tiles on her back as she slumped against the bathroom wall and studied the shape of the swaying bough through the frosted glass of the window. She wasn't sure how long she sat there, but the next thing she knew it was dark and she was at her desk, the Prophetic Sad playing on her turntable.

I tell myself I can't hold out forever
.

She looked round the room: the withered umbrella
plant; the row of red and white Klinsch & McLeish spines along her bookcase; the pub quiz trophy. The page on which he had written her name.

But you can't see my tears in the rain
.

The laptop lay open, the page frozen at Chapter 37. The cursor blinked.

Jane began to write.

‘I Can See Clearly Now (the Rain is Gone)’, Johnny Nash, 1972, Epic

‘T
HAT
'
S QUITE A SHINER
.’ Benny Lockhart scrutinised Tom's latest black eye, or, more accurately, the black eye he had sustained on top of his previous black eye. His vision had almost returned to normal after his latest run-in with Willie's fist, but the eye still throbbed and the skin around the socket was the colour of a ripe plum.

‘Was it over a woman?’ inquired Donald MacDonald.

‘Over an ending,’ explained Roddy.

Donald nodded with the appreciation of a man who had experience of such things. He sloshed a whisky chaser into his pint, adding, ‘Of course, your compatriot, Alexandre Dumas, fought his fair share of duels.’

‘Yeah, this was less pistols at dawn, more pissed-up in Partick.’

Tom surveyed the diverse group propping up the bar in the Walter Scott. A poet, an alcoholic, a teacher and a
Frenchman walk into a pub. It was the set-up to a joke, although the punchline escaped him for now.

He'd asked them all here tonight. In less than twenty-four hours Anna was expecting an answer regarding Pandemic Media's offer. Tristesse Books was on the ledge, a bloodthirsty crowd far below chanting ‘jump’. Partly he wanted to canvass the other men's opinions, but mostly he wanted their company as he drank himself into oblivion, or as close to it as his limited resources would allow.

Donald peeled back the sleeve of his tweed jacket to expose a sandy-haired arm mottled with liver spots. He pointed to an old scar.

‘FR Leavis, 1965. We came to blows over a review he gave me.’ He took a step back from the bar and with surprising agility kicked his leg up onto it then rolled back his trouser-leg to reveal another ancient wound. ‘Norman Mailer. Skye Book Festival, 1969.’

Not to be outdone Roddy turned his head to one side and tapped a finger over a tiny mark behind his left ear. ‘Inter-schools badminton championships, under-15s, quarter-finals, 1998.’

‘That, young man,’ said Donald, squinting, ‘is hardly a wound. Indeed it is no more than what my six-year-old granddaughter would refer to as a
boo-boo
.’ He took a thoughtful pull on his pint. ‘Health and Safety killed off the brawlers. These days you can't throw a punch without a risk assessment.’

Tom nursed his pint of lager and studied Benny. Jane's dad remained conspicuously silent as the others recounted the origins of their injuries. Tom had no intention of bringing him into this particular conversation, since his answers were likely to be far more troubling than bad reviews and badminton. However, Donald had no such inkling.

‘What about you, sir?’ inquired the poet. ‘A man of the Glaswegian persuasion must surely have a notable mortification of the flesh, or two.’

Benny nodded slowly. ‘I've handed out a few doin's over the years, aye, got my head kicked in a few times too. But never over a book.’ He stared into his orange juice. ‘Money and women.’ He put his head on one side. ‘Mostly women.’ He turned to Tom. ‘Why were you so worked up, son? It's just words.’

How could he explain it to Benny? Their experiences were so different. Perhaps unbridgeable. Tom's life revolved around words: shaping them, binding them, publishing them. In his world what Willie had done demanded confrontation. It was ignorant. It was criminal. But in his dudgeon an uncomfortable thought needled away: was it any worse than what he had done by changing Jane's title without telling her? With a pang he remembered that despite his best intentions, he had never quite got round to apologising for that—and it was too late now.

‘Let me get this right, son.’ Benny leant on the bar. It was clear to Tom that his explanation hadn't satisfied
Mr Lockhart. ‘You read Willie's play, got mad about the ending and told him to change it—a man who'd already decked you in a garage in Bridgeton under totally humiliating circumstances in front of a hundred folk?’

‘A hundred and fifty,’ added Roddy helpfully.

‘And I wouldn't say
totally
humiliating,’ said Tom quietly.

‘Over an ending?’ Benny shook his head incredulously.

Donald chuckled into his pint. ‘I believe Mr Lockhart's exposition contains a subtext.’

‘I don't know about that,’ said Benny. ‘I just think there's more to this than meets the eye.’ He rolled his shoulders and gave an awkward cough. ‘Now I'm no’ very good at “expressin’ my feelings” but you young guys, you're into all that shite, aye?’

‘I know men who have degrees in that shite,’ said Roddy.

‘Aye, well.’ Benny swallowed. ‘See, the only feelings I give a damn about are my Jane's, right? I fucked up her life for long enough, now I want to make it better.’ He looked at Tom. ‘And I think you do too.’ In a reflex action, seeking Dutch courage for what he had to say next, Benny gulped down the rest of his orange juice and banged the glass down on the bar. ‘You didn't get your head caved in for an ending, son.’ He squirmed. ‘You love her.’

Tom didn't reply at once. After all his talk of words he couldn't find a single one. Donald laughed out loud—a
deep, joyful sound—and began to declaim in a booming voice. Poetry curdled the thick air.

As he recited his paean to true love, the rest of the pub fell uncomfortably silent at the dubious development in their midst. When he finished the only sound was the TV commentary rounding up the racing results and then the burble of regular conversation closed over the hush like returning seawater as the drinkers turned back gratefully to their pints.

Roddy gawped. ‘That was beautiful. One of yours?’

‘Edwin Morgan,’ said Donald tersely. ‘Bastard.’ He turned to the barman. ‘Mein host, another round for my friends.’ He thumbed at Tom. ‘And a double for the young man having the amorous revelation.’ He laughed again. ‘Oh, and before you ask me for my advice on women, don't. Three divorces, all my fault, apparently. According to my beloveds I made the same mistake each time.’

‘And what was that?’ asked Roddy.

‘No idea.’

Tom's tongue had ceased working, awaiting instructions from his brain, which was replaying Benny's words in a loop. You
love
her.
You
love her. You love
her
. It was a lie, what they said about realisation. The writers had it wrong; realisation didn't ‘dawn’, nothing so disconnected as sitting on a rock with your arms around each other watching the sun come up. Realisation was a plummeting elevator. The precipitous snap of steel, followed by a
churning freefall. But at least you knew where you were going. Finally.

He'd come to Scotland to escape the endless sunshine that bleached ideas and enervated imagination. She'd come to him out of the rain-dark streets. But he'd made the same mistake everyone else had. Confused the writer with the writing. She wasn't some miserable novelist in thrall to her pain. The sun came out.

He loved her.

‘Tom? Tom?!’ Roddy's voice sounded far away. ‘I think he's having a stroke.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Donald MacDonald, in a field by the sound of it, the wind blowing away his words. ‘What we are witnessing here is a
coup de foudre
, a thunderbolt of love. And in the original French too.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Marvellous!’

Tom felt a hard hand grip his shoulder, calluses rubbing through his shirt, and he was back. Benny's eyes locked on his.

‘I'll be honest wi’ you,’ said the older man, ‘If you don't get over there right this minute an’ tell her how you feel, then you and me are gonnae have words.’ His hand dug into the fleshy part of Tom's shoulder. ‘And I'm no talking about your kind of words, I'm talking
real
words, from my side of town. Y'understand?’

‘I understand,’ said Tom. ‘But …’

‘But what?’ said Benny sharply.

He'd tried to do the honourable thing by her. She'd chosen
the other man. He hadn't respected her title, but felt he had to respect that. ‘She's with Willie now.’

Donald MacDonald elbowed his way between Tom and Benny, his bushy eyebrows clashing in the centre of his forehead like two small storm clouds. ‘I beg your pardon,
monsieur
, but you should be ashamed of yourself. A Frenchman unwilling to declare his
amour
for fear of upsetting marital convention?’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘A sad day for the
République
. The Tricolour will hang at half-mast.’