Wishful Thinking (3 page)

‘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 that 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 . . .'

The thought just flickered through the back of Lin's mind:
What happens when I am not so young or so innocent?
Aloud she said, in an aggrieved tone: ‘Of course I'm not
innocent
. Nowadays, nobody is.'

‘You're so right,' Sean said warmly. ‘The word has fallen into disuse because girls are just girls now, and there are few angels among them. You're the first I've ever met. You seem to glow like a rose in the moonlight.' There was no Blarney Stone in Deptford, but Sean claimed to have kissed it nonetheless. He had developed what he thought of as a poetic flair to complement his Irish image, borrowing freely from the scripts of his various shows. ‘I want to pluck you and wear you against my heart forever.'

Lin was charmed, for all her Scottish common sense. Common sense, after all, is not strong in a teenager, and she was susceptible, and secretly romantic, and he had charm enough to impress the viewing millions, never mind her. And blarney was a rare commodity in Edinburgh, where the young men tended to be dour and earnest, or dour and yobbish, or just dour. She gazed deep into his eyes and sank into them as into an Irish bog.

Later that night, back at his hotel, after large quantities of champagne and assurances of love and prudence, he relieved her of her innocence. The condom split during the proceedings, but he assured her everything would be all right. ‘Me sperm are very lazy: they won't go swimming off into the dark.' He was staying in the north for two weeks, and during that period she found herself borne off to nightclubs and restaurants, shrinking from the flash-bulbs of the paparazzi, to other hotel rooms, even to a lochside castle where a friend took him grouse-shooting and Lin struggled to quell her compunction for the hapless birds, telling herself it was only Nature. Her studies and her job were brushed aside: Sean bore her along in his swath like a favoured pet. He didn't talk about the future but, naïve to a fault, she assumed that was because it was taken for granted they'd be together. She deplored her own sneaking doubts, and did her best to ignore them.

And then came the day when he told her he was returning, not to the relative proximity of Liverpool and
Mandela Street
, but to London. To the deep south with its pollution and corruption, its hot climate, its posh accents and overpriced cuisine. She knew he had been written out of the soap at his own request, to graduate on to Higher Things, and now he told her that he would be making a new series, to be filmed in the capital, in which he would be the principal star.