The Girl On the Page Page 3

  ‘Thank you for joining us, Malcolm. Hashtag “ahundredways”.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  Malcolm put the phone down. Helen was staring at him with her mouth open. Then they both burst into laughter.

  ‘I won’t give any further interviews.’

  ‘It’s probably for the best.’

  Chapter 4

  A Good Hard Edit

  ‘It just isn’t any good,’ I said while trying to step into my knickers. The curtains were drawn and it was dark. My toe became tangled in the elastic and I toppled forward onto the bed. I laughed but Liam was silent. He hated criticism of any kind. But it was true: the new book was fucked.

  ‘Wait, she doesn’t think it’s me, does she?’

  Liam’s wife, Gail, had accused him of having an affair and was threatening to leave him again.

  ‘Does she?’ I repeated.

  He didn’t reply. Which was not unusual. He was a sulker. He sulked.

  ‘Liam, you’re going to have to speak.’

  Nothing.

  ‘I came here to work, but if you’re too angry to work, I’ll come back next week.’

  Nothing.

  ‘At the very least, take out your anger on my arse.’

  I crawled across the bed and lifted the sheet. He turned his head away, but his cock rose as my mouth took him in. He always fucks me hard after I’ve been critical of his writing. So I try to be critical.

  I released his cock.

  ‘You’ll have to start it again,’ I said. ‘It can’t be salvaged.’

  ‘That’s twenty thousand words,’ he said, still not looking at me.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I agreed, playing with his cock some more. ‘It’s shit. This always happens when you go it alone.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘I mean it. Commercial fiction is like driving using a sat nav. You know where you’re going and you take the most efficient route. These pages have no direction at all. You’re writing too fast. You’re forcing it. It’s really, really shit. Too shit for me to fix and I’ve fixed some shit in my time.’

  That did it. Suddenly I was flat on my stomach and Liam’s cock was deep inside me. He gripped the back of my head and was pounding me with all of his might.

  We’ve sold millions of copies using our system. We’ve both got rich. I don’t want anything to change.

  When we were done, and he’d agreed to scrap the pages and work with me, I said, ‘I’ll talk to Gail. It’ll be fine.’

  *

  Life moves way too slowly for me. It always has.

  I knew what I wanted to do when I was in my teens. I wanted to write and I wanted to work with writers. There have been three constants in my life – books, clothes, sex. And champagne. Four constants. And money. Five constants. My parents are wealthy. But too wrapped up in each other to pay any attention to me. Boarding school and au pairs raised me. My parents are both still alive, but it wouldn’t matter much to me if they weren’t. We barely speak. I liked having money but I wanted my own. I hated using theirs.

  But I didn’t want to wait. Writing takes forever. Forging a successful literary career takes even longer. It took Jodi Picoult six novels to become financially independent. I’m not a patient person now, and at nineteen I was even less so. Even before I went to university, I believed I knew the techniques that would help commercially minded writers reach their potential. I enrolled in English because that’s the way things work. I needed the degree to enrol in UCL’s MA in Publishing.

  Those were the dullest four years of my life. My courses were not demanding. I didn’t need to work because my parents insisted on loving me through their largesse. In my spare time I read and analysed every genuine bestseller I could get my hands on. I was aching to get going. If it hadn’t been for Max encouraging me to write my first novel, I think I would have dropped out. Besides, the simple idea that fast-tracked my career didn’t occur to me until after I had my masters.

  I had just done four years’ apprenticeship at university and the only way into a job in publishing was an internship. They wanted me to work for free. I joined the queue, of course. It was mortifying. I wasn’t even getting to the second-round interviews. It was my attitude, one of the interviewers kindly noted. I don’t think she liked the way I dressed. I’m no shrinking violet. I love looking great. I want eyes on me. I suppose I looked too good for an intern.

  After months of failure, I stopped applying and got myself a job in a cafe. I could no longer stomach accepting money from my parents. I always said I’d stop living off them as soon as I was earning. I wrote to them to let them know. While waitressing one day I noticed someone had left behind a half-read copy of a novel called Torch by Liam Smith. I knew it was meant to be a big book. I’d read a full-page puff piece about this ‘hot, young debut author’. So when no one came back to claim it, I took it home and read it. I quickly discovered it hadn’t been left behind accidentally. It wasn’t good.

  But it wasn’t terrible; it had the right elements and an excellent hero. I re-read it. Torch had potential.

  That’s when I had my idea.

  The front door to publishing was effectively closed to me. So I went through the back door.

  Max was still working hard on his PhD, editing UCL’s paper, Pi, and writing articles and essays at a ferocious rate, so my nights were free at the time. If I wasn’t crying over the rejection slips my first novel was accruing, I was reading through the works of Mickey Spillane.

  One night I planted Torch on a bag of rice and started to type it out on my laptop. As I typed it word for word, I wrote notes and alternative passages – some twenty pages long – that I would eventually use when I wrote a new version of the novel. The whole project took a few months. I was an amateur and learning as I went. I made some wrong turns but I was forging the technique I still use to this day.

  When I was finished, Max read a few chapters on my laptop and said, ‘It is what it is,’ and handed it back. Which was enough for me. I printed it out and sent this new version of Torch to its originator, Liam Smith.

  In my covering letter, I explained that it wasn’t a bad book, really. His editor had let him down, that was all. He had the talent needed to be a successful writer. I asked him to read through my version and contact me if he thought I’d done a good job.

  Luck was with me. The unsolicited package arrived on the very day Liam was realising his first book was sinking without trace. He contacted me. He was bewildered, he wrote. But interested. He’d just sent his publisher the manuscript of his new thriller, The Night. I asked to see it. We went back and forth on email for a bit. He didn’t know if he should. He didn’t know me. After a day of silence, when I thought I’d lost him, he sent it through. It was better than the first book. I had been right about him. He was a good writer. But he needed me.

  Knowing his editor had the book, I raced through the rewrite. I didn’t sleep. But then I rarely get through the night. I am a bundle of nervous energy. Two weeks later I had my version delivered to Liam by courier. I had been brutal. I had slashed at his work and written a great deal more myself. It must have been a ball-crushing experience for Liam.

  I’d also crossed out Liam’s name and had written in a new one, Jack Cade. Liam Smith was a shit name for a thriller writer, I wrote. And I’d also changed the name of the hero to that of the first book, Mark Harden. It was a good name for a kick-arse hero. He’d certainly done well with that. In the accompanying notes I wrote, ‘If you want to be a star, keep the same central character.’ Adding, ‘To be honest, the hero in the second book was essentially the same guy just with a different name.’

  As painful as it was for Liam to read all these changes – and it was very painful, he told me later – there was no escaping the truth. The book was better. I’d made it much, much better. Pacy. Powerful. Punchy.

  I included a separate letter I’d had Alan, who was a law student at the time, help me write, in which I outlined our working relationship. If Liam agreed t
o my conditions, I would help ‘Jack Cade’ become the UK’s bestselling thriller writer. I also wanted him to get me a job with his publisher. He wrote back saying yes to the first condition but that he had no way of getting me a job. I wrote back telling him what to do and enclosed a contract Alan’s lawyer father had helped Alan and me draft.

  He didn’t send the contract back straight away. I think he was waiting to hear back from his publisher. When Liam’s editor sent in her edits a few weeks later – a purely perfunctory effort, he saw at once – he was devastated. The tone of her correspondence with him was noticeably different from the upbeat, excited and encouraging tone used when editing the first book. Liam had no agent, so no one was on his side. I must have looked to him like a lifebuoy flung into a cruel sea. He rolled the dice and booked a meeting with the publishing director. He took with him my edits of both books and the edits of his editor. Though the meeting did not go well – Liam got a real sense of the publisher’s disappointment in his sales – he was able to leave the manuscripts with her.

  Two days later a call came through. Another meeting was scheduled: Liam, the publisher and me. It had worked. Liam sent through my contract, signed. Everything was going my way. But as I made my way to the offices of Morris and Robbins, I convinced myself that this meeting would go the same way as all of my internship interviews. That failure to gain a position had shaken my confidence. And though Max had spent the previous evening and most of the morning reassuring me that everything would go my way, I was retracing steps I’d taken only a few months before. I’d applied for an internship at Morris and Robbins and had been turned away. As I entered the lobby I felt physically ill.

  I hadn’t even met Liam in person. Until I walked into the publishing director’s office he had no idea what I looked like or how young I was. There was no hiding his surprise or that of the publishing director, Maxine Snedden. I wasn’t a child; I was twenty-three. I wasn’t what they were expecting. There was a moment of awkwardness. But I took a deep breath. I could do it. The proof was in the meeting. I just had to hold my own. I already knew how good I looked. The faces on the tube told me that. (I must sound terrible, but there’s no point mincing words. Looking good changes outcomes.)

  The best thing about that meeting was the fact that it was happening. I had been right. What I had done to Liam’s books made them better. So much better that the publishing director was talking about ways to republish Torch under the pseudonym Jack Cade before we’d even discussed terms. It was a strange business. But then publishing is a strange industry: a weird mix of business and pleasure, passion and pragmatism. Maxine wanted to change the setting and all of the character names, but she was willing to keep Mark Harden. Liam was momentarily crestfallen when she said it didn’t really matter, as the book had sold terribly. They would pulp the remainder and start again.

  Maxine was all in. She was convinced the books would do well. Liam freely admitted how much of the work had been mine.

  Maxine agreed to two books a year under the new name, Jack Cade, starting with my edited version of Torch, under a new title, Daytripper, and, six months later, my version of The Night. Maxine tried to tie us down for the third book. But I demurred and Liam followed my lead. We’d be in a much better position to negotiate on book three if books one and two did well. We shook hands on our deal. She’d send through the contracts later that week.

  We stood to leave. That’s when I asked Maxine for a job. She was a little taken aback.

  ‘I’m an editor at heart,’ I said. ‘You won’t find a harder worker.’

  In one stroke I had a job in publishing, a lucrative deal with a writer I’d turn into a bestselling author, and, though I didn’t know it then, a lover.

  Chapter 5

  Retirement

  Helen could hear music as she climbed the stairs. She’d just come inside after spending an hour or so in the back garden. It was in a terrible state. Neither she nor Malcolm had green fingers and both were unused to being responsible for a garden. Helen did what she could do, what looked obvious to her. She had weeded the flower beds. Some things she pulled up probably didn’t deserve such a fate. But she wasn’t versed in garden lore.

  She was climbing the stairs to ask Malcolm to mow the lawn. It wasn’t a vast expanse, by any measure, but Helen couldn’t manage the hand-mower they had inherited on buying the house and hoped Malcolm would fare better. Otherwise she would have to add the expense of a gardener to her ledger, which she most certainly did not want to do.

  As she ascended she could recognise the nasal whine of Bob Dylan. The music was coming from Malcolm’s office.

  She found Malcolm stretched out on the sofa on her right as she entered. On the floor in front of him were their old turntable and two large wood veneer speakers turned to face him. The power cords and speaker cables ran untidily across the floor. An open box containing LPs was beside the sofa. The plastic sleeve and cover of Dylan’s Hard Rain was on the floor.

  Malcolm’s eyes were closed and his left foot was keeping time with the beat.

  The boxes of books she’d asked Malcolm to empty a number of times were still piled in the middle of the room. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves she’d had built for the purpose, which lined the walls, were still pristine in virgin white. His desk, which she had asked the removal men to set against the windows overlooking the street, was beyond the wall of boxes and almost out of reach.

  Her office was perfectly ordered. She had made it a priority, as soon as they moved in, to set up her office the way she had always wanted. Her bookcases were filled with her book collection. Neatly arranged, ordered and beautiful. There was also a collection of her own novels, all in hardcover. Her desk was set up against the windows, too, with her laptop and everything she needed; photos of Malcolm and Daniel, the boys and even one of Geraldine sat proudly to her right, her work lamp to her left. She had a printer and paper. Seated at her desk, if she craned her neck, she could just see the treetops of the park. She’d even found space to set up a sitting area at the end of her office nearest the door, with a reading chair and lamp and sofa for visitors, or meetings with editors, journalists, and so on.

  Malcolm made no secret of the fact that he had loved the office they had shared for close to fifty years in their flat in Brixton. He would mention this arrangement in interviews. Always starting with the fact that, soon after they had married, they had placed two non-matching second-hand desks back to back in the middle of their book-lined study and worked opposite each other most mornings surrounded by even more books, manuscripts, notes, newspaper clippings and cups of tea. While Helen had moved on from a typewriter to a word processor, to a desktop computer and then many ever-smaller laptops, Malcolm had persisted with his patient scraping of 2B pencils across cheap foolscap paper.

  The flat had been Helen’s before they met. Something Malcolm never seemed to remember. She had written in that room by herself.

  In their new house they each had their own office. This was something Helen had dreamt of for years. A room of one’s own. Necessity had kept them in that cramped shared office. That was all. To her the romance of writing together had passed with the cessation of the impromptu sex on the desk. And that had happened soon after the talking stopped. Which was in their first five years together. Till then, their writing had been almost collaborative, but very gradually, each of them found their own voice, and took very different writing paths. In shared silence, over fifty years they, and their writing, matured.

  Angered by the chaos of Malcolm’s room and his obvious disinclination to do anything useful, without speaking to him, Helen started to rip open the boxes of books and, with no regard for system or order, began to throw the books onto the shelves.

  She was two boxes in before Malcolm said anything – or didn’t say anything, but acknowledged her presence by pulling the turntable power plug from the wall. She stopped what she was doing and turned to him.

  ‘Well, someone’s got to do it,’ she said.
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  ‘I like the room as it is. It speaks of impermanence.’

  ‘Or sloth.’

  ‘I’m retired. There is no sloth.’

  ‘Writers don’t retire, they die.’

  ‘I found the old turntable and our LPs.’

  ‘They weren’t lost, Malcolm. They were in a box labelled “Turntable and LPs”. And these are just some of the LPs, mostly yours. Mine are in my office.’

  ‘Yours. Mine. What happened to ours?’

  Helen turned back to the boxes of books and began stacking them on the shelves again, although without the passion she had shown earlier.

  ‘I’ve been out in the garden weeding. But I can’t manage the mower. Can you please give it a try?’

  ‘I only mowed it a few weeks ago.’

  ‘So you can do it?’

  ‘I can do it. I don’t want to do it. It almost killed me.’

  ‘You need a bit of exercise.’

  ‘I’m retired.’

  ‘Stop saying that. You’re not retired. You just need to keep writing. Something will come up.’

  ‘I can’t write here.’

  ‘No one could write here. It’s a mess. It distresses me just to see the state of this room. We just need to roll our sleeves up and get it sorted.’

  Malcolm was still stretched out on the sofa; he hadn’t moved a muscle other than to pull the plug.

  ‘Help me put these on the shelves. Getting the boxes out of the middle of the room will help. You can arrange your books the way you like later.’

  He didn’t move. She ripped open another box. It was filled with copies of A Hundred Ways sent to him by the publisher. They never knew what to do with these extra copies they sent. It wasn’t like they were going to send them out to friends and family. That would be presumptuous. In the past she used to sell them to a second-hand dealer she knew. But he had long gone out of business. The charity shops had killed the secondhand market. She pushed it towards the door and turned to open another box.