‘Yeah. Huh. Awkward.’ He was the picture of flustered good
manners. ‘I didn’t realise you were new here. Obviously. We all are.’ He tapped
his name-badge. Nicholas Palmer. ‘I thought you were a student, that day, on
the square.’
‘It’s the way I dress, isn’t it. I’m just too scruffy to be
staff.’
‘You can’t be too scruffy to be staff. Just. You just look
too young.’
I laughed outright.
‘Seriously,’ he said; ‘Doesn’t she – ’ he peered in at
Meryl’s name badge. ‘Meryl?”
Meryl smiled, happy to be drawn in. ‘Totally,’ she agreed.
‘I’m thirty-three,’ I said.
‘You don’t look it.’
‘You should see the portrait in my attic.’
Meryl laughed delightedly at this; he smiled, but looked at
me steadily as if he was checking me for signs of thirty-threeness. I felt a
little pink under his scrutiny. I felt a little flattered. What was he? Twenty
four, twenty five? No older than that, certainly. And then he turned to Meryl,
and offered her his hand.
‘It’s good to meet you, Meryl.’
Meryl lifted her hand to take his, then noticed that the
fingers were still dusty with Wotsit pollen. She set her glass down and brushed
them clean, and offered her hand again. He took it, met her gaze steadily, and
with a smile climbing one cheek. She blushed.
‘Back home you get a
bunch of napkins with everything,’ she said. A full-body blush blotching her
chest, rising up her neck, flooding her cheeks. I wondered if he knew that he
was doing it, or if it was just a reflex: the need to make women think that he
really, really noticed them.
‘Ah well, you see, they’re still on ration here,’ I said.
She boggled at me: ‘Not really.’
I turned to Nicholas. ‘Meryl was just telling me about her
novel: it sounds exciting. What are you working on, Nicholas?’
‘It’s not so easy to talk about.’
‘You’re going to have to get used to talking about it, if
you’re doing the MA.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘And there’s no time like the present,’ I said. I suppose I
wanted to put him on the back foot, after he’d backfooted the two of us by
being all interested and noticing.
He hesitated, placing his words like they were seeds in a
tray: ‘I’ve been working on it for a long time. I have a good part of it
written. The idea of the MA, for me, is that it’ll give me structure, enable me
to complete it.’
‘And what’s it about, your novel?’
‘I don’t even know if it is a novel. It really depends on
what you mean by ‘novel’. And as for ‘about’, I think that’s a bit limiting,
don’t you? I mean, as a question.’
‘Oh-kay.’ I was so conscious of Meryl’s assessing gaze, the
way she drank everything in. I felt like my soul was being weighed against a
feather.
‘So, how about this. Tell me three things about the thing
you’re writing.’ I tried.
‘Yeah,’ he said slowly. ‘So. I’m interested in
experimentation….’
‘Are we talking GCSE Chemistry here, or are we talking
Hadron Collider?’
‘Definitely Cerne,’he said. ‘I’m interested in pushing the
form, pushing my writing as far as it will go. What I’m doing hasn’t been done
before. People rehash Beckett or Joyce every day, and that’s…’ he shook his
head.
‘That’s not your thing?’
‘No. Because I’m not a fucking impressionist.’
The swearword made Meryl flinch. I found myself liking him
more: I really found it quite charming, his innocent arrogance; he was shooting
for immortal transcendence, with no real idea of how difficult it is to achieve
even mediocrity.
‘So what is your thing?’ I asked. ‘It’s not a novel. It’s
experimental.
It’s not like Beckett or Joyce. So what is it?’
‘It’s,’ he shrugged. ‘Well. I guess it’s Art.’ And then he
grinned: ‘That’s your three things right there now,’ he said.
I laughed outright; couldn’t help myself. ‘I look forward to
reading it.’
‘I look forward to you reading it too.’
Meryl opened her mouth to add her enthusiasm to the chorus,
but Nicholas spoke across her:
‘I’ve read yours,’ he said looking at me.
I kept my poker face. I stared him out. ‘Oh yes.’
‘It’s quite a read.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Based on your own experiences, I imagine? It has that feel
about it.’
‘Not really. It’s fiction.’
‘Aw come on. You can’t write it unless you’ve lived it. You
can’t write it well, anyway.’
I took the compliment with a tilt of the head; I’d had few
enough, God knows. ‘Maybe. But there are different ways of knowing, aren’t
there? You can know something emotionally, without having practical experience;
you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Otherwise how would anybody write
sci-fi, or historical novels?’
‘Yours wasn’t sci-fi.’
‘It’s more or less historical now.’
I wished I’d had the sense, all those years ago, to lift my
head out of the total-absorption of its writing, and consider what the book
might be saying about me. It didn’t occur to me, literally didn’t once cross my
mind, until that excruciating phone conversation with Mum, to whom I’d proudly
sent one of my comps, and who’d taken the whole thing so very literally, and
couldn’t forgive me my own darkness, or the blame on her that she felt it
implied. She hadn’t yet got over it. I’d lost my (touchy, stubborn, and
sharp-as-lemon) Mum to two lukewarm reviews, pathetic sales, and near-complete loss
of confidence in my own writing.
‘It had the ring of truth about it.’
I leaned in close, as if to tell a secret: ‘That’s the
trick, you see. To make the whole thing up, and to still tell the truth.’
He tilted his head, ‘That’s not my deal,’ he said.
‘What is your deal?’
‘Wait and see.’
He raised his glass, to show us its emptiness, then headed
off towards the drinks table. I turned to Meryl, eyebrows up: a kind of ‘What
about him, then!’ expression. Her face though had gone all compressed and
difficult.
‘That guy is so,’ she
said, and she hesitated and wafted her hand around, and we left the sentence
hanging unfinished between us.
We watched Nicholas over at the drinks table,
where Lisa refilled his proffered glass.
‘What he’s doing, the scale of that,’ she said, ‘Kinda puts
my little werewolf story in the shade.’
Bless her. ‘It’s all good, Meryl,’ I said. ‘There’s space
for all of it. Whatever he’s up to, it doesn’t diminish what you’re doing; it
doesn’t have any impact on you whatsoever.’ I leaned in and whispered to her:
‘Thing is: we don’t even know yet if he’s any good.’
Thanks for the blog tour support Pam x
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