...when the phone rings.
It’s my agent, piping down the line in her Captain of Lacrosse accent, that she just wants to remind me, 'darling,' that I’m a 'novelist, not a receptionist,' but her words fall on switchboard-deafened ears. I’m already in full receptioning mode: 'Good Morning, Pedantic Press, how can I help you?' I drone, showing the same sort of enthusiasm for the call that Virginia Woolf had for life belts.
There’s a meeting on. A planning meeting. Everybody else in the company is in it, planning, except me, who is sitting Cinderella-like, at my desk, playing forts with boxes of padded envelopes and reams of sticky labels, sending out somebody else’s work of genius to the great and the good-for-a-quote of literary London, fielding telephone calls, one after the bloody other like tennis balls being fired at me from one of those automatic machines.
It should be added that no-one who has ever seen me totter for a bus would ever think that tennis was my game, so though my words might be straight for Stepford Secretarial School, the desperation in my voice is pure Sauchihall Street.
‘You sound frazzled,’ she trills.
‘Just a tad.’
I’d just fielded a call from a terminally bored literary agent who haughtily asked for the lovely Ubereditor without any preamble, salutation, apology or thanks, as though tossing fish at a performing seal and expecting me merely to bark, clap my flippers, and put him through immediately, arphing deferentially at the sound of his gilded name.
Arf, Arf, Arf.
Arf, Arf, Arf.
Agents can be rather annoyingly grand, unless they are your own, in which case they are Gods.
'So, Where’s the next novel, darling?'chirps my Queen of Fifteen Percent - and worth every penny of it, she is. I needed some reminding that I am a mistress of letters, and not the sort you put through the freaking franking machine.
'I've just handed in the last one,' I plead.
'So, Where’s the next novel, darling?'chirps my Queen of Fifteen Percent - and worth every penny of it, she is. I needed some reminding that I am a mistress of letters, and not the sort you put through the freaking franking machine.
'I've just handed in the last one,' I plead.
Yes, she knows. She tells me she has just read the blurb from my publisher’s catalogue and starts reciting little bits of it. She 'loves the new title, darling. They’ve got you compared to Jodi Picoult,' she crows. 'Imagine!' Yeah, if only.
I make happy noises and vow to come home, open the file on my laptop marked Maggie, in which my heroine has been trapped in Novel No 2, standing on the threshold of a house in Chelsea where she is about to engage in frantic illicit sex with a man called Bruno or Marco or Luca (I can’t make up my mind – since ER started again, I’m heavily leaning towards Luca) but who I have not been able to move up the stairs yet. She’s been there since last October, drunk, reckless, ready to drop her clothes in a pool at the door but she still hasn’t done the deed. I think it’s safe to say she isn’t that keen. Nor am I. I want to say, don’t do it love. Keep your knickers on and go home. It’s not worth it.
It was different last time. Then the hero was pure wish fulfilment, but rent-an-Italian...? Ach, not so much. I’ve known this hero in various guises for five years or more. It’s gone beyond infatuation to boredom and indifference. I still haven’t forgiven him for disappearing with 65,000 of his fellow words on the study floor when I dropped my computer and smashed him to smithereens, destroying my hard disk and half the novel four years ago. Now I’m rewriting, and trying to work up enough enthusiasm to allow him to seduce me away from my life as West London Shop Girl where my heroine this time round has been dusting since Chapter 2 in September, but I’m not so sure any more. Life has taken the romantic shine off the allure his shabby, crushed, straight from central casting, hack’s raincoat. Reality has sandpapered the glossy varnish off adultery and extra marital sex. And so, my heroine loiters in the pebbles of his front garden, more interested in the planted terracotta pots and the neutral colours of his hall, than the prospect of sleeping with him.
He’s lost his lustre. He’s the one who needs polishing up a little.
But full of resolve I come home on the No 7 bus lolling to and fro like an Asian potentate atop a stately elephant, lumbering down Oxford Street, and revisit the plot all the way to Suburban Terraces, then fall down the stairs at my stop – who knew that getting off a London bus these days counts as a extreme sport.
Inside the house, though there is no husband there is, nevertheless, human life.
I find the cleaner blinking at me mutely in the hall like one of those nocturnal marsupials - mute because she only speaks Portuguese and I don’t, but no words are necessary - I understand what she’s saying. She’s speaking the universal language of I need money, in which my kids are fluent. She hasn’t been paid. We usually communicate the finer points of cleaning vocabulary using Babel Fish on the PC:
eg: please clean the oven: limpe por favor o forno (or so you hope - Babel Fish has a habit of mistranslating to, often, hilarious and embarrasing effect)
...but the computer is equally mute and disconnected from the internet thanks to her routine unplugging of every electrical appliance in the house.
I look around for a bundle of fivers, but there is nothing.
Damn the real life ex-husband. At least fictional Rent-an-Italian, would surely have a wad of bills stuffed into the pockets of that hack’s raincoat.
I mime that I am leaving and will be back in a minute using a VERY LOUD VOICE to compensate for my lack of Portuguese which the cleaner pretends she understands, while wincing at the volume, then rush across to the cash machine in the Tibetan Off License, where I withdraw £50 that I immediately hand over on my return.
This, you see, is the reason for all the receptioning. In order to have enough time not to write, I get to sit at my desk in Pedantic Press and answer the phone all morning, then come home and give my wages over to the woman who cleans my house while I am out answering the phone all morning. I fear, however, that the economics of the venture may be somewhat flawed. Especially since only one of us is paying tax.
Now I really should turn on my laptop and get my heroine up those stairs and into bed.
But, nah, the house is so clean it’s like it has been licked.
So I do what any other self-respecting ex-wife in a clean house would do.
Rather than mentally seducing a fictional lover, I leave the heroine deadheading geraniums in that house in Chelsea, make a sandwich and watch the episode of ER that I missed last night on Channel 4 On Demand.
Ah, if only everything in life were as easy to have On Demand.
I make happy noises and vow to come home, open the file on my laptop marked Maggie, in which my heroine has been trapped in Novel No 2, standing on the threshold of a house in Chelsea where she is about to engage in frantic illicit sex with a man called Bruno or Marco or Luca (I can’t make up my mind – since ER started again, I’m heavily leaning towards Luca) but who I have not been able to move up the stairs yet. She’s been there since last October, drunk, reckless, ready to drop her clothes in a pool at the door but she still hasn’t done the deed. I think it’s safe to say she isn’t that keen. Nor am I. I want to say, don’t do it love. Keep your knickers on and go home. It’s not worth it.
It was different last time. Then the hero was pure wish fulfilment, but rent-an-Italian...? Ach, not so much. I’ve known this hero in various guises for five years or more. It’s gone beyond infatuation to boredom and indifference. I still haven’t forgiven him for disappearing with 65,000 of his fellow words on the study floor when I dropped my computer and smashed him to smithereens, destroying my hard disk and half the novel four years ago. Now I’m rewriting, and trying to work up enough enthusiasm to allow him to seduce me away from my life as West London Shop Girl where my heroine this time round has been dusting since Chapter 2 in September, but I’m not so sure any more. Life has taken the romantic shine off the allure his shabby, crushed, straight from central casting, hack’s raincoat. Reality has sandpapered the glossy varnish off adultery and extra marital sex. And so, my heroine loiters in the pebbles of his front garden, more interested in the planted terracotta pots and the neutral colours of his hall, than the prospect of sleeping with him.
He’s lost his lustre. He’s the one who needs polishing up a little.
But full of resolve I come home on the No 7 bus lolling to and fro like an Asian potentate atop a stately elephant, lumbering down Oxford Street, and revisit the plot all the way to Suburban Terraces, then fall down the stairs at my stop – who knew that getting off a London bus these days counts as a extreme sport.
Inside the house, though there is no husband there is, nevertheless, human life.
I find the cleaner blinking at me mutely in the hall like one of those nocturnal marsupials - mute because she only speaks Portuguese and I don’t, but no words are necessary - I understand what she’s saying. She’s speaking the universal language of I need money, in which my kids are fluent. She hasn’t been paid. We usually communicate the finer points of cleaning vocabulary using Babel Fish on the PC:
eg: please clean the oven: limpe por favor o forno (or so you hope - Babel Fish has a habit of mistranslating to, often, hilarious and embarrasing effect)
...but the computer is equally mute and disconnected from the internet thanks to her routine unplugging of every electrical appliance in the house.
I look around for a bundle of fivers, but there is nothing.
Damn the real life ex-husband. At least fictional Rent-an-Italian, would surely have a wad of bills stuffed into the pockets of that hack’s raincoat.
I mime that I am leaving and will be back in a minute using a VERY LOUD VOICE to compensate for my lack of Portuguese which the cleaner pretends she understands, while wincing at the volume, then rush across to the cash machine in the Tibetan Off License, where I withdraw £50 that I immediately hand over on my return.
This, you see, is the reason for all the receptioning. In order to have enough time not to write, I get to sit at my desk in Pedantic Press and answer the phone all morning, then come home and give my wages over to the woman who cleans my house while I am out answering the phone all morning. I fear, however, that the economics of the venture may be somewhat flawed. Especially since only one of us is paying tax.
Now I really should turn on my laptop and get my heroine up those stairs and into bed.
But, nah, the house is so clean it’s like it has been licked.
So I do what any other self-respecting ex-wife in a clean house would do.
Rather than mentally seducing a fictional lover, I leave the heroine deadheading geraniums in that house in Chelsea, make a sandwich and watch the episode of ER that I missed last night on Channel 4 On Demand.
Ah, if only everything in life were as easy to have On Demand.
