To the land where electricity pylons go to mate for another reading in a library. The little town I chug into on the commuter train on the misery line looks just like the one where I grew up, but English, with docks instead of coal mines, and the library similarly shuttered and stained with graffiti. They are charging people to come and listen to me so I'm not expecting a big turn out. The organiser reassures me however: tickets have been sold and people as far away as the next station along have struggled through the torrential rain that is jumping off the tarmac in the car park like it's a power shower on high. I begged Louisa to come and support me but she's photographing a one armed man who can't get a disabled parking place in Billericay for a local paper, so I'm huddled in the staff room with a plate of Jaffa Cakes and four members of staff.
'So have any of you read the book?' I ask bravely.
There's a long silence while the librarians look at each other. I'm reminded of Louisa in the Clap clinic.
'Yes, I have,' said one, eventually when none of the others would own up.
I waited.
'...and?' I said when nothing more was forthcoming. Somehow, I knew it wasn't going to be a front page of the LRB sort of accolade, however her...
'It was alright.' still managed to humble me almost as much as my supposed friend Frances who drove up from the country to see me and announced, hand on my knee, that I was 'sort of' attractive. (He later followed up with a text message saying that what he had meant to say was 'really, really' but too late, that ship has sailed and docked in a far distant port where it has sprung a leak and sunk to the bottom of the harbour, and so you can get your ruddy hand off my leg, mate.)
'Oh well,' I said - thinking that this wasn't going to be much of a pull quote on the jacket, nodding like one of those dogs you used to put in the back window of Ford Escorts, trying to look as if this was something I could take in my stride, while I mentally scooped my guts off the floor and shoved them back into the gaping ego shaped hole in my stomach. I mean, you would hope that if someone asks you to trek out to the provinces to talk to their book club that they might have actually checked that they, themselves, enjoyed the book first.
I turned to another librarian who was dressed as a bus driver:
'What about you?' I asked with the same sort of hope that kids from Brent display when asking Santa for a pony.
'Well, the humour got me through it,' she said, valiantly, as though it was a struggle she had to overcome. Try Cold Mountain if you want a ruddy reading ordeal, I thought. She told me she was a fantasy fan, or speculative fiction as I have learned to call it and would probably have been much more impressed by my colleague Tom Stormcaller Lloyd, but no, they were stuck with me. And we still hadn't left the staff room.
'Though one woman did ring up and ask if we would be selling copies because she had enjoyed it so much she wanted to get another to give to her daughter,' said a third librarian (who either hated the book or simply hadn't read it - neither was confirmed or denied) tapping my arm consolingly. I jammed a Jaffa cake into my mouth and sucked all the orange jelly out of it to stop myself sobbing. just as the plate was whipped away and transported into the main library where people who had paid money to eat them had begun to gather.
'What about the book group, how did they take it?' Say what you like about me, but I've got guts when it comes to criticism... Glutton for punishment comes to mind, as well as for chocolate biscuits.
'Mixed,' said Ms 'Alright'. Another quotation for Amazon.
I daren't ask more and dragged myself into the main library where people had assembled around the biscuits like wildebeest round a watering hole.
'Now Marion's going to talk to us about herself and her book,' said Ms 'Alright'.
Bloody, bloody - this was news to me. I thought I was going to read. But then again, what was the point of reading if few of them had liked the book? I hadn't prepared a speech. I'm not that interesting. A person who promotes her book by talking about her recent marriage break up in the Guardian under the heading Sad, Single and something shudderingly worse that I cannot repeat, is obviously hard pressed for something to say.
My mind went blank.
Snowstorm.
Whiteboard.
New novel not written, blank.
'Erm, would anyone like to ask a question?' I murmured eventually, coughing the words up like nails from a rusty coffin.
A big girl with the air of an off duty policewoman in the front row said: 'I liked the first fifty pages but then I couldn't get on with it,' she said.
I'm still waiting for the question. It isn't coming.
'Yer, and then it got going and I liked it, but then it went off and I didn't like it again.'
The image of the man in the wheelchair in Little Britain popped into my head.
I nodded, as if this had been exactly what I planned when I poured a couple of years of my life into writing it.
'I didn't like it,' will go great with the 'Alright' when trying to impress my American publisher. I started to hyperventilate just as a nice woman on the left asked me how difficult it had been to get it published.
A monologue ensued. Those men I've been going out with - they stepped up and inspired me. Drone, drone, drone, publishing, drone, drone, agent, drone, drone, drone, drone, dropped computer, drone, drone, and then husband left me... (yep it got that bad - another five minutes and we would have been on to tales from childbirth).
I paused for breath and glanced around the room looking for another hand. A woman in an ugly jumper spoke up: 'I didn't like the language.'
Me nodding again. Of course. Terrible syntax, awful sentence construction, too many metaphors... I looked at her and raised my eyebrows waiting for her to elaborate.
'I don't buy books with bad language. I don't like it.' she elaborated. Profusely. Itemising the specific chapters.. They're nothing if not consistent these gals.
'Oh, you mean the swearing?' I said, relieved that at least it wasn't literary criticism she was offering but merely the Mary Whitehouse viewpoint. ' Well, you're quite right. If you don't like swearing in a book, you shouldn't buy it. I don't like your ****ing ****y jumper, and I certainly wouldn't buy that.' I didn't say.
No, I was cowed. Smiling ingratiatingly like a geisha in a tea house.
'I don't like books that have abuse in them. I don't know why there just can't be nice stories, that don't have any attacks in them,' said another who left, I noticed, clutching a Maeve Binchy book of short stories. Tough audience, setting me up against Saint Maeve.
I apologised for my 'attack' storyline. Next time I'll have Agnes go on a holiday to a Greek Island instead of being kidnapped.
Luckily there were a couple of retired teachers and a magistrate who may or may not have been a plant as she came from Leigh on Sea and knew my friend Louisa (hopefully not from a court appearance - or the Clap clinic, now I think of it) who were enthusiastic in their support, rolling their eyes and shrugging their cashmere twin sets in disgust at the hostile audience.
'I thought they were very rude,' said the magistrate as we travelled back up to London together.
'They just didn't like my book,' I said with stoic resignation.
'Well it's a cultural wasteland, dear,' she said, 'They don't know what they're talking about. Pay no attention. I'm surprised that your publisher let you go there.'
I don't think I'll be back somehow. However, I did get a letter from the bus driver who is training to be a Methodist Priest (yep good luck with that) telling me that the feedback had been good and that most of the women had never met a real live author before and had really enjoyed the event.
Good for them.
I'm surprised they didn't eat me instead of the biscuits.
