THOMPSON
Probably the first web-linked novel ever published!
CHAPTER ONE
PR consultant Hazel MacNamara was having a bad day, and it hadn’t even
officially started yet. Her brand new Wolford lacetops had snagged on the
edge of her waste paper basket, she had a bitch of a hangover, and her
assistant, Renée, had phoned in sick for the second day in a row. An alarm
was going off in the solicitor’s office across the road again and she knew
it would go on until the bastard solicitor finally showed up for work. When
she booted up her computer, the list of things to do that was staring her in
the face was actually longer than her face. She had a charity event to
organise, she had the recording of a commercial to supervise, and after
she’d got rid of the spam – delete, delete, delete – in her inbox, she had
at least a hundred e-mails clamouring for her attention.
Her mobile went off. Jesus! It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet! Caller display
told her that it was Mick, her ex as of ten hours ago. He could go boil his
head. She was never going to take a call from him again. How had she not
realised what a mean-minded tightwad he was before now? She’d sat across
from him at the table in the restaurant last night watching as he actually
counted out change! It had made her so mad that she’d extracted a wad of
notes from her wallet, slung them onto the table and high-heeled out of the
joint. Then she’d gone home, opened a bottle of wine and had a good bitch
with one of her BFs down the phone. She had to admit to feeling a little
stung when Erin had told her she’d never liked Mick in the first place, but
they agreed ultimately that Mick had been A Bad Thing, and that it was time
for Hazel to move on.
She switched off her phone, making a mental note to investigate the Blocked
Senders facility, and then put her head in her hands as the frenzied strains
of an angle grinder rose from the forecourt below. Ow. Fresh hell! What she
needed was -
Coffee. Very strong.
Ha, ha, Hazel – your day just got worse! There was no Illy left; she’d have
to have tea. In the kitchen she filled the kettle, jabbed the ‘on’ switch,
and went back into the office. The answering machine was blinking at her
nervously, as if it sussed she was in a bad mood. She wished she could’ve
phoned in sick, like Renée. That was the bummer about being the boss. Being
the boss meant that you had to show up - hangover, flu or Ebola virus
notwithstanding. But at least being the boss meant that she could show up in
her dressing gown if she felt like it. Hazel worked from home, and her
office was just downstairs from her bedroom. She was an escapee from
commuter-belt hell, and knew that she must count her blessings. She sat down
at her desk, reached for a Post-It pad and a ‘Nutcracker PR’ pen and pressed
‘play’.
Five messages had accumulated since she’d fled the office yesterday.
‘Hi, Hazel – Suki here at On-Line Studios…’ ‘Hazel, hello – it’s Jim here,
ringing about your tax returns…’ ‘Hi, Hazel – I’m PA to Dominic Forrest, and
we’re opening an exhibition by…’ ‘Hazel, hi! Finbar de Rossa here. We met at
the post-première party of…’ ‘Ms. MacNamara? My name is Hugh Hennessy. I got
your number from the Golden Pages, and I’m phoning to see if you might be
interested in handling the PR for the Kilrowan Arts Festival this year?
Perhaps you might call me on…’
Finally came the automated voice, which she automatically parroted. End of
messages!
Hazel looked down at the be-doodled Post-It, and drew a circle round the
word ‘Kilrowan’. She’d never been there, but she’d heard of it. Kilrowan was
a small village in the west of Ireland, and since her assistant - Renée’s -
mother had moved to the locality a couple of years ago, Renée was full of
gossip about it.
The gossip centred around the hordes of media types who descended
lemming-like upon the joint in the summer months. They went there in their
Beamers and Saabs for sailing and golf and scuba-diving and for the cultural
highlight, which - as with most thriving summer communities - was the annual
week-long Arts’ Festival. Kilrowan was famous, too, for its colony of
creatives – the village was the haunt of artists and writers and musicians
and Trustafarians who fancied themselves as being all three rolled into one.
At last! The alarm next door finally shut up, the angle grinder had taken a
tea break, and the pressure on her temples eased a little. Hazel pressed the
‘play’ button on the machine again, and systematically deleted each message
after she’d made certain she’d got the info right. She did not, however,
delete the last one. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe she just liked the sound of
this Hennessy bloke’s voice.
She entered his details in her organiser, made a pot of tea and knocked back
a couple of Panadol. And then she did something that was going to change her
life. She picked up the phone to Hugh Hennessy.
***
Pixie Pirelli was holed up in a suite in Ballynahinch Castle Hotel. She
was on the run. Nobody knew she was there – not even her agent, not even her
editor. Hopefully the press was equally unenlightened as to her whereabouts.
She’d had major, major flak with them since she’d split up with her
boyfriend. Pixie had found out about the castle in a book called ‘Greatest
Escapes of the World’ (or some such) and right now she had a burning
ambition to become as consummate an escape artist as David Blaine. Actually
– strike David Blaine: he was rubbish. Make that Houdini.
Oh, Heavens! Here she was, trying to escape, and she was still mentally
editing her own thoughts. That was the one drawback about being a writer –
you never, ever stopped working. Only yesterday, when she’d been strolling
by the river in the grounds of the castle, she’d been trying to find the
most apposite words to evoke the beauty of her surroundings. And once she
found the words, she had to scribble them down in her notebook with the pen
she always carried.
She’d tried to leave the pen behind once, hoping that its not-being-thereness
(consult Thesaurus) might sabotage her compulsion to write. But an entire
novel had come into her head that day, and by the time she’d raced home to
write down her ideas, the novel had vanished into the ether. So Pixie was
like Mary and her Little Lamb in the nursery rhyme – except that: Everywhere
that Pixie went, her Pen was sure to go.
The problem for Pixie was that she couldn’t simply enjoy life: she had to
write it down. She envied those lucky people who could go off on holiday and
send postcards home with scribbles like ‘Words cannot describe the beauty of
The Maldives’ (or Martinique or Mauritius or wherever), because it was her
job to find those words.
Pixie Pirelli was an author who’d got lucky. Except her real name wasn’t
Pixie, nor was it even Pirelli. Her name was plain Jane Gray. She’d been
advised by an expert that ‘A Brilliant Book’ by Jane Gray wasn’t going to
get as much press as ‘A Brilliant Book’ by Pixie Pirelli, and the expert
been right. Pixie’s books danced onto the bestsellers’ shelves in bookshops
and shimmied straight out of the doors, earning her a lot of money in
royalties in the process.
And if that’s all her job had entailed - if plain Jane Gray could sit in
front of her laptop and tip tap out Pixie’s novels - life might be very rosy
indeed.
But people wanted to see Pixie and they wanted to meet her. They didn’t want
to meet boring Jane Gray, who probably worked tapestries in her spare time.
They wanted to meet Pixie, with her glittering career and her scintillating
social life. So when Jane appeared before the public eye, she pulled on
Pixie’s persona - as well as Pixie’s dazzling array of designer threads. She
was a complete and utter media consultant’s dream. She posed for
photographers with a smile as big as Kylie’s, she flirted with chat show
hosts - even the rebarbative ones - (no. Strike ‘rebarbative’ - too obscure
– sub. ‘smarmy’). And she signed copies of her books until her nail
extensions ached.
That’s why she’d gone AWOL. Her latest book had waltzed straight onto the
bestsellers list at number one, and she was so exhausted by the concomitant
publicity that she’d even allow herself to get away with the word
‘concomitant’.
How glad she was that she’d found this haven! Ballynahinch Castle was one of
those splendid places that weren’t too intimidating. She’d had holidays in
more exotic and more luxurious places – the kind of hotels where you had
your own private infinity pool and staff salammed you everywhere you went
and there was a platoon of butlers and beauticians and masseuses on standby
to pamper you (she especially hated the butlering because she’d much rather
unpack her own underwear, thank-you very much). But once you’d visited one
of those resorts, you’d visited them all.
And that’s something Pixie thought was really strange about herself – she
found those Utopic resorts rather boring. She’d had herself deposited on a
small desert island in the Maldives by launch once, to spend a day alone in
a Bounty Bar ‘paradise’. The resort on the main island had packed a cool-box
full of delicacies and champagne and exotic fruit for her, but she had
stupidly left her book behind (the one she was reading, not the one she was
writing) and she had thought she might go insane with boredom. Tom Hanks in
‘Cast Away’ couldn’t have boarded that launch much faster than she did when
it finally showed up.
So when she’d read about Ballynahinch Castle, she’d booked herself in. She’d
jumped on a plane to Galway, and a driver had met her at the airport and
transported her here through some of the most astonishing scenery she’d ever
gazed agape at. And now she was sitting having coffee in her suite, admiring
the view of the river beyond the big picture window and actually smelling
that coffee for a change! She really had escaped, and boy did she need to.
Everywhere she went in London there was evidence of the ex love of her life
gazing moodily at her from the posters advertising his latest film, and
there was evidence, too, of the woman who’d stolen him from her smiling
triumphantly down from the posters advertising her latest film. Negotiating
the tube was like negotiating the halls of Hades.
Ballynahinch wasn’t the only good thing about this corner of the world.
Pixie had discovered, during the four days since her arrival, a nearby
picture postcard perfect fishing village called Kilrowan. She’d fallen so
totally in love with it that she’d decided she was going to rent an
apartment or a cottage there, to start work on her next novel.
She wasn’t sure how her agent would feel about her cutting herself loose
from the chain gang of authors who were currently dragging themselves and
their books the length and breadth of the UK for publicity purposes, but she
had to do it. Otherwise she would drive herself mad guffing on about herself
to all comers, and the new novel would never get written.
The person she felt sorriest for on these author tours was the PR girl,
Camilla, who travelled with her and held her hand. Poor Camilla had to
listen with a smile stapled to her face as Jane – or rather, Pixie – trotted
out ‘amusing’ anecdote after ‘amusing’ anecdote about herself. Camilla had
heard them all before on many, many occasions. When researchers on
television chat shows came out with that staple question: ‘Well! Have you
any amusing anecdotes for us?’ Pixie wanted to scream down the phone that
nothing, nothing even remotely amusing had ever happened to her in her life.
But these days people weren’t interested in her amusing anecdotes. They just
wanted to hear all about the affair between the rapacious film star Sophie
Burke and He-Whose-Name-Must Not-Be-Spoken and how it had affected her life.
The sound of the phone jangled her back to the here and now. She set down
her coffee cup feeling guilty. Oh, no! Could someone have tracked her down?
Should she ignore the call? But no worries. When she picked up, the
reassuring brogue of the hotel receptionist came over the receiver.
‘Ms. Gray? Just to let you know that your ghillie is here. He’s waiting for
you in the lobby.’
‘Thank-you. I’m on my way down now.’
Her ghillie! Last week she wouldn’t have had an idea what a ghillie was. But
since coming to Ballynahinch she had learned that a ghillie was the man who
helped out the tourists who came here on fishing holidays.
This was more like it, she thought, as she drained her coffee cup and took a
last bite of shortbread. Jane Gray was going to forget all her troubles by
spending a peaceful morning on the lake in a rowing boat, being tutored in
the arcane art of fly-fishing by a local ghillie, and - oops! What if he was
gorgeous? He could be the inspiration for the hero of her next novel (her
last book but one had featured a scuba-diving instructor).
As she rummaged in her bag for notebook and pen to slip into the pocket of
her padded gilet, a twinge of conscience made Pixie switch on the mobile
phone that had been turned off for the past four days. The phone told her
that her message memory was full, and the single message she peeked at
practically screamed at her from the screen. It was from her agent. WHERE R
U? she read.
And Jane Gray felt just like a child playing truant as she typed in ‘Gon
fishin!’, pressed ‘send’, then turned her cell-phone off.
***
Shiny new jackets and unblemished pages,
Slim books by poets and fat books by sages,
Best-selling titles with loads of bling bling -
These were a few of her favourite things!
‘Down for the weekend?’
She’d asked people that question over and over today. Her customers this afternoon were mostly those absentee residents of Kilrowan who only ever spent a handful of weeks here. Christmas, maybe; the occasional Bank Holiday weekend; a week or two in summer. They were here to chill, to escape from the Bedlam that Dublin city now resembled.
She didn’t blame them. The last time Cleo had been in Dublin had been a couple of months ago, when she’d driven up with her artist husband Pablo for an exhibition opening. She had barely recognised the city where she’d lived in a past life! Although gridlock had made the traffic virtually stationary, everyone was rushing, and everyone was barging. The city centre was crammed with snarling people who all looked at you as if they resented your very existence. Staff in newsagents behaved as if they wanted to kill you when you proffered money for your Hello! magazine, supermarket checkout operators had been replaced by zombies, and the taxi driver who’d taken them to the gallery had definitely been a psychopath.
She supposed her new antipathy to the city had a lot to do with the fact that she’d downshifted to a sleepy village. Kilrowan in the winter was the sort of place where you’d half expect to see dust devils or tumbleweed rolling towards you along the deserted main street, and if you saw anyone out and about after midnight it gave you as much of a surprise as if a stranger in a Stetson had just ambled into town.
The summer Kilrowan was as different to its winter sister as it was possible to be. They had to erect traffic lights on the main street to deal with the congestion, and tourist buses rumbled through the joint every five minutes. Cleo did a roaring trade then.
Trade today hadn’t been half bad, either, come to think of it. Pixie Pirelli’s latest book was flying off the shelves, and Cleo made a mental note to order more copies.
‘Hello,’ she said to a well-dressed refugee from Dublin 4. ‘Down for the weekend? Welcome back.’
‘Thanks, Cleo. How’ve you been keeping?’
‘Grand. You?’
‘Stressed. What can you recommend for some light weekend reading? Something escapist would be good.’
‘Try the new Pixie Pirelli.’
‘Oh – that’s out already, is it?’
‘There you go.’
Cleo indicated the dump bin that she’d set up by the cash desk. It was full of Pixie’s new bestseller, with gratifying dents where all the sold copies had been. Her backlist titles – ‘Venus in Versace’ and ‘An Angel in Manolos’ – had dents too. Pixie must be coining it.
The new Pirelli - ‘Hard to Choos’ - had a classy cover: the kind you’d reach out an automatic hand for. The author’s name was writ large, and Cleo often wondered what it must feel like to walk into a bookshop and see your name all over the place, and maybe even a cardboard cut-out of you standing sentinel against a cash desk.
‘Thank-you,’ she said, sliding a twenty euro note into the till and producing clinkety change. ‘Enjoy your weekend!’
She turned her attention to the display in the window. The cardboard cut-out of the writer Colleen was looking a bit grubby. Colleen was so famous that she needed no surname – a bit like the French author Colette - and because she had a house in Kilrowan and was one of the village’s most famous exports, her cut-out had practically taken up permanent residence in the bookshop window display.
Cleo reached for a packet of Cif Double Action wipes. She wondered as she exfoliated Colleen’s cardboard face whether the diva herself would descend on Kilrowan for the Bank Holiday. She and her lover, Margot (who also happened to be Cleo’s sister) spent most of their time these days on the island they’d bought in Clew Bay. But even the famously reclusive Colleen couldn’t hack being completely cut off from the rest of the world, and they’d occasionally bestow a visit on Kilrowan in the manner of potentates on walkabout in some remote Himalayan village.
Since Margot and Colleen had shacked up together, Cleo had seen very little of her sister. She had - according to an interview with the reclusive author in the ‘Irish Times’ - made herself indispensable as Colleen’s interface with the real world, handling her business affairs and issuing pronouncements to the press when Colleen was too fatigued to give interviews. Because she was very beautiful – and because she was officially Colleen’s muse - they were often photographed together. The most recent shot doing the rounds of trade mags showed them with their arms wrapped around each other, perched on a cliff on their island, gazing out to sea with enigmatic expressions, like Greta Garbo in Queen Christina. Pablo had drawn horns on Margot’s head.
Colleen’s latest magnum opus was due to hit the shelves soon. You’d be sure to need more time than a Bank Holiday weekend to wade through that, Cleo conjectured, as she finished wiping what looked like a jam stain off Colleen’s chin. She’d read in ‘The Bookseller’ magazine that the book had 889 pages.
‘Oh, look, Abigail! The new Pixie Pirelli’s out!’
A couple of girls had just come into the shop. They were young, beautiful, tanned, gym-toned – they were flawless, actually - and they had identical Posh Spice hairstyles. They were both sporting smart/casual: designer trainers, T-shirts with provocative slogans (T-shirts in March!), jeans with exclusive labels, and Gucci shades doubling as hair-bands. They were rich!
So was Cleo, but she’d never really got used to the fact. Being rich made her feel like a bad actor, or an impostor. It wasn’t that she was uncomfortable or guilty about being rich, it was just that she didn’t really know how to behave like a rich person. Neither did her husband, Pablo, she supposed. But at least he earned his money, through his paintings. Cleo had just got rich by accident when she’d won the lottery.
Her lottery euros had paid for this bookshop when it had come on the market a year or so ago, and she had never been happier. Owning her own bookshop had been the ultimate wish fulfilment for her, and sometimes she still pinched herself when she realised that she, Cleo Dowling, bookseller and millionaire, was actually living her dream.
She lived her dream best when the shop was quiet, and she could sit on her stool by the cash register, reading - or writing one of the erotic short stories that Pablo loved so much. She’d embarked on a novel once, and it had been shite. Cleo had learned then that it was one thing to love reading books, quite another to love writing them. She enjoyed writing the stories though, and enjoyed it even more when Pablo acted them out. They got up to some extraordinary shenanigans in the bedroom of Number 5, The Blackthorns, which was where they’d set up home.
‘Nice cover.’ The posh-haired princesses were examining the jacket of Cleo’s sister’s book. ‘Never heard of her though. Margot d’Arcy? Who she?’
‘Dunno. Looks boring, anyway.’
Margot’s slender novel – Proust’s Sewing Machine - had been published quite recently. It had gone out under the aegis of the literary publishing house that handled Colleen, and Cleo suspected that Colleen had threatened to throw a diva strop if they didn’t publish her lovair’s novel as well. Cleo had only sold two copies of Margot’s book in as many months, but she always had to remember to display it face out on the shelf under ‘New Releases’ in case her sister came into the shop to spy on it.
That was one of the disadvantages of living in a village where so many residents were writers. You had to be careful not to offend anyone by making sure that their newest offspring was prominently displayed. If you didn’t, they came in and did it themselves, anyway. She could see them on the security camera, surreptitiously transferring their books from where they were languishing in sheltered housing under the disadvantaged letters of the alphabet - ‘R, S & T’ - to the shelves where all the bestsellers hung out together, like a clique of the most popular members of the golf club.
The princesses who had just come into the shop were hanging in the ‘New Releases’ section, helping themselves to loads of glossy titles in hardback. Cleo had felt so sorry for the girl who’d come into the shop earlier to ask piteously when the new Pixie Pirelli would be out in more affordable mass market format, that she’d given her a free copy.
‘“The Shops!” Excellent! I’m buying this.’
‘Don’t you already have it?’
‘I lost my copy. Ha! I’ll leave it open at the page on vouchers so that mother will hopefully take the hint and allow me to choose my birthday present for myself. I am so tired of having to return every single thing she buys me. You should have seen the ostrich skin bag she got me for Christmas. It was beyond hideous.’
‘I know what I’m getting for my birthday!’
‘Oh? Tell!’
‘Daddy’s come up with a brilliant idea. He’s going to commission Pablo MacBride to paint my portrait.’
‘Oh – that is a brilliant idea!’
What? No, it is not! thought Cleo. That, sweetheart, is a ferocious idea, and I will do my double damnedest to make sure it does not happen! This streamlined baby was going nowhere near Pablo MacBride. To her reasonably certain knowledge, Pablo had never had a portrait commissioned by a woman under the age of thirty, and she didn’t want temptation in the form of this particularly succulent nymphette posing for him. Miss Abigail might be over the age of consent, but she had the unsullied appearance of jailbait. Cleo would have to do a little, very subtle, dissuasion when the princess’s daddy approached her husband with his cheque book.
‘Maybe I should ask daddy if he’d think about getting one done of me,’ said the other princess.
Not if I can help it, sister!
With a big fake smile, Cleo accepted the hundred euro note that was being proffered over the counter, and handed back two euro and forty-six cents in change. She was glad to see that it went into the Cancer Research Box that she kept by the cash register.
‘Enjoy your weekend!’
‘You too!’
Mm hm, Cleo thought grimly as the shop door closed on the two gorgeous designer denim asses. The way things were looking, a portrait by Pablo MacBride was set to be the new must-have status symbol for the jeunesse dorée, and if Cleo was going to divert attention from the delicacies that might soon be on offer on a porcelain plate to her complete ride of a husband, she was going to have to work very, very hard indeed on a new short story.
© 2005 Kate Thompson
