Running in Heels (45 page)

“Thank you, Mel,” I say, “that's good advice.” She blushes again.

I feel a warm hand on my shoulder, and spin around. “Alex!” I gasp. “Hi! Thank you
so
much for coming!” I feel ashamed of myself just looking at her. She smiles warmly at someone behind me, my heart leaps, and I turn. “Robin!” I croak. “I'm so pleased you're here.”

“You sound terribly disappointed,” he purrs, kissing my cheek.

“Not at all!” No wonder I couldn't even make it into my junior school's Christmas pantomime. “What would you like to drink?” I say hastily, “I've got cranberry juice, orange juice, mineral water—”

“Lager?”

“Of course! Alex?”

“White wine spritzer, if—Barbara!” she exclaims. It's the first time I've seen Alex look flustered. “How
are
you? God, it's been a while! I hear you got married, congratulations, you know I saw Andy last week, don't you? It was good to see him again, I missed him, uh, as a friend, I have to say I…”

Grateful for a legitimate mission, I allow myself to be swept into the corridor. The doorbell rings on cue. Matt looks mischievous. He, Paws, and a tall handsome guy on crutches are standing on my doorstep flanked by two chunky men. Men who wear rugby shirts but don't actually play rugby. Each with a big ruddy baby face, a Benson & Hedges cigarette stuck between stubby fingers, and a six-pack of Stella. Both are machoing it up for some reason.

“Ex-public-school boys,” murmurs Matt, kissing me on the mouth. “They protest too much. Natalie, you look divine, I knew getting away from me would agree with you. This is Stephen—professional layabout and your theatrical source of employment.”

“Stephen,
hi!
At last! I've heard so much about you! Thank you for giving me work! Hello, you two must be, er, Simon's colleagues?”

“The pleasure's mine,” says Stephen gallantly as Simon's colleagues grunt and shuffle in. Happily, I don't recognize them from the nightmare evening in the bar. Unhappily, I can't think of a word to say to either of them beyond “hello.” So I'm grateful when Simon appears behind me like a homing pigeon—prompting a loud flurry of greetings (“Todger! My man!” that sort of thing)—and ushers the two goons toward the booze mountain.

“Mel's here,” I tell Matt, “with Isabelle and Clara.”

“Poor love,” he says. “Did she tell you? She was always on the route to destruction, that one.”

“Shall I bring them over?” I say, anxious that Matt and Stephen are entertained.

“Natalie, relax!” replies Matt. “I'll get a drink down my neck first, and so will Fen. Trust me, Fen, it's a good idea. And Paws would appreciate some spring water. He's teetotal.”

“Volvic okay, Paws?”

Matt makes a face. “He prefers Evian. Stop flapping, you're too easy to tease. We'll be fine. Mingle, darling, mingle! And where's
your
drink?”

Matt pours me a large white wine, and I don't mingle because Stephen and I get into a chat about theater. With my extensive knowledge of theater, this has the potential to be a very short chat. So I'm happy to let Stephen talk (in fact, I'm delighted: a guest, at my party, talking—this is perfect). The last play he did publicity for was superb, very witty, with a marvelous cast. But they'd got in a cheesecake Hollywood actor—“B-list is putting it kindly”—to star—“put bums on seats”—and he'd ruined it—“a plank of wood, center stage”—and the rest of the cast were rabid—“it demeaned their art”—

I'm so enjoying our conversation that I stop running to the doorbell every time it rings. Belinda trots in with cries of “I swear I saw Jude Law comin' aht the pub!” and the biggest Gucci handbag I've ever seen—it might even be a suitcase on a strap.
An intensively tanned man with spiky hair and a good-natured grin trundles adoringly in her wake. I see Frannie arrive with a sour face (it sours further as she sees the place is packed with people who seem dangerously close to enjoying themselves).

Saul saunters in at
11:38
—this is a man who accords a cinema program the same degree of punctuality as a wedding ceremony, insisting on being seated, with a bag of malted milk balls and a can of Pepsi (purchased in advance at the news agent in protest against Warner Village prices and smuggled in under his raincoat)
before
the advertisements start. And he arrives at my party at 11:38! Still, at least he came. (Chris left a terse message on my answering machine saying would I please never contact him again.) And then, twenty minutes later, I spot an FBI jacket.

I'm talking to Babs at the time. “How long has Robbie been here?” I say, lighting a cigarette.

“You do give yourself away with those. He said hello to
me
about two hours ago. He probably meant to say hi but”—she nods at Frannie, who has all but planted a stake in his personal space—“got waylaid.”

I feel my mouth drying up. “Did he come by himself?”

“Why do you ask?”

I glance at Robbie. He sees me looking and pulls a rude face. But I'm the
host
!

“Do you, ah, think he might be annoyed with me?”

“What about?”

“Nothing. Doesn't matter.”

“So.” She grins, swigging from a can. “Looking forward to Sydney? How do you think your parents will get on?”

“Badly,” I say, sighing, “and well. It entirely depends on who's in the room at the time.”

“And do you think Tony will have a last-minute change of heart and hop on a plane?”

“Er, no,” I say.

“You never know. He might!”

“Babs, you know he won't,” I growl. “Mel says he's still furious. He'd do anything for her, even sit through
Swan Lake
, but he still wouldn't come here tonight. I'm not too upset, though. Mel seems to be confident that he'll ring me in the end. Which is a big step for mankind, don't you think?”

Drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg gggggggggggggg!

“Sounds familiar,” mutters Babs.

I sashay (involuntary in pink snakeskin) to the door and heave it open.

And there he is.

“This time,” he says, “I'm not going away.”

I gaze at him and my throat does its usual trick of seizing up. I take a deep restorative breath—from what I
think
Alex calls my jurassic abdominals, but I'll have to check—and say, “I wasn't going to ask you to.”

He blinks.

“In fact,” I add, “I was expecting you earlier.”

He shoves his hands into his pockets and replies, “I thought I'd wait till midnight. I thought if things didn't work out I could turn into a pumpkin.”

“The
stagecoach
turned into a pumpkin,” I say. “Get your food facts right.”

He laughs. “You look fantastic,” he adds. “I hardly recognized you.”

“Thank you. That's the nicest compliment I've received since Mel arrived.”

“What I mean is”—he nods at me shyly—“you look a million times better. Happier, and stronger. Really. Like you're looking after yourself. Like you could rule the world. Maybe I
should
go away again, if this is how you do without me.”

I grab his hand, and the words flow. “Not so fast, schweet-heart. I've been straightening myself out. I want to be well. It's quite a long boring haul. I thought I'd spare you some of it.”

Andy smooths his thumb over my palm, pressing it into the flesh. “I don't want to be spared anything,” he says, stroking my skin. “There's nothing you can do that will put me off you.”

“What about if I wander about the flat eating Nutella straight from the jar?”

He gives me a reproving look. “Natalie,” he says. “Nutella is
meant
to be eaten straight from the jar. Eating it with bread is plainly ridiculous.”

I smile. “I am a lot better. But I lapse. And yesterday”—a perverse part of me wants to shock him with the grim, unladylike truth—“I'd eaten like a well person all day, and then I did the Nutella thing and I walked into the bathroom and saw myself—no makeup, wearing pajamas, spoon in hand—and I thought, Is there any woman, alone in the house, who takes a big scoop of Nutella from the jar, looks in the mirror, and loves herself for it? There wasn't
loathing
. But it wasn't a great feeling. I wanted to, you know”—I force myself to speak—“be sick. I wasn't. I don't do that anymore. I was proud of that. But, Andy, it's a very low-grade kind of pride.”

I look into his eyes, challenging. He hasn't stopped massaging my palm. He replies, “Nat. Forget the Nutella, forget the mirror, forget other women. The real question is, do you love yourself? If you enjoyed shooting ocelots for their fur, or smacking babies, then you'd have a reason to doubt yourself—your empathy for other living things. But this is about your empathy for you—it's about you accepting you. Unless you're hurting someone, pride or shame shouldn't apply.” Andy clears his throat. “Once,” he adds, “in college, I woke up hung over, groped for the pint glass of water by my bed, and drank it, except—and remember the toilet was down the hall—it turned out not to be
water
. Not my finest hour. But, I promise you, I'm still a nice bloke.”

He lifts my right hand and gently waggles each finger in turn. “This,” he says, “is a special hand. It belongs to someone precious.
But she was sloppy. She didn't read the manufacturer's instructions properly. She ditched the batteries. And it took her a while to see that she wasn't working and that she'd better take more care. And though it was a big yawn, paying attention to the small print, that's what she did. And”—his voice dips to a whisper—“now she's working beautifully.”

I banish the tears to the back of my throat. We look at each other for a long while. “You know,” he murmurs, “my hygiene habits have improved since college. I'm ninety-nine percent sure you won't catch anything.”

I giggle. “Hey, Prince Charming,” I say. “You know all the best lines. There's a really revolting slipper in your old bedroom. Let's go and see if it fits.”

P
ART OF THE ALLURE
of writing a book is that it's the route to a wonderful life: you can bludgeon your alarm clock to death, swan to your oak desk at 10am, create magic for a few hours at your laptop while sipping champagne, break for lunch at the Sugar Club with your publisher (she pays, obviously), ride your pony in the afternoon. Sadly, when you are sitting in front of a blank screen with 150,000 words worth of space to fill, you realize that the monster book deal, the glamorous author parties, and the rave reviews in the
New York Times
, are a long way away. All thoughts of ponies are abandoned. So, you don't start writing. Starting to write is terrifying because the prospect of failure becomes imminent.

Because of this, I started writing my novel about two years after I'd first thought about it. That's how long it can take to run out of excuses. The possibility that I might actually like to write
a novel first occurred to me when I was features editor at the UK version of
Cosmopolitan
. A colleague had sold her book and I thought, ooh, champagne, ponies, lunches, I'd like to do that. The fact that she'd succeeded made the fantasy seem a little more attainable.

However, when you have a full time job your day is pretty much taken up with that. I feel hard done by getting up at 8. I was never going to rise at 5 and create reams of perfect prose before hopping on the tube to do a full day's work. Some people manage it. Those people want to write their book more than anything—more than sleep, or any kind of life—which is probably why they succeed. But at that time I didn't want it badly enough—so I continued at
Cosmo
until something happened that changed my priorities.

My father died. I was 27, it shattered me. A week after his death I was back at work but I wasn't the same person. I couldn't get out of my head that I had missed his last birthday dinner because I had been in the office editing a piece on perfect skin. Ten months after he died, I was still working at
Cosmo
, but I was still in a bit of a state. I didn't want to be there anymore. I wanted to be at home, getting to know my remaining relatives before they expired.

My editor at the time suggested that I write a feature about my grief (a very editor-y thing to do), so I wrote a piece entitled “The First Year Without My Father”. I found the actual writing cathartic, although I felt as a feature it was roughly 148 thousand words too short. But it gave me a good opportunity to say things I wanted to say to people, and to vent a lot of rage. For example—a cousin said to my mother “my husband has gone to South Africa for three weeks—I know exactly how you feel!”

The way people behave around you when you are bereaved is funny even if you don't appreciate it at the time, and I wrote
about that. A few readers wrote in, and a press officer who worked for a publishing house sent me a card saying “maybe you should write your novel around this subject.”

All this attention was satisfying (one of my fears was that my father would be forgotten, and as long as I wrote about him he was alive in peoples' thoughts) but it wasn't enough, and I know I seem to be going on about this but the point is that to write a good book you have to be passionate about your subject. You can't write a book as a cynical exercise because it shows.

You have to respect your readers. You can't patronize them. And for that, you have to believe in and love your characters, which sounds very pretentious. I always think of the start of
Romancing the Stone
, a film which begins with Kathleen Turner sobbing over what sounds like real events, but turns out to be the end of the blockbuster novel she's just finished on her typewriter. It seems laughable, but if you don't have that level of involvement with your characters—if you don't see them as real people—the book won't ring true.

When I wrote the last pages of
Getting Over It
and
Running In Heels
, I sniveled over my desk. I'm not saying I didn't feel like a berk, but if you don't care about the people in your book, no one else will either.

I always give my characters what I believe Robert McKee refers to as “a backstory”—a life before the novel began which isn't necessarily included within it—so that they're psychologically sound. In
Getting Over It
, Helen, my heroine, doesn't have a great relationship with her father. When he dies at the start of the book, she thinks she can continue as normal…and she does for a while, until her life and family start to fall to bits around her. While this book is essentially about grief, it's also a romantic comedy. At the beginning, Helen is attracted to men who are emotionally distant—it's what she's comfortable with and what she's used to, because of her relationship with her father. Part of Helen's grieving process is accepting the fact that she can never
repair the flaws in the relationship she had with her father. As she learns to live with this fact, she is able to accept that her romantic relationships with men do not have to be like this….

Until my father died, I don't think I felt strongly enough about any one subject to write a book about it but this was something that I couldn't get out of my system. Eventually, I resigned from
Cosmo
and started to freelance. This gave me time to delay a bit longer. I wrote one or two more features about grief but I realized it wasn't enough. I wanted to write a novel for the person I was when I lost my dad—a 27 year-old who had other things on her mind that Monday morning, when she turned around from her desk, to see her fiancee with this terrible look on his face and hear him say “Your father's had a stroke.” That one moment changed my whole life. Now, a year later, I had some distance from the acute bitterness and rage, and knew I wanted to communicate something. I think this is the next step—you have to want to write your book enough to stop lollygagging about and actually do it.

Being a freelance makes that easier, but I still don't think I would have written it if not for the friends who encouraged me. I was very fortunate in that I had several friends who knew people in publishing. One, who worked for
National Magazines
(the company that publishes UK
Cosmopolitan
) had seen the manuscript I'd written for a lighthearted
Cosmo
book entitled “How To Seduce your Dream Man.” She kept badgering me to write a proper book. She kept saying “Oh, soon you'll be a bestselling novelist la la la.” Unless you possess a monstrous ego that needs no outside input, this kind of thing is just what you need—people who convince you that your dream is achievable. I'm sure this is page three of the Ladybird book of Psychology, but you have to reach the stage where you believe you can do it before you can actually do it. Avoid people who don't believe in you, who, for some warped reasons of their own, would rather you didn't write a book and get it published.

In the end, my friend told a publisher about me, who called and invited me to come and see him. This guy's last name was Lancaster, but I was so excited I misheard it on my answering machine as Van Castor. I had nothing to show him so I rang back, arranged an appointment for seven days' time and started writing. There was a book inside me but alas, at this stage it was rubbish. It was, as my husband said, just a lot of typing. However I think Lord Van Castor was feeling charitable that day—he later said he thought there was a kernel of something there—because he offered me a two-book deal. I was tempted to accept it but I felt it might be wise to speak to some authors first. I spoke to two; both said not to go straight to a publisher, but to find an agent first. One said that her current bigshot agent didn't speak to “the little people” but she did put me in touch with the agent who'd negotiated her first deal. After reading my manuscript this agent wrote me back a very nice letter saying “Go away.”

Fortunately a friend of a friend knew a literary agent named Johnny G and he suggested I send him my work. I got excited again, and ignored my husband who had read the typing and told me I hadn't got a plot. I saw this new agent who was very kind and gave me five minutes of great advice. He told me I didn't have a plot. He also told me that a novel has to kick off with a dramatic event. Somehow, I'd missed that. In the gobledygook version I had the father die halfway through the book, which was—I now see—the decision of an idiot. Johnny suggested that the book began with the father dying. My heroine was also a tabloid journalist. Johnny said that readers didn't tend to be very sympathetic to tabloid journalists. He told me to go away and come back when I had something proper.

So I called the publisher and told him that I wanted to do a bit more work on the book before selling it. I also wanted to say that I couldn't really afford to take his offer, but I was slightly ashamed; after all the main goal here was to be published…so what was I doing quibbling about money? Didn't that make me
a hypocrite? Probably. But. You have to know what you want in order to get it—if I was going to be a novelist I wanted to be a full-time novelist. I wanted to give up the day job. I didn't want to start my novel feeling hard done by and cross. And this story was very personal to me, it was like being told your baby is quite ugly so he's not worth much. Also, the publisher had sent me a contract which I'd read to Johnny. One of the phrases on it entitled them to world rights and use of my kidneys on days ending in Y. When I read this to Johnny he made a noise like this: phhhhhh!

I sulked. At this point I'd also made the gross error of telling quite a few people that I was writing a novel. Never tell anyone that you're writing a novel until you've written it and sold it, because it's like a waitress who tells you she's really an actor. Everyone constantly asks “How's it going? Have you written it yet?? and you feel like a fool before anyone's even turned you down. I decided to abandon the meager residue of pride I had, and to buy a book on novel writing. It was entitled
Bestseller
. I felt like a fraud and was mortified beyond belief at the cash register. I couldn't even bring myself to open it for three weeks. But finally I did, and I recommend it. After all, if you want to become a judge, you don't just barge into court wearing a black robe.

Bestseller
, by Celia Brayfield. It's very good on the structure of a novel. It really helped me to order my thoughts. It also convinced me of the paramount importance of plot. So I took a month off to devise a proper plot. Please note: it had taken me 18 months to actually commit to spending time and losing money on this thing.

 

I managed the plot, but still couldn't quite start the writing. It took a chance meeting with Johnny G at someone's engagement party to goad me that bit further. He asked how the novel was
going, and I when I told him I hadn't started yet, he replied “Ah well,” as in “Ah well, you deadbeat, you smell of whiskey.” It worked. I almost started writing.

Until I found another excuse. I hadn't done enough research. I had enough distance from my own experience by then to have created characters and a story that weren't completely based on me or my family. A lot of the emotions were based on mine, but the people and events were mostly made up—and this is important from a “Sorry but you're being sued for libel and we're pulping your book and can we have our advance back?” point of view. So, I'd decided that the fictional dad would die of a heart attack in chapter two, and the heroine would have to organize his funeral in chapter three. I found I couldn't write because I sure as hell didn't know what happened when you had a heart attack—I haven't had one—and I didn't know how to organize a funeral. Horror. This meant leaving the comfort of my sofa and ugh—speaking to people.

After a few more months of stalling, I found a doctor who showed me around the local hospital, talked me through symptoms, hospital hierarchy, etc. He was brilliant. Knowing the facts makes it much easier to write fiction. You can be cleverer, funnier, wiser—you can build the fancy house because you have strong foundations. It's important though, to check what you've written. Probably through laziness, I made my heroine work at a magazine…and one little scene I particularly liked was the one where the heroine sees her father, lying in hospital, attached to a drip, and is appalled at the sight of his full catheter. To her, it's a gross symbol of that stripping of dignity to see powerful person so weak. I wrote this cute paragraph about my heroine being horrified by an “orange wee bag…” And yet, despite her shock, her women's magazine instinct wonders why the bag has to be transparent. After all, couldn't the state commission
Gucci
or
Prada
to design a more upmarket wee bag? Anyway, my doctor read this juvenile piece of wit and said, “After a heart attack, the kidneys malfunction…he wouldn't be producing urine!”

I think what goes onto the page is not the work, it is the culmination of a great deal of invisible work. You might sit down and work for five hours at the typewriter, but you should be working on your novel 18 hours a day…thinking about how to make that confrontation more dramatic, choosing the best word to describe something. Sure, you have a workable word, but you could do better. Of course, before you can write your story, you have to concentrate on finding your tone. For that, I think you have to know who your reader is. I was lucky because I had a fairly exact reader in mind. I wanted to write for women. Maybe it sounds cynical to say you have to know your market, but you do, especially because it's the first thing that publishers think about. If they can't see the market, then they'll hesitate to buy your book, no matter how good the writing. And there's no crime in wanting to be commercial. That's a dirty word to some people, but it doesn't mean you have to compromise your integrity or write badly. All it means is that you want to communicate to a lot of people rather than a few.