Famous Last Words

Chapter 20

20

Cam

Libby: What number date is this? I’ve lost count? Gooooood luck!!

Cam: Thanks.

It’s the evening, but it’s not busy in C?te Brasserie. It’s just Cam, Charlie, an old couple in the corner, and a few young people wearing headphones and working at miniature laptops, people who nomadically acquire any old place for the day or night as their office.

There’s something plush and nostalgic about it, the quiet and the dimness like a hotel bar or an art gallery. ‘Hook me up to some alcohol. Please. And some fun,’ Cam says to Charlie.

They are sitting at a table with four place settings, right in the window. Charlie, looking at his phone, glances up at Cam as she says this. He’s a newish freelance research assistant, had a career change in his early forties, wanted to try something completely different. They met at a work do in her agency’s office, three and a half months ago, right after she made some initial enquiries to sell the house. He walked into their office and she overheard him say, ‘There’s somebody actually sitting reading a novel just in your foyer! Are they on display?’ and something in Cam liked that cynicism about publishing, after a lifetime with writers. Charlie is a person firmly in the establishment, not outside of it. He believes very much in working hard. He runs at the weekends. He would never sit and ponder what it was all for. Cam likes this. Someone who’s good at life. Who won’t put a foot wrong in it. She’s enjoyed attending work things with her dark new friend, who says things like, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, but I hardly ever read.’

Cam smiles broadly at him and plays with her hair, a short messy bob these days, lightened, too, as a way to cover the greys. Sometimes she doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror, which she finds kind of thrilling: that was the point.

‘Alcohol and fun, you say?’ He rocks the chair back on its legs, his eyes on her.

‘One hundred per cent.’

He catches a waiter’s attention, then raises his eyebrows to Cam in a question. ‘The strongest cocktail,’ she says. ‘I could – I don’t know. I could stay out all night.’

‘A Bloody Mary – no, two. And a goat’s cheese tart,’ he adds. Cam, surprised he’s ordering food already, asks for the same.

‘So, what news?’ Charlie says.

‘Well,’ Cam says. ‘So.’

‘So,’ Charlie says back. He very deliberately puts his phone to the side, face down.

‘Remember Adam?’

‘The big-shot – bestselling debut?’

‘Yes. Well, his next book is six years late.’

‘Six years ?’

‘You know publishing.’

Charlie rocks back boyishly on his chair, legs stretched out underneath the table, arms folded across his chest. ‘Six years, though. I mean – what’s he been doing?’

‘Trying to have ideas.’ She glances at the menu.

Their drinks arrive, Cam’s cold but the glass warm from the dishwasher, and she takes a delicious, tomatoey-alcoholic sip, which hits the precise spot she needed. She closes her eyes, says a silent cheers to being here with Charlie at the very beginning of the evening. Maybe they really will stay out all night.

‘His publisher checked in with me today.’ She catches his eye, lets a grin out.

‘Crikey – did the publisher rap your knuckles?’

‘Well – kind of. Yes. Just said they can’t wait indefinitely . They’re hinting at wanting the advance back, in their own nice way.’

‘Tricky,’ Charlie says. ‘If I were the agent, I think I’d go into hiding.’

‘Ha.’

‘Is he stressed?’

‘Adam? He writes when he writes. I don’t even know if he’s started. He won’t say. He’s the one who will just post it to me when he’s ready. It takes as long as it takes.’

‘Oh yes, the Jiffy bag client!’

‘That’s the one.’ Cam smiles. Adam doesn’t much like email; he said he liked the remoteness of sending his printed novel in an envelope that he had no idea whether she had received or was yet reading. He had added, when she signed him, that when he wrote the second novel, he’d send it in an envelope, too. That it would be his thing. She’d loved this so much she had told everyone. Libby said he sounded pretentious.

‘I mean,’ Charlie says, ‘it’s just a book.’ As the words leave his mouth, she avoids her distorted reflection in the windowpane. ‘Anyway,’ Charlie says. ‘So this is why you want to stay out all night. Makes sense, CF.’

Camilla Fletcher. She reverted to her maiden name after her married one became infamous. She still remembers the day she signed the form. A kind of sombre reverse-wedding day. It was surprising how easy it was to change it. And she simply reverted to Fletcher on the agency website: most people got used to it quickly.

‘Exactly.’

‘Must be nice to be able to work precisely when you like,’ Charlie remarks. Evidently, he can’t get past it – sometimes, Cam thinks he doesn’t really understand publishing as much as he ought to, because he adds, almost under his breath, ‘Six years off.’

‘Oh, trust me,’ Cam says with a laugh, ‘he’s not been having any fun.’

Out of Sight , Adam’s debut, was published five and a half years ago. They – Cam’s temporary stand-in and Adam – accepted Penguin’s two-book offer, and Out of Sight had become an international bestseller, in the charts for four straight months here and in the US. The second book had been expected within the year, and is now so late that Cam is sort of half relieved she’s been chased because the next step is the publisher losing interest entirely.

She leans towards Charlie. ‘What’ve you been working on, anyway? Tell me something.’ This is their thing: Tell me something .

‘I’ve been working on … research about the Titanic ,’ Charlie answers with a smile. ‘Become an expert. Via Wikipedia. But perhaps no one will even read the book.’

‘Likely,’ Cam says. ‘Just a book,’ she adds lightly.

‘Touché,’ Charlie says. ‘Non-fiction. Interesting, though.’ He tells her of various queries and research, and what he’s learnt.

‘Don’t you think that sometimes?’ he asks. ‘That no one will ever read it? That it’ll just sit on the shelves in Waterstones?’

She raises her glass to that in a silent toast. ‘All the time,’ she lies. But something is bubbling up inside. The real her. The one she buries.

Their waiter brings their food. Charlie slices into his tart, a clean cut. He has neat hands, and they eat in silence for a few seconds. There is something nice about sitting with somebody confident. Like you somehow belong in the world.

‘So good,’ Charlie says, gesturing to the food. ‘I need it. Ran ten before work today.’

‘You are a better human than me.’

‘No, I just need to be exercised. Like a horse.’

‘Yes?’ Cam says, ignoring the humour and trying to plumb deeper. She puts her elbows on the table, her face in her hands. Most of all, she enjoys, behind the confident veneer, Charlie’s sometimes vague hints at his own misery: she knows that he is divorced, but not much more. ‘Or? What?’ she says brightly.

‘ Or ,’ he says, expression amused, reaching for the pepper shaker, perhaps as a distraction, ‘I worry about stupid shit. And don’t sleep.’

‘Join the club,’ she says.

‘There’s always running,’ he says, ‘even though it’s awful.’

‘Worse than publishing parties?’

‘Close second.’

He scootches towards her slightly. He smells nice, a subtle, expensive aftershave. His knee touches hers.

Cam looks around her. The waitress moves past, carrying a strawberry milkshake and a steak and fries. Cam finds herself watching avidly. She doesn’t even know why, until she realizes: it is precisely the sort of thing Luke would order. He would never, ever have a cocktail and a goat’s cheese tart. Cam doesn’t know why this thought arrives in her mind, or why it feels so forceful, but that is sometimes how it is. She checks the time. It’s ten past seven, and she hadn’t yet thought of him today. It must be the first time it’s happened.

That thought hits her even harder.

No Luke, until 7.10 p.m.

But, now, she does think of him, and up, up, up goes the pressure in her head.

‘One second,’ she says to Charlie. His eyes dart to hers, confused, like a hurt animal’s. Cam tries to care, but momentarily can’t. She crosses the dimly lit restaurant and pushes open the pink stall door to the toilets. She sits on a green velvet armchair, alone, just for a few seconds.

God.

That steak.

And – just like that – everything she’s been pretending falls apart. Her extroversion with Charlie, keeping the conversation going, taking the piss out of publishing, wanting alcohol, to stay out all night. As if.

Funny how some people have a way of pulling a version out of you that isn’t really you . She catches her eye in the mirror. Stupid haircut. It isn’t her.

On the green armchair, alone, Cam places both hands on her heart, closes her eyes, and allows herself to miss him, and the person she was before it all. Content to love herself, because he did. He did. He did .

She opens her eyes. The toilets’ walls are painted a matt calamine pink, the insides lit with bare bulbs. And she’s alone, the way she wants it.

She stares down at her phone in her hands, not wanting to go back in there just yet. And then, for the second time in her life, unexpected news, although she doesn’t know it yet, shatters everything.