Chapter Four
Ross shook his head as he walked up the hill, smiling despite himself. That woman had an even worse foot-in-mouth problem
than he did. Hilarious! And it was kind of nice to meet someone who knew their Milton too. He had missed that bit of his old
life—hanging out with other people who loved good writing. They were his people.
He had so nearly given himself away to her, though, biting her head off because she said she recognized him. And then letting
slip that he was writer . . . She must think him very odd. Or—worse—just rude. Not that it mattered what she thought of him,
of course. That aspect of his new life had been quite freeing, the “not caring what people thought.” It was that, versus the
oppression of people’s expectations, constantly trying to second-guess what his readers wanted so he could give it to them,
like a particularly people-pleasing dog. It had been exhausting.
Although, as the antithesis of keeping a low profile, he had gone and unnecessarily given her his name.
Just knowing his first name wouldn’t get her far, though, he reassured himself.
Somehow, he had just wanted her to know.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had heard someone say his name out loud.
Which was weird because he had always found it so intrusive—the discombobulation of realizing that people he had never met
clearly thought, somehow, that they knew him? Hearing strangers say his name. Shouting it in the street, even. He had hated
that. When you pour out your innermost thoughts into your work, it doesn’t feel like you are announcing them to the world.
You don’t imagine your words will be read by all those strangers, who then think that—in owning your book—they somehow own
a piece of your soul.
It was a strange, Faustian pact he had entered into then. He felt so obligated—so grateful—to his readers that even their
most ridiculous expectations had seemed eminently reasonable.
Until they didn’t.
Yes, cutting himself off from the world had been a relief at first. No, actually, it had been terrifying at first. Then it had been a relief. Then . . . ?
Then, it had become lonely.
But there was nothing to be done about that, because the only legitimate way back to the world—to his world, and his life—had been to write another book.
And that hadn’t happened, had it?
Ross sighed. It was all just too big a problem.
It had been five years—five years!—and he had not lighted upon a solution to it, not yet.
But—he smiled as he strode—even being in a bookshop had been surprisingly nice.
For a long time, being surrounded by other writers’ words when he had none of his own—nothing worth saying—had been a torment.
Today, though, it had begun to feel like something else.
A comfort. A fragile trail of white breadcrumbs in a dark forest .
. . Leading him home? Leading him somewhere, anyhow . . .
Smiling to herself, Petra checked all the doors and windows again before going upstairs in search of food. She really must
find out where the nearest supermarket was tomorrow, but just for tonight she was hoping to scavenge whatever she could find
in the kitchen.
Settling for a can of someone else’s oxtail soup and making a note on her phone to replace it when she went food shopping,
Petra stood stirring the saucepan in one hand and doing Wordle on her phone with the other. She was perplexed. It took longer
than usual, which was ironic, she realized, as inspiration struck.
“Novel.”
Ha.
Still, at least she got it in three tries. Not bad.
While shoveling in soup and a thick slice of bread and butter, Petra made a list of all the things she needed to ask Flo the
next day. The shop had better not be too busy. It was a long list.
Once planning ahead was done, the silence in the flat felt oppressive. It was too early to go to bed. There was no Wi-Fi,
or at least not a strong enough signal to make it upstairs from the office at the back of the shop. No Wi-Fi! Who didn’t have
Wi-Fi these days? It was barbaric. Also, there was no terrestrial television of any kind. Petra had been forced to fall back
on a disgracefully patchy phone signal that was far too intermittent to stream anything, denying Petra her usual mind-numbing
binge-watching of Friends and The Good Place. Tonight, though, her phone informed her she had hardly any data left either, so TV was out. Great.
What the heck did people do in Portneath?
She had deleted TikTok on the train coming down, because the algorithm delivered nothing but BookTok—which now caused her
actual physical pain—and she didn’t know how to train it to show her anything else. This seemed to gloomily confirm that—without
books—she was a nobody, with no personality and no interests. Instagram was no better but at least included a million ads
that were fascinating in their randomness. Why—in the name of all that was holy—did Insta think she wanted big underpants
and comfy bras, to the exclusion of everything else? What had led it to this conclusion? Had her account been hacked by a
busty middle-aged woman with an addiction to cake and underwear?
Doomscrolling endlessly anyway, Petra glanced up and—horrified to see she had allowed an hour and a half of her life to trickle
away pointlessly—put down her phone and jumped to her feet. Books! She would read. That was what she used to do, for hours,
weeks, months . . . her love of books had propelled her through most of the first twenty-eight years of her life. They had
been her hobby, her friends, her career, and her solace. She found herself on the shop floor without further conscious thought,
but that was where the enthusiasm drained away. Cozy crime, romance, literary feminist retellings of Greek myths . . . all
delicious, tempting, absorbing stories, but each possibility left her filled with ever increasing ennui.
Trying again on the second floor, looking this time for the comfort of something she had read a dozen times before, she dismissed du Maurier, George Eliot, Agatha Christie, or even Conan Doyle, although Holmes and Watson were her go-to absorbing read throughout her childhood.
She had happy memories of lying wrapped in the sofa throw on the hearth in front of the fire, totally transported by The Hound of the Baskervilles or “The Speckled Band.”
Everything she might re-read now felt stale and dry. Eventually, her eye lighted on the Milton book still on the table. An
epic poem might fill the void where a novel felt too large a commitment. Maybe that was the problem? A lifetime of tiny doomscrolling
dopamine hits had broken her ability to focus long enough to read a ninety-thousand-word story anymore. Unless it was for
work, which had—perhaps for that reason—become increasingly joyless.
The sonorous, magnificent language of Milton would draw her in and fill the emptiness in her mind, she decided.
Petra carried the book upstairs and settled herself, in pajamas, in her new, fabulous bed, with a cup of tea and a packet
of chocolate biscuits. Crumbs on the sheets? Who cared! She knew how to live!
Lucifer’s journey echoed her own all too closely, she realized. Hubris and pride had caused her descent into hell. But hell
wasn’t all fire and brimstone. As Milton knew all too well, hell was mostly a cold and lonely absence from the world. A casting
out. Yup. As delightful as Portneath appeared to be, the mind was its own place. And she was in hell.
Later, back in Ross’s stone cottage, where the top of the main street petered gently into a country lane, he slipped, out of habit, into his normal evening routine.
The house—his latest rental in a series of frequent moves—was probably pleasant in the summer.
In January, it was damp and dreary when he allowed the woodburning stove to go out.
It was out.
After getting it burning again, he cooked up some supper and ate it without relish straight out of the pan while he had a
crack at Wordle. This was usually the one pathetic sense of achievement he obtained all day.
The word was “novel.” Oh, the irony. And it took him six tries.
Staring sightlessly into the flames and spending too much time thinking about the woman in the bookshop, he decided to look
on Netflix for something distractingly bad to bury himself in. This evening, though, the gloomy Swedish detective shtick was
too predictable, even for him. He guessed the murderer during the first half hour, and the woman detective’s back story didn’t
engage him at all. He decided to call it a night, shut down his laptop, and went up the creaking wooden stairs to get ready
for bed.
Ross studied himself dispassionately in the bathroom mirror, toothbrush in hand.
No wonder that woman in the bookshop thought he was a pirate, although she was definitely a bit eccentric, in a strangely appealing way, he thought, suppressing a smile as he squeezed the toothpaste tube.
He turned his attention back to his reflection, sobered at the sight.
The state of him! He turned his face this way and then the other, as if seeing it for the first time.
The beard was a disaster. Less of a fashion choice, more an absence of the will required to shave, it had grown bushy and unkempt.
He also noticed in the harsh bathroom light that there were more than a few gray hairs in it.
He was only thirty-four, for God’s sake.
The hair on his head wasn’t great either.
There was plenty of it, at least—no sign of thinning—but he couldn’t remember the last time he had gone to the barber, and it didn’t know what to do with itself.
He looked like the wild man of the woods.
And his clothes weren’t going to speak up for him either, he thought, unable by now to stifle the critical voice in his head.
He had that morning—while giving it the usual zero thought—put on the ragged-hemmed dun-colored trousers that she had first