Chapter Six #2
“I like being alone,” Ross snapped, shutting off any further interrogation by standing up and holding his hand out for the
thermos mug, which she handed to him, chastened.
“I should get going,” he said, screwing the top on the thermos with what looked like unnecessary force. “Don’t rush,” he added,
apparently just in case Petra was thinking about accompanying him down. “Enjoy the view.”
Obediently, and keen to make amends—although she wasn’t quite sure what she had done, apart from the usual inadvertent insults—she
looked fixedly at the horizon as she heard him stomping away. A minute later, when she dared to turn around, it was confirmed
that he was gone, and she was alone. Again.
Ross shook his head angrily as he stomped back down the hill.
Why was all this stuff so complicated now?
He was lonely. She was nice. The intention was to be friendly and instead he was gruff and rude.
When did allowing other people in his life get so hard?
When he started having something to hide, he answered himself, scowling.
For the thousandth time he regretted not hiding behind a writing name as his agent had gently suggested.
No. His ego had insisted that he bare his soul to the world with his real name, thinking smugly of old school tormentors—teachers and students alike—and of how proud his parents would be .
. . It was vanity, of course. And now, in punishment, the identity he would rather escape from dogged him everywhere.
He wasn’t hiding from everyone—just the significant proportion of the population who had seen or heard the interviews, plus the people who might have even
read the damned thing. It was too much to expect that someone working in a bookshop wouldn’t have heard of him.
“The highest form of vanity is love of fame.” Who said that? They were right. It was his own fault.
The rest of the day yawned ahead of Petra when she got back to the shop. She was rubbish at being alone and was well aware
it signaled a lack of inner resources. As a child she was thrilled to have time on her own; it had given her a precious chance
to escape into books for hour after hour. Now, ruined by the tyranny of impossible work expectations along with the distractibility
driven by her social media addiction, she could barely read the back of a cereal box without losing focus. Everyone in publishing
knew the reality. You enter the profession because of a love of books and then that very thing—the reading—ends up getting
pushed into the margins. With whole days spent hustling, editors and agents alike invariably tackled the never-ending “to
be read” pile in their own time.
So now, when it came to the simple act of reading, Petra was all burned-out.
As for whole books, even picking one up to read it gave her palpitations, unleashing a flood of thoughts about all the people she had let down.
What had things come to that she didn’t even have the inner resources to make the most of a day off?
Tugging her coat back on, she grabbed her phone and set off to find the little supermarket Flo had told her about. The one
just over the other side of the bridge.
The familiarity of the grocery shop interior soothed her. She could be anywhere in the country; it would look just the same.
She felt reassuringly anonymous and rootless. Wandering the shelves, randomly chucking things in her basket—milk, toilet roll,
a packet of chocolate biscuits—she paused at the newspapers section. Maybe, if she could no longer lose herself in a book,
she could at least read the Sunday papers, like normal people did? She hefted the Sunday Times into her basket on top of the food, added a copy of the Observer to balance out editorial bias, and went off to pay.
Back at the flat, she lit the fire in the sitting room, committed to getting cozy. It was soon blazing merrily, combating
the chill outside. Making herself a pot of coffee and then settling on the sofa with the throw wrapped around her, Petra started
to read the papers. Usually, if she read them at all, she would read on her phone, but it was strangely soothing to have all
the sections of the paper slewed onto the coffee table in front of her. The Sunday Times had a great culture section. Knowing about all that stuff in the wider cultural arena other than just books was her job. She
needed to bring herself up to speed, and browsing the Sunday papers on a chilly weekend afternoon away from work was what
normal people did. She had almost forgotten that.
Now Petra learned from reading that there was a surprising amount of “culture” happening in Devon.
She had been snobby in her London-centric assumptions.
A couple of important plays were touring in Exeter before their London runs, and there was a huge concert hall with a full program in Plymouth, not too far away.
Soon she was wired from all the coffee—Ross’s coffee, in particular, had been caffeine-loaded—she needed to eat something.
She broke off for a bread and cheese lunch, and then—bringing a large bar of nut chocolate with her back into the sitting room and putting another log on the fire—she braved the literary section with a flutter of anxiety.
She was confronted immediately with a sharp reminder of her own failings. In the column devoted to new releases, there was
a debut novel by a writer who had requested representation from her. She had politely declined, and he had gone to another
agent who had negotiated him a significant deal, by the look of it. Oops. But she was glad for him. Breaking out with your
first book was an amazing achievement. Petra smiled, as she broke off another square of chocolate. She loved sharing those