Chapter Eight
Alex
The sight of Jess hobbling, visibly injured, has done something to Alex’s insides that he wishes it hadn’t.
The fact that she was trying to hide it from him made it endearing, somehow.
Why she’d insisted on impractical footwear is beyond him, though.
They’re nice boots, and he has to admit that they complement her outfit, but surely, getting places efficiently and uninjured should be the main priority when it comes to what you wear on your feet.
He doesn’t, of course, convey any of this to Jess.
Instead, he brings her tea, gives her some cushions to further elevate her foot, and checks multiple times that she is comfortable, until she seems almost annoyed with him for continually asking.
Alex knows he can be accused of many things, but ungentlemanly behaviour is not one of them.
‘So,’ she says, reaching for her tote bag and pulling out a wad of pages that he recognises as his novel.
They’d been pristine when Nathan had handed them to her – shiny and bright and full of potential – but now they’re crumpled and scribbled on.
He wouldn’t be surprised if they were out of order, too. ‘Yes. Your book.’
Alex holds his breath, waiting. Is approval from others something you look for, do you think?
his counsellor had asked him in their last session.
Doesn’t everybody? he’d replied. He isn’t sure why Jess’s approval, in particular, matters to him, though.
Perhaps for the same reason that he’d been struck dumb by the way her hair had brushed her shoulders at the coffee shop.
Perhaps because she is only the second person to have read this particular book.
Perhaps because she’d clearly sensed his disdain for the kinds of novels she loves, and may want, in retaliation, to express her disdain of literary fiction in general, and his writing in particular.
Which would be fair enough. But probably just because what she thinks, and her suggestions, and her ideas, are going to shape not just the novel itself from here on in, but also the next few months of his work, of his life, and determine how miserable or otherwise he is going to be.
Jess tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.
There’s no sign of a pencil holding her bun up today.
‘Well, first, let me say – I really enjoyed the read. I thought it was very immersive. I sat down to have a flick through for half an hour after our meeting with Nathan, and when I next looked up, it was dark and I realised my stomach had been rumbling for ages.’
He should take a moment to savour this. After all, isn’t this what every author wants?
For their audience to be so caught up in the story, or in the prose – or preferably both – that they forget they are reading, lose track of time, miss their stop on the Underground?
But he knows what she is doing: the compliment sandwich that he remembers all too well from his studies in the US.
An attempt to lower his defences by starting with something positive.
Any minute now, she will launch into what is, he thinks, mistakenly termed constructive criticism. It has always felt destructive to him.
‘I also thought the premise was brilliant. It reminded me of those old epic disaster films from the Seventies – you know, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno. You get to know people’s backstories, and you worry about them, you get emotionally invested, you want them to get out alive. Also, the best episodes of Casualty.’
He can feel his eyebrows responding. Casualty?
The trashy weekly soapified drama about a hospital?
He wants to respond, but he has been trained.
In writing workshops, you sit in silence while the compliment sandwich is delivered by person after person around a round table.
Only at the end are you allowed a few cursory words, which must include thank you, even when you want to murder everyone for how profoundly they’ve misunderstood what you were trying to do and ruined it in your own eyes as well as everyone else’s.
‘But I’ve noticed,’ she says, and the but is his sign to brace himself, to roll himself up into a ball like a hedgehog, spikes out, to protect himself, ‘that all the characters with the most interesting backstories are men. I also wonder if third person omniscient is the way to go with this one. Have you considered multiple-point-of-view?’
Has he considered . . . As if he doesn’t think of every possible option before putting pen to paper.
She is looking at him as if expecting a response. As if this isn’t a writing workshop in Iowa but a collaboration between two people who don’t need to abide by esoteric and slightly brutal rules devised in the Forties by some random academic.
‘I didn’t want to write from the point of view of women. Get accused of – you know. Coopting an identity not my own. Et cetera.’
‘Yeah, I can see that. Lucky you’ve got me, then.’
‘Got you?’
‘To help write the women.’
‘Help write the women?’
‘Is it me, or is there an echo in here?’
Alex makes a show of looking around the room. Then, despite himself, wanting in on Jess’s pathetic attempt at a joke, ‘Is it me, or is there an echo in here?’
She shakes her head in despair at him as you might at an unruly four-year-old. Which, as far as Jess is concerned, is perfectly fair: his childish joke deserves it.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I just thought – I saw your role as more editing, not actually writing, per se.’
He knows that bringing out the Latin is borderline insufferable.
It’s a move he learned a long time ago in an attempt to assert intellectual and educational dominance.
It’s also one that Elodie, his first serious post-university girlfriend, called him out on more than once.
It wasn’t what led to their breakup, but it also wasn’t not what led to their breakup.
Jess tilts her head and widens her eyes.
‘My role?’ she repeats.
‘There really is an echo in here.’
She presses her lips together, as if attempting to keep herself from saying something she’ll regret later. Not that he is looking at her lips or has any interest in them. She doesn’t break eye contact; she is daring him to speak. To say more. But he knows better than to do that.
‘Nathan seemed to think,’ she says eventually, and he is disproportionately glad of this small victory, of Jess being the one to give into the urge of filling the silence, ‘that I should have considerable input into the crafting of this book.’
She waits for him to respond. When he doesn’t, she shuffles in her chair, rearranges her ankle slightly, winces.
If he didn’t know better, he might suspect this to be a ploy for sympathy, or at least for him to back down in deference to her pain.
And though he does know better, something twists in his insides again.
‘Fine,’ he says, reluctantly. He knows he is being played, but he has no more control over the situation than a pawn on a chess board does.
‘Fine, as in, you’ll let me help write the women?’
‘Fine as in I’ll let you try and help me write something.’ He knows he doesn’t really have a choice; Nathan has made that much abundantly clear. He is just having trouble letting go of the illusion of control. ‘We can discuss the finer points later.’
He looks at her expectantly, nodding at the manuscript. He can’t bring himself to ask for more of her ‘constructive criticism’, but he knows there is more, and he might as well get it out of the way now.
‘I also think …’ She takes a deep breath, a sign perhaps that she is expecting him to push back on what she going to say. Or maybe she is expecting him to push back on everything. Which would not be entirely unreasonable, as expectations go. ‘I think they should all survive the plane crash.’
‘All of them?’
Jess nods, her blonde hair bobbing on her shoulders, which increases the earnestness of the moment, somehow.
‘That’s very romance-ending, happily-ever-after, Jess.’
He has never used her name out loud before. He likes the way it sounds, likes the way it feels, the s landing softly on his tongue.
She doesn’t rise to the obvious bait. ‘Just because they all survive doesn’t mean they don’t have issues,’ she says.
And then she says some other things, but he doesn’t really hear them, because the sentence has landed, somehow, deep in his gut, the way a punch might.
His ears ring; he feels, inexplicably, as if he were underwater.
When he emerges, she is drawing her substantial remarks to a close.
‘What do you think?’ she says.
‘About what?’
‘What I’ve just said.’
He has no choice but to hedge. ‘It’s a lot to consider.’
‘I know. And I know it’s not easy to hear criticism from – you know, a reader of inferior genres.’
It’s a dig, and Alex shouldn’t bristle, but he does. The usual internal hedgehog pose he adopts when hearing feedback on his work doesn’t seem to be working when it comes to Jess.
And that, no doubt, is going to be a problem.