Remy
REMY
I ’m pulling up my jeans when I hear the front door slam.
Mum enters and leaves the house like whispers, so it can’t be her.
I look out of the window and see a figure in a long black coat and boots walking away.
I open the window and shout, “Simone!” but she doesn’t turn around.
I think maybe the sound of the rain pelting the pavement drowns me out, but when I cup my hands around my mouth and shout her name again, people farther away look up at me.
I run downstairs and see the pages I’d printed to show her lying on the floor. “Shit!” I slip on my trainers and run out of the house. The rain is getting heavier and the clouds darker. My hair begins to weigh me down and rain seeps into my clothes. I make it up to her and pull on her coat sleeve.
“Simone, I’m sorry––”
Simone rounds on me. “You’re writing about me! About my life!”
I’ve never seen her look so wild and yet so vulnerable.
“I should have known,” she says, rain dripping from her lashes. “You were so desperate to be my friend. I thought you were lonely and that you liked me.” She reaches for her car door handle. “How stupid of me.”
“It’s not what you think,” I try to explain. “I was going to tell you, no, ask you—”
“I was just research!”
“No! How can you say that? I know this looks bad and I don’t have any excuse.
” I have to speak louder to be heard in the rain.
“It wasn’t meant to go anywhere; it won’t go anywhere!
It just started off as something to get me back into writing.
A couple of days after we met, I started and couldn’t stop.
Yes, I was lonely, but of course I genuinely liked you!
I was fascinated by you because you were confident and I wished I was more like that.
You love your own company and I wanted to be able to say the same.
You make me laugh without trying and think without meaning to and I don’t know how you’ve become the person I want to call in an emergency or the person I can talk to about anything and everything, but you are, and none of that is for this book.
” I’m gasping for breath by the time I finish.
“I mean… really, it’s only a book about two women who become friends: One just happens to be a writer and the other a sex worker. ”
Simone stares at me, her eyes hard. “Do you hear yourself? How ridiculous you sound?”
“It’s just what writers do! So much of what I’ve written is completely made up; you can read it all if you want!
None of the conversations we had are in there verbatim.
It’s like, you know how you accidentally spilled wine on my shirt the first time we met?
If I had two characters do that, would it be such a big deal? ”
“Remy, that story you’re writing? I may not be able to cite plagiarism and it might be ‘loosely inspired by,’ but it still isn’t your story to tell, creative license or not.
The world and its people do not exist for you and your books.
” Simone considers me one more time as we stand facing one another, being beaten by the rain.
For a brief moment I think she might soften, that I might mean enough to her by now, but when she shakes her head, the Simone I bumped into at the book event is back. She unlocks her car door.
“Simone, please don’t go.”
She looks at me from over her shoulder before stepping inside. “I don’t ever want to hear from you again.”