Chapter Four
‘Oh God, what is it?’ I brace, the trauma of Henry’s similar declaration last month making my heart pound, even though Mrs Casablancas is not the love of my life and couldn’t possibly have anything to say that would wreck me as much as Henry did. Still, my temples begin to sweat.
‘I … heard you last night,’ Mrs Casablancas says in a low voice, mouth stretched into an awkward grimace.
I blink. ‘Sorry?’
‘I heard you in your bathtub, Gertie. Crying. Actually, I would describe it more as a wailing sound.’
‘Oh God. You heard that? I’m so sorry! Did I keep you awake?’
‘It was not just last night. It has been every single night for thirty days in a row. The wailing. It is beginning to haunt me.’
My face turns fiery red with humiliation. ‘Why didn’t you say something sooner?’ I squeak. ‘I would have cried into my pillow instead! You should have just told me to pipe down!’
Mrs Casablancas shrugs a shoulder, the movement making her dangling sapphire statement earrings dance about prettily.
‘Week one, Henry had just left, your heart was an open wound and you needed to let it all out, I thought. Week two, you were singing a little, which seemed like an improvement, even if the songs you were singing were full of melancholia. Week three, the singing stopped and the crying got louder. Then last night I heard you cry out, “Jesus, why me? Why me? Help me, Jesus!” And I’m afraid that really felt like too much, especially since I have invited you to attend church with me on numerous occasions and you have never accepted the invitation, not once. ’
‘I was drunk last night,’ I protest weakly, shame skittering its way across my whole body like an army of ants. ‘Plus I’m feeling really really sad right now. Henry and I were together for almost four years. I thought we’d get married! I thought we’d grow old and senile together. I thought—’
‘It is time to pull yourself together, Gertie,’ Mrs Casablancas cuts in plainly.
I press my hands to my burning cheeks and sigh. ‘I know. I do know. I’m trying. I want to pull myself together. I hate feeling so fragmented.’
‘Heartbreak is rough, everybody knows this.’ Mrs Casablancas waves her hand about impatiently. ‘Processing it is necessary, yes. But self-pity? Self-pity is like quicksand. The deeper you sink into it, the harder it is to climb out.’
I wish I could say that I’m not filled with self-pity, but I know deep down that’s not true.
I am basking in that self-pity. Rolling around in it like Squish rolls around in the muddy puddles of Hyde Park.
It’s the only thing I know how to do right now.
The only thing stopping me from the creep of bitter cynicism which, to a romantic like me, is the kiss of death.
If I don’t throw myself into a little dramatic misery, what else is left?
The cold, echoing, harshly lit reality of my life? No thank you very much.
I stare at my feet and sigh. How the bloody hell did it come to this?
‘You are newly single!’ Mrs Casablancas trills, selecting a biscuit from the open tin on the table and taking dainty nibbles from around the edge. ‘Shouldn’t you be out with your friends? Having meaningless hot flings? Dancing in the nightclubs of Soho and sowing wild oats?’
‘I’m not the meaningless hot-fling type.’ I point at myself to indicate my whole deal. ‘For ever and ever amen? I want it. I want it bad. Sowing wild oats with zero emotional connection? Not for me.’
Mrs Casablancas acquiesces with a little tut. ‘Fine. But surely seeing your friends will cheer you up? At least distract you from your lonely heart? Jump-start the next phase of your life?’
I don’t want a next phase of my life. I was fine with the original phase. I want that phase back.
‘Have you called your friends? I’m sure they would be happy to help you in this time of need.’
I bite the corner of my lip. The embarrassing truth of the matter is that since I met Henry, I somehow did that awful thing of letting my friendships fall by the wayside.
I’ve never been a person who needed a ton of friends because I always had Josie by my side.
But the ones I did have sort of faded away the more embedded I became in my relationship.
Friendships need upkeep, and cocooning with Henry took up every ounce of spare time I had.
And whenever I wasn’t with Henry, I was wrapped up in the lives of my characters.
I was never ever lonely, which meant I was mostly pretty content.
I think about Alicia who I met last year at a publishing party.
I cancelled our trip to the cinema because Henry had a terrible case of the flu.
The second time I cancelled on her, it was last-minute because Henry had just had a short story rejected by the New Yorker and wanted me to stay in and help cheer him up.
After that Alicia texted a lot less which …
fair. My heart twists as I recall what Henry said, about me revolving around him.
I clear my throat. ‘Well, as much as I would love to go to the nightclubs of Soho with all of my many friends, I need to put every ounce of energy I have into writing my final Bedlam Creek book.’
Mrs Casablancas swallows the remainder of the biscuit, her eyes widening. ‘It is still not finished? Dear, oh dear.’
I refill Mrs Casablancas’s cup from the teapot and laugh darkly. ‘Inspiration’s running low these days. Plus, you know, I’ve been extremely busy wailing in the bath.’
‘I had the same trouble last winter,’ Mrs Casablancas confesses, taking a large gulp of her tea. ‘Complete creative stagnation, totally out of the blue.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s the worst.’
‘You’re telling me. Three whole weeks I made not a single thing. No hats, no garments, not even a cushion cover, and you know how much I love to make my cushion covers.’
I glance across at my sofa – it’s spilling over with all the Mrs Casablancas covered cushions I have acquired over the years. ‘I do know.’
‘When it happened, I thought to myself, “This is it! I have finally used up all my artistic juices. I might as well just die! What’s the point of life without creation?” And then I saw an internet post about “Manifesting” and I was instantly intrigued.
Have you heard of creative manifesting, Gertie?
It’s amazing. Aled at the library gave me some books, I found some articles online and I watched a YouTube video called “Unlock Your Magic with Manifestation!” The very next day – the very next day, mind you – my artistic juices were gushing like the Ganges once more. ’
‘Manifesting? That’s great, but what exactly—’
Before I can finish my question, Mrs Casablancas slams both hands down onto the kitchen table, making me jump.
A little bit of tea spills out from her teacup and splatters the notebook in which I have written zero words.
‘We will do it for you, Gertie!’ she declares.
‘A manifestation ceremony. Tonight there will be a full moon, which is imperative for a successful manifestation. It must be fate! We will do it! It will help with your writer’s block, I know it will.
’ She stands up from the table and starts packing the hats back into the plastic box.
‘Do not worry, I will get everything ready.’
I pull a face. How to say no to this without causing offence?
‘A ceremony? Manifesting? While I like to consider myself a believer, Mrs Casablancas, that all sounds a little …’
‘Hippy dippy? Woo woo? I thought so too when I first read about it. But I was so desperate I was willing to try anything. Aren’t you desperate, Gertie?’
I think about Ethan, down on one knee, an open ring box held aloft.
Cassidy, peering down at him, caught between her love for this man and her fear of how powerless that love sometimes makes her feel.
The pair of them stuck in the final chapter of book four for ever and ever.
I can’t leave them in limbo like that. I’ve been desperate to give Cassidy and Ethan their happy ending since the very first moment they arrived fully formed in my head on that strange sad morning four years ago.
It was 20 August, Josie’s birthday, and not even a week after her funeral.
I’d gotten in the bathtub to sob amidst the comfort of lavender-scented bubbles when suddenly a woman called Cassidy Oakley popped into my head, bright and bold in crisp HD.
She was around twenty-five, blonde, rosy-cheeked and driving; zipping past a wooden town sign that said Welcome to Bedlam Creek, Texas, which struck me as odd considering I’d never even visited America, let alone Texas.
But there she was, like a movie in my mind, on her way to the funeral of her cowboy father, Big Chip Oakley, nervous to encounter her evil cowboy half-brother, River Oakley, but longing to see Oakley Ranch – the place she grew up – for the first time in almost ten years.
I’d read about authors who’d experienced inspiration this way – the sudden arrival of characters fully formed and ready to go.
Was that what had happened to me, in the bath, mid-breakdown?
The curiosity, the distraction of this vision, felt like a blessed relief, especially since the only thing I’d felt since Josie died two weeks earlier was profound unrelenting sorrow with a side of bone-aching guilt.
I remember my tears subsiding as I pictured this self-possessed, determined-looking blonde in her red convertible, singing along so passionately to Kate Bush that she almost didn’t see the handsome doctor crossing the dusty road on his bicycle.
That man was Ethan Calhoun and he was not impressed.
I was immediately hooked. What did Cassidy need?
How did the handsome clever man in the road factor into it?
And what would happen to the famous Oakley Ranch now that Chip Oakley had died?
Would Cassidy get a chance to move back home to the place she loved so much?
Or would her womanising, villainous brother River thwart her like he always had?
Josie had always encouraged me to do something with my writerly ambitions, to stop skirting around my own desires.
She used to say, ‘Give it some oomph, Gertie!’ – her way of telling me to show the world what I was truly capable of.
So I took Cassidy’s sudden arrival on this particular day as a sign that perhaps I should give writing a whole book a try.
Here were the characters and the location, served on a platter.
At the very least it would be a distraction from the unbearable way I was feeling …
Cassidy, Ethan and the ragtag residents of Bedlam Creek, Texas have been keeping this romance-obsessed Brit company ever since.
At least, they did.
I think of Bridget’s increasingly frantic emails.
The messages I get from readers telling me how desperate they are for the final book.
How long they’ve waited for Cassidy Oakley to get everything she ever wanted, for Ethan Calhoun to finally complete his surgical residency, for River Oakley to get his comeuppance at last. I think of how much I miss these people that have been living in my head for so long. My heart longs for them.
‘I mean, you certainly look desperate,’ Mrs Casablancas says now. ‘No offence.’
‘None taken,’ I lie. ‘And you’re right. I am desperate. But I’m not sure a ceremony—’
‘Gertie, if it wasn’t for the creative manifestation ceremony I performed for myself, you would not be wearing the glorious hat you have atop your head right now.
The hat wouldn’t even exist! I’m sorry, but you have to get out of this spiral.
I cannot bear the wailing. Not for even one more night. Seriously, what have you got to lose?’
Mrs Casablancas heaves up her plastic box of hats and heads for the door.
I scooch ahead of her to open it. The last thing I want to do tonight is some mad ceremony with my next-door neighbour.
I had firm plans for the evening – more Tucci cocktails, more meaty takeaway and crying with my face smooshed into a pillow, rather than freely in the bathtub.
But I can’t say no to Mrs Casablancas – not only because it wouldn’t be very polite, but also because she’s the only person I’ve got these days.
You’ve still got Mum and Dad, a vague voice chimes in the back of my head. I push it away like I always do.
‘Fine.’ I throw my hands up in surrender. ‘Let’s do it. You’re right. It’s a sorry state of affairs when a person literally has nothing to lose.’
‘Good girl. Squish! Come to me!’ Mrs Casablancas commands Squish, who has been hiding by the bookcase, chewing the pair of Henry’s slippers I may or may not have pressed longingly to my heart in the most pitiful moments of last night.
Squish ignores her.
‘Squish! Reuben sandwich!’ she tries. In response, Squish immediately drops the slipper and darts over to Mrs Casablancas, sitting neatly at her side.
She lowers her voice to me. ‘I’m not even having a Reuben sandwich today, I’m having pea soup, but he doesn’t know that because he’s a dog.
’ She winks. ‘Eight p.m. sharp. On the roof terrace. Bring your novels. I will drop off your kaftan beforehand.’
‘Kaftan? Wait, what?’
‘Trust me,’ she answers, sauntering back to her own flat without a backward glance, a sandwich-hopeful Squish scampering closely behind. ‘Your creative juices will be overflowing in no time at all.’