Almost an Author, page 24
Chapter Thirty-Five
Trolling through Predators and Editors and seeing how many publishers are sued for mega millions has me consider that the money is not in writing but in scamming the writers, or being a lawyer for the scammers or scammed. That’s what drives otherwise honest, hardworking agents and publishers to a life of crime? Perhaps I could… Hunter and I could…
Responding to online advertisements never bodes well. Now I’m hunted by Caliber on a weekly basis. Sure, she’s a lovely lady, and her accent tweaks memories of a past Asian holiday. She’s going to make me the name above all names. She’s going to organize the movie rights for my work, what’s it called again? She’s going to raise me from mediocrity to the halls of fame, and so on. After her first three calls, I recall a similar patter from timeshare salesmen.
So I hang up and watch, incredulous, as James climbs the disused water tank stand, and then hoists himself onto the adjoining shed roof. After measuring the distance, he takes a quantum leap across the divide to land nimbly on his half of the roof—not to top himself, or even spy on me sunbathing on my side of the fence.
“Look at the gliders, Ruby!” Four of them are skimming soundlessly across the blue expanse. He ties his rope around his waist and secures it around his chimney. I’m not so sure relief is paramount in my mind, but at least James is alive.
It rains, oh, how it rains. The main bridge is closed, stopping most traffic in and out of Poitoa. Our river is almost level with its stop-bank, and the surrounding rivers all merge and become one great ocean, covering the plains. If I were a bird, I’d look down on this dirty brown water. I’d see it back up when it arrives at the sea only to find the sea is already full.
Eventually, the rain eases and James is back standing on our doorstep. The door is ajar. He can come in if he chooses to. But no, he stands in clear view behind the glass panels. Does he expect me to leap out of my chair, biff my warm blanket to the ground, and rush to welcome him? I’m not even properly dressed yet. For goodness sake, just come in, I mouth, and then go back to my book and music. If he understands women as much as he thinks he does—based on having had two female flatmates pass through his flat, emptying their room, taking his honey and toilet roll—he will stand outside my door forever. He raises his hand to knock. Pauses. The breeze has opened the door a wee bit and with his heavy breathing it seems to be opening wider. Now what’s he doing? He appears to be trying to blow the door open? What is he? The wolf? With both hands now tucked inside his pants pockets, to show himself he’s not cheating, he’s going to blow that door in? I’m amazed as the door continues to slowly respond to his morning breath; it backs up. Then stops. He turns his face sideways with his mouth against the opening. Then he puffs some more. Stubborn door that it is, it refuses to respond, so he presses against it with his forehead. Whatever he sees through that vertical gap must intrigue him—his behavior certainly intrigues me.
Keeping time with the background music, my toes move up and down. He can see them, surely. The door inches open a little more, aided by his foot. Seems, it hasn’t clicked that I am on the other end of my toes, watching him.
Wham! James’ head slams hard into the doorjamb.
I leap up in time to see James get spun around and smacked some more. He lands winded on the sodden lawn before being physically lifted to some great height and body-slammed into the side of the house. Now he’s being systematically beaten into oblivion.
I scream myself senseless. When I take a breath, I swear I hear bones breaking. And a noise like I’ve never heard before. I scream some more. People are shouting. Hands grabbing James. Hands grabbing Hunter. There seems to be a terrible fight going on, and Hunter raises James high again and throws him somewhere else, anywhere else. James lands heavily on his knees on the muddy lawn, and crawls as fast as he can into our ornamental pomegranate (really spiny) where he curls up all fetal-like and as quiet as a newborn calf. The fight continues around him, with Hunter clearly manic. More people are involved trying to break it up.
I’m frozen rigid. Standing on my doorstep, I offer another scream.
Eventually, the mayhem dies down. Someone hauls James out from under the pomegranate, and all the thorns that stuck him on his way in now stick him on his way out. He won’t be able to see on account of his swelling eyes and his head stuck into his own crotch.
Hunter is being restrained by a couple of strangers while another stranger is sitting in the muddy grass looking pretty dazed.
I sum up the situation. James was stuffing around at my door. Someone had opportunistically attacked him from behind and beaten him almost senseless. Coward! And Hunter miraculously arrived back from town, saw the attack and raced to James’ defense, thereby incurring a few whacks, which had apparently addled Hunter’s brain. He had then become deranged and joined in the attacking frenzy. But…the sequencing is all screwy. Perhaps shock has addled my brain, too.
Now Hunter is standing, fuming and panting. He manages a roar. “If! You! Ever! Come! Here! Again! I will KILL you!” But he’s facing James, not the stranger in the mud. Hunter has received a brain injury. James might have incurred some occipital nerve damage. I mentally note both for inclusion in my novel. So what is going on? Hunter’s our mate. And James is a…? Is a…? Really?
Hunter’s hair is all bristly and stuck up. He’s torn his pants and the rest of him is covered in mud.
While James can still see, he fixes his one slit eye on me and howls. If he expects me to rush to his side and let him bury his beaten head into my breast, he’s wrong. Belatedly, I get what Hunter was bellowing earlier. James is a pervert!
Later, still in my nightie, I sit back in my chair, watching the room darken. I can barely hold the glass still long enough to swig from it.
“I was right,” Hunter powers down on me. “I was absolutely right and what did you do? You took no notice of me. You even encouraged him.” He points to my nightie. I look down. Although it’s too late, I hug my glass-less arm across myself, but I’m in shock, too, so still don’t think to go and get dressed. I see my blanket on the floor where I discarded it earlier. I will it to come to me and wrap me up securely, like it had before the Hunter vs. James debacle.
Hunter bends to pick it up and throws it at me.
I feel tense. I feel more than tense. I’m not sure what I feel. I can’t pin it down or describe it in words. But I sure as hell feel it! And there goes another exclamation mark—I know they must be used sparingly, if at all. I know this. So, standing up, preoccupied, or whatever it is I am, I walk into the kitchen and I spill milk all over the bench, and think, That’s a metaphor. And make a mental note to delete clichés, as well as gratuitous exclamation marks.
To recap: I’d seen James hit the door jamb, and his knees give way as he flumped down on the concrete path with a thud and a crack. Then Hunter was on him, hauling James to his feet only to beat him senseless then hurl him around the garden. No sound bar Hunter’s grunting and mindless rage. I had stood in the doorway, screaming fit to bust, and didn’t do a blind thing because I had no idea what was going on—my senses were in freefall. James, all messed up on the lawn, was utterly still.
I went down the steps and along the short path to kneel beside James. He wasn’t bleeding much. I couldn’t tell if his bones were broken. He looked broken. He was as he fell and I knew I shouldn’t touch him. A police siren wailed, and an ambulance was pulling up. James’ mouth was open, his eyes were clamped tightly shut. I wanted to touch him, but couldn’t.
In the background, finally the words Hunter roared made sense: Pervert. Caught in the act. Hands down his pants. Peering through our bloody door. At Ruby. Charge him. Charge me. I don’t care. And so on…
The police have arrived. James is carted off in the ambulance.
Inside, we barely speak. I can’t look at Hunter. I begin to shake. Hunter wraps my blanket back over my shoulders, and puts his arm around me outside my blanket. I keep my eyes on his shoes, which are too smart for what has just taken place—I would have expected sneakers or runners. I want to brush his arm away, but I might lose the blanket. I want to say—something.
He beats me to it. “I’m going to the police station. They want a full statement. Are you coming?”
“No,” I spit. “He’s not like that. Not like you said. It’s a mistake. He’s–just not!”
“Hey, Ruby,” Hunter says gently, patting my tangled hair into a matt. “You’re in shock. He’s a creep.”
“He’s not.”
“With respect, Ruby, you didn’t see him.”
In the end I do go to the police station. I listen to what Hunter says and then I say what I believe is the truth. Hunter’s accusations against James are duly noted, filed, but not forgotten. As are mine.
The upshot is that James falls even more in love with me. In fact he venerates me more than I venerate Hunter. Why, I have no idea.
A few weeks pass, before James plucks up the courage to invite me over for a cup of tea. Is he joking? I laugh, trying to lighten the tension between our flats. “Have you smelt your place lately?”
So he sets to spring-cleaning although he says he’s five months early. He sounds incongruously happy. Is this all it takes for him to be happy? It takes him the rest of that day and long into the next before he says he’s confident that all pongy smells are eradicated, all damp towels are double-washed, and the food scraps and dishes are sorted.
He phones to announce that now is the hour. Then stands in his narrow front window waiting for me to arrive. He watches as I walk along the path and through his front gate.
I am wearing long sleeves, jeans and a sloppy cardie. I am decently and fully clad.
He opens the door and a breeze rushes through, blowing his junk mail and toenail clippings to the floor. I step over this small mess.
“The sunlight makes you seem extra-dimensional and distinct, Ruby. It reminds me of a jigsaw puzzle I once started. A young maiden dancing through the golden fields…to meet her lover…who must have been outside the puzzle frame,” he gushes.
Yes, the sun is indeed behind me.
He glances down at his sweats. “I was just going to get changed. Time ran away from me.” He chuckles but doesn’t make a move.
“I’ll check out your axolotls while you do that,” I say.
James begins stripping off his sweats before he’s even left the room. While he’s gone I check out his dive. Yes, he’s done some cleaning and tidying. It doesn’t smell as rank as usual. The piles of junk, bedding, clothes, old and new laundry seem to have some order to them.
“Have you eaten?” he yells from the bathroom where he’s spraying himself with deodorant. He says it saves on water, soap and towels. “I have new biscuits. Chocolate.”
“Saving my appetite for you.” Even as I say it, I stifle a snigger. Not what I meant at all, and I’d had to make sure I was ravenous so instinct would override the one of revulsion at drinking his tea.
“Nearly there,” he yells again.
When he emerges he looks better. And smells better, too.
“You’re okay,” I say. For all his dumb mannerisms, I like the kid. He’s harmless in a spooky kind of way. Hunter and I have had many talks about him over the past weeks. I still maintain James isn’t a pervert, but Hunter says I’m the only one who thinks that. Hunter tries to insist I never ever visit James alone. We compromise. James is banned from ours. I can go wherever I bloody well choose.
Back home and Hunter continues to try and smooth things over because they’ve gotten a bit weird between us. “Look,” he says, “I know you don’t agree with everything that was going on, because you didn’t see it, but what if I told you the whole situation once again, minus my testosterone-filled loathing? And you can just, you know, elevate your eyebrows a little when you hear something that makes sense. Could we do that?”
“Fine.” My eyebrows are down around my chin.
“Okay.” Hunter sips at a tumbler of whisky. “I don’t drink at this hour. Usually.”
“I don’t either.” Until recently. Hunter pours some more whisky for himself and I magic up a glass from somewhere so he pours some in that as well. The smell might turn my stomach, so I drink cautiously.
Hunter begins his take on how James had breached all manner of decency conduct, how James…
I quite like whisky.
A few days later I come across Hunter and James doing some rare male bonding at the gate. “…And that dust storm soon enveloped the whole tractor?”
“What? Enveloped? It’s not made of bloody paper, you ignoramus. Pronounce it properly.”
James just laughs that neighing laugh of his, as if he’s told a joke. I am so relieved the tension is broken.
Every night when I go to bed I think that in the morning I will wake up in my own home, in my own bed—which I do anyway—and things will be the way they were, when I was focused on my writing and heading for great things with Barbara.
It hasn’t happened this morning, either.
Hunter phoned her and explained that he was acting on my behalf to end the contract between Ruby Wright and Banning Books.
So here is what I’d like to tell. I’d like to tell a story about how Hunter came home for good, and that he’d stopped his disappearing acts. Or if I couldn’t tell that story, I’d like to say some major publishing house published my book. But so far neither has happened. I don’t know if both are fantasy, or only one.
A man comes out of the darkness. He moves closer to me. Outside there’s a punctuation mark of thunder. He undoes my dress, but I can’t see his face. I can hardly breathe, hardly stand, and then I’m not standing. His mouth is on me, his hands—I’m alive in my skin, again, arms around me… I hope it’s Hunter, not James, or Armstrong. I wake up.
It didn’t actually happen. It never will. And that’s why I find it difficult to write beyond these ellipses…
I wish my story was different. I wish it was more hopeful. If not happier, then at least not so inert, so boring. I wish it had more shape. I wish it was about love... I snap myself back to my reality, stand up, and go make myself a tuna sandwich.
Outside the sun is bleaching the grass, and the clothes hang rigid on the clothesline.
I don’t want to be telling this story.
Chapter Thirty-Six
It has rained and rained since Thursday. At least the farmers will be happy. Clouds and mist move through the plains like Maori women carrying great flax-woven kete of foam on their shoulders.
Sometimes, I feel I’m going underwater. I’m lost. I’m undone. But I carry you with me on the front of my body up by my face and chest where your soft breathing warms the hollow of my neck, which is nice but it makes me miss you more, Iris.
Iris’ eggcup, the white-china-with-blue-stripes-on-it eggcup, still lives in my coat pocket along with her handkerchief. It makes me feel encouraged. In my other pocket lives the letter from her lawyer telling me Iris left me her cash, her loose change. It’s a wee fortune from what I gather. The lawyer intimated it ran into the thousands but would not confirm this over the phone. Argh!
I’ve taken quite a liking to Aquila, even though it has me standing before a display of instruction books. Lesbian Love for Dummies? I wonder how I got into this store in the first place, since I was meant to be buying postage stamps. I blame the Aquila.
“If you want me to demonstrate anything for you, just say,” says the eager young shop assistant through her chewing gum. She has a mousy ponytail done up in a row of pink and red twisties, and braces. She manages to talk to me without removing her forefinger from her mouth. Perhaps that’s lesson one.
My phone rings. I leave this tawdry shop but miss the call. International? That pesky Caliber woman to say they have the movie rights for my books, past, present and future, in the bag. I scoff and shove my phone into my pocket. It rings again, all strident and jolly. I make a mental note to change the ring tone. Something more suiting the weather, not the shop I just exited.
On the third ring, I answer it. “Ruby speaking.”
“Ruby, it’s me, Alicia.” Argh, I remember her accent and her name. Alicia Alphabet. Greek or Spanish. Olives and pizza. Kid’s soup. Nice European accent. I’d phoned her once while on a bender, after promising Hunter I’d gone through the list of agents he downloaded for me. She was the first and last I called. I’d practically begged her to read my book. It was going to cost me a bomb to mail it to her, and if she wasn’t going to actually read it could she tell me outright, so I could save all that postage money.
“Ruby?”
“Yes, hi, Alicia.” I change up my tone. It isn’t as if I’ve been sprung lurking in a sex shop or have anything more pressing in my diary.
“Well, I have news,” she says. “Your book, Ruby. Amanda.”
I swallow hard, while bracing myself for Alicia Alphabet to say she had forgotten about it, hadn’t read it, and/or hated it.
Even so, here I stand, outside the sex shop. I straighten my shoulders, tilt my chin, and listen professionally.
“I love it. The character of Amanda is so realistic.”
It should be. It’s me.
“She’s smart and funny, and she’s so gifted. I’d be honored to meet her. If she’s based on a real person.”
“She’s me,” I whisper, wondering if that’s perhaps not the wisest thing to say.
“Oh, wow. Really? I fell in love with the story,” Alicia continues, her words tumbling out faster and faster. “And I’ve clinched a deal with a major publishing house. I showed your book to the Editor in Chief. She loves it, too. She says it might also become a screenplay. So, with your permission, Ruby Wright, Alphabettali Publishing Agency, would like to run with it. We’d like to buy it. The entire deal. Of course, you’ll be involved the whole way through, and it will be given a comprehensive edit. You’ll sign off on any changes to the manuscript they make, and the cover design…”
