For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

a couch next to this man. He, too, was an author, but one whose share of the spotlight vastly dwarfed her own. His writing had been the vehicle for an empire of horror, and with it fame and fortune.

Inspired and poetic, that’s how her writing had begun, artistic in its flair and technique – until sales dwindled, leading to her publisher identifying the corner of the market in which Renata could realistically shift most units.

Units. She’d been shocked by the word, but had come to associate it, and the money attached, with the possibility of avoiding a real job with real people. Those ‘units’ had afforded her the life of a hermit.

Dumb it down, Ms Wakefield! the letter from Damian Abbott at Highacre House Publishing had read, written, she’d imagined, from behind the horizon of a sprawling desk at the top of a skyscraper. That’s the secret. I can see you know what they want, it’s just that in your stories, what they want is a little…overshadowed.

Substance, she’d thought. Overshadowed by substance. She’d been won over in the end by this little niche he’d identified for her scrawny romance texts. She’d gone on to turn this dumbing down of which he’d spoke into a veritable art form.

She looked at Quentin, a man on the verge of tears, and began to wonder if they weren’t so different, after all. He dealt in death, she traded in dumbed-down romantic tripe, yet they may as well have been hookers under the same pimp.

Maybe she’d never even had any talent to start with. Her career might just have been the law of averages playing out. Sit a monkey in front of a typewriter and let infinity play out, and the thing’ll fart out an airport potboiler eventually. As for all the conversations she’d avoided over the years, all the potential friendships and relationships from which she’d hid, this guy was backdating the whole damn lot. Hell, forty-five and she’d never even been with a man. She’d practically lived the life of a nun.

A tear rolled down Quentin’s cheek. He had passion, she’d give him that, but there was something missing in those eyes. What was it?

‘Detective O’Connell was right,’ she said, fiddling with her sleeve. ‘You’re doing a good thing by staying, even if my father can’t see it.’

Their eyes met.

As an ambulance screamed to a halt by the blast site, as the warzone fizzled down to a by the book clean-up operation, two writers sat side by side on a dusty, worn couch, their eyes meeting for a moment that seemed to stretch beyond time. And as the endlessness of that moment reached on, it dawned on Renata what was missing in these eyes.

No knives.

5

 

The shouting had reached its climax just before midnight. There’d been a crash from downstairs, followed by an unnerving hush, until the clock tower finally did its thing across the fields. Footsteps creaking up the stairs, the slam of a door, and only a couple more hours of pulling the tear-sodden pillow over her face before the night settled into its silent slumber.

She dare not read. The mere thought of her father spotting the light from her bedroom window upon the grass outside was too grim to bear. What about the curtains? Nah, he might still see it under the door. That brave little choo-choo was decommissioned years ago, now rusting in a junkyard somewhere.

Stupid kid.

Once the yelling had yelled itself to sleep, and from the stomping there wasn’t a peep, then the light could go on. Young Renata could finally slip from this world into the pages of a story, except her current novel had run dry during playtime today. She hugs the book to her chest as if it’s a kitten trying to leap from her arms. She considers settling for scribbling in her silk-bound diary, the one Mother gave her when she turned nine last year, but that can’t offer the escape a story can. Tonight she needs escape.

She hugs the book tighter. The kitten behaves. Instead of just grabbing a new one from the bookcase in the living room, she prefers making a sly exchange. Less attention drawn. She never makes the exchange while her father is still up. The books aren’t even his, but still, less attention drawn.

More meek.

She eases open the bedroom door and slips onto the dim landing with all the stealth of one entering a lion enclosure.

Our Father, who art in heaven…

The journey downstairs and into the lounge seems like a Himalayan trek, the staircase an Everest descent. She reminds herself that going down a mountain is easy-peasy. You fly like a kid on a sledge. Definitely the easiest bit.

Or was it the hardest?

…Hallowed be thy name…

In her mind a roadmap long committed to memory emerges from the steps. The staircase is a minefield, the map providing safe navigation through its most treacherous points. One wrong move and it wouldn’t be blown limbs flying through the air, but the scream of creaking steps. Then you’d get your blown limbs.

…Thy kingdom come…

The ritual was always the same: hold the book under your chin so you can press your hands against the walls on either side of the staircase in an attempt to somehow displace your weight. Just don’t think about dropping the book. Don’t think about it, but also don’t forget to keep pressing that chin. If the book falls, every landmine littering this wooden Everest blows.

Also, don’t forget to pray.

…Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…

She grins as her bare feet touch down silently on the fluffy Persian rug at the foot of the mountain. To the girl, the rug is a field of undisturbed snow, not unlike the kind you’d find at the end of your Himalayan descent. Hers are the first footprints on this winter