Too Exciting

Chapter 2

Our hero has a bad day and also meets me, the heroine and/or villainess of the story

*

When Lily turned up on my doorstep a couple of days later in the evening it came at the end of a bad day. After lunch with my publisher's fiction manager, Rob, I had gone for a long walk in the nearby park and realised that all the anger that I felt was because I knew that Rob was right in what he was gently trying to tell me. Putting it more bluntly I have been writing ever more polished books about less and less. I have lost authenticity, and readers. And at lunch I talked like a blustering arsehole. My dialogue, or rather monologue, could be quoted wholesale without change and put into the mouth of a fictional character, and probably be rejected as 'over the top'.

Not being a large park, and having a lot of thinking to do, I made continuous circuits, past uninterested pigeons and squirrels and the odd dog-walker, my pace slowing as I worked things out. Despite the sunshine the colours had been leached out of the world, and I was seeing it at a distance greater than could be measured in metres, and through greying filters.

Authenticity. Gone. I remembered one of the few lecturers I had respected musing on authenticity in writing in a tutorial, on how we know what it is but cannot define it. But it was not just in my writing. It was in my life.

For some reason I remembered a conversation in bed with Sandra from a few days before, after love-making, in the afterglow; hers at any rate. She talked wonderingly of her friend Cath who had this collection of vibrators and other sex toys, and then said,

"Poor Cath, but then she hasn't got you, I have. You're better than any old vibrator".

Even at the time it had struck me that far worse than an insult is something meant as a compliment but which, perhaps because of its element of truth, has a soul-corroding effect. I even had this momentary picture of myself packaged on a shelf in Ann Summers, next to the vibrators ... But of course I just smiled and said something clever and modest.

I made my way home, having decided at least to apologise to Rob, but wondering what else I had to do to become me again.

That evening the Lily who turned up on my doorstep was incredibly poised and confident, as though it would never even cross her mind to be at least a little wary of her new live-in landlord, who she was meeting for the first time. On thinking about it I realised that her aunt, Sarah, had obviously vouched for me.

'Vouched?' Well that's one way to put it. How about giving me a full in-depth briefing on your vulnerabilities?

Lily was rather on the small side, had black -- truly black - hair worn straight and simple, brown eyes like her aunt, though lighter, almost golden, and she shared Sarah's taste in lipstick, though it was applied to a rather smaller mouth. She was both more and less than just pretty. In fact she was, there was no other word for it, sexy. Other words that as a writer would seem to apply were all a little trite: pert, cheeky or gamine. But with a detached insight, I guessed that hers were looks that were an active creation of her spirit and she might look quite ordinary in a photo -- attractive but ordinary.

I was slightly disturbed at the way in which this girl, a nineteen-year-old student, almost a dozen years younger than me, had me thinking in sexual terms within minutes of meeting her, but I passed it off as my writer's nature, always seeking ways to describe and explain people. No doubt she could provide the basis for one of my characters.

Dangerous idea that. As you will find I have a tendency to take control, as I am doing with this 'book' and I will do with your life, Nick.

I helped her to take her things up to her room on the first floor and was oddly pleased to see how happy she was with it.

With a faint sense of irritation I remembered I was to take Sandra to a concert that evening and would have to go and get ready.

I have to admit that actually Nick was a surprise to me, in a good way, seeming younger and sexier than Sarah made him out to be, and he is not as pompous in real life as he makes himself seem on the page. I am going to have fun making him come undone.