Fiction Friday (7)

Rachel was selecting bananas when she next saw him. She was fussy about bananas, she couldn’t just reach for a bunch like everyone else, she had to get a bag and select them individually, making sure that there were no bruises and that none would ripen too quickly, rendering them useless to her as she was never going to be the type of person who baked them into a loaf of banana bread. He was in a security uniform, bulkier than she remembered from her brief glance at the library almost a year before. Her immediate, and damning, first thought was that she wished Mike wasn’t with her, her boyfriend of over six months, recently promoted to live-in boyfriend and a very new accompaniment to her food shop.

She allowed herself a glimpse of him. He was stood by the automatic doors, not twelve feet from where she was standing and he looked almost as she remembered. She thought of him often, this unnamed beautiful man, as she fell asleep some nights, though he appeared with alarming frequency in her dreams.

‘You ok, babe?’

Mike was behind her, a hand reaching for her waist, his voice loud, his teacher voice he called it, a hangover from his work day, only quietening within the four walls of her, sorry their, home. Rachel jumped slightly, her reverie broken and as she started to turn to him, the security guard looked up and caught her eye. There was a brief moment of recognition and then a smile.

Oh, that smile. Rachel would have known it anywhere, walked to the end of the earth for it, would have shoved Mike aside to see it again but his hand was on her waist, his voice in her ear, his breath in her hair and she was turning towards him.

‘Fine. Right, done, have you got the list?’

The words poured out of her, almost completely without thought, there was a sense of autopilot about her as she reached blindly for the trolley to move away from the fruit and towards whatever else was on the list, or whatever was away from the danger of his smile.

He was no longer there as they left the shop, the bags neatly packed and Rachel’s chin tucked deep into her scarf against the wind. She had looked for him in every aisle, wished that she could freeze time, make every other customer stop dead so that she could roam around and find him, stop the world and ask him his name.

He was there again briefly as she shut the boot of her car, her hair whipping in her face, her hands coming up to pull it back, stuff it under the hat she had found on the back-seat. He was smiling, but not at her, at a colleague, a thin pretty girl, her work fleece pulled tightly around her body. He had been smoking, Rachel could see, there was a plume of smoke against the darkness but maybe it was the girl, Rachel hoped so, but it amused her as to why it mattered. She hovered a little before getting into the car, Mike was waiting, the complimentary coffee between his knees. She looked past him through his window and watched as her security guard made his way through some double doors and away from her. She could tell from the set of his shoulders that he was laughing and the thought made her unbearably sad.

The Writing Process

My first book was written quite quickly in the end. As always with me, there were several first draft chapters sitting in my computer, all different ideas, some too personal, almost autobiographical, some half hearted, some a lot better than others. But none really ever got past that, there wasn’t time, it wasn’t good enough and some I had made the mistake of trying to edit as I went so they were then deemed too awful to ever see the light of day.

Then I was in Starbucks and there was a barista there at the time who was a little bit flirty. With everyone, certainly not just with a tired looking mum who always had her little ones with her, but it occurred to me that there was a story in it. What if a barista DID fancy the tired looking mum and something did actually happen?

So I wrote it down. And it was slow at first, the self doubt crept in and I was tempted to stop but this was the first genuine story idea, one that might be good, that I’d had in forever so I ploughed on. No idea what I was doing, just sitting and writing and the words added up. 115,000 of them in the end.

J sent them off, the first three chapters, and the rejections rolled in, very nice rejections, you definitely do not just get a no these days, there was loads of constructive criticism and one not quite a no, one email that requested some more of it. I sent it off, the optimism bubbling just a little then nothing, no follow up email.

I self published in the end. A laborious, ultimately anti-climactic experience. But it’s out there in the world. A book written by me with my name on it. Book Two is in the works, curtailed by early pregnancy and having no energy to speak of, but I’ll write that too and it’ll sit along side the first one. I’m immensely proud of that book, I re-read it recently, having not since I edited it and I forgot that I’d written it to be honest, I just read and enjoyed it. I adore the main character, she is bold and emotional and she makes good and bad choices and I just love her. I wish that I could shoehorn Emily into the new baby’s name somewhere in homage to her but I don’t think that J would go for it. Maybe I’ll get a strange Emily tattoo somewhere….

The writing process is unique, of that I am sure. Absolutely different for everyone, laborious and long and difficult but the only work that you ever want to do. I am a better person when I’m writing, less bogged down, happier, clearer. It is no coincidence that this blog has sprung up in January, in an effort to write more, write anything, write what means something to me without the pressure of 1000 words, of finishing this chapter or editing this scene.

There was a meme doing the rounds after Christmas, in the rounds of resolutions and anti-resolutions that take over social media at that time, and it said that if you had written a book, you were an author. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t sold in Waterstones, or hadn’t been read by a hundred thousand people, you were an author.

I am an author.