Three years ago in an attempt to win myself a new publishing contract, I wrote nearly 20,000 words of a piece of fiction. It started with a scene set on 9/11. I sent it to my agent. She loved it ( and she’s not easy to please). She sent it to my publisher.
My publisher didn’t like it. She didn’t find the characters ‘likeable’.
Sigh.
So it was back to the drawing board for me. I rather lost my faith in my ability to meet the requirements of the publishing industry in terms of content - because I thought it the book, or at least the start of the book, was pretty good, and getting no uptake at all crushed my confidence for a while. So I turned my thoughts to non-fiction and my book on the craft of writing.
Now it occurs to me that I have a chance to get some feedback elsewhere - in the Boot Camp Community. And to publish what was deemed unpublishable.
So I am going to serialise the novel here - what there is of it - and listen to the feedback. Was my publisher right? Perhaps. Did she miss the mark this time? Possibly. I’d love to get your view. And if the feedback is positive enough, I might even return to the novel and start writing it again.
And if you are a publisher yourself, I’d love to hear from you.
So, free to all subscribers, here is the first few thousand words of ‘Afterward, Before We Met’. Does it make you want to read on? Or is it a bit of a dud? I will post on this day every week until the full text I have written is completed.
Thank you for your attention and thoughts.
Afterwards, Before We Met
Chapter One
Connie Ford remembered the exact day Tanner Hilyard appeared in what felt like her already pre-scripted life, ready to take on the burden – and it would be a burden - of his appointed role. That much she could be certain of and state without prevarication. It was a day of dust blizzards and paper-strewn winds and plummeting silhouettes and twisted metal. It was the day the twin towers fell in Manhattan.
Connie was due to attend a production meeting at the small independent TV company where she toiled as a researcher. The 14-hour-a-day, minimum wage job, she had stumbled into after an acquaintance introduced her to a producer at the company, a wealthy, sleek man who proselytised the excitement and glamour of television. She accepted the job and quickly discovered that it meant navigating, through the fatigue and boredom, the constant unspoken impatient invitation to get closer to the producer than she wished to. He was ten years older, smooth, with even teeth, thick hazel wavy hair, a smile so well wrought it almost seemed real.
She came to hate him. He was, she concluded after a very brief period of employment at the company, the emperor in his small dominion, and resembled any other emperor, except that he had to conceal his predatory intentions rather than flaunt them at the Colosseum as lions clawed the sinews of the virtuous. The ‘glamour of television’ was an illusion that lasted not even as long as her illusions about love, or her illusions about the way the world was. Or the way she was, which was perhaps much the same thing.
She had just been out to pick up a slug of coffee from Starbucks for the producer – the amount of lattes he downed every hour made her suspicious of his teeth and their improbable bone-whiteness – and found everyone in the office, instead of rushing around pretending to work, watching the big screen erected on the wall at the far end of the production room, mounted above the clear plastic box holding the producer’s prized BAFTA, which made it impossible to watch the one without holding the other in peripheral vision.
She ascertained what was going on and mutely delivered the coffee to the producer – who was now loudly making a ‘joke’ about whether the autumn New York broadcast summit he had been so proud to be invited to was now going to be cancelled and what a genuine disaster that would be. Some of her colleagues, whom she had had hitherto thought were decent enough human beings, dutifully snickered, banking their sycophancy against future favour. She grimaced, and took a seat in front of the screen. The chair was damaged, with a leg stud missing, and left her feeling off balance. After the second tower was struck, without saying another word, and without asking for permission, she left the office. Suddenly the world was too large to fit in those careful, tasteful, technocratic art-hung walls. She was disgusted and afraid and no longer had any room for surfaces.
She walked, fast, madly and pointlessly, nowhere in particular. Years later, she saw a scene in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, when, just before a comet hits and destroys the earth, a mother takes her child, piles him into a golf buggy and drives around in circles, trying to escape, when there was nowhere to escape to. It was like that, she thought.
Connie eventually came to a rest on a pigeonshit-bleached bench in Soho Square, silently weeping, not bothering to wipe the slow cascade from her cheeks. She was peripherally aware that a man – around her age, not too tall, not especially attractive – was also sat on the bench. He was wearing – she didn’t care what he was wearing, and it was plain neither did he. The effect was largely brown. She remembered his socks. They were thin, you could see pale skin through the mesh and decorated with small yellow diamond patterns in concentric rings against a midnight blue ribbed background.
The trees around them were sinister with their shedding coronas of deep green and brown, Grey segments of the sky shaded closer to black. The people moving around the square seemed at a loss. More likely they were simply acting as refractors for the inside of her own mind. She stared as a squirrel reared up, then scampered into some litter-strewn shrubbery, pushing aside a chocolate bar wrapper that was picked up by the wind and blown under its feet. Some tape of white noise was running in Connie’s head, thrumming in her ears. She didn’t feel she had any control over it.
The man spoke. Connie wasn’t sure if he was speaking to her. She ignored him. The squirrel had come back, or a squirrel that looked very much like it. Whatever the case, this one seemed as stupid, twitchy and instinct-driven as the creature she had first sighted. The man spoke again. She divined, as if rising from a still, dark pool into riotous air, that he was trying to say something to her.
Are you OK?
She snapped her neck to look at him. She didn’t welcome the interruption, however well meant. It may not have been well meant. She had known men who were not above taking advantage of any stray moments of female vulnerability that happened into their field of predation.
Why wouldn’t I be? She replied. She jinked her neck back, looking ahead again, and although she didn’t want to anymore, not in front of him, she carried on weeping. He just sat there. She wanted him to go away. She felt he was sitting too close to her, although there was a respectable six inches between them. She could smell him. He was loamy, sodden with earth tones.
She also wanted him to stay - to move closer. She wanted him to shut up, but also wanted him to say something - something that mattered. She looked up at him once more. He carried on staring at nothing. She watched his eyes follow a fire engine that careered around the square. It circled the perimeter twice as if uncertain of its destination. Chaos was unzipping the world. Connie tried to dive into the depths once more, where it was cold and dead and still, when he spoke again.
Are you sure you’re OK?
She felt her face soften into incomprehension.
Is anyone ever going to be OK again? She murmured, to herself as much as to him.
He turned, with a gentle smile, which may have been genuine or may have been designed for some other purpose. It was then that she noticed the tear stains on his own face. He was wiping at them with the back of his hand to try and remove all trace of them, but they were stubborn and left a salty faint track. His hands were meaty, although thin skinned. You could see the blue veins underneath like tree roots.
I expect so. he said. But not today. Not for a while.
Then he nodded, as if that was settled, got up, and walked away. Without much interest, she watched him go. He had an odd way of walking, almost as if he had a limp, with one side of the body hesitating slightly before being followed by the other side as he swung along. She found the stumbling effect strangely moving . She stopped crying and forgot about him
Connie didn’t return to the office that day, or the next. She didn’t call in either, although the company had several urgent projects on the boil, all of which she was peripherally involved in. It was the early days of reality TV, and they had two commissions – one a fly-on- the-wall about funeral directors and another the inside workings of a fish processing factory. They still had the chutzpah to style them ‘documentaries’ in those days.
She thought the world needed to stop for a while to give proper consideration to what had happened. All the flux and movement should just cease, to allow assessment of the weight and magnitude of the event. The world didn’t seem interested in pausing, but she stayed in bed, not answering the phone, watching DVD’s – the Marx Brothers, Bette Davis - or she wandered to the kitchen and peeled the chocolate off the surface of each of a pack of biscuits, returning only later in the night to guiltily complete the consumption.
By then, of course, she knew that both towers had ultimately fallen, but like everyone else, she wasn’t sure what had really fallen. Something so important as to be beyond words or even thought. She was aware that most people hadn’t taken the matter as personally as she had. To her, it seemed like one of the most personal things that had ever happened in the world that lay beyond her narrow borders of experience. As if the planes had flown into her own bones and collapsed them, leaving twisted sculptures pointing out of her own ground zero.
When Connie returned to work, on the Thursday after the Tuesday attacks, the producer was angry. He didn’t say so, but Connie knew , because he did not ask for coffee ( he always asked for coffee) and he did not deploy his tiger’s smile. She had blotted her copybook. His lack of understanding made her indifferent to his anger. She thought he also may have noticed her look of disgust when he made his joke, so called, about the broadcast summit in New York. One of the things that had fallen on that day was her belief that what she did for a living was remotely important or meaningful. She needed to find another path. She needed to discern in which direction the twisted sculptures were pointing.
She was let go at the end of her contract three months later, as she had suspected, even perhaps planned at some level. Nevertheless, the severance came as a shock. Connie had little in the way of savings and no real other source of income. Her well-connected but financially threadbare parents were recently dead - cancer, heart attack - and they wouldn’t have bailed her out anyway. There was no great stigma to losing your place at a TV production company, it happened all the time, but she knew she had to find a way forward, and she had no idea what it might be. She was twenty seven years old, with a degree in Human Geography, a brief career in broadcasting and not much else.
As a stopgap, she found a job as a waitress in Soho, serving at a mid-range pizza restaurant ( was there any other kind?). Most of the customers were interchangeable – tourists or day trippers or local office workers or the bridge and tunnel crowd in kagoules and puffy jackets. There weren’t many regulars. One customer sometimes came in at lunchtime once a week and sat on his own, and he always looked faintly sad. She was careful to be nice to him and he usually left a good tip. He always had the same pizza. Mushroom.
The third time she served him, he said, ‘ the girl on the bench’ as she settled his customary glass of diet Coke on the table, and divided the pizza with the wheel.
The what? she said, carrying on cutting, not really listening. Who listens to a customer unless they’re ordering?
You were on the bench, in Soho Square. On 9.11. You were crying.
Her gears slipped. She felt embarrassed as if suddenly confronted with someone who had inadvertently seen her naked. The nature of the transaction between them had jumped from conventional and professional to personal and private without warning. Connie, in dismay, unnecessarily and noisily re- arranged the cutlery on the small, round, cast iron table.
Are you OK now?” he said, a nervous strain in his voice now, apparently regretting bringing the subject up. He glanced at her name badge. Connie?
Of course.
Her voice was defensive and she offered him a thinner than normal smile. But she was OK now, just as he said she would be when they met on the bench. She hardly thought of 9-11 at all, except when she read about it in a newspaper, which wasn’t often, since she had stopped reading newspapers. Even momentous public events had a way of dissipating into the everyday static of routine and necessity.
She turned to him, softening her face slightly. He had muddy eyes of no particular colour. She remembered then that he had been crying on that day too. She understood then that she had embarrassed him. His chops were flushed in apology, suffusing his pale skin on either side with spreading corneas of pink
I was being melodramatic she said.
He tilted his head. When he spoke again his voice had lost the brightness it held at the initial discovery of her identity.
Not at all. Something terrible had just happened. Why wouldn’t you be upset?”
I was angry.
I know.
Sorry if I was rude.
You weren’t.
I mean - just now.
I know.
There was a pause. Some phrase that called to be imagined and inserted at this point faltered and fell into the gully between the tables. Neither of them, it seemed, were motivated to pick it up.
Did you remember the extra garlic?
Yes, she said, then out of nowhere, and for no apparent reason, No dates for you tonight, then.
No he said, simply, without a smile. No dates.
Another pause, longer this time.
Why do you always have mushroom pizza?
He looked at her with fain annoyance, as if she had contravened some unwritten rule of customer and waitress etiquette
I like mushrooms.
That’s it?
I’m a vegetarian.
There are other vegetables.
Not that work on a pizza.
Tomatoes?
They’re a fruit. What is this, an interrogation?
He nodded in the same ‘ so now the matter is closed’ style as he had done before, when he left the park bench. He turned his attention to his pizza. Connie glanced at him occasionally as she served other customers. She didn’t much like his eating style. He opened his mouth too early before the food arrived at its destination, displaying the remnants of the previous mouthful to any unwilling observer. Pizza was never elegant to eat, but he wasn’t doing a good job of managing the challenge. Perhaps it was because he was on his own, with no one to watch him. With that thought, she suddenly felt a lance of sorrow in her side.
When she returned to his small corner table, with an immense cheese plant looming over it like a terrible claw, to clear the plate and bring the dessert menu, she took up a stance slightly closer to him than she needed to. Connie hadn’t been out on a date for a couple of months – she had broken up with her last boyfriend, a DJ, after six months of OK sex and not-OK attempts to find any other common ground whatsoever – and found herself unexpectedly imagining Pizza Man/Bench Man/Mushroom Man as a vague possibility.
She leant over him with the dessert menu. The uniform she was wearing was close fitting, or at least, too small for her (she had been eating a lot of pizza since joining the outfit) and it inadvertently showed off what she thought was good about her figure, which, most men would say, were her breasts. Her waist in her estimation was and had always had been too thick, and her face too flat and vacant looking (again in her estimation) but her breasts were OK – not too big, well-shaped, no noticeable gravitational pull compromising their natural cantilever.
You smell of garlic too he said, as he read the menu.
She was momentarily irritated, even though she knew he was right. She had to serve a lot of garlic bread that day, and it was diffusing on her. instead of snapping back, she replied in a more flippant fashion than she had intended,
No dates for me either then
Not only that, he continued, not seeming to hear. Ashes. And something like apple?
Her new perfume, a final gift from the DJ, had advertised itself as having ‘low notes of wood apple’. She wasn’t sure about the ashes. Perhaps she had been standing too close to the pizza oven.
Sounds – paradoxical, she said.
It is
He looked at her directly in the eyes, the same muddy blurs, as when they had sat on the bench. She waited for - something.
Can I have the vanilla ice cream, with some chocolate sauce? Also an Americano at the same time.
With milk?
Cold milk. Coffee at the same time as the ice cream.
He left fifteen minutes later without a backward glance, after bolting the ice cream, nearly knocking over, she noticed, the cheese plant. Not only was his walk ungainly, and his eating uncouth, but he was clumsy.
He had left his business card with the usual tip.
Tanner Hilyard
Assistant Regional Manager
The Global Aid Project.
Golden Square, W1.
To Be Continued…
OK. More direct commentary. The opening part in the office was a little obscure. You spend a lot of time on the boss and it seems irrelevant here. I suggest taking that out and save it for a time he is being a jerk again. If it is there to show her character, maybe there is another way later on. This intro needs to be crisp and clear to draw people in.
Hi Tim,
This is intriguing. As an American, I assumed the characters were American. I didn't know they were from London until place names and details straightened that out. I was all set to tell you that the language and the flavor didn't strike me as American, and that maybe you should write about a setting you knew...ha ha. Your language and characterization are spot on. But maybe you could slip in something about where the story begins. That is, if you think Americans will read it.
We assume the trauma was all ours. I didn't know others were strongly affected too. Thank you.
About the story, I definitely want to read more. The characterization was effective--I was prepared to like C, but I already liked the man with muddy eyes because of his compassion. There are hints that she has experienced some trauma before, which has made her defensive and somewhat judgmental.
Please continue.