The Queen's Margarine (22 page)

‘Lauren!' Hugo hissed, bringing her back to the present with an urgent nudge in the ribs. ‘We're waiting for you to speak.'

In search of inspiration, she gazed out through the panoramic windows at the lights of London reflected in the water. Churches, bridges, cupolas were laid out below, as if some kindly architect had provided little toys for her diversion; sent catamarans and cabin cruisers chugging up and down the river purely to amuse her.

‘W … welcome,' she stammered, suddenly overcome with nerves. She had never made a speech before, let alone to such a swanky gathering. But Hugo's strong, supportive arm was still pressing into hers, acting as a prompt. ‘It's great to have you here,' she said, smiling round at the assembled company. ‘This block is called River Heights, which isn't very original, I know. But actually I like
the name, because I feel I've moved from living at “
rock bottom
”' – she emphasized the title of her book – ‘to a place not far from Heaven!'

Surprised by the ripple of laughter, she continued with more confidence. ‘When Hugo told me we were going to go to auction, I didn't understand. You see, I thought only paintings or furniture were auctioned.'

More laughter. How extraordinary. As a child, she'd been instantly shot down if she dared to open her mouth, but these people were laughing when she hadn't been remotely funny, and seemed to be hanging on her every word. ‘But it was me that was going to be auctioned, Hugo said, or at least my two new books, so you can imagine just how scared I was! It turned out all right, thank God. In fact, it was the only time I remember in my life when men – and even women – were fighting tooth and nail to possess me.'

Guffaws now. She relished them; gloried in the fact that nobody was telling her to shut up, pipe down and stop making an exhibition of herself. Her parents had always sought to muzzle her, but with an audience like this, she felt she could talk for ever and the whole of teeming London would stop its frenetic life to listen.

‘Say thank you,' Hugo whispered.

God, she'd totally forgotten! She was meant to be expressing gratitude to Piers Pemberton, the publisher, who had outbid all his rivals and ‘bought' her for his stable.

She began voicing her appreciation and, all at once, the legendary P.P., alarmingly high-born and seriously rich, pushed forward to embrace her – an overpowering figure, built like a boxer with broad shoulders and a burly chest. He kissed her on both cheeks and she seemed to drown a moment in the heady scent of cigars and Dior
Homme
, as the entire rapt room exploded in applause.

She paced up and down the lounge, dragging on a cigarette – the first since she'd quit, officially, at the beginning of the month. But this was an emergency: a severe case of writer's block. At first, she had put it down to a hangover resulting from the flat-warming, but no hangover would last for four whole weeks. Since the morning
after the party, she had deleted every sentence she had typed, as being, stupid, ungrammatical or just boring, boring, boring. She had even ditched the computer and tried writing in a notebook, as she'd done with her first book, but that had proved worse still. The messy scrawl looked so childish and unprofessional, she'd finally tossed the notebook in the bin.

‘Look, get a grip,' she told herself. ‘You need a cup of coffee, that's all – something to wake you up.'

She stole into the kitchen, daunted, as always, by its steely, cold perfection. Ignoring the complicated coffee machine (which still baffled her, with its strength-selector, milk-frother and rows of different buttons for Espresso, cappuccino, lattes and the like), she unscrewed the jar of Nescafé and tipped a good three spoonfuls into a white bone-china cup. Then, taking her coffee back to the lounge, she sat staring at the computer screen, still frustratingly blank. She had reached the point in the memoir when she had first moved in with Nathan, and there was enough drama in that period to fill a dozen books: the violence, the affairs, the risks he took to fuel his crack-cocaine habit. Yet still the words refused to come.

She glared at the prissy cup, feeling a pang of nostalgia for the chipped, stained Snoopy mug that had been her constant companion throughout her writing career to date – indeed had become a magic talisman. So long as she used it for her endless cups of coffee, it kept the words cascading out and imbued them with real power. Whereas this namby cup and saucer was useless in the extreme, and seemed even to disapprove of her raw and brutish memoir. ‘You're mental!' she muttered irritably, ‘blaming a cup and saucer for your own lack of inspiration.'

Jumping up from her desk, she lit another cigarette and continued her restless pacing – back and forth, back and forth, from the pompous, pallid sofas to the glass-topped dining-table and its uncomfortably pretentious chairs. This expensive, showy furniture was beginning to seem unnatural, if not downright alien, and, in fact, only now did it dawn on her that there was not a single item she had actually bought herself. She had deliberately trashed her former stuff as being cheap and shoddy and thus forbidden entry into prestigious River Heights. But, without her things, she felt her whole identity slowly crumbling into nothing.
The flat didn't appear to want her here, as if its own insipid pallor recoiled in sheer distaste from her jolt-blue nail-varnish and wildly hennaed hair. Never, in her former pad, had she felt stagnant or slow-witted. Vivid scenes and characters poured pell-mell from her pen, in their haste to be immortalized, but here the
high-flown
atmosphere acted like a censor.

Stubbing out her cigarette, she marched into the bedroom and grabbed her coat and bag. She was going out – to buy another Snoopy mug. And a fake leopard-skin rug to lend a bit of tarty life to those immaculate twin sofas. And a nice, fat, bouncy beanbag, so she could sit cross-legged on the floor, as she had always done at home.

‘This
is
home,' she reminded herself. ‘You've left Tottenham for good.'

Could you really miss a squalid basement flat, with damp walls and peeling paint and the whiff of cats and cabbage seeping through the ceiling from the weird old trout upstairs? Yes, you damned well could.

Having banged her fortress-like front door, she stood waiting for the lift. Even that was pointlessly grand: carpeted and spacious, marble-clad and mirrored. Once she'd stepped inside, she averted her gaze from the glass, avoiding the sight of her pale, drawn face and the dark circles under her eyes. It was proving impossible to sleep in that vestal-virgin bedroom, beneath a stiff white shroud.

The foyer was deserted, save for the smugly plashing fountain and the veritable Kew Gardens of exotic, jungly plants. Most of these flats were corporate lets, rented by faceless City types who spent most of their time at work. And the upmarket boutiques and restaurants, planned as part of the complex, hadn't yet been built. Though even when they
were
built, she would still hanker for the corner shop right opposite her former flat, run by Pakistanis who treated her as family and even gave her credit; still miss the friendly newsagent a few paces down the street, the grungy caff and shabby launderette.

‘You don't need a launderette,' she said out loud. ‘You have your own washer-drier, as well as a dishwasher, a microwave and an elaborate juicer-cum-blender you haven't even used yet.'

Yes, but the launderette was company, a place to meet the
locals, have a chat, share a joke, cadge a cigarette. As were the café and the newsagent's. At River Heights, there was not a soul to talk to.

‘Which is why you're talking to yourself.'

Christ, she'd better watch it! If she carried on like this, she'd be locked up as a lunatic. Already the concierge was glancing at her oddly. Which was hardly any wonder when she was wearing purple leggings and bright green plastic flip-flops underneath her coat. He, of course, was all dolled up in his smart blue livery and ridiculous top hat, and looked like an extra from some TV series on Dickens and his World.

Before venturing to the shops, she decided to take a walk along the river. The languid way it was rippling and meandering might help to calm her down, but, of course, it had nothing else to do all day but slowly sink and rise in obedience to the tide, and open its obliging arms to fish and flotsam, birds and boats. She buttoned up her coat, wishing she'd brought gloves. The November day was cold and overcast; the pigeons on the promenade fluffing out their feathers; the water itself pigeon-coloured: a sombre, brooding grey. As a child, she had always used her blue crayon to colour in a river, but the Thames was never blue – rather shades of shale and slate.

The tide was out and she stopped a moment to watch the scrum of hungry gulls pecking for food in the mud bank. Birds were lucky in that they didn't live alone, but in flocks and throngs and colonies. Still, it was probably her own fault that no one phoned or visited. She'd cold-shouldered all her former friends, assuming she'd gain entry into her agent's own charmed circle, mixing automatically with the cultured types she had met at his smart soirées. But although they'd fêted her short-term as Hugo's latest protégée, they'd subsequently ignored her; never following up with an email or a phone-call, and probably regarding her as scum, because she hadn't been to Oxbridge and didn't read the Literary Review. But just give her time and she'd show the rotten snobs. Once her two new books were published to critical acclaim, they'd be queuing up to kiss her arse.

She spread the tartan rug across one of the white sofas, and stood back to judge the effect. Yes, a definite improvement. Fake leopard-skin
had been impossible to find, but at least the zingy reds and greens made the flat more colourful, lessened its severity. And the giant-sized scarlet floor-cushion would be perfect to sit on while she wrote. She had bought a Snoopy notebook and a near-twin of her old Snoopy mug – a double dose of magic, bound to yield results. She planned to return to the computer once she was in full flow, but for now she'd trust to pen and paper. According to a piece she'd read, writing by hand was more natural altogether. The hand, it said, was connected to the arm, and the arm to the rest of the body and thus to the brain and heart, which meant the process could produce effects denied to soulless technology.

Settling herself with her new notebook and new mug, she jotted her provisional title at the top of the first page. Then, biting her lip in concentration, she continued where she'd left off a good four weeks ago.

‘Nathan,' she wrote, taking care to make her scrawl more legible than before, ‘was a cross between a peacock and Rottweiler – vain and self-regarding, but also savage, aggressive, destructive and obstreperous.' She chewed the end of her pen, wondering if it was true. Who cared? The important thing was to get the words on paper. If Nathan sued, that would be a problem for the libel lawyers and, in any case, might even help her sales.

Except she mustn't think about sales. The publishers were building such high hopes on her, she was terrified she'd let them down. Suppose this second memoir bombed? Would they blame her, send her packing? When she'd written her first book (scribbling it as therapy rather than as literature), she'd known absolutely nothing about royalties, advances, foreign rights,
book-club
deals and all that sort of stuff. Now she felt overwhelmed by the expectations resting on her shoulders: would she sell serial rights to the
Express
or
Mail on Sunday
? Get a big American deal?

‘You won't get a bloody thing if you don't write the fucking book!'

She was startled by the sound of her own voice. She was talking to herself these days almost all the time. Could it be a sign of something sinister? If she lost her marbles, that would put the kibosh on any future as a writer.

‘Don't overreact,' she told herself. ‘You're just not used to being on your own.' In her previous jobs, she had always interacted with
the public, nattering non-stop to customers or clients, and spending barely any time alone. Talking to herself was simply a harmless substitute.

‘I first met Nathan,' she continued, trying to concentrate on the task in hand, ‘when I was working at the
Brasserie Chantal
.' God! The thrill of that encounter; the audacious way he'd looked at her, holding her gaze for an insolent two minutes flat, as if challenging her to lose her nerve and look down, look away. Instead, she'd stared back blatantly; told him with her eyes that she'd go as far as he liked – and further – do anything he pleased. But how could she put that meeting into words; make the prose rampage and throb with the sheer frenzy of that evening; the move from passion and elation to fury and despair? She sat sucking the end of her pen, conjuring up odd phrases in her head, only to abandon them as tepid. No words seemed quite to capture the emotions of that desperate, electric night.

Maybe she was hungry – she'd had only toast for breakfast and half a nectarine. With some decent lunch inside her, the creative juices might begin to flow. Having mooched out to the kitchen, she stood examining the array of foods in the cupboard and the fridge. She had set up an account with an organic delicatessen, in an attempt to change her diet – in fact, embark on a total detox, by giving up booze and cigarettes. No more junk food or unhealthy snacks or greasy takeaways; only fruit and vegetables and stuff awash with vitamins. Just last week, she had taken a delivery of so-called superfoods, but already she was tiring of bilberries and wheat germ, probiotic yogurt, adzuki beans, alfalfa. Bamboo shoots, in her opinion, were better left to pandas; hemp-seed was
canary-food
, while only vegetarians would enthuse about five-lentil salad – or any kind of lentils, for that matter. What she really fancied was a cheeseburger and chips – and would it really hurt? After all, she could order a burger as easily as hemp-seed, simply by picking up the phone. She had the cash and standing now to summon anything she pleased, be it a bottle of Smirnoff or a hundred cigarettes. She had probably been too hard on herself, banning every pleasure, and all in one fell swoop. Most writers had their vices – needed them, in fact. While she waited for the burger, a vodka might actually help, loosen her up, cure that dreaded block.