‘It just isn’t any good,’ I said while trying to step into my knickers. The curtains were drawn and it was dark. My toe became tangled in the elastic and I toppled forward onto the bed. I laughed but Liam was silent. He hated criticism of any kind. But it was true: the new book was fucked.
‘Wait, she doesn’t think it’s me, does she?’
Liam’s wife, Gail, had accused him of having an affair and was threatening to leave him again.
‘Does she?’ I repeated.
He didn’t reply. Which was not unusual. He was a sulker. He sulked.
‘Liam, you’re going to have to speak.’
Nothing.
‘I came here to work, but if you’re too angry to work, I’ll come back next week.’
Nothing.
‘At the very least, take out your anger on my arse.’
I crawled across the bed and lifted the sheet. He turned his head away, but his cock rose as my mouth took him in. He always fucks me hard after I’ve been critical of his writing. So I try to be critical.
I released his cock.
‘You’ll have to start it again,’ I said. ‘It can’t be salvaged.’
‘That’s twenty thousand words,’ he said, still not looking at me.
‘Uh-huh,’ I agreed, playing with his cock some more. ‘It’s shit. This always happens when you go it alone.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘I mean it. Commercial fiction is like driving using a sat nav. You know where you’re going and you take the most efficient route. These pages have no direction at all. You’re writing too fast. You’re forcing it. It’s really, really shit. Too shit for me to fix and I’ve fixed some shit in my time.’
That did it. Suddenly I was flat on my stomach and Liam’s cock was deep inside me. He gripped the back of my head and was pounding me with all of his might.
We’ve sold millions of copies using our system. We’ve both got rich. I don’t want anything to change.
When we were done, and he’d agreed to scrap the pages and work with me, I said, ‘I’ll talk to Gail. It’ll be fine.’
*
Life moves way too slowly for me. It always has.
I knew what I wanted to do when I was in my teens. I wanted to write and I wanted to work with writers. There have been three constants in my life – books, clothes, sex. And champagne. Four constants. And money. Five constants. My parents are wealthy. But too wrapped up in each other to pay any attention to me. Boarding school and au pairs raised me. My parents are both still alive, but it wouldn’t matter much to me if they weren’t. We barely speak. I liked having money but I wanted my own. I hated using theirs.
But I didn’t want to wait. Writing takes forever. Forging a successful literary career takes even longer. It took Jodi Picoult six novels to become financially independent. I’m not a patient person now, and at nineteen I was even less so. Even before I went to university, I believed I knew the techniques that would help commercially minded writers reach their potential. I enrolled in English because that’s the way things work. I needed the degree to enrol in UCL’s MA in Publishing.
Those were the dullest four years of my life. My courses were not demanding. I didn’t need to work because my parents insisted on loving me through their largesse. In my spare time I read and analysed every genuine bestseller I could get my hands on. I was aching to get going. If it hadn’t been for Max encouraging me to write my first novel, I think I would have dropped out. Besides, the simple idea that fast-tracked my career didn’t occur to me until after I had my masters.
I had just done four years’ apprenticeship at university and the only way into a job in publishing was an internship. They wanted me to work for free. I joined the queue, of course. It was mortifying. I wasn’t even getting to the second-round interviews. It was my attitude, one of the interviewers kindly noted. I don’t think she liked the way I dressed. I’m no shrinking violet. I love looking great. I want eyes on me. I suppose I looked too good for an intern.
After months of failure, I stopped applying and got myself a job in a cafe. I could no longer stomach accepting money from my parents. I always said I’d stop living off them as soon as I was earning. I wrote to them to let them know. While waitressing one day I noticed someone had left behind a half-read copy of a novel called Torch by Liam Smith. I knew it was meant to be a big book. I’d read a full-page puff piece about this ‘hot, young debut author’. So when no one came back to claim it, I took it home and read it. I quickly discovered it hadn’t been left behind accidentally. It wasn’t good.
But it wasn’t terrible; it had the right elements and an excellent hero. I re-read it. Torch had potential.
That’s when I had my idea.
The front door to publishing was effectively closed to me. So I went through the back door.
Max was still working hard on his PhD, editing UCL’s paper, Pi, and writing articles and essays at a ferocious rate, so my nights were free at the time. If I wasn’t crying over the rejection slips my first novel was accruing, I was reading through the works of Mickey Spillane.
One night I planted Torch on a bag of rice and started to type it out on my laptop. As I typed it word for word, I wrote notes and alternative passages – some twenty pages long – that I would eventually use when I wrote a new version of the novel. The whole project took a few months. I was an amateur and learning as I went. I made some wrong turns but I was forging the technique I still use to this day.
When I was finished, Max read a few chapters on my laptop and said, ‘It is what it is,’ and handed it back. Which was enough for me. I printed it out and sent this new version of Torch to its originator, Liam Smith.
In my covering letter, I explained that it wasn’t a bad book, really. His editor had let him down, that was all. He had the talent needed to be a successful writer. I asked him to read through my version and contact me if he thought I’d done a good job.
Luck was with me. The unsolicited package arrived on the very day Liam was realising his first book was sinking without trace. He contacted me. He was bewildered, he wrote. But interested. He’d just sent his publisher the manuscript of his new thriller, The Night. I asked to see it. We went back and forth on email for a bit. He didn’t know if he should. He didn’t know me. After a day of silence, when I thought I’d lost him, he sent it through. It was better than the first book. I had been right about him. He was a good writer. But he needed me.
Knowing his editor had the book, I raced through the rewrite. I didn’t sleep. But then I rarely get through the night. I am a bundle of nervous energy. Two weeks later I had my version delivered to Liam by courier. I had been brutal. I had slashed at his work and written a great deal more myself. It must have been a ball-crushing experience for Liam.
I’d also crossed out Liam’s name and had written in a new one, Jack Cade. Liam Smith was a shit name for a thriller writer, I wrote. And I’d also changed the name of the hero to that of the first book, Mark Harden. It was a good name for a kick-arse hero. He’d certainly done well with that. In the accompanying notes I wrote, ‘If you want to be a star, keep the same central character.’ Adding, ‘To be honest, the hero in the second book was essentially the same guy just with a different name.’
As painful as it was for Liam to read all these changes – and it was very painful, he told me later – there was no escaping the truth. The book was better. I’d made it much, much better. Pacy. Powerful. Punchy.
I included a separate letter I’d had Alan, who was a law student at the time, help me write, in which I outlined our working relationship. If Liam agreed to my conditions, I would help ‘Jack Cade’ become the UK’s bestselling thriller writer. I also wanted him to get me a job with his publisher. He wrote back saying yes to the first condition but that he had no way of getting me a job. I wrote back telling him what to do and enclosed a contract Alan’s lawyer father had helped Alan and me draft.
He didn’t send the contract back straight away. I think he was waiting to hear back from his publisher. When Liam’s editor sent in her edits a few weeks later – a purely perfunctory effort, he saw at once – he was devastated. The tone of her correspondence with him was noticeably different from the upbeat, excited and encouraging tone used when editing the first book. Liam had no agent, so no one was on his side. I must have looked to him like a lifebuoy flung into a cruel sea. He rolled the dice and booked a meeting with the publishing director. He took with him my edits of both books and the edits of his editor. Though the meeting did not go well – Liam got a real sense of the publisher’s disappointment in his sales – he was able to leave the manuscripts with her.
Two days later a call came through. Another meeting was scheduled: Liam, the publisher and me. It had worked. Liam sent through my contract, signed. Everything was going my way. But as I made my way to the offices of Morris and Robbins, I convinced myself that this meeting would go the same way as all of my internship interviews. That failure to gain a position had shaken my confidence. And though Max had spent the previous evening and most of the morning reassuring me that everything would go my way, I was retracing steps I’d taken only a few months before. I’d applied for an internship at Morris and Robbins and had been turned away. As I entered the lobby I felt physically ill.
I hadn’t even met Liam in person. Until I walked into the publishing director’s office he had no idea what I looked like or how young I was. There was no hiding his surprise or that of the publishing director, Maxine Snedden. I wasn’t a child; I was twenty-three. I wasn’t what they were expecting. There was a moment of awkwardness. But I took a deep breath. I could do it. The proof was in the meeting. I just had to hold my own. I already knew how good I looked. The faces on the tube told me that. (I must sound terrible, but there’s no point mincing words. Looking good changes outcomes.)
The best thing about that meeting was the fact that it was happening. I had been right. What I had done to Liam’s books made them better. So much better that the publishing director was talking about ways to republish Torch under the pseudonym Jack Cade before we’d even discussed terms. It was a strange business. But then publishing is a strange industry: a weird mix of business and pleasure, passion and pragmatism. Maxine wanted to change the setting and all of the character names, but she was willing to keep Mark Harden. Liam was momentarily crestfallen when she said it didn’t really matter, as the book had sold terribly. They would pulp the remainder and start again.
Maxine was all in. She was convinced the books would do well. Liam freely admitted how much of the work had been mine.
Maxine agreed to two books a year under the new name, Jack Cade, starting with my edited version of Torch, under a new title, Daytripper, and, six months later, my version of The Night. Maxine tried to tie us down for the third book. But I demurred and Liam followed my lead. We’d be in a much better position to negotiate on book three if books one and two did well. We shook hands on our deal. She’d send through the contracts later that week.
We stood to leave. That’s when I asked Maxine for a job. She was a little taken aback.
‘I’m an editor at heart,’ I said. ‘You won’t find a harder worker.’
In one stroke I had a job in publishing, a lucrative deal with a writer I’d turn into a bestselling author, and, though I didn’t know it then, a lover.