CHAPTER 2

 

NEW YORK, PRESENT DAY

 

Dudley Grose walked into the lecture hall and swung his battered leather briefcase onto the table in front of the whiteboard. There was an overhead projector on the table but he never used it or the whiteboard. He’d long ago decided that he was there to talk and if the students didn’t bother writing anything down then that was up to them. There was a wooden chair at the side of the table and he sat down and looked at the hundred or so students filling the rows of seats facing him. The keen ones were sitting at the front, their laptops open and primed, fingers poised over their keyboards. In the middle were the ones who took notes by hand, scribbling the odd phrase and chewing on the pens and nodding thoughtfully whenever they thought he was looking in their direction. At the back were the least-interested students, the ones who spent most of their time playing with their cell phones. Grose barely knew a dozen of them by name so he opened his briefcase and took out the folder in which he kept a printed list of the students who had signed up for the course, where they had come from, and what work if any they had handed in.

He stood up and the students fell silent. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and green corduroy trousers and faded desert boots. Grose dressed for comfort and everything he was wearing he’d owned for at least ten years, even his socks and underwear.

He took a deep breath, trying to drum up the enthusiasm for a course that he had next to no interest in. ‘The Mechanics Of Writing A Bestseller’. That hadn’t been his choice. In fact he’d argued against it, pointing out that he was supposed to be teaching English Literature, not a Writing For Dummies course. He’d been over-ruled by the Head of the English Faculty, a pinch-faced lesbian who’d only been at the university for two years but who seemed to have it in for Grose and every other male member of staff aged over fifty. Grose was only a few months away from his fifty-second birthday. He didn’t know if it was his age, sex or the patches on his jacket, that had annoyed her, but she’d seemed to have taken inordinate pleasure insisting on the title. She’d explained to him that it was all about pulling in the students, and that twenty-first century students weren’t interested in studying the works of “long-dead white men” as she relished describing history’s greatest writers.

Grose forced a smile as he surveyed the eager faces in the front row. “So, ladies and gentlemen, we now begin the third week of the course and as I told you on the first day, now is the time to put up, or shut up. Or as my old grandfather used to say, shit or get off the pot, God bless him.”

He waited for laughter but there was none. Not even a smile. He looked over the top of his glasses. Without the benefit of corrective lenses everything beyond twelve feet was a soft blur and he generally found it less stressful addressing large groups of people when he couldn’t see their faces.

“You all signed up for this course because you wanted to be writers, you wanted, for the lack of a better expression, to write the great American novel. I did hope that you might want to be the next Cameron Fitzgerald or Steinbeck or Hemingway or Salinger, but from the feedback I’ve been getting over the past two weeks it’s clear that your sights are in the main somewhat lower. The new Stephanie Meyer, perhaps, or JK Rowling.” His nose wrinkled as if he’d detected a bad smell wafting over from his audience. He took off his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief. The handkerchief had been a present from his wife many years ago and she’d embroidered his initials in blue in one corner. “But even if your ambitions are to pander to the mass market, you still have to do what all writers do – you have to write. You have to put words down on paper. Or I suppose these days the best I can hope is that you put them onto your hard disc drive.” He put away his handkerchief but held onto his glasses. “Now, I might not be able to get you to write like Cameron Fitzgerald. I might not even get you to Stephanie Meyer standard, if indeed she has a standard, but the one thing I can guarantee you is peer review of your work, and that’s something every writer needs. And today is the day that we start that process.” He tucked the glasses in the top pocket of his jacket and opened the folder. He didn’t need glasses for reading so long as he held the material at arm’s length. “So, let’s do this alphabetically, shall we? Miss Abrahams.” He squinted at the students. “Miss Abrahams?”

A plump girl with badly-permed hair held up a hesitant hand. She smiled hesitantly. “That would be me.”

Grose looked at his printout. “From Baltimore. Well Miss Abrahams from Baltimore, why don’t you stand up and let us hear what you’re working on.”

“Now?”

“Now would be good, yes.”

Her cheeks reddened. “It’s not really ready for…” She shrugged. “It’s just not ready.”

“When do you think it will be ready?” said Grose.

“Next week?” she said, hopefully.

“What are you afraid of, Miss Abrahams? Ridicule? Contempt? Criticism? All of the above?”

Miss Abrahams slumped back in her seat and didn’t answer. Grose took a step toward her. “That’s what a writer does, Miss Abrahams. A writer bares his – or her –soul, a writer writes from the heart and then yes, that means opening yourself up to criticism. If you’re not prepared to do that then you might as well go back to serving burgers or selling jeans or whatever it is you were doing before you let your dream of being a writer get the better of you. Do you understand me, Miss Abrahams?”

She nodded but didn’t say anything and steadfastly refused to look him in the eye.

“I can’t hear you,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, close to tears.

Grose sighed and looked around the lecture hall. “Very well,” he said. “We’ll drop the alphabetical system for today. By next Monday I want you all ready, willing and able to give the class a reading. It doesn’t have to be much, a couple of pages will do. In the meantime, is there anyone who is ready now to bare their soul to the group?”

Several hands went up. The most enthusiastic was a blonde girl at the front who began waving her arm left and right like a metronome. Grose put on his glasses. The blonde was Melissa Knox, from Atlanta, big-boned and horse-faced, she had sat in the front row since day one of the course and was always the first to ask a question. Her voice was deep and throaty and for the first week he suspected that she might be a man in drag or at the very least a pre-op transsexual, but he’d come to accept that she was all woman. She was pushy, unpleasant, and seemed to think that she was destined to be heading the bestseller lists. She had already forced on him three writing samples which he’d read and dismissed as the product of a talentless wannabe writer, though of course he hadn’t told her that. The Head of Faculty had made it clear that he was to be supportive and not critical, that the purpose of the course was to encourage creative development and not to be critical. Students didn’t need to be criticized, he’d been told. They needed support. They needed encouragement. They needed smoke blown up their backsides is what she meant, but of course Grose hadn’t told her that. He’d argued his case but that had been a waste of time. She’d taken him in to see the Dean.

The Dean was a forty-year old career academic who had never had an original thought in her head, so far as Grose could tell. She had a tight, bird-like face, close-cropped black hair and nails that were bitten to the quick. Her eyebrows had been shaped to within an inch of their lives and were always outlined with black pencil, and her lipstick was a pale beige that always seemed to find its way onto her front teeth. Kimberly Martin. Dean Martin. Under other circumstances Grose might have found the name funny, but there was nothing amusing about the Dean. She had backed the Head of Faculty, made a few patronizing comments about the university having to move with the times, and said that she was as pleased as punch with the number of students who had signed up for the course and didn’t want him to do anything that would jeopordize those numbers.

Grose was pretty sure that Dean Martin was a lesbian and wouldn’t have been at all surprised to learn that the Head of Faculty was her bitch. But he couldn’t say that, of course. It was dangerous enough just to think it. In fact he was pretty sure that the day would come when even having a thought like that would lead to dismissal.

Melissa was bobbing up and down, her hand held high. Grose forced himself to smile, even though the last thing he wanted was to hear the silly woman’s nauseating prose. “Yes, Melissa, let’s start with you,” he said.

Melissa was already on her feet. She picked up her MacBook, looked around to check that she had everyone’s attention and began to read. Her voice seemed even deeper than usual and Grose couldn’t help but look for signs of a prominent Adam’s apple as she spoke.

Grose sat down and nodded thoughtfully as Melissa droned on. Her story was a soulless romance about a nurse in a mid-Western town who is torn between two men – an impossibly handsome doctor and an equally impossibly handsome delivery driver. Both had cleft chins, rippling muscles and washboard stomachs and both thought the nurse was the woman of their dreams. It was tosh. Absolute tosh. It was so bad that Grose was tempted to walk over, take the laptop from her and throw it against the wall. He settled for looking over at Jenny Cameron, another of the front row stalwarts. Jenny had been born in Orlando, not far from the Magic Kingdom, but whenever Grose looked at her he imagined the sound of bagpipes and the smell of heather. Fair skinned, soft shoulder-length blonde hair and a sprinkling of faint freckles across her nose.

Grose continued to nod as he looked at Jenny, taking in her high cheekbones, Cupid’s bow lips, pale blue eyes and long black eyelashes. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on. Except she wasn’t a woman, she was a girl. Less than half his age. A lot less than half, as it happened. Closer to a third. The thought made his stomach lurch.

She realized that he was looking at her and she smiled and self-consciously brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. Grose wanted to wink at her but he knew that wouldn’t be smart, not with so many students facing him. He realized with a jolt that they were all looking at him expectantly and that Melissa had finished talking.

He smiled at her. “Excellent,” he said. “First-rate.” He took off his glasses again and slid them into his top pocket. “Now, let’s all share our thoughts with Miss Knox. Who wants to start?” A forest of hands shot up.