ELLIE
Ellie had placed her laptop on the table in front of the window in her old bedroom and was rapidly turning the space around it into her office. So far she’d refrained from sending her CV out to prospective employers, deciding instead to freelance for a bit. See if she could earn enough money to survive that way.
Thanks to Estelle, she’d been commissioned to write three features with more promised in the next few weeks. She’d also been busy pitching some story ideas to a couple of magazines where she had her own contacts, quickly realising freelancing was a numbers game – the more ideas you pitched, the more the chance of being commissioned.
She’d not yet started the hunt for a new flat either, mainly because both Mum and Dad, together and separately, had urged her to stay for as long as she liked – and had refused to take any rent, which was a big bonus until her finances were in better shape. Her redundancy money was already gathering a little bit of interest in the bank and there was still money in her current account – thanks again to Mum and Dad who were also feeding her. They’d insisted she accepted the status quo while she got back on her feet.
It was funny living back home again though. Dad was away on business a couple of days a week and Mum seemed to be living in a world of her own at the moment. To say she was preoccupied was putting it mildly. Once or twice Ellie had caught her looking at her with a funny expression on her face. When she’d asked, ‘What?’ her mother had shaken her head, smiled at her and said, ‘Sorry, love. I was miles away.’
At least both parents had stopped tiptoeing around the subject of Rod. Her dad had been forthright in his dismissal of him. ‘Never took to him if I’m honest, love. You deserve someone much, much nicer,’ and he’d patted her gently on the back as he hugged her.
Mum, when Ellie had tearfully muttered she was worried about never meeting ‘the one and never having children’, had hugged her tightly and said ‘You will. The right one always comes along in the end.’
Ellie had sniffed and prayed that she was right. It was three months now since Rod had cast her adrift and moved to Manchester with her replacement. Three months in which she’d been determined to get her life back on the track she wanted – never to put it on hold again for anyone. She still had the occasional teary moments, usually in bed around midnight when unsolvable problems went round and round in her head.
Thankfully, there had been fewer nightmares and midnight crises lately. But she had to face facts. She was thirty in September. The clock was ticking. She’d always expected to be married by now. All her old friends – except for Tamsyn who from sixth form days had always vowed she’d never tie herself down to one man – were married and most had one if not more children. Although on the downside, there was poor Liz currently facing single motherhood after her sleaze of a husband had gone off with their Spanish au pair. At least she didn’t have to cope with that.
Switching on her laptop, Ellie picked up a pile of papers on her desk and began to flick through them as she waited for it to boot up. She’d been amazed to discover these tattered pages of a novel she’d started about ten years ago at the back of her wardrobe yesterday – she’d thought she’d thrown all her old notebooks and jottings away when she’d left home.
Now, giving the manuscript a quick read through prior to finally throwing it away, she found herself intrigued by the words she’d written so long ago. She remembered how inspired she’d been when the idea for the novel had first occurred to her.
Thoughtfully she sat back. Ever since she could hold a crayon, she’d drawn and written stories, as a teenager she’d dreamt of being a bestselling novelist. Everybody knew novelists struggled unless they hit the big time bigger than big. Being a writer meant a life on the breadline with no job security, no regular wage, no pension in the dim and distant future. Something both Harriet and Frank had urged her to think about when choosing a career.
Becoming a journalist had seemed the sensible option for a career involving writing. For the last eight years she’d enjoyed writing up news and features – she’d even won a prestigious ‘Young Journalist of the Year’ award in the early days soon after she’d left journalism school.
Redundancy had changed things though. Proved that there was no such thing as job security these days. So why not take the opportunity and become a novelist – or at least give it a try. To be truthful, she hadn’t thought about writing fiction for years but now the idea had popped into her brain, it refused to go away.
If she treated the freelance writing of articles as her ‘proper’ 9–5 job, she’d have money coming in and she could write her fiction in the evenings. Maybe even go on a Creative Writing course to get her into the mind-set of writing fiction.
Resolutely Ellie pulled her laptop towards her, opened a new file and titled it ‘Novel’. She’d make a start by editing and typing in the twenty thousand words or so she’d written all those years ago and seeing if there was potential there. If not, she’d think of another idea.