The House on Willow Street. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ made the girl smile, Suki thought. Tess was beautiful and yet she’d had that gift of being able to stop other women from hating her. Suki had never mastered it. Men loved her, women were wary of her.

      Why was she thinking about Tess so much? It had to be all the worry over the book and how it all linked up. The past, Avalon, all the things she’d tried to forget, all the secrets.

      In the women’s room, she locked herself in a stall, put down the toilet seat lid and sat. A Xanax for nerves, some Tylenol for the headache that was rumbling at the base of her skull and one of her prescription antacids to quell the bile that seemed to rise so easily these days. She washed it all down with her bottle of water. That all these ailments were stress-related didn’t pass her by, but Suki knew there was no easy fix when it came to stress. She was broke, so that stress wasn’t going away anytime soon. And the book …

      The women’s room door slammed and Suki got up, flushed the loo loudly to imply she wasn’t in there taking cocaine – which she would have been, back in the day – and came out.

      She slicked on some lip gloss and walked back up the hall as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Act as if, she thought.

      Melissa Lowenstein was a tall, striking woman who favoured tailored pantsuits worn with a single large piece of costume jewellery. Today’s was a striking orange Perspex brooch on one lapel.

      ‘Suki, great to see you,’ she said, shaking hands.

      Melissa didn’t go in for continental air kissing. ‘Gives some men the wrong idea,’ she’d told Suki once. ‘Kissing can make them think it’s fine to put a hand on your butt. Kissing blurs all the rules. So I keep it simple. No kissing anyone, no touching – and no messing if they overstep that line.’

      Suki found this approach strange. She liked seeing the flicker of admiration in men’s eyes, liked using her sexuality as part of her personal arsenal of weapons. But it was different for Melissa, she realized: Suki was the talent, the performer, whereas Melissa had to do deals with men. Totally different.

      At Melissa’s small boardroom-style table, lunch was set up for two: some deli cold cuts, bagels, salad and diet sodas.

      They sat and helped themselves, even though Suki wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry. The Xanax was kicking in and now she wanted a strong coffee, preferably a macchiato with foam, and a cigarette, then she’d relax totally. But instead she made up a plate of salad and poured herself a diet drink.

      ‘How’s the book going?’ Melissa asked.

      Suki had already worked out how she was going to answer this.

      ‘Slowly,’ she said. There was no point in lying to Melissa. She was about to explain all the issues which were clouding her head: money worries, the damn Suarez book, and point out that if she was earning more money, then she could concentrate …

      ‘What’s wrong?’ rasped Melissa, bonhomie gone, suddenly looking panicked. ‘You’ve given the publishers the outline, Suki. That’s what they’ve paid for. Reuben is a big fan of yours, he turned down Women and Their Wars all those years ago and he still regrets it. That’s money in the bank for you, but the publishers won’t keep waiting for ever. Past glories have got you this far, now you have to deliver – on schedule. My ass is on the line with this. Your due date is in three months and they’ve had nothing so far. What’s going on?’

      Suki could feel the hand holding the glass of soda shake at Melissa’s lengthy outburst. The fear rose in her again.

      ‘It’s Redmond Suarez,’ she said. ‘He’s writing a book about the Richardsons. He’s interested in me. I’m so stressed about all of this, I just can’t write.’

      The words, once blurted out, had the effect of making Melissa sit back and smile with relief.

      ‘Suki, relax, honey. This is good, better than good. This is a publicist’s dream. I get that you’re worried. Nobody wants a guy like that writing about them. Suarez is a sewer rat – but people are interested in sewer rats. No matter what he says, it will be good for your profile. A little of that high-class Wasp stuff can only do you good. Plus, Reuben is going to flip with joy. He’s always had a thing for the old Republican Mayflower types like the Richardsons and he’d like nothing better than to see them red-faced with embarrassment – if WASPS can go red, that is. Money can’t buy it!’ She beamed. ‘This is all good. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

      Melissa began eating her bagel again and Suki somehow found the strength to put her glass down. ‘I need a coffee,’ she said. ‘I can’t eat.’

      Melissa flipped a switch on the desk phone and asked for coffee. ‘Hurry, Jennie, we’ve got to be out of here at forty after one to get to Box House by two.’ Then she turned back to Suki. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘what have you heard about the Suarez book? Have you talked to the Richardson family about it yet? I presume they know? Bet they do.’

      ‘I haven’t talked to them,’ Suki said, ‘but they’ll know. They always know everything.’

      That she knew for a fact.

      By the time they got to Box House Publishing – another monolith of sheeny glass – Suki had drunk two coffees, plastered a nicotine patch on her arm in lieu of cigarettes, and taken another half Zanax. She was feeling no pain and the face she examined in her compact mirror was looking good. Tranquillizer-induced good, she knew, but that was fine. Who cared where the relief came from, right? She raked her blonde hair back from the widow’s peak in place of combing it, and applied more eyeliner and fire-truck red gloss.

      ‘Is Suarez interested in the Jethro years?’ Melissa asked as they went up in the elevator.

      ‘Not sure,’ said Suki, unconcerned in her happy bubble. ‘Not yet, anyhow. Jethro’s people would have the lawyers on to him like a shot. It’s always hard to nail down facts with bands like TradeWind. The tabloid rumours are so wild, nobody cares what another biography would say. Jethro never speaks, never denies, never apologizes.’

      She knew that from personal experience. When Jethro had moved on, she’d never heard from him again, despite their having shared a bed for more than two years.

      Today’s meeting was with her editor, the marketing team and the cover department. They were all at least fifteen years younger than Suki and Melissa, but Suki tried to tell herself she didn’t care. When she’d started out as a writer, these kids were still in strollers. How could they know what she stood for with their talk of modern covers and what people wanted?

      It turned out that they had heard about the Suarez book and everyone was pretty perky at the prospect.

      ‘It’s what people want to read, the inside story,’ breathed one particularly young girl in opaque pantyhose and a skirt so short she’d have been told she was ‘asking for it’ when Suki was young.

      Suki had railed against the ‘asking for it’ mantra all her life. Women should be able to wear what they want, be what they want. But as she’d found to her cost, it hadn’t quite worked out that way. When you looked like you were asking for it, you sometimes got it – and that had the potential to destroy you.

      Decades on, female politicians were still criticized for what they wore, though nobody would do that to male ones. Yet here were these young women with careers wearing clothes that seemed to say ‘one more inch and you’re at my crotch’.

      Suki СКАЧАТЬ