Around the table, a tense silence is simmering. Reluctant to look up and take sides in the standoff, I stare down hard at my phone, the screen I’ve been reading from now idle.
“Okay, then,” says Ryan brightly, like a playgroup leader trying to calm down warring toddlers. He glances up at the clock. “Reckon we’ve got time for one more exercise before we finish.”
—
Ryan catches me afterward as I’m packing up to leave. Dark-haired and sunken-cheeked, he’s wearing mostly black, a handful of chains around his neck, like he’s off to play guitar in a battle of the bands.
Ryan has had two books published, both dark comedies set in corporate London. Earlier this week I read his first, which was a best seller on publication nine years ago. It reminded me loosely of Joseph Heller, and I wondered if it was partly autobiographical (except for all the firearms, obviously).
Ryan’s enthusiasm for his craft seems at times to border oneccentricity—intermittently throughout our session, he’d plant his hands on the table, leaning his whole body in to make his point, before leaping to his feet and striding the length of the room. I was braced for him to jump up onto the furniture at any moment.
He’s calmer now. All that adrenaline came from sharing his passion, I realize, which is very inspiring, in aDead Poets Societykind of way.
“Will you be back next time?” he asks me. “Hope we haven’t scared you off.”
I smile. “Not at all. I really enjoyed it.”
“Out of interest... how long have you been writing?”
“Just a few weeks, really,” I say, shyly.
He seems surprised. “Seriously? Never before now?”
“Well, I started sketching out the idea years ago, but... never went anywhere with it.”
He nods, slowly. “Life got in the way?”
“Kind of. I feel a bit stupid it’s taken me so long to get round to it.”
“Took Margaret Mitchell ten years to writeGone with the Wind.”
I smile. “Ha. There’s hope yet, then.”
“Absolutely. You should keep going. Really. You’ve got talent.”
I almost gave up and went home before the session had even started—I was late, having only just clocked off from a full day at Pebbles & Paper after Ivan’s daughter was struck in the neck by a lacrosse ball at school (luckily, she’s fine). But when I did finally arrive, I struggled to find a way to the room that didn’t involve clattering down the church nave during evening choir practice. Anyway, apart from Ryan and me, four others are regulars: Debs, a grandmother of four in her sixties who’s writing a heavily religious novel set in a hospital; Aidan, a computer engineer and dad of two whose writing reminds me a bit of Jay McInerney; Paul, my tomato-faced challenger from earlier, who’s all about the dystopian thriller; and Paul’s adversary, Emma.Roughly my age, maybe younger, she’s writing a novel about a woman who walks out on her own life in order to find herself.
I like Emma: I’ve only known her for two hours, but she seemed to enjoy my writing, and I appreciated her fierce defense of it against Paul. I met her eye over the table once they’d stopped arguing, and she shot me a littleYou’re welcomewink.
I like the idea we might become friends. I’ve met up with a couple of ex-colleagues from Figaro since I left, but seeing them feels awkward now. The topic of Georgia seems to be off-limits, and we don’t really discuss the office, and without that common conversational ground—colleagues, clients, who stole whose biscuits, the slightly scary sandwich man—our chatter quickly ran dry, and so our meetups have become more sporadic. I still have old school friends in Shoreley, but those were never intimate friendships—just surface-level, gossip-based. Good for quick drinks and nattering over coffee, but little more than that. My true friends dispersed across the country after we left school—for university, jobs, relationships—and it soon became clear that Shoreley was fast becoming a place to be returned to only at Christmas, or for funerals, weddings, or holidays.
Caleb’s much the same. His friends from school have largely moved away now, and the ones he’s made since are mostly London-based. Like me, he has casual acquaintances here, ones he can meet for a pint or game of pool. But his two closest mates are still in North London, and they also happen to be mutual friends of Helen’s.
Right at the start of the session tonight, Ryan asked if I’d be comfortable sharing an excerpt from my novel, to give everyone a flavor of my writing style. So, with my pulse buzzing and my cheeks tingling, I read out the first chapter.
I’d been expecting to wilt with regret as soon as I finished—despite Caleb’s words of encouragement at the weekend. But then something strange happened. As the group began discussing the workI’dwritten—suggesting improvements, dissecting my characters, debating certain turns of phrase—I could feel my mind start to sing with something resembling pride. The same feeling Caleb was able to stir up in me the other night, for the first time in almost a decade.
—
He’s probably got unresolved emotional issues,” Caleb says later, when I describe the altercation between Paul and Emma. “Don’t take it personally.”
“No, I mean, the feedback in general was positive. And Ryan was super-encouraging.”
He squeezes my hand happily.
I squeeze him back. “So, where are we going, again?”
It’s late, long after dark. I called Caleb after the session to see if he’d mind me dropping in. He didn’t, so I did, but we got pretty distracted as soon as he opened the front door, so it was getting on for ten o’clock by the time he said, “Fancy doing something a bit crazy?”
