Alice laughs.She’s mad,Vince would be hissing into my ear right now.Quick, let’s get away from her.
Yet I can’t, somehow. I literally can’t move my foot, which is crazy because it’s not as if it’s been trapped there by a paving slab. It’s just a little dachshund, resting her chin on it.
The doors are about to close... If you’re not intending to travel on this train, please return to the platform...
I’m pinned here by a sausage dog.Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep!The doors close and the train starts to move. Now my heart is racing in a way I haven’t felt for a very long time. Not with frustration and anger but the thrill of doing something just for the hell of it.
Why not do this? Why not pretend to be the other Kate?
What’s the worst that could happen really?
I look at Alice, and there’s a beat’s pause before the beaming smile floods her face. ‘Let’s get settled then, shall we?’ she says.
‘Yes, let’s do that,’ I say as we make our way back to our seats.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Vince
If Vince can remove a door from its hinges, he can write his own book. Well, the final bit anyway. Kate’s done the rest. Okay, he didn’tactuallyremove the door – Carse did that – but Vince oversaw the operation and kept everyone calm, and that’s what mattered.
So, the final chapter. Hmm. How hard can it be? It’s just one sentence after another, and he actually writes all the time, prepping his stand-up material. However, that’s just scribbled notes; the ‘broad strokes’ stuff he’s so good at. Details, like the correct grammar, punctuation and making actual sense, not so much.
This is Kate’s area! She’s the semicolon person in this marriage. (Vince has never understood what they’re for.) So why isn’t she here?
Frowning now, he figures that the last time he was forced to write anything ‘proper’ was a school essay onMacbeth. It still haunts him now, almost as keenly as that wooden horse in the gym hall. ‘Out, out, damned spot!’ Lady Macbeth had ranted. All he could think of was his mum instructing him to steam his blackheads over a bowl of hot water, which he’d tried, as he’d always done what his mum told him. He’d nearly boiled his face off. Anyway, Vince was no better at understanding the work of a playwright who’d been dead for four hundred years than at fathoming out why his wife took herself off to London last night.
She’ll be home soon, he reassures himself. Gazing out of his study window, he hopes to spot Kate approaching in time to finish writing the book before Zoe, his editor, gets too cross with him. However, all he sees is Gail from next door setting off in her turquoise running gear with her blonde ponytail bouncing, the epitome of rude health. That’s what you get when your fluid intake consists solely of tisanes and pea milk. Catching his gaze, she grins and waves. Vince’s cheeks redden as he waves back briskly, hoping he looks like a proper writer, deep in thought – like Hemingway or Kerouac – rather than a gawping weirdo.
With stress levels rising Vince tries again to think of an opening sentence, but his mind drifts back to Kate. Or, more specifically, Kate announcing that she wasn’t coming home.
Did she actually mean it? Of course she didn’t. It’ll be some menopause thing, he reckons. Before all this started, Vince had never known that hormones could be so problematic – causing his previously happy and generally cooperative wife to start sweating and thrashing about during the night, like she’s dreaming of kicking his head in, and have her previously long hair chopped to chin length like Pam Ayres. Not that Vince has anything against Pam Ayres. But if Kate was going to turn to the literary contingency for hair inspiration, then couldn’t she have picked someone like... he racks his brain for sexy poets. All he can think of is Sylvia Plath – and she won’t do.
The menopause though, Vince reflects, gnawing on the end of a Biro. It has an awful lot to answer for. The other day he noticed a hair sprouting from Kate’s chin and thought she’d be pleased when he pointed it out.
‘Thanks a lot, Vince,’ she said with a trace of bitterness.
‘Could you get it electrified?’ A reasonable question, he thought.
‘What?’ she exclaimed.
‘You know, killed with an electrical current. Zapped at the root.’
‘You seem to know an awful lot about treatments,’ she declared, stomping off.
These days he can’t do anything right.
Fuck it, he decides. Kate’s probably sitting there, spinning out a coffee in one of those bleak cafés at Euston, making him suffer for a bit longer. For what, he can’t imagine.
He stares back at the laptop, aware that time is slipping by because here comes Gail again, back from her run already! She’s probably racked up 10k, and what has he achieved? Sod all. Well, of course he can’t write. Not when Kate’s left him in the lurch – on deadline day too. Why do books have to be so fucking long anyway? And the type so small? People don’t have time for reams of text these days. Colin Carse admitted that he only ever reads when he’s on the loo.
All this graft, Vince reflects bitterly, and it’s going to be flipped through by a jumped-up goblin with his trousers down. Is it any wonder artists – true artists – have struggled so much with their mental health over the centuries, slicing off their ears, slugging absinthe and setting fire to their life’s work? Now Vince is picturing Jack Nicholson inThe Shining, furiously typingred rum red rum.It’s almost appealing, the idea of going glamorously berserk in a huge, dilapidated hotel up in the Colorado mountains. It’s not quite the same in a bungalow in a cul-de-sac, in what Vince grandly calls his study, which still has the peach floral wallpaper from when it was his mum’s sewing room.
Apart from his desk and a crazily expensive office chair he bought when he got his book contract (because he absolutely needed to swivel on something that cost nearly a grand, right?) there is no other furniture in the room.
‘Are you going to keep your stuff in boxes forever? It looks like we’ve just moved in,’ Kate remarked a few weeks ago, referring to his vast collection of raggedy notebooks and assorted paperwork. She’d gone on and on until he’d chosen and ordered a shelving unit. But the stupid thing never turned up.
Vince sighs heavily, reflecting that Jack Nicholson’s wife inThe Shiningdidn’t nag him about shelving units. She was too busy running around and screaming in a Seventies pinafore dress—
