Because Jess’s ending is … not subtle.
As a book’s conclusion goes, it is not great. Too obvious. Too unnuanced.
But as a message to him, it is loud and clear, and that’s what he needs. Jess has obviously figured out that subtlety would be pointless, lost on him.
We have to figure out how to talk about difficult things, says one character to another.Life is full of difficult things. Hopefully not as difficult as this plane crash, but still. I know I paper over the cracks by putting on a brave face and looking for the bright side and the fun. And I know conflict makes you anxious. But you’re more resilient than you give yourself credit for. And we have to figure this out if we want it to work. And I want it to work. Do you?
Alex swallows hard. He turns the page for the response.
I do. Of course I do.
Alex has read enough. He clears his throat. ‘Well, anyway. I’ve got my own version of the ending, as it turns out. If you would like to see it.’
‘Of course,’ Nathan says, not bothering to hide his grin. ‘I’d love to. I imagine it will be very enlightening. Email it to me, would you?’
‘No problem,’ Alex says. And then he says some other things, and so does Nathan, but he won’t be able to recall, later, what any of those things are. He needs to get out of there, drink some water, count to ten and do his grounding exercises so that he can bring his pulse down and think clearly enough to get himself back on the Northern Line. Maybe he won’t get any coffee from Borough Market after all. Caffeine seems like the last thing he needs right now. He is perfectly stimulated as it is.
Outside the door, he slumps against it. His knees feel as weak as they did when he was a teenager, in the grip of his first crush.
‘I’d move, if I were you,’ Nathan calls from inside the room, his grin obviously still there, audible in his voice. ‘Health and safety, and all that.’
He’s not wrong. If this were a cartoon, and Nathan were to open his office door – something which is not exactly beyond the realms of possibility – Alex would end up flattened against the opposite wall, a pancake that would gently slide down until it landed in a crumpled heap on the floor. Not that Alex landing in a crumpled heap is an unlikely scenario, after this turn of events.
Chapter Forty-Three
Jess
Jess didn’t expect Nathan’s response to her sending in the finished book would be a simple,Please come and see me at your earliest convenience. She feels as if she’s been called to the headmaster’s office, about to be given a detention for etching the name of a boy on the underside of a wooden desk (she can neither confirm nor deny that this has actually happened to her).
Was her ending that bad?
Maybe it was. It’s possible she was more focussed on sending Alex a message than she was on actually writing an ending worthy of the rest of the book, which as a whole is really rather good, if she does say so herself.
She knocks on his office door more timidly than she usually would.
‘Come in,’ says a voice that doesn’t sound gruff or angry. She relaxes a little, takes a deep breath. This will be fine, right? It will be fine.
‘Hi,’ she says. Her voice comes out shaky. Not such a bad thing: it communicates to Nathan that she knowsshe has messed up. She hovers nervously next to the chair opposite his desk.
‘Sit, sit,’ he says, so she does.
She waits for the verdict.
‘So, the ending.’
Get to the point, she wants to shout. This was always the worst part about being called to the headmaster’s office. The waiting for the axe to fall.
She can’t bear it anymore. ‘You hate it.’
Nathan seems to be suppressing a grin. ‘No, no. I don’t hate it at all. I think it’s a great … outcome.’
He’s hedging. Jess waits for him to elaborate.
‘I think you both know that the ending needs to be rewritten. The most important thing about each part of a book is that it serves the story. And this ending – well, it’s serving something else, isn’t it?’
Her cheeks burst into flames. At least that’s what it feels like.
‘What do you mean?’ she says, for the sake of saying something, and then she cringes, because she doesn’t want to sit here while Nathan explains her own feelings to her.
