Lifesaving for Beginners (50 page)

Epilogue

1 July 2012; Dublin

I

This is the first book launch I’ve ever attended.

Faith says, ‘Are you nervous?’

I still get a jolt when I see her.
The very fact of her, standing here, beside me.
She is taller than me.
Thinner.
But there are similarities.
The long, dark hair.
The pale skin.
The green eyes.
She doesn’t look like me but she looks like a version of me.

I shake my head.
‘Actually, no.
I thought I would be nervous.
But I’m not.’
This is not bravado.
It happens to be true.
I should be as nervous as a hedgehog chancing a beach road on an August bank holiday.
But I’m not.

She nods then.
Smiles.
The dimple dents her right cheek.
Ed’s dimple.
She says, ‘Anyway, there’s no need to be nervous about the book.’
Her copy of
Lifesaving for Beginners
is tucked under her arm, like a clutch bag.
Now my mouth is dry and my heart is banging against the wall of my chest, like a drum solo.
I had already decided – before I sent her the book, before I’d finished it – that I wasn’t going to ask her if she’d read it.
I definitely wasn’t going to ask her what she thought of it.
I wasn’t going to say a word.

‘Did you read it?’
I feel like someone’s just plugged me into the mains.

Faith nods.

‘And .
.
.
ah .
.
.
what did you think of it?’
Goosebumps rise on my arms, like I’m standing in a draught.

‘I thought it was brave.
And honest.
And I really like the way it ends.’

I’m glad I’m sitting down.
The relief would have floored me.

Faith puts her hand on my arm.
A brief touch.
‘Good luck.’
Then she walks towards the door of the office, which is a small, cluttered room at the back of the bookshop.
‘See you out there.’
When she leaves, I twist the rod at the edge of the window and the venetian blinds tilt.
The bookshop is teeming with people.
Journalists and photographers mostly.
You’d think, after six months, interest would have waned.
Heads turn as Faith disappears into the throng in the green linen dress that her mother called her ‘Ireland’ dress.

I scan the crowd again but it’s only when I don’t see him that I realise I’m looking for Thomas.
He’s a journalist after all.
It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that he might be here.
No matter how many lambs his ewe bears, he’s still a journalist.
He could easily be here.

But he’s not.

II

Minnie bursts into the room, gripping a clipboard in her hands.
A pen is clamped between her teeth like a bit.
She looks at me.
Plucks the pen from her mouth.
‘Good,’ she says.
‘You’re here.’
She scores a tick on a page that’s attached to the clipboard, like I’m an item on her ‘to-do’ list.
I probably am.

The clipboard is Natasha’s, the PR Brona hired to handle the launch.
Except that at exactly 9.13 this morning, Natasha got text-dumped by her boyfriend of seven and a half months who was on the cusp of moving into her one-bed in Notting Hill.
Now she’s in the Turk’s Head drinking tequila and leaving increasingly incoherent messages on her ex-boyfriend’s mobile which he has – thus far – failed to return.
The cad.
That’s what Brona called him.

Minnie has stepped into the breach.
She’s in her element.
‘PR’s a doddle,’ she said, in front of Natasha’s assistant, who curled his hands into fists so Minnie couldn’t smell his fear.
She’s put him on name-badge duty.

‘You ready?’
She inspects me from the feet up, nods and scores another tick on her page.
She doesn’t comment on the effort I’ve gone to.
The red dress with the matching shoes and the fitted black leather jacket.
But she ticks me off her list and that’s something.

I say, ‘Yes.’

‘Good.’
She takes a walkie-talkie out of the pocket of her jacket and presses a button.
Static hisses through the speaker and she winces.
She presses another button and says, ‘We are leaving position D and will be at position A in T minus twenty seconds; do you copy, Alistair?’

A man’s voice with an English accent, high and halting, quivers down the line.
‘Er, yes, Minnie.
We – I mean I – I’m reading you, ah, loud and clear, as it were.’

Minnie looks at me.
‘Fall in,’ she says and I do because Minnie is on a roll and so, I suppose, am I.
The crowd parts like curtains and we make it to the podium at the other end of the bookshop in exactly T minus twenty seconds.

Brona introduces me.
She says lovely things, all of which are untrue to a greater or lesser degree.
She calls me ‘charming’ and ‘cooperative’.
She says it’s always been a ‘pleasure’ working with me.
She tells them about my work ethic, which she describes as ‘exemplary’.
HA!

Minnie can’t wait to get her hands on the microphone.
For a moment, standing on the podium with her huge blue eyes and her blonde hair in a plait down her back and her belly swelling against the silk of her pale pink maxi-dress, she looks adorable.
She looks like the type of woman who might make cupcakes and help little old ladies across the road.
Then she snaps on the microphone and says, ‘Kat won’t be doing a reading so if you want to know what the book’s about, you’ll have to buy it.
If you have a question, put your hand up.
If I point to you, ask your question.
If I don’t point to you and you ask a question anyway, you will be removed from the premises.’
She nods towards two enormous men swaddled in sombre black suits and wearing matching black wraparound sunglasses.
The same pair from the press conference, which seems like a long time ago now.
They stand on either side of the entrance, silent and unmoving and a little bit magnificent.
Minnie ends with a curt, ‘Kat will sign copies of the book afterwards.
Form an orderly queue in single file at the right-hand side of the shop.’

For a moment, nothing happens.
It’s hard to know where to look.
Then, one by one, the arms go up until the bookshop is a sea of disembodied hands, all waving at me.
Minnie points to a journalist near the back and barks, ‘YOU.’
The journalist – a woman with a meaty red face – looks at Minnie and points to herself with a questioning expression and Minnie nods impatiently, hands me the microphone and so it begins.

‘Kat, first of all, may I offer you my congratulations on the book.
I finished it last night.
I couldn’t put it down.’

Killian Kobain would know what to say to that but I can’t think of anything.

She goes on, ‘The book is not a Declan Darker book.’

I would have thought that was pretty obvious.

‘Why did you decide not to write another Darker book?’

Finally.
A question.
I look at the front row where Mum, Dad, Faith, Milo and Ed are sitting.
Milo looks like he’s been attacked with Dad’s Brylcreem because his fringe is pasted against his head.
He smiles at me and gives me the thumbs up sign.
He uses both thumbs.
I wink at him and then return my attention to the journalist.
‘It was time to write something new.’

Hands go up.
Minnie points at a middle-aged man wearing a beanie hat in the second row and shouts, ‘YOU.’
I’m surprised because beanie hats on middle-aged men are one of the items on Minnie’s pet-hate list.
 She says they’re a foil for either baldness or sticky-out ears or a combination of both and that they fool no one.

The man in the beanie hat says,
‘
Lifesaving for Beginners
is about a teenager who gets pregnant and gives the baby up for adoption.
Is it autobiographical?’

I’ve been dreading this question but it’s not unexpected.
The details of my life have been wrapped around a fair amount of fish and chips in the last few months.
I say, ‘No, it’s a work of fiction,’ and I’m about to leave it at that and then I don’t.
This keeps happening recently, since I finished the book.
It’s like I’m springing leaks.
I’m coming out.
I keep coming out.
I take a breath.
‘But it’s true to say there’s a lot of me in this book.
I didn’t realise that until I read it myself for the first time.
I had buried that part of myself.
That fifteen-year-old girl.
I hadn’t thought about her.
I abandoned her, in a way.
And then I read the book and there she was, on the page.
It was like meeting someone I used to know but hadn’t bothered to keep in touch with.
It was a shock.
But it was something I needed to do.’

There is silence in the room.
I’ve been taciturn these past few months.
The media has interpreted this silence as aloofness.
They’ve called me cold.
Remote.
They were not expecting this.
This deluge.
Neither was I.
And neither was Minnie by the look of her.
Shocking Minnie is no mean feat but it seems like I’ve managed it.
Then the man in the beanie hat opens his mouth to ask another question and this brings the unshockable Minnie back because she hits him with a tart, ‘You’ve asked your question,’ before pointing to a woman on the other side of the room and roaring, ‘YOU.’

She says, ‘What genre is the book?’

I say, ‘I don’t know.’

Minnie points and roars again, ‘YOU.’

‘How long did it take to write the book?’
A high-pitched voice near the back of the room that turns out to be a burly man with a ferocious-looking beard.

‘Six weeks.’

There is a pause then.
A collective intake of breath.
But it’s true, that’s how long it took me.
Six weeks.
Beginning to end.
With no need for editing other than a few apostrophes that were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I’ve never been great with apostrophes.

Six weeks.
Writing and sleeping.
That’s what I did for six weeks; that’s all I did for six weeks.
Brona said, ‘See what you can do when you put your mind to it?’

Minnie points and roars, ‘YOU,’ at a skinny youth with enormous glasses perched on a long, narrow ridge of nose.

‘Some commentators are saying that your second novel,
In the Dark,
is loosely based on some of your real-life experiences.
What’s your response to that?’

‘In the Dark
is about a serial killer who buries his victims alive in shallow graves in Leitrim.’

‘Yes, that’s the one.’
He seems pleased with me.

‘I’ve never been to Leitrim.’

‘But the killer was adopted.
And the book is the only one that’s set in Ireland, isn’t it?
That’s the point I’m making.’
You have to wonder if some of them have been to any sort of educational facility.

I look at Minnie and she points to another one and roars, ‘YOU.’

‘Is it true that you had a nervous breakdown when you were sixteen?’

‘No.’

‘Seventeen?’

‘No.’