There were three of them, a man and two women, seated around an oval table. They all looked up as I walked in.
The man was seated on the far left. He was in his late thirties, with a high forehead and a neatly trimmed beard. I recognised him, but couldn’t quite place him. Sitting almost on his lap was a young blonde woman with pale eyelashes and a small mouth. Pretty, in that English-rose way, but not my type. On the other side of the table, a woman in her fifties with an expensive-looking haircut was thumbing an iPhone.
The man gestured for me to take a seat.
‘So you’re the new guy,’ he said, sticking out his hand. ‘Max Lake. This is Suzi Hastings.’ The younger woman mouthed hello.
‘And I’m Karen,’ the older woman said. ‘Karen Holden.’
I’d heard of Max Lake, of course I had. He was a writer of literary fiction who’d been talked about as a kind of enfant terrible a decade ago. Now, as far as I could tell, he spent most of his time on Twitter, trying to make every injustice in the world about him. I didn’t recognise Suzi’s name. A first-time novelist? She and Max were sitting very close together, almost touching. I was sure I’d seen Max mention his wife in an interview – yes, he was wearing a wedding ring – so it would be faintly scandalous if he and Suzi were sleeping together.
I introduced myself as I sat down.
‘Lucas Radcliffe as in L. J. Radcliffe?’ Karen said. ‘Goodness. I loved your book.’ As I tried to look modest she turned to the others and asked if they’d read it. They hadn’t. ‘It’s about all these children who disappear and this creature who eats their souls. So deliciously scary. I loved it. It sold squillions as well, didn’t it?’
‘Yeah, it did okay.’ I hated talking about this kind of thing. It made me cringe to my core.
‘I heard it was being made into a movie. With Emma Watson?’
‘Well. Maybe. But probably not with Emma.’
While looking at Karen, I could feel Max scrutinising me.
‘A horror novel, is it?’ he asked. ‘My agent is always telling me I should write something genre, a thriller or crime novel perhaps, between my proper books. Something to help pay the bills.’ He chuckled. ‘But I don’t know if I could bring myself to stoop to it.’
Before I could respond, Julia entered the room, carrying a plate piled high with bread rolls and a dish of butter. There were a couple of bottles of sparkling water on the table already. She hurried out and returned with four bowls of vegetable soup.
‘Smells lovely,’ Max said, pouring himself a glass of water.
‘Julia, I don’t suppose there’s any wine, is there?’ I asked.
The other three exchanged knowing looks as Julia said, ‘Ah, sorry. This is a dry house.’
‘That’s why we go to the pub every night,’ Max said. ‘To get our rations.’
A dry house? That wasn’t mentioned on the website.
‘Would you like a coffee?’ she asked.
I told her no, water was fine. The disappointment must have shown because, as Julia left, Karen leaned over and, with a conspiratorial wink, said, ‘I’ve got a bottle of gin in my room if you get desperate later.’
As we ate our starter, I asked Karen and Suzi what kind of stuff they wrote. I was tempted to ask Max too, to prick his ego by pretending I hadn’t heard of him.
‘I write genre stuff too,’ Karen said, with a pointed glance at Max. ‘A mystery series and an urban fantasy series.’
‘Women bonking billionaire werewolves,’ said Max with a smirk. ‘She writes a book a month. Can you believe that?’
‘Self-published?’ I asked Karen, and she nodded enthusiastically.
‘Oh yes. I couldn’t bear to have people interfere with my work.’
‘An editor, for example,’ Max said.
She ignored him. ‘I like to be in control. And I like the money too.’
I had a horrible feeling they were about to descend into a tedious argument about traditional versus self-publishing, so I cut them off by asking Suzi what she was writing.
Her voice was soft. ‘I’m working on my first novel. It’s a . . . picaresque, set at a university . . .’
‘Not a werewolf in sight,’ said Max.
Karen caught my eye. ‘There is a lot of bonking, though.’
‘Max is helping me with it,’ Suzi said. Her face pinked. ‘With the writing, I mean.’
Karen chuckled. ‘If you say so, dear.’
Suzi was saved from further blushes by the arrival of Julia with our main course, a goat’s cheese tart with potatoes and salad. We ate in silence for a few minutes. Suzi still seemed mortified by what she’d said. Karen kept looking at her phone.
‘The Wi-Fi here is terrible,’ she said, as Max made his excuses and went off to the loo. ‘And don’t talk to me about the mobile signal. Still, I guess that’s what we came here for. Solitude. Time to concentrate.’
‘Maybe you can teach me how to write a book in a month,’ I said.
‘Oh?’
I sighed. ‘My deadline is mid-May and everything I’ve written so far is . . . well, it’s shit. It’s not scary. It’s boring. Boring as hell. I need to start from scratch.’
Karen shrugged. ‘Easy. Three thousand words a day, every day, for a month.’
She made it sound so doable. The problem was, I didn’t have a story in my head. I barely had an idea. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone, because it sounded like a first-world problem, but I was blocked. Worse than that – paralysed. Soon, everyone would find out that my bestseller was a fluke and I would be exposed as a fraud, vanishing back into obscurity before you could say ‘one-hit wonder’.
Like I said, it was a first-world problem. But it was my problem.
A week before, I’d called my agent, Jamie, in a panic, telling him we were going to have to give the advance back, that I was washed up, finished.
He told me to calm down.
‘You need to go back,’ he said. ‘Back to the source of your inspiration. Where did the idea for Sweetmeat come from?’
‘I don’t know. A dream.’
He groaned.
‘No, really. I woke up one morning with the picture of the creature in my head, and a woman crying because her daughter was missing. The idea came from my subconscious.’ I made a pained noise. ‘It’s so frustrating. I mean, I’ve always written. It’s always come easily, since I was a kid.’
‘Then maybe you need to go right back. You need to fall in love with writing again. Find whatever, or wherever, it was that caused that first spark.’
Wherever. That caught my attention. Although Sweetmeat was set in an invented community, it was very much based on the place where I grew up in North Wales. The green, empty landscape, the relentless rain. Dark woods and low mountains; the river where a boy from our school drowned. And boredom – that was a vital ingredient. There was nothing to do, so I’d made stuff up. I started off by drawing and writing comics, then moved on to short stories. I invented whole worlds to entertain myself.
In London, where I’d lived since my early twenties, there was too much to stimulate me on the surface but not enough to stir my deeper imagination. I needed darkness, but lived in a city where lights always shone.