B00BCLBHSA EBOK (4 page)

The voice on the line said, “Hiya! Zena? It’s Trevor here. This a good time to talk?”

And Zena said, “Yes, baby. Ask me anything. Zena’s ready for it!”

“Tell me about your day. What’s in store for you?”

“Being a spiritual person, I usually spend an hour chanting in the morning.”

“Football?” said Trevor, a little surprised. He wasn’t a sports fan himself. But the rivalry between London teams was notorious: Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur in North London, Chelsea and Fulham in the west, West Ham in the east, Millwall in the southeast. He wouldn’t have pegged Zena for a footie fan, but if she was, presumably she favored Arsenal or Tottenham. He just couldn’t imagine her chanting songs popular on the football terraces for an hour every morning, unless perhaps she did it to train her voice.

“It’s part of my Buddhist practice, Trevor. Nuthink to do with football, you lemon. I chant to align the spiritual and the physical dimensions of my world.”

“Oh, I see!” Trevor sounded relieved.

“I’m interested in nature. See, I have a keen sensibility for the influence of taste, touch, smell, sound and sight on my well-being. I put fresh flowers on the windowsills. I burn incense on the altar in my house. I’m drawn to certain colors, like gold and purple—empress colors. Knowing how much influence even the most fragile elements of the universe can have on me, I try to influence the universe—not just with words. There’s more subtle ways. There’s the chanting…”

“And the altar? You said you have an altar?”

Zena laughed. “You think I’m gonna tell you I practice black magic, yeah? Only a little
Zena
magic, bro. The lady’s black but the magic isn’t.”

Trevor laughed, too. He was also black, so he didn’t mind Zena kidding about the color of her skin—he knew she wasn’t doing it to see if it made him uncomfortable, the way she might with a white journalist. Just so long as she kept off the subject of football, he could get through the interview without any awkwardness. He really didn’t know anything at all about football.

“What do you worship on your altar?” he asked. “Do you use it for worship?”

“Say there’s some element of your life, yeah, that needs acknowledgment or control? That’s what it’s for. So if there’s something that I want to celebrate or influence, I’ll place it on the altar. I might put one of my books there, and be thankful that it’s been published, and hope it’ll do well with sales. Or I might put a little doll there that represents a person who’s important to me. My grandma, say, when she was sick for a while.”

“Oh yeah!” said Trevor. “Yeah, I can see why you’d do that.” He almost sounded convinced. Like many nicely brought-up young men (and some of the bad boys too), Trevor loved his grandma.

“See what I’m saying! He’s listening to Zena now,” said Zena. She was all for speaking in the third person when the drama or emotion of a situation demanded it. “Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be all about celebration, Trevor. See, right now, I’m trying to give up smoking cigarettes. So I put a cigarette butt in there, on my altar, and I ring the little silver bell I keep to the side, and then I crush the cigarette butt with my fingers; I peel off the paper and shred it; I mash up the nasty, sticky, brown filter. Symbolically, I’m crushing a very nasty habit. Yeah? And that prepares Zena to beat it in real life. So that’s how I use my altar. Plus, when I light it, the incense smells nice.”

Trevor laughed. She imagined him scribbling away, impressed, though he might actually just be recording this. Did he realize she was in the bath? It would only add to her allure, like the earthly goddess Cleopatra before her.

“I grew up a sassy North London girl, Trevor, with my share of setbacks. I’m not afraid to strike out at someone or something I believe is holding me back. Sure, Zena’s a bold, beautiful, spiritual woman who has risen up in life, and she likes to help others rise up. I’m a mentor to wayward children, disaffected youth, disenfranchised adults and other writers.”

“Me too, I’m a mentor to some kids in a local school. What is it about being black that means we’ve all got to be a beacon for our local community? You ever wish you could be frivolous, Zena, instead of being a saint?”

“You don’t have to be a saint, brother. Someone wants to make an enemy of me? They better watch out. I can be a saint, but I can be vindictive, too.”

“I bet you can,” said Trevor. “Someone would have to be an idiot to make an enemy of you.”

“You’re right. Crush or be crushed, yeah? Ain’t no one ever wants to know what it’s like to be crushed by Zena.”

“Unless in the most passionate, romantic sense,” said Trevor, dutifully, offering Zena an opportunity to chat about her work (the real purpose of the call) and her new novel, a sensual romance called
Venus in Velvet
. Zena explained that she would be discussing the book during her appearance at the upcoming Romance Writers of Great Britain conference. She plugged a few other events—a book signing at a shop in Kensington, a reading at a spoken word event in Shoreditch—and made sure that Trevor was clear about where his readers could buy her books, both in store and online, and then they ended the call.

Zena stepped, finally, out of the bath, with the grandiosity of a rock star emerging from an onstage water feature to rapturous applause. She planted one foot onto the bath mat, then the other, her ten purple-painted toenails making a V-shape like migratory birds. She pulled off her purple shower cap and shook loose her plaited hair so that it tumbled almost to her shoulders. She patted the moisture off her skin with a towel, and then made a fair attempt to put a little back in by rubbing coconut body salve over herself. She hummed again. Almost everything she did was self-congratulatory, but then there was a lot that she had to be happy about, considering her past and what she had overcome. She was inspirational—many people had told her so: at the schools where she went to talk to excluded children, and the institutions where she went to talk to adults with difficult lives. She thought of herself as having a calming influence. But she was a big woman, and she could be physically intimidating. Her physical presence was one of the reasons she was listened to with respect by wayward children. They respected her powerful physique and the thrilling tales of all the awful things she had got up to at their age; they were slightly baffled when she started talking about doves and jewels and cathedrals.

Zena got dressed. Breakfast would be next—toasted crumpets with butter and honey on them, and a pot of sweetened mint tea. She used to finish breakfast by rolling herself a cigarette, lighting it and inhaling deeply on its calming smoke. But now she was a nonsmoker. Instead she would take deep, calming breaths…

She put two crumpets in the toaster and set the timer. When they popped up with a promising ping, hot and crunchy, she slathered them with butter so that it would melt and dribble into the random, tiny holes on the surface of each. Then she took the lid off the jar of honey, dipped her knife in and scraped around. There was hardly any honey left in the jar—not enough to sustain a bee, let alone a big, busy black woman with cigarette cravings. Zena lived alone, there was no one to blame for having used the honey without buying a new jar to replace it, but she didn’t feel she herself was at fault. She blamed the universe. She took the jar and flung it at the wall, where it shattered, leaving a sticky smear, and then fell tinkling onto the tiles of her kitchen floor. Her heart pounded and her breath came quickly. Being calm, being sensual, was hard work sometimes. The little dove in her head fluttered and pecked, anxiously. On days like this she wished she had a gun: she’d shoot the stupid thing and bake it in a pie.

Zena took a moment to calm herself and review how the day had gone so far (good and then not so good) and how it might go after this, and how it might go in the days to come. She was looking forward to getting to the conference, catching up with Morgana and the rest of the guys, room service, lots of pampering in the spa. Maybe what she needed was contact with humankind—with womankind. She had kept herself shut away for too long in her flat in North London. She hadn’t realized it at first, but the shattering of that honey jar symbolized her shattered ego. The universe was trying to tell her that she suffered too much for her art.

For now, she could get herself back on track by chanting, and lighting the incense at her altar. When she’d agreed to answer questions from that journalist, she hadn’t expected so much interest in her altar! More people should have them: hers was a very useful addition to her life. So useful, in fact, that she also had a small, portable version that she could take with her anywhere, with a tiny silver bell, an incense holder, and a place to put a miniature representative of whatever she sought to influence…or crush. She would be taking it with her to the conference in Bloomsbury. There was no telling when she might need powerful magic like that.

The day was drearily damp and gray when Emily arrived at the Coram Hotel in Bloomsbury. Her short, dark hair was neatly combed; her shoes were new but comfortable to stand in. She was wearing her best coat, and she was carrying a small case she had packed with the requisite amount of underwear, some smart clothes for the daytime and a flattering dress for dinner. The hotel was an enormous Gothic structure fashioned from salmon-colored bricks, the sky above it as gray as a slab of panfried tuna. From the street, it was impossible to tell what it would be like inside; it might be musty and mildewy, more hostel than hotel. But the salute from the elegant doorman, who touched his right hand to the brim of his gray bowler hat as Emily arrived, hinted at lavish interiors and first-class service beyond the heavy door he held open for her. Emily felt her shoulders relax as she went through into the dark calm of the hotel, the cool air spicy with the perfume of long-stemmed lilies. This weekend was going to be as relaxing as a spa break—a much-needed antidote to the stress of working in the cutthroat environment of London’s financial district.

Emily didn’t think of herself as a fanciful person, but she sometimes had fanciful thoughts. As she stepped through the doors into the immaculately artificial, recently restored lobby of the hotel—the furniture, carpets, mirrors, even the
air
apparently heavier and richer than anything anyone would have at home—Emily had an impression of unreality, as if she had stepped through a portal into a previous age. She looked out again at the mackerel-gray streets—at the present-day people striding past, heads down against the wind, their slightly bitter expressions suggesting they had expected the day to turn out better than this—and saw that the world was just as she had left it.

Emily saw Morgana waiting for her in the lobby with the hotel manager and went over to meet her. A badge on the lapel of his suit announced that the manager’s name was Nik Kovacevic. He had been confiding to Morgana that he would like to write a book. People always did this when they got her alone for five minutes, so she was used to it. They made it perfectly clear that it was a lack of time, rather than a lack of talent, that was preventing them setting the publishing world alight, as if Morgana was some kind of layabout who sat around writing books because she had nothing better to do with her time.

“I’d like to write a book about this place,” Nik said.

“What a brilliant idea. You must do it.”

“The stories I could tell. I know where the bodies are buried! Is it difficult to get an agent?”

“I’ll put you in touch with mine, if you like. Just let me know when you’ve finished your manuscript.”

“They don’t pay advances these days, then?”

“They do. But they like to see what you’ve written first.”

“It’s finding the time, isn’t it?”

Morgana introduced Emily to Nik. He bowed deferentially in that English way that seems borderline mocking to other English people. “The staff at the Coram Hotel will take great pleasure in working with you to make this conference a success. My office is just behind Reception if you need anything.” He bowed again and then withdrew.

Morgana was wearing a smart powder-blue, velveteen trouser suit, a fluffy blue angora beret atop her head. Silver bangles jingled on her wrists as she turned to give Emily a kiss on the cheek. With the jingling, and the soft, appealing jumble of textures she was wearing in blue, Emily thought that Morgana would have made an excellent educational toy for a baby. But irreverence and employment are not a good mix, so Emily tried to compose herself and think businesslike thoughts.

“Let me introduce you to the others,” Morgana said, and turned and walked very fast through the hotel’s opulent interior, Emily beside her. Emily looked to left and right, taking in glimpses of silk patterned wallpaper, silk-upholstered furniture, uniformed staff, tall vases, short tables, stopped clocks, and a gilt barometer, as Morgana briefed her about the conference and its attendees. And then they reached the mahogany-lined bar. It featured a ceiling-high mirror, its reflection doubling the range of wines and spirits available behind the well-stocked bar, and giving the white-shirted, French-looking bar steward a twin. She briefly saw her twin there too—short, dark, bobbed hair, freckles, dimples, an eager expression and a nice strong little chin. Beyond her own reflection, Emily saw Morgana’s fellow committee members in the mirror before looking into the room and seeing them in real life. Three of them—two women and a man—sat at a low, round table in the hotel bar eating steak and horseradish sandwiches in crusty white bread, the bloody red juices from the meat running down their fingers as though they had just taken part in a ritual killing.

Morgana introduced each of them in turn. The first was Cerys, a big Welsh woman in her fifties with white-blonde hair cut into an expensive bob. Emily put out her hand in greeting. Cerys stood and picked up her napkin. The heavy rings on her fingers formed a solid mass, like a sparkly knuckle duster, as she curled her fingers around it. She put her shoulders back and pushed her chin forward just a few millimeters. She wiped her hands, very slowly. She didn’t shake Emily’s hand. “Are you one of the bloggers?” she said to Emily, distrustfully.

“Goodness, no!” said Morgana. “Emily is my assistant.”

“Your assistant?” Cerys said. This time she spoke more gently. “Very posh!”

Morgana said to Emily: “We have bloggers coming along for the first time this year. I’m afraid it has caused a bit of an upset. Do you know what a blogger is?”

“Is it someone who writes an online journal or review site?”

“Reviews!” said Cerys, angry again. She threw down her blood-and horseradish-streaked napkin as if throwing down a challenge to any blogger who might wish to take her on. “What gives them the right? I’ve a mind to start a site of my own, reviewing the reviewers. Then we’d see what’s what.”

“Cerys is hosting ‘Don’t Ask Me! I’m Only a Woman’ this year,” said Morgana quickly. She was obviously keen to change the subject. “You should try to sit in for that session, Emily. If you have ever wondered if women writers mind being patronized, marginalized, underestimated, separately shelved in bookshops and generally sneered at, then the heat and passion in that room should give you the information required to answer the question. Cerys is a formidable champion for romance authors.”

Cerys looked as though she could be a formidable champion for just about anything, if she put her mind to it. But now that she knew Emily was not a blogger she relaxed her fists. The rings on her fingers looked like jewelry again, rather than offensive weapons. At last, she smiled at Emily. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, love. But if there’s a murder on the premises today, don’t bother looking for the culprit, it’ll be me.”

“What on earth’s the matter, Cerys?” said the man sitting next to her. The angular lines and hollows in his face were so carelessly perfect, they could have been the work of a gifted sculptor. His gleaming red hair was catwalk-beautiful. He was poetic-looking, but there was a wariness about him, as if he would never relax and put aside his experiences, whatever they might be. Emily couldn’t resist speculating. Perhaps he was an ex-soldier? He spoke quietly, and he kept his energy to himself: he didn’t look the type to get involved in a bar room brawl. But if someone had aimed a blow in his direction, Emily thought he’d strike back speedily and effectively. Not that there was going to be a brawl here, in the protected five-star luxury of the Coram Hotel.

Cerys sat back down, wheezing slightly. She said, “I’ve been reading the reviews for my latest book, Archie.”

“Ah!” said Morgana. “If only we could all stop doing that.”

“Plenty of nice ones, of course,” said Cerys.

“Course! That’s good.”

“Couple of nasty ones, too. Anonymous, mind you.”

“Ach,” said Archie. “That’s one of the sorrows of writing historical fiction, eh, Cerys? We cannae get our revenge by killing bloggers on our pages. It’d be anachronistic.”

“And we can’t kill ’em in real life, more’s the pity,” said Cerys, grimly. “There should be exemption from prosecution for authors if the reviews cause mental torment. Remind me to write to the Welsh Assembly about it.”

“Archie writes historical fiction under the name of Annie Farrow,” Morgana said to Emily.

“Aye,” said Archie. “I do.”

“Are the books set in Scotland?” asked Emily, politely. She imagined Jacobite rebellions, horses, heather.

Archie grinned at her. “Good guess!”

“Yeah?” said Zena, the big black woman sitting next to Archie at the table. She wore her hair in long plaits piled up on her head and bound with a purple silk scarf. Her fingernails were purple, and her lips were slicked with a shimmer of purple lip gloss. “Archie couldn’t be any more Scottish unless he was sitting there playing the bagpipes.” She winked at Emily to show there was no offense intended.

Morgana said, “I do wonder if you’re putting it on sometimes, Archie.”

“You could set off the fire alarm at three in the morning if you want to check,” said Emily. “No one’s ever more themselves than at three o’clock in the morning in a strange bed.”

Morgana stared at Emily, and then she began to chuckle. “Ach,” said Archie, which was his way of expressing mirth (and also—as Emily was later to learn—dread, displeasure and disappointment). The other members of the committee joined in laughing.

Emily had a slightly offbeat sense of humor that didn’t always sit well with employers, so she was relieved that her fire alarm quip was a hit with the romance authors. It was too bad that she wasn’t going to be able to work with them permanently—she might finally have found the perfect job for herself.

“Three o’clock in the morning in a strange bed! Yeah, babes!” said Zena. She shook her right hand very fast several times as if she was trying to dry the varnish on her nails, and exclaimed to no one in particular, “We’ve got an erotic romance writer in the making here!” Emily was intrigued to discover that Zena sometimes spoke as if to enlighten an unseen audience who were fascinated by what they saw of her life, but likely to be confused by it. It was like living in an audio-described episode of a reality TV program.

Zena leaned forward and briefly grasped three fingers of Emily’s left hand with the tips of the fingers of her right in a feminine handshake. She said, “She’s met the whole gang now!”

“Except Polly,” said Morgana. “Where’s Polly?”

“Is Polly one of the bloggers?” asked Emily.

“Polly’s one of our most successful authors,” Morgana explained. “Polly Penham.” Yes, even Emily had heard of Polly Penham. The Sunday supplements were full of stories about Polly’s financial and critical success, accompanied by photos of her in her book-lined study, looking calm, poised and clever. Morgana said, “She’s made enough money to buy a restaurant. Or was it a yacht?”

Zena said, “I heard she bought a swannery.”

Cerys said, “I thought it was a cannery. Though maybe you’re right about the swans—isn’t her husband a vet?”

“I thought he was a dentist,” said Morgana.

Cerys said, “I heard she’s going to stand as an MP at the next election.”

“Did you?” said Morgana. “She’s incorrigible. Dear Polly. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did. We’re lucky to have her.”

“I can’t wait to meet her,” said Emily. The other authors looked offended. Archie let out a very soft “achhh” that lasted longer than usual. Emily wondered, then, if it was really such a good idea to bring all these authors together in one place, considering how competitive they were. Probably it would be OK, just so long as they didn’t turn on her. She imagined a blurry photograph of herself, looking shocked but ordinary, below a screaming headline in one of the true-life-tales magazines that are sold at supermarket checkouts: “What Happens When Novelists Attack!!!”

“Polly will find you soon enough,” said Morgana to Emily. “She has something she wants to put in the gift bags that we’re giving out later.”

“Of course she does,” said Zena, not altogether approvingly.

“There are essentially two types of romance author,” Morgana said to Emily. “What do you think those two types might be?”

“Historical. And…uh…” Emily was a bit thrown by the question. She had thought that romance novels fell into lots of different subcategories. She looked at Morgana in her jaunty beret. Maybe it was something to do with hats? Authors who wore hats and authors who didn’t?

Morgana laughed her smoky laugh. “The two types, Emily, are the ones who are grateful for the free gifts that the organizers have spent three months begging from cosmetics companies, chocolatiers and lingerie shops, and the ones who are not grateful.”

Archie, Zena and Cerys cheered up a bit at the thought of the ingratitude of all the other authors who would shortly be joining them for the weekend, and they laughed too, and the mood lightened.

The phone rang at the bar. The barman came over. He was dressed as though he was in a Parisian bar, but he had a strong Australian accent. He said, “I have someone on the line who’s asking to speak to one of the organizers of the Romance Writers conference.” He stood at the table waiting for a response for a longish time, with no one moving or meeting his eye.

“Would you?” said Morgana to Emily, sweetly

Emily went to the bar and took the call. In the giant mirror facing her she could see that Morgana was skewed round in her chair, watching and listening.

“Hello?” said Emily into the phone. And then, as much for Morgana’s benefit as for the caller’s, because she wanted to appear very efficient: “You’ve reached the Romance Writers Conference at the Coram Hotel. How may I help you?”

“Am I speaking with Morgana?”

“No,” Emily said, “not Morgana. This is Emily.”

Hearing her name, Morgana made an
unlikely to want to speak to anyone
face in the mirror.

Emily said, “I’m not sure where she is at the moment.”

The voice on the other end of the line was almost exaggeratedly American. If a voice could wear a large, white rhinestoned pantsuit, this is what it would sound like. “Hey, Emily,” the voice said. “I’m one of the prizewinners. I go by the name of Winnie. You guys might know me as Tallulah, from Tallulah’s Treasures? I’m awful excited to meet y’all. Can ya tell Morgana I’ll be a little late this afternoon?”