Bronte's Inferno I (419)

I was in the town, behind a cold coffee and my battered lap-top. The older of the two staff in The Old Fire Station Café kept glancing over and failing to catch my eye. The coffee had been cold for a while. Probably since my mini-mouse had devoured the pathetic one hundred words that my first mug of most-definitely-not-smooth white whatever-chee-no had coaxed onto the screen. It was ten o’clock. Tea-breaking builders would be in shortly for hot drinks, and hangover-curing bacon in a tea-cake, but not a barm. Not this side of the Pennines. I wasn’t writing. I couldn’t. Not since my publisher dropped me. You couldn’t blame them, I’d sold enough books to fuel a fire, as long as it didn’t have to keep anyone warm for longer than five minutes.

Untethered had been a brave, but ultimately foolhardy, experiment in publishing. At the same time, it was, for around two hundred would be reality TV stars – I mean writers – the last roll of the loaded dice in the last chance saloon. And as we know, the house, particularly Dodo Adventitious House, always wins. But, as we also know, it may be rigged, nevertheless it’s the only game in town. Whatever, it was a blow when Untethered said “Thanks, but no thanks” to the third of my lovingly-created pastiches of different Victorian-age writers, “Bronte’s Inferno.” So I had a book I couldn’t get published and no money to sink into its cover-design, editing, proofing, type-setting, or even bribing small independent bookshops into stocking a copy of it.

Mug drained, I ordered another coffee in a plain white mug, knowing it would be a long wait to get one once the builders came in. Besides, I wanted the vicarious thrill, in the form of the smell of frying bacon, of the cause of someone else’s future cardiac event. Sure enough, minutes later Roy came in, gave me a bluff nod and ordered enough rolls and pig meat to feed however many builders it would have taken to build HS2. Roy had ripped out the decking from the back yard at home, then knocked up a couple of benches. He’d done the job as a ‘tweener’, something that would take a day or so, whilst the next big job came up. It was the first time I’d never given tea to builders on a job. They had sweated in the masks and taken them off after an hour, but they wouldn’t touch my mugs. Sometimes, I wonder how we didn’t all go mad. Then I read the newspaper and think perhaps we did. Roy’s order was ready in no time, The Old Fire Station had been expecting him too.

The screensaver was on the laptop. Yes, a photograph of a copy each of my books, the time I’d put them on a shelf in Waterstones and snapped them with my phone, just before I was escorted out by someone who probably had a manuscript somewhere in the ether or under the short leg of a writing desk. In limbo somewhere, anyway. I pressed the return key. Why make the log in difficult? Who was going to steal three unfinished novels and “Bronte’s Inferno”? Precisely.

There were some notifications: three tweets about bats in Berkshire, a retweet of one of my own about finishing BI, and quote-tweeting me luck with it, a dozen Facebook posts with pictures of cats, and e-mail from someone called “Valteri Mitie”, subject ‘An Offer. Not a 419. Read this, what’s to lose?’ I must confess, I had always been interested in these scams. I sandboxed the e-mails from time-to-time, but still wouldn’t click on or through. I used to enjoy the spelling. I was disappointed in Valteri’s e-mail, there weren’t any spelling mistakes. When I opened it, all it said was,

‘I’m finishing a meeting. One signature and I’m done. Stay there.’

I stayed there. What would you have done?

[TBC (maybe) ... ]