Nine Perfect Strangers

There was a pause.

‘Alain?’ she prompted, but she knew, she already knew exactly what he was going to say.

‘I’m afraid I am not the bearer of good news,’ said Alain.

‘I see.’

She sucked in her stomach, ready to take it like a man, or at least like a romance novelist capable of reading her own royalty statements.

‘Well, as you know, darling,’ began Alain.

But Frances couldn’t bear to hear him hedging, trying to soften the blow with compliments.

‘They don’t want the new book, do they?’ she said.

‘They don’t want the new book,’ said Alain sadly. ‘I’m so sorry. I think it’s a beautiful book, I really do, it’s just the current environment, and romance has taken the worst hit, it won’t be forever, romance always comes back, it’s a blip, but –’

‘So you’ll sell it to someone else,’ interrupted Frances. ‘Sell it to Timmy.’

There was another pause.

‘The thing is,’ said Alain, ‘I didn’t tell you this, but I slipped the manuscript to Timmy a few weeks back, because I did have a tiny fear this might happen and obviously an offer from Timmy before we had anything on the table would have given me leverage, so I –’

‘Timmy passed?’ Frances couldn’t believe it. Hanging in her wardrobe was a designer dress that she’d never be able to wear again because of the stain from a pina colada Timmy had spilled on her while he had her cornered in a room at the Melbourne Writers Festival, his voice hasty and hot in her ear, looking back over his shoulder like a spy, telling her how much he wanted to publish her, how it was his destiny to publish her, how no-one else in the publishing industry knew how to publish her the way he did, how her loyalty to Jo was admirable but misplaced because Jo thought she understood romance but she didn’t, only Timmy did, and only Timmy could and would take Frances ‘to the next level’, and so on and so forth until Jo turned up and rescued her. ‘Oi, leave my author alone.’

How long ago was that? Not that long surely. Maybe nine, ten years ago. A decade. Time went so fast these days. There was some sort of malfunction going on with how fast the earth was spinning. Decades went by as quickly as years once did.

‘Timmy loved the book,’ said Alain. ‘Adored it. He was nearly in tears. He couldn’t get it past acquisitions. They’re all shaking in their boots over there. It was a hell of a year. The decree from above is psychological thrillers.’

‘I can’t write a thriller,’ said Frances. She never liked to kill characters. Sometimes she let them break a limb, but she felt bad enough about that.

‘Of course you can’t!’ said Alain too quickly, and Frances felt mildly insulted.

‘Look, I have to admit I was worried when Jo left and you were out of contract,’ said Alain. ‘But Ashlee seemed to really be a fan of yours.’

Frances’s concentration drifted as Alain continued to talk. She watched the closed gate and pushed the knuckles of her left hand into her lower back.

What would Jo say when she heard Frances had been rejected? Or would she have

had to do the same thing? Frances had always assumed that Jo would be her editor forever. She had fondly imagined them finishing their working lives simultaneously, perhaps with a lavish joint retirement lunch, but late last year Jo had announced her intention to retire. Retire! Like she was some sort of old grandma! Jo actually was a grandmother, but for goodness sake that wasn’t a reason to stop. Frances felt like she was only just getting into the swing of things, and all of a sudden people in her circle were doing old-people things: having grandchildren, retiring, downsizing, dying – not in car accidents or plane crashes, no, dying peacefully in their sleep. She would never forgive Gillian for that. Gillian always slipped out of parties without saying goodbye.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Jo’s replacement turned out to be a child, because children were taking over the world. Everywhere Frances looked there were children: children sitting gravely behind news desks, controlling traffic, running writers’ festivals, taking her blood pressure, managing her taxes and fitting her bras. When Frances first met Ashlee she had genuinely thought she was there on work experience. She’d been about to say, ‘A cappuccino would be lovely, darling,’ when the child had walked around to the other side of Jo’s old desk.

‘Frances,’ she’d said, ‘this is such a fan girl moment for me! I used to read your books when I was, like, eleven! I stole them from my mum’s handbag. I’d be like, Mum, you’ve got to let me read Nathaniel’s Kiss, and she’d be like, No way, Ashlee, there’s too much sex in it!’

Then Ashlee had proceeded to tell Frances that her next book needed more sex, a lot more sex, but she knew Frances could totally pull it off! As Ashlee was sure Frances knew, the market was changing, and ‘If you just look at this chart here, Frances – no, here; that’s it – you’ll see that your sales have been on kind of a, well, sorry to say this, but you kind of have to call this a downward trend, and we, like, really need to reverse that, like, super-fast. Oh, and one other thing . . .’ Ashlee looked pained, as if she were about to bring up an embarrassing medical issue. ‘Your social media presence? I hear you’re not so keen on social media. Neither is my mum! But it’s kind of essential in today’s market. Your fans really do need to see you on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook – that’s just the bare minimum. Also, we’d love you to start a blog and a newsletter and perhaps do some regular vlogs? That would be so much fun! They’re like little films!’

‘I have a website,’ replied Frances.

‘Yes,’ said Ashlee kindly. ‘Yes you do, Frances. But nobody cares about websites.’

And then she’d angled her computer monitor towards Frances so she could show her some examples of other, better behaved authors with ‘active’ social media presences, and Frances had stopped listening and waited for it to be over, like a dental appointment. (She couldn’t see the screen anyway. She didn’t have her glasses with her.) But she wasn’t worried, because she was falling in love with Paul Drabble at the time, and when she was falling in love she always wrote her best books. And besides, she had the sweetest, most loyal readers in the world. Her sales might drop but she would always be published.

‘I will find the right home for this book,’ said Alain now. ‘It might just take a little while. Romance isn’t dead!’

‘Isn’t it?’ said Frances.

‘Not even close,’ said Alain.