This Book Made Me Think of You(7)
“Hi, Mum.”
Alfie can distinctly remember the moment he surpassed his mother in height and how disorientating it had felt. When he was a child, she’d always seemed so reassuringly big to him: the place to run to when he came off his bike and grazed his knees or if his older sister Tash hid one of his favorite rocks to annoy him, or later teased him for having a rock collection at all. But before he knew it, he had grown gangly limbs, and people kept telling him how much he looked like his father. And then one day he was leaning down to hug his mother rather than the other way around, and it felt like he was no longer allowed to be a little boy even though sometimes he still very much felt like one on the inside.
As she holds on, Alfie rests his chin on the top of her head, catching her familiar Nivea face cream and Imperial Leather soap smell. The smell of home.
“So, what needs doing then?” he asks, heading straight for the cupboard in the hall, reaching for the toolbox.
“Just a few pictures that I picked up at a flea market this week. I want to hang them before Andrew gets back from his work trip.”
“So he has no choice if he hates them?” Alfie teases, following his mother into a living room filled with knickknacks.
“You know Andrew doesn’t care about things like that,” she says, waving a hand as Alfie gets the drill ready. She’s right. While Andrew might pretend to grumble occasionally about their flat resembling a secondhand shop thanks to Emylia’s stoop sale addiction, in reality his mother could fill the place to the ceiling or paint it neon pink and Alfie’s stepfather wouldn’t care as long as Emylia was there when he came home.
Once the pictures are hung, Alfie suggests a takeaway.
“Are you sure? I don’t want to drag you away from friends. Or a date…” she adds hopefully.
“There’s nowhere I’d rather be. Pizza or Indian?”
Her face brightens. Because Alfie knows she doesn’t like being alone in the evenings. It brings back bad memories.
He lets her pick what they watch. It’s only on the third episode of a house makeover program that he lets himself question how he’s ended up at this place: sitting with his mother on a Friday evening watching couples discuss wallpaper choices and knowing that this is favorable to his alternative plans for the evening—getting intimate with an Excel spreadsheet.
As he watches, his thoughts drift to Matilda Nightingale and the day Joe Carter visited Book Lane. He looked around Alfie’s age but was unsteady on his feet, his face pale and eyes sunken. Alfie immediately offered him a seat, which he’d taken with a thanks, mate. When he told Alfie about the order he wanted to place, it had knocked the air out of him, but he’d done his best to remain professional. And yet it’s hard not to feel personally invested in this particular order. He’d made a promise that all twelve books would reach their intended recipient, no matter what. But what if Matilda Nightingale never comes back?
* * *
—
“…and we’re seeing an uptick in the youth market, driven by some TikTok success stories…”
Tilly looks down at her notebook, aware that she agreed to take notes for today’s editorial team meeting but that so far she has written nothing. She writes “TikTok,” then scribbles it out.
“Now, we’ve just acquired a big new book,” says her boss, Sade, a copper-skinned Black woman dressed in her signature crisp white shirt, colorful acrylic jewelry, and slim-fit trousers. “Esmerelda Love’s first memoir.”
She clicks a button, and a montage of photos appears on the screen. Last night Tilly put off going to bed alone by staying up late working on the presentation, using the social media account she has for work but very rarely uses herself to scroll through endless photos of Esmerelda Love. Now she stares up at images of a young, slim, blond white woman posing in a variety of beautiful locations in a variety of expensive-looking neutral-shade outfits.
“Tilly, you’re Esmerelda’s editor, do you want to say a few words about the book?”
The eyes of the entire editorial team turn to face her. They are sitting in one of the office’s glass-fronted meeting rooms that gives Tilly a view of the bookcases that line the corridor, books turned cover out and bearing the faces of the celebrities whose memoirs they have published over the years. There’s a brief silence as her colleagues and boss wait for her to speak. Sleep deprivation fills her mind with fog.
After a moment her brain kicks in, and the facts and figures from the proposal that kept her company last night along with a bowl of pesto pasta and half a bottle of wine come out of her mouth. She speaks with the confidence and experience that, combined with years of late nights and weekends working, have earned her the position of senior editor at Splash Books. At her last appraisal, a potential promotion to deputy publishing director was dangled—that is, if her projects this year pan out well.
“And she has a combined social following of around a million,” Tilly finishes. “So, we’re hoping this will be a big book for us.”
“That’s brilliant, thank you, Tilly. Will Esmerelda be writing the book herself, or do we need to secure a ghostwriter?”
“She’s asked for a ghostwriter.” Most of the celebrities she works with do, although very few are up-front about the fact. “I’m going to start compiling a potential list today.”