Miriam shoved her trembling hands into her pockets. “I haven’t been anywhere near your family,” she said. “Unless . . . do you mean your nephew?” She looked him dead in the eye. “Horrible business.” Retrieving the bookshop key from her bag, she elbowed her way past him at last. “I’m a witness, did they tell you that? The police came to see me, asked me a whole lot of questions, and I answered them.”
She turned to look at Theo, a tight smile on her face. “Would you have had me do otherwise? I tell you what”—she reached into her handbag and took out her mobile phone—“shall I give them a ring? I have the detective’s number in my phone; he said I should call if I remembered anything, or if I noticed anything untoward. Shall I ring him now, shall I tell him that you’ve come here to see me?” Miriam watched the consternation pass over his face like a shadow, and the rush of pleasure she felt was intense and quite unexpected. “Mr. Myerson?”
So this, Miriam thought to herself, is what power feels like.
* * *
When Miriam got home from work that evening, before she’d even made herself a cup of tea or washed her hands, she took her wooden box, the one in which she kept her trinkets, from the shelf above the wood burner and placed it on her kitchen table. She opened it up and sorted through its contents, a ritual she engaged in from time to time to soothe her anxiety, a way of calming herself, ordering her thoughts, focusing on what it really was that was important to her.
She was an odd fish and she knew it; she knew what she was and she knew how people saw her. People looked at Miriam and they saw a fat, middle-aged woman with no money and no husband and no power. They saw an outsider, living in a houseboat, clothes from the charity shop, cutting her own hair. Some people looked at her and dismissed her, some people looked at her and thought they could take whatever they liked, imagined she was powerless and couldn’t do a thing about it.
From the box in front of her, Miriam took out a piece of paper, a sheet of A4, folded in half and into quarters; she unfolded it, spread it out in front of her. She ran the heel of her hand over the letterhead, she read the words again, words she had read so often she felt she might be able to recite them, or at least the most offensive parts of them, by heart.
Dear Mrs. Lewis,
I write as in-house counsel for Harris Mackey, Theo Myerson’s publishers, in response to your letter of February 4. I write on behalf of both the company and Mr. Myerson, who has approved the contents of this letter. We wish to make it clear from the outset that Mr. Myerson completely denies the allegations of copyright infringement made in your letter; your claim is entirely without merit.
Your claim that The One Who Got Away, the novel penned by Mr. Myerson and published under the pseudonym “Caroline MacFarlane,” copies “themes and significant portions of the plot” of your memoir is flawed for a number of reasons.
In order to establish a valid copyright infringement claim, there needs to be a causal connection between the claimant’s work and the allegedly infringing work; you must demonstrate that your memoir was used by Mr. Myerson in writing The One Who Got Away.
Mr. Myerson acknowledges that you asked him to read your manuscript and, despite his extremely busy schedule and considerable demands on his time, he agreed to do so. As Mr. Myerson explained to you when you went to his house on December 2, he placed the manuscript into his luggage when he flew to Buenos Aires for a literary festival; unfortunately, his luggage was lost by British Airways and was not recovered. Mr. Myerson was therefore unable to read your manuscript.
The similarities you claim between The One Who Got Away and your own memoir are nothing more than generic themes and ideas . . .
We consider it neither reasonable nor necessary to address every weak comparison you attempt to make . . .
You have made serious and false allegations against Mr. Myerson . . .
Any legal action by you would be inappropriate and unreasonable and would be robustly defended by Mr. Myerson; he would look to recover all legal costs from you which, in light of the above, we have no doubt the court would grant.
There it was, in black and white. For all the insults they hurled at her, for all the hurtful, unpleasant accusations, for all the dismissal of her claims as entirely without merit, flawed, weak, false, inappropriate, unreasonable, the substance of their argument, boiled down to its essence, could be found in that final sentence: We have all the money and therefore all the power. You have nothing.
Hands trembling, Miriam refolded the letter and tucked it back into the bottom of the box, retrieving instead the little black notebook in which she recorded comings and goings on the canal. She had lived here, on this boat, for six years, and she had learned that you had to be vigilant. All human life was here: good, decent, hardworking, generous people, mixed in with drunks and druggies and thieves and all the rest. You had to keep your wits about you. You had to keep your eyes peeled. You had to learn to watch out for predators. （Miriam knew that better than most.）