At the pub he sees a girl sitting with her ugly friend and she’s wearing a skirt, not a crop top but a white T-shirt and no bra and she’s beautiful.
She hitches up her skirt to give him a better look and he’s grateful for that, so he smiles at her, but instead of smiling back she makes a face and says to her ugly friend, As if.
As if.
He feels all wrong, like he’s being hollowed out from the inside, like something’s eating him up, and he feels a terrible craving, a longing left by the place her smile should have been.
TWELVE
Miriam thought she might not make it back to the boat. She thought she might pass out right there on the towpath; she could feel it coming, the crashing wave of panic, her field of vision narrowing, darkness crowding in, chest tight, breath coming in gasps, heart pounding. She crashed down the stairs into her cabin and collapsed onto the bench, head hanging, chin to chest, elbows on her knees, trying to regulate her breathing, trying to slow her racing heart.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should never have gone over there to see him—who knows what might have happened? He might have called the police, he might have claimed she was harassing him—she could have ended up jeopardizing everything she’d been working toward.
She had given in to her desire, her impatient desire to see Myerson, just to catch a glimpse. She was getting no joy at all from the news: two days had passed since her call to Detective Barker and she’d yet to hear anything about anyone new being questioned in connection with Daniel’s death.
She had started to wonder—perhaps they hadn’t taken her seriously? It wouldn’t be the first time someone had claimed to have her interests at heart, had pretended to listen to her and then had dismissed her out of hand. Perhaps Myerson had said something about her, something to discredit her? That was why she needed to see him, to see his face, to see written on it fear or stress or unhappiness.
And she knew exactly where to direct her gaze: up at the window looking out over the garden. That was the window to his study, in front of which stood the stout mahogany desk at which Theo Myerson toiled, head bent over his laptop, cigarette burning down in the square glass ashtray as he crafted sentences and conjured images. As, in an affront that felt like an act of violence, he wrote Miriam out of her own story.
* * *
When Miriam pictured Myerson in his home, at his desk, wandering down to the kitchen to fix himself a snack, pausing, perhaps in front of the framed picture in the hall of him and his wife, young and vital and wreathed in smiles, she was not conjuring these details out of thin air. She had visited Theo’s beautiful Victorian house on Noel Road; she had walked through the entrance hall and into a dark corridor, painted some fashionable shade of ash or stone, mole’s breath or dead fish. She’d admired the paintings on the walls, the jewel-colored Persian rug laid over original wooden floorboards, the drawing room lined with bookshelves groaning under the weight of first editions. She’d noticed, with a sharp twinge of pity, the silver-framed photograph on the table in the hall, of a smiling dark-haired toddler.
Miriam had been working at the bookshop for no more than six months the first time Myerson appeared, strolling along the towpath with his dog, a small terrier, a tiresome yapper whom he would tether to a mooring while he browsed the books. Myerson and Nicholas, Miriam’s boss, would gossip about what was selling well and what was bombing, about who was getting savaged on the pages of the London Review of Books and who was in the running for the Booker. In the shadows behind a shelf, Miriam eavesdropped, unseen.
She’d read his books—most people had. His first, published back in the mid-1990s, had moderate sales and good reviews; the second was a runaway bestseller. After that, he disappeared, not just from the bestseller lists but from bookshops altogether, his name cropping up in the odd Saturday supplement feature, the great literary success story of the nineties undone by personal tragedy.
Miriam had always considered his writing overrated. But she found that even she was not immune to the glamour of a brush with celebrity—it was odd how quickly one began to reassess the quality of someone’s work once its creator was no longer an abstract, no longer just a smug photograph on a book jacket but a living, breathing person with a shy smile and a smelly dog.
One day, a Wednesday morning in early summer, perhaps six months after he’d first started visiting the shop, Myerson turned up while Miriam was minding the shop alone. He tethered the dog as usual, and Miriam brought it a bowl of water. He thanked her graciously, asking whether they had in any copies of the new Ian Rankin. Miriam checked and discovered that it wasn’t published yet; it was due in the following week. She’d set aside a copy for him, if he liked. He replied that he would, and they began to chat. She asked if he was working on something new and he said that he was, that in fact he was thinking of trying his hand at crime. “Really?” Miriam was surprised. “I wouldn’t have thought that was your cup of tea.”