The Woman Who Stole My Life Read online

  In fact, if it hadn’t been for the wardrobe plan Gilda had done for me, I really wouldn’t have been able to dress myself. However, it worked like clockwork.

  Although you can’t factor in the entirely unexpected …

  Later that same day, in Cleveland, Ohio, at a charity lunch, a drunken eejit slopped half a glass of red wine onto my light blue suede stilettos, the shoes that were in shot in nearly every TV appearance I did.

  All credit to me, I managed to not bite him. Baring my teeth in a rictus smile, I poured white wine on the shoes, then doused them with salt and kept on smiling even though nothing lifted the stains. Smiling, smiling, smiling. All fine, yes, thank you, only shoes, hahaha, no, no need for the dry-cleaning bill, anyway you can’t dry-clean shoes, you drunken old cretin, if you would just leave me alone now, please stop apologizing, please stop making me make you feel okay about it, I must go now, wonderful time, yes, thank you, yes, at least I have feet, true enough for you, but now I must go to a private place and scream.

  Back in the hotel room, Mannix said cautiously, ‘You do have other shoes.’ No fool, he knew this was the wrong sort of thing to say to a woman.

  ‘I haven’t!’ Tearily, I held up a pair of black boots. ‘Can I wear these with skirts? No. Or these?’ I held up a pair of Uggs, then a pair of trainers. ‘No. No.’

  ‘What about these?’ Mannix produced some blingy sky-high platforms.

  ‘They’re for evening, for gala dinner events. These shoes …’ I held up the ruined pair. ‘They were perfect for daytime, for bare legs, for wearing with skirts. They were pretty, they were glamorous, they were even comfortable! And now they’re ruined. I know I’m overreacting but they were the very linchpin of this book tour!’

  ‘The very linchpin?’ Mannix repeated and looked at me.

  ‘The very linchpin and don’t make me laugh.’

  He could always defuse a situation. For a few blissful moments, before we had to start work again, we lay side by side on the bed.

  ‘Can’t we get another pair?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re from Kate Spade. We’re in Hicksville, Ohio. They won’t have Kate Spade here.’

  ‘I thought Kate Spade was over,’ he said.

  ‘They’ve had a reboot. And you shouldn’t know about things like that. Be a man.’

  He rolled over on top of me and looked into my face. ‘Be a man?’

  I stared at him for a moment. The mood between us changed and thickened.

  There wasn’t time. But I didn’t care. ‘Be quick,’ I said, tearing off my knickers.

  He was quick. Just about. His moans were still dying off when the phone jangled.

  ‘Jesus,’ Mannix groaned.

  It was the front desk, telling me that a journalist was waiting in the lobby. ‘Thanks,’ I gasped. ‘I’ll be right down.’

  ‘Stay a minute.’ Mannix tried holding onto my hips.

  ‘I can’t.’ I wrenched myself free of him. ‘While I’m out, will you see if you can do something about my shoes?’

  ‘What if I try spilling more red wine on them and pretend it’s a feature? A Jackson Pollock look.’

  ‘Okay …’ It was worth a try. I pulled on a pair of jeans and boots that were all wrong for Cleveland and all wrong for an interview, but I had no choice.

  ‘If that doesn’t work we’ll just cancel the rest of the tour,’ Mannix said.

  ‘Grand. I’ll be back in half an hour.’

  Mannix’s Jackson Pollock spatters didn’t work; they just looked like red wine stains, more of them. Then he’d tried cleaning the stains off with make-up wipes, but they gave the shoes alopecia. While I clattered out my blog, Mannix tried to order a replacement pair of shoes from Kate Spade in New York.

  ‘You can overnight to Cleveland, Ohio? But we’re flying to Tucson at five p.m. today. We leave Tucson at seven a.m. tomorrow. You can’t guarantee they’ll get there by then …? Okay, tomorrow we’ll be in San Diego between nine thirty a.m. and four p.m. But we don’t have an address, we’ll be moving around. Tomorrow night? Seattle. Great.’ After he’d given all his details, he hung up. ‘Okay, an identical pair of shoes will be waiting for you in Seattle.’

  I couldn’t wear jeans and boots tomorrow in San Diego. I’d melt. I’d have to go out and try to find a temporary pair of shoes here in Cleveland but I had three back-to-back interviews to do.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Mannix said.

  He returned with a pair of light blue shoes: they were patent not suede; they were round-toed, not pointy-toed; the heels were clumpy rather than curved and skinny. They looked plastic and cheap and horrible.

  ‘Nearly identical?’ Mannix sounded pleased with himself.

  Rage – terrible, awful rage – rose up in me. Fucking men. They were so stupid. They hadn’t a fucking clue.

  Something somewhere told me that I was being irrational, so I swallowed down the fury and reminded myself that these crappy shoes were only for one day.

  (As it happened, that wasn’t true. The Kate Spade shoes didn’t make it to Seattle until we’d left. They were then despatched to San Francisco to meet us there, but once again they arrived too late. They were probably still out there, to this day, in the great landmass of America, trailing in my wake, like a Grateful Dead fan.)

  While I was trying to make peace with the cheap-looking shoes, my phone rang. It was Gilda – and I wavered about answering. All through the tour, Gilda had continued my personal training by phone. She knew my schedule, so she factored in a run every day and Pilates every other day.

  ‘Hey, Gilda,’ I said. ‘I’ve got my gear on, my earpiece in and I’m ready to go.’

  ‘Great!’

  I lay on my back on the floor of the hotel room and breathed a little heavily. ‘Okay, I’m outside in the street now. I’m running. I’m at twelve-minute pace.’

  ‘Pick it up,’ she said. ‘Ten-minute miles. Keep that pace for fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Okay.’ I huffed and puffed, while Mannix quietly looked at me and shook his head and smiled.

  Gilda spoke encouraging words into my ear and I made myself gasp for breath.

  ‘Turn back now,’ she said. ‘But do the next mile in eight minutes.’

  I panted into the mouthpiece until Gilda said, ‘Slow it down to ten. Now twelve. Stay steady at twelve until you get back to the hotel. How’s your food?’

  ‘Good,’ I wheezed. ‘I ate the chicken and the green beans at the charity lunch. No bread. No rice. No dessert.’

  ‘And now you’re flying to Tucson for a charity dinner. Same rules apply: no matter what they put on your plate, no carbs. Ever! Especially no sugar. I’ll call you in the morning at five thirty a.m. Tucson time. Four-mile run before you go to the airport. Do your stretches now. You did good.’

  ‘Thanks, Gilda.’ I hung up and remained lying on the floor.

  ‘You know,’ Mannix said. ‘This is crazy. Just tell her you’re too tired to do it.’

  ‘I can’t. She’d be … disappointed in me. Come on, we have to go to the airport.’

  The flight to Tucson was delayed by three hours and Mannix and I made good progress on our his-and-hers ulcers.

  ‘It’s a charity dinner,’ I said, my face in my hands. ‘All those people have paid for their ticket. They’re expecting me to show up to talk to them.’

  Once we’d landed in Tucson and run to catch a taxi, I tried to wriggle into my evening dress and accidentally kicked the driver in the head. I was still apologizing when we drew up outside the hotel, where a deputation of hysterical committee members was watching out for me. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Sorry for –’

  ‘Come on. This way.’ They bundled me onto the stage without a chance to catch my breath.

  Immediately I knew it was a tough crowd. Sometimes the energy is with you and sometimes it isn’t. I’d kept these people waiting and they were wounded, so as soon as I finished telling my story, the hostile questioning started.

  ‘My husband got Guillain-Barré Syndr
ome …’

  I nodded sympathetically.

  ‘… and he died.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I murmured. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘He was a good person, probably better than you. How come he died and you didn’t?’

  ‘… Well, I survived because I was given a tracheotomy and put on a respirator in time.’

  ‘He got a tracheotomy too. Did he get the wrong kind?’

  ‘Well, er …’

  ‘Why does God let people die? What’s up with God’s plan?’

  She stared at me, waiting for an answer. I was even less of an expert on God’s plan than I was on effective tracheotomies.

  ‘… God’s ways are mysterious,’ I eventually managed. ‘Any other questions?’

  A Tucson matron with astonishing hair took the roving mic and cleared her throat. ‘Do you think they’ll make a movie of your book? And if so, who would you like to play you?’

  ‘Kathy Bates,’ I said.

  A confused murmuring broke out at this. ‘Kathy Bates?’ I heard them turn to each other and say. ‘But she’s a brunette.’

  I’d forgotten the Americans didn’t do self-deprecation.

  ‘I mean Charlize Theron,’ I said quickly. ‘Or Cameron Diaz.’ I was racking my brain for blonde movie stars. ‘I see a lady over there has her hand up. What’s your question, please?’

  ‘How do I get to be famous?’

  ‘You could murder someone,’ I heard myself say.

  A shocked Oooooh moved through the room. Aghast, I said, ‘I’m very sorry! I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just the tiredness –’ And I’d been unsympathetic to the woman whose husband had died. This exhausting process had sapped me of my compassion. ‘I’ve been on the road for eleven days and –’

  The mic was grabbed from me by one of the committee ladies. ‘Thank you, Stella Sweeney.’ She paused to allow some desultory applause and a couple of boos. ‘Stella will be signing her book in the auditorium.’

  The line was a short one. Nevertheless, I was on nutter alert. The nutters always hung around until the end. The nutters didn’t queue up with the rest of the people and let themselves get conveyor-belted along.

  Tonight, as a special treat, there was a nutter-off with two alpha-nutters squaring up to each other. One, a perky lady nutter; the other, a bloke, an anger-management-problem nutter.

  ‘You first,’ Perky Lady Nutter said, sweeping her hand in a gracious inviting manner to the man.

  ‘No, you.’

  ‘No, you.’

  ‘Look, bitch, I’m letting you ahead of –’

  As he was led away, he threw some pages at me. ‘It’s my book. Critique it! Call me!’

  Perky Lady Nutter leaned too close and said gaily, ‘I’m going to take you for cocktails in a great bar I know, and you’re going to tell me your secret formula for writing a best-seller.’

  ‘That’s so nice of you,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got to be on a plane in about six hours to …’ Where the hell was it tomorrow? ‘San Diego,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘I bought your book! I recommended it to my friends. You bitch! All I’m asking for –’

  ‘Thank you.’ I stood up and smiled around blindly. ‘Thank you, you’ve all been lovely. Tucson, yes, lovely. All of you here, lovely. But I must go now.’

  I grabbed an abandoned glass of wine from a table, downed it in one, took off my shoes and said, ‘Mannix, shall we?’

  We got a taxi to our hotel, where I lay on the floor of our room in front of the minibar and poured M&Ms into my mouth and intoned over and over again, ‘Chocolate, chocolate, I fucking love chocolate.’

  ‘Ruben wants to talk to you.’ Mannix held the phone at me.

  I widened my eyes and shook my head: I didn’t want to talk to Ruben. I’d got back from the book tour two days previously and had spent the entire time in bed, almost unable to speak.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Mannix said, quietly. ‘It’s good.’

  I took the phone.

  ‘I have some incredible news,’ Ruben said, tantalizingly. ‘Are you ready? Okay! One Blink at a Time has charted. Number thirty-nine in the New York Times best-sellers. Meanwhile, Bryce needs to get you guys in for a post-tour debrief. We’ll see you Friday, at eleven. Bryce can take you for lunch afterwards.’

  I lay back on the pillow, light-headed with relief.

  Hot on the heels of Ruben’s call came a flurry of congratulations from six or seven of the vice-presidents.

  Next to get in touch was Phyllis. ‘Number thirty-nine?’ she said. ‘My cats could get to number thirty-nine.’

  Before the meeting, Gilda came to the apartment and blow-dried my hair – it turned out that as a teenager she’d had a Saturday job in a salon and had ‘picked up the basics’.

  ‘Is there anything you can’t do?’ I asked, as she twirled the brush through my hair.

  She laughed. ‘My rocket science is a little spotty.’ Then she frowned. ‘You’re not planning to wear that dress?’

  ‘… Er, yes.’ It was a really pretty one from Anthropologie; Gilda had helped me choose it.

  ‘Not today,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Stella, but today you need to look tough.’ She began flipping through items in my wardrobe and brought out a sharply tailored suit. ‘Wear this,’ she said. ‘This is the right thing.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  At Blisset Renown, Mannix and I were herded to the boardroom table, where a small army of vice-presidents was waiting. I’d expected to see Phyllis – she’d been copied in on the emails – but there was no sign of her.

  ‘Welcome, everyone.’ Bryce strode into the room and took his place at the head of the table. ‘Let’s get going.’

  It seemed we were starting without Phyllis.

  ‘Great work, everybody, on One Blink at a Time,’ Bryce said. ‘Special thanks to Ruben and his team for the excellent coverage he got. And, of course, we’re all thrilled that the book charted. So this is a good time to reflect and see where we are. We don’t yet have final numbers from Barnes & Noble and online retailers, but we have hard information from the independents and we can extrapolate from there. For that I’m going to hand over to our colleague, Vice-President of Sales, Thoreson Gribble.’

  Thoreson, an enormous-chested man in a snow-white shirt, sent a blinding flash of teeth around the room. ‘So the book charted, which is terrific news. However, we didn’t get the optimal sales lift-off we would have preferred.’ He referred to his iPad. ‘We’re guessing the Annabeth Browning association scared folks away. But the signs are hopeful. For example, sixty-four copies sold in one independent in Boulder, Colorado, driven by a rave review on WoowooForYou.’

  I realized I was holding my breath.

  ‘Vermont also showed strong sales,’ Thoreson said. ‘Maple Books in Burlington sold thirty-three copies in a single week, driven by a lone bookseller who describes herself as “passionate” about One Blink at a Time.’ Another blaze of Thoreson’s gnashers. ‘So high five for that –’

  ‘That’s great, Thoreson,’ Bryce interrupted smoothly. ‘Stella and Mannix, you guys can read the full report at your leisure. To summarize, this is a marathon not a sprint. We’ve had an encouraging start and the plan is to build aggressively on this solid foundation. Could we have seen more encouraging results from the first tour? Hell, yeah. But basically it’s all good.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I murmured, a little anxiously.

  ‘There are many pockets of support for you out there, so our math-whizz Bathsheba Radice’s cost-benefit algorithm indicates there’s value in two more tours.’

  ‘Okay, but –’ Mannix said.

  ‘Here’s the plan,’ Bryce said. ‘Another tour in July, when people are starting their vacations. Then we’ll go again mid-November, to catch the holiday-gifting market. By the start of the new year we’ll have had an avalanche of sales. Have your new book ready February first and we’ll publish July.’

  He shoved his chair back an
d stood up. ‘Terrific to see you guys.’

  He was leaving? I’d thought we were going for lunch.

  I stumbled to my feet and Bryce was shaking my hand and patting my shoulder, already halfway out of the room. ‘Stay well, Stella.’

  It was the middle of April and spring had arrived, seemingly overnight. The sun was shining, there was even a bit of heat in it. Mannix and I came home via Central Park, where hundreds of Day-Glo yellow daffodils lined our route. Despite being bum-rushed by Bryce, it was impossible to not feel hopeful.

  Back at the apartment, I texted Gilda to let her know I was home and ready for my daily run. Fifteen minutes later, she arrived at my front door.

  ‘So they didn’t take you for lunch?’ she asked.

  ‘No …’

  ‘Ah … Oookay. So! How’s your crazy agent? What did she steal today?’

  ‘She didn’t come.’

  ‘Wooah! She just left you hanging in an important meeting? She doesn’t do much for her ten per cent.’

  Phyllis actually got thirteen per cent but I still felt I had to say, ‘She’s not the hand-holding type.’

  ‘Hey, none of my business. So, Stella, let’s get out there and speed up your metabolism!’

  ‘Be careful with her,’ Mannix said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Gilda flicked her eyes upwards. ‘Precious cargo, I know.’

  We went down in the elevator and stepped out into the sunshine.

  ‘He’s so nice to you,’ Gilda said.

  ‘Ah, you know, he … Ah, yeah, he is.’

  ‘Okay, get those arms pumping, get that heart beating.’

  ‘So are you … er … dating at the moment?’

  It was strange, my relationship with Gilda. We were instinctively intimate, but, because I paid her, some boundaries had to be observed.

  ‘Kissing my frogs, kissing my frogs.’

  ‘You’ll meet some lovely man,’ I said, encouragingly.

  ‘Well, I’m sure as hell not putting up with some asshole.’ Her tone was clipped. ‘I’m holding out for a dreamy guy like Mannix.’

  I’m holding out for a dreamy guy like Mannix. Her words repeated in my head and – surprised and rattled – I turned to look at her. I’d always thought she was pretty but, unexpectedly, she appeared like a queen. A beautiful queen with the power to take Mannix away from me. My mouth fell open and I retreated from her.