David Solomons - Not Another Happy Ending

The printer spewed out another copy of the manuscript, and as she waited for the four hundred pages of her thus far ill-starred debut to stack up she hoisted the sash window, leaned on the sill and took a deep breath.

The air smelled of trees after the rain. Half a dozen slender poplars lined the quiet West End street, in full leaf now that what passed for the Scottish summer had arrived. Beyond them stood a blond sandstone terrace, a mirror to the building Jane's flat occupied. From the top floor someone practised the cello. The doleful strings drifted over the treetops, and suddenly the flats were miserable dolls’ houses with naked windows through which Jane glimpsed desperate lives: a raging argument between husband and wife, the tired old lady with no visitors, the self-harming teenage girl crying in her bedroom. On the street below a wan-faced young mother slouched behind a squeaking pushchair, cigarette jammed between chapped lips, flicking ash over a wailing infant.

The cellist took a break from his practice and reality was instantly restored. The windows revealed no more heartache than a tired executive mourning a slice of burnt toast, and in a patch of sunlight beneath the trimmed poplars it was a smart young mother wheeling a silver-framed pram, talking to her child in a voice as groomed as her suit.

Jane roused herself from her melancholy flight of fancy. This was the West End of Glasgow, a dear green place of well-kempt gardens, specialist delicatessens, and more convertibles per square mile than anywhere else in Europe.

She still couldn't quite believe she lived here. She had grown up in the East End of the city. It was four and a half miles away, but may as well have been a million, her life until the age of sixteen spent in one of the brutalist tower blocks more readily associated with the mean city of legend.

Residents never referred to them as tower blocks; they were always the ‘high flats’. Plain language hid a litany of flaws as deep as their rotten foundations: walls thin as cigarette paper, alien mould choking every corner, a stagnant pool of water in the basement referred to with typical humour as ‘the spa’, and stairwells daubed with crude graffiti that always bothered Jane less for its vulgarity than for its incorrect use of the apostrophe (in retrospect, a clear sign of bookish leanings to come). She laughed when she heard people reminisce about growing up on the schemes: ‘Aye, we might have been poor, but we were happy.’ What a load of crap. It was a miserable place to exist.

She'd only got out thanks to her mum. She remembered the letter arriving on her twenty-first birthday. It was from her mum, which came as something of a surprise since she'd died fourteen years earlier. They'd had so little time together that now when Jane tried to picture her face it was like reaching through water. Turned out mum had squirrelled away most of the wages she made at the Co-op in some kind of get rich quick scheme invested in Jane's name soon after she was born. The letter duly arrived with a valuation and a note on how to claim her inheritance—god, it sounded like something out of Dickens.

She remembered sitting on the floor by the front door reading the contents with growing disbelief. The money was enough for a healthy deposit on her new flat; her new life. It was surprising enough that the dodgy investment had reaped a profit, but the bigger surprise was that her mum had contrived to keep the money out of her dad's thieving hands.

A breeze at the open window ruffled the rejection letters on the board. Set amongst them was a faded Polaroid of an older man, face scored with deep lines, eyes surprisingly soft, one pile driver arm wrapped around a ten year-old girl. In the photograph the late afternoon sun has caught her hair, turning the hated ‘ginger’ a deep, sunset red. Father and daughter are both smiling. But then, that was the summer before it happened.

Mum had taken the snap on a day out to the beach at Prestwick. Unusually, the sun had shone all day, just like it should in a memory. She remembered on the way home afterwards stopping in Kilmarnock at Varani's for ice cream. Best in the world, her dad used to say. Not that to her knowledge her father had ever been outside Scotland. Of course she couldn't be sure of his travel itinerary since then, not after he walked out on them later that year. He left a few months after the photograph was taken, on her birthday. She laughed. How much more of a cliché could you get? Her hand brushed the faded photograph. That was the last time she'd had ice cream from Varani's.

Her eye fell on a flourishing umbrella plant on her desk, its soft, green leaves trailing across the top of her laptop screen. It had been a present from him a few years ago; the only evidence in a decade that he was still alive. When it arrived she prepared herself for the inevitable follow-up: the drunken, apologetic phone call in the middle of the night; the knock at the door with a bunch of petrol station flowers. Neither of them came; only more silence.

The leaves were dry to her touch. She gave the plant a quick spray from a water bottle she kept close by. They didn't have a garden in the high flats, but her dad had installed a window box and she remembered planting it with him. It was a shady spot, he explained, so they filled it with Busy Lizzies in summer and hardy cyclamen in winter. The water-spray hissed. Thinking about it, she wasn't even sure why she kept his plant.

With a whine the printer finished its work. She packaged up the latest submission into a large buff envelope and wrote out the address of the next publisher on her hit list. Tristesse Books were based in Glasgow. Tristesse was French for something she couldn't quite remember. She'd taken Higher French at school, but only just passed the exam. Je m'appelle Jane . J'habite à Glasgow . That was about the extent of her conversation. That and, at a push, she reckoned she could order a saucisson .

Outside, the sky darkened, dampening the earlier promise of sunshine. The wind swirled around the trees, sending a flurry of rain against the open window. Hurriedly, she slid it shut and stood for a moment gazing at her reflection in the rain-soaked pane. Her hair was still long and straight and red, its neat fringe framing a pair of bright green eyes held open in what seemed to be a state of permanent surprise at the vagaries of the big, bad world. When the kids at school had taunted her for being a ‘ginger’, her dad had pulled her onto his knee and together they'd watched his (pirated) copy of Disney's The Little Mermaid . The first few times she didn't understand the message that however tough the journey, even redheads are allowed a happy ever after. Instead, through a terrible misreading, Ariel and her singing friends gave her a horror of losing her voice, and for years the slightest hint of hoarseness convinced her that the end of her little life was imminent.

The superstitions and playground taunts of childhood were long gone, but now she attracted a different kind of unwelcome attention, from the Armani-skinned lizards with large cufflinks who frequented the bars on Byres Road. And these days there was no dad to tell her it would all turn out happily in the end.

He was the one who'd inadvertently introduced her to the world of books, dropping her off in the public library to wait while he took care of a little business at the bookies across the street and then nipping in for a swift pint—or nine—at the pub next door. As he gambled and drank away their benefit money she immersed herself in books.

Even after he walked out of her life she continued to visit the library, just in case he came back. She hated him for leaving, but more than anything else she wanted him to come back. And as she waited for him to swing through the door with his big grin and too-loud voice, she read. The library was her playground, her university. Here she was surrounded by familiar faces. Hello, Cinderella. Cheer up, Tess. Good day, Mr Darcy. As the years passed, The Brothers Grimm became The Brothers Karamazov until one day she picked up a pen and began to write her own stories.