mexican bandits - First Chapter

Monday, 4th June 2019. 9.15am

I am on the cusp of greatness. Everything is within my grasp. I have made difficult decisions along the way, but all for the greater good. The path to success stretches out before me, and all that is required is for me to take the first step.

I am on the cusp -

‘So, you’re absolutely clear?’

Has she been talking this whole time? I must confess, I switched off for a minute there. What a nuisance. Still, I doubt I missed anything terribly important.

It was my first morning as an intern at Mackenzie and Miller, perhaps the seventh or eighth most influential publishing house in this part of Soho. The eponymous Miller poised, hunched over my empty desk, motioning with a ballpoint pen towards my notebook, which remained blank. She was an old crow of a woman, stunted by so many years spent slaving away at the coalface of the modern literary world.

I nodded attentively, resisting an impulse to look at my watch. There was nothing to be clear about. The awful woman was asking me to undertake the most mundane task imaginable. I remained calm and compliant in the hope that she would leave me alone so I could get my browser into incognito mode and stalk Tyler on Facebook. Nevertheless, she hovered, seemingly expecting some other form of response. I smiled meekly and continued to nod, my head bobbing like a tremor until the older woman slowly straightened. A curt ‘right then,’ and she was off, and I could survey my domain.

Many people I meet make a little joke when I tell them that my name is Maria Luck. They will giggle as they ask me for this week’s lottery numbers, or enquire after my black cat, or perhaps decide to call me Mystic Maria for a while. It is tiresome, but I put up with it. The truth is, I am not a lucky person. Nothing has happened to me by chance.

No, my life is moulded to my specifications because I have made sure that everything works exactly as I expect it to, and that anything which does not function to my standards is eliminated in short order. Some people see me as a total salt factory for the way I go about things, but that’s their loss. In my twenty-two years to date I have never encountered anyone who disagreed with me who ended up being important in any kind of meaningful way.

With a heavy heart I considered the pile in front of me. This was not going well. I had imagined foamy cappuccinos with passing authors. Shooting the breeze with the design team about the cover choice for the latest installment of a best-selling crime series. Inspired and in fact deeply meaningful conference calls with the west coast in which the solution seemed always just out of reach until, right at the last, I would chip in a ‘what about…’ and there would be a shocked silence, followed by a gasp of amazement that here in their midst was a true visionary, someone who just, you know, got it, in a way that so many others simply didn’t. The MD would break into a grin and say, well ladies and gentlemen, it looks like young Maria is after my job! And we would all laugh.

It was not to be. Instead here I was with the slush pile. All the losers who were apparently too simple-minded to understand the basic sentence which was emblazoned on the website: We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. If it hadn’t been my first day, I might have argued courageously for a more definitive solution to the problem, one involving shredders and recycling and digital portals, but I’d already heard that Miller had some superstition about JK Rowling being rejected by seventy nine publishers or something, so they all had to be trawled through. All the chirpy wannabe bestsellers with their carefully chosen double spaced fonts. The whole thing was just so bloody dreary.

What was Tyler doing? Across town in the shining glass and chrome of Kings Cross. His internship had started last week, but unlike me, his uncle had hooked him up with some sweet gig over at Spotify, compiling R&B playlists, playing table tennis at lunchtime, early finishes to go to new release parties at places with rooftop gardens, promos and incentives, and no doubt always girls, girls, girls, everywhere he looked. And I was stuck in this airless office, on the third floor of Mackenzie and Miller, so far away from the coveted Marketing & PR department I could almost cry. So unfair. There was hope, however. The summer couldn’t last forever. And beyond it lay the hippest music festival on the planet, which we had snapped up tickets for. A sanctuary for the beautiful people, our Aegean escape to sun and sea, beats and bikinis. A long, long weekend of DJs and daquiris. It would all be worth it for the blessed escape of Global Tantrum.

An uneasy groan swept through my stomach, which I couldn’t put down to too much coffee or a rushed breakfast. The fight with father still echoed through my bones, flicking my ears and pulling my pigtails. The look I had fired at him had been practiced for many hours beforehand in front of the bedroom mirror. I knew just the glare, just the contempt to push into the frame to make my displeasure stick. I mean, it wasn’t his fault. I realised that. Someone had to be blamed, though.

Irreconcilable differences. Everywhere you looked. That’s what this morning’s letter had said anyway, with all of its fancy logos and arrowed stickers with ‘SIGN HERE’ written on them in bold. The nuts and bolts of it, the mechanics, that bit was straightforward, spelled out. The truth behind the black and white of the ink was another matter. He still seemed so bewildered about it all. She had only left three weeks ago and now it was legal letters and beans on toast for dinner again. Poor sap.

I hadn’t been disappointed at father. Oh no, he would have recognised my disappointed face, the sour pout that spoke of a new phone, one model down from the item specified. Disappointment is my default setting, the casual hardships of modern life as a young twenty-something. It wasn’t sadness either. Sad had been the previous step, as I’d realised their separation was inevitable if happiness was ever to be achieved. It had seemed unfair, but at the same time I’d understood that there was no other way for the chips to fall. I’d even been sad when the dog had died, all those years ago, just after my difficult fourteenth birthday, but in truth by that point my sadness was muffled by boys and make-up and Snapchat. Poor Foxglove.

No, this look was an anger, a pure, righteous, unbridled fury that such a ridiculous turn of events should happen to me, Maria, rather than one of the less fortunate girls like Geraldine Fletcher or Sarah, or even Rebecca, whose dad had died of cancer, and we had all rallied round to help with sponsored walks and Great British Bake Off competitions. Not my father. He’d just taken it, just accepted it. I had expected a bit of a fight. It turned out he was weak, just like all the others. Mother was a different story, but I didn’t have the head space for her at the moment. I needed to concentrate.

There was nothing else for it. Miller had been clear, for all her patronising repetitions. Just read the first chapter. If it hadn’t hooked you by then, forget it. That was a small mercy. Running my finger down the pile I tried to estimate how many manuscripts there might be. 20? 30? At a chapter each, plus notes, plus time to craft a response that would show I was taking this new position seriously (ha!), it was still going to be a few days before I got past this first hurdle. And by then, how much more of this crap would have appeared in the mail? When had this pile been started? Months ago? Weeks ago? Today? I thought absentmindedly of Sisyphus. Perhaps I should have stuck at English Lit rather than going for the double with Classics. Perhaps a more focused approach would have paid dividends. It was too late for all that now. With a dejected slump, I reached for the neatly stapled manuscript on the top of the pile.