The Unwritten Bestseller

Someone must have taken Mary’s mind and made an exact copy of it, because without having told anyone ever, she was hearing it read out loud to her this very moment. 

“Last night I went for a walk through a clear, but not cold Dublin night. Which isn’t true. In reality, I went for a walk in high heels and dressed up to the nines across the bottom of my self-esteem. A very dark place without a light of hope. Without any lights of home. It doesn’t matter if the next woman’s walk through her darkest valley looks different to mine. At the gate of her own she hands over all respect and love for herself and her family like a coat in a theater’s cloakroom, just like I did. Only to become the clown in her own play. Like me.”

Kate loved the words she was reading to her. Mary could sense the fondness through the line. She felt dizzy. Those were her words, her sentences. Down to the last comma. Where had Kate gotten this? The room was spinning. She could not ask. But. She had to.

“Kate?” 

“Yes?”

“Is this, well, what is it, a book, Kate? Or where are you reading this?” Mary spoke faster than she could think. She had to get the words out before they got stuck. She took her car keys from the wooden bowl on the shelf beside the phone’s base station, pressing the flip button with her thumb, pushing the key back into the black silicon shell in a quick sequence. Click, flip, sleeetsh, click, flip, sleeetsh.

“Isn’t this so sad and beautiful, Mar’?” Kate ignored her question, she wanted to hear the approval first for having picked out lines that sounded like they were written for them, please join me in my excitement, her bated breath whispered. For years they joked about coincidences and that there must be an omnipotent head writer who built serendipity as well as unlucky fortuity right into their lives. The coincidences came in the shape of songs, numbers (mostly 42), headlines, pictures, or, like now apparently, books. It was often sarcastic, rarely funny, sometimes so paradoxical it hurt their brains. When the coincidence was even bigger than expected. When one’s thoughts are suddenly public. For example. 

“Listen to this, here, this, you gotta hear this: ‚In case you don’t know your way around my deep and dark valley: It is extremely similar to a small park in Dublin city surrounded on three sides by Georgian Town Houses, some lovingly kept, some a tad messy, some downright beautiful – does that sound familiar? Some doors have pots with lush flowers growing in them on the steps in front of them; all the doors have different colours. Pink, blue, white. Yours is red.’ That does sound familiar, it so does, doesn’t it?” 

It does, yes. Mary’s lunch began to creep up, rising up in her throat – that previously delicious sausage roll, from Bread 41 (not 42, ironically, she thought) on Pearse Street was now soaked in bile. The formerly flaky pastry was now soggy and thick. The succulent, perfectly seasoned pork filling, mashed into pastry mush. She got it from a shop just around the corner of her darkest valley, not even five minutes away from that door, his door. His red door.  She hummed agreement to Kate, afraid to open her mouth, in case her stomach’s contents would explode, escape from her throat, through her lips, would she let them open even just a second. Her fingers tightened on that key. Click, flip, sleeetsh, click, flip, sleeetsh. She would have to say something though. Or Kate would keep reading this to her. Oh, she did.

“Mary, Mary, it continues, listen, listen – ‘I am aware that there are many low self-esteem maps looking much worse, just as much in need of a better functioning emotional GPS as mine. They could be smelly and dirty and fittingly disgusting places – as if the person walking around in them is to be punished for her awful dreams, surely one doesn’t deserve any better anyway. But the ugliest part of mine, from an objective point of view, is: The uneven concrete on the footpath which made me stumble a few times, because it was dark, and nobody ever sees any need in this city in evening the patchy surface out.’ That’s exactly like you giving out about the Dublin City Council not filling those potholes.“ Yes, and stumbling over them like a sad left-over nightclubber, but unfortunately sober.

Mary flipped the key open again, turned it, held it like a knife, stabbed it against her right thigh. The blunt tip wouldn’t pierce her jeans’ side, it would barely leave a bruise. But she had to direct her thoughts to calmer waters, focus on plain physical pain, anything, as long as it was something else other than her racing thoughts. And she had to keep Kate from reading on whatever it was she held in her hand: What if there was more, if it continued to be my detailed account of my entire past four years? Word for word? What if Kate would read on from this maybe dark-sounding but, in comparison, very innocent moment? What if she found out what she did? 

“Kate, listen,” she managed, jaws clenched, “I have to go.” No screaming now. Breathe. Be casual. “Tell me, that sounds really fascinating, where did you get that?” 

“Would you believe it, I was in the bookstore earlier. They had just gotten it in the other day, and Patrick recommended it – apparently it’s the truest account of a friendship they have ever read. It will top the bestseller lists, he said.” Oh, I bet it will. Mary’s mind raced. “What is it called?”

“That’s the weirdest part. The protagonists lend their names for the title. It’s called ‘Maria and Katharina’. And both of them are struggling in their marriages, almost like we were.” Exactly like we were, really. What is happening with my thoughts? 

“That is weird indeed.” She needed Kate to put that book down and step away from it. At least until she found out more. “Will you bring it over and show me? Maybe we could read it together? Like in a book club?” 

She could hear her friend shutting the book, laying it down on the table at the other end of the line. “Yeah, okay, that sounds good. I wonder who must have been reading your mind,” she said, amused, “It’s incredible, the coincidences, the potholes and the red door. Honestly, if that’s a real thing now, can you read my mind and have a pizza and a glass of Tempranillo waiting for me tonight?”

“I will.”

Until then, Mary had things to do. Upstairs, she pulled the middle drawer of the old doctor’s surgery desk open. Mary had kept diaries since she was a young woman. They were neatly stacked in the drawer, the accounts of the years long gone pushed to the back, the last few years sitting in the front. They are all there. Thank God. All of them. She pulled the one from two years ago out. The slim, black pen that rested on the latest notebooks slid down, onto the little nest of cables in the front right corner of the drawer. She’d charge it later. No time for this now. Mary flicked through the first few pages. June. There it was. “In case you don’t know your way around my deep and dark valley –” Mary’s eyes widened as they searched the next lines. “Does that sound familiar?” Yes. And: “Yours is red.” 

She flung the notebook onto the desk, it landed with a thick sound on the green leather of the desktop. When she first used the ruled notebooks with the smart pen she was treating them like raw eggs, afraid her entries would get lost if she shook the books or dropped them. 

“They didn’t get lost, these words.” Mary spat the sentence out into the empty room, the words falling on the floor, like the study was all of a sudden a huge vacuum, with no air to carry sound or souls. “But they did find their way into a bestseller that I did not authorize.” Was she now talking to herself? She looked around. Is someone listening to me too? 

Mary opened her laptop, typed “Maria and Katharina” into the search field. There it was, a cover much brighter than her black notebooks, full of flowers and greenery. Gawd. She clicked on it. It was written by (Written by? Really?) some guy called Paul Evans. No other books under his name. Just the one. Published by Dolphin Press. A website, a phone number, in the States. Mary fished her mobile from her long black cardigan’s left pocket and dialed.

“I need a contact number for Paul Evans.” Mary didn’t even let the receptionist finish chirping the publishing house’s name into the phone. 

“Just a moment, please.” It was just gone four. Please, don’t let Kate read it all until she gets here tonight, please, I have to find out first how this happened. Let her not open the pages of October. Please. 

Kate knew all about her affair from the word go. They had no secrets from each other. Bar this one that Mary had kept. Admittingly well, until today. Because now, amongst everything else, it had crept into this newly-printed publication; hey, hey, hey, available in well-stocked bookstores near you. The holding melody was as happy as that receptionist. Mary still felt like throwing up.

“Hello, are you Maria?”

“What? No.” The deep voice and the broad American accent on the other end threw her. “I mean, in a way, yes. Yes, I am she. Well, I am not Katharina anyway. Are you Paul Evans?”

The voice laughed. It had no face. In Mary’s mind there was no body attached to that voice. To her, there could not be a person. The laughter turned into a chuckle. “Paul Evans? No, not at all. But I am delighted you called straight away, Maria.”

“It’s Mary.”

“Of course, Mary. I was wondering how long it would take for you to –”

For me to ring? For me to what? 

“–to claim your stake. We prepared the paperwork already, hoping we’d hear from you soon after publishing. That you’d get in touch in the first week, amazing. But ah, unfortunately, we cannot offer more than twenty thousand.” He paused. “US Dollars.”

Mary shook her head, as if to fight off her thoughts like annoying midges on a humid summer day. “You are offering me twenty grand for publishing my diaries? Without asking me?”

“Yes.”

“But I did not give you permission to print my thoughts.”

“And? How will you prove that? You could have just copied our book into your notebooks and then claim you wrote it first. 20,000 dollars is a lot of money.”

That was a lot of money. And she could give most of it to Kate, who’d seriously have good use for it. Kate was a single mom-of-three for a while now, and that money could turn into shoes for the teenage boy, a summer jacket for the girleen and a doll for the baby who was actually a proper toddler, but nobody wanted to admit that yet. 

“Let me think about it. I’ll ring you back.”

After I decide how to I tell my best friend that I ran over her husband and killed him because he was such an arsehole. 

“You do that, Maria. Uhm, Mary. Ring me later.”

Yes. Right after I decide how to open the door to Kate. Hey hun, remember that hit-and-run two years ago? Wine and pizza’s on the table inside, enjoy. Oh, and somehow the description of how it happened is in the book in your hand that’s deemed to become a bestseller.