Because eventually we realise that the writers aren’t broke girls from Bumfuck, Nowhereshire. Writers need supportive families. Not just families who love you, or families who believe in you. But families with money. Fathers who own mews properties in West London. Aunties with columns in the Daily Mail and pals at Tatler, who will put money in your bank account while you come in and answer the phone in the Easter holidays. Mums with handbags that cost more than most second-hand cars, who will truss you up in their cast-off Chanel, to make sure that you look the part in the office. If I was a real writer, perhaps I wouldn’t feel quite so alone, and abandoned. I’d never look at the people who live their lives in daylight and feel like the one left out in the cold.

I reach for something positive—I feel as though I owe it to her. ‘Honestly though, Jen, I think teaching English will inspire you to write your novel. Sure, my grubby, sexy stuff seems exciting now—but by the time we’re forty, I’ll be barely making a living and you’ll have won the Booker Prize!’

‘I am rolling my eyes down the phone at you.’ Still, I can hear the smile in her voice. We’re good.

Chapter Eight

Nothing But The Girl

Harri

It’s the third Sunday night in January, the eve of that magical, melancholy Monday that has been labelled ‘blue’ by scores of desperate and inventive public relations teams. The day that all sparkling Christmas memories have faded and tarnished, the only evidence of any festivities being a reminder to make an eye-watering minimum payment on a billowing credit card balance. The day before the chicken, chocolate and turkey come home to roost, and women all over the world lie on their beds, tense their biceps and feel beads of sweat jewelling their foreheads, as they force zips and button-holes to defy all known laws of physics. The night before the Day of Grey, when you’re statistically most likely to pour coffee down your white shirt, somewhere between your front door and your office. A day when you don’t just miss the bus, but you’ll be caught in its splashy, filthy trail as it drives through puddles at 70 miles an hour. Harri reckons that any bleak Blue Monday would have to go a long way to beat the one when she leapt out of an Uber only for her right foot to crunch against the bones of a still warm, near dead pigeon.