3 Underpass View,

Ringroad Way,

Birmingham

Dear Ms Devino,

I enclose my novel Shooting Up, Shooting Down, plus a cheque for three hundred pounds, although I wondered, since this is a very short novel, whether I would receive a refund for part of that.

As you can see from my work, I am very much influenced by the Trainspotting school of fiction, and being a social worker in Birmingham I have certainly experienced life’s rough underbelly first hand. This is a very black, futuristic vision: a cry of doom.

Since I am a poet, already published in many magazines, including Strimp!, Angry Young Poets Bulletin, and the prestigious Cracked Voices Journal with my elegy, ‘Meditations of the Beetle’, it seemed a logical progression to me to write the whole of my novel in free-verse form, an idea that I am sure will strike you as innovative and original.

My novel has been rejected by two mainstream publishers with no comments whatsoever, except that one remarked that Wilfred was a very old-fashioned name considering that I am only twenty-nine. Actually I was named after the Great War poet Wilfred Owen and certainly do not wish to change my name!

Perhaps you could advise me on who would be most likely to appreciate a work of this kind.

I look forward to your reply.

Yours sincerely,

Wilfred Quinn

I was invited to attend a photo shoot with the other five Brown’s Bright New Flowers of Fiction in Spring, and there was going to be coverage in Sunday newspapers and a glossy mag! Then we were to tour Brown’s London branches signing books, where we’d be displayed face-out at the front of the store in a special stand, as would the books.

At least it meant that I had to tell Sergei that I couldn’t make it on the following Monday, because it had been getting a bit tricky holding him off, especially since he’d sent me the diamond heart, and clearly he felt he’d done the sackcloth-and-ashes role to death. But just because he was famous and gorgeous, did that really mean that he could sleep with anyone he wanted and I’d have to accept it because I was the only one he loved?

I just put that question to Jackie, who looked at me as if I was a halfwit and said, ‘Well, duh, Tina! Yes, it certainly does!’

But that was not my idea of love, actually.

When I phoned him, Sergei said rather nasally that it was perhaps as well I wasn’t coming over on Monday because he felt as though he was coming down with flu and he wouldn’t want me to get it. I expected it would just be a little cold, at the most, and very likely he was being a malade imaginaire as usual.

‘What’s that hammering noise in the background?’