Page 1 of One Bed

ChapterOne

Driving her rental car away from the airport, Bea Williams wished she wasn’t in a rush to get to Golly’s Santorini villa near Oia. It was midday, and the sun was high in the dense blue sky, coating everything in a luminous glow. Despite summer being over, the bougainvillaea, jasmine, and potted geraniums still pulsated with colour, while the lake-smooth turquoise sea shimmered. The Greek sun created sharp contrasts between light and shadow and accentuated the contours of the cliffs and rocky outcrops of the caldera.

Mid-October, when many of the accommodation establishments closed their doors and the owners wiped the sweat from their foreheads and checked their bulging bank accounts, was her favourite time to be on the island.

The sunsets were as vibrant, the sea still warm, but the island, especially the famous, blue-roofed town of Oia, wasn’t a portly man’s vest bursting its buttons. In October, Oia returned to being part of a community, a place where people lived year-round, where you didn’t need to fight your way through the streets because the selfie crowd needed to pose in front of the iconic views of the caldera, or because theyhadto capture the always amazing sunset.

Thank God the island was, for Santorini, relatively empty. Bea didn’t know if she could contend with hoards of pushy tourists. The next two weeks were going to be busy. She was organising Golly’s joint retirement and seventieth birthday bash while wrestling with a combination of writer’s block, imposter syndrome and characters who wouldn’t bloody talk to her.

She’d visited Santorini in every season, sometimes several times a year, sometimes to write, sometimes to relax. This island was her second home, the place where she’d banged out the first book in herUrban Explorersseries, where she’d gathered her courage to show Golly her work, praying her acerbic godmother wouldn’t strip ten layers of her skin while she critiqued her work before telling her it was unsaleable.

Ithadbeen unsaleable, back then, but Golly had made a series of suggestions and Bea had rewritten the book three times. A year later, her super-agent godmother sold the first three books in the series. Bea’d submitted book nine of the series a few weeks back and was currently plotting book ten. Lately, she was as insecure as she’d been as a debut author five years ago, jumpy and jittery and second-guessing herself at every turn.

She couldn’t remember when she’d last lost time in front of the keyboard, stumbling out of the story bleary-eyed with cramping fingers, knowing the letters she tossed onto the screen were pure gold. The voices in her head – snatches of conversation between her characters, some in whispers, some shouted – were silent. She no longer saw short video clips of what they were doing or how they were reacting.

Writing, her solace, her joy and her escape felt like dragging stone-heavy feet through peanut butter…

Blup…

Bea cocked her head and hit the volume button to turn down Shaboozey’s ‘A Bar Song’ blasting from the rental car’s small speakers. She usually caught the bus from the airport to Oia, with just a rucksack on her back, but this trip to Golly’s Folly required a large suitcase and dresses in bags. Whatwasthat strange noise? Not recognising it, she shrugged, lifted the volume, tapped her fingers against the steering wheel and wished for her own double shot of whisky.

As Bea’s professional crisis was ratcheting up, Golly had announced her retirement and told the publishing world she was closing her literary agency. That meant Bea (and the agency’s other clients) needed to find alternative representation. She’d been tossing back antacids like chocolate-covered peanuts since first hearing her godma’s news.

‘I’ve got more money than God, Bea-darling, and I want to spend it! I want to spend some time at the Hidden Beach Resort, party at Tomorrowland, and drink Ayahuasca in the Orinoco basin. I want to read forpleasure, Bea-darling;ifI find the time between learning Spanish and my Pilates and Bikram yoga classes. I also intend to find a lover.’

The fact that Bea needed to look up the Hidden Beach Resort – it was a luxurious nudist colony on the Mexican Riviera – and refresh her mind about Ayahuasca – the Amazon version of psychedelic ’shrooms – was a little embarrassing. Golly was extremely eccentric, vivacious and super cool. Everything she was…

Not.

Her godmother – actually Golly was her mum’s godmother but, thanks to Bea being dropped on her doorstep every holiday since she was six because her mum couldn’t be arsed to have her during the summer as per her parents’ custodial agreement – lived life at a thousand miles per hour.

While Bea was still trying to take in the soul-sinking news about her retirement, Golly went on to say that she wanted her seventieth birthday and retirement bash to be on the Greek island of Santorini, at her villa on the outskirts of Oia.

Golly was a stalwart of the London and New York literary and art scenes and had a vast network of contacts all over the world. She wanted everyone she worked with: editors and authors –friendsandfoes, Bea-darling!– to attend. It took Bea a week to whittle the thousand-plus guest list down to two fifty, with Golly kicking, shouting and pouting while they argued about whether a lover she’d had in her forties warranted an invitation. Or her beauty therapist or her new hairdresser.

Golly didn’t see the point of holding a small party. She wanted a crowd, dammit, so she could be the belle of the ball and be painted with adulation, buoyed by blandishments. Bea thought she was being a tad optimistic believing everyone thought she was wonderful. Golly’d had numerous lovers, had broken up a marriage or two –I didn’t cheat, Bea-darling, they did! – and was once a powerful editor in publishing before establishing the G&T Literary Agency, a play on her initials and her favourite drink. It started out small and exclusive, and stayedveryexclusive. The agents she employed looked after the interests of many well-known and mid-list authors, but Golly repped a couple of New York Times bestsellers, a Booker Prize winner, and the publicity-shy Parker Kane, an authorLibrary Journalhad called ‘an exceptional, exciting talent’.

Bea tuned back into her music and hit the button to drop the window open and allow the fresh, herb-scented air to stroke her cheeks and mess up her hair. It wasn’t a bad way to spend a Sunday.

Golly was her anchor, her true north. She was the font of irreverent wisdom, the kick up her butt, the Doric columns holding up her world. The only person she trusted to be there for her. Bea had friends, but she kept them at arm’s length, never allowing them to get too close; and thanks to her mum and her ex hooking up, Bea rarely dated. What was the point when she was terrified of being hurt and being disappointed again? But she’d allowed Golly behind her mile-high wall. Her life would be paint-dryingly boring without that tiny, cigarillo-smoking, alcohol-swilling, filter-lacking loudmouth, the person who invented the concept of giving no fucks, in her life.

Golly’s house had always been where Bea escaped to when life with her dad became too overwhelming, the only place she could be a kid. Golly had scooped her up after her father died when she was sixteen, becoming her mentor, aunt, grandmother and best friend all rolled into one. And as her literary agent, Golly was the only person (apart from Reena, Golly’s oldest friend) who knew that Bea was Parker Kane, the author of the surprisingly successfulUrban Explorersseries for pre-teens. Golly – confident, loud, gregarious and generous – was whom Bea strived, with little success, to be.

When she’d dropped the news of her retirement – without the gravity it deserved – Golly had asked Bea to help with two things: one easy, one bitterly hard.

‘I’m combining my seventieth birthday with my retirement, and I need you to organise everything, Bea-darling. I’m saying goodbye to my old life as a literary doyenne, so I want a blowout, raise-the-roof, fuck-with-everyone’s-head party. Can you organise that for me?’

With the help of an event planner, that part was easy peasy.

Her second request was more difficult.

‘You also need to think about how my retirement affects you, Bea. Currently, I’m the shield between you and the world, and you need to figure out what you are going to do. I’d like you to step out from behind your pseudonym. I can’t force you to do that, but, if you still want to hide, then you need a new agent. How do we get you one without revealing who you are?’

It was a conundrum and one that made Bea’s head ache. She was no closer to an answer than she was when she’d first heard Golly’s news. What nobody, not even Golly, understood was that she and Parker Kane were two different entities. The Parker Kane who replied to reader’s letters and bantered with her fans on social media was hip and switched-on; a little glam, a lot confident; someone cosmopolitan and creative, who knew how to use words like ‘yeet’ and ‘sus’ and ‘flex’ and didn’t have to look them up on Urban Dictionary. Parker was on the ball, confident, funny, and smart.

Parker Kane was the protective barrier between Bea and the world, a way to shield herself from the criticisms of reviewers and readers, and the fluctuations of an industry that could, on some occasions, be brutal. Bea, the person she was away from her computer, was plagued by self-doubt, someone who found it difficult to trust herself, someone who occasionally, despite some success, often felt lost, and overwhelmed. She could blame her useless parents for her F’d-up mindset.

And she did.

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