Page 3 of Famous Last Words

A video of a spinning cake, one side collapsed but repaired with icing.

Cam: Definitely acceptable.

Libby: Thanks for lying to me.

Cam: Always.

‘Cam!’ her boss, Stuart, says, rounding the corner to the kitchen. ‘Welcome back.’ Tanned, strawberry blond, mid-fifties. Ostensibly benign and somewhat dithery, he has a list full of bestselling writers that hints at his regular displays of brilliance. He is the sort of person you think isn’t listening in a meeting, who then makes the best suggestion of anyone there.

‘Baby well? Life feeling on an even keel yet?’ he asks.

‘Oh yes, better,’ Cam says, thinking that the house is full of piles of laundry, of unopened bills. The baby doesn’t sleep. This morning, Cam showered while shouting nursery rhymes to placate her. When Cam sits in the garden every night, she feels the tasks looming behind her, to-do-list spectres that she doesn’t have the time to deal with in the way she used to. ‘All good here,’ she adds brightly.

‘Great stuff,’ Stuart says. ‘It all falls into place eventually.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Anyway,’ he says. He raises his arms above his head – he has been, for the past couple of years, that most toxic of things: a gym convert – and starts stretching. Cam finds the best tactic is to ignore him when he does this, and so she pulls the sash window open, overlooking Pimlico below. Gardens out the back, and here, in front, huge white Georgian buildings. She’s missed it. The simplicities of anice view and a hot cup of coffee that she can drink in peace.

‘Did you send Adam’s novel out?’ he continues, two hands braced on the kitchen counter. Cam is worried he’s going to start doing squats, but he stops and switches on the kettle instead.

She helps herself to a biscuit, replacing hours unslept with sugar. She discovered Adam’s novel while on maternity leave. He’d sent her a query email. She had been checking her inbox, couldn’t resist the premise, and asked for the full manuscript. Adam said he preferred to physically post the novel: that he felt like it was no longer his, that way. He’d sent it to her house, since she was off, and she’d offered him representation within three days. The thing is, this work – it doesn’t feel like work to Cam. Nothing does that you’d do for free.

‘I sent it out last night,’ she answers Stuart. ‘Couldn’t help myself. I think it’s going to go big.’ She hopes her radar is accurate. Cam knows a good book when she sees one. That feeling you get as a reader, 10 per cent in, where you just kind ofsinkinto the novel and its world. This one is contemporary fiction about the son of two YouTubers who sues his parents for breach of privacy. She still remembers the moment she opened that padded envelope, read the first line, and thought:Yes.

‘I want to get a two-book deal, but he hasn’t sent me a new idea yet,’ she says.

‘Hmm. You only need a one-line pitch, and it can change. Right, got a crisis meeting,’ Stuart says, checking his watch. ‘Author going nuts.’

Cam takes some biscuits to her desk and spies more texts from Libby, beginning withThe cake has betrayed me.

She moves a coaster bearing the slogan ‘Main character energy’ out of the way, suddenly wary of her own drama playing out, and opens her laptop. She never shuts it down and it currently has twenty-five tabs open, almost all of them Google searches.

Baby not finishing meals.

How to stop bickering with husband.

Should my pelvic floor be better by now?

She checks her email. No wild seven-figure pre-emptive offers for Adam’s book yet. Next, her phone. Nothing from Luke. Should she ring him again, or …?

Cam doesn’t know where to begin. Her brain feels so full. Meetings, submissions, novels about to be published. There’s a word for this that she recently learnt:fisselig. A German word meaning ‘flustered to the point of incompetence’.

She was mainlining Jaffa Cakes last night with Luke – who somehow never gains an ounce – lying on top of their duvet. She had been moaning to him about, well, everything really. That Polly wasn’t weaning or sleeping well. That she didn’t know how she was going to work alongside it all. That she felt a failure most days. Things Cam would only admit in the middle of the night, and only to him, the person who never judges her. Luke had listened and offered her more Jaffa Cakes, not suggesting anything, but she didn’t need suggestions, just needed him. ‘Things feel – I don’t know,’ she had said. ‘Just like they’re not getting any easier.’

‘I’m chatting to you and eating Jaffa Cakes,’ he had replied, running a hand through his hair, past the small scar on his forehead that he got from falling off a bicycle as a child. ‘Seems OK to me.’

‘We’re so unhealthy.’

‘Junk food is our only defence,’ Luke had said. ‘Don’t rob me of my pleasure in life. Look – when you go back, why don’t you take an evening a week off Mum duty? I’ll do bedtime. You go and do something. With Libby? Holly? A bar. The cinema.’

Cam had grimaced, though she’d appreciated the gesture. Going out would suit Luke, but not Cam. ‘I like to go to bed with a book,’ she’d said, sounding meek, but it was true. A paperback novel, pages rough under her fingertips. A candle. Fresh pyjamas and sheets. Motherhood, for introverts, is a special kind of difficult, the usual escape routes not available, a thought Cam regularly feels guilty about, but which is nevertheless true.

‘You do that every night,’ Luke had said, leaning over to touch her shoulder affectionately.

‘I know that. I know I am lame.’

‘Everyone needs a break. You need … space.’ His expression became more serious. ‘Cam – you ever drowning … you shout? And I’ll rescue you. OK?’

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