(Almost) Weekly Writer at Work

[image error]

Writers' Work-in-Progress showcases the work of new and long-published authors. This is what their first pages look like now—perhaps the published versions will read exactly the same, perhaps they will be quite changed. That part of the mutable beauty of writing—always a work in progress, until the book hits the shelves.

As the Crow Flies

by

Elizabeth Barrett

The stairs leading down to the nightclub gleamed wet black in the street lights. Angie stepped carefully, uncertain if the gleam was just wetness or incipient ice, forming in this dank stairwell that never saw sunlight. The TV newscaster swore the temperature was above freezing; she didn't believe it. Her feet in cheap leather boots ached with cold. Her hands were warm enough, shoved into the pockets of her wool coat; but of course she hadn't worn a hat and her ears had gone numb three blocks back.

"Hurry up!" said Toss, Angie's closest friend in Edinburgh, her adopted home. "It's fookin' freezin' out here."

Toss reached past Angie and dragged open the heavy wooden door, and heat and noise and the smells of beer and chips and scores of warm young bodies smashed into the two women. Toss grabbed Angie's hand as she hit the crowd clustered nearest the door and shoved her way through, heading for the bar.

"We'll see if James is here first," she said over her shoulder.

"How about the loo?" Angie said. "My hair …"

The damp Scottish air was a blessing during the day, thickening and curling her dark hair, which in her native New England always lay flat and uninteresting against her head. She hated the wavy hair when she went out though, thinking it made her look childlike and naïve.

Toss turned to face her. Her own short black hair was streaked with purple, matching her eye shadow and lipstick. She had offered to take Angie in hand that night, but although Angie had freely borrowed from Toss's closet, she refused the makeover. She could never pull off the punk look.

Toss lifted a hank of Angie's hair and let it drop back onto her shoulder. "Still straight. Not to worry. Let's get a drink. Christ, I'm so fookin' cold I might order a fookin' tea."

Of course she didn't. They both pushed close to the bar, young men giving way for them and genially saying hello and how are you, in accents that ranged from unintelligible highlands Scot to unintelligible Midlands Brit. Actually, not as unintelligible to Angie as they once had been, when she first arrived in Edinburgh six months earlier. The two women ignored the men and both tried to catch the bartender's eye. Toss, no surprise to Angie, succeeded first.

They both ordered half pints of a local brew, the barkeep swept up their money, and they dove back into the crowd.

The pub they'd chosen for that night, Grace's, was popular with students. But considering Edinburgh had five different schools, half the pubs and nightclubs in the city seemed to cater to students. Not that Angie was a student, not any longer. Nor Toss. But they were only twenty-three and certainly lived like students, working low-wage jobs and sharing a small apartment with irregular heat and rooms the size of shoeboxes.

Her height giving her an advantage over Toss, and half the people crowded into Grace's front room, Angie spotted James first. She thumped Toss on the shoulder and pointed; Toss nodded and switched direction toward the blond man leaning against a wall, beyond a cluster of overcrowded tables. He stood alone, drink and cigarette in one hand, the distant expression on his long narrow face indicating he did not want to be there. Or that he was stoned out of his mind.

Toss sidled through another gaggle of shouting students, finally reaching James. Angie held back for a moment, waiting to see James's reaction. He was moody, no doubt about that, and had been known just to tell Toss to piss off when he was feeling bleak and anti-social.

Not tonight. For a man with such a melancholy face, he had a charming smile. He dropped a kiss on Toss's lips, then gestured to Angie with his drink and smoking cigarette. One arm around Toss, he gave Angie a cheek kiss when she joined them.

"How are you, Angie?" he asked, his King's English crisp and clipped.

"Slumming again, James?" she said in response.

He tightened his arm around Toss as he took a long drag on his cigarette. "Only the best girls come to places like Grace's. What, you thought I'd fine such prime company at the Balmoral?"

Both women laughed, though Toss enjoyed the joke more than Angie. James was slumming, enjoying the novelty of hanging around with and, to be blunt, shagging a lower-class girl from the rough streets of Glasgow. Not a girl he'd ever take home to the castle.

Toss said she didn't mind. Said James was perfectly up front with her, told her he wasn't looking for anything serious or long term. And neither, Toss said, was she. She had no expectations.

Angie didn't believe that. Women always had expectations.

[image error]

Elizabeth Barrett worked for nearly twenty years for the New York publishing house, Bantam Books, first as an in-house editor, and then as a consulting editor working out of her home. In 2003, she started her own freelance editing business. She also teaches adult education writing classes in both Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Newburyport, Massachusetts. Her young adult novel, Free Fall, was published by HarperCollins in 1994.