For all of the thirty minutes I was actually there, when the time for sipping anything had long since passed.

The party was at the V&A this year. The V&A is a beautiful place, but I wish Orion would have its parties in a scout hut. Because if you are in a scout hut, you’re not kicked out on the dot of eight. And, if you could meet (or peer shyly at) Miranda Richardson in either the V&A or a scout hut, you’d pick the scout hut, wouldn’t you? If only for the pleasing incongruity of the thing.

Let the train take the blame

I don’t see why I should take responsibility for my idiotic actions when there are other options available to me, so I mean to blame the fact that this time  I was an hour and a half late, because of the Trainline website.

It gave me a list of trains going to Charing Cross,  with only a tiny little 2 in place of a 1 to warn me of what was going to happen. Admittedly I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have done. I was running late and barely made it to the station. It would have been far better if I had not. Once on the train, I sank into peaceful communion with my iPod and the view from the window.

That I ended up at Cannon Street instead of Charing Cross shouldn’t have mattered at all. But I didn’t notice I was at Cannon Street until the train started going backwards.

That shouldn’t have mattered either, I should have been able to get off at London Bridge and not even be late.

But I couldn’t get off at London Bridge because the train was going fast all the way to High Brooms.

Where is High Brooms? you ask.

EXACTLY.

High Brooms  is a filler station; a place-holder station; a bleak outpost on the industrial estate attached to a village imperfectly absorbed into Tunbridge Wells. In fact—there is no fast train to High Brooms. There can’t be, it doesn't make sense. This was some parallel universe I’d slipped into, in which High Brooms is a thriving commercial centre and people cannot wait to get out of London and go there as fast as possible.

I know where High Brooms is, but only because it’s the next stop towards London from where I live. That’s right, one stop away from where I’d started.

I breathed a quiet, "Oh, fuck."

The Evil Within

"Wrong train?" inquired the man sitting opposite me. He was about fifty, suited, spectacled, and he seemed a perfectly reasonable, decent, even a kindly man. There was, as yet, no sign of the evil within.

I tried to explain that it hadn’t been the wrong train, exactly, a few minutes ago, but it certainly was now.

“Is it important?”

I had a very bad idea and acted upon it; I told him that while it wasn’t important in the life-and-death sense, it was going to be the first time I’d seen my editor since finishing the book and that writers often don’t meet each other very often and so…

From this, of course, he deduced I was a writer. This was why it was a very bad idea to say any of it.

“You’re a writer?”

Yes.

“What do you write? Children’s books?”

I bristled a bit. Children’s books? Why should he assume I wrote children’s books? Because I was fairly young and entirely female? What?

Well, yes, partly, it turned out— it was because his daughter wrote children’s books, but wasn’t published. I promise, I am usually a nice, approachable author, I often will be interested in your daughter who writes children’s books but isn’t published. But at the moment I was a little preoccupied with my own troubles. Only seconds had passed since the discovery of how very screwed I was and I was still in shock.

He saw this. He said helpfully, "There's nothing you can do about it, you know."

Yes, I did know that.

“The train’s not going to turn round and go back.”

No, it wouldn’t.

"It's done now. Like your books."

Very true, ye...What?

"You know. When you've written them, that’s it, it’s over.”

I said, "Actually, there's a lengthy process during which you can go back and change things."
 
He had more advice, though. “Give up the whole thing. Write the evening off. Oh, you’ve booked a hotel? Well, cancel it. That’ll cost you money? Well, cancel it anyway.”

…No.

“Then you might as well just sit back and enjoy the journey.”

If by “enjoy the journey,” he meant slump into an abyss of mingled self-pity and self-loathing, and maybe at some point phone my dad and tell him what witless offspring he had produced, I was in full agreement with him. I only wanted to be allowed to do it in peace.

Then he said, "Write it into your next book." 

At this point I lost the ability to speak. I was entirely consumed in trying not to stare at him incredulous horror. He grinned at me, in a diabolical, chivvying kind of way.

The Best of British

There weren’t many other passengers. Among  them, some way behind me but not nearly far enough, was one of those people who thinks everyone within earshot would benefit from exposure to his taste in music, turned as loud as the tiny little speakers on his mobile phone will allow. Which is pretty loud.

“…Sexy mama…” Stop. Skip. “….Sexy mama…”

It’s only a song. Only an incredibly horrible song. Just please play through to the end and then stop.

There was a young man sitting across the aisle from me. We began glance and roll our eyes and make faces at each other in a companionable way. He was foreign and it was somehow clear to me that he hadn’t been here very long. I didn’t want him to think Britain was all about cringing subjection to people playing horrible music at you on trains. 

“….Sexy mama…” Stop. Is it over, it sounds like it’s over?  No. “…Sexy mama…”

I made the internal calculation common to such situations. Yes, this is rude, intrusive, infuriating. I should be able to stand up and object. However—think what could happen. Am I willing to die for this?

Yes.

“Come on,” I said to the man across the aisle. “Let’s both go. He can’t stab two of us.”

The logic of that was, as a crime novelist pointed out to me later, flimsy at best but we marched righteously down the carriage and we stopped him. It was disappointingly easy; he didn’t even put up a fight. He looked alarmed, plugged in his headphones and apologised almost before I’d finished saying, “Excuse me—”

So we returned to our seats victorious. It turned out my new friend was trying to go to Brighton, so was even more lost than I was. All this was a consolation of sorts. But it goes without saying that this second train was running twenty minutes late.

It goes without saying that the taxi I took dropped me off outside the wrong museum.

So then I finally staggered into the V&A, babbling incoherently. Michael Palin was there. He was not a double scotch, so I didn’t really pay him much attention. He would probably have been glad about this, had he known;  if you are Michael Palin you must get sick of people being pleased to see you wherever you go. I took the same stance on Kylie Minogue’s gold knickers.

Jon, my editor, was happy to find me; he had been searching for me as if I were a side-quest on his further mission to find Ian Rankin, which he had to do before something disastrous happened.

I’d found some alcohol by this point, so I was up for a quest to find Ian Rankin. It sounded  doable, it sounded a worthwhile cause, and I thought it would distract me from thoughts of lying taxi drivers and sexy mamas and bodies stuffed under train seats. I also thought it would defer having to explain why I was so late, because you see, I had not yet achieved the tranquility which allows me to recount these things so calmly to you now. So we hunted for Ian Rankin together: Jon was the hero whose quest it was, I was the brooding and angst-ridden sidekick who won't reveal anything about her past until the end of the second act.

Horror writing

Ian Rankin was calm, composed, dignified and drunk. Under his arm was a laptop, on which, he explained, was the only existing copy of the novel he had just finished. At this news so many authors staggered back gasping in vicarious horror that a kind of crop-circle of empty space opened around him. Ian Rankin remained unmoved.  Jon turned white but kept his head; he  performed some sleight of hand whereby one minute Ian Rankin had the laptop, the next Jon did, and was clutching it as if it were a bomb.

Jon guarded the laptop with his life through what remained of the party but he could not change the fact that Ian Rankin was proposing to go back to Edinburgh with the only copy of his novel under his arm.

I did not go away empty-handed; I have a little block of Rebus post-its and a pencil.

I have no reason to think Ian Rankin didn’t bring his laptop safely home to Edinburgh, but I hope he didn’t get on any wrong trains. Or confide in any harmless-seeming strangers if he did.

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