Eighty Days Red by Vina Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

things, sex scenes verging on the crude between faceless protagonists even he the author could not engage with. A fine mess, he was aware. As if the road map for the book had gone missing, the train it was travelling on still miles from the station.
‘Hey?’
Lauralynn was watching him as he just stood there, his mind elsewhere.
‘Snap out of it.’
‘I’m sorry. You caught me daydreaming.’
‘About the book?’
‘I suppose so. Yes.’
‘You could tell me about it, the story you’re hoping to tell. Might help sharpen your focus.’
Dominik repressed a wave of irritation. She was a musician. She knew how to interpret, not to create. What did she know? Then he realised how unfair he was being to her. She was only trying to help.
‘I don’t have a story. A skeleton on which to hang the characters, the places,’ he confessed. ‘It just won’t come. Whatever I conjure up is commonplace, done a hundred times before and no doubt better. I’m struggling. For a story,’ he said.
‘The story?’ she repeated, her eyes widening as if she was only now realising the enormity of his failure.
‘Yes,’ he sighed.
He was saved by the ring of the front doorbell. From the kitchen window, he could see a red post office van – it was a postman with a parcel delivery. Probably more books he had ordered as part of his incoherent research.
‘I’ll get it.’
He rushed down the stairs and signed for the delivery, not even bothering to look up at the driver’s face as he handed the lightweight parcel over. A guide book to Berlin night life and a novel set there in the 1960s, which he’d impulsively acquired with the click of a button just a week ago when he had toyed with the idea of setting the new novel in the German capital. Which, by the following day, he had realised was a stupid idea, as not only had he never been to Berlin but didn’t even speak German.
He set the brown cardboard box down on the floor next to the muddy trainers he had kicked off and abandoned there on his return from the Heath the previous day.
Lauralynn’s tall and heavy cello case stood in the corner of the hall, festooned with labels, travel mementoes from hotels foreign and local, backstage passes and memorabilia she had assiduously stuck across its surface.
One of the labels was peeling off, he noticed, advertising the charms of the Royal e Golf Grand Hotel in Cour-mayeur. Where was that? Switzerland or Italy, he thought. When had Lauralynn ever been there? It was a ski resort and unlikely to have much of a music scene. Maybe he would ask her.
His curiosity awakened, he kept on staring at the gallery of labels adorning the cello case.
Ideas come out of nowhere. They make no sense. Drop unannounced in your lap. Ignore logic or sanity.
It was as if something had clicked.
The instrument. Its travels. The tale behind all those stickers, hotel labels, decals and the torn remnants of airline baggage tags.
There was his story.
The one that had been eluding him. As if he’d been blind all the time and ignored the obvious.
It didn’t have to be about characters.
In the Paris book, he’d been writing about an alternate, imaginary version of Summer. Of a past world in which she was not a musician, had no violin.
This time, he could write about her instrument. The one he had bought for her.
The violin.
The story of a violin.

3 It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll
    ‘I always knew you were a dark horse,’ Fran said in a smug tone.
She was leaning back on the car seat with her head nearly resting on Chris’s shoulder. We were speeding through London in the back of a black cab on our way back to the flat in
    Camden Town. I had moved in with Chris temporarily, just until I managed to find a place of my own. Fran was sharing my room until she found her feet, so things were cramped in comparison to the relatively vast apartment that I had shared with Simón in New York, but so far we hadn’t had any major rows.
    It was early on Sunday morning and the three of us