Her Name Was Lola

11 Blighter’s Rock No

February 1997. When Max isn’t with Lola and also when he is, he’s looking for Page One. This is a bit like trying to retrieve a coin that’s fallen down a grating. Is that it, that faint gleam in the darkness? Not sure. He lowers weighted strings and chewing gum and brings up bottle caps.

‘Blighter’s rock?’ says Max’s mind.

‘I am not rocked,’ says Max. He avoids the proper name of that condition in which writers are unable to write. ‘My ideas aren’t the usual thing and they don’t come easy.’ His last novel, Any That You Can Not Put Downe, published in 1993, was about a man’s pursuit of the ghost of a woman who put a curse on him. His two previous novels, Turn Down An Empty Glass and Ten Thousand Several Doors, were published five and seven years ago respectively. For each of these Max received a twenty-thousand-pound advance. None of the three has yet earned back that advance. Fortunately Charlotte Prickles, Lollipop Lady was a commercial success when it came out in 1994, and his juvenile backlist is healthy. So Max can afford to write another novel. If he can think of one.

‘I’m starting to get a kind of flavour,’ says his mind.

‘What kind of flavour?’

‘Dark, shadowy, sad, full of loss.’

‘I’m tasting it,’ says Max. ‘It’s very disturbing.’

‘But it’s your kind of thing, no?’

‘Yes, but it scares me.’

‘Scared is good, isn’t it?’

‘Not this kind,’ says Max. ‘It’s not the normal kind of writing panic. It’s full of regret.’

‘For what?’

‘I don’t know and I’m afraid to find out.’