Twinned
Authors: Alice Ann Galloway
TWINNED
By Alice Ann Galloway
“Romance ficti
on with a rock star and a paranormal twist”
“Read it on a train, read it in bed, read it on holiday, just read it!”
“A book to be devoured”
***
This book is dedicated
to anyone who ever
had a dream so good
they didn’t want to wake up
***
It is also dedicated to
Elisa and Katie
who make sure we do wake up
- often earlier than we would have liked -
and make every day precious.
***
Copyright Alice Ann Galloway 2012
Alice Ann Galloway has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and, without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ORD
Anne Rosa
The manuscript was pushed and shoved through my front door with such obvious frustration that I
’d left my cup of hot coffee mid-slurp, to go and see if the postman needed some help.
My name is Anne Rosa. I used to be quite the literary businesswoman, with my own publishing company and a lifestyle as glittering as the diamonds I wore. I now think of myself as a seasoned, freelance literary agent. Freelance, meaning that I may spend the morning in my dressing gown and slippers and still be credible. And I must be seasoned, because I am thirty years into my career and I no longer feel a thrill upon seeing a new manuscript submission.
I have read too many awful ones, dreary ones, ghastly ones and worst of all, boring ones. To be able to retain a sense of excitement and consider endless inspirational and financial possibilities when faced with a large envelope that you know will contain over 80,000 words, every laboured one of which the writer expects you to plough through and marvel over - it’s a little daunting.
This manuscript was immediately quite different.
Upon opening the envelope, seated back at the breakfast bar with my beloved morning coffee cooling by the minute, I realised that this was not my usual budding author. The manuscript was a mess, one I was tempted to bin. A scrawl of an address on the envelope, a heap of mismatched pages – some typed and some handwritten – with copious crossings-out and interjections in a frantic pencil scribble. What’s more, it looked like most of it was written as a screenplay, which isn’t really my thing.
But something stopped me from putting it straight into the recycling bin. At the front of the heap of paper, on a piece of A5 notepaper, was written; “Do not destroy!!! – This is the
only
copy. If you don’t like it, please forward to another agent - £10.00 enclosed to cover postage.”
I couldn’t see the £10.00, I wondered if it was between the pages. There was
no
author name.
No
100-word synopsis.
No
double line spacing.
No
traditional letter, pleading and promising a flurry of riches in return for publication in time for the Christmas book season.
Then I found another piece of paper, A4 this time, which reads as follows:
Dear Anne,
I have a story to tell and I thought you might know a writer who can tell it better than I can. Y
ou can do what you want with it; take your cut, a writer’s cut, a publisher’s cut and whatever else you need. Hold any money left over for me if you can, I may need it one day. This letter is my acceptance of your usual terms, whatever they are. I just need to know that this story will be told and I can’t do it myself.
Having a secret hurts. Over the course of the story I enclose, I have been both ecstatically happy and burning up in hell, all at once. Part of me hopes that you will think my story is fiction. You see, I am terrified that you will believe my story and somehow the people involved will hear about it. I was ‘seeing’ a famous married man. His wife would most likely do as I would do - ask him to take out an injunction against the weirdly knowledgeable stalker girl… while feeling privately overcome with a creeping sickness - because she will recognise him in the intimacy of my description; the undeniable scent of truth.
Please do change the names. I didn’t intend for this to happen. When it began I hoped I was not cursed with two lives but blessed with them. Since then, this secret has ruined my marriage and I can no longer be sure of my sanity. I explain it to myself that, like the signs you see in the towns you pass through I have been irrevocably ‘Twinned’.
I don’t know what I will do next. I need to get some distance from this situation, before it ruins more lives. If or when I manage to settle myself into normality once more, I will contact you. I hope you will understand when you read the manuscript.
I have faith that something good must come from what I have gone through.
- Beth
It was not really a manuscript submission at all.
I was really quite intrigued, which was a good feeling. And there was never any doubt in my mind that this book would be best written by a writer I know well, Alice Ann Galloway. And so it was that Alice Ann and I, using the notes of a girl who neither of us has ever met and perhaps never will, have woven the bones of her screenplay into ‘Twinned’.
Beth – if you’re reading this - I hope it is with the peace of mind that both I and Alice Ann have done justice to your story. I will wait to hear from you.
ONE
Beth
It would be unkind to call me a late bloomer. Unkind but
– in terms of romance - not unjustified.
On paper I was right on track. My name is Beth Britten; I was 25 years old when I moved out of my family home to live with my fiancé, Richard. We bought a sweet mid-terrace house with a smart black front door and a rather large mortgage in Borough Green, just outside of Sevenoaks.
I had grown my career from humble beginnings as a lowly editorial assistant at the Maidstone Chronicle, to journalist for a National newspaper’s weekend magazine, in just three and a half years. I am good at my job and I thoroughly enjoy interviewing interesting people and putting articles together. I have always been able to work quickly under pressure, which is probably why I progressed relatively quickly.
My main stumbling block has always been confidence. I have always felt ‘different’ and it has taken me quite a while to grow into my skin. To be fair, I have felt different because I
am
different.
You see, I’ve never been
entirely
sure whether the things that I see are
really there
. I have always seen things that other people couldn’t. Maybe I just have an overactive imagination. It’s hard to fit in at school, or in a group of work colleagues, when you know you can’t be honest with them about who you are.
It started when I was a child. My mum tells me how I would wave enthusiastically to an empty room, run up to greet thin air and share my toys with invisible strangers. She never once saw what I could apparently see. My strange behaviour got more prominent when I started secondary school. I had an invisible friend who went everywhere with me. I quickly developed a reputation as the freak of the year-group which led to me being teased and bullied. Over the years my invisible friend disappeared –
even he didn’t want to hang around with me
– and I started to have visions that were more akin to ghost sightings.
Looking back at photos of me aged 18, I can see now that - underneath the dodgy clothes and frizzy auburn hair - I was actually quite pretty. Back then, if you’d have sent me into a top London salon and given me a stylist for the day, I’m sure I could’ve looked quite spectacular. However, beautiful was the last thing I felt at age 18.
Only now can I see that there is something beautiful in all of us. It takes something special to find it.
It takes falling in love.
I was 22 when I met Richard. I’d been brave and said yes to an assignment that was a little out of my comfort zone. It was a three-day business trip to a Paris trade fair at the Parc des Expositions.
This would be a typical journalist junket with a busy press schedule. My job was to compare the European exhibition venue with its opposite number in the UK, due to the UK having lost a handful of exhibitions to their continental rivals in the past few months. The host of the visit was the Parc des Expositions’ main sponsor, a company called Gerrard Enterprises. They were keen to show us what the venue had to offer and why it was winning business.
I took an evening flight from London to Charles de Gaulle. It was my first experience of business class. I am a bit of a nervous flyer so I usually do whatever I can to occupy my mind. I bought a magazine at the airport and tried to concentrate on reading it during the flight.
We landed safely, with barely a bump. After making my way through customs I was met by a chauffeur who drove me right the way into Paris and through the beautiful streets, which were lit up like London at Christmas. I arrived at the hotel, a supremely tall building - practically a skyscraper – just down the road from the Arc de Triomphe. I was quite excited and feeling really lucky to be in a foreign country with all expenses paid.
The driver left me with my bags. I checked in to find that my room was on the 19
th
floor. The lift went up and up and up. I found myself imagining the hundreds of metres of empty lift shaft beneath my feet. When I entered the room I’d been given, I made my way straight to the window. The view of Paris was breathtaking. A huge expanse of inky blue sky; the stars above and the lights below were twinkling like tiny jewels.
Looking downwards I was surprised to experience a sudden, extreme rush of vertigo. I quickly stepped back from the window. I think it was because the line of the building dropped straight down and looking out to the horizon I could actually see the curvature of the Earth. I had never had to sleep such a very long way up before and, though I don’t usually suffer from a fear of heights, I found something about that room really unnerving.
It was late so I ordered room service; Spaghetti Bolognaise and a glass of red wine. I unpacked my bags and hung up my suits and dresses. It was unnervingly quiet so I put the TV on and found a French news channel for a bit of background chatter.
About 20 minutes later there was a knock at the door. The porter brought in a trolley, upon which was my dinner. I held the door open for him so it didn’t knock the trolley; he smiled and said “Merci”. And that’s when I first saw Richard, about to enter the room next door. I smiled, he smiled. He had reddish brown hair and dark eyes. I wondered if he was French and whether he was staying alone. He was very good looking.
In the middle of the night I was woken by a really loud bang, which sounded like it came from the corridor. As I lay there in the roomy, queen-sized bed, my breathing quite fast and panicked from waking so suddenly, I remembered where I was. I was shocked to realise that the temperature in the room had dropped dramatically. I could actually
see
the condensation from my own breath as I exhaled. I knew I had checked the room thermostat before I went to bed. It was set at 20 degrees. My body was quite warm under the thick duvet, which made it even stranger for the room’s ambient temperature to now be so cold.
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I became utterly terrified to see what looked like a person staring back at me. The outline of a head, shoulders and arms, body, legs. I tried to refocus my eyes, thinking that it must be an illusion, perhaps clothes hanging up on the outside of the wardrobe, though I knew there were none, or maybe something benign in the dark – a lamp and a chair perhaps, whose combined shape suggested a presence.
My heart was in my mouth as the figure moved, silently crossing the foot of the bed, from the window towards the bathroom door. I was frozen still, scared to move and desperately trying to remember where the light switch was. My brain was racing… what should I do? The intruder was just a dark shape in the blackness; I couldn’t make out any particular features or even see what kind of clothes they wore. But it had the build of a man. It moved like a man.
A sudden scream from the corridor all but froze my blood. The intruder turned towards the corridor. The scream was followed by an eerie silence, then a high pitched laugh. Then I heard someone else make a shhh-ing noise. The noises gave me the distraction I needed to reach for the light. The intruder heard my movement, which prompted him to turn back towards me. I had just a few seconds in which to reach across to the light, I felt my way across the headboard to the wall beyond. Where was it?
I located the light switch and I flicked it on, leaping out of bed on the opposite side to the intruder as I did so.
Light flooded the room.
There was no one there.
I knew I had seen someone. I checked the room, including in the wardrobe and under the bed. I checked the window and the door. Both were locked from the inside, in fact the door still had the chain on it. The thermostat said 20 degrees and I could no longer see my breath, the room temperature felt normal. It must have been a hallucination.
I couldn’t possibly sleep. I was wired for ‘fight or flight’. My heart was racing; I had been scared out of my mind. I wanted someone to talk to, I considered calling down to reception or going out into the corridor to see if there was anyone. But it was the middle of the night and I was in my pyjamas. I put the TV back on and tried to settle myself back into bed. I kept the light and the TV on all night and eventually I managed to doze a little.
It was such a relief to see daylight flooding into the room when my alarm went off at seven am. Despite my lack of sleep, I was just glad to have made it through the night with no more scares.
Finally, it was morning and I could get out of this room. I knew from the schedule that I had been sent in advance of the trip, that my first engagement was breakfast at eight am in the hotel restaurant. A table was reserved for all 12 journalists to meet there, under the watchful gaze of Gerrard Enterprise’s press secretary, Selina. It was her job to shepherd the journalists from one appointment to the next. I showered and dressed, applied my makeup and packed some essential items into my briefcase.
If you’ve never worked as a journalist, I should probably explain how you are treated by the people who sponsor your trip. They stump up for the entire cost of business class travel and five star accommodations. They decide what you eat, when you eat and where you eat. Sometimes this means eight course dinners in Michelin-starred restaurants, flamboyant entertainment and endless litres of the finest wines. Other times, it means a below-par buffet or something you’d never normally eat through choice, like frogs’ legs or snails. In return for their hospitality – whether you’ve enjoyed experiencing it or not - they expect their pound of flesh and they hope to secure a favourable write-up.
Selina had organised exhaustive schedules for each of us. We would be fed and watered; we would be wined and dined. However, from eight in the morning right through until midnight our time was theirs to do with as they wished.
I sat next to Richard at breakfast on the first morning. I assumed he was a journalist like me. I said something along the lines of how we were trapped from morning to night under Selina’s watchful gaze. I joked about how I always got the desire to escape when my freedom was restricted.
He made a joke about Stockholm syndrome then he let me carry on complaining for a few minutes before explaining that he wasn’t a journalist. He described himself cheekily as “One of your captors.” He was the Business Development Manager for the Parc Des Expositions, which hosted the exhibition I was there to see. Oops.
My face flushed with embarrassment, I apologised but he put me at my ease. He assured me that I could escape with him any time I needed to get away. I noticed there was no wedding ring on his finger. He was certainly English, though he spoke excellent French to Selina and to the waitress. I asked him about his job, where he lived and his home back in England. He revealed that he was 31, quite a bit older than me, which somehow made him all the more attractive.
At eight o’ clock sharp, we were ushered onto a coach for the thirty-minute ride to the Parc des Expositions. It seemed natural to sit together again and I noticed small details about Richard on that coach journey, details which made me like him even more. The way he spoke about his passion for business and meeting new people. His taste in music was very similar to mine. He had strong hands and arms.
He radiated self-assurance, which was just the thing that I lacked. There was nonchalance about the way he rolled up his shirt sleeves. There was a feeling of security in his solid, stocky frame. I wanted to get to know him and I had three uninterrupted days to do so.
*****
Richard and I spent quite a bit of time together during the trip, encouraged by the fact that I didn’t want to spend any more time than I absolutely had to alone in my hotel room. The days were intense, jam packed with pre-booked briefings and meetings to ensure we were only able to hear what our hosts wanted us to hear.
I stayed up late each evening with the drinkers in the hotel bar, which was perched on the 20
th
floor. It had massive picture windows with great views of the City. We racked up some shockingly large bar bills.
I discovered that Richard and I didn’t live terribly far from each other. He was from Uxbridge, which was just over an hour’s drive from where I was living. He spent most of the week in Paris and came home through the tunnel each weekend. It sounded like he’d had a lot of fun in Paris but was considering a new challenge.
In terms of the group’s conversation, being naturally shy I was used to being on the fringes of a discussion. Yet Richard made sure to include me, inviting me to sit with him. I could tell that Selina found this an irritation. She obviously liked him. Though he gave her no encouragement she was quite persistent in trying to attract his attention.