Signing Off in Style by Simon Berry

(Please see tags for content warning)

“‘I can’t go on,’ just doesn’t cut it. Doesn’t stand out from the crowd.” Mandy pushed the offending piece of A4 back across the table.

Timothy looked at her and she knew what he was seeing.

Dark glasses covered Mandy’s bloodshot eyes and the silver embedded in her face made her look like a window display at a Fifth Avenue jeweller’s. It was a line she’d written about herself and she was okay if people thought about her in those terms, if only because it made her a little less forgettable. It was for much the same reason Mandy had gone Goth shortly after hitting her teens. Jet black hair had replaced the maternal mousey-brown, black clothes had taken over her wardrobe and parental disapproval had accompanied her first and each subsequent facial piercing. But Mandy had been adamant: if the image mattered for the writing, it mattered even more for the writer. It certainly wasn’t doing her new career any damage.

Focus on the client, she chided herself.

Timothy didn’t look convinced. Miserable certainly. Defeated too. Convinced, not at all. She didn’t want to lose the client.

Another latte polluted with four sugars sealed the deal. The receipt was carefully folded and placed in Mandy’s purse. She’d learnt the hard way that the IRS tended to disallow deductions unless they were backed by audit-standard proof. Especially for people with a history of what the police impolitely called ‘substance abuse’ and the MFA-qualified writer termed ‘inspirational necessity’.

While his tired eyes followed the movement of two kids chasing after each other across the grass, his hands clutched a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus. It had been new when Mandy had given it to him; now it was heavily dog-eared.

They were meeting in Central Park, which served as Mandy’s office whenever it wasn’t raining. Unlike coffee shops, there was little risk of being overheard. It was a nice day, which was unfortunate. Her predominantly male clients were a fickle lot – clear blue sky and a bit of sunshine and the world might not seem so bad. She’d lost quite a lot of business to the weather, the sight of a pretty girl going for a jog and, once, an old lady walking her King Charles spaniel.

She cleared her throat. “Not to be indelicate, but I’ll have to ask for payment up front.”

“Of course, of course.” He didn’t need her to explain why payment afterwards wasn’t an option.

Timothy didn’t hesitate when Mandy handed him the contract. His wasn’t the expression of a happy person, but the reflex of a youth going through the motions. The agreement was a mere two pages of plain English minimalism drafted by Mandy herself. No lawyer had blessed it because no lawyer would touch it. He signed at the bottom of both pages, then pulled out the latest iPhone (brand new), opened up his private banking app and typed in the payment instructions. A beep from Mandy’s phone confirmed payment had been received. Her outstanding overdraft dropped from two hundred and forty-three thousand and change to two hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars. Overdrafts and credit cards were like that – if she didn’t keep chipping away at the cumulative bills for past prolificacy the balances just went in one direction and each month’s total would end up being higher than the previous month. Mandy knew a thing or two about debt, but she was slowly getting on top of her obligations while becoming more adept at dodging the debt collectors who had pursued her to New York.

She pulled a Moleskin notebook out of her handbag and started taking notes with her Montegrappa fountain pen. Notes for the client went on the left hand pages and notes for her Great American Novel (all caps and five years of remorseless self-pitying pseudo-progress) on the right. She could multitask, doing both the important stuff and the paying stuff at the same time. Her hand trembled as she wrote, but Mandy’s handwriting was less shaky than her memory.

“Well … um the …,”

Mandy waited patiently, pen poised over the Moleskin successor to the notebooks Hemmingway used, though she was a little miffed that the paper wasn’t the same.

When he eventually got started, Timothy rambled along going through all the people who’d made his life shit. Getting to know her clients was part of the job, but it stopped short of becoming emotionally invested in the personal darkness that had brought them to her. Detachment was not merely necessary, it was essential.

On his side, the process was therapeutic. Not in the sense of resolving unresolvable issues, but giving the whole exercise a sense of completion. Justifying a logical progression to the only reasonable conclusion.

When the young man ran out of words, Mandy stepped into the breach. Hoping Timothy wasn’t going to ask for a poem, Mandy talked about styles, gently steering her client in the direction of minimalism.

“Could you do a poem?”

Damnit. Mandy was a fiction major born seventy years too late to be part of the Beat Generation. Narrative crap flowed from her pen with ease. Poetic shit had trouble getting past the nib. She was a Kerouac, not a Ginsberg. But others had made the same request and she had her defence down pat. Poems were more work too. “Huh, sure. If that’s what you want.”

The client’s forehead furrowed. It was a nice piece of alliteration, something she could add to the list of images she kept building. She made a note on the right hand page and then assessed her client. Resolve was a tangible thing. Timothy radiated it. His hands no longer shook and the latest latte from the guy with the cart was not contaminated with sugar.

Mandy waved the white flag. “Sure, I can do a poem. Have you thought about style? I don’t recommend limerick for obvious reasons and epics are just too long. Most readers start skimming over everything after the first page. How about a narrative one?” If it had to be a lousy poem, she could at least bypass rhythm and metre and all that other shit she didn’t understand.

“Yeah. I guess?” That was a question.

“And then there’s choosing between cryptic and clear.”

Timothy shrugged.

Sensing a twitch in his determination, Mandy leaned a little closer. “It’s important, Timothy. Go hard on the metaphors and we can create something beautiful but we risk people not understanding or, worse, misunderstanding. The other way’s no better – too clear and it’ll look immature.” First impressions mattered. For Timothy, they would be the only impressions. There’d be no opportunity to revise the poem after the first reading.

He sighed and admitted that it was harder than he’d thought it would be.

The contract said no refunds, but an unhappy client was bad for business, so Mandy ploughed on. “Don’t worry. It’s my job to think of these things. A moving narrative poem it is. When do you need it?”

She used drugs to get the best results, and Central Park wasn’t her preferred place to take a trip to the land of creativity. Getting high wasn’t a performance art. She also had to replenish her stash, which meant paying Highball Harry a visit. Trying to get a tax credit for payments to her dealer had been a dead end, not helped by said dealer’s refusal to issue receipts for his product. Last time she’d asked, Harry had looked her up and down like there was something wrong with her. Or perhaps wondering if all artistic types were all as detached from the real world as this one.

“How’d you get into this business?”

A friend had steered Timothy to her website. Referrals were unusual in this line of work, but not non-existent. Telling her story had brought her a few introductions and it helped people bond with her – knowing someone else’s life sucked created the illusion they had something in common.

Mandy Moran was the product of a privileged up bringing. As a result, she’d never been forced to confront the realities of getting by in a world where most people had to actually work and earn a living. Before the divorce, her father had indulged her financially and artistically, and after the divorce her mother had given her a generous allowance to squander. All that had come to an end. Father was dead, Mother was awaiting trial, and Mandy was on her own. Well, almost. Her brother was in a deeper hole than she was and had tried to lean on Mandy for support. But there was none to offer. She could more or less cover the cost of keeping her ’67 Mustang on the road, the right compounds in her blood stream and the minimum payments on her credit cards, but that was about as far as it went. She was digging hard to get herself out of a financial hole, not make it deeper, and she had no intention of bankrupting herself by making contributions to Sebastian’s own debts, forthcoming paternity payments or supply of single malt.

When Mandy’s first novel had failed to climb the Amazon sales rankings, she’d been sufficiently desperate (she liked to think of it as artistic) to consider driving up to Lowell, Massachusetts and taking an overdose on the grave of her literary idol. But somewhere along the way she’d paused to research suicide notes and been appalled at just how mundane and unmemorable the samples had been. Tacky and unimaginative were her first reactions to most of them. Realising there was an untapped market, Mandy put an ad on her website. She’d also decamped from her hometown of Boneyard, Vermont, with its inadequate (for her purposes) population of 7,236 unhappy souls to the much bigger market of New York City (population of eight point four million potential clients).

She could tell Timothy envied her and she liked that.

Ever the impressionist, Mandy offered a handshake instead of a hug as they parted. It was her hand that was trembling.

Three days later, they met up again and she performed her side of the contract by handing over a poem meeting the client’s specifications. She’d had it typed and printed a hard copy. “Your decision,” she said, “but it will have a better impact if it’s in your handwriting. More personal.”

Timothy nodded. She thought he was going to cry and hoped he wouldn’t. Her detachment was fragile enough as it was. Fragile detachment. Another good sound bite for the right-hand side of the Moleskin.

He thanked Mandy and she watched him walk back in the direction of his grandmother’s Park Avenue Penthouse.

Reading the obituary columns in newsprint was an indulgence Mandy had no qualms about. The smell of ink and paper did almost as much for her as cocaine. Almost. Behind the dark glasses, her eyes ran down the column. And there it was. Timothy Alan Redding (19). Much loved son of the father who hadn’t listened and the mother who hadn’t been there. He’d been a scholar too. And nothing at all about the last note she’d written for him. Normally she’d be disappointed, but this time she was just relieved – it had been a terrible poem. Mandy thought about going to the memorial service. But there was always the awkward question about how she’d known the departed and the unspoken disdain for someone who handed out business cards at a funeral.

Above all, it was pointless – no one ever appreciated the work she put in to help people sign off in style.

Simon Berry

Image: Note pad with screwed up papers from Pixabay.com