The Love Factory

by Elaine Proctor

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

What readers are saying about The Love Factory : 'The first time I've wanted to start re-reading a book from the moment I finished it' 'Like Sex and the City on acid' 'Anna [is] a heart-capturing protagonist' 'a warm, inclusive, big-hearted book' You can control want, but desire controls you When literary writer Anna falls on hard times, she tries her hand at erotic fiction to make money, and faces an uncomfortable truth. Though she's a wife and mother of two, her stories fail to fly because she's never experienced true sexual desire. Even her Sicilian grandmother - wearer of diamante sunglasses and knock-off Louis Vuitton - knows more than she does about real passion. Anna turns to her friends for inspiration. As secrets and desires are revealed, she discovers more about the people close to her than she ever knew. When one of them suggests she borrow an alter ego to banish her inhibitions, a new world opens up, and The Love Factory - a group of writers penning ever more successful sexy stories - is born. Yet Anna knows that she can't rely on borrowed passion and an alter ego forever. For her tales to truly sizzle, she needs to find a true love of her own.

Release date: March 22, 2018

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

Chapter One

Anna sat up in her bed warmth and waited for her natural impatience to tip her towards the waiting day.

She slid from under the bedcovers so quietly that the harghgggg-p-p-p-whooshnrrrr of her husband’s snoring continued without the slightest increase in pitch or rhythm. Then she ran lightly down the stairs with Liebe, her hunting dog, at her heels.

If she’d known what turmoil the day was to bring she might’ve slowed her pace, but unlike some in her family, Anna was not burdened with prescience.

She pulled open the kitchen door and sucked in a lungful of frosty air; she smelled the city in it and the liquid green of the underground stream at the bottom of her garden.

As she breathed in she whispered to herself, ‘I am,’ and, as if willing it would make it so, she said, ‘at peace.’

There was fox scat on the stonework; the big male must have passed by in the night. She heard the distant sound of the early train.

Liebe scratched at the gate at the far end of the garden, her pied orange and white body luminous in the dark day. ‘Coming,’ called Anna softly.

The dog and her owner both loved the unruly allotments that ran along the edge of the railway line behind the house, each small garden tended according to their owners’ fancy; some grew flowers, others, like Anna, vegetables. Most started off every spring with a burst of enthusiasm and then let their beds fade to nothing by late summer. Only a few managed to keep something alive through the cold.

Just about all the families on Carlyle Road had a strip of earth to tend here. Anna liked to think it brought them closer together but, in truth, it was the two tornados that had twice torn the roofs off their houses that had made them allies. If past storm patterns continued, they were about due for another.

The grind of a sash window opening disturbed the darkness of the house next door. Anna saw a young man, pale-skinned and lanky, flip over the sill and onto the frozen grass. Liebe stiffened into pointer bird-hunting-alert.

The intruder turned back to the window . . . for one more kiss . . . oh Lord . . . from her neighbour, Farhad.

Anna watched the kiss pass from sweet-goodbye to fuck-me lust. She could have been inside their mouths, for the sudden heat they put out. She watched as Farhad fumbled with his lover’s belt.

The encounter that followed, both their bodies half-in, half-out of the window, was over quickly. The lover pulled his trousers up, pecked Farhad on the nipple, and stumbled away over the grass. Farhad stood in the window bare-chested in the freezing dawn, watching him go.

And Anna stood to full attention in the perpetual spinach patch – impossible for Farhad to miss as he turned to close the window.

She longed to bend down and tend to her beds, to pretend that she’d not witnessed their coming together, but it was too late for that. She could see thought-ripples cross Farhad’s face; Ah shit, he seemed to say. Do you judge me? Will you tell my mother?

Anna waved at him, an awkward flick of the hand – as if to say Your secret is safe with me – although I can’t say it didn’t shake me up so early in the morning.

He waved back.

Anna could see that Farhad would have preferred not to have to take his pleasure in so clandestine a way, and she turned away.

Released from watchfulness, Liebe ploughed joyfully into a flock of half-frozen pigeons huddled on the grass. They took to the air in a cloud and swept away over the rooftops of London’s Kensal Rise.

*

Every morning the live creatures in Anna’s life lined up to be fed in their established order; dog, cat, boy, man, snake. There used to be a girl in the line-up too but Anna’s daughter was far away now, eating whatever they served up in her university canteen.

Anna filled a bowl with oatmeal and handed it over to her son, Luke.

‘Ta,’ he said and he glanced up at her.

Luke was a darter, inserting himself into the adult world just long enough to get the gist.

He ate six meals a day and snacks in between and still he was always hungry.

She poured a cup of freshly brewed coffee for her husband, Peter, released a small cloud of crickets into the aquar­ium-home of Luke’s red-lipped herald – and wondered if her farmer ancestors feeding their flocks had felt plentiful in this way?

Peter took a long swig of coffee and scraped his chair back on the wooden kitchen floor. He pecked Anna on the forehead – she leant briefly into his kiss.

Anna could see that he was thinking about the day ahead as he gathered his phone and his keys. The tilt of his elegant head, pale-skinned and hollow-cheeked, precluded chatter. She lingered on his lightly freckled hands.

‘Come on, Lukey,’ said Anna. ‘It’s nearly half past.’

Luke got up and put his bowl into the sink. The sharp peaks of his shoulder blades through his T-shirt made Anna want to feed him beef stew and potatoes.

He and Peter left the house noisily.

‘See you later,’ shouted Anna from the kitchen and waited for the front door to bang shut before she and her small animal posse trickled into the lounge and settled into the armchair by the window.

The little death of her family’s daily departure always filled Anna with an oddly flippant grief, yet grief it was. It meant she had to stop sheltering in the practical pleasures of being a farmer/mother/wife, and haul herself up the stairs to get on with the task of adding a thousand words to her exacting book. It was a difficult transition.

Anna closed her eyes and a fragile silence filled the long room, scattered with shoes the size of ocean liners and too many books.

Bar the arrival of her two children, she had always measured the passing of time not in births, marriages or deaths, but in the great books she’d read, and later, the lesser ones she’d written.

She recalled Don Quixote, say, which she first read aged sixteen, but also the volatile condition she found herself in as she turned its pages.

This was even more true of the books she’d written, especially if the labour had been hard, and the latest was the toughest yet. She dreaded nothing more than the dull silence of the days when her powers failed her.

Thankfully, in the quiet of this morning, her book people began to shuffle into view. She could stay this way for hours, suspended between worlds.

The doorbell rang – as shocking to her state as if Luke’s pet viper had escaped its tank and sunk its teeth into her ankle. It’s the postman; quick hello and he’ll be gone. Please, please, be the postman.

Anna put her ear to the front door and called out, ‘Hello?’

‘Sì, Anna, it’s me!’

‘Nonna?’ she asked in surprise.

‘Are you going to let me in?’

Anna pulled open the door.

Her grandmother looked up at her, small, bent, and crackling with outrage ‘In case you were wondering, I am still alive.’

The old lady stood on the doormat in a faded knockoff Louis Vuitton jacket and diamanté sunglasses, a suitcase at her feet. A suitcase?

‘Oh, che cosa, Nonna?’ said Anna. What have you done?

‘I did nothing, di nulla, I swear,’ said the old lady.

The last time Nonna had been sent to Anna’s house it was because she poured a glass of water over an eighty-five-year-old fellow resident at the retirement home. When Anna chided her, she snapped, ‘Dear God in heaven, Anna, the man told me the same story THREE times, and it was agonia the first time around . . .’ and then she shrugged as if she was the wronged one.

‘I’m here because I have the feeling,’ the old lady said gravely.

‘What kind of feeling?’

‘You know the kind.’

Anna raised her hand. ‘Don’t say another word.’

She didn’t want to hear about her grandmother’s foretellings. The old lady opened her mouth to object.

‘Zip it, Nonna!’ said Anna.

And she did.

Anna took a breath. ‘We’ll give them a chance to cool off, then I’ll take you back to the home.’

There would be no thousand words today.

*

Anna’s grandmother came from a long line of worriers.

‘Not worriers, Anna!’ she’d exclaim. ‘Seers!’

She smelt of anise, favoured hot curlers over a blow-dry and had her nails painted pearl-pink every ten days. Her mission, her very reason for being, was to ensure that her children and grandchildren rose up, and to achieve that, they had to dodge the bullets of life’s misfortunes.

‘To be a winner,’ she said, and it sounded like weener, ‘you have to catch the trouble before it catches you.’

‘Yes, Nonna,’ said Anna, aged just five.

‘The ones who suspect nothing, they are the what?’ she would ask.

And Anna would say loudly, ‘THE LOSERS.’

‘Exactly,’ her grandmother would say and pat her head. ‘Watch out for that, Anna . . .’ and she pointed into the unknown future with her eyes blazing. ‘Watch out!’

And Anna did watch out, her whole life long, until she could see trouble coming from a thousand miles away. Except the trouble that mattered, that is, like the day her mama was rushed into St Mary’s intensive care, and never came out.

Chapter Two

There was trouble in the way Peter opened the garden gate that evening. And in the way he paused, as if to prepare himself, before completing the journey to the front door. But it was the totally unexpected nature of his trouble that took Anna by surprise. What did he mean he’d lost his job?

‘Just that.’

‘But what about us?’ she asked before she could stop herself.

‘For Chrissakes, Anna! I don’t know.’

Peter had been waiting a long time for the university to give him tenure but he never doubted that they would. Instead, his head of department that morning had suggested he look for another job, ‘Out of the capital, perhaps, for someone of your age? So sorry, Peter.’

Peter had told Anna the bad news as he stood in the kitchen with his coat still on.

Later, she remembered the look on his devastated face but just then she was too blinded by this catastrophe to see him clearly.

She’d always taken her husband’s long and secure employment as a given. It covered their basic life needs; food, and a roof over their heads, to say nothing of Nonna’s retirement home, the children’s university education, and some slim pickings put aside for retirement. But for Anna, most important of all was the freedom it gave her to write.

She was especially grateful for that when Sofia and Luke were babies and the longing to relieve her isolation and make something was strong. She put the children in her double stroller and went walking, drawn to the noise and clatter of London’s street markets, each one further from home than the last. When she found the Queen’s Market in Newham, it seemed to her like a new country; there wasn’t a native Englishman in sight apart from the grumpy geezer selling bananas.

The route Anna took led them past a battered school building. On the wall outside was a poster for an immigrant advice centre.

One day she pushed her stroller over the broken door jamb and knocked on the door.

‘What can you do?’ asked the young woman manning the desk.

Anna shrugged. ‘Not much.’

‘Can you fill in forms?’

‘Yes. I can do that.’

Anna volunteered for a few hours, three times a week. She filled in applications for amnesty, for disability support, assisted housing and schools, and in this way she came to hear the stories of the people who had washed up there. She met the children of women who had been trafficked and the ones who had arrived parentless, hanging onto the coat-tails of unscrupulous adults out to make a living from their plight.

Before Anna knew it, she’d been there a year. The people who frequented the market assumed her to be local and nodded their heads in greeting.

It was many years later, when Anna’s first two books were long finished, that the character of Boubakar began, uncertainly, to show up in her mind. She willingly followed the young Malian boy looking for his mother in London’s immigrant outskirts, into a world of war and people trafficking and tragedy.

A little bit at a time, Anna began to write a book about how those who know the worst live amongst those who do not.

Peter seemed to accept the modest earnings Anna was able to contribute to the family economy, but whenever she tried to explain her work to him, it opened a rift between them. Like the evening not so long ago, in the perfect peace of their autumn garden when he’d asked, ‘How’d it go today?’

‘Oh, hard,’ she’d said. ‘Some days are hard.’

‘Why do it then?’

Anna had looked at him as if to say, Are you serious?

*

The pot on the stove began to bubble and hiss. Beef stew was a favourite of Luke’s. Anna had made it as part of her campaign to build up his bony shoulders.

Come dinnertime he devoured his helping and asked for more. As he ate he watched his silent father with uneasy attention.

‘Did someone die?’ he asked quietly.

His slightly flushed alarm stuck in Anna’s gut.

‘Don’t be silly, caro,’ she said, and ruffled his hair, ‘Jump into bed and read a book. It’s cold in here.’

He left reluctantly.

Anna and Peter stumbled through the clearing the table part of their evening in silence. It had taken her a long time to adjust to her husband’s insistence that he be left alone when times were hard. ‘Let me sort it out in peace,’ he would say. ‘Please.’

As she loaded the dishwasher Anna had to stop herself from hissing in anxious self-regard, What’s going to happen to my book people, Peter?

The ringtone Anna reserved for her daughter rang out behind her. She and Sofia spoke often. Free wireless connection meant they were no longer exchanging news but rather chatting idly as they pottered. Anna used the time stealthily, to notice if Sofia looked tired, or whether she’d washed her hair.

Today, though, if she was honest, she clung to the conversation because she took comfort in her daughter’s shining almond eyes.

‘Che cos’hai Mama?’asked Sofia in Italian, which is what the children and Anna did whenever they wanted to get to the bottom of things.

‘Va tutto bene. I’m fine, just tired.’

Later, when Anna crawled under the sheets, she found Peter already there.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘No, please.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. I’ve made a bit of a mess of it all.’

She reached for him.

‘I should’ve published more, learnt code, read environmental science, chemistry, politics . . . I’m a dinosaur, Anna.’

‘Sshsh.’

They lay very close in the hope that it would bring comfort. She wrapped her arms around him and held on tight.

They lay like this until the house was still, then Anna reached for her husband in a different way. She stroked his lean limbs and dug her fingers into his hair. Slowly, gently, he turned to face her. He lifted himself over her and parted her legs until their bodies rocked together in familiar and consoling lust.

*

‘Anna, you know cousin Giovanni was squashed under the tyres of his own tractor because he didn’t heed his mother’s warning!’ said Nonna on the phone first thing in the morning

‘Nonna, per favore,’ said Anna, crouched at the side of the empty garden bed that had offered up a lavish crop of carrots in the autumn.

‘But there’s trouble coming, my child.’

‘It’s already here, Nonna,’ snapped Anna. ‘Peter lost his job.’

‘Oh, santo Dio,’ whispered the old lady. ‘That was it.’

‘Now tell me what to do, please,’ said Anna.

‘I don’t know, bella, this I don’t know,’ said her grandmother.

‘Right. That doesn’t help me.’

‘Just pay attention Anna! There is more to come.’

Anna turned the soil with a small garden fork. A vagrant carrot, shrivelled and almost black, emerged in her turning. She shook the soil off, frozen-fingered, and took a bite – it still held some of its taste. She snapped what was left in two and gave half to Liebe, then she went inside to take refuge with Boubakar and his people.

She found only silence when she opened her computer to work. She gave it a few minutes and then reached for her headphones.

Anna had written each of her books to a different playlist. Her father had helped her put the latest one together from his vast collection of African music. It was made up largely of a traditional Mande repertoire. He’d also thrown in some Puccini and Verdi for moments when she needed opera.

She put the headphones on her head, turned up the volume, and tapped her fingers to the music’s quixotic beat.

From her earliest years, Anna’s father had shared with her his love of music. A professor at the Royal College for thirty years, his knowledge was encyclopaedic, but it was how he reached for it after Anna’s mother died that revealed to her its redemptive grace.

Many nights would see the three of them – Anna, her brother Stefano, and their father – listening to music on the sofa, or better still, playing together. Her nonna once said that after they lost their mother the three of them were like separate vines, too frail on their own, but capable when wound together.

She dialled the number of the small house in the Swiss village to which her father had retreated when he retired, but it rang unanswered. He was probably out walking his dogs.

Anna sat back in her chair and evoked him anyway. After all, he lived in her; he and his grit. Had he not packed her and Stefano’s school lunches for years after their mother died, brushed their hair and cooked their dinners, when all he wanted to do was follow his beloved into the next world?

He had honoured them with his care. How then could she let Boubakar and his story go without a fight?

Anna turned away from the desk. If her imaginative world was made timid by the blow of Peter’s news, perhaps the outer world would be more responsive?

She hit the redial button on her phone and called her friend and agent Lisbet Marais.

‘How the fuck are you, Anna?’ she said, ‘And where’s my manuscript?’

Lisbet was a South African with a mouth like a sewer. It was she who’d plucked Anna’s first book out of the mountain of submissions years ago and become its cheerleader. She’d transformed a promising book into a pretty good one, even if the world mostly didn’t notice.

Anna said, ‘Peter’s lost his job.’

In her strong South African accent Lisbet said, ‘Fuck me . . . wait . . . what?’

‘His head of department gave him the boot.’

‘But academics never lose their jobs, they are carried out feet first.’

‘Not this one.’

‘Jesus, sorry, bokkie.’

She called Anna that whenever she was ruffled. The first time she did it Anna had asked, ‘What’s a bokkie?’ and Lisbet had looked up and said, ‘Little buck. You know, big eyes, soft muzzle, delicious in a stew.’

That was Lisbet, at once sentimental and effortlessly cruel.

Anna took a deep breath and asked Lisbet to bring forward the publishing date for her book by six months.

‘What did you say?’

‘I need to publish sooner, Lisbet, tomorrow actually.’

There was silence on the other end of the phone. They both knew how immovable publishing dates were. That’s why Anna felt compelled to explain herself. ‘It could save my life.’

‘No, dear girl, it won’t do that.’

‘I can have it finished in a month if I really push.’

Lisbet let out a great booming laugh. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

Quite possibly, thought Anna, and an image came to her of Peter, Luke, Sofia and Nonna, splitting apart and hurtling through space in an explosion of unmet need.

She jumped when she heard the hooter blasting outside in the street.

What day was it?

The hooter sounded again. Anna sat up. Bugger!

It was her friend Bouchra picking her up for Wednesday yoga. She made it into the passenger seat before she realised that she was still wearing her threadbare bedroom slippers.

Chapter Three

‘Breathe in, right into the back of your chest,’ said Stokely, their yoga teacher of eight years. ‘Let your hips settle into the floor, release your neck.’

Stokely, so named by his Jamaican father after the militant leader of the Black Panther Party, was an inspired teacher. Wednesday yoga had become a cherished space in the lives of Anna and her two best friends, Bouchra and Nadia.

Stokely seemed to know instinctively when they needed shoring up and he did it with unusual skill.

‘Torschlusspanik,’ he said quietly to Anna as they stood poised to begin the sun salutations.

‘What’s that?’

‘It means gate-shutting panic.’

‘Yeah. That about sums it up.’

Torschlusspanik was exactly what Anna was feeling. She had long ago stopped wondering why German words held such attraction for Stokely. He didn’t speak the language and had no cultural crossover with the country but the sounds of the words themselves, as well as their meaning, delighted him.

Anna always began yoga class knotted up like a tree branch and when it was over her muscles felt long and supple. She often had her best ideas upside down and thinking of nothing at all.

Not today though. Today, only her concern not to disrupt the class got her to the end.

*

‘Oh, shit,’ said Nadia as Anna shared her news. The three friends stood in the parking lot outside the yoga studio with the winter drizzle turning to sleet around their heads.

‘Shit is right,’ said Anna.

‘So now what?’ asked Bouchra.

Before Anna could answer, Nadia enveloped her in a hug, and murmured protectively, ‘It’s too soon for such questions, Bouchra.’

‘Sorry . . .’ muttered Bouchra. A dynamo Syrian, she hated uncertainty. ‘But what’s the plan, Anna?’ she asked, unable to stop herself.

Anna leaned further into Nadia’s embrace and closed her eyes.

*

Bouchra turned up at Anna’s front door that afternoon with a lamb and eggplant curry in a large orange pot. Her visit was not unexpected.

Nadia wasn’t far behind and she brought dhal.

The two women took occupation of Anna’s kitchen table as if it were a war room.

‘So?’ asked Bouchra.

‘I’m going to finish my book and hope it sells,’ said Anna.

‘What makes you think it will?’ asked Nadia.

Anna took a breath. ‘Nothing.’

‘That’s reassuring,’ Bouchra muttered.

The friends had known one another for a long time. They’d met at the school gates and their children had grown up in each othe. . .