AllFreeNovel
Share Us
220 Madison Avenue, Suite 406
New York, NY 10016
leaflandliterary.com
@emmelinesanders
NOTES/DRAFTS—FILMING REFEREE’S A WANKER
On the first day on set I was… now you fill in this part!
Mabel, I’m not doing that much, I’ve told you. You can’t just give me a one-sentence prompt like I’m doing a creative writing assignment in school. Though I’ve gotta be honest, I used to bloody love them things. You know, when some substitute comes in and they never knew what they were doing and so they’d just go “Okay, everybody, give me a two-page story based on the prompt: you’ve found a monkey in your toilet” or summat like that.
And everybody else used to moan and groan because filling two whole pages was a lot. But I never thought it was, I always thought that was nothing at all. I’d get to the end of the second one in my exercise book and realize the monkey wasn’t even out of the toilet yet. My main character was still constructing his elaborate winch-like device to extract him.
I could never go on, though. It was already weird that everybody else in class had scratched out one sentence while I’d crammed in seven thousand of them in my tiniest handwriting to make it all fit. I’d have to tear the page out and claim I’d written swears all over it, so the teacher would let me throw it out.
Still, I’d be thinking about that monkey all day.
Eventually I nicked exercise books from the supply cupboard, so I had a fake one that I wrote bollocks in, and a real one that I kept to myself. Twenty-seven pages I ended up with on getting that winch working. Then the boy and the monkey became best friends, and fought an invading army of aliens, from the movieAliens.
You remember that?
Best bit is when he teaches her how to use his gun.
P.S. Actually, you can’t include any of this.
FifteenNatasha Denona Probably Never Forgets How to Eat Cereal
She felt moderately calm about things, when it came time to do something a little more flashy than going round to his to write his book. Mostly because he did just as he had in the car that afternoon. He spelled it all out, nice and clearly, with predetermined boundaries in place.I will come and pick you up at six, we will have dinner at seven at somewhere fancy enough for people to see us, during which time I shall touch your hand, and maybe your knee, and probably do something sickening like feed you something from my plate, and then I shall bring you back to yours, and kiss you at the door while pretending no fucking massive wanker is across the street snapping our picture, he’d told her.
So she was fine about all that.
But what she wasn’t fine about was the one thing she hadn’t thought of while panicking about weird hot reactions to nothing, and worrying that touching him and kissing him would make her break her own bones. She was going to be out on the town with Alfie Harding. Alfie Harding, who regularly wore suits last seen in a Bond movie, and had girlfriends who didn’t justuseproducts by Natasha Denona.
They posed inadvertsfor Natasha Denona.
Natasha Denona was somehow their best mate.
Heck, for all she knew some of themwereNatasha Denona.
Whereas she didn’t even really know who Natasha Denona was. She just popped up when Mabel searched “eyeshadow that a footballer’s girlfriend would wear.” Alongside about seventhousand pictures of eyelids that looked as if Michelangelo had done all of them as some kind of sequel to the Sistine Chapel.
Which, needless to say, put her own attempts at makeup to shame. Even though her attempts weren’t that half bad, really. In fact, most of the things she did, style-wise, weren’t half bad. A good proportion of social media seemed to think she looked great, and wanted her shoes, and liked her dresses.
But that wasn’t the point.
The point was:
She was a mid-level cute sort of stylish.
The people he dated were professional-tier elegant.
So really, was it any wonder that she was beside herself by the time he arrived? She didn’t think so. She thought it was perfectly understandable to have one leg in a pair of tights, two odd shoes on her feet, and a dress on backward when he showed up. But of course he had other ideas about that.
“What in the fucking fuck are my eyes beholding here, then?” he wanted to know as soon as he stepped into her flat. And she didn’t think it was just about the absolute state of her, either. No, she thought it was very possibly about everything she had just done to every room in the place.
Because she’d made a mess.
