Tiny Acts of Love ~ A Funny
Romantic Novel
Surviving
motherhood? It's all about having the right support network.
Lawyer and new mum Cassie has a husband
who converses mainly through jokes, a best friend on the other side of the
world, and a taskforce of Babycraft mothers who make her feel she has about as
much maternal aptitude as a jellyfish.
Husband Jonathan dismisses Cassie’s
maternal anxieties, but is he really paying attention to his struggling wife?
He’s started sleep talking and it seems there’s more on his mind than he’s
letting on. Then sexy, swaggering ex-boyfriend Malkie saunters into Cassie’s
life again.
Unlike Jonathan, he ‘gets’ her. He’d like
to get her into bed again, too…
And on top of all her emotional turmoil,
she also finds herself advising a funeral director on ghost protocol and
becomes involved in an act of hotel spa fraud, never mind hiding cans of wasp
spray all over the house to deal with the stalker who seems to be lurking
everywhere she looks. Marriage and motherhood isn’t the fairytale Cassie
thought it would be. Will her strange new world fall apart around her or will
tiny acts of love be enough to get her through?
Funny, perceptive and real, Tiny Acts of Love portrays the rawness of
motherhood, the flipside of love and the powerful lure of paths not taken.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
I’d been
awake for eighty-six hours when I realised what my husband had done. We’d just
got home from the hospital and he was upstairs holding Sophie so that I could
make myself a cup of tea and possibly have a nap.
But by the
time I’d inched my way to the kitchen, tea-making seemed too daunting a task –
something I’d been used to doing in a previous life, but not now. From the
fridge magnets and the Isle of Skye tea towel to the strand of spaghetti dried
onto the hob, everything seemed familiar but distant, as though I’d returned to
a house I’d lived in a long time ago.
My eye
caught the laptop, open on the kitchen table. People were bound to have heard
about the birth by now – maybe I should check my emails. Perhaps some words of
congratulation would flick a switch, jump-start me, and shake me out of this
jittery, twilight world.
To my
surprise, I had a hundred and four unread emails, all with identical subject
descriptions. I opened up my sent box, a terrible suspicion forming in my mind.
The offending communication was right there at the top.
Subject: 48 Stitches Later!
Attachment: sophiebreastfeeding.jpg
She has arrived! Sophie Louise Carlisle, a bouncing baby girl 7lb 5oz.
Cassie’s waters broke on Monday afternoon (at work!) and we rushed up to the Edinburgh
Royal Infirmary in a taxi (taxi driver NOT happy). However, she wasn’t dilated
enough, so we were sent home. Contractions started overnight, and when we went
back the next morning, we were rushed up to the delivery suite where the
midwife decided . . .
Unable to read any more, I opened the attachment. It
was a photograph of my top half, naked and white against hospital sheets. I was
frowning in concentration as I tried to coax my nipple into Sophie’s mouth.
It had been sent to every name in my contacts list,
including the following recipients:
1. David Galbraith,
Senior Partner, Everfield Chase, London office. He’d been the lawyer acting on
the other side of a multi-million pound joint venture called Project Vertigo.
I’d been advising on transfer of employment issues and for some reason got
involved in some late-night emailing from my home computer.
2. Everyone else from
Everfield Chase who had ever worked on Project Vertigo. This ran to dozens of
people, including: Nadeem Madaan (employment law), Bill Harkness (banking),
Julie MacDonald (tax), Benjamin Trent (property), and Ashley Green (night
typing secretary).
3. Doreen King of HM
Revenue & Customs – provider of guidance in relation to a tax issue that
had arisen in another corporate transaction.
4. Elliot McCabe,
Manager of Braid Hills Funeral Home – correspondence concerning Great Auntie
Judith’s funeral.
5. Renato Di Rollo,
Reservations desk, Hotel San Romano. Holiday booking.
6. Malkie Hamilton.
Ex-boyfriend. Oh my God.
‘Jonathan!’
He eventually
appeared, carrying Sophie snug against him on one forearm, supporting her head
in his palm.
‘Is it time
for your paracetamol?’ he asked with a bright smile.
‘What . . . is this?’ I whispered, my
hand pointing somewhere in the direction of the screen. The effort of twisting
my head to look up at him had dissolved my vision into a field of black swirls.
‘What? Let me see.’ He peered in closer. ‘It’s the
email I wrote in the hospital – remember, the one I showed you?’
‘What? I’ve never seen this before in my life!’
He paused for a moment, frowning while he considered
his response. ‘Well, maybe you were a bit . . . out of it . . . at the time . .
.’
Scenes from the birth, fragmented and disconnected,
surfaced in my mind: Jonathan fiddling with his BlackBerry during the pushing
stage, at around the point where I’d reached a calm acceptance that I would
never get out of that room alive; Jonathan taking pictures as the midwife
hauled a purple, blood-stained Sophie onto my chest for skin-to-skin contact;
Jonathan waving the BlackBerry in my face just as the haemorrhaging started . .
.
‘You needn’t look like that, Cassie. You said it was
okay.’
‘I might very well have done. But I was not of sound
mind at the time.’
This lawyerly pronouncement didn’t seem to make much of
an impression on him. He merely bent his head and kissed Sophie’s nose six
times. Her arms flew out in a startle reflex. It occurred to me that we’d have
to take off the hospital bracelet that still encircled her thin, translucent
wrist; she was ours now. I could scarcely believe they’d let us take her home.
‘And
anyway.’ I glared at Jonathan again. ‘Then you decided to email it to half the
lawyers in the UK?’
‘What do you
mean?’
‘You’ve
managed to send it to all my contacts, which seems to include everybody I’ve
ever sent an email to since I got this account.’
He was quiet
for a moment, taking this in. ‘Hmmm. You’ll need to change your default
settings.’
‘So it’s my
fault now?’ Rage was bubbling up in the pit of my stomach, but somehow it
wasn’t reaching as far as my voice, or the part of my brain that formed words.
I sat back with a big shuddering sigh.
‘Don’t you
think you might be overreacting? And besides,’ he said, narrowing his eyes,
‘you’re not supposed to do work emails from a personal email account. You know
that, Cassie.’
‘There were
other people on that list too.’ I scanned through it again. ‘The damp proofing
guy, the fish deliverer . . . people who are now going to think I’m mad.’
‘So? I
hardly think that matters. If you like, I’ll send out another email saying it
was my fault, and that it wasn’t intended to reach them.’
Before I
could reply, the doorbell rang, and Jonathan rushed off to answer it. He came
back beaming, an enormous bouquet of flowers in his non-Sophie arm.
The
cellophane screeched as I tore off the card, making Sophie startle again.
‘Congratulations! With
best wishes from the Joint Ventures Team at Everfield Chase.’
With a squeal, I tossed the bouquet onto the table.
‘For God’s sake! It’s from bloody Everfield Chase!’
Jonathan
seemed delighted. ‘You see, Cassie, everyone is going to be happy for you. I
hope there were some clients on the list too. It’s quite an original marketing
tool – you’ll certainly stand out in their memories, look at it that way.’
‘Yes, I
should think the mental image of their employment lawyer naked and
breastfeeding in the delivery room will be quite hard to erase.’
‘I’m sorry,
Cassie-Lassie.’ He came over and folded me into a hug with his spare arm. I
detached myself and took Sophie from him – a process that took several moments
as I eased my hands around her back, working my fingers upwards to support the
back of her head. She felt more like a kitten than a baby; a pliant bag of
bones. She curled into an upright position against me, nose nodding into my
shoulder as she tried to move her head, sensing milk nearby. I stroked the nape
of her neck with one finger, lost in the utter softness of her skin.
‘Our very
own joint venture, Cassie,’ said Jonathan, curling his palm around the back of
Sophie’s head, his eyes looking moist.
And although
it was a terrible line, it did make me smile. Because it was his way of saying
that Sophie had been born out of our love, because of our love, and would grow
up in our love like a little bud unfurling its petals towards the sun.
About the Author
Lucy Lawrie was born in Edinburgh, and
gained an honours degree in English Literature from Durham University before
going on to study law. She worked as a lawyer in Edinburgh for several years,
specialising in Employment and Pensions law. When Lucy was on maternity leave
with her first baby, she unearthed a primary two homework book in which she’d
stated, in very wobbly handwriting: ‘I want to be an AUTHOR when I grow up.’ To appease her six-year
old self, she began writing her first novel.
Author Links
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GUEST POST
The
‘What If?’ Game
Tiny
Acts of Love is about a young lawyer whose
seemingly perfect life unravels in the aftermath of having a baby.
I used to be a lawyer. I’ve had two babies.
So people often ask the question: ‘Is it based on your own experience?’
There are two answers to this: ‘Yes,
absolutely!’ and ‘No, not at all!’ Both are equally true. To explain this, I
want to talk about the three things you need to write a novel.
1. First, there’s the
craft of writing – this is like a toolbox. The tools can be used at sentence or
paragraph level - adjectives, metaphor, simile, the rhythm and sound of the
words, dialogue and humour. Then there are storytelling techniques that work on
a bigger scale – whether that’s over the course of a scene, a chapter or a whole
novel. Those include elements like pacing, suspense, unanswered questions,
controlling the release of information, juxtaposition of characters, settings
and events. Craft can be learnt, whether that be from ‘how to write’ books,
writing workshops, or simply though trial and error.
2. Secondly, you need
material - something to get working on with
those tools. You might have ideas for a story, a plot, themes you’d like to
explore, or for a certain type of character. These could be inspired by your
own life, but don’t have to be. If you
need material, a useful way to begin is to play the ‘What If?’ game.
When I started writing
Tiny Acts of Love, I started with myself
(I didn’t feel I had anything else to start with!) Cassie, the main character, had
an outlook that was basically identical to mine. But then I added in ‘What
Ifs’… So, what if, instead of growing up in a happy, secure family, I’d been
brought up by a single, widowed mother struggling for money? How would that have
changed me, and the way I approach life?
What if, instead
of marrying my real life husband, I’d married someone infuriating like Cassie’s
husband Jonathan, full of bounding, puppy-dog enthusiasm, but dismissive of my worries
and parenting angst, and not on the same wavelength at all? How would that have
affected my experience as a new mum? What if, instead of having a lovely,
supportive antenatal group, I’d got caught up with a taskforce of
ultra-competitive mums like the Babycraft group? What if, instead of an
understanding and reasonable employer, I’d had a boss who phoned me at home, three
days after giving birth, to land a new case on me?
Once you start
the ‘What If?’ game, there’s no shortage of potential material. I applied it to
almost every area of Cassie’s life, and she quickly became her own person, as
real, and as ‘other’ to me as a good friend.
3. Once you have the
material and the tools, the third part is that you have to somehow breathe life
into what you’ve made. This is all about the emotions your characters feel.
As far as this
goes, all you have is your own
experience. If a character feels jealousy, or regret, or fear, or hope, or heartbreak,
the only way you can write that (the only way I can do it, anyway) is to
remember a time you felt those emotions, and incorporate that into the story.
That doesn’t mean that your character experiences the same events as you, but
rather, simply, that emotions have shapes.
You extrapolate those shapes, drawing them on a bigger scale, or perhaps a
smaller one, to fit the events of the book.
To take a minor example,
one day a neighbour came round to tell me that someone had been in her garden. There
was no break-in, no damage. She only knew because they’d picked up some stones
and lined them up along the top of the patio wall. I remember my physical
response to hearing this – a creepy, spidery sensation, like someone running a
finger down my back. And a slippery, panicky feeling at the thought of anyone
watching me, or my children, or the house. A similar but more worrying thing
happens to Cassie in the book – someone starts leaving anonymous notes, then rearranges
the stones in the garden rockery to spell out a message. Cassie’s reaction is
an exaggerated version – a bigger version, if you like - of my own emotional
response when my neighbour told me that story.
This technique
works for deeper, more complex emotions too, ones that play across the canvas
of a whole book. In Tiny Acts of Love,
Cassie’s long lost ex-boyfriend comes back into her life, and every time they
spend time together (he’s working at her office), she’s overwhelmed with
yearning for him, and a sense that maybe he was the right one for her all along,
and the only person who’ll ever be able to make her happy. This is potentially
devastating, given that she’s now married with a new baby. Again, I played the
‘What If?’ game. I remembered back to the aftermath of one of my big breakups
(a long time ago!) and the tumultuous feelings I’d had then – full of despair
one minute, full of hope and longing the next, and a blind conviction that it
was all, somehow, still meant to be. Then I imagined what it might be like if
those feelings had never been resolved - if I’d just buried them, rushed into
another relationship, and was feeling them afresh now, in Cassie’s situation,
married to someone else.
Other writers may approach things very
differently. But I like the ‘What If?’ game, because it does something
important – it keeps a thread of connection to yourself. So there is a good
chance that the emotions in your novel – and they are the beating heart of it –
will come across as real, and honest, and true. That’s when your story will
resonate with readers, because what’s real for you might very well be real for
them too, or at least some of them. That’s when they’ll give the magical
response: ‘I felt like you were writing about me!’ And suddenly the book is not
about me, at all, any more - it’s about them. As a writer, that’s what makes me
happiest of all.
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