Chapter 7

The next day, we were packed and in the back of the car, heading for the next event. It was a busy six weeks, going from one signing to a hotel, followed by another signing and then on towards the next hotel. We were well looked after, had some time for rest and time in a salon once a week. The signing, in Norwich, had all of Ellie’s family in the queue, and we took them for dinner afterwards.

By the time we had arrived back at the London hotel, a lot had happened, due to emails and phone calls between signings and sleep. We had been advised of our new company, called EfosTP, and had our new secretary, Samantha, with a single-room office in a group of leased offices. Samantha had equipped it with the desk, a couple of chairs, her computer and a phone line. She would be our nerve centre over the next few years, while we concentrate on our work and more books.

The company had its own bank account, into which the money that the publisher owed us had been deposited. The accountant had set up all the regular payments, including a small salary to each of us, the salary for Samantha, and the outgoings for the office. We had sent out the books for our families and friends and had been in touch with Madame Duval about giving access to the film studio to the island.

We had a meeting set up in the function room the day after we arrived. The film studio was to be there with the official papers and the cheque. Samantha was to be there to meet us for the first time and take notes. The accountant was coming to take the film cheque and give us the first financial report for the company. Madame Duval was coming over to talk to the studio and was bringing a French civil servant who would be able to smooth all the paths for them in French Polynesia.

We were happy to have the tour over. We had signed hundreds of books every few days, met a lot of people and tried to be approachable as we went around, while having defend the ending of the book as being possible. We would be settling down before going back to Belgium, to prepare for our next year in Antwerp, and catching up with what had been going on in Brussels.

The meeting was good, with our accountant happy with the way we were going, the film studio happy with the help we had organised, the EU happy with the book becoming a film. Madame Duval offered EU assistance and the French civil servant was given the names of those who would be talking to him, so that he could organise the paperwork to give them access and assistance on the island, which wasn’t actually named in the book.

We put lunch on for everyone, and everyone left except Samantha, who came back to our room where we went through all the things we expected to be doing, and how much lead time we would need to fly back to England for only important reasons. She had purchased and set up two phones, which only she knew the numbers of. All we had to do was to keep them charged and return her calls when we could. She stayed for dinner, and when she left, we were friends, with her knowing my secret. When I had sent my first manuscript to the publisher, I had never thought that one day I would be employing someone to be the cut-out between me and him.

Ellie and I went sight-seeing in London, mainly visiting galleries and the main library to have a look at the early editions of some of the books we both loved. We didn’t go mad, buying clothes or jewels, as that wasn’t the people we were. Our money was held by the company, and our personal accounts were healthy, if not huge, from our earlier books. After a few days, we decided that we needed to be back in Brussels. Madame Duval had told us that there would be things to do whenever we returned, and we did need to talk to Antwerp to see if everything was in place.

We told the hotel that we would be checking out the next morning and arranged the ferry for a couple of days later. After breakfast, a couple of boys carried our cases down and packed them in the Citroen, which had been pulled out of storage, serviced and cleaned. We paid our account on the company card we had been given and the hotel gave us a card, each, and a list of hotels all over the world that would honour it.

We spent that night at Barking, with my folks, bringing Mum up to date on Adrian and Joseph, as well as relating some of the funny things that had happened on the tour. We stayed the next night in Harwich, and then took the ferry back to Europe. As the coast approached, we sat, looking forward, and Ellie said that it was like coming home. I had to agree, but that was tempered by the fact that we had a lot of work ahead of us by the time we had finished our degrees.

We drove through to Mechelen, arriving after Juliette had got home from work. She welcomed us in, and Jules helped us get the cases in. We told them that we would take them to dinner, so we freshened up and went to our favourite restaurant.

Over the next few days, we quickly got back into a routine. The first thing we did was to spend time returning me to being Clarence, removing the breasts. I would have to wait until the eyebrows grew again and would go through life with studs in my ears, but wondered if a small moustache and a goatee would accentuate my maleness, in a sort of twee way. We went into Brussels and visited the salon, where my false nails were removed, and all twenty digits brought back to a natural colour. I also had a haircut which matched the first I had there, making me look a bit like Oscar Wilde.

We then went to Antwerp and verified that they would be taking us through to our degree. When we went into see them, I think that someone had been talking to them, as the only assignments for the year was another play for the drama class, and a publishable book, no less than two hundred thousand words. We went into the office to tell them we were back in business. There was a small pile of files on our desk, all speeches that needed to be written as the winter approached.

The summer had been kinder to the world, and some were thinking that we got off lightly. The real problem during those few months was on the other side of the world, where the temperature of the waters south of Australia had increased by two degrees, and the Antarctic shelf was starting to break up. The Arctic had already reduced in size by over thirty percent, and the overall water level of the oceans had risen several inches.

In no time at all, we were in a regular round of writing. Work things stayed at work, and our evenings were taken up with working out a play and the book. When we thought about it, we decided that the plot for the play would be my original idea of the housing estate and the resistance from the heroine about damaging the pristine environment. Like the previous play, it could be done in four acts, with the first being a town meeting where the project was put forward.

As far as the book was concerned, we started thinking about an overall premise for the story. Impending doom was out, blue sky thinking was out. No. This book would have to be set after the full range of changes had come into play. A world where survival was paramount. Using our resources in the EU, we downloaded the projections of what land masses would look like given various rises in the sea levels. It would be a shrinking world, and one where there would be competition for the available high ground, both physically and morally.

In many countries, the outcomes were easy to predict. In most South American countries, it would be the dictators and the cartels that would dominate. In North America it would be organised crime and the gun-toting far right against the government and the army. In Europe, many countries would remain basically unchanged, because of the terrain, except the lowlands of the Netherlands. We saw one extreme projection which showed Australia looking like an atoll with an inland sea, much like it may have been some millions of years before.

The story was set well into the future. Our heroine was a girl from low-lying Norfolk, near the Wash, who is forced to move further inland, and follows her adventures and perils along the way. She planned to go north to the Lake District but came up against armed militia. Heading south, she ran into similar problems along the Welsh borders, which had declared that its high ground was ‘Wales for the Welsh’.

On the way, she teams up with our hero, who she met leaving the Lake District, with him having made the trip from the Tyneside. We called it ‘Climb Every Mountain’. The song lyrics gave us some ideas towards the story, with our words meaning the opposite of the joyful song. It made it easier to write, with every short journey filling a chapter. We used one of the worst-case reports, which had a likely rise of two to three metres.

For Christmas, that year, we led Jules and Juliette to the ferry and across to Harwich, with our Yuletide break at Ellie’s family home, Juliette catching up with her sister after more than ten years. The play was performed in the last term, around the same time that the manuscript went to the publisher, with a copy taken to our lecturer in Antwerp. The writers were Elaine Terrey and Clarence Higgins. We sent a note to the publisher that Patricia had got herself married and had moved to Canada. In the meantime, we had written more speeches and reports that I would have thought possible.

During the year, we had been back to England a few times, for meetings with the film studio that Samantha had set up. The location work had been finished and it was mainly studio scenes to do. They had called in a well-known composer for the background music. We saw some rushes of what had been completed, met the cast, and Elaine gave her permission to the studio to finish had they had started. The studio was also given the unpublished manuscript of the next book to look at.

Elaine explained that the harder edge of this story was due to my input. Patricia was not coming back, so future collaborations would be the two of us. This didn’t worry the studio, as long as the story hung together. It was no business of the publisher, as we were on his books as our original names. It made things easier for the accountant, as any questions about Patricia would be referred to her, if she could be found in her new name, which he could declare, in all honesty, he didn’t know.

My old EU passport replaced the POS one, with a new photo to show the slightly older me, along with a new ID tag for the office. It was all back the way it was before the mix-up, but with a slight difference. I now had a dislike of heavy clothes and rough materials. I started buying unisex items, wearing women’s socks, and favouring brighter colours. Ellie told me that I had retained the brighter personality and friendliness that had been the biggest change.

Just before we graduated, Elaine went to see a doctor, coming back with the news that she was expecting. It was planned, to see if we could make a child without going through a lot of tests. The thing was that we now needed to decide where we wanted our child to grow up. Antwerp was a good five metres above the high-water mark of the very worst projections, with Brussels some five metres higher, with Mechelen somewhere in between.

We started looking around Mechelen first, as Brussels was very expensive. We found a nice place in the outskirts, a detached three-bedroom place, with a large block and steep roof to minimise problems with the expected snowfalls. It was about six hundred thousand Euro. We spoke to our accountant, and he told us that we had plenty we could put on it, even paying for it outright, with the film rights covering the cost. If we used one bedroom as an office for writing, we could class it a partially work-related expense.

The graduation ceremony was good. Madame President was in the official party and gave a speech that we had not been part of writing. Both of us were given honours. At the after-ceremony mingling, we were told that we could be in line for Honorary Doctorships with a few more best-selling books under our belt.

We moved into the house, a month after we graduated. There was a garage for the car and the biggest extra expense was buying furniture, which was fun. We set up the office with all the equipment that we would need to work from home should we get snowed in. We were close enough to Juliette to be convenient, but far enough away to be private. Over the summer, we redecorated and filled the house with all the things we wanted. One bedroom was reserved as a nursery, but our baby would spend a lot of the early nights in a crib with us.

After this, we planned a wedding before Elaine was showing too much. Most of the main churches in the town were Catholic. We settled on the Beguinage Church, or Begijnhofkerk in Belgian Dutch. They were all right with me as one of us was of the faith. It was a beautiful building from the mid-sixteen hundreds. We arranged accommodation for my family, with Elaine’s now going to stay with Juliette. When we sent out the wedding invitations, we were surprised at the answers. There were going to be some highfliers there.

The wedding was wonderful. Ellie looked magnificent in white, while I was resplendent in a suit. Adrian was my Best Man, with Joseph as a groomsman. Ellie had her sister as Maid of Honour, with Belinda as the second bridesmaid. Mum and Jim were happy to see us and where we were living. Ellie’s parents were happy to revisit their own history, with her father walking her down the aisle. The reception was in a local restaurant and our honeymoon was in Paris for a week. After that, it was back to work.

While we were away, the play was taken up by the Amsterdam theatre again, and the new book hit the shelves. A week after we had arrived home, we had the invitations for the premiere of the ‘Last Wave’ film, which we attended as a married couple with Ellie getting all the requests for interviews. I was along as the ‘plus one’ but there were a few critics that had seen the plays that my name was on. Within the space of the rest of that year, the film earned enough that our half of a percent gave us half a million Pounds, which went into the business account.

As the year progressed, the EU work became less hectic. There were more speechwriters in tune with the new thinking, and we had done our job of turning the ship. Madame President told us that we would continue to be paid, as long as we turned out one book a year that followed the likely future, as they gave a lot of people an insight into what to expect, and our salaries were a lot less than an advertising campaign that nobody would notice, anyway.

Ellie was now showing, with the baby due in March. We had a quiet Christmas at home, and me able to stay home helped her. Oddly enough, we both wanted a rest from writing stories about the end of the world, and she started writing the Elaine Terrey romantic novels again, without needing my input. I started writing Clare Higgins stories, with the benefit of having lived as a female for two months, or so. We did collaborate on a new story for the EU, pacing ourselves so that we could do one a year.

In February of the following year, the studio got in touch with Samantha about negotiating the rights for ‘Mountain’, and we did a cash deal with a one percent stake in the takings. We had not gone on a tour for the book, claiming that Elaine couldn’t take the pressure being pregnant.

Our baby was born on time, in the first week of March. Patricia Annika Higgins was beautiful, with a lot of her mother in her. I doted on her and we shared parenting equally. It took some time from our writing, but Juliette told us that the EU was happy to give us some slack, as there was a lot of people now working on the various projects that we had been the parents of. The new book to fulfil our salary was sent to the publisher in September, joining two each of our own novels in that year.

We went to England in July of the following year, and it was a hot, dry, summer. We hired a car with air conditioning from the airport and went to our favourite hotel, where we were welcome guests. They had spent a fortune on reworking their air conditioning, getting the best cooling as well as heating, so it was a steady temperature all year round. Of course, that had put the rates up but that was becoming normal these days. We needed to make sure Patricia didn’t overheat.

We had a meeting arranged with Samantha and our accountant, to talk about investing some of our business account. He was going to give us a report on what he had found out. When we sat down with them, he suggested that we put our money where our original premise started. He suggested that we set up a company, in England, building the sort of houses that we had designed in the early days. We could source the panels from manufacturers of modular houses in Europe, and we only needed to start with a single project, using the sale of the houses to fund further developments.

He even had a site in mind, about eight metres above the current sea level, in Essex. That would make it viable for some hundreds of years, and the raised design would withstand any unusually high tidal surge. He had found out that most developers were avoiding the edge of the likely changed shore, moving to much higher ground.

“You know that you two are to blame for that. Your book ‘Climb Every Mountain’ has made them all think that it will only be safe on really high ground, not the five or six metres that you told me would be likely. The book is not only giving you income, but also created a business opportunity. We can quietly buy property at the five to ten metre level and fill them up with new modular housing that would be easy to build and even easier to sell at a reasonable price.”

“What about tradesmen?”

“We employ teenagers with handy skills and send them to Europe to learn. I believe that there are already a few companies making the designs that you suggested.”

We authorised further investigation into the plan, with money set aside for consultants. After a couple of days in London, we drove to Barking to see my folks, young William now approaching his last couple of years in primary. After that, we went to Norfolk to see my in-laws. On the way round, we detoured to look at the area that had been suggested, and we tried to imagine it with the new shoreline. A lot of southern Essex shore would be flooded, as they found out almost a hundred years before, but a lot of the northern part of the county was well above the flood levels. It was just a matter of guessing where the final level would be.

Before we flew home, we visited the film studio and was shown the final cut of the ‘Mountain’ film, which was very good, even if we did say so, ourselves. It would guarantee us a regular income for some time to come. They wanted to know what we had for them after that, but all we could say was that it needed to be written when we had a bit of time.

When we got home again, we took stock of what we had on the go. We still needed a book to fulfil our agreement with the EU, which would be the story for a film. If the building project took off, it would need little input from us, other than money for the first project. The publisher would take any Terrey or Higgins book we sent his way, but we were finding it hard to come up with fresh stories.

We talked it over for several weeks before we made our decision. We had been working at full throttle since we started University, now some six years. We wanted to take a rest and had the money to do just that, devoting our time to raising Patricia, and any siblings that arrived, and to try something new. It was the report, from the accountant, that the project was too chancy to follow through, that made the decision easy.

We wrote to the Commission, officially resigning from our posts and sending the IDs back. They sent us a nice letter, thanking us for our input and wishing us well. That income stopped at the end of that month. We were now free to stop writing the bigger books, so concentrated on the odd romance novel, seeing that these were generally the same story, recycled with different names and different locations.

We put out feelers for a theatre, hopefully able to be bought freehold. It needed to be somewhere close to a larger centre, and one came up in Paris. It had been closed for several years and had been intended to be turned into a multiplex cinema, but the advent of streaming services had caused the cost of alterations to be not viable.

We bought the theatre, as well as an apartment in a new tower block, selling our home in Belgium, and set about bringing the stage area back to being workable. It took a lot of cleaning and some new seating before we could put on a play. We had advertised for anyone who wanted to join a drama group, as well as drama teachers, putting together a solid troupe. We then worked with them to put on a few plays that were popular favourites while we wrote one ourselves to utilise the space and the skills we had to work with. We offered Samantha a relocation to Paris to be our company secretary, and she came over after closing the London office.

It took us two years before we started breaking even, and then we began to fill the auditorium almost every night. We could bring in featured actors to give extra appeal and started to be approached by some who wanted to work with us. We had two successful films that we had written, and about six of our own plays from our early days. Plus, we had a group of eager actors who were ready to try everything.

After five years, we were established theatre owners, and playwrights, with regular seasons and running at a profit. We had gambled with our own money and owed nothing. We had one theatre in the black and looking for another. Our time with the EU had been forgotten, even if the climate change was still happening. We had made our stand. We had created our places in the world and had used our years of training. Some days, I arrive at the theatre and look up at the name on the front. It was called ‘Everyman’s French Theatre (and Popular Outstanding Shows)’. Theatregoers just called it ‘Everyman’s’ but we just called it EFTPOS.

Marianne Gregory © 2024