sour look. Never in his life had he expected to own either. But then he’d never expected to become Matt Harper, travel writer and, he grimaced some more, keen walker.
Finding his new name had taken best part of a morning in front of the computer. On page thirty of the search engine’s results for ‘travel writer’ he had spotted it and knew it was perfect. There were no photographs and only a tiny biography saying: ‘Twenty-nine, born in Weymouth, author of two books on walking in the West Country. Currently lives in Bristol.’
He’d have no problem remembering to answer to that brilliant first name and good old Matt didn’t even appear on any social networking sites.
Big, anonymous Bristol was perfect too. Mack knew it almost as well as he knew Bath, and unlike Bath, nobody in the frozen north would have visited it looking for bloody Jane Austen and want to talk to him about it.
The only thing that would scupper everything was if low-profile, low achiever Matt Harper suddenly embarked on some publicity-grabbing behaviour such as running naked through a load of nuns. On a chatshow.
The buffet trolley started its lumbering journey along the carriage and he got out some cash from his wallet. That was all that was in there since he’d emptied out anything with his real name on it. The one thing he’d hung on to was his passport, currently safely locked away in his suitcase. O’Dowd would have a fit if he knew, but Mack would need it if he had to fly home quickly.
He flicked through some of his guides to Northumberland laid out on the table, but his brain couldn’t take any more forests and castles and miles of sodding coastline. He opened up one of Matt Harper’s West-Country walking books unearthed in a bookshop in Bath. Fortunately A Guide to Dorset Coastal Walks and A Walk Around North Somerset were slim little volumes he could easily read and more or less memorise, not some five-hundred-thousand-word tomes on kayaking in the melt water of the Himalayas. Also, not once did the words ‘Because I am six foot seven and have bright ginger hair’ appear. The writing was nicely anonymous too, but skull-crackingly dull – if Matt Harper had been walking the Hanging Gardens of Babylon he would have spent half an hour describing the soil.
Putting down the walking books he opened O’Dowd’s file, skimming through the details on Cressida Chartwell yet again – a BAFTA and Olivier Award; what the bookies were giving as odds for her winning an Oscar within two years of arriving in Hollywood; past lovers. There wasn’t so much on this Jennifer, and what he did know depressed him – particularly that she was secretary of the Brindleyand Yarfield Drama Club. Great, the north, the countryside and amateur dramatics; throw in a bit of morris dancing and he’d be reet ecstatic, pet.
The only other facts were about her schooling (bright girl), her gap year (VSO in Botswana) and the drama degree at Manchester University (dropped out a couple of months shy of graduation). Silence for twelve months before she’d gone to work in the local library in a place called Tyneforth. Been there ever since.
No significant boyfriends among the guys she’d dated at university and a complete drought since. After reading that, Mack had invented himself a girlfriend. If this Jennifer was desperate for a man, it was best to get it clear from the start that he wasn’t offering anything more than friendship.
There was no photograph of Jennifer in O’Dowd’s file and somewhere in the back of Mack’s brain a question formed about that before he shrugged it off.
Mack felt the train start to slow again as they came into some godforsaken place called Doncaster, and he looked up at the luggage rack again. The rucksack and fleece were just two of the things he’d bought during a depressing afternoon kitting himself out for a ‘holiday in Scotland’. Among his other purchases was a thing called a ‘wind-proof, waterproof outer
Finding his new name had taken best part of a morning in front of the computer. On page thirty of the search engine’s results for ‘travel writer’ he had spotted it and knew it was perfect. There were no photographs and only a tiny biography saying: ‘Twenty-nine, born in Weymouth, author of two books on walking in the West Country. Currently lives in Bristol.’
He’d have no problem remembering to answer to that brilliant first name and good old Matt didn’t even appear on any social networking sites.
Big, anonymous Bristol was perfect too. Mack knew it almost as well as he knew Bath, and unlike Bath, nobody in the frozen north would have visited it looking for bloody Jane Austen and want to talk to him about it.
The only thing that would scupper everything was if low-profile, low achiever Matt Harper suddenly embarked on some publicity-grabbing behaviour such as running naked through a load of nuns. On a chatshow.
The buffet trolley started its lumbering journey along the carriage and he got out some cash from his wallet. That was all that was in there since he’d emptied out anything with his real name on it. The one thing he’d hung on to was his passport, currently safely locked away in his suitcase. O’Dowd would have a fit if he knew, but Mack would need it if he had to fly home quickly.
He flicked through some of his guides to Northumberland laid out on the table, but his brain couldn’t take any more forests and castles and miles of sodding coastline. He opened up one of Matt Harper’s West-Country walking books unearthed in a bookshop in Bath. Fortunately A Guide to Dorset Coastal Walks and A Walk Around North Somerset were slim little volumes he could easily read and more or less memorise, not some five-hundred-thousand-word tomes on kayaking in the melt water of the Himalayas. Also, not once did the words ‘Because I am six foot seven and have bright ginger hair’ appear. The writing was nicely anonymous too, but skull-crackingly dull – if Matt Harper had been walking the Hanging Gardens of Babylon he would have spent half an hour describing the soil.
Putting down the walking books he opened O’Dowd’s file, skimming through the details on Cressida Chartwell yet again – a BAFTA and Olivier Award; what the bookies were giving as odds for her winning an Oscar within two years of arriving in Hollywood; past lovers. There wasn’t so much on this Jennifer, and what he did know depressed him – particularly that she was secretary of the Brindleyand Yarfield Drama Club. Great, the north, the countryside and amateur dramatics; throw in a bit of morris dancing and he’d be reet ecstatic, pet.
The only other facts were about her schooling (bright girl), her gap year (VSO in Botswana) and the drama degree at Manchester University (dropped out a couple of months shy of graduation). Silence for twelve months before she’d gone to work in the local library in a place called Tyneforth. Been there ever since.
No significant boyfriends among the guys she’d dated at university and a complete drought since. After reading that, Mack had invented himself a girlfriend. If this Jennifer was desperate for a man, it was best to get it clear from the start that he wasn’t offering anything more than friendship.
There was no photograph of Jennifer in O’Dowd’s file and somewhere in the back of Mack’s brain a question formed about that before he shrugged it off.
Mack felt the train start to slow again as they came into some godforsaken place called Doncaster, and he looked up at the luggage rack again. The rucksack and fleece were just two of the things he’d bought during a depressing afternoon kitting himself out for a ‘holiday in Scotland’. Among his other purchases was a thing called a ‘wind-proof, waterproof outer
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