Caroline’s Bikini

Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.

Alright,’ I said. ‘I’ll try ...... ’ ‘But I’ve never done this sort of thing before,’ is what I would have said next, I’m sure, as it still seems a strange kind of thing to do, be involved in this kind of writing, the sort of project that was being suggested to me by Evan now.

‘I really need you to write this story down for me, Nin,’ he was saying, in no uncertain terms, if I think about it fully. ‘Really, I do...’ – and yes, it did feel like a new kind of idea for me, this, a different sort of way to spend my time. It did. It felt new.

Because though, it’s true, I have published various pieces before – short stories, bits in books and essays and so on – I’ve never taken on someone else’s narrative, had that kind of a role. ‘Amanuensis’ they would have called it in the old days, and I’ve always loved that image of Milton with his daughters; the scene by the bed: the poet and those steady scribes of his, waiting for them to come in after a night of composition with his chunks of iambic pentameter at the ready and them being there to write it all down.

‘Ghostwriter’, some people might say now. ‘Biographer’, maybe. Though neither of those terms are quite right, they’re not, for the kind of thing Evan Gordonston was asking me to do.

I’ve known Evan a long time. I’ve known all the Gordonstons actually, practically forever, well, for most of my life. My mother was great friends with Helen Gordonston, and I went to school with Felicity, Evan’s younger sister; his older sister, Elisabeth, went out briefly with my brother when they were in sixth form.

So... ‘forever’, yes, seems a pretty realistic description, in terms of giving the feeling of how long I’ve known Evan. There was a massive time lapse, of course, between back then and now, when this story happens, because they all went off to live in America, the Gordonstons, when Tom, Evan’s handsome father, got transferred there for his job. Not that any of this is particularly relevant, but to provide some kind of context here is what I’m doing, I suppose.