Hemingway once said, “The first draft is always shit.” He included his own in that.

A lot of authors announce with great joy that their novel is now finished. That usually means the first draft of …well, if you’ve got a publishing deal then there will be about nine more edits before it goes to market. That’s why most books can take up to four years to get in bookstores.

Therefore, it is with great joy I announce my third novel is now written (draft number two). I’ve got the first couple of thousand words polished up and have shared it with you below. If you read the first two in the Paths Unknown series you’ll see that curmudgeonly Claudia is the star this time on an island off Malta. Remember, this is not ready for print so you’ll see grammar stuff etc. and it will likely be dramatically changed by a potential agent or publisher. Wild Rose will take it if no one else. But am hoping I might find an agent this time. It’s a long shot. Here it is with the latest title.

The Beating Heart Cadavers Among Us

Chapter 1

From the day they met, Claudia had lusted after his father’s blue ponytail long before she loved the man himself. It was a Homer story, of course, but one Dafnis thought might be true. He assumed Claudia and Homer suited each other because they were both so old. Claudia had to be at least forty. His father, even more.

Those were the days when Homer loved Claudia, but Claudia hated everything about his father except his hair. Now that they finally liked each other, Claudia sometimes looked like she loved Homer. Today—she wanted him dead.

It was hard to figure out those two.

Dafnis was slurping soup in the cafeteria of his father’s fertility clinic when Claudia walked in with her million-dollar bribe and he knew he could never again eat soggy meatballs without thinking of the day they plotted to erase Homer. He stared at her as if she’d turned into the one-eyed thing called a cyclops. “I don’t always like what my father does, but what you want is so nasty,” he said.

Or was it? Everyone was saying Homer had gone too far this time. Dafnis sure wouldn’t like it if he’d done that to their kids. What Claudia was asking for, though, was so cruel—sort of like Claudia and Homer’s relationship itself.

Claudia came to Homer lonely. Now she would leave even lonelier.

Even Dafnis could see that, and he was an idiot. 

But no ordinary idiot.

To the staff inside the clinic he was known as Homer’s idiot. His son. They said his brain leaked information like water through a sieve. However, since the teen couldn’t seem to remember that he was the son they were talking about, the sticky slur rolled right off him most of the time. In fact, the more Dafnis heard the nurses and doctors calling each other idiots, or morons—the word Dafnis used because it was easier to spell—the more he wanted to fit in with this giggling gang of fellow morons. But four years since joining the clinic, he still worked the night shift, alone and separate from all others.

Before Dafnis met Claudia, he knew nothing of the world beyond what Homer wanted him to know. Dr. Claudia turned out to be the most exciting person he’d ever met and oh boy could she make him laugh. She still could, but in a sadder way.

When someone said her hairstyle was a Chinaman coolee’s topknot, he asked Claudia if that’s what she was—a Chinaman coulee. She laughed, but not at him, making him feel like the clinic moron he knew himself to be. It turned out China was a country. Not her country, though. She was from another place he’d never heard of.

Later on, she showed him both countries on an internet map, which was such an amazing thing because, for the first time in his entire life he saw their island, a tiny dot at the center of a big blue blob. That, she said, was the Mediterranean Sea. Their home.

It was Claudia who told him to write the story of his life. So, one day he sat down with a completely blank notepad and wrote: I Am A Jeep as a title, then the first line: Until Jaza jumped me, I was stalled, unable to start the life I wanted.

At the time, Claudia explained in doctor language why it was funny. Then she said it was still a perfect first line and he should carry the notepad everywhere to remember that Jaza was his girlfriend.

He owed Claudia so much. If he did this thing for her, it would be the final chapter of I Am A Jeep. Is that what he wanted? And where would he find a new notepad for Book Two? Dafnis grasped one of Claudia’s hands and raised it to his cheek. If only he could absorb part of her pain.

Claudia came to Homer lonely. Now she would leave even lonelier. Dr. Claudia would have been better off to have never felt Homer’s love at all. And never have come to Inquisitor’s Island, either.

Chapter 2

If Claudia was here to perform her brand of miracle, then the rocky nipple of land up ahead wasn’t going to cut it. The remote Mediterranean island didn’t look big enough for a two-hole His ’n Her outhouse—never mind a hospital.

At the bow of the ferry, she dug out the postcard she’d bought earlier at the harbor gift shop in Malta, and clutched it in both hands as if she could wring some hidden meaning out of its weird description.

Inquisitor’s Island, it said in small print in one corner, is a far-flung promontory with a bloody past. Unloved and unclaimed by any nation, it lies in tortuous seas, dead center of the Mediterranean. Below was a drawing of an eight-pointed cross from the time of the Holy Crusades.

She flipped the postcard over to a sepia tone graphic over which one could scrawl a greeting like: Having a great time on Inquisitor’s Island. Wish you were here. That would be all fine and good if the skilfully rendered background wasn’t of someone being burnt at the stake. Lovely. Even worse, Claudia had little idea why she was being summoned to an island she’d never heard of.

I know how busy you are, her friend’s email had said, but we need you. Desperately. When you get to the Maltese harbor of  Birzebugga, text us and we’ll send the island’s hydrofoil ferry to fetch you. Don’t try to phone. Can’t say anything else right now. Much love and gratitude. Paula, Benny and Maya.

The cryptic message was not Paula’s usual heartfelt style. Yet, of all Claudia’s transplant patients only her four-year-old goddaughter, Maya, could convince the doctor to forfeit her warm bed in London for an overnight flight bound for Malta.

If the child was rejecting her new heart, though, why not say so straight up in a phone call? Had Paula and Benny found yet another crack-pot holistic cure for their daughter’s heart disease? They certainly had the millions to pay for anything. Or was this . . . Oh, give it a rest. I’ll hear what it is soon enough as long as the captain can get this big-arse ferry there. Not the most patient person, but neither was she about to turn down an adventure.

It was the timing that sucked. Claudia rooted around inside her briefcase for the other wadded up ball of paper. Her latest disciplinary letter apparently also needed her attention. As she wrapped her fist around it, ominous rumbles seeped into the soles of her boots. A high-frequency vibration tore up her legs, and cut a path through every molecule of liquid in her guts and head. If a monstrous boiler or gas tank was about to blow, Claudia wanted to be inside the passenger lounge behind her. She side-stepped toward safety.

Everyone knows that when the sea is calm and the sun is shining, the best view on passenger ferries is at the bow of the second deck. How was she to know that hydrofoils which ride above the waves on submerged water wings can reach a blazing sixty miles per hour? This, according to the only other person onboard—the captain himself—who gave not a word of warning. No T-minus countdown. Not even a friendly, Hang onto your hats, folks, before a bone-crunching jolt launched the vessel forward and whiplashed her into submission against the lounge’s observation windows.

Unanchored in the fierce crosswinds Claudia’s wool pea jacket split wide, its metal buttons pummeled the back of her head like mini-spikes. The braid at the crown of her head convulsed, spastic as a tasered snake. A grudging nod to trends meant Claudia’s oriental look was slipping dangerously close to a disheveled French milkmaid.

“Bloo—dy hell.” A simple disclaimer near the gangway would have sufficed: All passengers bringing hairstyles on board do so at their own risk.

She battened down her briefcase under one arm and white-knuckled the all-important disciplinary letter, but as Claudia reached for the lounge’s doorknob her concentration wavered and up the paper flew.The wad hovered like a fairy with a magic wand, before zipping sideways and disappearing over the vessel’s railing.

Too stunned to cry out, at forty-seven-years-old she was still as lean as a thoroughbred. Her legs churned across the deck in time to see the tiny ball riding the hydrofoil’s wake.

A blessing, perhaps, for the miserable cursed disciplinary letter—birthed as it was the day before while she squatted in the lobby of her London apartment building. Instead of having her hands immersed in someone’s chest cavity, Claudia found herself that particular afternoon on her haunches, the ends of her sloppy bathrobe splayed across the worn vinyl while she rifled through her pathetically tiny mail slot for the missing letter.

Like dried paste from a tube, the clumps of glossy flyers at her feet had been crammed tighter than an intestinal tract bunged up on a year’s worth of junk mail. Nothing but time-limited offers admonishing her tardiness. She’d missed the End Of Summer swimsuit blowout. Hadn’t worn one in fifteen years. And the Yuletide sales. Nothing to someone who spent every Christmas and New Year’s inside an OR. There was still time, however, to buy a two-fer Valentines dinner cruise on the Thames—surely the most useless promo of all for a middle-aged unattached woman.

Bags, a colleague nick-named for something other than puffy eyes, was the stinker who’d ordered her out of her warm bed and down to the lobby around noon the previous day. It was on the fourth ring that her arm shot out for the save but came up with nothing until she remembered her bedside phone’s new home was on an actual table instead of the cardboard box which had served her well for over a year. The red plastic table, which she’d nabbed from the curb during trash collection day, was the sort of cracked low-slung affair that sits in the sun and rain all summer. 

Claudia glanced at the call display and lifted the handset from its cradle. “This better be important or you’re a dead man. I got home at seven this morning from a 12-hour double transplant.”

“I take it you haven’t seen your latest disciplinary letter?” the man asked from the dry soulless depths of a true research administrator.

Bad attitude be damned, she thought. Dr. Claudia Vlakia saw herself championing a rebel’s cause. Policies and procedures were tedious distractions, better left ignored. Neither was the acclaimed heart surgeon particularly concerned she was once again up shit creek with her hospital. “You woke me up to say you’re worried about another whinging first-year student?”

Her bullying of medical students on clinical rotations was legendary. The second-years warned the newbies not to be seduced into complacency by Dr. Vlakia’s fascinating words of welcome which went something like: Unique from all other organs the heart isn’t dependent on the brain to function.

In the sterile landscape of her outstanding life, she would have readily admitted the opposite was also true: Was she not proof the head could function without one speck of input from the heart?

“I don’t think it’s a student,” Bags said. “It looks serious. They want a performance review this time.”

“Those bastards. For what?”

“The letter doesn’t say, but I’d read it if I were you.”

“This can’t be about the Johnson baby. Who’d be daft enough to complain after I saved the kid’s life for God’s sake?”

“I know,” he whined.

Claudia searched her mind for who could have blown the whistle on her unauthorized implant of an artificial heart. “The OR staff didn’t know anything,” she reminded the both of them. Soon, like bitter phlegm, the name of a possible culprit slowly congealed on the tip of her tongue. “The parents?” she asked, incredulous. “Their daughter is alive. What else could they possibly want?”

“Money,” was Bags’s flat response.

“If they want to sue me, then give them the damn money.” 

“Unfortunately,” he said. “The problem won’t end there. If a court deems your implant illegal, my research institute won’t want their name connected with the case. Our bionic heart could be mothballed before it ever gets to market.”

“No fucking way I’ll let that happen,” she said.

“Then we’ve got a lot to think about.”

She hung up and headed to her lobby and no sooner had she freed the letter from her downstairs mailbox than her friend’s Inquisitor’s Island email came through on her upstairs laptop. She tucked the as-yet unread letter from the board into her briefcase where it stayed forgotten until she pulled it out on the ferry and it took a dive overboard.

****

Thank God for strong cell signals at sea, she thought while staring into the hydrofoil’s wake. It was payback time for Claudia—six a.m. off the coast of Malta. Even earlier in London.

“This better not be a joke or you’re dead, too,” Bags said when he answered.

“Sorry, but I lost the letter before I could read it. If it’s important then you’d best tell me what’s in it. I’m on a Mediterranean ferry so get that damn thing out before I lose my cell signal.”

He groaned into a yawn. “Love of my life; pain of my arse. Hold on. It’s right here beside the bed.”

Bags hadn’t been anywhere near Claudia’s now extinct love life for at least four years, but it didn’t stop him from leering at the legs of her PAW Patrol flannel pajamas whenever he caught her at home on days off. Bags was the last man allowed time with what one of Claudia’s old boyfriends had called “two fine works of art.” No doubt Bags still dreamed of her long legs emerging from the black lace bodysuit now rotting in a landfill somewhere.

There was a rattling of paper before he said, “Okay. From the top. The hearing will convene the fifteenth day of February, 2018, inside the fifth-floor—”

“Bollocks,” she cut in. “The fifteenth. That’s only two days from now. There’s no way I’ll be back in time. Paula has an emergency.”

“Paula . . . Paula,” Bags mumbled. “You did a heart transplant on her daughter . . . like a month ago, didn’t you? Is the girl’s body rejecting it?”

“Oof. I don’t even want to think about that possibility. She’s on some island about 100 miles south of Malta.”

The line went quiet. “Bags. You still there?”

“Yeah. The FDA’s been investigating a remote clinic near Malta for embryonic gene editing. Do you think Paula’s going for a designer baby?”

“I hope not. That shit is scary. And illegal. Listen. Jump to the end of the letter and tell me who’s attending this hearing.”

“Claudia. What if you’re facing a malpractice suit? Going to a clinic creating designer babies will only add fuel to that fire.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. I can always reschedule the hearing.”

The line erupted in static from his sigh. “The Thames institute has invested hundreds of millions in your artificial heart.”

Claudia closed her eyes and tried to shut out her old friend’s agitation. Granted, he had a point. In charge of research funding at the Thames Heart Institute, Bags had single-handedly raised the millions which made her groundbreaking research a reality.

“Are you saying that visiting one of your patients is more important than saving your entire medical career?” he asked.

“This particular one—yes. She’s my goddaughter.” She’d never tried this sappy tact on Bags before and in the silence which followed she half expected him to burst out laughing. Beings could be so intransigent when it came to their progeny, but for Claudia no one and nothing came before her research. Did the man not know this by now?

“Anyway,” Claudia said, “This is probably nothing. The island doesn’t look big enough to hold much more than an outhouse. Now tell me who’s attending this hearing that has you so twisted out of shape.”

“Fine.” He rattled the letter once more.  “The committee, of course,” he said, “and . . . The General Medical Council.”

“Ew,” she blurted out. “That doesn’t sound good.” Breaking something-or-other subsection of the hospital’s useless manual was one thing, but surely the council wouldn’t have the balls to suspend her medical license. The news media wouldn’t stand for it. “Who else?” she asked.

“Um . . . I didn’t notice this before,” Bags said, “but there’s an addendum. An affidavit from Mr. and Mrs. D. Johnson.”

So Bags was right. The Johnsons were planning to get rich from Claudia’s last ditch effort to save their dying daughter. “Those ungrateful weasels,” she said. It felt like they’d taken a cleaver to everything Claudia believed to be true and noble about her future.

The plastic bench where she sat groaned as she fell back and stared at the spider webs dotting the hydrofoil’s laminate ceiling. “I think a vulture just flew off with my Nobel Prize for Medicine,” she told him before ending their call.