Wogan House, London, 15.25

part one.

No sound comes through the headphones. On the desk in front of me, Ava Anna Ada. On the wall, a large clock, even the seconds are digitised. So nervous I can’t work out if the seconds are counting up or counting down. Read over the page I’m here to read live, try to anticipate the questions although there’s never any second guessing these things.

Couldn’t nail the reading when I practised yesterday, although the day before that and the day before that, it was good. Hit a wall then, when I was reading but not inhabiting the character. You can’t do that, if you want to sound convincing. Suddenly realised, I didn’t know what mood Ava was in when I was reading her back, and then I realised she’s excited to tell her secret. It is this I was failing to convey. Reading it this way carries the risk I will seem at least a little unhinged. Then again, I wrote it. Little point in worrying about this now. Bit late.

Ten minutes to go, a song in the headphones. And of course it is. It’s a friend’s new single, and the chances of that are what? Stole the title of The Last Days from one of his songs and now here he is again just as I’m about to read. See it as a good sign.

Then the producer is in the headphones and to hear Scottish accents while I’m tucked away in a London studio is such a relief I immediately worry I will fall back into more of a Scottish accent than I ever have really been in possession of. This is what happens now when I’m home or around other Scots. In Glasgow, I sound Glaswegian despite the fact I never lived there; this strange exile does odd things.

And then the countdown and another song and I am on and I will throw up right now, I have been coughing for days, my voice increasingly hoarser, the 100 day cough they’re calling it, as if all our illnesses are now tinged with the medieval or the apocalyptic, I have not counted how long this cough has hung around or how often it has come and gone; I can’t cough, not on air; I can’t swear, not on air; the piece has been vetted already. Vast parts of the book too much for an afternoon audience. Took a lot to find this bit.

Swallow. Time to read, don’t be sick. Remember how they taught you to control your voice when you were seven, when you learnt to breathe when you went on the platform. Things to be thankful for. Also, don’t remember, not here, not when you’re about to read and of course they mention the first book in the intro and you find yourself coming back round to this one, this thing you hated for a while, and it’s ok, no one likes their work, or not unless they’re psychopaths and it wasn’t me who said that, not going to say who it was; and god, the breathing is hard again, and read.

And she’s back and I can feel her; she’s breathing down my neck, she’s crawling up my spine, she’s under my skin, she’s in my voice as it comes out, until I am not in the room in the way I was not in the room any of the long, nerve raw days I wrote her. I did not make her up, this Ava in the same way I did not make Anna up. I do not know where they were before or where they’ve gone or if they’ll stay away either, and people have asked for a sequel and I’m not sure I can do it again, if they’ll show themselves to me. She comes out now in the slight shift in tone, in the upwards lilt and there is no one in the room to see my posture change as I lean closer to the mic, or to observe the glee on my face as I tell about the first time I saw Anna and how everyone needs a hobby, and she became mine. And oh god, reading it there, it sounds insane, and writing it here, it also sounds insane, a special possession, if I am to get Biblical, as if I’m ever not.

And later, on stage, this Biblical nature of Ava Anna Ada will be observed, and how it links to the first book and I thought I’d written a marked departure but what you think as the writer doesn’t matter one piece, you don’t get to tell a reader how to read. Imagine there’s one way to read a book. How hellish it would be. There’s just the book, and however anyone wants to read it and there’s just in that moment, Ava, until the presenter’s voice cuts in and we talk and then it’s out into a late London afternoon to get ready for the next part of the day.

(You can listen here to my short reading from Ava Anna Ada on BBC Radio Scotland along with an interview about the book, I am maybe 15 minutes from the end)