We are in his kitchen again. He doesn’t actually have an office. And because it’s late afternoon, he’s fixing drinks instead of coffee, which makes it feel social. I’m okay with it: he’s good to talk to, and I need someone to talk to. Again.

  He’s told me that he read my Calibre Prize essay and related to the topic of midlife sexual confusion. I haven’t asked him to elaborate.

  ‘What did you say to him? Scott?’ he asks.

  ‘I told him that he and Emily had all the power, and they’d just used it to crap on my career because I got in the way of their plan…’

  ‘That was brave.’

  ‘You think he’ll try to pay me back?’

  ‘In a good way or bad way? Don’t worry. Scott wants everyone to like him. He’ll probably send you a bouquet of flowers.’

  ‘Ugh. Don’t.’

  ‘But you’re saying that their plan is to write another book? So they’re back together? We’re watching a rom-com. Boy gets girl, boy loses girl…’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s…romantic. But I guess you know—for them it’s mainly about writing.’

  ‘So if they’re writing together, they’re as back together as they’ll ever be: that’s what you’re saying. Have you seen Annie Hall?’

  ‘The movie?’

  ‘Unless you know someone called Annie Hall.’

  I laugh, more because of the sudden change in topic than the weak joke. ‘No.’

  I’m assuming he’s about to tell me there’s something in the movie that relates to Scott and Emily’s situation, but he says, ‘Do you want to? See it?’

  ‘Why would I want to?’

  ‘Because it’s arguably—and I’m prepared to make that argument—the best romantic comedy ever made. We might get some tips. For Emily and Scott.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘I know. We can have the argument about art and the artist after. I promise to listen.’

  He’s read my mind, and while I’m trying to come up with a response, he adds, ‘It’s showing at the Astor. We could see it before I buy you dinner. Like I promised.’

  A couple of years ago, I read a book that I thought would define my writing career, written and published by people half a world away. Now I know the writers so well that I’m disillusioned, my literary crush crushed, and I’m doing dinner and a movie with the publisher.

  We’ve seen Annie Hall and Gideon’s kept his promise to listen to—and argue with—my position on differentiating artists from their work, while we wait in line for a table at an Italian restaurant in St Kilda. We seem to have an audience, and I’m kind of enjoying it.

  He hasn’t said any more about Scott and Emily ripping me off; I guess he thinks his ‘shit happens’ answer is enough, and it probably is. Also, he’s their publisher: not exactly the right guy to ask.

  I’m wrong. After we’ve ordered, he comes back to it. ‘How much do you want to write this book? The one Scott and Emily are doing?’

  It’s a good question. ‘It was only a possibility if I was doing it with Scott. And it’s not the sort of book I wanted to write anyway. And…I felt I was going to be contributing more than I was going to be recognised for. Three strikes. I guess I was just angry.’

  ‘Do you know how many novels are written by more than one author?’

  ‘Not a lot?’

  ‘When they said Scott and Emily were the world’s hottest literary couple, it was like saying The Philadelphia Story is the best comedy of remarriage. Not a big field. Anyway, what’s the book about? You can tell me: I’m their publisher. And you haven’t signed an NDA, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s what happens when authors don’t talk to their publishers. Scott could have the highest high concept ever and you could go away and publish before them. I’m only telling you that because you’ve told me you won’t.’

  ‘It’s about activists who are killing random people to pressure the government to do something about climate change.’

  ‘Good pitch. I mean, you did a good job of explaining it. You didn’t say, “Well, there’s this guy, and he’s really worried about climate change and…” I’d have said “terrorists” rather than “activists” and “blackmailing” rather than ‘pressuring’. If I were you. Writing it. But, as a publisher, I wouldn’t buy it. The reader’s going to be confused by the climate-change activists being the bad guys. People who read believe in climate change.’

  ‘They’re not the bad guys. I mean they’re technically bad, breaking the law, killing people, but they’re the protagonists. The heroes.’

  ‘Say again? The terrorists are the heroes?’

  ‘Flawed heroes, I guess.’

  ‘Flawed. Flawed like…What was Scott thinking? That’s the worst idea I’ve heard since Springtime for Hitler. Trust me, I may be their publisher, but if he—they—send me that…He shouldn’t be allowed to be a mentor. Especially to Emily. And you…you’ve dodged a bullet.’

  He was probably right.

  ‘Tell me something interesting about yourself,’ he says. It’s a bit klutzy, but he is a bit klutzy and I’m comfortable with it.

  Instead of saying something useful like, ‘I’m looking for a publisher,’ I say, ‘I’ve never dated a man shorter than me.’

  I guess it’s defensible, technically, since I didn’t say ‘until now’ but why would I say it at all? Why bring up his height? And he’s barely shorter than me. Am I saying I don’t want to date him in the future or that I think this is a date right now? La-di-da, la-di-da, la-la. I hold my breath.

  ‘And I’ve never been on a date with anyone thinner than me,’ he says.

  I don’t think I actually am thinner than him, which makes his message a bit confusing, and gets me wondering if he has body dysmorphia, but it leads to me telling him about losing weight and how it might have been a subconscious desire to look like Emily. I remember as I’m talking that he’s also attracted to Emily, which makes him asking me on a date—which is what we seem to agree it is—a bit complicated. By which I mean weird.

  It gets worse, or maybe better, because he’s feeling the same way, and he tells me. Then we talk for ages about Emily’s writing. Like a couple of fangirls.

  The next day, I get a call from Australian Book Review. They’ve received a delivery addressed to me. I guess it was the only way Gideon knew how to reach me, given I’m not working with Scott anymore. A young guy from their office drops it in at my apartment.

  It’s a gift that would have felt old-fashioned if it wasn’t for the conversation about me dropping weight to look like Emily. When you take that into account, it’s kind of sweet. A box of chocolates.

  28

  Emily

  Scott springs me in my room, crying over my writing—moved to tears by my own words. I’m not embarrassed. Both of us have cried and occasionally laughed out loud as we’re writing. It’s about being emotionally connected to the work: for Scott, it’s also about being in that uncritical space he allows himself with a first draft. The words have been coming easily for me, so perhaps I’m allowing myself into that space too.

  I tried to write something of the soldier and then the farmer and finally the schoolboy bird-killer, but ended up holding the card that read Layla remembers tension between her parents. I’d complained that it was too vague; now it felt too specific. I crossed it out and wrote Layla’s back story. Among all the cards written by Scott and Piper, this one in my handwriting stands out.

  Scott steps behind me, as if to read the screen, but he’s not close enough.

  ‘Genius?’ he says.

  ‘Therapy.’

  ‘Can I read it?’

  He’s expecting my usual answer, but, going with my feelings, I say, ‘Yes, I’d like you to.’ In my head, I add, ‘Because then you might understand, and I’m not sure where that’s going to take us, but I’d really like you to understand.’

  He takes my seat and scrolls back to the beginning of the document.

  ‘Don’t read over my shoulder,’ he says.

  ‘I haven’t read it through,’ I say. I’m already feeling unsettled and he hasn’t got past Version History.

  We did this all the time with The Girl: me reading over his shoulder, him complaining about me doing it, saying I should have checked it before showing it to him. I guess I’m trying to divine his reaction, though he’s pointed out, more than once, that I could do better by looking at his face. Maybe.

  He finishes, turns to me and there’s a tear in his eye: not just mist, but an actual tear, which begins to track down his cheek.

  ‘It’s that bad?’ I say, half-believing it.

  He does an impression of our American agent. ‘They craah, they baah.’

  ‘I don’t think they are going to be reading this.’ I’m guessing what I’ve written is nothing like Scott had imagined for his thriller. Or popular fiction at all.

  ‘There’s a lot of you in the terrorist,’ he says. ‘I mean, the fight with David over who’s going to do the shooting—him trying to call the shots, so to speak, but not prepared to do the actual deed, and him still acting like…It’s all about control, like we said. But colour me stupid: I hadn’t really understood how it affected you till I read this.’

  ‘I didn’t set out to write about me.’

  ‘Nobody does. And then we end up in all of our characters. But David’s got a bit of me in him, right?’

  ‘I guess. You can be a bit controlling.’

  ‘It’s the way we work. Worked. Structure controls the prose. And I’m the structure guy.’

  ‘It’s the way we chose to work.’ I don’t want to beat him up. The writing and the discussion have actually helped me to see what’s been going on. And why I’ve pushed back so hard at his attempts to take over. ‘Maybe I’ve played into it,’ I say. ‘The conflict.’

  ‘This book’s yours,’ he says. ‘Even if you seem to be focusing on the terrorist strand.’

  ‘It’s the one with the most cards. The most developed.’

  ‘And the character that’s closest to you.’

  ‘The only woman.’

  ‘Fair point. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’ve finished with her. I mean, digging into her motivation.’

  Scott’s right. I want to keep writing Layla, but only to explore who she is. Why she is who she is. I don’t really care much about what happens after she starts shooting. Which is not going to make for the thriller Scott is expecting.

  ‘Can we have a drink?’ he says. ‘Go to the bar where great thoughts are born?’

  Walking there, he confesses he needed time to process what I’d written. As did I.

  ‘You want to do three questions?’ he says.

  ‘No. I want to know what you think about what I wrote.’

  ‘So, we don’t ask what would you tell your best friend, because that’s trite, and we don’t ask what would you tell your therapist, because that’s the story you’ve written. For anyone who has an ounce of psychological mindedness.’

  ‘So we skip straight to what would the therapist say, except the therapist is you?’

  ‘I’m assuming that’s what you were asking me to do. Unless you want me to tell you that you could have entered the scene later and that you misspelled factotum. U-M.’

  ‘I think I prefer Freud to Holofernes.’

  ‘A bit of a Freudian choice there. Love’s Labour’s Lost.’

  He’s in danger of screwing this up by being too smart. ‘Just do it,’ I say. ‘The therapist thing.’

  ‘You’re a martyr.’

  He looks at me and sips his drink. Doesn’t elaborate. Doesn’t need to. And I look into space and a whole lot of things that must have been in my head, somewhere, guiding my flying fingers today, and everything else before then, fall into place. I’d already realised that I must have been attracted to Scott because of his resemblance to my father—the can-do guy who just needed a handmaiden, a factotum.

  I’d pushed back hard, even when I shouldn’t have, because I didn’t want to be like my mother. My mother, not just the handmaiden, but the martyr. My mother, who was proud of putting her own fulfilment in second place. I was never going to sacrifice myself on the altar of someone else’s success. But I’d found a bigger cause.

  ‘You think I’m a martyr to literature.’

  ‘The literature isn’t the problem,’ he says. ‘It’s the need to be a martyr. You’d be happy if Gideon lost all our money, wouldn’t you? Because it’s not enough to be successful. You need to suffer.’

  ‘He’d better not lose all our money.’

  ‘Imagine he has. Now, tell me how you feel, in your guts? Not as bad as I would. Because…’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

  ‘About the money?’

  ‘No, the martyr. Wait…you’re not telling me that he has lost all our money?’

  ‘Later. This is more important. I didn’t make the observation about you being a martyr before because I hadn’t worked it out. Probably because it’s so antithetical to the way I think. Most results for the least effort. I didn’t see it till you put it on the page.’

  ‘You know, you’re right. I think.’

  ‘No, you’re right. You wrote it. Which means you have to believe it. And think about what would happen if you set yourself free of it.’

  ‘Can we go home?’ I say. ‘I want to go to bed.’

  ‘You don’t want to keep working on this? See where it takes us? Where it takes your story?’

  ‘I thought you said you liked sex better than writing.’

  Scott

  I waited until the next morning to test whether I’d just had sex with an ex or whether Emily might be interested in having me back in a more holistic way.

  I brought her coffee in bed and it seemed she’d been thinking along similar lines.

  ‘I really want to finish this book,’ she said. ‘Even if it’s unmarketable, or just crap, I’m writing, and it feels good. But I don’t want you to…’

  ‘Take over. I know. I don’t need to read it, either. Happy just to help you get it done. I’m on call, okay?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Like a partner. Call me out if I transgress.’

  ‘And I’d like to not have to sacrifice…well…anything.’ She looked at the place I’d occupied beside her in bed and laughed. ‘Gideon didn’t really lose our money, did he?’

  29

  Emily

  The book has taken over. Taken over my life. And, indirectly, Scott’s. It’s on track to be one of those three-drug-fuelled-days creations, except that my drugs are limited to coffee and adrenaline, and wine when I’m done for the day. And I’m up to day five. I’ve asked one of the other teachers to cover my classes: she of the ‘Here’s a prompt: write for an hour, then workshop in groups’ is happy to take the money.

  My feelings about what’s happened with Gideon are just grist to the writing mill: perhaps Scott was right, and it suits me better not to be rewarded. Does Layla want to die? Scott has kept his promise and not interfered with what I’m doing—just given me physical sustenance and emotional support. A bowl of minestrone on my desk and, when I’m flagging, a gentle reminder that nothing good happens after midnight. In the re-creation of my parents’ relationship, I’m now my father.

  The farmer, the soldier and the schoolboy have been left behind. The only card that has any connection to what I’m writing is the one I created myself: Layla’s back story. That card is in danger of turning into a hundred thousand words: a bit more than Scott’s rule of a thousand words per card. He hasn’t asked to read what I’ve written since that early passage, perhaps afraid that his reaction will break the spell.

  So I press on, sentence after sentence: no cards, no synopsis, no outline, no beat sheet, no rules. Never looking back. Writing by the seat of my pants. A vomit draft. The writer’s block kicked to oblivion.

  Scott senses when I’m done for the day and brings me a whisky glass of something mouth-burningly strong. Probably whisky. ‘How many words?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m at thirty-nine thousand.’

  ‘Barbara Cartland would be envious. You’re not obsessing over every sentence, then?’

  ‘Not even the spelling.’

  ‘Good writing is rewriting,’ he says, but I’m not sure I’ll be doing that. I thank him for his support, but it’s not ‘I couldn’t do it without you.’ I’d do it anyway.

  It’s therapy of sorts, but more like a primal scream than analysis. I’m not discovering any facts beyond what Scott has already articulated for me, but I’m getting it down in all its horrible glory. Bits and pieces; glimpses and fragments; fleeting impressions and half-formed thoughts. Scott wanted me to write in scenes: I’m all montage and voiceover.

  I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read it.

  ‘Do you want to read it?’ I ask Scott. It’s nine days since I finished the draft—wrung out, played out, shattered. All my manic energy gone, the muse departed, abused into retreat. I’ve printed the full manuscript, the hundred and nineteen thousand words, but haven’t looked at it since.

  But I’ve been thinking—thinking for the first time in years with a mind free of the nagging, stifling omnipresence of the unwritten book. Of the many things that have become clear to me, one is that I want Scott to read what I’ve written, for the same reasons I must have chosen him to be the reader of an unpublished erotic short story on the day we met.

  Scott’s face opens in a smile. ‘Are you sure?’

  It’s early in the afternoon but he pours us each a glass of chardonnay before beginning. I watch, not over his shoulder this time, but sitting in the chair opposite. I just look at him as he reads each double-spaced page then puts it on the coffee table beside him. I’m not tired, but I’m not compelled to do anything. It’s strange and calming.

  I’m still not sure if I love him: I don’t have much experience with romantic love. But at this moment, he feels right as my partner.

  Is it just the writing, then? Perhaps, but it’s the most profound connection anyone could make with me. To understand, to get, my writing. An errant thought intrudes. He’s not the only person who has a special affinity for my writing. Piper hasn’t returned to my classes, and I don’t feel good about it.

 

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