‘Please turn to page forty-six,’ he demands in the type of withering tone he reserves for closing arguments.
Page forty-six?Suddenly, all feeling drains from my limbs. I know exactly why he wants me to turn to that section, and I feel like I’m in a courtroom witness box. In a panic, I try to remember the definition of slander. Or libel. Whichever applies when you unambiguously call the fictional boss at a made-up triple-barrelled law firm the ‘Antichrist’ in your show.
‘This was a private document,’ I explain weakly. I amhorrifiedthat he seems to have read the whole thing in such detail, partly because it’s very much a first draft and I need him to know, if he’s about to boot me out, that I am better than this, creatively. I haven’t even shown it to Rach or Sara yet. Gawd, my sister will have a field day when she hears this story:Oh, Audrey—how could you? Penguins? And the Antichrist?
I tell myself it’s liberating to be unexpectedly jobless. Am I not forever dreaming that fate will force my hand and make me rely on my music to pay the rent? Isn’t this exactly what performers and artists and composers and writers have been doing for centuries?
Although, how am I going to accomplish that? Busk outside Woolworths? Nobody carries cash anymore. I could pick up some piano or composition students. Surely there are a whole bunch of stressed-out high school students who I could shepherd through their final exams?
Or I could do what I’ve been promising myself for years and pick up some sort of casual job while I finally finish writing the show. Really work on it, properly, and pitch it to investors …
I go into my email one last time and set an out-of-office message:Audrey Sullivan is no longer employed by Bates, Scrivener and Daley. Please contact Anne O’Rourke with any questions.
As the sliding doors part and I escape from the glass atrium into the freedom of a meeting-less midweek mid-afternoon, there is one final, unprofessional email that part of me regrets not taking a minute to fire off:
Dear Dr Miller,
Anne O’Rourke is a stickler for financial accuracy, but should you find her wanting in the Penguin Appreciation Department, here’s my personal email …
4
FRASER
‘Can I steal you for a second?’ a woman says, slipping her hand through the crook of my arm, disturbing me from the breather I was taking on the back balcony. I’d barely returned from my three-month trip when my colleague Zoe insisted I attend her costume party to ease back into normalcy—and now some stranger is dragging me down the steps into the courtyard garden, not that I’m putting up a fight …
Even after a full week with Parker (mostly spent wrestling her maths homework, hosing a meltdown over the read-a-thon, then sending emails back and forth with Maggie about whether or not we should be concerned that Parker seems to be scratching her arms—is it anxiety?), I’m still acclimatising to ‘real life’.
Frankly, I’m missing the singing of the ice and the creak of the ship’s bow as it slices through slush, broken ice sheets roaring as they thunder into the ocean. And the boundless space I had on the research trip to get my head together. Give me the eerie silence under a dazzling aurora sky over this blast of music and lights, and this throng of people shouting to be heard while I’m forced into small talk with humans. Or with this woman. Who seems to be dressed as a cat.
She glances towards the costume party as she pushes me behind a hedge, black latex suit pressed against me as she adjustsher whiskers, champagne on her breath, and says, ‘I told some lecherous drunk in there that you were my fiancé.’
What is happening?
‘Actually, he’s not some random,’ she confesses, falling onto a concrete seat beside us and pulling me onto it next to her. ‘He’s my ex-boyfriend.’
‘Shit, really?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t serious! In fact, it was a giant mistake. The Everest of dating debacles—’
This sort of thing doesn’t happen at the South Pole. That’s why I like it. No anonymous Catwomen entwining me in their failed romantic exploits.
‘I know all about mistakes,’ I start to say.Where am I going with this?I haven’t been on Tinder. Nor do I see my marriage that way. That was more a case of two people getting involved before our brains had matured, dazed on the idea of love. But now I’ve broken Zoe’s rule:No thinking about Maggie at the party. And for God’s sake, shave off that beard and make an effort, Fraser, unless you’re in costume as a reclusive scientist.
Iama reclusive scientist. But I did what she said. The closest thing I had to a nineties costume was a David Beckham jersey that I dug out of one of the boxes I have yet to unpack in my new rental. Maggie stayed in the house and is in the process of buying me out.Stop thinking about her.
‘Don’t worry,’ Catwoman reassures me. ‘This isn’t going to snowball into one of those full-blown fake dating sagas, like in Hallmark movies and romance novels.’
I wasn’t worried, because I didn’t know fake dating sagas existed. They sound hideous. And the way she’s still got one eye on the house is unnerving. Eventually, she drags her attentionfrom the balcony, thrusts her face uncomfortably close, inspects me in the moonlight, and says, ‘Have we met?’
As her features are obscured behind a shiny mask with pointed ears, it’s difficult to say. ‘Perhaps in one of your eight other lives?’ I suggest, diplomatically.
She laughs, loudly, then clamps a hand over her mouth and puts a finger to my lips as if to shush me, too, not that I have any intention of blaring our whereabouts to the alleged thug she used to date.
‘Could we have met at the university?’ I ask quietly, after I remove her finger. ‘I’m in the School of Science.’
She shakes her head. ‘Not likely. I’m a very boring cybersecurity analyst. Currently researching international espionage, but I can’t really talk about it …’
The woman takes self-deprecation to a new level. ‘You do seem quite dull,’ I volley, deadpan. She shrinks a little, clearly one of those brilliant people with no sense of irony. ‘Between the false engagement, the spy-wrangling, the whole’—I wave my hand at the costume—‘cat situation.’
