Ugh,Chess had said to me, turning the fan on our rickety table towards me when I told her about it that evening, sweltering in the shitty little un-airconditioned granny flat we’d been sharing since our mother died.Fucking privileged little private school boys. They’re a plague in the law faculty. They think they know everything.
I don’t think anyone’s ever told him he’s wrong a day in his life,I’d replied, wiping the sweat off my brow with the back of my hand.
That, I would learn several years later, listening to Professor Fisher eviscerate Jonah in a PhD seminar, was not even remotely the correct reading of his family dynamic.
But symbols were powerful. Jonah had been the face of everything I was fighting against for too long for me to change my mind. And besides, even if his dad told him he was wrong every single day of his life, Jonah was still his father’s son. Professor Fisher certainly wasn’t introducingme– whose research he had once described, to my face, as ‘specious, frivolous and pointless’, centred on ‘a childish interpretation of deus ex machina’ – to any senior academics who could offer me work.
Jonah Fisher was my yardstick. He was my benchmark. If I could keep pace with him, then there was still a chance that I could make it in academia. The fact that he too – with all his privilege and connections and acceptably ‘literary’ area of study – was still insecurely employed and living in a share house in his thirties was one of the few things that let me keep hoping.
Jonah Fisher, though, was also a person.
I wasn’t sure exactly when I’d started to divide him into two different people in my mind, but it had crystallised at our PhD graduation, when he’d casually revealed thatof coursehe knew his dad was a terrible nightmare person who made a habit of being deeply and offensively unfair to me – and that the reason he had never pushed back was that he didn’t want to undermine me.
Anyway, you hold your own against him perfectly well, Shaw,he’d said casually, adjusting his doctoral bonnet in the mirror, like he wasn’t forcing me to fundamentally reconsider his place in my personal universe.You don’t need my help.
So now there were two Jonahs. Tweed Jonah and Cardigan Jonah.
Tweed Jonah was the symbol of everything I was fighting against. The institutional privilege of the ivory tower, determined to keep me and my specious, frivolous, pointless, childish research out.
Cardigan Jonah, though, was the human. The one I’d lived with for years now, and who, despite the fact we argued abouteverything,might not actually be that bad.
That’s who I’d sat with, in the darkness of the kitchen. The least tweedy, most extremely cardigan version of Jonah there was. The Jonah who loved his sister, the most relatable, humanising emotion in the world to me. That was who I had agreed not to fight with anymore.
But now there was this job ad – which could not be more perfectly designed to pit us against each other, more bitterly than ever.
It was unrealistic of me to hope that he hadn’t seen the job ad, but… well, I’ve never really been a huge fan of realism.
My hope was shattered almost immediately. It was always going to be, given how many early career researchers lived in our share house. ‘Jonah!’ Van said jovially, as the man in question walked into the kitchen later that night. ‘You saw the Lyons ad, right?’
Jonah set his satchel down and got himself a water glass. He had to reach past me – I was standing at the stove cooking myself dinner – and his sleeve gently brushed against my ear, the merest whisper of a touch. ‘I saw.’
‘That’s only the third Lit Studies job that’s come up this year, right?’ Van said.
‘Second,’ Jonah and I said at the same time.
Involuntarily, I glanced at him. He must have had the same reflex, because he met my eyes, offering me a tight, profoundly joyless smile. It was a Tweed Jonah smile, one he’d given me a million times before, a smile which usually meantthere is no socially appropriate way for me to say this at present but please know that everything you are saying is wrong.
‘What do you think of the location?’ Van asked. ‘Tassie’s pretty far away.’
‘I’d move,’ I said.
‘My sister Fiona lives in Hobart,’ Jonah said. ‘So I’d quite like to move there, actually.’
Ohfuck me.
And I thoughtI’dhad a moment of eucatastrophe. When Jonah had seen the ad and realised that not only did they want someone with his specialisation, not only was it hundreds of kilometres away from his awful dad, but it was in the same city as his sister – his newly-abandoned sister, the one he was desperate to mend his relationship with! – he must have just about died with happiness.
Had he experienced a moment of dyscatastrophe too, when he’d realised that ‘popular fiction’ was hiding there behind ‘early modern drama’? Anger? Frustration, maybe, that his annoying upstart redhead nemesis was going to fight him for somethingagain, or—
‘I think that’s burning, Sadie,’ Jonah said.
I took the pan off the stove moments before my dinner became entirely unsalvageable. ‘Just because you’re better at cooking than me doesn’t mean I want a lecture on it,’ I said tightly, putting it into a bowl and leaving the kitchen as quickly as I could, because I didn’t want to look at him.
In my room, I opened my laptop and pulled up the selection criteria again. I took a bite of my barely edible chicken stir-fry and started ranking myself against Tweed Jonah.
PhD: even. We’d held that degree exactly as long as each other.
Teaching record: probably even. There was a time when I would have awarded the point to myself – my enthusiastic embrace of popular culture meant I had a reputation as Not A Regular Teacher, A Cool Teacher – but seeing the student surveys from English 101 at Bass had made me understand that Jonah had his own appeal. I might be the cool one, but he – with the glasses and the dark hair always falling in his eyes and the beard and the apparently endless collection of knitwear – looked like the archetypal hot young English professor from every student’s dark academia fantasy.
