53 I thought I was smothering you, so the only other alternative was completely exiting your life– really? That would get some stern words in the margins about logical leaps and a profound lack of nuance if it were an assignment I was grading.
54 If you’ve ever sat through an amateur dramatic society production ofHamletset in an insane asylum – of which I’ve somehow seen three – you know exactly what overreading is.
55 Happy tears excepted. All good mantras should have fine print in the footnotes.
56 Could this be an overreading? Sure. Was it? Definitely not.
57 It was amazing, really, the amount of restraint I was able to employ now that I wasn’t spending most of my mental energy on keeping my love for her hidden in the footnotes.
OCTOBER
EpilogueSadie
‘Oooh, that sounds promising,’ I said to Chess, phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder as I tried to pry the cork out of the wine bottle without breaking it. ‘Do you have any time in your calendar in the next couple of days? I can set up a Zoom with you, me and Julia, and we can talk about next steps.’
‘Tomorrow’s a fourteen-hour day for me, but I’ve taken Friday off,’ Chess replied. ‘I was thinking about flying down to Hobart Thursday night. Maybe we can all have lunch on Friday?’
‘Absolutely. I’ll text Julia. And I’ll make up the Bunbury Suite for you.’
‘Don’t do that. I’ll stay in a hotel.’
I did my best to suppress a sigh. Chess had visited Hobart several times over the past few months, working with us and the union on the anti-Renewniversity campaign, but she was so intent on thisSadie is an adult who needs spacething that she’d steadfastly refused to stay with us, no matter how many times I told her that I wanted her to.
Well, either that or she was terrified she’d hear me and Jonah having sex and didn’t want to admit it to me. That, I supposed, I could understand.
‘You’re not getting out of Friday night dinner at Fiona’s, though,’ I said, finally managing to get the cork out of the bottle. ‘She tells me to thank you every time I see her.’
Chess snorted. ‘She’s probably spent more time thanking me than I’ve spent working on her case.’
That definitely wasn’t true. Chess had found Fiona an incredible family lawyer to represent her in the divorce, but she’d also gone digging into Matt’s finances personally. Fiona had nearly fainted when Chess had revealed to her what she’d be entitled to in child support once the divorce was finalised.
‘And yet you will be thanked again,’ I said. ‘In words, and probably in wine. Thank goodness you like Bibliophile.’
‘Thank goodness,’ Chess echoed.
There was a knock at the door. ‘Jonah, can you get that?’ I called. ‘It’s the pizza!’
‘On it!’ he called back.
‘He’s not cooking tonight?’ Chess asked.
‘I ordered him to take a night off,’ I replied, pouring the wine – a Bibliophile syrah – into two glasses. ‘We just finished writing the last of our lectures for the semester and we’re both completely exhausted. Plus, we’ve got our workload meeting next week and fuck knows how many more Petrovski is going to heap on us in retribution.’
It hadn’t taken much for the university to back down on laying Jonah off. Chess had barely begun to terrify the university lawyers when the media campaign started rolling out, portraying us as a sort of academic Romeo and Juliet, two lovers being torn apart by cruel institutional forces outside their control.A clerical error led to Dr Sadie Shaw and Dr Jonah Fisher’s positions being considered in scope for the Lyons University ‘Renewniversity’ major work-force realignment project,came a swiftly issued public statement.The Faculty of Arts looks forward to employing both Dr Shaw and Dr Fisher for many years to come.
They’d clearly been hoping that with Jonah’s job saved, the media campaign would fizzle out and they could go on their merry way with Renewniversity Phase Three. And, to an extent, it had – we’d kept juicing it all we could, but there was only so long you could keep the public interested in stories about layoffs, particularly ones in an industry they didn’t really understand or care about.
But there was no tiring Francesca Shaw, The Lawyer Who Eats Lawyers.
She’d been as good as her word. I didn’t understand half the things she’d done – give me academic jargon and I’ll tell you exactly what it means; give me legal jargon and I’m completely lost – but she’d done exactly what she’d told Jonah that night in Tsundoku. She’d buried them in red tape.
With her help, the union got the first arm of the Renewniversity agenda thrown out. There would be no adjustments to 40-40-20 contracts, which meant that Veronica, Lin and all the other people in the Lyons precariat would still have work next semester. Casual academics werenotgoing to be the first casualties, not this time.
Now we were working on getting the other arm – the academic Hunger Games arm – tossed too. The end of the academic year was coming up, so we were running low on time, but given Chess had begun this phone call tonight with, ‘so I have an idea’, I was pretty sure we were going to make it happen.
‘I should let you go and eat,’ Chess said. ‘I’ll see you in a couple of days, okay? I love you.’
I had a sudden vision of her pacing around her high-rise apartment in Sydney, and for a moment I felt profoundly sad. I hated to think of her being there every night, all on her own.
