Strong publication record: probably also even. I’d published more overall, but he’d published in higher-ranked journals – not that I hadn’t tried, but Shakespeare and friends were a much easier sell to the establishment journals than my work. If he’d kept dragging his heels on turning his PhD thesis into a monograph I might have had him – mine,Joy Poignant as Grief: Reading Popular Fiction in Interesting Times, had come out fairly quickly after our graduation – but his,No Hate Lost Between Us: Relationships on the Jacobean Stage, had been published about a year ago, and already had the same number of citations as mine.
Not that I checked or anything. I definitely didn’t have any Google Scholar alerts set up.
Expertise in modernism, early modern drama or popular fiction: even. Obviously.
I probably had him on the criterion about impact and engagement – I was a fairly regular media commentator on romance and fantasy fiction. He had me on the criterion about grant income, though – he’d taken an intermission during his PhD to do a researchassistantship, and it had landed him a spot on a research team that won a major national grant.
The last criterion was ‘proven ability to establish good working relationships with colleagues’.
Ha fucking ha.
Well, at least we were even on that one too.
I ate the last bite of burnt chicken. When it came down to it, there was only one thing on which we were not even.
But also, when it came down to it… it was a pretty big thing.
‘No,’ Chess said to me the next night. ‘No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not, Sadie.’
‘It’s hissister, though. How am I meant to look past that?’
‘No.’
She swallowed a mouthful (a perfectly cooked, unburnt mouthful. I went round to Chess’s apartment in North Sydney twice a week for dinner, and she always ordered something delicious from somewhere expensive). ‘This is not something you’re seriously considering.’
‘How can I not consider it?’
I took a long sip of my wine (also delicious: Chess’s love of wine had started out as a way to accrue cultural capital in the fancy law firm she worked for, but now it was just a genuine love of wine). ‘Who does it make me? If I sit there and listen to him tell me that awful story about his sister, and then the perfect opportunity comes along for him to be able to go and help her out, and I say, “no, actually, that’s mine, I’m taking that”?’
‘Sadie,’ Chess said, ‘do you want this job?’
‘Of course I do, but—’
‘Are you qualified for this job?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Do you deserve this job?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Has the clause after “but” in your last three yeses been some version of “but so does he”?’
‘No.’
Chess raised her eyebrows.
‘But so does he,’ I said, ‘and a bajillion other people. There are far,farmore people with PhDs than there are jobs. That’s one of the reasons the academic job market is so fucked.’
‘Forget about the bajillion other people. You’re not considering throwing away this dream opportunity for them, are you?’
‘No,’ I admitted.
‘Who has everything on his side? The privilege? The connected daddy? The more academically acceptable specialisation?’
I sighed. ‘Jonah.’
‘Given all this, if another job came up, who would stand a better chance at getting it?’
