I nod at Hugh. He always does this. Always convinces me. He’s the most commanding, persuasive—
‘Have a really great time,’ he says. He means that too. Then he opens the car door and I get in and watch him out the window as we drive off, and then again in the side mirror, because I am what, exactly? Obsessed?
Standing on the road watching us go, he looks lost. He’s hoping he can trust us not to mess this thing up. The problem is he knows who he’s dealing with.
33
Despite this Genevieve business, I spend the first two sessions at the festival deeply, deeply engrossed. If I’ve been searching for my happy place my whole life, I think I’ve found it. To be surrounded by people who get it. Storytelling. It’s enchanting. Even better, I’m meeting ordinary people from vastly different walks of life, at various stages of success from just starting out to having several books on the shelves, and they’re all just willing each other on.
I attend a session called ‘Almost Fiction’. It’s about how to take your own experiences and pack them into a story that isn’t exactly yours. It’s how to ‘write what you know’ without selling your own soul. Cam died from Alzheimer’s disease, but if that’s too hard for me to write about, I could make my protagonist’s husband die from a heart attack instead. Same emotional punch but not my exact life.
‘Fill your book with details and anecdotes so personal and real your friends will question whether the entire thing is true,’ the presenter advises. ‘If they’re not doing that from the very first chapter, you’re not infusing your fictional story with enough convincing fact.’
Afterwards, I find myself in conversation with an editor from a boutique publishing house in Victoria. I forget I’m writing a book and fall into a chat that involves giving her the executive summary of my last four years.
‘We need the voices of women in their forties,’ she reassures me as she passes me her card. It’s not a publishing deal, obviously, but it’s not a ‘no-one wants to read that stuff’ either. Maybe Cam and Hugh were pushing me in the right direction after all.
‘I’m not shrinking,’ I type in a text to Hugh. Andrew’s off at a screenwriting session and we’re meeting at the bar in a few minutes. Hugh’s leaving the house now to pick me up.
I see the dots on the screen, and my heart does this crazy little flip. Then I scroll back up, through literally hundreds of texts over the last four years. Not one of them had this effect on me.
Mind you, they’re all about work, or my personal logistics. Me saying I’ll be late in, or not coming to work at all. Him assuring me it’s fine. Again. Asking if I need anything dropped off when Charlie’s down with a 24-hour virus, or when I am. Further back, before Cam died, they’re reminding me things will be okay. Reminding me I will be.
Maybe I should write a book on this. The way we have built this – whatever this is – without a picture of the end result on the front of the box for reference. The fact that I’m even here, waiting for words to appear on a screen, speaks volumes about the state of play. This is my dream, this festival. But I’m just as excited about the idea of Hugh’s incoming messages dangling on my phone. If you can’t lose your head a little after you’ve been dragged through hell, when can you?
Andrew appears across the bar and comes towards me. ‘Hey, what can I get you, Kate? Champagne? Wine? G’n’T? Cocktail?’
I feel like celebrating just the fact that we are here. ‘Champagne, thanks.’
Hugh has stopped typing now. Obviously re-thinking it. I’m fifteen again and bursting with nervous energy waiting for a boy to pass a note to me in class. It’s alarming how fast you can slip into this mindset once you open the door to it.
‘Here you are,’ Andrew says, a minute or two later, passing me a glass as I slip my phone into my bag.
‘What are we toasting?’ I ask.
‘To Cam?’ he says cautiously. ‘And . . . to Genevieve?’
I hover the glass near my lips. Those two hardly belong together in a toast. I can’t bring myself to utter the words, so I skip that bit and gulp down half the champagne. It’s barely touched my oesophagus before the warmth begins to diffuse the chatter in my brain. Even then, half a glass of champagne isn’t up to a predicament as steep as my own. Cam. Hugh. Genevieve. Career crisis. Thinking of selling the house, uprooting Charlie from his entire world . . .
‘You know, she’s no threat to you,’ Andrew says, and I wonder for a second if we’re talking about the young woman who just walked past us and clearly caught his eye. But of course we’re not. It’s bloody Genevieve. Again. A woman with the power to hold two men in her thrall for decades.
‘What happened in your relationships, Andrew? If you don’t mind my asking.’ I’m eager to shift the attention away from myself.
‘It was nothing to do with Gen, if that’s what you’re wondering.’
I wasn’t. But now that the thought is planted in my mind . . .
‘You know, you remind me of her. Have done, ever since Hugh told me about you months ago and I looked you up on LinkedIn. Seeing you in person, I can’t put my finger on what it is. Maybe it’s a certain look you get. Maybe your energy. You’re nothing alike, physically. She was classically beautiful . . .’
Oh!
‘Absolute knockout of a woman . . .’
Well, thanks for that comparison, Andrew. I hadn’t thought I could feel any more insecure about this, but we’ve plunged to new depths.
By the time Hugh appears in the doorway, Andrew has shared one too many extraordinary Genevieve anecdotes, I’m a champagne and several Proseccos into falling off the two-year near-abstinence wagon and I’ve requested Dancing Queen from the DJ while I FaceTime Grace from the middle of the dancefloor, crying about how much I miss her.
‘Remember the time we were spotted by ABBA’s manager and taken backstage to meet them?’ I ask her loudly, through alcohol-induced tears.
She laughs. ‘It was a Bjorn Again concert, Kate. Not that that stopped you from being starstruck! Love seeing you on a dancefloor, by the way. I’ve missed you!’
‘I miss you too!’
‘NO! I’ve missed YOU. This you. The old you.’
I’ve missed the old us. The Grace and I who’d laugh at ourselves until tears were rolling down our cheeks in dressing rooms. The friends who’d dance till the lights came on at pre-baby nights out at the one eighties-inspired nightclub in town. I’m struck by the loss of our spontaneity and lightness. The whole ‘Want to grab brunch? See you in twenty’ thing.