‘When will you own it?’ Hugh says unexpectedly. ‘The writing?’
This question is beyond his remit. It’s hard to admit just how long I’ve been tussling with this manuscript. How hard I’ve been fighting it, while words trip me up as they fall into the enormous gap between how I imagine it could be, if it was any good, and how it really is.
‘If you don’t tell people about it, the writing dream stays untested,’ my grief counsellor once told me. ‘It stays intact.’ She went on to pronounce my relationship with words and literary rejection as ‘toxic’。 ‘It’s gaslighting you,’ she told me bluntly. ‘All this “What’s wrong with me? Am I really this bad?” It’s not healthy.’
‘Anyway, we won’t be here at the weekend,’ I explain to the cab driver, ignoring Hugh’s question. ‘We’re not meant to be here at all. We’ll sort out flights back—’
The cabbie chuckles. ‘Not in a hurry you won’t. The whole east coast from Melbourne to the Sunshine Coast is in chaos. Hundreds of hail-damaged planes. Thousands of stranded travellers. Make a weekend of it. Romantic little Airbnb in the hinterland. Go chase your dream at the festival.’
‘We’re not together,’ Hugh interrupts, as if it’s vitally important to clarify the situation with a guy we’ll never see again in all our lives. Even Hugh seems surprised by the intensity of his own protest and glances at me almost apologetically.
‘Heartbreaker!’ I whisper jokingly. At least I hope he knows I’m joking. Now it’s me surprised by how much it matters to me that he doesn’t get the wrong idea.
What my heart is really breaking over is the way a child-free weekend in this paradise is being dangled in front of my eyes, and I cannot think how to realistically make it happen. Logistics like this are my nemesis. Mum can’t handle Charlie for more than a night or two, and I’ve never been away from him longer than that. I don’t want to ask Grace – it would take a whole weekend out of her mission to find Mr Right Enough and get pregnant before Christmas.
‘What do you want to do?’ Hugh asks. ‘I think we’ve got a few options.’
We do? I angle my body to face his in the back seat so he can walk me through them, because from where I’m sitting, it’s all too hard.
‘We’re going to have to reschedule the meetings, either way. So cut that out of the picture.’
Right. That’s a relief.
‘Realistically, we probably can’t fly anywhere today, so cut that option.’ He rushes on, because he can probably see the anxiety rising within me about Charlie. ‘If you really need to get home for Charlie, we could hire a car. It’s a twelve-hour drive though, and you haven’t slept.’
It feels like we’re rapidly running out of feasible choices.
‘You need a break, Kate,’ he says. ‘You’re fragile.’
Fragile? Doesn’t he mean ‘strong’？ Everyone else tells me I’m strong! I don’t know how you do it! You’re amazing! I could never be as strong as you!
It’s an exhausting reputation to uphold. I’ve given up trying to explain that it’s not the way it seems. I’m not strong at all. I just have no choice. The idea of collapsing in a heap, drinking myself into a stupor and retreating from the world seems like a fantasy, but I just don’t have that luxury. Every day, I have to get up and be two parents, even when every part of me wants to stay under the covers and hide from the experience that swept away my entire future.
‘I mean that with respect,’ Hugh explains gently. ‘The fragility. Anyone would be . . .’
Grief almost beat me, once or twice. I wanted to die just to make the pain stop. Landed in his office on one occasion, at wits’ end, shut the door behind me and lost it. ‘I can’t do this any more!’ I cried, between gasping sobs. ‘I’ve tried. It’s too hard. I miss him too much. I just want to be with him, Hugh. Wherever that is. Even if it’s nowhere.’
The mother guilt that flooded in after I’d admitted that was on a scale of its own. And Hugh had listened and let me talk and cry and fetched the bin for me to fill up with a million tissues. Then he’d popped his head out of the office and asked Sophie to bring more tissues and clear his calendar for the rest of the day. He and Cam had been thick as thieves. Hugh would have done anything for him.
‘Are you safe?’ he’d asked when I finally ran out of words. ‘Are you thinking of hurting yourself?’
He was the only person ever to ask me that directly. Even the doctor had glossed over it when she’d increased the dose of my antidepressants. Telling Hugh had been sensible. Close as he had been to Cam, he kept enough professional distance from me to cope with the information. Mum or Grace would have fallen to pieces over it and somehow made it worse – and they had enough to worry about just dragging Charlie and me through daily life. Hugh organised a psych through work. Gave me easy projects I could do in my sleep, or difficult ones I could get lost in. Whatever I needed. And he didn’t once complain if I just sat at my desk, accomplishing nothing.
I am fragile. Just too exhausted to allow it. Sick of being sad all the time and stuck in an endless rut where the game plan is simply ‘holding on’。 Surviving. With no glittering prize if I make it through. Just raising Charlie, then seeing out the course of my natural life, minus Cam.
The Darth Vader ringtone shatters me back into the present and Mum launches unconventionally straight into a conversation. ‘Katherine! Right. Grace and I have been in cahoots,’ she begins in a businesslike manner. ‘I told her about my conversation with Hugh about your being stranded there with no fixed address and no plans right in the middle of a natural disaster—’
‘It’s not quite that bad,’ I say, my face basking in brilliant sunshine through the car window.
‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me about that disastrous attempt you had at matchmaking?’
What?
‘I don’t know what you were thinking. Hugh and Grace? Entirely unsuited – you’re as bad as Emma Woodhouse.’
Does she have an actual point?
‘Anyway, is Hugh there? Put the phone on speaker.’
‘That depends, Mum. Are you about to change the topic?’
‘Yes, yes. I have news!’
‘Brace yourself,’ I whisper to Hugh as I hit the speaker button.
‘Look. Both of you. We’ll have no argument about this,’ Mum starts. ‘Grace and I have organised everything and it’s all settled and paid for.’
Okay, now I’m nervous. Hugh catches my eye, wary.
‘You’ll be staying for three nights in a two-bedroom beach house in New Brighton.’
My stomach flips and I look at Hugh, dismayed. What have they done?
‘Grace said you’ll want to go to the Byron Bay Writers Festival and I said I couldn’t think why. Of course, you were always scribbling away as a teenager but I thought you were over that now you’re an important executive at the university.’
Hugh somehow maintains a straight face.
‘There are two separate bedrooms, Kate . . . And this is your first proper child-free break. All I’m saying is you’re a young, single woman and it’s time you started acting like one.’