We pay the bill at the cafe and I excuse myself to use the bathroom while Hugh and Andrew wait outside. I’m really only in here for a break from Hugh. The man is doing things to me that I didn’t think could still be done. It feels unstable and dangerous – one wrong move and we’ll fall off this cliff. So many unanswered questions, some going a long way back. Way before we met, in fact.
Checking myself in the mirror, I imagine Genevieve. In my head she’s impossibly beautiful. Long, luscious, perfectly straight and therefore perfectly manageable hair. Eyes so dark and deep, young Hugh couldn’t stop himself falling right into them, never to fully clamber out.
Now he’s coming up for air. Encountering me. A woman who is hot in the wrong way, and off to a writers festival, feeling like a fraud beside the real writers.
As I come out of the bathroom, I can see Andrew and Hugh on the street. They’re deep in conversation. That is, Hugh is deeply conversing while Andrew listens intently. He has to. Hugh’s drumming something home passionately and I have a fair idea what it’s about. Or whom. Their mutual crush turned Hugh’s first love. The one you never get over. And the one he’s no doubt imploring Andrew not to tell me more about this afternoon. But why?
I pause in the doorway. Seeing them like that gives me a horrible flashback to that moment in our lounge room with Cam and Hugh about three years ago, after Hugh had been AWOL from work for days, thinking. The moment was so fleeting, I almost missed it. All I know is Cam had hope in his eyes when Hugh walked in, and Hugh extinguished it. When we went to bed that night, I asked Cam to tell me what it was about and he said he couldn’t remember. It’s the only time in the two years after his diagnosis that I’m sure he was lying about his memory.
Sure enough, when I appear at the door of the cafe, the conversation stops dead. ‘Talking about me, Hugh?’
He laughs. ‘Kate Whittaker: hottest topic in Byron Bay. Says so herself.’
It’s like we’ve met up at the school gate in Year Ten. I thump him on the arm.
‘Whoa, this takes me back,’ Andrew says.
‘To when, exactly?’ I ask, guessing he’s had ‘third wheel’ experience with Hugh before.
Hugh realises I’m taking no prisoners. He asks Andrew to excuse us for a second while we have a brief word, and pulls me aside. Andrew says he’ll go get the car. I sort of want him to stay. Safety in numbers.
‘Kate. I know I’ve been secretive about Genevieve. It’s not for the reason you think.’
‘You don’t know what reason I’m thinking.’
‘I can guess.’
‘It’s none of my business who you loved in your past. Or your present,’ I add, even though it twists my insides to voice the possibility.
‘Not in the way you imagine,’ he says.
So he does still love her. Perfect.
‘I feel like you’re always keeping secrets from me,’ I admit.
‘What secrets? I haven’t told you about Genevieve, but there’s a reason for that. It’s too complicated to explain now.’
The bottom drops out of my world. I imagine he has Genevieve and some secret family stashed somewhere. Maybe that’s where he disappeared to that time when he fell off the face of the earth for a few weeks and came back looking traumatised.
‘I know that look,’ he says. ‘Whatever idea you’ve taken and you’re running with, just stop it. Wait for me to explain. Please.’
‘I don’t understand how this is anything to do with me, Hugh.’ It’s none of my business if he has a family of six and a Tarago. He could have hordes of children for all I know. All those one-night stands. The mind boggles.
‘Just please don’t ask Andrew about it. He’ll butcher the story.’
‘So you admit there is a story,’ I say. I’ll whip out a notepad and pen next.
He sighs in frustration, looks to the heavens, then back at me, resigned. ‘Of course there’s a story, Kate. I’ve wanted to tell you so many times over the last four years, but whenever I tried, I lost my nerve.’
Well.
I never.
A car draws up beside us, and Andrew winds the window down. ‘C’mon, Kate. Festival time!’
There’s a festival going on right here on the pavement. I am ninety per cent enthralled by the trailer Hugh is playing for this epic tale, and ten per cent have my hands over my ears, too scared to hear it.
‘Please,’ he says again, placing his hand on my arm. He’s imploring me to wait for later.
‘Kate, come on. Get in!’
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.