‘Which boat’s that? The life-raft of people who have been chucked out of other, better boats? You think that’s the best I can do?’
‘It’s not a question of the best you can do. It’s a question of practicality. You need someone with kids.’
‘I don’t need any more kids. I have enough of my own and other people’s to look after already. The Brady Bunch always seemed like a complete nightmare to me. I don’t really like other people’s kids. Sometimes I barely even like my own kids. Why can’t I have someone footloose and fancy-free?’
‘Because blokes without kids don’t want to look after other people’s kids. Blokes don’t even really want to look after their own kids. Except penguins. That’s biology.’
‘Laura, if there’s one thing I’m even more certain about than not dating a weirdly tall, divorced vet, it’s that I don’t want to go out with a parent from Tim’s school,’ I tell her firmly. ‘This suburb’s too small as it is. I’ve been the scandal of Shorewood once already. I’m not doing it again. If I’m going to go out with anyone, it’s going to have to be someone from, I don’t know, truly far away. Like Denmark.’
‘Western Australia?’
‘No, proper Denmark. Someone who has no place in this life. A dad from around here is going to an ex-wife around here. He’s going to have his version of me. I don’t want to know any more versions of me.’
‘Well that’s a point,’ says Laura. ‘You’ve already got one Helen. I’m just not sure how you’re going to find a never-married Danish man around here. You only ever go to the school and the shops. I suppose there’s always the gym.’
‘There isn’t even the gym,’ I say glumly. ‘Troy got the gym. I haven’t set foot in there since before Freya was born. Do you know he and Helen go there to celebrate their anniversary?’
‘That is disgusting,’ Laura says. ‘It strengthens my point though: you only go two places. And they’re not exactly magnets for hot, single Scandinavians.’
‘Tonight I’m going somewhere else,’ I tell her. ‘I’m going to a book launch.’
Laura wrinkles her nose. ‘Book launches are full of women. Always. You won’t meet anyone there.’
‘I’m not going there to pick up,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t care if I meet anyone there. This is my point.’
‘Fine,’ she says. ‘It’s your funeral. Which will happen sooner than it needs to, because I read that married people live longer than single people.’
‘That’s not true,’ I reply. ‘It just feels longer.’
* * *
What I don’t tell Laura, but I suspect she knows anyway because she’s my sister and likes to rummage about in my head without my permission, is that I am still, three years down the track, far too frightened to go out on a date with anyone.
What happened to my marriage came so out of the blue. Only from my perspective, obviously. Troy had some inkling it was coming.
I could never understand those stories you’d hear about people who led double lives and got away with it. How does someone not notice that their partner is running another family somewhere? It’s a logistical nightmare. You’d have to be a highly organised sociopath to pull it off.
Or, as it turns out, you just have to be a sociopath and your new girlfriend can be the highly organised one. That’s an unstoppable combination.
Helen and Troy had met at the gym, where she was teaching the Pilates mat class. Troy was in that class because he’d put his back out from bouncing Tim to sleep. So really it’s Tim’s fault, what happened. I’ll save that up to tell him when he’s old enough to understand.
Helen wasn’t single either. She had a long-term boyfriend to whom she gave the elbow some time in that first year she and Troy were sleeping together. That poor bloke. I think they’d been together for a while, too. Maybe he and I should have gone for a drink and commiserated about our respective dumpings.
I wonder if her boyfriend had any idea of what was going on. Looking back now, I can see things that should have made me worry. Troy’s sudden interest in how he looked. Suddenly dealing with the weird foot fungus thing he had been ignoring for years, despite my telling him it was disgusting and quite probably contagious. The working late.
It really did seem, after the fact, as if Troy had been following some sort of guide to cheating that included all the classic hits.
When Tim was two, just as sleep was starting to look like it hadn’t left us forever, and the idea of a shag no longer seemed, as it had in the earliest days of parenthood, like something only slightly preferable to Exit-Moulding the bathroom, Troy started working late. A lot.
Instead of coming home from the office around six, walking in right after the toddler was fed and bathed, just in time to rev him up before bed, Troy started arriving later and later each evening. It was gradual, but once I found out I was pregnant again it really struck me. At least four nights a week he wasn’t home before nine or ten.
But he was running a small business, a start-up that was growing fast. I could put his absence down to that. And with me being pregnant, if he wasn’t home by seven it didn’t really make much difference to me whether he came home at eight o’clock or three the next morning. I was out for the count as soon as I had Tim asleep.
That was probably something he learned in his Affairs for Dummies manual: cheat on your wife while she’s pregnant. She’ll be too knackered to notice, and if she does get suspicious you can reassure her that it’s her hormones talking.
Sometimes I wonder if Troy will do to Helen what he did to me. Once a cheater, always a cheater, isn’t that what they say? Perhaps I should make Helen a handy list of warning signs to look out for. But then again, why should I?
* * *
When Charlotte the babysitter arrives — half an hour late — Laura takes off. Charlotte is a fifteen-year-old who lives around the corner. She is my last choice of babysitter, owing to her constant lateness, which is a symptom of her pathological inability to give a shit about anything. She drawls every word she deigns to utter, plays with her hair too much and is never off her phone. But she’s cheap, and local enough that I don’t have to give her a lift home. And she was the only one available tonight.
She wanders into the living room and flops down on the sofa with the kids while I order an Uber and dash about giving instructions she will almost certainly disregard. The kids should be in bed by now, but since I was busy being harassed by Laura I’ve dropped the ball a bit. Charlotte is the sort of babysitter who will see I’ve dropped the ball this evening and languidly watch it roll under the couch.
But it’s already six-thirty and the speeches start at seven, so I haven’t got time to give her a lecture about her work ethic. I kiss the kids, who are lobbying against tooth-brushing and bed, and leap into the waiting car.
The launch is for a new thriller by Wanda Forthwright, the woman who invented being famous for being famous. American by birth, she moved from a small town in Vermont to New York City in the early 1960s to become a model, and spent the rest of that decade sleeping with pretty much every musician, artist, writer and actor of note. She ended up doing a bit of everything they did — a sexually transmitted career, really. She released albums, exhibited paintings, starred in films and then, ten years ago, she married an Australian man, moved to the Noosa hinterland and began turning out thrillers of impressive quality with equally astonishing frequency. She was a publisher’s dream come true.
My old boss, Carmen, is that publisher, and so I worked on the final edits of a couple of Wanda’s books back before I had kids, when I worked full-time, in an office, wearing makeup, and pants that were hardly ever what I’d slept in the night before.
Since returning to work as a freelancer, I’ve worked on two more of her novels, and we have a pretty nice little author–editor relationship going. Which is to say, I’ve met her on more than two occasions, I’m invited to her book launches, and she sends me a bottle of French champagne at Christmas every year.
&nbs
p; Although of course I’m keen to witness Wanda’s new book being released into the world, I really want to see her tonight so I can figure out why her next book, a memoir, which was meant to come to me for editing three months ago, is still nowhere to be seen. Titled Affairs in Order, it’s supposed to be a chronological account of Wanda’s love life: a warts-and-all catalogue of the mischief and mayhem she’s been involved in over the past half-century.
The publishers want it out for Christmas this year, a plan that is growing ever less likely with each missed deadline, since — quite apart from the time it will take to edit the book — the thing will have to be scrutinised by a team of the finest lawyers in the land as it is almost certain to be largely made up of potentially defamatory statements about other famous people.
Every few weeks Carmen calls Wanda and politely inquires after its progress, and each time there’s not much to report. Not surprisingly, every time I’m informed that the dates have been pushed back again, the tone of Carmen’s emails becomes ever more panicky.
The delay is wreaking havoc with my schedule too. The weeks around the time I’ve put aside for this project I’ve filled up with other work, and whenever I get another email saying ‘Sorry, I know we said the manuscript was going be with you next week, but it’s going to be another month,’ I fly into a panic about what I’ll do with the projects that are already booked in for that date. It’s a bundle of laughs, working for yourself.
Tonight’s launch is at the Justice and Police Museum, which is where Wanda has set this novel, After the Fact. It’s about an archivist who realises, as she is researching old crimes for an exhibition, that someone is recreating those crimes around the city.
Even though it’s late there’s still traffic, and I have forgotten, or maybe I never knew, since I so rarely go anywhere, that Ubers can’t use bus lanes. A trip that would take fifteen minutes in a cab takes forty-five, and by the time I jump out of the car and run up the steps of the museum, the speeches are in full swing.
Sophie, the managing director of the publishing house, is at the podium, heaping praise on Wanda, so I quietly wedge myself into the back row. A tall man with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair shuffles to the side, making room for me.
I look up to thank him and he smiles. He has startling blue eyes. I smile at him, then we both look to the front again.
When the MD finishes, Carmen steps up. She starts to speak, and the man beside me reaches over to a waiter who is standing by the wall and takes a glass of champagne from his tray. He passes it to me without a word.
I smile at him and take a sip. She’s a valuable author, so this is proper champagne. It’s so delicious I want to knock back the whole glass, but then I remember I haven’t had dinner. Standing beside the drinks waiter is another waiter, this one holding a tray of what are almost certainly duck spring rolls. I try not to think about them, but my eyes must flick over there a few too many times, because the blue-eyed man reaches over again, takes a napkin from the fanned out pile and puts two spring rolls on it. He passes them over, again without a word and motions for me to give him my glass so I have enough hands free to eat.
I wolf the spring rolls down gratefully, then, seemingly without taking his eyes off the stage at the front, he leans over and passes me two more.
I don’t listen to Carmen. I’ve been to enough of these to know what she’ll be saying. Wanda’s outdone herself, every time they think she’s done her best work, she surpasses it, blah blah blah. It’s not entirely bullshit, Wanda does get better with each book, but the number of times Carmen’s said this you’d think Wanda would have won a Nobel Prize for Literature by now.
Wanda’s loving every word. There are some authors who look bashful and shrug off praise at events like this, but Wanda’s beaming. She has a childlike attitude to praise, which I quite like. She’s holding a glass of champagne in one hand and her clutch bag in the other. Under one arm she has tucked her husband Monty’s left hand. He’s standing beside her, patiently. Seeing I’ve finished eating, my snack benefactor hands back my glass.
I look around at the crowd. The current crop of young editors, assistants and publicists are easy to spot; they’re the ones necking the champagne like people who barely earn a living wage. Ten years ago, that was me. It’s hard to believe. I feel like that’s still me, that I should be over there with them, but I realise that to them I am a fossil.
I’m an old person who disappeared off into the bourn from which few travellers return: maternity leave. I remember when I started my job that there was someone on maternity leave. She was spoken of in hushed tones, the way you would if someone had fallen down the gap between the train carriage and the platform and been horribly killed, and it was sort of their own fault. If they’ve even heard of me, that’s how those girls will regard me.
After the speeches, I turn to thank my saviour, but he’s been swept away into the crowd that is building around Wanda. I mean, I assume it’s around Wanda, though she’s so small I can’t see her. Like a whirling eddy, the crowd moves over and the gap in its middle settles around a small table. That’s where she’ll be signing books. I should make my way over and congratulate her, but I’ve no need to line up for a signed copy, so instead I cast around for someone I know.
It’s been six years since I worked in-house for the publisher, and there’s been a lot of turnover. I don’t recognise anyone at first. Eventually I spot the boss, Sophie, who I never had much to do with, but who will at least know who I am.
It’s been such a long time since I’ve been to anything like this. Wanda brings out a book every year, but I haven’t been to the launches of the last four, I don’t think. The last of her launches I came to was when Tim was almost one, and I had thought it would be fine to bring him.
It would have been fine, too, if the launch hadn’t been at six o’clock in the evening and if my baby had been a different baby altogether. Tim cried all the way to the event, I couldn’t find a parking spot, I missed all the formalities, and once I had him strapped firmly to my front in the baby carrier he unleashed what could only be described as a shituation — a nappy fail of such catastrophic magnitude that there was no way to deal with it in a public place. I had to walk straight out of the bar, back to my car, change the nappy, clean him as best I could using an entire package of wipes, double bag all his clothes and the baby carrier, and drive him home, the front of my dress covered in poo.
That was the last time I saw most of the people I used to work with. Now, understandably, they mostly deal with me only by phone or email.
I’m trying to summon up the courage to walk over to Sophie, when someone taps me on the shoulder. I turn around to see my duck-spring-roll-enabler from earlier. I only saw him from the side before. He’s quite handsome, and his eyes are really amazing. My mum would have called him a dish.
‘Thanks for the food and drink earlier,’ I say. ‘I forgot to have lunch and I was about to pass out.’
‘Yes, you did seem to be swaying. I thought you might need a bite to eat. If you miss the food at one of these things they’re a bit hard to tolerate, I find.’
‘Absolutely,’ I agree. ‘I used to be really good at figuring out which door the waitstaff were coming in from and lurking over there, but I’m a bit out of practice at book launches these days.’
‘Have you read this new one yet?’ he asks.
‘As a matter of fact I have. Many, many times — I edited it.’
‘Oh!’ His face lights up. ‘You must be Emma!’
‘Yes,’ I say, with some apprehension. Should I know this person? How does he know me? No one knows me.
‘I’m a good friend of Wanda’s,’ he says. ‘She thinks you’re the bee’s knees. She says you’re a terrific editor. Very methodical.’
‘Well that’s nice to hear,’ I say. ‘I’m looking forward to the new book. It’ll be quite a departure from her fiction.’
‘Ah, yes.’ He suddenly looks intently at his champagne glass.
&n
bsp; He knows something about the book. I can tell. ‘Are you quite close to Wanda?’ I ask.
‘I’m staying with her and Monty for a few months.’
‘So you know how the book’s progressing?’ I’m not giving up. Something’s going on.
‘Look, it’s really not my place to report on that,’ he insists.
‘Fair enough, of course you can’t say.’ I should stop hassling him, I know. But I’m very curious now. ‘How come you’re staying with them for so long? Where do you usually live?’
‘London, mostly, but my work’s pretty portable. And Wanda sometimes finds me useful to have around, when she’s working.’
This is all very strange. What is the deal with this guy? Is he Wanda’s guru or something?
‘So you just hang around her house for months on end providing moral support?’ I ask.
‘It sounds pretty weird, when you put it like that. I suppose I’m — actually, do you know what I am? Have you heard of emotional support animals? They’re a thing in America now. Instead of just having guide dogs for the blind and helper monkeys for the physically disabled, people now have miniature horses and peacocks and all sorts of mad things to provide emotional support.’
I’m laughing now. ‘You’re Wanda’s emotional support peacock?’
‘Yes,’ he says, puffing his chest out in mock pride, ‘I think that’s what I am.’
He raises his glass to take a sip and, as he does, Wanda bustles under his arm and hurls herself at me.
‘Emma, darling!’ she pipes. ‘It’s magnificent to have you here. A dream! Philip, this is Emma, who is magnificent and a dream. Isn’t she gorgeous? I’m the luckiest woman alive to have her to sort out all my wretched scribblings. Emma, have you met Philip? I simply can’t do without him.’
‘Congratulations, Wanda,’ I say. ‘You’ve done it again. The book’s going to be a smash.’
‘I know,’ she sighs happily. Suddenly her smile drops away and her eyes narrow. Philip and I turn and follow her gaze. She’s scowling at Carmen, who’s raising her glass across the room at Wanda.
How to Be Second Best Page 3
