Page 131 of People Skills

‘Good luck,’ he calls out, too loudly. He has been referring to me all day as the dead-possum lady, a title he believes is very complimentary.

Hillary is thanking the audience for their understanding about Jessica cancelling, and that she asked her son to step up and fill in at the last minute. And that she knew that the only way he’d do it was if he was doing it with me.

‘Charlotte told me she could cure his writer’s block, and she did. And now, she’s also convinced him to do events again. So we have a lot to thank her for.’

The audience laughs and claps.

‘Let’s welcome her to the stage.’

The audience claps again, dutifully, and I walk out. I am not made for this. They are here for Xavier, I tell myself, over and over. You don’t matter. Don’t worry. Put on your armour, run this show.

Hillary squeezes my arm as she moves past me.

‘You’ve got this,’ she whispers, and I smile at her.

I introduce Xavier, and he gets rapturous applause, and that settles me. He’s the star. But I’m the one in control. I even know how to fix the microphones if they stop working.

I start with some easy questions about his journey to becoming a writer. ‘In order to understand what went wrong,’ I say, ‘first tell us what went right with your writing of the first book. What came easy the first time?’

We settle into the conversation, and the Xavier of the cafe is gone. Every time I speak, his eyes are on me. Of course they are, we’re on stage together, but there’s something about the way he looks at me that makes me feel a little bit breathless, exposed, almost. Can everyone in the audience tell that when he looks at me, when he smiles and laughs and banters, when he talks to the audience and then swings his attention back to me, I feel it almost like an electric jolt? Every time? Can they see my leg jiggling, my cheeks warming, my body angling in his direction like a flower to the sun, my humming desire to be closer to him? God, I hope not.

I move the conversation into trickier topics, digging into the second novel.

‘What were you thinking when you were promoting The Deep?’ I ask him. He hesitates, and I wish I could reach out and squeeze his hand like he did mine.

‘I was thinking, I hate this, and I never want to do this again. The pressure of having written a popular book and following it up with a flop, the shame of that, it really got in my head. And I know how privileged I am—to have a bestselling book, to be the son of Hillary Hobbs, to be sitting right now on the stage of a festival she organised—so I’m certainly not asking for anyone’s sympathy. But I think I had just been so obsessed with this dream, and then I got it, and then I got the backlash, and I wasn’t enjoying any of it anymore, and I decided to walk away from everything. I stopped writing and I went overseas.’

‘And you didn’t write for almost four years.’

‘Correct.’

‘Not a single word.’

‘Not a single word.’

‘Until?’

‘Until I met you.’ He says it lightly, but his gaze on me is so steady, so intense, so layered with meaning, that I can feel goosebumps on my arms. My heart hurts. My chest is physically aching. I swallow, working hard to not react, determined to not let my face show anything.

‘What was your headspace when we met?’ I ask.

It’s like a therapy session on stage. I can feel the audience leaning forward.

‘I was at a low-point of my life. I was certain that I was done with writing forever, but I needed somewhere to live and when I moved into your spare room, part of our agreement was that I would follow a program you’d devised to fix my writer’s block.’ He smiles, and it’s a smile that feels like it’s just for me, until he turns and gives it to the crowd.

‘Right. And what did the program involve?’ I ask.

‘Well, I think you need to take over here. This is your story too,’ he says. ‘How did you come up with the idea of a program?’

All those squashed feelings rise in my throat. I blink, and turn away from him.

‘I’ll be completely honest,’ I say, looking out at the audience. ‘My motives were not pure. I was mainly trying to impress Hillary.’

The crowd laughs, and a bubble of tension releases in my chest, and Xavier and I chat about the various details of the program: the digital detox, the reading list, the ocean swim (‘That’s backed by science,’ Xavier says, with a straight face), the chess. Jane Austen.

The crowd loves it, I can tell. They laugh in all the right places.

And then I say, ‘And the big question—have you written anything new?’