Page 22 of People Skills

Apparently that’s all the feedback I’ll be getting. Still, I feel awash with relief. I haven’t been fired. She’s happy with me. My job is secure, and Xavier is my insurance policy. Everything is exactly as I wanted, if I ignore the fact that Xavier is now essentially a work assignment. But imagine, in the future, Hillary talking about me to her next assistant. The girl before you, she did everything, and she even got my son writing again, can you believe that? I could be an urban legend. I could be a hero in the world of personal assistants.

Later, when Hillary leaves the office for an important meeting (she’s actually going for a massage and float-tank session, but she sees her need for this kind of relaxation as a self-indulgent weakness she doesn’t want anyone to know about), I fill Kat and Jamila in on the Xavier situation.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t get over this. You’re living with Xavier?’ Jamila’s eyes are wide.

‘Only for a month,’ I say.

Their expressions are telling me I might have made a very big mistake.

‘And you’ve staked your entire professional reputation on the idea that you can fix him?’ Kat says, looking at me with a mixture of amusement and deep sympathy. You absolute fool, her eyes seem to say. I don’t necessarily disagree with her. I have never successfully changed a man in my life. I have never successfully got a man to improve even slightly for me. But this isn’t a romantic relationship. This is work. And I’m nothing if not a hard worker.

‘I haven’t staked my reputation on it,’ I say. ‘I’ve kept the whole thing very casual.’

‘You told Hillary you’ll fix his years-long writer’s block.’

‘I said I’ll try to fix his years-long writer’s block. I’m going to very casually try to fix some of his deep-seated issues in a fun, low-pressure way.’

Kat laughs, then her face gets serious again. ‘You never tell a mother you can improve her son. Especially when that mother is Hillary. It just doesn’t work out well,’ she says.

‘I can’t believe you’re going to be sharing a bathroom with Xavier Hobbs Sullivan,’ Jamila says. Xavier is to her what Hillary is to me. She studied The Bird House in her contemporary fiction class at university and wrote an essay on how point of view is deployed in the novel. Also, she thinks Xavier is extremely hot. Kat thinks his hotness is mostly conceptual because the sight of a man under thirty-five holding a book is enough to set an English major’s heart aflutter.

‘Temporarily,’ I say. ‘Nothing about this is a big deal.’

They’re not buying what I’m trying to sell here, and they know me well enough to call me out. We bonded quickly when I started working for Hillary. That’s the thing about working in a small office under the same intense boss—you have a common enemy, ‘enemy’ in quotation marks here because none of us despises Hillary in the way that you hate a toxic boss. We’re all here because we’re fans of Hillary, and we want to be in her orbit because we believe in what we’re doing with the festival. At the same time, Hillary, by her own admission, can be a lot. She’s demanding, she’s opinionated, she has high expectations, she’s impatient, she’s egotistical, she has a mean streak, and she is often completely insane. To work with someone like her, you need to form an army of sorts, a little battalion to protect each other. We have a shorthand. An acknowledgment of when she’s being unreasonable, of when we need to step in for each other, when we need to distract and disarm.

By the end of my first week working here, we had already established this. It was a kind of instant we’re-on-the-same-team feeling, and I know not every workplace has that, in fact, so many don’t, and that’s when I was sure I’d made the right decision. Kat had carefully explained not just the computer system to me but the workarounds she’d created to make life easier, the idiosyncrasies of Hillary’s schedule and the innocuous things I might do that would unknowingly piss Hillary off. Jamila brought me in a box of homemade biscuits to celebrate my first day. They have my back, so if Kat thinks I’ve made a terrible decision, I probably have.

I spend an hour researching how to fix writer’s block, in case there have been some recent breakthroughs since I researched it for the Judith Burrow meeting. I read several interviews with famous authors, and it becomes clear that the most common and popular answer given when asked about writer’s block is that they simply don’t believe in it. Everyone likes to give a little backhanded lecture on work ethic in response to this question. ‘I just sit down at the desk and do the work.’ ‘There’s no such thing as writer’s block.’ ‘Go for a walk, then get back to it.’ ‘Just do the bloody work.’ ‘If you have an imagination, then you won’t ever suffer from writer’s block.’

None of this is helpful. Xavier has not written a word for years. This isn’t about being stuck for a week or two. This situation is specific to his circumstances, and so I need to forget what other people have done and figure it out for him.

An email from Hillary lands in my inbox. No subject line. She hates subject lines. She feels irritated at the expectation she must have a subject line for every little email.

She’s sent me her thoughts on how to get Xavier writing, typed quickly on her phone while she’s sitting in the waiting room of the local spa.

A traumatic memory can sometimes kick off an idea. Remind him of the time when he was a little kid and he went through a separation-anxiety phase, he hated me even leaving the room without telling him where I was going, maybe there’s something there? Oh, and when he was ten, his father had a car accident, the boys saw it and thought he died. (He was fine, a few stitches, he milked it for weeks of course.) And Xavier broke his arm at school and the teachers couldn’t reach us, so he had to sit in the sick bay for hours—no one realised how bad his injury was.

I try to imagine casually bringing up one of these stories. Hey, random question, did you ever see your dad get in car accident? Or, I don’t know, feel abandoned by your parents while seriously hurt? Because if you did, that would make a great opening chapter of a new novel.

Kat and Jamila’s ideas aren’t much better.

‘Tell him he has to write a thousand words a day and if he doesn’t, you kick him out. Like a tough-love bootcamp kind of thing,’ Kat says. ‘Withhold food. He’s a grown man. He does not need to be coddled.’

‘He’s not my prisoner. At this point, he has not even agreed to me helping him.’ And I highly doubt he will.

‘I think there’s some kind of drug you can take that opens up your mind to a new plane of creativity,’ Jamila says. ‘Give him that.’

‘Like slip it in his food?’ I say, horrified that sweet Jamila of all people would suggest this.

‘Oh sure, you definitely want to secretly drug your boss’s son, nothing can go wrong with that plan,’ Kat says.

‘Not secretly drug! You tell him about the drug but not your plan to get him writing once he’s high,’ Jamila says. ‘He thinks he’s going to have a good time and watch stupid YouTube videos or something, but actually, you sit him down and get him to outline a novel.’

‘It’s not the worst idea,’ I say.

‘Or see a hypnotist. That’s how my mum stopped using Facebook,’ Jamila says. ‘Well, except for the local buy-swap-sell group. She needs to stay on that for the opportunities.’

‘A hypnotist could work,’ I muse. ‘I wonder if there’s an online course I could quickly do to get the basics.’ The idea of being able to hypnotise someone quite appeals to me.