Page 5 of People Skills

Oh good. I can add rodent removal to my CV.

As I climb up the ladder, I feel the calm relief that descends on me whenever I avert a crisis or solve a problem for Hillary and the niggling, clawing fear that I might lose my job, again, can be pushed away. I’m okay. The smell will be gone soon. Everything is fine. I’ve got everything under control.

3

IT’S A PLEASANT two-minute walk from the town hall back to our office, which is situated above a local cafe called the Good Spot.

Barwon Bay is a small tourist town by the beach, the last in a line of small tourist towns dotted along the coastline. The other towns mostly lean into surfing culture, but Barwon Bay differentiates itself with a sense of charm and history—there are beautiful heritage buildings dotted all around town, antique shops and art galleries, an excavated shipwreck in the local museum, and a steam train you can ride fifteen minutes in one direction and then back again.

My parents see history and think old. They disapproved of me moving here. I was leaving a bustling city of young people to live in a sleepy village by the sea—to work as an assistant. They saw it as a downgrade in multiple ways.

‘This is where people come to retire,’ Dad had said, as he unpacked boxes on my moving-in day.

‘And die,’ Mum had added helpfully. She had already identified the spot where she suspected the previous tenant had ‘probably passed away in her sleep’.

‘You won’t meet anyone here,’ Dad said.

‘You’ll be bored.’ Mum was unpacking my books with a haphazard aggression, shoving handfuls of them on my bookshelf in any order, alternating novels by Anne Tyler and Ann Patchett as if they were the same person, and it was making my eye twitch to watch her.

‘I have a job, I have a house, I have a garden, I have the beach. I have everything I need,’ I’d said. ‘And I’m not looking to meet anyone.’

‘You’re running away from your problems,’ Mum said.

When I was unemployed and directionless, lying in my childhood bed at their house, she’d complained I was wallowing in my problems, so there was no winning, apparently.

‘I’m starting over,’ I said.

‘Well, the coffee will be bad,’ Mum said with a note of finality, and of this, she and Dad were so certain, they bought me a coffee machine.

But they were wrong, about most of it but especially about the coffee. The Good Spot is run by Elaine, a pastry chef who trained in France in her twenties, and her coffee and her handmade pastries (flaky croissants, Belgian-chocolate brownies, baked custard danishes, Persian love cakes, lemon myrtle yoyos, mini pavlovas) are better than anything I ever had in Melbourne. People come to Barwon Bay from the city just for her orange-and-cinnamon morning buns.

I almost stop at the Good Spot now to get a treat, a constant temptation anytime I leave or return to the office, but I’m running late so I force myself to keep going, up the steep flight of stairs to the right of the cafe door and into our festival headquarters. Our office is one big room with a bathroom and kitchenette out the back and a small private office space for Hillary in one corner. Kat and Jamila, the other two employees helping to run the festival, and I share the open space.

Kat glances up from her computer as I walk in. Tendrils of her curly brown hair fall out of the claw clip messily holding it back, and her glasses sit a touch too low on her nose.

‘You have cobwebs on your back,’ she says as I walk past her.

‘Oh, gross. Can you wipe them off please?’ I say, stopping in my tracks.

Barely looking away from her screen, she reaches out an arm and vigorously brushes my back.

‘Why are you covered in dust?’ she says.

‘I had to get a dead possum out from under the stage at the town hall.’

‘Ew! Get away from me,’ Kat shrieks, leaping out of her seat.

‘What’s wrong?’ Jamila says, hurrying out of the bathroom. She’s twenty-two, almost a decade younger than Kat and me, with dark luscious black hair falling like a river down her back and skin so perfect and unmarked that I feel guilty anytime I cause her to make an expression that might one day lead to a wrinkle.

‘Charlotte is covered in dead-possum juice and disease,’ Kat says, heading to the sink to wash her hands.

‘There was no juice,’ I say. ‘I was wearing gloves. And I washed my hands.’

‘Go home and shower immediately,’ Kat says. ‘You could have scabies.’

‘I have a meeting with that community group,’ I say.

For a town of five thousand people, Barwon Bay has a surprising number of community groups.