Page 6 of People Skills

‘The Concerned Citizens for Climate Change?’ Kat asks.

‘No, that was last week.’ I reassured them we would have several panels on climate and our program would be printed on recycled paper.

‘The Barwon Bay Civic Association? Or the Barwon Bay Community Association?’

‘Wait, aren’t they the same thing?’ I say.

‘They originally were but the civic association is a splinter group of the community association after Murray O’Healy fell out with Rose Burnley. Now they’re rival groups, and if you meet with one, you have to meet with the other.’

‘Right.’ I make a mental note to add this to my ever-expanding stuff-to-know-about-this-town document. ‘Anyway, the meeting is with the Art, Culture and Wine Appreciation Society.’ Hillary tasked me with getting the ‘movers and shakers’ of the town on board with the festival, and apparently the Art, Culture and Wine Appreciation Society is one of the most powerful groups. Their bad word-of-mouth reviews caused a local production of Sweeney Todd to close a week early.

‘I’ll do it,’ Kat says. ‘Or Jam can. You need to shower and decontaminate. You have a smell.’

I pull my hair around and sniff it. It does have a bit of a musty dead-possum smell to it. And Kat will be better than me in the meeting, because Simone, her wife, has just opened a wine bar in town. The Art, Culture and Wine Appreciation Society seem mostly focused on wine, from what I’ve gathered so far.

‘I can’t do the meeting, I don’t really drink,’ Jamila says nervously.

‘So?’ Kat says.

‘I can’t talk to wine people.’

‘They’re not going to ask you how many drinks you have a week. Just smile and nod and make them feel like they’re very important to our process even though they’re not,’ Kat says.

‘And get them excited about volunteering,’ I add.

Jamila looks anxious. She doesn’t like face-to-face stuff. She is social media, publicity and marketing for the festival all rolled into one. Which basically means she runs the website, writes great copy, can edit the hell out of a video, and spends ten hours a day on her phone so she knows every trend. Kat is festival operations, and she makes sure things actually happen. Technically, the dead possum was her purview, a venue issue, but I am kind enough not to point that out.

‘Thank you both,’ I say. ‘I might be a while.’

‘How long are your showers?’ Kat says.

‘I have to pick up Xavier from the station.’

‘Hillary’s Xavier? On a train?’ Kat says.

‘He was having car trouble and trying to get out of coming altogether, and I told him to catch the train and I’d pick him up.’

‘Five bucks says he won’t be on that train,’ Kat says.

‘No, he will, he’ll be here,’ Jamila says. She is the only one of us with a soft spot for Xavier. None of us has actually met him, but all of Hillary’s children loom large in the office as frequent topics of Hillary’s conversation and our speculation.

‘Okay, well whoever is right gets their coffee bought for them on Monday,’ I say. ‘I’ve got to go and wash my hair.’

On my walk home, Hillary calls, and asks me to do an urgent run to the vet for more skin cream for her French bulldog Aggie (full name Agatha Christie). Aggie takes up a surprisingly large amount of my time. I have walked her, I have gently wiped her wrinkly little face with premium fragrance-free baby wipes, I have bought her specialty food, I have put drops in her eyes, I have cooked for her, I have taken her to the vet for a myriad of issues, I have picked up her poo, I have scoured the internet for cute jackets for her to wear, I have road-tested carriers, I have shoved tablets down her throat, I have babysat her while she shook through thunderstorms. Sometimes it feels like Hillary and I are a divorced couple sharing custody of a needy young child with gastrointestinal issues.

By the time I do the vet run, take a call from Hillary about finding a particular spreadsheet, then another about a dinner reservation in Melbourne for next week, and a third about booking her car in for a service, then jump in the shower to wash my hair and quickly blow dry it after, I’m running late. I hurry to my car.

Despite my less-than-warm feelings towards him, meeting Xavier is an important moment. He’s Hillary’s youngest and most prized child, and I need to make somewhat of a good impression. I’m at the very end of my three-month probation period with Hillary, and while I think everything has gone well, really well, an I-have-worked-myself-into-the-ground level of well, I don’t trust my own instincts anymore. If I’ve learned anything in these last few years, it’s that the rug can be pulled out from underneath me at any time. I can be doing everything—I can be working long hours, making my job my priority, achieving every goal—and I can still lose it all. Added to this is the fact Kat accidentally let slip that Hillary’s last two assistants have not made it past the probation period. ‘But you’re different, you’re much better,’ Kat assured me, when she saw my face processing this horrifying tidbit.

Hillary and I have a meeting scheduled for Monday morning, and it is looming, ominous, in my work calendar and has been ever since Hillary said it would be good to sit down and talk about how things have been going. I can’t escape the deep, sickening feeling that she won’t keep me on, that I’ll be unemployed again and this time stuck with a one-year lease on a house in a small town where I can’t get any other work; that I’ll have to listen to my mother say ‘I told you I never liked that woman’ over and over again. That I’ll be back to where I started, but worse.

I just need everything to go smoothly today.

4

I CAN’T FIND a park. I circle the train-station car park for the fifth time, sweating. On my first lap, I heard the train arrive, clattering into the station, sounding its horn, and on my second lap I could hear it heading off again.

There is a pick-up/drop-off area in the car park, where a small group of people from the train have appeared and are waiting patiently, getting picked up one by one. I scan the group every time I circle, but none of them looks like Xavier. I know his face best from his official author headshot, which must be at least five or six years old now: a professional studio pic of him sitting on a stool, one leg bent across the other, one arm on the bent knee, his chin just sort of brushing the back of his hand, resting on it but not quite because actually resting might reduce the impact of his jawline, more a fake propping, his chin carefully angled so it is maximised in terms of sharpness. He’s wearing a white T-shirt with an open dark-blue shirt over it, his thick, wavy brown hair falling just so, smooth skin, barely looking mid-twenties. If you were to imagine the stereotype of a young handsome wunderkind author, this photo is what you’d see.