Page 8 of People Skills

‘I’m good at getting suitcases and bags into cars,’ he replies.

‘What an interesting skill to have,’ I say, trying to keep my tone in the realm of polite.

‘I’ve travelled a lot,’ he says vaguely, looking around until he sees the food kiosk. ‘Sorry, I just need to get something,’ he says.

I fold my arms and watch him. He buys two cans of Coke and three fried dim sims. That confirms it. This man is deeply, horribly, unbearably hungover. You don’t order a fried dim sim from a regional train-station kiosk unless the situation is dire.

I watch him open one can of Coke and wonder if he’s being polite and is going to offer the second one to me, not that I want it, but I would appreciate the gesture. Instead, he drops the second one into his backpack. He’s going to drink back-to-back Cokes and eat the dim sims. It is fascinating in an almost-anthropological way. Will he rally, or will he fall asleep in my car? I suspect he’ll fall asleep.

Since he’s not offering me any food, I’m not offering to help him with his luggage. I walk across the car park to my car and watch him follow me, awkwardly pulling his suitcases while juggling the Coke can and brown paper bag with the dim sims. It’s taking all my effort not to laugh, he looks so sad and ridiculous. The hoodie, the board shorts, the ragged sneakers with no socks. One of the suitcases trips him and he almost falls.

Finally, I take pity on him and walk over and grab one suitcase handle.

‘It’s okay, I’ve got it,’ he says, but he lets me take it.

My car is a fifteen-year-old little Hyundai. I open the boot and he looks at it and for a moment I think he’s going to abandon the suitcases, but the sugar must kick in and he takes a deep breath and lifts one suitcase into the boot, then manoeuvres it over onto the backseat, where it becomes briefly stuck halfway but he shoves it like a man possessed until it slowly slides down, and then he puts the other suitcase in the boot, along with his backpack. My god, the volume of stuff.

‘There,’ he says and gives me a look, an I told you so look, and I narrow my eyes at him and walk around to the driver’s door.

He opens his passenger door a crack, because the car on that side is extremely close, and tries to slither in without letting the door hit it. He gets stuck halfway, like his suitcase just did, and kind of falls in the rest of the way. His sneaker comes off as he drags his left leg in. He leans down to retrieve it, and it gets caught in the door, and he’s helplessly yanking and yanking at it, until I’m worried he’s just going to give up and let it drop out the door. But he finally gets it in, as though it’s the greatest effort he has ever faced, and closes the door.

It’s like a comedy routine. I’ve managed to hold in my laughter through all of this but when he finally gets the door shut, I can’t help it. I burst out laughing. I think maybe he will laugh too, a moment of connection, but humour is beyond him. He’s at level-five hangover. Or maybe he’s just a humourless person. Hillary has always emphasised what a sensitive, deep-thinking, intelligent man he is, which in my experience is usually code for insufferable.

I wait until he’s buckled his seatbelt.

‘You’re all in?’ I ask. He’s like a toddler at this point. Buckled in, with his snacks, one shoe off.

‘I’m in,’ he says.

I reverse out and busy myself pretending I need to concentrate to find the car park exit. (I know exactly where it is, I passed it at least five times earlier.)

We have a twenty-five-minute drive together, and I turn on the radio because I sense he is not capable of small talk right now.

After a few minutes, he turns to me and clears his throat.

‘Do you mind if I eat?’

‘Go for it,’ I say.

He eats the three dim sims methodically, one after the other, and drinks his second Coke and closes his eyes. The hood of his hoodie is still up. I feel like his Uber driver and rail against him in my mind. Buddy, I’m doing you a favour. Just because I work for your mother doesn’t mean I work for you. You have no power over me. In fact, I am pretty sure Hillary would be appalled at every interaction so far, especially and including the dim sims. She doesn’t approve of fried food. She recently stopped eating red meat and has sardines on toast every morning for breakfast even though she doesn’t actually like sardines—she’s investing in her brain. Invest in your brain is one of her favourite refrains.

Xavier clearly hasn’t got the invest-in-your-brain message. His brain is sloshing around and fermenting in alcohol right now.

According to Hillary, Xavier is the smartest of all her children and that means a lot because ‘James is a top lawyer and Ettie is one of the most sought-after financial consultants in her firm’. Xavier studied English literature, then travelled the world after graduating (‘He has a wandering soul,’ Hillary said once, and Kat and I dared not look at each other), then, when he was twenty-two, he published an essay about the lost art of hitchhiking that went viral, he wrote a short story at twenty-four that got published in the New Yorker, and then he published The Bird House at twenty-six. It became a huge bestseller in Australia, won two significant literary awards, and sold into over thirty territories internationally. His second novel The Deep was released a year later and it sank like a stone. A stone wrapped in terrible reviews.

And now he’s thirty-one, and he hasn’t published a single word since.

‘He has writer’s block,’ Hillary said to us. ‘A very, very bad case.’ She said this gravely, like it was a terminal illness.

The rest of the story, according to Hillary, is that Xavier has been lost and directionless these last few years. But his life is apparently back on track now that he’s seeing Lana, a fellow writer, journalist and podcaster. Hillary loves Lana because she is the kind of woman she has always hoped Xavier would find—talented, beautiful, driven. She co-hosts a popular podcast called Atelier about the intersection of fashion, culture and gossip, writes a weekly newsletter about her life called Love, Lana with fifteen thousand subscribers, and she founded a series of networking events for young women in the arts. Hillary had been planning to feature Lana on her TV show for an episode showcasing five influential young women under thirty-five, before the show got axed. That’s how Lana and Xavier met—Hillary introduced them. It’s her proudest matchmaking moment (also, I think, her only one). ‘If anyone can get Xavier writing again, it’s Lana, and not in a regressive “she’s his muse” way,’ Hillary assured us, although she didn’t provide an explanation of what other way.

‘We’re here,’ I say to Xavier now, as I park outside Hillary’s house.

His eyes jolt open.

‘Is she home?’ he asks, his voice croaky like he’s a zombie crawling out of his grave for his yearly haunting.

I know what he’s thinking. Hillary will freak out if she sees him in this state. She’ll have a million questions and he’ll wilt or maybe snap and then Hillary will be upset and tonight’s event will be a hundred times more stressful than it needs to be. I can see it all playing out.