19.

 

Arriving at work the next day, I feel a disquiet. My workmates still chat the way they always do, but I pick up a glance here, a lowering of the voice there, a sense of expectation – when you’re somewhere long enough, you pick up the rhythm of the place, as well as any disruption, no matter how small.

I might’ve been pre-armed with the script that this was going to happen, and I’d decided to bluster my way through it – or maybe that was the way I was told to play it. But I can’t now. Fuck the script. This is an affront, even if it makes me the smaller person, although I’m unsure what’s the best way to respond.

Autumn comes to the door of her office just as I’m sitting at my chair, and she gestures me over. I rise and make my way over, aware there are eyes on me, although when I look I see nobody; she gestures me to a chair, then closes the door to her office. This is the way people are fired, although I’m sure she wouldn’t handle it this way – but whatever constitutes “handling”, the others know.

“You firing me?” I ask, as takes her place in her chair.

“Why would I fire you?” she asks. “Because some precious author doesn’t like her editing?”

“She’s got a name.”

“She doesn’t know what’s good for her.”

“And yet here we are.”

“Melody’s agent contacted the higher-ups, so I was asked to pass her manuscript to another editor,” she says.

If she expects me to be pissed, I’m not, because I know Melody’s going to be an unimaginable pain – an inexperienced author who thinks she has it all worked out. I know the route – I went through it myself, and have seen countless other authors do so. This little bit of reason mitigates the potential fury I wanted to unleash.

“Who?” I ask. “Are they going to some freelancer?”

“Shia.”

Now I do get pissed. You’re likely not going to remember me referencing Shia, but she’s a junior editor fresh out of some tertiary institution. She’s a so-so editor – okay on copy stuff (like grammar, punctuation, spelling), but doesn’t grasp the structural shit. You can’t teach that. Schooling and workshopping can hone it, but editors who specialise in structure have a good understanding of it intuitively.

“Why not give it to Bell?” I ask.

In case you don’t remember her either, Bell’s our other editor, although she oversees nonfiction. But that’s really because I’m here. If I was to spontaneously vanish, Bell could edit our fiction list. She’d be good at it. Not great. But good. And definitely much better than Shia.

“Melody requested Shia,” Autumn tells me.

“They know each other?”

“They met at some book talk Melody gave not too long ago.”

I shake my head because I am escalating to raging – this book is going to be overwhelmingly mediocre, this shit impersonation of Romeo & Juliet with this ridiculous shoehorned climax, and critics here will lap it up because Melody’s this media darling. Overseas, where nobody knows her, critics will slaughter it. And the shame of it is it could be a good book, and Melody could be a greater writer if she worked at it.

But, fuck, what do I know after the meeting I’ve had with my own publisher? Maybe I’ve got it all inverted and I’m just the hack with misguidedly unfailing self-belief, and Melody’s some prodigy who’ll reshape the literary world. That’s a possibility, too, and it thrives in my insecurity.

“You all right?” Autumn asks.

“Sure,” I say.

But it nags at me through the day, and gets worse in the afternoon when Melody shows up, hair dyed yellow (not blonde, but actual yellow), in this oversized smock that makes her look like a garbage bag somebody had collected twigs in.

She and Shia hug and giggle like they’ve known one another for the longest time, they make themselves herbal teas (elderberry & echinacea for Melody, lemon, ginger & manuka honey for Shia) gaggle for the next five minutes about the beauty of flavoured herbal teas, then sit and go through my edits, Melody explaining why they’re wrong (not why she doesn’t agree, but why they’re outright wrong), and Shia agreeing the bulk of the time.

I should just quit – that’s the thought that jags into my head, although it does that regularly, because while I enjoyed this job originally for the first few years, now it feels limiting, and as if it’s defining me. This is what I am. This is all I am. And staying here means that’ll never change. But I’m also scared to go out on my own at my age, and beyond the fear is my friendship with Autumn, however muted it’s become during the Reign of Lana.

Come the end of the day (Shia and Melody still aren’t done, and I expect when I show up tomorrow morning, they’ll be fused there, still gaily chattering away with the insanity and inanity of goats baying at one another) I shoot the fuck out of the place and drive home.

I sit in front of the computer, continue to rage at the arcade game I play (ice hockey) as I procrastinate, have my Words shots (while raging at the abysmal letters in my racks, as if the algorithm is incapable of duplicating a probable hand, and is purposely spitting out the most impossible combinations), write for a bit, then set up for my Zoom meeting with the little team I’ve become a part of in hopes we can make a movie.

Gillian’s a single forty-something mother, a dynamic and capable woman who’s always in motion – working as a realtor, being a mum to two young kids, and pursuing her career as an actor and producer. I don’t know when she sleeps, or if she does. She’s always moving.

“I love the rewrite,” she says, “and the new title’s perfect.”

“What’s the new title?” Dom asks.

“‘Rain of Shadows’,” I tell him. “Did you end up reading it?”

Dom’s chuckle is a short, stuttering chortle – it’s the sound he makes when he’s gearing up a lie. “Yeah, but I just skimmed past the title page,” he says.

I could so easily call him out – ask him to cite any of the differences in the revised script; or ask him about something that’s not even in the script, and let him be caught out when he tries to bluff his way through it; or I could challenge him, because he has no composure under pressure, and humiliate him in front of the others.

But he’s the bald little elephant in the room – he’s like that thirteen-year-old showing up at high school, claiming the dog ate his homework. as if it’s such an original excuse that teachers will buy in. Then he’ll go away, and commend himself for his ingenuity, and follow that same pattern.

I could detail this conversation: Sam works in project management (although I never remember what industry), solid and unassuming, eternally patient, with a goal to get into mainstream cinematographer. He’s fucking brilliant – meticulous, eternally patient, and always diplomatic in these discussions.

Peta’s maybe pushing fifty, outspoken and occasionally abrasive, and while we’ve butted heads, it’s because she cares so much about what she does – and she does work hard, investing her own money, and always keeping things moving. I only know her peripherally, but respect her.

So you would think with such a team, these meetings would get somewhere, but for whatever reason we never do.

I could exhaustively detail the whole meeting: Dom fumbling through the script (which he reads from his phone, because his kids have always used the ink in his printer) or asking questions for a conversation we had two minutes earlier; the way we read through the script, discuss who we could cast (outside of the people in the meeting), what locations we have available or might be able to find, and how we may be able to raise funding – I could write it all down, throw in the jokes and laughs and banter, the tasks we assign (which we’ll see through, but then something always inevitably derails us), and how after the meeting Gillian will call me on her way to pick up her kids to debrief about whether Dom has done what he says he has (and we both always agree that he never has), but after the day it’s been, I can’t be fucked.

I feel all this needs to work is something that’s not quite there, although maybe that’s me. Maybe I’m the common denominator, and I offload a lot of my angst onto Dom because it’s easier to than facing any of my own shortfuckingcomings. I don’t know.

Here’s something more important that I do know: as I lie in bed, I go through my Words shots. In both games, I’m down. My tiles in the first game, despite repeated efforts to offload bad tiles and get some good ones, are U, U, A, E, Y, C and V, and in the other, Q, H, H, A, I, O, and E.

I swap them out in both games and try to sleep.