An Academic Affair

Chapter One Sadie

Chapter One Sadie

I wrote my PhD thesis on a concept called eucatastrophe.

People always think I spent a bunch of years wallowing in something really depressing when they hear this, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Eucatastrophes are good catastrophes.

The term was coined by J.

R.

R.

Tolkien in a lecture called ‘On Fairy-Stories’, which he gave in Scotland in 1939.

The first time I read it, it struck a chord deep inside me that never really stopped thrumming.

Eucatastrophe, in Tolkien’s words, is ‘the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn”?’.

In mine, it’s the moment in a story where, when it seems like all is lost, that things are going to be awful forever, that the only possible endings are full of misery and despair, something good happens .

My favourite example of eucatastrophe comes from one of my most beloved childhood books.

An enterprising school librarian had seen me, a disadvantaged little redheaded girl who loved books and learning, and pressed Anne of Green Gables into my hands.

I loved it so much I cried when I had to return it, so Chess, then in her early teens, had begged, borrowed and eventually stolen to get me a boxset of all the Anne books from the school book fair.

I loved and treasured them all, but the third book was my favourite: Anne of the Island, the one where Anne goes away to university.

Near the end of the book (spoilers, sorry, but this book came out in 1915) it’s revealed that Gilbert Blythe, Anne’s one-time-rival/ eventual-friend/sort-of-ex-because-she-rejected-him-earlier, is dying of typhoid.

And Anne has a horrible, awful realisation.

She is in love with this man – and now she’s going to lose him.

The next morning, steeling herself for the worst possible news, Anne tremulously asks how Gilbert is.

Gilbert is better.

His fever broke.

He’s not going to die after all.

Eucatastrophe.

I can remember the first time I read this so clearly.

I was nine years old, sitting on my bed in the late afternoon in the tiny bedroom I shared with then-fourteen-year-old Chess.

I started tearing up when Anne found out Gilbert was dying, but I tried to keep quiet – Chess was sitting on her own bed, studying, and I didn’t want to disturb her.

But then Anne found out Gilbert wasn’t going to die and I couldn’t help it – I burst into tears.

‘What’s wrong?

’ Chess was beside me in an instant, her textbooks hitting the floor.

‘Nothing,’ I sobbed.

‘It’s just—it’s just so—’

‘It’s just so what?

’

‘It’s just so nice !

’

It took half a second for Chess to put her arms around me, a full second for her to start laughing.

‘You scared me to death,’ she said.

‘Next time you start crying, can you send me some sort of signal that it’s just because of a book?

’

There were lots of very solid, serious, scholarly explanations as to why I wrote about eucatastrophe in my PhD thesis, but the real reason was that I’d been chasing the feeling I’d had that day ever since: that euphoric moment of joyous relief; that sense that for once, finally, things were going right ; that sunbeam penetrating the darkness.

I had grown up in that darkness.

I had grown up trapped.

There were only two things standing between me and the grim realities of a terminally ill mother, an absent-at-best father and crushing poverty: my sister and my books.

Outside the pages of those books, there had been no eucatastrophe for Chess and me, no sudden joyous turn.

There had only been a series of long, slow battles.

Our mother’s against her illness, until she died.

Ours, against our father, until he finally stopped coming back.

Chess’s, to succeed in corporate law, to ensure that we never, ever experienced that kind of poverty again.

And mine, to carve out a career in academia, one of the most competitive and cut-throat industries in the world – and to do it by studying the books that had been my escape, even though a huge percentage of the scholars in my field had no respect for them at all.

It was a battle that, in recent times, I’d started to accept I was going to lose.

It had been years since I’d graduated, and yet I felt like I’d made no progress.

I’d published a monograph and a lot of articles and book chapters, and for now, I was managing to find enough teaching work to survive semester to semester, but I was still stuck, stagnating, in the precariat.

I was making no progress at all towards anything real, anything solid, anything that would last .

There were hardly any permanent academic jobs advertised in Literary Studies, but every time one came up, I applied.

I’d only made it to one interview.

I thought it had gone well, but then, when they emailed me my rejection, one line jumped out immediately: your research into popular fiction, while strong, does not fit within our current programme.

I might be a good scholar – a brilliant one, even – but it didn’t matter at all if no one respected my object of study.

I kept marching forward.

One thing I had never managed to learn was how to surrender.

But no matter how hard I worked – no matter how hard I fought – no matter how many union campaigns I was a part of – it was becoming clearer and clearer that this march I was on was Sisyphean.

No universities were hiring.

They were all firing – and casual academics like me were always the first to be sacrificed.

I could fling myself into the boulder as hard as I liked, but there was no way to stop it from crashing back down on me.

I had just about admitted to myself that it was over, that despite all the years and years I’d sunk into becoming a scholar I was going to have to find another career path for myself—

And then the job was listed.

My heart only leapt a little when I saw the ad in the university jobs email digest: Lyons University, Lecturer in Literary Studies, Level B, permanent, full-time.

I was too wise and too weary to hope too hard.

But then, when I saw the desired research specialisations, a blinding wave of joy hit me.

The successful candidate will have expertise in one or more of the following areas: modernist literature, early modern drama, popular fiction.

The tears welled up in my eyes.

I blinked them away so I could check I hadn’t read it wrong, that this wasn’t a hallucination caused by wishful thinking.

Popular fiction.

The sob escaped me before I could cover my mouth, a loud, choked sound, embarrassingly high-pitched.

I grabbed a pillow off my bed and bit down on it, so none of my housemates would hear me low-key having a breakdown.

There’s a line in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ that I love so much I got it tattooed on my foot.

Eucatastrophe, Tolkien writes, gives us a glimpse of a joy so powerful it’s mythic: ‘Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.’

Sometimes, even though it seems all but certain, Gilbert Blythe doesn’t die.

Sometimes, the ad for your dream job wants someone with your ironically unpopular specialisation.

Sometimes, despite all the odds, something good happens .

It took me a while to compose myself after that first ecstatic white-hot moment of hope, but eventually, I took some deep breaths and sat back down in front of my laptop, telling myself to be sensible.

The job ad might be asking for a popular fiction specialist, but I was far from the only one of those in the world.

Some other Sadie was probably sitting in some other bedroom in some other share house, screaming into their pillow at the thought that their dream might not be dead.

There’s another word that Tolkien coins in ‘On Fairy-Stories’: dyscatastrophe.

That one actually does mean what it sounds like.

If eucatastrophe is the good catastrophe, dyscatastrophe is the bad one.

The first hint of dyscatastrophe came when I clocked where Lyons University actually was: Hobart.

If I got this job, I’d have to leave Sydney.

That was all right, though.

I’d always known that if I was going to get a permanent academic job, I’d probably have to move.

And it wasn’t like I had much keeping me here.

I had friends, sure, but I worked so much that those bonds were tied pretty loosely, even though I lived in the same house as most of them.

Really, the only person in my life I absolutely couldn’t live without was Chess, and she had money now.

She could visit whenever she wanted.

Still.

The thought of moving hurt more than I thought it would.

I rubbed my chest absently.

I read through the selection criteria again.

PhD in a relevant discipline: yes.

Excellent teaching record, including curriculum design: yes.

Strong publication record: yes (I’d tried to combat the bias against popular fiction studies by taking the academic maxim ‘publish or perish’ very, very seriously).

Expertise in one or more of the following areas: modernist literature, early modern drama, popular fiction.

It was still there.

It still said popular fiction .

But I’d been so excited by that – so automatically drawn to those words – that I’d hadn’t processed the other desired specialisations.

Early modern drama.

The exact research specialisation of my nemesis.

The man I had only last night agreed to stop fighting with.

I owed more to Dr Jonah Fisher than I would ever, ever admit.

There were a few reasons for this – pride, for one – but primarily, it was because my debt to him wasn’t rooted in anything he’d done for me, exactly.

It was what he meant.

What ‘Fisher’ stood for, in the grand narrative of the universe of Sadie Shaw.

It’s hard to fight a battle when your enemy is amorphous, nameless, faceless.

You can’t defeat something you can’t see.

And when, in a first-year poetry seminar, a boy with scruffy dark hair and thick-framed glasses and the beginnings of a beard had disagreed with my reading of Wordsworth’s ‘To Joanna’, not backing down even a little when I fought back, he became the face of my enemy.

Ugh, Chess had said to me, turning the fan on our rickety table towards me when I told her about it that evening, sweltering in the shitty little un-airconditioned granny flat we’d been sharing since our mother died.

Fucking privileged little private school boys.

They’re a plague in the law faculty.

They think they know everything.

I don’t think anyone’s ever told him he’s wrong a day in his life, I’d replied, wiping the sweat off my brow with the back of my hand.

That, I would learn several years later, listening to Professor Fisher eviscerate Jonah in a PhD seminar, was not even remotely the correct reading of his family dynamic.

But symbols were powerful.

Jonah had been the face of everything I was fighting against for too long for me to change my mind.

And besides, even if his dad told him he was wrong every single day of his life, Jonah was still his father’s son.

Professor Fisher certainly wasn’t introducing me – whose research he had once described, to my face, as ‘specious, frivolous and pointless’, centred on ‘a childish interpretation of deus ex machina’ – to any senior academics who could offer me work.

Jonah Fisher was my yardstick.

He was my benchmark.

If I could keep pace with him, then there was still a chance that I could make it in academia.

The fact that he too – with all his privilege and connections and acceptably ‘literary’ area of study – was still insecurely employed and living in a share house in his thirties was one of the few things that let me keep hoping.

Jonah Fisher, though, was also a person.

I wasn’t sure exactly when I’d started to divide him into two different people in my mind, but it had crystallised at our PhD graduation, when he’d casually revealed that of course he knew his dad was a terrible nightmare person who made a habit of being deeply and offensively unfair to me – and that the reason he had never pushed back was that he didn’t want to undermine me.

Anyway, you hold your own against him perfectly well, Shaw, he’d said casually, adjusting his doctoral bonnet in the mirror, like he wasn’t forcing me to fundamentally reconsider his place in my personal universe.

You don’t need my help.

So now there were two Jonahs.

Tweed Jonah and Cardigan Jonah.

Tweed Jonah was the symbol of everything I was fighting against.

The institutional privilege of the ivory tower, determined to keep me and my specious, frivolous, pointless, childish research out.

Cardigan Jonah, though, was the human.

The one I’d lived with for years now, and who, despite the fact we argued about everything, might not actually be that bad.

That’s who I’d sat with, in the darkness of the kitchen.

The least tweedy, most extremely cardigan version of Jonah there was.

The Jonah who loved his sister, the most relatable, humanising emotion in the world to me.

That was who I had agreed not to fight with anymore.

But now there was this job ad – which could not be more perfectly designed to pit us against each other, more bitterly than ever.

It was unrealistic of me to hope that he hadn’t seen the job ad, but…

well, I’ve never really been a huge fan of realism.

My hope was shattered almost immediately.

It was always going to be, given how many early career researchers lived in our share house.

‘Jonah!’ Van said jovially, as the man in question walked into the kitchen later that night.

‘You saw the Lyons ad, right?’

Jonah set his satchel down and got himself a water glass.

He had to reach past me – I was standing at the stove cooking myself dinner – and his sleeve gently brushed against my ear, the merest whisper of a touch.

‘I saw.’

‘That’s only the third Lit Studies job that’s come up this year, right?

’ Van said.

‘Second,’ Jonah and I said at the same time.

Involuntarily, I glanced at him.

He must have had the same reflex, because he met my eyes, offering me a tight, profoundly joyless smile.

It was a Tweed Jonah smile, one he’d given me a million times before, a smile which usually meant there is no socially appropriate way for me to say this at present but please know that everything you are saying is wrong.

‘What do you think of the location?’ Van asked.

‘Tassie’s pretty far away.

’

‘I’d move,’ I said.

‘My sister Fiona lives in Hobart,’ Jonah said.

‘So I’d quite like to move there, actually.

’

Oh fuck me .

And I thought I’d had a moment of eucatastrophe.

When Jonah had seen the ad and realised that not only did they want someone with his specialisation, not only was it hundreds of kilometres away from his awful dad, but it was in the same city as his sister – his newly-abandoned sister, the one he was desperate to mend his relationship with!

– he must have just about died with happiness.

Had he experienced a moment of dyscatastrophe too, when he’d realised that ‘popular fiction’ was hiding there behind ‘early modern drama’?

Anger?

Frustration, maybe, that his annoying upstart redhead nemesis was going to fight him for something again , or—

‘I think that’s burning, Sadie,’ Jonah said.

I took the pan off the stove moments before my dinner became entirely unsalvageable.

‘Just because you’re better at cooking than me doesn’t mean I want a lecture on it,’ I said tightly, putting it into a bowl and leaving the kitchen as quickly as I could, because I didn’t want to look at him.

In my room, I opened my laptop and pulled up the selection criteria again.

I took a bite of my barely edible chicken stir-fry and started ranking myself against Tweed Jonah.

PhD: even.

We’d held that degree exactly as long as each other.

Teaching record: probably even.

There was a time when I would have awarded the point to myself – my enthusiastic embrace of popular culture meant I had a reputation as Not A Regular Teacher, A Cool Teacher – but seeing the student surveys from English 101 at Bass had made me understand that Jonah had his own appeal.

I might be the cool one, but he – with the glasses and the dark hair always falling in his eyes and the beard and the apparently endless collection of knitwear – looked like the archetypal hot young English professor from every student’s dark academia fantasy.

Strong publication record: probably also even.

I’d published more overall, but he’d published in higher-ranked journals – not that I hadn’t tried, but Shakespeare and friends were a much easier sell to the establishment journals than my work.

If he’d kept dragging his heels on turning his PhD thesis into a monograph I might have had him – mine, Joy Poignant as Grief: Reading Popular Fiction in Interesting Times , had come out fairly quickly after our graduation – but his, No Hate Lost Between Us: Relationships on the Jacobean Stage , had been published about a year ago, and already had the same number of citations as mine.

Not that I checked or anything.

I definitely didn’t have any Google Scholar alerts set up.

Expertise in modernism, early modern drama or popular fiction: even.

Obviously.

I probably had him on the criterion about impact and engagement – I was a fairly regular media commentator on romance and fantasy fiction.

He had me on the criterion about grant income, though – he’d taken an intermission during his PhD to do a research assistantship, and it had landed him a spot on a research team that won a major national grant.

The last criterion was ‘proven ability to establish good working relationships with colleagues’.

Ha fucking ha.

Well, at least we were even on that one too.

I ate the last bite of burnt chicken.

When it came down to it, there was only one thing on which we were not even.

But also, when it came down to it…

it was a pretty big thing.

‘No,’ Chess said to me the next night.

‘No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not, Sadie.’

‘It’s his sister , though.

How am I meant to look past that?

’

‘ No .’

She swallowed a mouthful (a perfectly cooked, unburnt mouthful.

I went round to Chess’s apartment in North Sydney twice a week for dinner, and she always ordered something delicious from somewhere expensive).

‘This is not something you’re seriously considering.

’

‘How can I not consider it?’

I took a long sip of my wine (also delicious: Chess’s love of wine had started out as a way to accrue cultural capital in the fancy law firm she worked for, but now it was just a genuine love of wine).

‘Who does it make me? If I sit there and listen to him tell me that awful story about his sister, and then the perfect opportunity comes along for him to be able to go and help her out, and I say, “no, actually, that’s mine, I’m taking that”?’

‘Sadie,’ Chess said, ‘do you want this job?’

‘Of course I do, but—’

‘Are you qualified for this job?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Do you deserve this job?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Has the clause after “but” in your last three yeses been some version of “but so does he”?’

‘No.’

Chess raised her eyebrows.

‘But so does he,’ I said, ‘and a bajillion other people. There are far, far more people with PhDs than there are jobs. That’s one of the reasons the academic job market is so fucked.

’

‘Forget about the bajillion other people. You’re not considering throwing away this dream opportunity for them, are you?

’

‘No,’ I admitted.

‘Who has everything on his side? The privilege? The connected daddy? The more academically acceptable specialisation?’

I sighed.

‘Jonah.’

‘Given all this, if another job came up, who would stand a better chance at getting it?’

‘He would. But it’s this job, Chessie.

In Hobart.

Where his sister lives.

There are only two universities in Tasmania, and—’

‘How would you feel,’ Chess said, holding a finger up, ‘if you didn’t apply for this job, which has your name written all over it, so he could sail in and take it – and then he didn’t get it?

’

That answer was easy.

‘Gutted.’

‘What about if he did get it?’

I bit my lip, trying to imagine a world where Jonah had moved on, ascended to the higher plane of secure employment, and left me behind.

‘You would feel like he beat you,’ Chess said, ‘and you didn’t even put up a fight.

’

She tapped her fingernail against the table.

‘You’re a fighter, sweetie – and you’re not going to give up now.

’

There had been something liquid in Jonah’s eyes when he’d sat across from me in the kitchen.

I don’t want to fight anymore, Sadie, he’d said, his fingers tight around mine.

I’ve been fighting for so long I’m not sure I know how to stop, I’d replied, but I’ll try if you will.

I was both a truth-teller and a liar.

I didn’t know how to stop fighting.

And I wasn’t going to try.

‘No,’ I said, on a long exhale.

‘Of course I’m not going to give up.

’

‘Of course you’re not,’ Chess repeated.

‘And you never were.’

She leant back in her chair, swirling the wine in her glass.

‘If you were seriously considering not applying, you never would have told me about the job in the first place. The whole reason you laid out this dilemma for me was because you knew there was no way I would let you self-sabotage.’

Not for the first time, I thought about how other lawyers must feel when they came up against Francesca Shaw.

They must be absolutely fucking terrified.

‘This is what you’ve always wanted,’ she continued.

‘This is what you’ve been working for, all these years.

And if you think I’m going to let some skinny little private school boy take it away from you because his sister is sad…

well, I know you’re smarter than that.

’

‘It’s his sister, though.

His sister .

’

Chess reached across the table and took my hand.

She, of all people, knew why Jonah’s story had affected me so much.

But then, ‘I don’t care how sad his sister is,’ she said.

‘If he – or she – or anyone – makes you get in your own way, I’ll have them assassinated.

’

There’s not a person on this planet, Cardigan Jonah had said heavily, voice hoarse and throaty, who would fight for me the way Chess did for you.

‘I love you, Chessie,’ I whispered.

She squeezed my fingers.

‘You too, sweetie. To the end of the universe and back again.’

Then she let go.

For all that Chess was a bulldozer, she knew exactly where the lines were – specifically, the lines that, if she bulldozed past them, would make me cry.

‘So that’s sorted,’ she said briskly, topping up our wine glasses.

‘Did you bring me any new books?’

‘Of course I did.’

I reached under the table for my bag.

Every time I came around to Chess’s for dinner, I brought her a couple of new romance novels, sourced from my extensive network of online second-hand bookshops.

Chess loved romances – I wasn’t the only Shaw sister to enjoy it when things turned out all right in the end – but she had stringent requirements that made her difficult to cater to.

There was a fairly detailed list of tropes and plot points she point-blank refused to tolerate.

‘I’m going to pre-warn you that these two are pushing it a bit,’ I told her.

‘But there are valid reasons for their inclusion in the Francesca Shaw collection.’

Chess narrowed her eyes and took another sip of wine.

‘I’m listening.

’

‘This one,’ I slid A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske across the table, ‘is probably going to make you have some contract law feelings.’

The first romance trope that Chess just Could Not with was problematic paperwork.

Her lawyer brain simply did not allow her to move past things like ‘sex contracts that people apparently definitely have to stick to or else ’ or ‘wills that mean two people have to cohabitate for a year or else risk losing their inheritance’.

If I ever write a romance novel, it’s going to be about a lawyer who goes around getting people out of these contracts, she’d told me once, at one of our boozier dinners.

She’ll charge through the nose and she’ll barely have to work, because none of this is in any way legally enforceable so it’ll only take her, like, two minutes per client.

Who will the love interest be?

I’d asked.

She’d stopped, wine almost sloshing over the rim of the glass she’d been waving around.

I haven’t thought about that part yet.

Chess picked up the book and examined it suspiciously, like it was an envelope that had a strong chance of containing anthrax.

‘But it’s a magical contract,’ I said.

‘It’s set in Edwardian London, but, like, magical Edwardian London.

Given the world of magic presumably has a whole other legal and judicial system, I’m hoping you can suspend your disbelief, because this book is so good.

’

She pursed her lips.

‘If you say so.’

I slid Lovelight Farms by B.

K.

Borison across the table.

‘This one is fake dating, but—’

‘No,’ Chess groaned.

Chess hated fake-dating books.

We’d had many, many conversations about realism and how it wasn’t always the most useful barometer when reading romance, but something about fake dating completely set her off.

This is the least sensible way to solve your problems, she’d said to me the last time I’d given her a fake-dating book.

I can think of at least forty-seven better ways these two – she’d smacked the book so hard I thought I saw it flinch – could have solved their problem than pretending to be in a relationship.

I told Chess pretty much everything, but one thing I’d kept carefully hidden from her was the existence of Goodreads.

If she ever took to writing reviews, she would definitely make some people cry.

‘Why are you doing this to me, Sadie?’ she asked.

‘I wouldn’t give you this book if I didn’t think you’d like it,’ I replied.

‘It’s fake dating, sure, but it’s so cute and it absolutely works.

’

She narrowed her eyes.

‘What problem are they trying to solve by fake dating at it?’

‘I’m not going to tell you.

Spoilers.

’

‘You’re lucky I love you,’ she grumbled, taking the book from me.

‘The things I do for you. Honestly.’

It was a deeply unserious exchange, but it made me think about Jonah again.

If he loved his sister even a fraction as much as I loved Chess, how far would he go to get this job?

Later that night, sitting in front of my computer, the selection criteria open in front of me again, my gigantic tea mug full, I was still thinking about it.

I had every right to apply for this job.

I was going to apply for this job.

Chess was right.

I had fought too hard for too long.

With all the budget cuts going on, I wasn’t going to be able to survive much longer in the brutal world of the precariat: it wasn’t like I could just wait around for the next job listing.

And on top of that, opportunities like this – ones where they actually wanted popular fiction specialists – were so rare that if I threw it away, I would almost certainly be throwing away my last chance at an academic career.

I was not going to do that.

Not for anyone.

Jonah – every version of him, tweed, cardigan, symbolic, human or otherwise – was going to have to fight really fucking hard if he wanted to rip this job out from under me.

But if it had been Chess in Fiona Fisher’s shoes – if it had been my sister, abandoned a thousand kilometres away, alone, vulnerable, hurting – and this wonderful, golden, eucatastrophic opportunity had appeared in front of me…

I would burn the whole world down before I let anyone get in my way.