32
I HAVE TAKEN on the bookshop’s social media and website, and it’s more fun than I could have imagined. I can post things without having to run copy through Compliance and Legal and getting sign off from ten people. The freedom! Bobbi gives me all the log ins and says, go wild. She’s never been very interested in anything online. But, as it turns out, she’s very good on screen. She loves walking around her shop and making book-recommendation videos, as long as she doesn’t have to film it, edit it, post it, caption it or be involved in any other part of the process—the parts I love. Bobbi starts to get an immediate following for her book chat but also her fashion. People are always asking where her big, bright earrings are from in the comments (Bobbi has a formidable earrings collection). She loves the attention and I love creating it, and who knows if it’s actually impacting sales but it’s definitely getting us more followers. And it’s fun .
I also post pictures of the typewriter reviews, which people love, and one day a young woman comes into the shop and says, ‘I just had to see those cute little write-ups in person’, and Bobbi and I exchange a look of delight. We then sell her three great romcoms.
I spend time updating the shop’s website, simplifying it, and writing copy, and I find myself doing it on my days off, just because I enjoy it. I don’t hate marketing, I am starting to think, I just need to be marketing something I love. I also have plenty of free time on my hands to do this, because I’m still waiting on Samantha to get back to me about The Scam . I’m in the scary void between handing in a manuscript and getting the edit back.
A woman comes into the shop one day wanting to buy a book for her son. He’d just graduated uni and was moving out, she said, and he needed a beginner’s cookbook. The way her face lit up when she spoke about her son, how proud she was that he was moving out, even though it was only one suburb away from her, it made me think of Mac. It made me wonder what his mother had said about him to strangers when he’d gone off to America on his own at twenty-one.
‘Tell me about your mum,’ I say to Mac that night.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘What was she like?’
‘Well. She liked to make things special. She made a big deal of birthdays, she loved Christmas, she decorated for Halloween way before that was a thing in Australia. She would make our Friday-night movies into a whole production—she’d write on a little blackboard in the morning the name of the movie she’d be putting on, and what time, and the snacks available, like our house was a little cinema.’
‘That sounds so sweet.’
‘I looked forward to it all week when I was in primary school. When we were really little, if we had a nightmare and we went to her in the night, she’d always let us in the bed, she’d never make us go back to our own beds. She wouldn’t make me go to school if I said I wasn’t feeling well. She believed you, you know, and always wanted to make it better.’ He pauses. ‘I’m saying us , but possibly my sisters had a different experience. They always said I was the favourite, the spoiled youngest child, the only boy.’
‘Well, I’m worse,’ I say. ‘I’m the spoiled only child, and I had a “go back to your own bed, you’ll be fine” mother when it came to bad dreams, but she was also a hypochondriac who would take me to the doctor for every sore throat. So kind of the worst of both worlds. But very loving.’
‘What does she think about you working in the bookshop?’
‘She is beginning to accept it, begrudgingly, although she keeps sending me links to a podcast about how to invest and manage your money.’
‘My mum was probably a worrier too, but she hid it from us.’
‘What did she think about you being an actor?’
‘She supported it completely. Dad didn’t, but that kind of made Mum dig her heels in. She wanted us to take big swings.’
‘Even when you moved overseas?’
‘Oh yeah. She told me to go. She said, “Go and do it and don’t look back. And don’t come home if you’re scared, don’t come home if it doesn’t work out right away, don’t come home if it gets hard. Only come home if that’s what you want.”’
‘That’s intense.’
‘She could be intense.’
‘And what was it like, when…when it happened? When she died?’
‘I can’t really remember it. I’ve kind of blocked it out: the call to say she’d died, the flight home. I was shaking, I remember. I couldn’t stop shaking. I was a mess, my whole family was just such a mess. And then flying back to the US after the funeral, I remember telling myself to leave it all there, try to leave the worst of it all back there in Australia.’
‘And did that work?’
‘Sort of. I had to be on the Code Blue set a week after the funeral. Everyone kept saying, “Go, go, she’d want you to do it, she’d want you to be there, don’t miss the opportunity.” And she would. But also, I never got to grieve with my family. I never got to go through her things, to share the sadness, I guess. And then once I’d left, I just never went back.’
‘That’s sounds messed up.’
‘Yeah. I had this acting coach, later, who told me to use it, to take the grief and put it in my scenes, and I did, a few times, but that fucked me up even more. So I stopped doing that. That’s the stuff I don’t touch.’
‘I think for some writers, it’s the same. If you put too much of your own trauma on the page, even fictionalised, it can start to chip away at you.’
‘Did you do that with your first book?’
‘Not really. A bit. Little snippets of your life work their way in, whether you mean to put them there or not.’ I am already wondering what I’ve accidentally put into The Scam , what parts of me will feel exposed when it’s published.
‘So was Joel right, what he said to you? About it being about him?’
‘No and yes. There was some of the tension we were having as a couple in there, and yes, we had gone on a hiking holiday, but the characters were really nothing like us. If we’d worked things out, and we were still together, I don’t think he would have thought that at all.’
‘Yeah at least with acting, someone else wrote the lines, made the character up. I just focus on bringing them to life.’
‘They’re kind of opposite vulnerabilities. Share tens of thousands of words from inside your brain or stand on stage in front of hundreds of people and have them watch your every move. Pick your poison.’
He laughs. ‘That’s why all writers and actors need to be in therapy.’
‘Have you? Gone to therapy?’
‘Yeah, mostly for stuff about Mum, dealing with the grief. It was good. It helped.’
‘I should go again. It’s been on my to-do list.’ Along with book a dental check-up, find better health insurance and do my tax.
‘You don’t have any issues,’ he says.
‘I have so many issues.’
‘What are your issues?’
‘I’m not going to tell you. I want you to keep thinking I’m perfect.’
‘You think I think you’re perfect?’ he says.
‘Yes! Or near to. No, I don’t know. My issues are…pathetic.’
‘Pathetic is hot, remember. And I already know all your issues anyway.’
‘What are they?’
‘Well, we’re in our thirties. Everyone has a big wound by this age. Mine is my mum, obviously. Yours is the breakup. I’m not sure you know how to get over it.’
‘Can’t my wound be something else?’
‘Well. There’s also your mother.’
‘True. Issues galore.’
‘And maybe your dad, I’m not sure, you don’t talk about him much, and that could be something or it could be nothing.’
‘My poor dad. I should talk about him more. He’s fine. He’s lovely.’
‘And your career change.’
‘Which will probably turn out to be the biggest mistake of my life.’
But I don’t think it’s a mistake. An eleven-year-old girl came into the shop the other day and told me she loved the book I recommended for her. What better feeling in the world is there than that?
‘And the murderous tendencies exhibited in your first book.’
‘Another red flag for sure.’
‘And you’re a writer. Which is the biggest red flag of all. Worse than being an actor.’
‘So you’re saying I’m undateable.’
‘No,’ he says, and his voice is soft and warm. ‘I’m saying you’re perfect, actually.’